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Updated: June 19, 2025
It is, as a matter of fact, remarkable that it has not taken place in more numerous instances, and the mallows show that such opportunities have been available at least more than once. Other instances of taxonomic anomalies are afforded by leaves. Many genera, the species of which mainly bear pinnate or palmate leaves, have stray types with undivided leaves.
My view is, then, that specific characters are usually not adaptations, that other characters of taxonomic value are some adaptive and some unrelated to conditions of life, and that while non-adaptive characters are due to spontaneous blastogenic variations or mutations, adaptive characters are due to the direct influence of stimuli, causing somatic modifications which become hereditary, in other words, to the inheritance of acquired characters.
Even were the presence of the temporo-occipital, or external perpendicular, sulcus, a mark of distinction between the higher apes and man, the value of such a distinctive character would be rendered very doubtful by the structure of the brain in the Platyrrhine apes. A character which is thus variable within the limits of a single group can have no great taxonomic value.
In my opinion, those who, like Weismann, consider all taxonomic characters adaptive, are equally mistaken with Bateson and his followers, who regard all characters as mutational. No system of evolution can be satisfactory unless it recognises that these two kinds of characters are distinct and quite different in their nature.
Wernicke wisely refrained from attempting more than a loose descriptive grouping. He called all conditions with marked inactivity and apathy “akinetic psychoses” and said that some recovered, some did not. Taxonomic zeal began to blind vision when Kahlbaum formulated his “Catatonia” and included stupor in the symptom complex.
Even were the presence of the temporo-occipital, or external perpendicular, sulcus, a mark of distinction between the higher apes and man, the value of such a distinctive character would be rendered very doubtful by the structure of the brain in the Platyrrhine apes. A character which is thus variable within the limits of a single group can have no great taxonomic value.
When a new set of rocks is found in any part of the world it is simplicity itself for any one acquainted with the fossil index system to assign these new beds to their proper place, though of course the one doing this must be prepared to defend his assignment with pertinent and sufficient taxonomic reasons.
It is scarcely necessary for me to say that this arrangement of the fossils is not at all affected by my criticism of the cause of the geological changes. The geological series is merely an old-time taxonomic series, a classification of the forms of life that used to live on the earth, and is of course just as artificial as any similar arrangement of the modern forms of life would be.
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