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Updated: May 16, 2025
Spencer does not mention them at all, and Darwin has to attribute them to a special cause which is independent of any general theory of use-inheritance.
If use-inheritance is really one of the factors of evolution, it is certainly a subordinate one, and an utterly helpless one, whenever it comes into conflict with the great ruling principle of Selection. Would this dominant cause of evolution have favoured a tendency to use-inheritance if such had appeared, or would it have discouraged and destroyed it?
As depicted by its defenders, use-inheritance transmits evils far more powerfully and promptly than benefits. It transmits insanity and shattered nerves rather than the healthy brain which preceded the breakdown.
If use-inheritance has tamed the rabbit, why are the bucks still so mischievous and unruly? Why is the Angora breed the only one in which the males show no desire to destroy the young? Why, too, should use-inheritance be so much more powerful in the rabbit than with other animals which are far more easily tamed in the first instance?
There is no need to undertake the apparently impossible task of demonstrating an absolute negative. It will be enough to ask that the Lamarckian factor of use-inheritance shall be removed from the category of accredited factors of evolution to that of unnecessary and improbable hypotheses.
Under normal healthy conditions use-inheritance is so slow in its action that "several generations" must elapse before it produces any appreciable effect, and then that effect is only precisely what selection might be expected to bring about without its aid.
Such self-multiplying gemmules without pangenesis would enable us to understand both the excessive weakness or non-existence of normal use-inheritance, and the excessive strength and abruptness of the effect of their partial destruction under special pathological conditions.
The assistance of use-inheritance seems to be as unnecessary as its opposition is ineffective. The alleged inheritance of the effects of use and disuse in our domestic animals must be very slow and slight. Darwin tells us that "there is no good evidence that this ever follows in the course of a single generation."
But could we rely upon the aid of use-inheritance if it really were a universal law and not a mere simulation of one? Let us consider some of the features of this alleged factor of evolution, seeing that it is henceforth to be our principal means of securing the improvement of our species and our continued adaptation to the changing conditions of a progressive civilization.
There must apparently be a constitutional or inheritable predisposition or fitness for the habits spoken of, which otherwise would scarcely be continued for many generations, except by the favourably-varying branches of a family: which again is selection rather than use-inheritance. Where is the necessity for even the remains of the Lamarckian doctrine of inherited habit?
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