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Updated: May 16, 2025
Use-inheritance would be ruinous through causing unequal variation in co-operative parts of which Mr. Spencer may accept his own instances of the jaws and teeth, and the cave-crab's lost eyes and persistent eye-stalks, as typical examples.
Practically he abandons the hope of evolution by natural selection, and substitutes the ideal of a nation being "modified en masse by transmission of the effects" of its institutions and habits. Use-inheritance will "mould its members far more rapidly and comprehensively" than can be effected by the survival of the fittest alone.
In eliminating various evil results of use-inheritance, natural selection would be eliminating use-inheritance itself.
The displacement of Lamarck's theory by Darwin's shows that the effects of use-inheritance often differ from those required by natural selection; and it is clear that the latter factor must at least have reduced use-inheritance to the very minor position of comparative feebleness and harmlessness assigned to it by Darwin.
And use-inheritance all the while is being thoroughly overpowered by impression-inheritance by the full transmission of that which is merely seen in others! If such a law prevails, one may feel cold because an ancestor thought of the frosty Caucasus.
Seeing that natural selection can form and maintain the various structures and the exceedingly complicated instincts of ants and bees and wasps and termites in direct defiance of the alleged tendency to use-inheritance, surely we may believe that natural selection, unopposed by use-inheritance, is equally competent for the work of complex or social or mental evolution in the many cases where the strong presumptive evidence cannot be rendered almost indisputable by the exceptional exclusion of the modified animal from the work of reproduction.
The belief that whatever is acquired by sires is inherited by sons, and the ignoring of purely inner variations, are weak points; but to have brought in the environment as vital was a master stroke. I may say that Spencer's controversy over use-inheritance with Weismann, entered into after he was sixty, seems to me in point of quality better than any other part of his work.
Mr. But these great musicians inherited far more than their parents possessed. The excess of their powers beyond their parents' must surely be attributed to spontaneous variation; and who shall say that the rest was in any way due to use-inheritance?
It is alleged that dogs inherit the intelligence acquired by association with man, and that retrievers inherit the effects of their training. But selection and imitation are so potent that the additional hypothesis of use-inheritance seems perfectly superfluous.
Strong for evil and slow for good, it can convey epilepsy promptly in guinea pigs, but transmits the acquirements of genius so poorly that our best student of the heredity of genius has to account for the frequent and remarkable deterioration of the offspring by a theory which is strongly hostile to use-inheritance.
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