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Updated: May 17, 2025
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.
Unlike printer's type, however, the material source of heredity is of a fluctuating nature, consisting of competing elements derived from two parents and from innumerable ancestors. Galton compares parent and child to successive pendants on the same chain. Weismann likens them to successive offshoots thrown up by a long underground root or sucker.
Weismann suggests that the morbid condition of the nervous system may be due to some infection such as might arise from microbes, which find a home in the mutilated and disordered nervous system in the parent, and subsequently transmit themselves to the offspring through the reproductive elements, as the infections of various diseases appear to do the muscardine silkworm disease in particular being known to be conveyed to offspring in this manner.
The tendency is to assign to these last a life of their own, apart from, and unconnected with that of the other cells of the body, and to cheapen all evidence that tends to prove any response on their part to the past history of the individual, and hence ultimately of the race. Professor Weismann is the foremost exponent of those who take this line.
From among the passages in which Professor Weismann himself shows a desire to hedge I may take the following from page 170 of his book:
Eimer, on the other hand, is sharply antagonistic, especially to Weismann; he takes his proofs from the animal kingdom, and in the second volume of his large work already mentioned, which deals with the “orthogenesis of butterflies,” he attempts to set against the Darwinism “chance theory,” a proof of “definitely directed evolution,” and therefore of the “insufficiency of natural selection in the formation of species.”
When we see a person "ostrichizing" the evidence which he has to meet, as clearly as I believe Professor Weismann to be doing, we shall in nine cases out of ten be right in supposing that he knows the evidence to be too strong for him. The Deadlock in Darwinism: Part III Now let me return to the recent division of biological opinion into two main streams Lamarckism and Weismannism.
Professor Weismann, in passages too numerous to quote, shows that he recognises this necessity, and acknowledges that the non-transmission of acquired characters "forms the foundation of the views" set forth in his book, p. 291. Mr.
Among other matters apparently changeable at will is the duration of individual life. Weismann, a very clever and suggestive biologist who was unhappily reduced to idiocy by Neo-Darwinism, pointed out that death is not an eternal condition of life, but an expedient introduced to provide for continual renewal without overcrowding.
Moreover, civilization means evolution; consequently the conditions under which the imagination is active change with the times. Let us suppose, Weismann justly says, that in the Samoan Islands there were born a child having the singular and extraordinary genius of Mozart. What could he accomplish?
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