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Updated: June 17, 2025
The isolation and independence of the germ-cells, which Weismann postulates as opposing this, can hardly be as great as he thinks. 2. It is in his view impossible to conceive how these acquired characteristics can in any way reach and affect the germ-cells in such a manner as to reappear in the next generation. 3. All variations can be explained by his own theory without such transmission.
As far back as 1896, in a lecture “On the present position of Darwinism,” in which he dealt only with Weismann, he criticised and analysed that author’s last attempt to uphold Darwinism by the construction of his theory of “germinal selection.” He concluded with the wish: “That a spirit of earnestness would once more enter into biological investigation, which would no longer attempt to find in nature just what it wanted to find, but would be ready to follow truth at all costs, and to approach the riddle of life with an open mind.”
The orthodoxy of science, therefore, must be held as giving at any rate a provisional support to Professor Weismann, but all of them, including even Professor Weismann himself, shrink from committing themselves to the opinion that the germ-cells of any organisms remain in all cases unaffected by the events that occur to the other cells of the same organism, and until they do this they have knocked the bottom out of their case.
Romanes, Galton, and Weismann have made great use of this principle in explaining the diminution of disused organs. Weismann has given it the name of Panmixia, all individuals being equally free to survive and commingle their variations, and not merely selected or favoured individuals. Inclusive in each case of fixed strengthening wire weighing about a sixteenth of an ounce or less.
Oh, many loved her as much as you! Colonel Thornton, Dr. Weismann, Judge Gordon, Mr. Barnwell, all adored her! Ah! she was worthy of it." "No more of that, dear Edith, it will overcome us both; but tell me if you will give me your little girl?" "Dear Thurston, your proposal is as strange and unusual as it is generous.
Three essays have been published lately in Germany which would interest you: one by Weismann, who shows that the coloured stripes on the caterpillars of Sphinx are beautifully protective: and birds were frightened away from their feeding-place by a caterpillar with large eye-like spots on the broad anterior segments of the body.
Weismann at once objected that the operations of Brown-Séquard might have introduced certain special microbes into the body of the guinea-pig, which had found their means of nutrition in the nervous tissues and transmitted the malady by penetrating into the sexual elements. This objection has been answered by Brown-Séquard himself; but a more plausible one might be raised.
The difference between Professor Weismann and, we will say, Heringians consists in the fact that the first maintains the new germ-plasm when on the point of repeating its developmental processes to take practically no cognisance of anything that has happened to it since the last occasion on which it developed itself; while the latter maintain that offspring takes much the same kind of account of what has happened to it in the persons of its parents since the last occasion on which it developed itself, as people in ordinary life take of things that happen to them.
Galton's biometrics and eugenics is a return to nature, a keen scrutiny of human beings, which is really an orderly fruition of that of the same author's "Art of Travel." Similarly, Mr. Weismann that he can plague his adversaries with the small but literal and concrete mice and hydroids and water fleas with which his theories began?
Weismann and his followers say that these peculiarities are gained or inherited "from the common stock," but what that common stock is they do not explain. Where is that common stock and why will certain germs acquire certain tendencies and other germs retain other peculiarities? What regulates them? These questions are not solved. So far we have gathered from Dr.
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