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Updated: August 2, 2024
One group is called the Neo-Lamarckians; they assume a direct modifying agency of the environment, producing a corresponding and useful change in the organization. The other group call themselves Darwinians or selectionists, but to my mind with no other right beyond the arbitrary restriction of the Darwinian principles by Wallace.
All that is today sound biology and psychology; and the efforts of Natural Selectionists like Weismann to reduce evolution to mere automatism have not touched the doctrine of Jesus, though they have made short work of the theologians who conceived God as a magnate keeping men and angels as Lord Rothschild keeps buffaloes and emus at Tring.
According to the selectionists' theory, chance gave the bird its wings, the fish its fins, the porcupine its quills, the skunk its fetid secretion, the cuttlefish its ink, the swordfish its sword, the electric eel its powerful battery; it gave the giraffe its long neck, the camel its hump, the horse its hoof, the ruminants their horns and double stomach, and so on.
Nevertheless, with the constant advances in the skill of our economic selectionists, there is reason to expect that our bees may be progressively improved.
The position of the camel with reference to the giraffe in Africa is analogous to that, say, of the Catskill conglomerate to the laminated sandstone that lies beneath it. They are kindred; one graduates into the other. Whence the long neck and high withers of the giraffe? The need of high feeding, say the selectionists, but other browsing animals must have felt the same need.
Try to think of that wonderful organ, the eye, with all its marvelous powers and adaptations, as the result of what we call chance or Natural Selection. Well may Darwin have said that the eye made him shudder when he tried to account for it by Natural Selection. Why, its adaptations in one respect alone, minor though they be, are enough to stagger any number of selectionists.
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