Darwinism and Race Progress

View on

e biologists have discovered concerning racial chan

re has caused individuals to acquire or lose through the circumstances to which their race has found itself for a time exposed, and consequently, through the predominant exercise of certain organs, or through a failure to exercise certain parts, it preserves through heredity to the new individ

ted in consequence of this stretching, and that this elongation was transmitted by heredity, although even by imperceptibly slight degrees, from one generation to another, until the part gradually grew to the present length. Lam

are transmitted to the offspring and may produce in time marked racial change. The first idea is undoubtedly and admittedly true. The build of a soldier, a clerk, a ploughman, and an athlete is distinctive; the horn that grows

Law of

onditions in which they live, some of these offspring will have an advantage over the rest, dependent upon an inborn peculiarity. Inasmuch, therefore, as more progeny are produced than can ever survive, those most f

d subsistence to animals with a higher reach. Amongst the ancestral giraffes those born with the longest necks would at such times have an advantage over the rest, who in large numbers would die out. The longer necked ones, more suited to their environment, would perpetuate their inborn quality of long-neckedness: of the next generation those again with the longest necks would survive, and so on. The Darwin and Wallace school of thinkers would

g.

en. Environment is represented by a board with holes through which they must pass. In so doing they become thinner, transmit the thinness to their children, and so on. In B, a man of rounded propor

involved i

ch other, and it is said that the last years of the lives of the Siamese twins were sadly marred by their opposing views as to the rights and wrongs of the American Civil War! It stands to reason also that these variations may be of advantage or disadvantage to their possessors, and that among animals and plants, where there are no social props given to the weak, the variations may and do determine survival. To give an idea of the rigorous operation of selection which we find among the lower animals, we have only to enumerate the number of the progeny produced by each pair, which is often prodigious, and knowing as we do that the number of individuals in a species remain virtually the same in a given district for long periods of time together, we conclude that the room of the parents is just filled by a younger pair, and all the

ce in each year. In all a cat will have, on a fair estimate, thirty-two kittens, and may be a great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother in her lifetime, yet we do not observe in town or village such an alarming increase in the cats from year to year. Their number is pretty stationary, kept so by the enormous destruction of their prog

s come and go, and their survivors again fall victims to privations, disease, or nat

s a Fact, n

the present day, but by those who trust only to their everyday experience. "The child has its father's temper," or "its mother's eyes," are expressions heard in ever

ists, but by most intelligent and educated persons. It was understood, and its significance partly appreciated by Malthus, and I find that even he acknowledges a prior claim of Franklin's.[

explainable

wever, inclined to believe that along with this, there may be some transmission of acquired character, only discernible after the lapse of many generations. Darwin himself thought that this was the case; he held that certain racial distinctions were due to the action of the environment on the parents and the transmission of the change thus produced upon their offspring. In his great work upon "The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication,"[4] he enumerates some

position now held by the Neo-Darwinian School of Galton and Weismann. He says (pp. 117, 118), "If under changed conditions of life, a structure, before useful, becomes less useful, its diminution will be favoured, for it will profit the

direction. It may be said, I think, without gainsay, that, since Darwin's death, the most important and outstanding work done by the biologists has been the uprooting of much of the Lamarckian doctrine, originally held

and W

dicate that the generative matter is passed on from one generation to another, remaining intact in the body of the parent, and that we have no reason to suppose that it could be influenced by changes in other parts of the parental organism. It is not uninteresting to note and

e sexual elements at all, and we may be confident that at most they do so in a very faint degree: in other words, that acquired modifications are barely, if at all, inherited in the correct sense of the term." Thirteen years later[7] he expresses

een experimentally shown to be correct. Our experiments are still too coarse, as compared with the fine distinctions which separate one individual from another, and the difficulty of obtaining clear results is greatly increased by

modes of life of a vast number of animals and plants, has shown that many of the cases which Darwin was doubtful about may reasonably be explained by s

way to speculations of the most elaborate kind, built upon the most flimsy substratum of fact. There is evidence of this tendency even in his early writ

e clear what in his works may, in my opinion, safely be looked upon as speculative rather than legitimate, or even provisional, general

Characters

imated, and, in respect to the non-inheritance of acquired characters, the mass of modern th

question upon the facts themselves we may take two lines of research. In the first place, we may examine every case of racial change, the production of new or different parts, the development of a new instinct, or the degeneration or loss of parts or instincts present at some past epoch. If in every case we are not compelled to exclude natural selection, and if in every case that we can directly and exper

d Transmission to be

heir turn will produce others as favourably or more favourably constituted, from whom further selection can take place. We cannot shut our eyes to the operation of selection in such instances, nor have we any reason for saying that part of the effect must be due to some other cause. In the case of organs which become useless and finally disappear in the course of generations, a selective agency will sufficiently account for this disappearance. As Darwin himself pointed out, a useless organ is an expense and a drain upon an animal's capital; it requires blood, and its exercise uses up some of the sum total of energy the animal possesses. The truth of this can be shown experimentally, as when compensatory growth occurs in the rest of the body after amputation of a limb, or when one lung or kidney enlarges subsequently to the disease or removal of the other. In cases where an or

e results of training are transmitted. For it is easy to understand how those that would have rebelled most against man's authority, and who were by nature the least tractable, would have been less cared for by man, and probably would finally have suffered extermination, while the docile received his attention, and were allowed to reach maturity and perpetuate the race. That this selection must be going on at the present time

ental Evidence of

parts appear in the offspring of to-day as in the earlier periods of their race's history. Certain breeds of dogs and sheep have for many generations been systematically docked, and yet the young are born with as long tails as those of other breeds. Chinese women have compressed their feet from times long past in their history, yet Chinese female infants are still born with large

need not wonder that it has produced such widespread conviction,

tive and the

cks and stones of a house, to form the body. The cells are, all of them, nourished by the blood and lymph, and some are connected together by strands of connecting matter termed nerves. All the cells of the body are descendants from a single fertilise

affected by Local Cha

. But the blood is now known to be but a food and oxygen carrier, and an eliminator of used-up products. It is like a river laden with vessels carrying corn for the food of the big city, and nothing more. The life, the energy, the character of the body i

though it rarely does, af

s of such a thing, as when the blood and whole constitution are involved after maybe a primary local affection, and when, in consequence, the hair drops off, or marks and irregularities of the nails appear. In these cases the sexual cells may suffer from want of nourishment, or from what we may term a poison, and may produce less vigorous and perhaps diseased or malformed offspring, but they will show no tendency to develop in the offspring that primary local affection w

few statements, such as that of De Quatrefages, that horses taken from Normandy to the hilly and less fertile country in Brittany become distinctly smaller in the course of three generations. In our own country large horses are found in the plains and small horses and ponies in the hilly districts of Wales and Scotland. But the obvious utility to man of small breeds in hilly dis

ly in the adjacent plains, and a classical case mentioned by Lemaire[11] is that of the hemp which, removed from Piedmont to the less suitable soil of France, becomes a smaller variety, growing to only half its former height in the course of two or three generations. The eno

f its substance, but they show minor differences amongst themselves, and give rise in their turn to offspring no two of which are alike. These sexual cells, residing within the paternal or maternal body, are uninfluenced by the course of life led

Selection known to th

various breeds of cattle have been produced by man, not by any new method of ventilating the cow-sheds, or by some freshly discovered patent fodder, but simply by selecting for breeding purposes those individuals that most suited the breeder's purpose. The racing stallion was kept which most resembled a greyhound, the hog that most resembled a beer bar

far the most powerful factor in producing racial change. So far these facts have had little or no application to the question of human race progress. People are still too much biassed by archaic anthropocentric ideas; they view man by himse

not speak of the "leg" of a piano; but we in our turn draw our own often exaggerated lines, beyond which we will not pass. Just as there is no subject which will not yield food for the evil-minded, so there is no subject-having to do with the laws of nature-which cannot be naturally approached in all sim

TNO

in's Miscel

after Darwin,"

xxvii., vo

Letters," vo

thropological Institut

Inheritance"

of Descent," translated b

by Poulton, Sch?nland and Shipley; vol.

d by W. Newton

igny's "Di