Page:A critique of the theory of evolution.djvu/72

 Not only has this power to make whatever combinations we choose great practical importance, it has even greater theoretical significance; for, it follows that the individual is not in itself the unit in heredity, but that within the germ-cells there exist smaller units concerned with the transmission of characters.

The older mystical statement of the individual as a unit in heredity has no longer any interest in the light of these discoveries, except as a past phase of biological history. We see, too, more clearly that the sorting out of factors in the germ plasm is a very different process from the influence of these factors on the development of the organism. There is today no excuse for confusing these two problems.

If mechanistic principles apply also to embryonic development then the course of development is capable of being stated as a series of chemico-physical reactions and the "individual" is merely a term to express the sum total of such reactions and should not be interpreted as something different from or more than these reactions. So long as so little is known of the actual processes involved in devel-