Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/340

336 There can be no question, however, that Darwin did love his selection theory, and somewhat overestimated its importance. His conception of selection in nature may be compared to a series of concentric circles constantly narrowing from the largest groups down to the minutest structures. In the operations of this intimate circle of minute variations within organisms he was inclined to believe two things: first, that the fit or adaptive always arises out of the accidental, or that out of large and minute variations without direction selection brings direction and fitness; second, as a consistent pupil of Lyell, he was inclined to believe that the chief changes in evolution are slow and continuous. The psychology of the former is that he was in a reaction state from the prevailing false teleology. He was not expecting that purposive or teleological or even orthogenetic laws of variation would be discovered. William James has thus recently expressed and endorsed the spirit of Darwinism as a natural philosophy in the followfollowing [sic] words:

It is strange, considering how unanimously our ancestors felt the force of this argument [that is, the teleological], to see how little it counts for since the triumph of the Darwinian theory. Darwin opened our minds to the power of the chance-happenings to bring forth "fit" results if only they have time to add themselves together. He showed the enormous waste of nature in producing results that get destroyed because of their unfitness.

The simple question before us to-day and in the succeeding lectures of this course is: is this true? This really involves the deep seated query whether the intimate or minute parts of living things are operating under natural laws like non-living things, or are really lawless.

Before expressing my individual opinion based on my own researches of the last twenty years I may summarize the general modern dissent: in three points it may be said that Darwin's teachings are not accepted to-day.

First, his slowly developed belief in the inheritance of bodily modifications as well as the provisional "assemblage theory" of heredity which he called pangenesis, have been set aside for Weismann's law that heredity lies in the continuity of a specific heredity plasm, and for want of evidence of the transmission of acquired characters.

Second, while his prevailing belief that changes in organisms are in the main slow and continuous is now positively demonstrated to be correct by the study of descent in fossil organisms, there is also positive evidence for the belief which he less strongly entertained that many changes are discontinuous or mutative, as held by Bateson and De Vries.

Finally, his belief that out of fortuitous or undirected variations in minute characters arise direction, purpose and adaptation through selection still lacks proof by either observation or experiment. Fossil