Chapter II: Part 2

To his great task he brought a patience that is almost without parallel. One of his biographers, Grant Allen, tells us that: “His uncle and father-in-law, Josiah Wedgwood, suggested to him that the apparent sinking of stones on the surface might really be due to earthworm castings. So, as soon as he had some land of his own to experiment upon, he began in 1842, to spread broken chalk over a field at Down, in which, twenty-nine years later in 1871, a trench was dug to test the results. “What other naturalist,” asks Allen, ever waited so long and so patiently to discover the upshot of a single experiment? Is it wonderful that a man who worked like that should succeed, not by faith but by logical power, in removing mountains?”

Darwin studied domestic animals. He observed how many, and how widely different, races there are of horses, dogs, swine, poultry in general and pigeons in particular. In each instance the many varieties are derived from an original common stock, as domestic fowls from the Indian jungle fowl, and pigeons from the old-world rock-dove.

“Derived,” but how--by what process? In the case of domestic creatures this was not difficult to answer. It is accomplished by breeders “selecting” the individuals to be bred from. In the case of pigeons, which Darwin laid particular stress on the fancier seemed to be able to obtain almost any kind of a bird by selecting as parents those pigeons which had the desired characteristics developed to the most pronounced degree, and then again selecting in the same way from their progeny. In this way were produced birds so different from each other and their ancestors as the tumbler, the fantail, the pouter, and about a hundred and fifty other varieties. The same with horses. If the breeder desired draught horses, he selected for parents those animals with massive shoulders and sturdy limbs. When a racer wins a “classic” race, it is at once sent to the stud-farm. Although in the zenith of its powers it races no more; it is “selected” for another and more important role--the reproduction and, it is hoped, the accentuation of the characteristics which enabled it to outrun its competitors.

All this impressed on Darwin’s mind the importance of the word “selection,” which appears in the title of his theory and the subtitle of his epoch-making book. Could it be possible that nature contained some principle or combination of principles, which performed among wild animals a part analogous to that of the breeder, among domestic animals? Darwin discovered that this is precisely what takes place. His famous theory may be formulated under the three following heads:

(1) Heredity.

(2) Variation.

(3) The struggle for existence, with its resultant, survival of
the fittest.

Darwin requires very little of heredity, and what he does ask is beyond dispute. It is enough for his theory if like begets like and “figs do not grow on thistles.”

Similarly with variation, the demands of his hypothesis are very slight. If it be conceded that variation is a fact, that offspring do vary from their parents and each other, it is enough. And who will dispute this in a world where no two creatures are exactly and in all particulars alike? The apparent contradiction that, heredity demands likeness, while variation requires difference, is confined to the surface--it is not real. The likeness is general while the difference is particular. A sheep may be born with shorter or longer legs, by variation; but it will be a sheep and not a horse, by heredity.

As an example of the working of the theory let us take Lamarck’s piece de resistance, the giraffe. Lamarck says: “We know that this animal, the tallest of mammals, inhabits the interior of Africa, and that it lives in localities where the earth, almost always arid and destitute of herbage, obliges it to browse on the foliage of trees and to make continual efforts to reach it. It has resulted from this habit, maintained for a long period in all the individuals of its race, that its forelegs have become longer than the hinder ones, and that its neck is so elongated that the giraffe, without standing on its hind legs, raises its head and reaches six meters in height (almost twenty feet).”

Lamarck thought this length of neck was acquired by “continual efforts to reach,” or, as Alfred Russell Wallace puts it in his criticism of Lamarck--“stretching.” Many critics ventilated their wit on this theory of Lamarck’s, under the impression that they were lampooning Darwin’s idea.

They made a blunder similar to that of those critics of Utopian Socialism who labor under the pleasing delusion that they are riddling the theories of Marx. Professor Ritchie has preserved a couple of stanzas by a witty Scotch judge who aimed his poem at Darwin, but hit Lamarck.

“A deer with a neck that was longer by half
Than the rest of his family, try not to laugh,
By stretching and stretching became a giraffe
Which nobody can deny.

That four-footed beast which we now call a whale,
Held his hind-legs so close that they grew to a tail,
Which he uses for threshing the sea, like a flail,
Which nobody can deny.”

But Darwin’s theory is altogether independent of the “stretching” idea. The causes and origin of heredity and variation are up to this moment, alike wrapped in mystery. But when science succeeds in penetrating those secrets, it is extremely unlikely that Darwin’s theory will be seriously weakened, no matter what the causes may prove to be.

Now about the giraffe. We will suppose, for the sake of illustration, two giraffes, a male and a female, whose necks are precisely five feet long. We will confine our illustration to the question of the neck alone. We will suppose this particular pair to give birth to a family of three. First comes heredity. All we ask of heredity is that the young shall be giraffes, not camels or any other species; and this heredity guarantees. Now comes variation. As this is an ideal case for the purpose of illustrating the theory, we will have one of the three shorter-necked than the parents, another the same length, while the third has a longer neck--over five feet.

Now comes the struggle for existence. When this family of giraffes is fairly grown and the new-comers are approaching breeding age--mark the importance of this matter of “breeding age,” for the problem is to find out how nature determines which shall be bred from--they are obliged to forage for themselves. There is no pasture to graze; they live in what is almost a desert. There are few shrubs; scarcely anything but fairly high trees--from ten to twenty feet. If a giraffe breeder had this matter in hand and he wished to increase the length of the giraffe’s neck, the problem would be simple. He would select number three with the longest neck, pair it with the longest necked member of the opposite sex in some other family and the trick would be done. But this is in Central Africa, where there is no breeder to interfere, and the question is: can nature accomplish the same result without his help?

This is what happens. First the leaves are eaten from all the lower branches as they are reached with the least effort. Then they go higher and still higher until the point is reached where number one with the shortest neck cannot reach any further and the terrible struggle for existence begins. Number two sees no danger as yet and number three has things all his own way. But with short-necked number one, a tragedy has begun. Every day now sees the food further out of his reach and even number two is obliged to reach out for his supply. The breeding time is approaching but the longer necked and therefore well-fed and vigourous females will have nothing to do with this wobbley starving creature, and the longer necked, well-fed males shun the short-necked starving females. If the starving ones mate, the mother dies before giving birth to offspring, or she cannot get nourishment enough to rear her progeny; in either case there is no effective succession. So the longer-necked are the fittest and they survive. Thus does nature “select” one by the negative process of destroying the rest, in about the same way as a man “selects” one puppy in a litter by drowning the rest.

In the case of the puppies we may say “artificial selection;” in the case of the giraffe it is “natural selection.” And this theory, simple as it may seem here, revolutionized Biology.

It is worthy of note that “natural” selection has many advantages over “artificial” selection. The breeder may be mistaken; he may select the wrong puppy and drown its superior. The horse that won the great race may have had a fleeter-footed companion in the same stable had the trainer known how to develop his possibilities. The gardener may have passed the best root or stem through carelessness. But nature makes no such mistakes, or if she does she eventually redeems them. Her method, while it is wholly fortuitous and unintelligent, is practically infallible. The condition of survival is, adaptation to environment. The very process of selection is, in itself, a sure test of fitness. True, moral considerations are eliminated--at least in the non-social world--yet nature offers something like a fair field and no favors. When we speak of nature’s favorites, we simply mean those who are best fitted to meet her hard conditions.

Take a row of celery plants, from which future seedlings are to be “selected.”

In this instance, let us suppose, the quality desired is ability to resist frost. How is the gardener to know which of fifty plants are the “best” in this respect. He has no method of finding out with any degree of certainty. But nature comes along some night with a sharp frost and “selects” ten by killing forty. And the very act of this “natural” selection proves that these ten are better able to withstand the frost than their fellows.

Breeders of white sheep who supply the white wool market have a very tangible guide--they kill every lamb that shows the least tinge of black. But even here, nature is not to be out-done. In Virginia there is--or at least was in Darwin’s day--a wild hog of pure black. One of its staple foods was known as the “paint-root.” Any hog with the least speck of white on its body was poisoned by this root while its all-black brothers found it a health-sustaining and succulent food.

In an environment which remained constant and where a species of animals had reached a population which strained the limits of subsistence--food supply--those offspring which most closely resemble their parents, who had won out in that environment, would again succeed and be selected. While if the environment changed--became warmer or colder for example--those descendants which happened to vary in a direction making them better able to cope with the new conditions would be selected for survival as against those who resembled their parents, which parents had survived in their day because they were adapted to the prior environment.

For example, a country is well supplied with water and it is as a consequence fertile and “green.” In such a country green insects and green reptiles will be selected, because a green background will render them almost invisible to their enemies. Individuals of other colors will make their appearance by variation, but they will be such plain targets to their enemies, they will be devoured before they reach breeding age and have a chance to reproduce the variation.

But suppose desiccation (drying up) sets in. The country loses its water supply, as Krapotkin has shown to have been the case in North-West Mongolia and East Turkestan, leading to the enforced exodus of the barbarians. Now green will disappear and brown or yellow--say brown--takes its place. While this change will not, so far as we know, cause insects and lizards to breed brown instead of green, it will ensure the survival or “selection” of such as are born brown and the destruction of those who breed true to their green ancestors. Now every atavistic return to green will be mercilessly weeded out, just as, when the country was well-watered and green, every sporadic production of brown was done to death.

This is the biological foundation of that environment philosophy which now pervades all our thinking. Change the physical environment, says the biologist, and the species will be transformed. Change the economic environment, says the Socialist, and, if you make the right change, the race will be redeemed. Both statements rest on the same fundamental laws.

As the many and highly important implications of this theory, are fully dealt with in subsequent lectures most of them will be passed here.

We may note however, that whenever any nation in the modern world, produces, in the development of its industry, a Socialistic variation, that new feature at once proves its utility and is “selected” in the Darwinian sense, because it constitutes an advantage over the previous form of social organization, in that particular. This is the reason why the trust--which is socialistic and revolutionary in its essential tendences--is always victorious, in spite of the foolish ravings of the Hearst newspapers and the antediluvian twaddle of William Jennings Bryan.

But Darwin’s crowning achievement is that he made the general theory of evolution impregnable by thoroughly and conclusively demonstrating it in his own field as a naturalist. From then on it was only a question of time as to when its application would be universal.

Socialism may be defined as the application of the theory of evolution to the phenomena of society. This is precisely what Marx and Engels accomplished, and this why their work is so fundamentally opposed to the conventional theories and theological superstitious current in their time, and so fully in harmony with all the latest achievements in the scientific world. History ceases to be a meaningless mass of war and famine, bloodshed and cruelty. It becomes a panorama presenting the development of society according to laws which may be understood and with a future that may be measurably predicted.

It develops by the operation of forces that no man or class can wholly stay or hinder. The power of those forces and the direction in which they are now making has been well set forth by Victor Hugo by a very striking simile in the following passage:

“We are in Russia. The Neva is frozen. Heavy carriages roll upon its surface. They improvise a city. They lay out streets. They build houses. They buy. They sell. They laugh. They dance. They permit themselves anything. They even light fires on this water become granite. There is winter, there is ice and they shall last forever. A gleam pale and wan spreads over the sky and one would say that the sun is dead. But no, thou art not dead, oh Liberty! At an hour when they have most profoundly forgotten thee; at a moment when they least expect thee, thou shall arise, oh, dazzling sight! Thou shalt shoot thy bright and burning rays, thy heat, thy life, on all this mass of ice become hideous and dead. Do you hear that dull thud, that crackling, deep and dreadful? ’Tis the Neva tearing loose. You said it was granite. See it splits like glass. ’Tis the breaking of the ice, I tell you. ’Tis the water alive, joyous and terrible. Progress recommences. ’Tis humanity again beginning its march. ’Tis the river which retakes its course, uproots, mangles, strikes together, crushes and drowns in its waves not only the empire of upstart Czar Nicholas, but all of the relics of ancient and modern despotism. That trestle work floating away? It is the throne. That other trestle? It is the scaffold. That old book, half sunk? It is the old code of capitalist laws and morals. That old rookery just sinking? It is a tenement house in which wage slaves lived. See these all pass by; passing by never more to return; and for this immense engulfing, for this supreme victory of life over death, what has been the power necessary? One of thy looks, oh, sun! One stroke of thy strong arm, oh, labor!”

IV.

WEISMANN’S THEORY OF HEREDITY.

The weak, untrained brain must have a conclusion. It cannot reserve its decision or render an open verdict. It is completely at sea in the scientific world where the most profound savant is often obliged to say, “I don’t know.” In a crowded courtroom, ninety per cent of the spectators have made up their minds that the prisoner is innocent or guilty before the first witness is called or a line of the evidence has been read. He has a square jaw, or bushy eyebrows, or thick lips, or he shifts uneasily from one foot to the other, any or all which proves to the simpletons back of the rail, that he must be guilty no matter what the crime is, or what the evidence may be. If he has blue eyes and fair hair and mustache, or a pleasant manner, or pretty hands and the onlookers were to decide the matter, they would hardly convict him on his own confession. In England, a judge is not placed on the bench because he “stands in” with a ward boss, but because of his wide scholarship and systematic training, and the reason advanced for this method is, that only a scientific scholar can reserve his opinion until all the evidence is in and then, if the case demands it, render an open verdict.

With the vexed problem of heredity, which has been so much to the fore in science for the last twenty-four years, while many great thinkers have distinctly taken sides, it must be remembered that in many points of great importance, the only possible verdict on the contentions of either side, is one of “not proven.”

But although this controversy has split the evolutionists into two camps, it in no way compromises the evolution theory itself. The controversy is based on the admission of all the parties to it, that evolution is granted, and the question at issue involves only a difference as to how the acknowledged results are accomplished. Evolution is no longer merely a theory, it is an established fact, and is recognized as such by all who live in an intellectual atmosphere belonging to this side of 1859, the year of the publication of the “Origin of Species.”

Neither does the result of this discussion threaten, in any way, the validity of the Darwinian theory of “Natural Selection.” All the disputants are avowed Darwinians, and disagree only as to whether Darwin’s theory is alone sufficient to account for the origin of new species.

Professor Packard, Lamarck’s biographer, and one of his warmest admirers, at the close of his chapter devoted to the denial of “pure” Darwinism says: “We must never forget or under-estimate, however, the inestimable value of the services rendered by Darwin, who by his patience, industry, and rare genius for observation and experiment, and his powers of lucid exposition, convinced the world of the truth of evolution, with the result that it has transformed the philosophy of our day. We are all evolutionists, though we may differ as to the nature of the efficient causes.”

There are now three possible positions. (1) That of the Lamarckians, pure and simple, who maintain that Lamarck’s theory in itself explains all the phenomena, and that Darwin’s principle of selection is not only invalid but superfluous. This school is practically extinct, though Packard often sails to its very edge in his efforts to defend his subject, as is the manner of biographers. (2) The Neo- (New)- Lamarckians who develop Lamarck’s theory and add to it Darwin’s selective principle as of greater, equal, or secondary importance, according as they lean the more strongly to Darwin or Lamarck. This position held the field almost alone, until Weismann fired his opening gun in 1883. He founded (3) the Neo-Darwinian school which repudiates altogether the Lamarckian factor of the hereditary transmission of acquired characters, and maintains that Darwin’s theory is able to dispense with Lamarckian ideas of use and disuse.

As Weismann is the storm center of the controversy we will now examine his theory.

In 1883 Weismann became the pro-Rector of the University of Freiburg and in the hall of the University, in June of that year, he publicly delivered his inaugural lecture “On Heredity.” This lecture is generally regarded as the first broadside in that war which filled with its reverberations the scientific magazines of the world for the next thirteen years. As one writer aptly says, “The warring scientists splashed like irate cuttle-fishes in clouds of their own ink.” About 1896 however, the public grew tired of the never-ending flood of biological lore on what looked to the lay mind like an insoluble problem. The editors, with their fingers on the public pulse, cried, “A plague on both your houses,” and sent the savants to seek in their laboratories the victories denied to their pens.

As a matter of fact however, the coming struggle was foreshadowed in a paper read by Weismann at the meeting of the Association of the German Naturalists at Salzburg, two years earlier, in 1881.

This paper was entitled “The Duration of Life,” and the subject was still further developed in an academic lecture, in 1883, on “Life and Death.” These two biological contributions not only indicated the foundations of Weismann’s theory, but they threw a very brilliant light in certain very dark places. Weismann not only took up, but he solved the hitherto obscure question of the origin of death.

Johannes Muller had, as early as 1840, rejected the prevailing hypothesis which held the death of animals to be due to “the influences of the organic environment, which gradually wear away the life of the individual.” Muller argued that if this were so “the organic energy of an individual would steadily decrease from the beginning.” Everybody knows, however, that in spite of the wear and tear caused by the “environment,” be it organic or inorganic, the volume of life increases, until a certain stage is reached in all animals. But Muller had failed to fill the gap his criticism had created.

This problem Weismann solved by analysing the methods of reproduction among animals. These generally speaking are two; sexual, and non-sexual or, as it is sometimes termed, a-sexual. This latter form is the mode that prevails at the bottom of the organic scale--among the protozoa, animals consisting of a single cell. This method has a variety of forms which are classified by Haeckel as (1) self-division; (2) formation of buds; (3) the formation of germ-cells or spores. We shall here deal only with the first, self-division, or fission, which is the most universal of all methods of propagation, being the progress by which the individual cells which compose all the higher animals multiply themselves. This is the method vital to Weismann’s theory and the other two are no more than distinct modifications of fission.

When a Moneron or an Amoeba reaches a certain size, it begins to pinch in the middle like a tightly-laced corset. This increases until the creature divides into two equal halves. Each of these halves becomes a complete individual which continues to thrive until the next division takes place.

What Weismann observed as the most significant thing about this was that in this process and among these unicellular (single celled) organisms there is no such thing as natural death. Accidental death is wholesale in its proportions, but no Moneron ever dies of old age. Astounding as it may seem to the layman, the race-old, world-wide idea that death is “essential to the very nature of life itself” is here totally and indisputably overthrown.

“I pointed out,” says Weismann, in the second lecture and referring to the first “that we could not speak of natural death among unicellular animals, for their growth has no termination which is comparable with death. The origin of new individuals is not connected with the death of the old; but increase by division takes place in such a way that the two parts into which an organism separates are exactly equivalent to one another, and neither of them is older or younger than the other. In this way countless numbers of individuals arise, each of which is as old as the species itself, while each possesses the capability of living on indefinitely, by means of divisions.”

Among the Metazoa, i. e., multicellular or many celled animals, this immortality of the individual disappears. “Here, also,” says Weismann, “reproduction takes place by means of cell-division, but every cell does not possess the power of reproducing the whole organism. The cells of the organism are differentiated into two essentially different groups, the reproductive cells--ova or spermatozoa--and the somatic cells, or cells of the body. The immortality of the unicellular organism has passed over to the former--the reproductive cells--the others must die, and since the body of the individual is chiefly composed of them, it must die also.”

And so death came into the world, not by sin, as the Genesis legend reports, but through sex; a most astonishing conclusion, it may be, but one from which there is apparently no escape. Immortality still remains, it is true, but it is not the immortality of the conscious self. Positive science, nothwithstanding all its glorious gifts, has dealt a terrible blow to those gorgeous dreams of primitive men and modern mystics; those hopes and longings which have sustained millions of our race in hours of supreme sorrow; a blow which not even the bravest has been able to receive without flinching. The only immortality of which science has any surety is that of these unconscious single cells, which make possible the reproduction of the species.

Weismann, then, divides the cells which compose the bodies of the higher animals, including man, into two distinct kinds; the somatic, or body cells and the germ, or reproductive cells. These germ cells are, so to speak, batteries in which are stored a substance which Weismann calls germ-plasm. A minutely small portion of this germ-plasm from an individual of one sex, mixed with a similar portion from an individual of the other will produce a new individual. But--and here comes the keystone of Weismann’s arch--only a portion of the mixed germ-plasm is used up in the composition of the new individual; the rest is stored away in the germ-cells of the new individual for further reproduction when the time arrives. The only relation that this reserved germ-plasm has with the body cells of the new individual is that it is provided by them with room and board.

Thus, according to Weismann, from generation to generation, there is an unbroken stream of germ-plasm, and this constitutes his celebrated theory of “The Continuity of Germ-Plasm.” Granted this theory as a premise, and Weismann’s conclusions cannot be gainsaid. This germ-plasm being the sole “carrier of heredity,” nothing that happens to the somatic or body cells can be transmitted to the progeny.

Darwin had put forward a theory of heredity which he called “Pangenesis,” which made out a good case for the admission of the Lamarckian factor. According to this theory all the somatic or body cells give forth still smaller cells which he calls “gemmules.” These gemmules are collected, by some process not explained, in the reproductive organs. Here they are in packets, and these “packets of gemmules” are “the carriers of heredity.” One can easily see how by this process the effects of use and disuse would be transmissible for an organ shrunk by disuse would not be capably represented by an efficient delegation of gemmules at the reproductive headquarters.

Speaking of this theory, Grant Allen in his biography of Darwin says, “Let not the love of the biographer deceive us. Not to mince matters, it was his one conspicuous failure, and is now pretty universally admitted as such.” It must be remembered however, that Darwin was fully aware of its purely speculative character and with his usual caution entitled it the “Provisional Hypothesis of Pangenesis.”

Romanes, one of Weismann’s ablest critics, compares Weismann’s theory with Darwin’s, and while he refuses to defend Pangenesis against Weismann’s charge that it is a wholly unsupported speculation, he replies by contending that the germ-plasm theory lives in precisely the same kind of a glass house.

However that may be, it is quite clear that the germ-plasm theory completely shuts out the Lamarckian factor of evolution in all cases where propagation is sexual.

“But,” say the Neo-Lamarckians, “Darwinism in itself, merely assumes variations without attempting to explain their origin. Natural selection only explains the survival of the fittest; it tells us nothing of what Prof. Cope calls the ‘Origin of the Fittest.’ There must be variation before selection, whence then, comes this variation?” To this question Weismann has a ready reply. “Variation is due to the blending of two wholly different kinds of germ-plasm at conception, producing at birth a result that is not, and cannot be, wholly like the contributor of either.”

And now, at last, the great German is in a corner. If all variations are due to congenital characters only, and these, of course, are only possible because of the combinations secured by sexual reproduction, how do variations arise among non-sexual organisms where such combinations cannot exist?

This is indeed, a poser. But any rejoicing by Weismann’s opponents is quite premature. The sagacity which set those opponents by the ears is still available. There is no attempt to untie that knot; Weismann cuts it with a knife. He empties his antagonist’s sails by a smiling and gracious surrender. Below the sexually reproducing animals, he concedes the operation of the Lamarckian factor. In that unicellular world it is not a special cell that is passed on but the individual itself is continued, and of course any character acquired by the individual will be preserved along with the individual.

Thus then the region of controversy is limited to sexually reproducing organisms and we come to the field where the fiercest fight was made. Do these organisms transmit by heredity those characters or peculiarities acquired by the individual during its own life-time? To this question the Neo-Lamarckians gave a positive affirmative, which Weismann met with an unwavering denial.

Weismann challenged his opponents to produce a single demonstration of such a transmission. Here let us be clear as to what is meant by an acquired character. For illustration, let us suppose a father leaves his son an estate of a thousand acres. That is inheritance. If the son leaves his son the same one thousand acres, that is still inheritance. But if that son increases the estate, during his life-time to two thousand, the second thousand is an “acquired character” of a property nature. There the analogy ceases for there is no dispute as to his ability to transmit both thousands to his heirs by inheritance.

But with “acquired characters” of a biological nature, Weismann maintains this to be impossible. Many specific instances were put forward in refutation of this contention. Herbert Spencer cited the case of the supposed degeneration of the little toe in civilized man as a result of the shoe wearing habit. This it was urged could only have occurred through the transmission of acquired characters and not by natural selection as this diminished toe could not be of any value in the struggle for existence.

But it was shown by measuring the feet of savages, who do not wear shoes, and whose ancestors never wore them, that the small toes of savages had degenerated quite as much.

Then Cesare Lombroso entered the arena leading a camel. According to the Italian criminologist, the camel’s hump had been first acquired by bearing loads and then transmitted by heredity. From the fact that the camel and the llama, which is smooth backed, have something in common, he concludes that camels are really llamas that have recently acquired a hump in the performance of their labors. Lombroso also supported his hump theory by some statements about Hottentot women having developed callouses on their hips by carrying their children on their backs. Unfortunately all Lombroso’s ingenuity was wasted for we happen to possess the geological record of the camel in good condition, and from this history we know that the “ship of the desert” had his hump before the human race appeared when according to Lombroso he should have been a smooth-backed llama. Disappointed as Weismann’s critics were it was hardly feasible to argue that the camel had gotten his hump in those early times by placing loads on his own back.

It was clearly seen that if a case of the transmission of a mutilation could be established, Weismann’s theory would be thereby demolished. A remarkable attempt was made in this direction in 1887 at the meeting of the Association of the German Naturalists at Wiesbaden. To that dignified gathering came Dr. Zacharias with a number of tailless cats. It was asserted that these cats had no tails because their mother had lost her tail through having it run over by a cart wheel. The examination of these specimens proved an entertaining diversion from the regular proceedings, and Prof. Eimer took them seriously enough to refer to them in a later work as “a valuable instance of the transmission of mutilations.”

Weismann, however, refused to be put down. He insisted that in the absence of absolute certainty as to the cart wheel incident, they did not fulfill the first condition of scientific evidence, and Dr. Zacharias wisely admitted later, that this point was well taken. Prof. Poulton had described certain cats with extra toes which he had kept under surveillance for seven generations. “It would be equally justifiable,” says Weismann, “to derive cats with extra toes from an ancestor whose toes had been trodden on, as to derive the tailless cats of the Isle of Man from an ancestor of which the tail had been cut off by a cart passing over it, and thus to regard the existence of the race as a proof of the transmission of mutilations.”

Again Weismann points out that the absence of a tail may not be owing to the mutilation of the mother but to the inherent taillessness of an unknown father. He proceeds to relate how during the year that Dr. Zacharias came with his collection, “My friend, Prof. Schottlius brought me a kitten with an innate rudimentary tail, which he had accidentally discovered as one of a family of kittens at Waldkirch, a small town in the southern part of the Black Forest. A closer investigation resulted in the following rather unexpected discovery. For some time past, tailless kittens have frequently appeared in the families of many different mother cats at Waldkirch, and this fact is explained in the following manner. A clergyman, who lived for some time at Waldkirch had married an English lady who possessed a tailless male Manx cat. The probability that all the tailless cats in Waldkirch are more or less distant descendants of that male cat amounts almost to certainty. Since a male Manx cat has reached the Black Forest, it might equally well arrive at some other place.”

This very same year a popular scientific journal came to the rescue of the transmission theory with the following incident purporting to have taken place 22 years before, in 1864. “A pregnant merino sheep broke its right foreleg about two inches above the knee-joint; the limb was put in splints and healed a long time before the following March, when the animal produced young. The lamb possessed a ring of black wool from two to three inches in breadth round the place at which the mother’s leg had been broken, and upon the same leg.” When this incident was related to Weismann, he replied, “It is a pity that the black wool was not arranged in the form of the inscription ‘to the memory of the fractured leg of my dear mother.’”

Writing in the following year Weismann says, “Furthermore, the mutilations of certain parts of the human body, as practised by different nations from time immemorial, have not in a single instance, led to the malformation or reduction of the parts in question. Such hereditary effects have been produced neither by circumcision nor the removal of the front teeth, nor the boring of holes in the lips or nose, nor the extraordinary artificial crushing and crippling of the feet of Chinese women. No child among any of the nations referred to possesses the slightest trace of these mutilations when born; they have to be acquired anew in each generation.”

While it is undoubtedly true that much in Weismann’s position lacks experimental demonstration, it is equally true that when the heat of the discussion somewhat subsided, his theories were well to the fore, and they have since secured a wide acceptance among competent authorities. It is hardly to be expected that his two greatest critics, Spencer and Haeckel, would look with much favor on a theory the acceptance of which would make necessary the re-writing of those many volumes which constitute their lifework. Lankester, himself no mean authority, in translating Haeckel’s “History of Creation,” feels constrained to say in the preface, “I feel it due to myself to state that I do not agree with him as to a very large part of his views on classification, and as to his belief in the necessity of assuming the ‘transmissibility of acquired characters.’ Readers who have gained an interest in these questions from the brief statements of the present work must, without assuming that Professor Haeckel’s judgment is final, go on to study for themselves the works of Weismann and others which are mentioned with perfect fairness in these pages.”

And Joseph McCabe, the translator of his “Riddle of the Universe,” and “Last Words on Evolution,” has this to say in his introduction to the latter, written two years ago, “To closer students, who are at times impatient of the Lamarckian phraseology of Haeckel--to all, in fact, who would like to see how the same evolutionary truths are expressed without reliance on the inheritance of acquired characters,--I may take the opportunity to say that I have translated for the same publishers, Professor Guenther’s “Darwinism and the Problems of Life,” which will shortly be in their hands.”

It must be admitted that the older view is much less favorable to the Socialist position in sociology than the later theory of Weismann. It is a matter of some satisfaction that so great a critic as Romanes concedes the feasibility of Weismann’s theory while rejecting some of the conclusions which he draws from it. “If Weismann’s theory is true,” says Prof. David Starr-Jordan, “the whole literature of sociology will have to be rewritten!” And another writer insisted that Weismann had reopened the case for Socialism.

If it were true that the terrible results of the degrading conditions forced upon the dwellers in the slums were transmitted to their children by heredity, until in a few generations they became fixed characters, the hopes of Socialists for a regenerated society would be much more difficult to realize. In that case these unfortunate creatures would continue to act in the same discouraging way for several generations, no matter how their environment had been transformed by the corporate action of society. This much at any rate, Weismann has done for us, he has scientifically destroyed that lie.

In this respect, independent sociological experiments and investigations have arrived at the same conclusions as Weismann. Prof. John R. Commons by careful study, reached the following conclusions: That 1.75 per cent of the population of the United States are congenital defectives; that 3.25 per cent are induced defectives, that is, they have not inherited their deficiency; that 2 per cent are possessed of genius and will make their way under the hardest conditions; that 2 per cent are below the Aryan brain level; and that the remaining 91 per cent are normal persons who are neither good nor bad, brilliant nor stupid, criminal nor virtuous, and whose future is entirely decided by the environment which surrounds them during the first fifteen years of their life.

Herman Whittaker, a magazine contributor, states that during eight years in Canada 2,000 boys taken from the London slums by Dr. Barnado passed under his observation on a farm colony. And although most of them had served terms in jail, not more than one per cent reverted to their own former habits, or the habits of their parents.

When it is charged that a transformed social environment will not solve the problem presented by the slum, the sweatshop and the jail, as Socialists assert, we are justified in nailing the statement as false, and a libel on human nature. And in so doing, we are not sentimental dreamers of dreams, crying for the moon, but rigid analysts and investigators, and, as Lassalle once proudly said, “We have behind us the science and the learning of our day.”

V.

DE VRIES’ “MUTATION.”

Orthodoxy received the most stunning blow ever given it, at the hands of Charles Darwin, and it is ever on the lookout for an opportunity to make reprisals. It is only necessary for some fledgling to challenge Darwin’s theory of the origin of coral reefs and offer some grotesque assumption in its place, and it is at once announced from a thousand pulpits that Darwinism,--that enemy of God and man--is dead.

Hugo DeVries, however, could hardly be called a fledgling, and the supporters of Darwin had real cause for apprehension, it would seem, when the rumor gained ground that no less a person than the Amsterdam professor had overthrown Darwin’s theory, and substituted one of his own.

Alas, this latest “death of Darwinism” was no more fatal than its numerous predecessors, as the following quotation from DeVries himself will show:

“My work claims to be in full accord with the principles laid down by Darwin.” And again, “To Darwin was reserved the task of bringing the theory of common descent to its present high rank in scientific and social philosophy.” And, “Notwithstanding all these apparently unsurmountable difficulties, (absence of experimental evidence since gathered) Darwin discovered the great principle which rules the evolution of organisms. It is the principle of natural selection. It is the sifting out of all organisms of minor worth through the struggle for life.”

The greater part of the adverse criticism, aimed at Darwinism applies only to the extravagant claims put forward by his overenthusiastic disciples; claims not to be found in the works of Darwin himself. As we shall see later, one of the greatest offenders in this respect was no less a person than the co-discoverer of the selection theory--Alfred Russell Wallace.

Of all the mischievous misconceptions of Darwin’s theory none have worked so much harm as that which regards natural selection as the active and efficient cause of evolution. Although evolution is an established fact, our knowledge of its processes are incomplete and must always remain so until we have solved that most vexed of all biological problems, the “causes of variation.”

As to the nature of these causes, natural selection is dumb. For its purpose, variation is simply assumed to be a fact, and Darwin’s acknowledged ignorance as to how variation is brought about is expressed in the term “spontaneous variation.” Until variation has played its part by producing new and various forms, selection has no function or office to perform. Then it simply decides which forms shall survive by destroying the rest. As Wigand has pointed out, selection does not do more than determine the survival of what is offered to it, and does not create anything new. As DeVries very strikingly puts it, “It is only a sieve, and not a force of nature, no direct cause of improvement, as many of Darwin’s adversaries, and unfortunately many of his followers also, have so often asserted. It is only a sieve which decides which is to live and which is to die.... With the single steps of evolution it has nothing to do. Only after the step has been taken, the sieve acts, eliminating the unfit.” Thus Prof. Cope’s point that Darwin’s theory does not explain the “origin” of the fittest, is well taken, or as Mr. Arthur Harris puts it, “Natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest.”

It was around this question of the “causes” of variation that the Neo-Lamarckians and the Weismannians fought their battle, the former insisting, as we have seen, that variation was caused by the hereditary transmission of acquired characters, while Weismann maintained that variation arose solely through the combining of two portions of differing germ-plasm contributed by two different individuals, and producing a new individual unlike either,--a “variation” from both. While whatever there was of victory fell to Weismann, neither side has experimentally proven its case, and we are still in the dark as to the “causes of variation.” Our ignorance is still cloaked in the convenient word “spontaneous;” to Darwin’s “spontaneous variation” we now add DeVries’ “spontaneous mutation.”

It is another tribute to Darwin’s caution and insight that he recognized the possibility of variations arising either suddenly, as DeVries asserts they do, or gradually as DeVries denies.

Not only did Alfred Russell Wallace seek to limit the operation of natural selection in certain fields, in order to make room for his spiritualist theories--an adventure which failed dismally--but he denied the sudden appearance of new species or sub-species, thereby restricting Darwinism, as he understood it, to the origin of new species by the gradual accumulation of those almost imperceptible variations usually described as “fluctuations.” Whatever conflict there may be between Darwinism and mutation must be ascribed to Wallace. As DeVries clearly recognizes, Darwin is in no way responsible. “Darwin,” says DeVries, “recognized both lines of evolution.”

The difference between “fluctuations” and “mutation” is illustrated by DeVries recalling Galton’s simile of a polyhedron--an example of which is a solid piece of glass covered with many small flat faces. When it comes to rest on any particular face, it is in stable equilibrium. Small disturbances may make it oscillate, but it returns always to the same face. These oscillations are like fluctuating variations. A greater disturbance may cause the polyhedron to roll over on to a new face, where it comes to rest again, only showing the ever present fluctuations around the new center. The new position corresponds to a mutation. One of the disabilities of this illustration is that some fluctuations represent a greater disturbance from the given position than some mutations. The essential difference is that in the fluctuation it rocks back again while in the mutation it remains on a new base.

Everybody has heard something of the famous evening primrose which gave DeVries his first and most conclusive evidence of mutation. At Hilversum near Amsterdam, he discovered a large number of the plants of the evening primrose, named Lamarckiana after Lamarck. It is an American plant imported to Europe. It often escapes from cultivation and in this case DeVries says it had escaped from a park. It had run wild ten years. A year after first noticing them DeVries observed two new forms which he at once recognized as two new elementary species.

In the test conditions of his own garden, in an experiment covering thirteen years, he observed over fifty thousand of the Lamarckiana spread over eight generations and of these eight hundred were mutations divided among seven new elementary species. These mutations, when self-fertilized, or fertilized from plants like themselves, bred true to themselves, thus answering the test of a real species. DeVries also watched the field from which his original forms were taken, and saw that similar mutations occurred there so that they were not in any way due to cultivation.

Thus has the modest mutating primrose contributed its quota to the solution of that riddle of the universe which, until it is solved, will always command a paramount position in the thoughts of men.

DeVries discourages the notion that mutations are always occurring everywhere, which might seem to be one of the inferences from his theory, and his twenty-fourth lecture of the series, delivered before the University of California is entitled “The Hypothesis of Periodic Mutations.” The common primrose, he says, seems to be immutable at present, and argues that it must have had a mutatory period sometime in the past, when, perhaps, the evening primrose was not mutating. He says: “All the facts point to the conclusion that these periods, of stability and mutability, alternate more or less regularly with one another.”

He deals the Neo-Lamarckians a heavy blow by his denial of “direct” adaptation, and he greatly strengthens their opponents when he asserts that mutation takes place, not only in useful directions, but in all directions, leaving natural selection to destroy the unfit. This is a restatement of Darwin’s conception, followed by Weismann, of “fortuitous” variations, and is contrary to the notion of Spencer and Haeckel, that variations are mainly in the direction of adaptation to environment, as a result of animals exerting themselves in that direction.

This point is well stated by DeVries in the following passage,--“This failure of a large part of the productions of nature deserves to be considered at some length. It may be elevated to a principle, and may be made use of to explain many difficult points of the theory of descent. If in order to secure one good novelty nature must produce ten or twenty or perhaps more bad ones at the same time, the possibility of improvements coming by pure chance must be granted at once. All hypotheses concerning the direct causes of adaptation at once become superfluous, and the great principle enunciated by Darwin once more reigns supreme.”

Another difficulty which DeVries claims to have solved by his theory, is the supposed contradiction between the physicist and the biologist as to the time allowed by the former and the time required by the latter, for the evolution of animals.

Lord Kelvin asserted the age of the earth to be between twenty and forty million years. George Darwin estimates the separation of the moon from the earth as having taken place some fifty-six million years ago. Gekie estimated the existence of the solid crust of the earth as at most hundred million years. Joly, by calculating the amount of dissolved salts, and Dubois by the amount of lime, estimated the age of the rivers, Joly giving as probable fifty-five and Dubois thirty-six millions of years.

“All in all,” concludes DeVries, “it seems evident that the duration of life does not comply with the demands of the conception of very slow and continuous evolution.” Mutation, with its sudden leaps, has no such difficulty, and,--“The demands of the biologists and the results of the physicists are harmonized on the ground of the theory of mutation.”

In order properly to estimate the sociological significance of DeVries’ theory it will be necessary to go back more than a century, and observe the sociological import of the leading biological ideas of that period.

And here let us remark, that nobody knows better than we do the danger of transplanting, without criticism, biological theories into the field of sociology. Nevertheless, our opponents have never lost an opportunity to twist and distort science, if perchance by any possibility it could be made to contradict anything that had so much as the semblance of Socialism. We, however, have always insisted on the weakness of reasoning by mere analogy and have kept to those general laws which have been worked out separately in sociology.

The principle now about to be applied belongs to this latter class. It is the most luminous principle ever employed in the interpretation of the phenomena of society. This principle is that the intellectual life of a people is determined by its mode of wealth production and the social classes arising therefrom.

Jean Lamarck, the first great modern apostle of evolution, died in poverty because he advocated a theory that appeared to contradict the interests of the ruling class of his time. He had against him all that survived of feudal interests, which was intensely theological, and although his theory really favored the bourgeoisie, that class was not yet aware of it.

Cuvier was the lion of that day, for he managed the remarkable feat of adapting science to the ideas, not only of the increasing bourgeoisie, but also of the diminishing feudal power. He pleased the feudal regime, such of it as remained, by denying evolution, and endorsing its theology. This made his theories welcome also among those shrewd early capitalists, as the English, who realized more quickly than their fellows, that religious belief might constitute as great a prop for one ruling class at it had already been for another.

But in his capacity of scientific reflection of the class interest of his masters, Cuvier’s masterpiece was his “cataclysmic theory.” According to this theory, organisms were not the result of evolution, but they were now just as when they issued from the hands of the Creator. The difference between existing forms, and those creatures whose story is preserved in the rocks, was explained by a series of cataclysms or catastrophes by which, at certain widely separated periods, all living forms were destroyed, and a completely new stock was created to take their places.