The power of environment : nurture versus nature / editor: Henry Smith Williams, M.D., LL.D.

Date:
[1914]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The power of environment : nurture versus nature / editor: Henry Smith Williams, M.D., LL.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    thus distributed came in the first instance to be divergent. In the nature of the case, no organism can transmit anything that it does not possess either as a patent factor or a latent one submerged in its germ-plasm. Yet the present-day representatives of any species of organism confessedly have many marked and conspicuous characteristics that were not possessed by the very remote ancestors of that species. It is almost axiomatic to say this, when we reflect that, to cite the extreme instance, man himself is believed to have descended from a primordial single-celled organism. When we view the matter in this light, we are forced to conclude that in one way or another, sometime, somewhere, new qualities have been added to the evolving organism; and that these qualities have in due course taken their place as heritable qualities, represented by hereditary fac- tors that aforetime had no existence. And avoiding for the moment all controversy as to just how these new traits have been acquired, the conclusion is inevitable that if we are to accept an evolutionary origin for higher organisms, we cannot escape the conviction that the new char- acters are heritable. There can be no question that an individual organism today receives in the sum total of its inherited tendencies a goodly num- [22]
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