Darwinism to-day : a discussion of present-day scientific criticism of the Darwinian selection theories, together with a brief account of the principal other proposed auxiliary and alternative theories of species-forming / by Vernon L. Kellogg.

  • Vernon Lyman Kellogg
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Darwinism to-day : a discussion of present-day scientific criticism of the Darwinian selection theories, together with a brief account of the principal other proposed auxiliary and alternative theories of species-forming / by Vernon L. Kellogg. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    63/426 (page 45)
    increase, there is necessary an extraordinary coincidence in the appearance of the needed variations in many forms at The needed co- the right time. That is, a theory based on chance incident occur- 0r accidental phenomena demands after all the rence of several . , variations at one assumption of the occurrence of phenomena tlme' of the right kind at the right moment, and the persistence of such occurrences through a definite time-period. This is too much to assume, too much to ask even of those of the true faith, say the antagonists 13 14 of the selection theory. Kronig 15 makes sport of the selection -doctrine by having his rather frivolous character, Sabiich- winski, undertake to have made, by a foolish clown, various trifling changes in all kinds of industrial products with the expectation of bringing them into the market. He is con- vinced that he will win a fortune by this, for he says to himself that the struggle for supremacy must work out the same in the industries as in nature, and in his case with the added advantage that the changes effected by even the most slender-witted boor must result better than those which are the outcome of perfectly blind chance. Indeed, from the very heart of the neo-Darwinian ranks come signs of dis- may when this objection is faced. Weismann, leader of the ultra-selectionists, practically concedes the irrefutability of this objection to the Allmacht of selection when he intro- duces a statement of his latest theory, that of Germinal Selection, by saying:16 “Knowing this factor [that of germi- nal selection] we remove, it seems to me, the •admission of the patent contradiction of the assumption that the seriousness of general fitness of organisms or the adaptations this objection. & ° necessary to their existence are produced by accidental variations—a contradiction which formed a seri- ous stumbling-block to the theory of selection.” And the formulation of the theory of germinal selection is of itself a practical confession on the part of the foremost neo- Darwinian of the inability of natural selection to explain