Volume 2

The system of animate nature : the Gifford lectures delivered in the University of St. Andrews in the years 1915 and 1916 / by J. Arthur Thomson.

  • John Arthur Thomson
Date:
1920
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The system of animate nature : the Gifford lectures delivered in the University of St. Andrews in the years 1915 and 1916 / by J. Arthur Thomson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    25/356 (page 363)
    tury ? There is no doubt, Professor Bateson tells us, that our cultivated Sweet Peas “ have been derived from the one wild bi-colour form by a process of successive removals (Pres- idential Address Brit. Association, Australia, 1914, p. 18.) Professor Bateson is one of the foremost living aetiologists, and respect is due to his pronouncement that we must begin seriously to consider “ whether the course of Evolution can at all reasonably be represented as an unpacking of an original complex, which contained within itself the whole range of diversity which living things present. ... As we have got to recognise that there has been an Evolution, that somehow or other the forms of life have arisen from fewer forms, we may as well see whether we are limited to the old view that evolutionary progress is from the simple to the complex, and whether after all it is conceivable that the process was the other way about .... At first it may seem rank absurdity to suppose that the primordial form or forms of protoplasm could have contained complex- ity enough to produce the divers types of life. But is it easier to imagine that these powers could have been conveyed by extrinsic additions ? ” Professor Bateson asks us not to think of the primordial forms of life as necessarily very simple. We are to think of them as richly endowed with initiatives and potentialities. He is particularly inclined to this view because his extraor- dinarily fine experimental work has led him to conclude that most of the novelties that appear nowadays in garden and breeding-pen are due to the removal of hindrances that sup- press or mask underlying qualities. There has been an un- packing of a crowded treasure-box and a placing of assorted jewels in special caskets. Mr. Bateson appears to believe that the reason why we are not all geniuses is not that we have