The evolution of sex / by Professor Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson.

  • Patrick Geddes
Date:
[1900]
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The evolution of sex / by Professor Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    10/366 (page VI)
    VI PREFACE. But while Books I. and II. are thus the more miportant, and such chapters as Hermaphroditism, Parthenogenesis, Alternation of Generations, have only a subordinate and comparatively technical interest, it will be seen that our theme raises nearly all the burning questions of biology. Hence, for instance, a running discussion and criticism of the speculative views of Professor Weismann, to which their very recent intro¬ duction to English readers* has awakened so wide an interest. At once of less technical difficulty, and in some respects even wider issues, is the discussion of Mr Darwin's theory of sexual selection, reopened by the other leading contribution to the year's biological literature which we owe to Mr Alfred Russel Wallace.! Besides entering this controversy at the outset of the volume, we have in the sequel attempted to show that the view taken of the processes concerned with the maintenance of the species leads necessarily to a profound alteration of our views regarding its origin, although the vast problems thus raised necessarily remain open for fuller separate treatment. It is right, however, to say that the restatement of the theory of organic evolution, for which we here seek to prepare (that not of indefi¬ nite but definite variation, with progress and survival essen¬ tially through the subordination of individual struggle and development to species-maintaining ends), leads us frankly to face the responsibility of thus popularising a field of natural knowledge from which there are so many superficial reasons to shrink, and which knowledge and ignorance so commonly conspire to veil. For if not only the utmost degeneracy be manifestly connected with the continuance of organic species, but also the highest progress and blossoming of life in all its forms, of man or beast or flower, it becomes the first practical * Heredity. Oxford, 1889. + Darwinism. Lond. 1889.