Nature versus natural selection : an essay on organic evolution / by Charles Clement Coe.

Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Nature versus natural selection : an essay on organic evolution / by Charles Clement Coe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    IO mere variations [in which mere individual differences are included] that it is impossible to separate them. Mr. Wallace says that variation is generally very small in amount ; that variation is merely the absence of identity : and yet he also says few persons consider how largely and universally all animals are varying. A similar difference of opinion is found as to whether the same variation will occur in one or a few, or in many individuals. Mr. Darwin says : “ These individual differences afford materials for Natural Selection to act on.”—(Origin of Species. p. jp) Professor Huxley says: “ The variations from their specific type which individuals present ‘ are the objects of’ the selective action of external conditions.” Mr. Romanes says :— “The theory of Natural Selection, as such, furnishes no warrant for supposing that the same beneficial variety should arise in a number of individuals spontaneously. On the contrary, the theory of Natural Selection trusts to the chapter of accidents in the matter of variation ; and in this chapter we read of no reasons why the same beneficial variation should arise simultaneously in a sufficient number of individual cases to prevent its being swamped by intercrossing with the parent species.55 Hence it is contended that— “ A very large assumption is made, when it is said that the same variation occurs simultaneously in a number of individuals inhabiting the same area.55—{The Journal of the Linnean Society. vol. xix., Zoology, p. 343.) To this, Mr. Wallace, speaking from actual observation of nature, makes the following reply “ But that which Mr. Romanes regards as £ a very large assumption,5 is, I maintain, a very general fact, and at the present time, one of the best established facts in natural history. A brief summary of these facts is given in my £ Island Life5 (p. 57), and I possess in manuscript a considerable collection of additional facts, showing that simultaneous
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