Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited?: An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and DarwinBall, W. P. (William Platt)
Philosophy
Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited?: An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin
Ball, W. P. (William Platt)
Heredity; Variation (Biology)
It is often mischievous as well as anomalous in its action. Under
civilization with its division of labour, the various functions of mind
and body are very unequally exercised. There is overwork or misuse of
one part and disuse and neglect of others, leading to the partial
breakdown or degeneration of various organs and to general deterioration
of health through disturbed balance of the constitution. The brain, or
rather particular parts of it, are often over-stimulated, while the body
is neglected. In many ways education and civilization foster nervousness
and weakness, and undermine the rude natural health and spirits of the
human animal. Alcohol, tobacco, tea, coffee, extra brain work, late
hours, dissipation, overwork, indoor life, division of labour,
preservation of the weak, and many other causes, all help to injure the
modern constitution; so that the prospect of cumulative intensification
of these evils by the additional influence of use-inheritance is not an
encouraging one. It is true that modern progress and prosperity are
improving the people in various respects by their direct action; but if
use-inheritance has any share in effecting this improvement it must also
transmit increased wants and more luxurious habits, together with such
evils as have already been referred to. As depicted by its defenders,
use-inheritance transmits evils far more powerfully and promptly than
benefits. It transmits insanity and shattered nerves rather than the
healthy brain which preceded the breakdown. It perpetuates, and
cumulatively intensifies, a deterioration in the senses of civilized
men, but it fails to perpetuate the rank vigour of various plants when
too well nourished, or the flourishing condition of various animals when
too fat or when tamed. It already transmits the short-sight caused by so
modern an art as watchmaking, but so fails to transmit the
long-practised art of seeing (as it does of walking and talking) that
vision is worse than useless to a man until he gradually acquires the
necessary but non-transmitted associations of sensation and idea by his
own experience. In a well-known case, a blind man on gaining his sight
by an operation said that "all objects seemed to touch his eyes, as what
he felt did his skin"--so little had the universal experience of
countless ages impressed itself on his faculties. Under normal healthy
conditions use-inheritance is so slow in its action that "several
generations" must elapse before it produces any appreciable effect, and
then that effect is only precisely what selection might be expected to
bring about without its aid. Strong for evil and slow for good, it can
convey epilepsy promptly in guinea pigs, but transmits the acquirements
of genius so poorly that our best student of the heredity of genius has
to account for the frequent and remarkable deterioration of the
offspring by a theory which is strongly hostile to use-inheritance. It
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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