Animal behavior; Animals -- Color; Plants -- Color
Now, suppose that instead of these hypothetic gemmules we endow the
units with memory in ever so slight a degree, how simple the explanation
of all these facts becomes! What an unit has learned to do under given
conditions it can do again under like circumstances. Memory _does_ pass
from one unit to another, or we could not remember anything as men that
happened in childhood, for we are not physically composed of the same
materials. It is not at all necessary that an unit should remember it
remembers any more than we in reading are conscious of the efforts we
underwent in learning our letters. Few of us can remember learning to
walk, and none of us recollect learning to talk. Yet surely the fact
that we do read, and walk, and talk, proves that we have not forgotten
how.
Bearing in mind, then, the fundamental laws that the offspring is one in
continuity with its parents, and that memory arises chiefly from
repetition in a definite order (for we cannot readily reverse the
process--we cannot sing the National Anthem backwards), it is easy to
see how the oft-performed actions of an individual become its
unconscious habits, and these by inheritance become the instincts and
unconscious actions of the species. Experience and memory are thus the
key-note to the origin of species.
Granting that all living matter possesses memory, we must admit that all
actions are at first conscious in a certain degree, and in the "sense of
need" we have the great stimulation to action.
In Natural Selection, as expounded by Mr. Darwin, there is no principle
by which small variations can be accumulated. Take any form, and let it
vary in all directions. We may represent the original form by a spot,
and the variations by a ring of dots. Each one of these dots may vary in
all directions, and so other rings of dots must be made, and so on, the
result not being development along a certain line, but an infinity of
interlacing curves. The tree of life is not like this. It branches ever
outwards and onwards. The eyes of the Argus pheasant and peacock have
been formed by the accumulation, through long generations, of more and
more perfect forms; the mechanism of the eye and hand has arisen by the
gradual accumulation of more and more perfect forms, and these processes
have been continued along definite lines.
If we grant memory we eliminate this hap-hazard natural selection. We
see how a being that has once begun to perform a certain action will
soon perform it automatically, and when its habits are confirmed its
descendants will more readily work in this direction than any other, and
so specialisation may arise.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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