Darwin, and After Darwin, Volume 3 of 3: Post-Darwinian Questions: Isolation and Physiological SelectionRomanes, George John
Science
Darwin, and After Darwin, Volume 3 of 3: Post-Darwinian Questions: Isolation and Physiological Selection
Romanes, George John
Evolution (Biology); Heredity
How, then, are we to account for the fact that Darwin attributed to
natural selection the power to cause divergence of character? The answer
is sufficiently simple. _He does so by tacitly invoking the aid of some
other form of homogamy in every case._ If we carefully read pp. 86-97 of
the _Origin of Species_, where this subject is under consideration, we
shall find that in every one of the arguments and illustrations which
are adduced to prove the power of natural selection to effect
"divergence of character," he either pre-supposes or actually names some
other form of homogamy as the originating cause of the diversity that
is afterwards presented to natural selection for further
intensification. To give only one example. At the starting-point of the
whole discussion the priority of such other forms of homogamy is assumed
in the following words:--
But how, it may be asked, can any analogous principle [to that of
diversity caused by artificial selection] apply in nature? I
believe it can and does apply most efficiently (though it was a
long time before I saw how), from the simple circumstance that the
more diversified the descendants from any one species become in
structure, constitution, and habits, by so much will they be better
enabled to seize on many and widely diversified places in the
polity of nature, and so be enabled to increase in numbers.
Now, without question, so soon as segregate breeding in two or more
lines of homogamy has been in any sufficient degree determined by some
"change of structure, constitution, or habits," natural selection will
forthwith proceed to increase the divergence in as many different lines
as there are thus yielded discriminately isolated sections of the
species. And this fact it must have been that Darwin really had before
his mind when he argued that diversification of character is caused by
natural selection, through the benefit gained by the diversified forms
being thus "enabled to increase in number." Nevertheless he does not
expressly state the essential point, that although diversification of
character, _when once begun_, is thus _promoted_ by natural selection,
which forthwith proceeds to cultivate each of the resulting branches,
yet diversification of character can never be _originated_ by natural
selection. The change of "structure," of "constitution," of "habits," of
"station," of geographical area, of reciprocal fertility, and so
on--this change, _whatever_ it may have been, must clearly have been
antecedent to any operation of natural selection through the benefit
which arose from the change. Therefore the change must in all cases have
been due, in the first instance, to some other form of isolation than
the superadded form which afterwards arose from superior fitness in the
possession of superior benefit--although, so long as the prior form of
isolation endured, or continued to furnish the necessary condition to
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