Evolution, Old & New: Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck,; as compared with that of Charles DarwinButler, Samuel
Philosophy
Evolution, Old & New: Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck,; as compared with that of Charles Darwin
Butler, Samuel
Evolution (Biology) -- History
These organs are now no longer useful, but they once were so, and were
therefore once purposive, though not so now. They are the expressions of
a bygone usefulness; sayings, as it were, about which there was at one
time infinite wrangling, as to what both the meaning and the expression
should best be, so that they then had living significance in the mouths
of those who used them, though they have become such mere shibboleths
and cant formulae to ourselves that we think no more of their meaning
than we do of Julius Caesar in the month of July. They continue to be
reproduced through the force of habit, and through indisposition to get
out of any familiar groove of action until it becomes too unpleasant for
us to remain in it any longer. It has long been felt that embryology and
rudimentary structures indicated community of descent. Dr. Darwin and
Lamarck insisted on this, as have all subsequent writers on evolution;
but the explanation of why and how the structures come to be
repeated--namely, that they are simply examples of the force of
habit--can only be perceived intelligently by those who admit so much
unity between parents and offspring that the self-development of the
latter can be properly called habitual (as being a repetition of an act
by one and the same individual), and can only be fully sympathized with
by those who recognize that if habit be admitted as the key to the fact
at all, the unconscious manner in which the habit comes to be repeated
is only of a piece with all our other observations concerning habit. For
the fuller development of the foregoing, I must refer the reader to my
work 'Life and Habit.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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