Hormones and Heredity: A Discussion of the Evolution of Adaptations and the Evolution of SpeciesCunningham, J. T. (Joseph Thomas)
Science
Hormones and Heredity: A Discussion of the Evolution of Adaptations and the Evolution of Species
Cunningham, J. T. (Joseph Thomas)
Endocrinology; Heredity; Hormones; Mendel's law
There are thus two main problems of evolution: first, how have animals
become adapted to their conditions of life, how have their organs become
adapted to the functions and actions they have to perform, or, at least,
which they do perform? The power of flight, for example, has been evolved
by somewhat different modifications in several different types of animals
not closely related to one another: in reptiles, in birds, and in mammals.
We have no reason to believe that this faculty was ever universal, or that
it existed in the original ancestors. How then was it evolved? The second
great problem is, How is it that existing animals, and, as the evidence of
the remains of extinct animals shows, these that existed at former periods
of time also, are divided into the groups or types we call species,
naturally classified into larger groups which are subdivisions of others
still larger, and so on, in what we call the natural system of
classification? The two problems which naturalists have to solve, and
which for many recent generations they have been trying to solve, are the
Origin of Species and the Origin of Adaptations.
Former generations of zoologists have assumed that these problems were the
same. Lamarck maintained that the peculiarities of different animals were
due to the fact that they had become adapted to modes of life different to
those of their ancestors, and to those in which allied forms lived, the
change of structure being due to the effect of the conditions of life and
of the actions of the organs. He did not specially consider the
differences of closely allied species, but the peculiarities of marked
types such as the long neck of the giraffe, the antlers of stags, the
trunk of the elephant, and so on; but he considered that the action of
external conditions was the true cause of evolution, and assumed that in
course of time the effects became hereditary.
Lamarck's views are expounded chiefly in his _Philosophie Zoologique_,
first published in 1809, and an excellent edition of this work with
biographical and critical introduction was published by Charles Martins in
1873. Although his conception of the mode in which structural changes were
produced is of little importance to those now engaged in the investigation
of the process of evolution, since it was naturally based on the
physiological ideas of his time, many of which are now obsolete, for the
sake of accuracy it is worth while to cite his principal propositions in
his own words:--
'Il sera en effet évident que l'état où nous voyons tous les animaux, est
d'une part, le produit de la composition croissante de l'organisation, qui
tend à former une gradation régulière, et de l'autre part qu'il est celui
des influences d'une multitude de circonstances très différentes qui
tendent continuellement à détruire la régularité dans la gradation de la
composition croissante de l'organisation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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