Luck, or Cunning, as the Main Means of Organic ModificationButler, Samuel
Philosophy
Luck, or Cunning, as the Main Means of Organic Modification
Butler, Samuel
Evolution; Natural selection
This is easy; it tells people how they may test any action so as to know
what they ought to call it; it leaves well alone by avoiding all such
debatable matters as reflex action, consciousness, intelligence, purpose,
knowledge of purpose, &c.; it both introduces the feature of inheritance
which is the one mainly distinguishing instinctive from so-called
intelligent actions, and shows the manner in which these last pass into
the first, that is to say, by way of memory and habitual repetition;
finally it points the fact that the new generation is not to be looked
upon as a new thing, but (as Dr. Erasmus Darwin long since said {61a}) as
“a branch or elongation” of the one immediately preceding it.
In Mr. Darwin’s case it is hardly possible to exaggerate the waste of
time, money and trouble that has been caused, by his not having been
content to appear as descending with modification like other people from
those who went before him. It will take years to get the evolution
theory out of the mess in which Mr. Darwin has left it. He was heir to a
discredited truth; he left behind him an accredited fallacy. Mr.
Romanes, if he is not stopped in time, will get the theory connecting
heredity and memory into just such another muddle as Mr. Darwin has got
evolution, for surely the writer who can talk about “_heredity being able
to work up_ the faculty of homing into the instinct of migration,” {61b}
or of “the principle of (natural) selection combining with that of
lapsing intelligence to the formation of a joint result,” {61c} is little
likely to depart from the usual methods of scientific procedure with
advantage either to himself or any one else. Fortunately Mr. Romanes is
not Mr. Darwin, and though he has certainly got Mr. Darwin’s mantle, and
got it very much too, it will not on Mr. Romanes’ shoulders hide a good
deal that people were not going to observe too closely while Mr. Darwin
wore it.
I ought to say that the late Mr. Darwin appears himself eventually to
have admitted the soundness of the theory connecting heredity and memory.
Mr. Romanes quotes a letter written by Mr. Darwin in the last year of his
life, in which he speaks of an intelligent action gradually becoming
“_instinctive_, _i.e._, _memory transmitted from one generation to
another_.” {62a}
Briefly, the stages of Mr. Darwin’s opinion upon the subject of
hereditary memory are as follows:—
1859. “It would be _the most serious error_ to suppose that the greater
number of instincts have been acquired by habit in one generation and
transmitted by inheritance to succeeding generations.” {62b} And this
more especially applies to the instincts of many ants.
1876. “It would be a _serious error_ to suppose,” &c., as before. {62c}
1881. “We should remember _what a mass of inherited knowledge_ is
crowded into the minute brain of a worker ant.” {62d}
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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