On Germinal Selection as a Source of Definite VariationWeismann, August
Science
On Germinal Selection as a Source of Definite Variation
Weismann, August
Variation (Biology)
Heinrich Hertz,[4] the discoverer of electric undulations, had the same
thought in mind when he said: "We form inward representations or constructs
of outward objects, so constituted that the results that follow logically
and necessarily from the constructs are in turn always constructs of the
results flowing naturally and necessarily from the objects." "These
constructs or mental images copied after familiar objects possessed of
familiar properties, so constituted that from their manipulation effects
result similar to those which we observe in the objects to be explained.
Experience teaches us that the requirements here made can be fulfilled and
that consequently such 'correspondences' between reality and the supposed
images [or, as Hertz says, between nature and mind] actually exist. Having
succeeded in extracting from the accumulated experience of the past,
representative images or constructs fulfilling all these necessary
requirements, we can then reproduce by them in a short space of time, as we
might by models, results that in the outward world require a long space of
time for their actualisation or can be produced only through our personal
intervention," etc.
{7}
Such representative models, or constructs, now, in my theory of heredity,
are the _determinants_, which may be conceived as indefinitely fashioned
packages of units (biophores) which are set into activity by definite
impressions and put a distinctive stamp upon some small part of the
organism, on some cell or group of cells, evoking definite phenomena
somewhat as a piece of fireworks when lighted produces a brilliant sun, a
shower of sparks, or the glowing characters of a name.
The _ids_, also, are such representative models, and may be compared to a
definitely ordered but variously compounded aggregate of fireworks, in
which the single pieces are so connected as to go off in fixed succession
and to produce a definite resultant phenomenon like a complete inscription
surrounded by a hail of fire and glowing spheres.
Owing to the greater complexity of the phenomena in biology we can never
hope to reach the same distinctness in our constructs and models as in
physics, and the attempt to derive from them mathematical formulae by the
independent development of which research could be continued, would at
present be utterly fruitless. In the meantime it seems preferable to have
some sort of adequate model to which the imagination can always resort and
with which it can easily operate, rather than to have to revert, in
considering every special problem of heredity, to the mutual actions of the
molecules of living substance and outward agents--processes which we know
only in their roughest outlines. Or is any one presumptuous enough to
believe we can infer from our slight knowledge of the chemical and physical
constitution of the germs of a trout and a salmon the real cause {8} of the
one's becoming a trout and of the other's becoming a salmon?
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