Once this supposition is made, however,
all the objections we have mentioned in connection with factorial
mutation (_e.g._ the subnormality of its products, its intra-specific
nature, etc.) return to plague the speculator, and, in addition to
these, he is confronted with the new difficulty of explaining how the
redundance of duplicate genes can be removed and replaced by coördinate
differentiation in their respective specificities. Now we have no
factual evidence whatever of such a solidaric redifferentiation of the
germinal factors, that would modify harmoniously the composition and
rôle of each and every gene in the factorial complex. Nor is there
any possibility whatever of accounting for this telic superregulation
of the germinal regulators upon a purely mechanistic basis. How can
the ultimate chemical determinants of heredity be thus redetermined?
Consequently, although there is gametic incompatibility between diploid
races and the tetraploid races, which are said to have arisen from
the former, we are not, nevertheless, warranted, by what has been
experimentally verified, in regarding tetraploid races as new species,
or as progressive steps in the process of organic evolution.
To conclude, therefore, we have experimental verification of the
efficacy of the similifying process said to have been at work in
evolution, namely, inheritance. The same, however, cannot be said of
the correlative diversifying process of trans-specific variation, which
is said to have superficially modified old structures into new species.
The latter process, accordingly, is but a pure postulate of science
known to us only through the effect hypothetically assigned to it,
namely, the adaptive modification.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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