The Wallaceians hold the doctrines which have been set forth above as
those of the Neo-Darwinian school. It is incorrect to call those who pin
their faith to the all-sufficiency of natural selection Neo-Darwinians,
because Darwin at no time believed that natural selection explained
everything. Darwin moreover was a Lamarckian to the extent that he was
inclined to think that acquired characteristics could be inherited. His
theory of inheritance by gemmules involved the assumption that such
characters are inherited. It is Wallace who out-Darwins Darwin, who
preaches the all-sufficiency of natural selection. For this reason we dub
the school which holds this article of belief, and to which Weismann,
Poulton, and apparently Ray Lankester belong, the Wallaceian school.
Weismann has put forth a theory of inheritance, that of the continuity of
the germ plasm, which makes this inheritance a physical impossibility. We
believe that the Wallaceians have erred as far from the truth as the
Lamarckians have, because, as we shall show hereafter, a great many of
the organs and structures displayed by organisms cannot be explained on
the natural selection hypothesis. Those who pin their faith to this,
needlessly increase the difficulty of the problem which they have to
face.
There remains the third school, to which we belong, and of which Bateson,
De Vries, Kellog and T. H. Morgan appear to be adherents. This school
steers a course between the Scylla of use-inheritance and the Charybdis
of the all-sufficiency of natural selection. It may seem surprising to
some that we should class De Vries as a Neo-Darwinian, seeing that he is
the originator of the theory of evolution by means of mutations, which we
shall discuss in Chapter III. of this work. As a matter of fact the
theory of mutations should be regarded, not as opposed to the theory of
Darwin, but as a theory engrafted upon it. De Vries himself writes:—“My
work claims to be in full accord with the principles laid down by
Darwin.” Similarly Hubrecht writes in the _Contemporary Review_ for
November 1908: “Paradoxical as it may sound, I am willing to show that my
colleague, Hugo de Vries, of Amsterdam, who a few years ago grafted his
_Mutations Theorie_ on the thriving and very healthy plant of Darwinism,
is a much more staunch Darwinian than either Dr Wallace himself, or the
two great authorities in biological science whom he mentions, Sir William
Thistleton Dyer and Professor Poulton.”
Complexity of the Problem
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