The Unpopular Review, Number 19: July-December 1918Various
History
The Unpopular Review, Number 19: July-December 1918
Various
American periodicals
Now for real thorough-going dogmatism there is nothing like scientific
dogmatism, there is no dogmatist like a scientific dogmatist. There are
many scientific men who pretend to know absolutely that many things
cannot possibly be because they have never seen them, heard them, felt
them or measured them. It is because of these men, who are not many, but
loud, that we scientific men as a class have a reputation among many
people of being narrow-minded and bigoted; and I hasten to admit that
many of us are. Not all that is called science is proved; and most
certainly not all that is called non-science is disproved, or because as
yet unproved is to be tossed lightly or sneeringly aside. The scientific
man who declares what cannot possibly be, exposes himself as a boaster
and a charlatan, for by such declaration he, by implication, claims to
know all the order of nature, which certainly no man does know. No man
knows all that is or may be; hence no man knows what is not or may not
be.
It was Weismann's new facts and new theories about heredity that did
much to overthrow Lamarckism and make it possible to expand rational
Darwinism into irrational ultra-Darwinism and then claim for it such an
insolently dominating place among the explanations of evolution. And now
it is the still newer and far less theoretical and more concrete
knowledge of heredity that has dethroned Neo-Darwinism, made impossible
and absurd the German claims of the _Allmacht_ of natural selection as
evolution explanation, and revealed to us how little we really know of
the potent causes and controls of evolution--if we may call that
revelation which reveals darkness where before was apparent light. The
factors of evolution that today we are more certain of than any others
are the unknown factors, the causes we do not know, the methods we do
not understand.
If this seems to be a humiliating confession to come from a biologist
and professed student of evolution, it is one in which all honest
scholars must join. If the Germans will not, they are not honest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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