CHAPTER V 



HEREDITY AND INSTINCT a 



i. Romanes on Instinct 



IN his able posthumous work on Post-Darwinian Ques- 

 tions, Heredity and Utility, the lamented G. J. Romanes 

 sums up the evidence for the inheritance of acquired char- 

 acters in the final statement that only two valid arguments 

 remain on the affirmative side ; and to each of these argu- 

 ments he has devoted considerable space. One of these 

 arguments is from what he calls ' selective value,' and the 

 other from the ' co-adaptations ' found in the instincts of 

 animals. He says (p. 141): 'Hence there remain only 

 the arguments from selective value and co-adaptation.' If 

 we take the instincts as illustrating the application of 

 the principle of ' selective value as well/ we may gather the 

 evidence which Romanes was disposed to cling to, for the 

 inheritance of acquired characters, into a single net, and 

 inquire as to the need of resorting to the Lamarckian factor 

 in accounting for the origin of instinct. I wish to suggest 

 some considerations from the psychological side, which 

 seem to me entirely competent to remove the force of 

 these two arguments, and to show to that extent that the 

 instincts can be accounted for without appeal to the hypoth- 

 esis of 'lapsed intelligence,' as the use-inheritance theory, 



1 Discussion (revised) following Professor C. Lloyd Morgan before the New 

 York Academy of Sciences, Jan. 31, 1896; from Science, March 20, 1896. 



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