DARWINISM ATTACKED. 39 



to his own understanding, however short of perfection and 

 omniscience that is, he is bound to answer the subsidiary 

 problems such as usefulness or non-usefulness on a basis of 

 his own seeing and understanding capacity. As a matter 

 of fact the indifference of many specific characteristics of 

 organisms is not denied by selectionists. Romanes l was 

 perhaps the first representative Darwinian, after Darwin 

 himself, to admit this. But many biologists say, further, on 

 a basis of their experience as observers, that these very 

 indifferent, meaningless (as far as utility goes) mor- 

 phological characteristics and differences are much more 

 constant in their character than the obviously adaptive, i. e., 

 useful ones. However, as pointed out first by Niigeli, accord- 

 ing to the selection theory the characteristics of organisms 

 should be just in that degree the more constant, the more 

 useful they are. Hence there is here a serious discrepancy 

 between theory and fact. Darwin himself felt the force of 

 this objection and met it in a manner not at all acceptable 

 to the ultra-Darwinians, that is the strict selectionists of 

 post-Darwinian times. He admitted that these trivial, ap- 

 parently non-useful, but constant specific characters could 

 not be explained by natural selection, and must be due to a 

 fixation in the species of these characters at one time or 

 another through the nature of the organism and the influ- 

 ence of extrinsic influences ; a true Lamarckian or at least 

 anti-Weismannian * explanation. 



This objection to the selection theory based on the ad- 



* Students and readers who have not read Darwin recently, or 

 in the light of the controversy between the neo-Darwinians and the 

 neo-Lamarckians, that is, between those who disbelieve and those 

 who believe in the inheritance of acquired characters, will be sur- 

 prised to note on a careful re-reading of the "Origin of Species," 

 with this post-Darwinian sharp distinction in mind, how often Dar- 

 win calls on the Lamarckian factors to help his species-forming 

 theories out of tight places. Morgan in his "Evolution and Adap- 

 tation" points out many cases of this. 



