Organic Selection 41 



processes of selection. It seems to me that, from the facts that sterile 

 animal forms can adapt themselves to new vital functions, their 

 superfluous parts degenerate, and the parts more used adapt them- 

 selves in an ascending direction, those less used in a descending 

 direction, we must draw the conclusion that harmonious adaptation 

 here comes about without the cooperation of the Lamarckian 

 principle. This conclusion once established, however, we have no 

 reason to refer the thousands of cases of harmonious adaptation, 

 which occur in exactly the same way among other animals or plants, 

 to a principle, the active intervention of which in the transformation 

 of species is nowhere proved. We do not require it to explain the 

 facts, and tJierefore we must not assume it. 



The fact of coadaptation, which was supposed to furnish the 

 strongest argument against the principle of selection, in reality yields 

 the clearest evidence in favour of it. We must assume it, because no 

 other possibility of explanation is open to us, and because these 

 adaptations actually exist, that is to say, have really taken place. 

 With this conviction I attempted, as far back as 1894, when the idea 

 of germinal selection had not yet occurred to me, to make "harmonious 

 adaptation" (coadaptation) more easily intelligible in some way or 

 other, and so I was led to the idea, which was subsequently expounded 

 in detail by Baldwin, and Lloyd Morgan, and also by Osborn, and 

 Gulick as Organic Selection. It seemed to me that it was not 

 necessary that all the germinal variations required for secondary 

 variations should have occurred simultaneously, since, for instance, in 

 the case of the stag, the bones, muscles, sinews, and nerves would be 

 incited by the increasing heaviness of the antlers to greater activity 

 in the individual life, and so would be strengthened. The antlers 

 can only have increased in size by very slow degrees, so that the 

 muscles and bones may have been able to keep pace with their 

 growth in the individual life, until the requisite germinal variations 

 presented themselves. In this way a disharmony between the in- 

 creasing weight of the antlers and the parts which support and move 

 them would be avoided, since time would be given for the appropriate 

 germinal variations to occur, and so to set agoing the hereditary 

 variation of the muscles, sinews and bones 1 . 



I still regard this idea as correct, but I attribute less importance 

 to "organic selection" than I did at that time, in so far that I 

 do not believe that it alone could effect complex harmonious adap- 

 tations. Germinal selection now seems to me to play the chief part 

 in bringing about such adaptations. Something the same is true of 

 the principle I have called Panmixia. As I became more and more 



1 The Effect of External Influences upon Development, Romanes Lecture, Oxford, 

 1894. 



