336 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



There can be no question, however, that Darwin did love his selec- 

 tion theory, and somewhat overestimated its importance. His con- 

 ception of selection in nature may be compared to a series of concentric 

 circles constantly narrowing from the largest groups down to the 

 minutest structures. In the operations of this intimate circle of 

 minute variations within organisms he was inclined to believe two 

 things : first, that the fit or adaptive always arises out of the accidental, 

 or that out of large and minute variations without direction selection 

 brings direction and fitness ; second, as a consistent pupil of Lyell, he 

 was inclined to believe that the chief changes in evolution are slow 

 and continuous. The psychology of the former is that he was in a 

 reaction state from the prevailing false teleology. He was not expect- 

 ing that purposive or teleological or even orthogenetic laws of variation 

 woiild be discovered. William James has thus recently expressed and 

 endorsed the spirit of Darwinism as a natural philosophy in the follow- 

 words : 



It is strange, considering how unanimously our ancestors felt the force of 

 this argument [that is, the teleological], to see how little it counts for since 

 the triumph of the Darwinian theory. Darwin opened our minds to the 

 power of the chance-happenings to bring forth " fit " results if only they have 

 time to add themselves together. He showed the enormous waste of nature 

 in producing results that get destroyed because of their unfitness. 



The simple question before us to-day and in the succeeding lectures 

 of this course is: is this true? This really involves the deep seated 

 query whether the intimate or minute parts of living things are opera- 

 ting under natural laws like non-living things, or are really lawless. 



Before expressing my individual opinion based on my own re- 

 searches of the last twenty years I may summarize the general modern 

 dissent : in three points it may be said that Darwin's teachings are not 

 accepted to-day. 



First, his slowly developed belief in the inheritance of bodily 

 modifications as well as the provisional " assemblage theory " of 

 heredity which he called pangenesis, have been set aside for Weis- 

 mann's law that heredity lies in the continuity of a specific heredity 

 plasm, and for want of evidence of the transmission of acquired char- 

 acters. 



Second, while his prevailing belief that changes in organisms are 

 in the main slow and continuous is now positively demonstrated to 

 be correct by the study of descent in fossil organisms, there is also 

 positive evidence for the belief which he less strongly entertained that 

 many changes are discontinuous or mutative, as held by Bateson and 

 De Vries. 



Finally, his belief that out of fortuitous or undirected variations 

 in minute characters arise direction, purpose and adaptation through 

 selection still lacks proof by either observation or experiment. Fossil 



