3i8 Relation of Use and Disuse to Evolution 



Confusion from Selected Cases 



Every community has its share of old wives' tales illus- 

 trating the dire consequences of throwing strawberries at or 

 exhibiting mice to pregnant women. It would be unscien- 

 tific to dismiss these tales out of hand, along with ghost 

 stories and horse-hairs that turn into wriggling worms, 

 simply because they do not fit into our preconceptions as 

 to how things work. Of the older tales we can at most say 

 that the observations may have been faulty, the records in- 

 adequate. In more recent times, however, many of these 

 stories have come under critical notice. Whether they are 

 treated statistically en masse, or analyzed in detail, the only 

 possible conclusion is that there is nothing in them — so far 

 as concerns the transmission to offspring of maternal im- 

 pressions. In one lying-in hospital over ten thousand 

 mothers were given an opportunity to relate events in their 

 pregnancies that might have influenced the unborn child. 

 In no case could markings or malformations or minor ab- 

 normalities be anticipated on that basis. 



There are other tales that have to do with the trans- 

 mission of acquirements — not indeed the inheritance of 

 wooden legs, for example, but the inheritance of a malforma- 

 tion at a spot where the father had burned his finger, or 

 shortsightedness in a child subsequent to the father's hav- 

 ing studied too hard while at college. Spencer cited the 

 frequency of shortsightedness among the Germans as an 

 example of the transmitted effect of using spectacles 

 excessively — and the Germans used spectacles so much 

 because they were so studious. There are also examples of 

 the reappearance of other unusual traits in successive gen- 

 erations. These have all been offered, not to prove that 

 acquired modifications are transmitted, but merely to 

 illustrate what we thought we already knew. There are 

 in these cases two kinds of misunderstanding, or at least 

 the conclusions may be unsound because of two types of 

 fallacy. 



