266 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



survival are nil; for it cannot afford to wait at all. *'In order 

 to live," says Fabre, ''we all require the conditions that enable 

 us to live: this is a truth worthy of the famous axioms of 

 La Palice. The predatory insects live by their talent. If they 

 do not possess it to perfection, their race is lost." ("Bramble 

 Bees," p. 364.) 



Recently, there has been a revival of Lamarckism hitherto 

 regarded as defunct. Guyer, Kammerer, and Pawlow profess 

 to find factual justification for it, and Bouvier adopts it in his 

 *'La vie psychique des insectes" (1918), to account for the ori- 

 gin of instinct. Of the alleged facts of Kammerer and Guyer, 

 we have spoken in a previous chapter. Here we shall content 

 ourselves with few remarks on the experiments of Ivan 

 Pawlow, as being especially relevant to the subject under 

 consideration. The Russian physiologist has experimented on 

 white mice, and claims that the mice of the fifth generation 

 learned to answer a dinner bell in the space of five lessons, 

 whereas their ancestors of the first generation had required a 

 hundred lessons to answer the same signal. Hence he con- 

 cludes: "The latest experiments . . . show that conditioned 

 reflexes, i.e., the highest nervous activity, are inherited." 

 {Science, Nov. 9, 1923, p. 360.) His results, however, do not 

 tally with those recently obtained by E. C. MacDowell of the 

 Carnegie Institution, by H. G. Bragg, and by E. M. Vicari of 

 Columbia. MacDowell found that white rats trained in a 

 circular maze did not improve in their susceptibility to training 

 from generation to generation. "Children from trained par- 

 ents," he says, "or from trained parents and grandparents, 

 take as long to learn the maze habit as the first generation 

 used." {Science, March 28, 1924, p. 303.) Having cited the 

 similar results of Bragg, who experimented with white mice, 

 he concludes: "The results are in full accord with those given 

 above; they indicate that the training of the ancestors did 

 not facilitate the learning of the descendants." {Ibidem.) 

 E. M. Vicari, using a simple maze and white rats, obtained 

 the same results. "It seems clear," she says, "that the latter 



