WHAT EVOLUTION IS 165 



are subject to mutational change and 

 to natural selection. The part La- 

 marckism plays in their moulding is 

 as little known in man as in other 

 animals. 



Social inheritance includes our so- 

 cial customs, our language and the 

 way we use it, our daily habits of 

 honesty or dishonesty, frugality or 

 wastefulness, and such minutiae as 

 eating food with a knife or using a 

 napkin. All these features are learned 

 either through experience or from a 

 teacher. None of them comes to us 

 through the sperm or the tgg. Lan- 

 guage, one of the most fundamental, 

 never reaches us as a germinal con- 

 tribution, but must be learned by each 

 generation as it matures. To these 

 traits natural selection has no applica- 

 tion except in a figurative way, for 

 though an individual may gain a mate 

 and offspring in consequence of his 



