Whai Is a Fish? 9 



first place, they lead a dull life, stuck away in their stuffy 

 laboratories surrounded by dead animals, and the only way 

 they can get any fun, or give their egos the occasional boost 

 which all egos need, is to use a word which no one else 

 understands. In the second place, some long words save a 

 great deal of time and explanation. If they deal with things 

 which we are never to meet again, we can pass them by, but 

 if we are going to have to recur to their subject with some 

 frequency, they are worth learning in order that we may 

 say in one word what would otherwise take many. "Auto- 

 mobile," for instance, was once a long and unfamiliar word, 

 but if we had to keep saying "a vehicle which is provided 

 with machinery for propelling itself" each time we wanted 

 to talk about an automobile, we should find it very awk- 

 ward. 



Teleology, then, means the assumption that there is a 

 definite purpose, a definite goal, in the processes of cosmic 

 evolution. The teleologist places the emphasis on adapta- 

 tion to this purpose. He believes that animals develop new 

 characteristics in response to the pressure of their environ- 

 ment, and that the characteristics so acquired can be inherited 

 by succeeding generations. He believes that the primordial 

 giraffe reached up into the trees, when grass became scarce, 

 for leaves to eat, and thus elongated his neck, and that this 

 long neck was inherited by his children. 



On the opposing side is the "mutationist." He does not 

 believe in the inheritance of such acquired characteristics. 

 He holds that all the variations which brought about the 

 differences in species were due to what he calls mutations — 

 chance recombinations of the germ-cell material into what 

 we would call lucky freaks. He believes that some of the 

 primordial giraffes happened to have longer necks than 

 others, and that when a grassless era came upon them the 

 short-necked ones died, but the long-necked ones took to 



