A CRITICISM OF LOTSY'S THEORY OF EVOLUTION. 



Bv Prof. Selmar Schonland, M.A., Ph.D., F.L.S.. C.M.Z.S. 



The enorniuiis amount of work which has been done on 

 the theorx- of evolution since the ptibHcation of Darwin's " Origin 

 of Species, in 1861, leaves one with a feeling of disappointment. 

 It cannot be denied that the facts which have been accumulated 

 during tlie last 50 years have made it quite plain that evolution 

 has taken place in the organic world, but hardly two biologists 

 agree exactly as to the means how it has been brought about. 



Both Darwin and Wallace were of opinion that the origin 

 of new species (into which evolution ultimately resolves itself) 

 was due to natural selection in the struggle for existence. We 

 need not cavil at the term " natural selection," which even 

 Darwin, in chapter IV of the *' Origin of Species," considers a 

 false term, if literally taken. Those wdio do not like it may 

 substitute " natural elimination " for it, as Professor Lloyd 

 Morgan did. 



Both Darwin and Wallace started from the fact that the 

 individuals of each species are not exactly alike, that they, as it 

 were, oscillate round a type, and that the fittest will survive. 

 Asa Gray said* in 1880 (in a lecture before the Theological 

 School of Yale College) : 



Xatnral selection l)y itself is not a hypothesis, nor even a theory. 

 It is a truth — a catena of facts and direct inferences from facts. . . . 

 There is no douI)t that natural selection operates ; the .open question is, 

 what do its operations amount to? 



He clearly saw that natural selection does not go to the root of 

 the matter. In his " Evolutionary Teleology " he states : 



Xatural selection is not the wind which propels the vessel, but the 

 rudder which, by friction, now on this side and now on that, shapes the 

 course. The rudder acts while the vessel is in motion, efifects nothing 

 when it is at rest. Variation answers to the wind. ... Its course 

 is controlled bv natural selection. This proceeds mainly through out- 

 ward influence. But we are more and more convinced that variation 

 . . . . is not a product of, but a response to, the action of environ- 

 ment. Variations are evidently not from without, but from within. 



Even Darwin himself has explicitly stated that natural selection 

 has been the most important, but not the exclusive, means of 

 modification. There have been many who have followed 

 Wallace in ascribing to natural selection exclusively the power 

 of bringing about evolution. Amongst them w'as Weismann, 

 who, by his theory of Amphimixis, tried to remove an obvious 

 difficult}' presented by the vmdoubted great stability of specific 

 types even if taken in the Linnean sense. The fundamental 

 f|uestion, how new variations arise, is hardly touched if we 

 substitute Lamarckismf for Darwinism, or even if we accept 



* Sereno Watson in " Memorial of Asa Gray." Cambridge Uni- 



versity Press. 1888. p. 42. 



t Compare Herbert Spencer, " The Inadequacy of Natural Selection," 

 in Cnntcmporarv Rcviciv, February, March, and May, 1893. 



B 



