Summary and General Discussion 373 



You see that very soon a sequence of externally adaptive muta- 

 tions of this sort is going to lead to a nonviable giraffe. It is using 

 up its somatic flexibility with every adaptive mutation that it gets. 

 The only way it can regain flexibility is by getting those mutations 

 which will enlarge its heart or do whatever is necessary to cope 

 with the externally adaptive changes. It has to shift some of its 

 acc|uired characteristics from the somatic servo-systems to the 

 soldered-in genotypic systems. 



The system can only work if there is a comparatively large 

 number of mutations which will simulate a Lamarckian process, 

 and evidently God set it up this way to deceive the Russians. 



Now, let us look at the other side of the picture. Suppose the 

 system were set up on Lamarckian lines. The genotype would 

 then have to pick up from the soma (and it is difficult enough to 

 imagine it picking up anything) those particular acquired charac- 

 teristics which are the essential ones. But the enlarged heart is 

 not just an enlarged heart. It is one item in a general shift in value 

 all around servo-circuits to enlarge that heart. All those values 

 at other points around those circuits are going to be picked up 

 in a Lamarckian system, passed on by inheritance, and soldered 

 into the genotype. In fact, a Lamarckian system will very rapidly 

 gum up the works by decreasing the somatic flexibility just as 

 badly as the Darwinian system. 



We face, therefore, an economics of communicational pathways. 

 Evolution will only work if you have one system (the genotype) 

 relatively independent of the other (the somatic), with natural 

 selection playing on the whole thing. You have to have a digital 

 genotype, soldered in, with random changes, and you have to 

 have a system (the soma) of analogue operations. The soma is 

 being, so to speak, a trial model to test the genotype. The hen is 

 the egg's way of finding out if it was a good egg or not. 



The whole economics of the system depends upon keeping the 

 soma and the genotype separate. If you are right in saying that 

 cultural evolution is something much more like a Lamarckian 

 system, I think we may look forward to considerable chaos in 

 the culture. The genotype is the analogue of a legislator. He can 

 only afford to make those changes which affirm changes that have 

 already occurred at the somatic or popular level. If we live in a 



