ASPECTS OF KINETIC EVOLUTION 28 1 



They hold that new groups have to be isolated, that new species 

 have to be made, in order to originate and preserve new char- 

 acters. 



" Each new variety or species, when formed, will generally 

 take the place of, and thus exterminate its less well-fitted parent. 

 This, I believe to be the origin of the classification and affinities 

 of organic beings at all times ; for organic beings always seem 

 to branch and sub-branch like the limbs of a tree from a common 

 trunk, the flourishing and diverging twigs destroying the less 

 vigorous, the dead and lost branches rudely representing extinct 

 genera and families." 



Evolution, on this basis, would not be a process of transfor- 

 mation so much as of elimination and substitution. The parental 

 type remains relatively stationary and unmodified until the new 

 form can expand and replace it. The same is true of the 

 mutation theory of De Vries, except that the new variations are 

 supposed to be larger. The new character can persist only as 

 it is able to crowd out its parent or neighbor and to conquer for 

 itself a place in nature. Every new character which has been 

 preserved, must, under these theories, be environmentally useful, 

 which a very large proportion of the characters and differences 

 of plants and animals are not, as even the most pronounced 

 Darwinians like Professor Lankester now admit. 



The kinetic theory does not encounter these difficulties and im- 

 probabilities. It recognizes speciation and evolution as entirely 

 distinct problems, and does not require that a new species be 

 made in order to preserve a new character, or even that char- 

 acters must be useful. Characters may be preserved even when 

 they are harmful, and may contribute to the extinction of the 

 species. Evolution, in the kinetic theory, is definitely a proc- 

 ess of transformation by the adoption and propagation of new 

 variations in existing species. New variations are not segre- 

 gated from the parental type, but interbreed freely with it, and 

 thus bring about its evolutionary progress. 



SELECTION EXPLAINED BY EVOLUTION. 



As so often happens, the philosophical abstractions of logic 

 have yielded very little assistance in the comprehension and 



