From the Unconscious to the Conscious 



The same line of reasoning applies, of course, to the 

 transition from the fish to the batrachian. 



But it is in the evolution of the insect that the 

 impossibility of transformation by adaptation is yet more 

 obvious. There is no connection between the biology 

 of the larva, which represents, to some degree at any 

 rate, the primitive state of the ancestral insect, and the 

 biology of the perfect insect form. One cannot even 

 conceive by what mysterious series of adaptations an 

 insect, accustomed to larval life, underground or in 

 water, could succeed in gradually creating for itself 

 wings for an aerial life, closed to it and doubtless unknown. 



When, further, one considers that this mysterious 

 series of adaptations would have had to take place, not 

 once, by a kind of * natural miracle,' but as many times 

 as there are genera of winged insects, it becomes as 

 hopeless to deduce the appearance of these species from 

 Lamarckian as from Darwinian factors. 



This point is in fact self-evident. Plate himself 

 perfectly understood the impossibility of explaining these 

 major transformations by * adaptation,' when he wrote 

 that * by the very fact that an animal belongs to a certain 

 group, the possibilities of variation are restrained, and in 

 many cases, restrained within very narrow limits.' 



Therefore Lamarckianism and Darwinism are alike 

 incapable of giving a general explanation applicable to 

 all cases, of the appearance of new species. If the 

 majority of biologists who hold to transformism do 

 not yet admit this, there are, nevertheless, those who do, 

 and endeavour to find elsewhere a superior factor in 

 evolution which may get over the difficulties inherent in 

 the classical evolutionary theories. 



Some neo-Lamarckians, such as Pauly, attribute to 

 the constituent elements of the organism, to the organism 

 itself, to plants, and to minerals, a kind of profound 

 consciousness which might originate all modifications 

 and all adaptations. At all steps of the evolutionary 



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