30 SOCIAL HEREDITY AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION 



biologists confined their attention almost wholly to 

 the animal and vegetable kingdoms, exclusive of man, 

 it was natural that they should pay less and less 

 attention to acquired characters. It has thus come 

 about that to advance a belief that acquired char- 

 acters may influence the onward sweep of evolution 

 has come to be regarded to-day as almost biological 

 heresy. 



But this is manifestly a very one-sided view of 

 nature. Even though acquired characters may not 

 be inherited in the usual acceptance of that tenn, 

 they surely have some influence upon life. It is 

 time to turn our attention for a little away from 

 congenital characters, whose appearance in the germ 

 plasm is as yet wholly unexplained, and to see 

 whether we may not have made a mistake in aban- 

 doning all acquired characters so totally as factors in 

 evolution. If we find that such characters, instead 

 of constituting a small part of human attributes, 

 really form a larger part of the whole, surely, then, in 

 explaining human evolution the process of acquiring 

 characteristics by the individual cannot be placed 

 behind the process of inheritance. If we find that in 

 the human race these acquired characters comprise 

 nearly all that we hold most valuable in our human 

 nature, then with equal certainty social heredity will 

 not stand behind, but really ahead of organic hered- 

 ity in determining human evolution, quite irrespec- 

 tive of what influence it may have had among other 

 animals. Since we find these factors are handed 

 from one generation to the next, we are justified in 

 calling the law of their transmission by the name of 

 heredity. 



