90 DARWINISM TO-DAY. 



Men using, or rather, testing, these theories every day in 

 their work in field and laboratory, find selection insufficient 

 to explain the conditions that their observation and experi- 

 ments reveal to them. These men are students in all the 

 different lines of biological work ; they are zoologists, bota- 

 nists, palaeontologists ; they are students of anatomy, physi- 

 ology, oecology, and taxomony (classification) ; they are 

 embryologists, pathologists, animal and plant breeders. 

 From all these lines of work come increasing complaints; 

 selection cannot explain for me what I see to exist. From 

 some the cry is more bitter : selection is a delusion and false 

 guide; I reject it utterly. For me, I repeat, this is an 

 objection of much significance and importance. Just as 

 modern chemistry seems to be finding its long useful atomic 

 theory now a restraint and a hindrance in understanding the 

 wonderful new facts that have followed the pushing out of 

 investigation into the rich fields of physical chemistry, so 

 the biological experimentalists, the students of variation and 

 heredity, of life mechanics, of physico-chemical biology, 

 are finding the rigid theory of selection's control of all 

 processes and phenomena a rack on which they will no 

 longer be bound. 



Coupled with the significance of this general objection to 

 the reign of the selection theory a general objection that 



the selectionists will say is simply the objection 

 The concessions . 



of the selection- that the selection theory is objected to is the 



lsts< added significance of the concessions in the way 



of supporting theories that the neo-Darwinians have made 

 to the general increase and sharpness of scientific criticism 

 of selection ; conspicuous examples are Roux's theory of the 

 battle of the parts, and Weismann's theory of germinal 

 selection. This latter is no less than a neo-Darwinian ex- 

 planation of how determinate variation, that is ortho- 

 genesis, may be explained non-teleologically. Which is 

 practically to rob natural selection of all influence in the 



