DARWINISM DEFENDED. 137- 



winism proper, and the extreme position of the believers in 

 the Allmacht of selection was certainly never taken by Dar- 

 win himself. In fact, most of neo-Darwinism has been 

 deserted by its one-time followers, and most conspicuously 

 and perhaps most radically by Weismann himself. 



Thus, with these two categories of objections listed in 



the "Darwinism Attacked" chapter put to one side, for the 



moment at least, by admitting the validity of one category 



and showing the inapplicability of the other as regards its 



relation to true Darwinism, we have left to us- 



The objections o consider those remaining objections which 

 needing answer 



are made (i) against the capability of selec- 

 tion's making any use at all of the familiar and always 

 occurring fluctuating variations called Darwinian, (2) 

 against its capacity to explain coadaptive and highly com- 

 plex adaptations, especially those which seem as if they 

 could be of advantage to the organism only in fully 

 developed or specialised state, (3) against its inability to 

 account for overdeveloped specialisations, (4) against the 

 possibility of selection's explaining qualitative differences in 

 species, and many-branched descent (quantitative differ- 

 ences and linear descent seeming to be the only kinds pos- 

 sible to it), (5) against its capacity to explain complete 

 or extreme structural degeneration of useless organs and 

 parts, (6) against the reality and extreme rigour of the 

 struggle for existence and personal selectiofi (an essential 

 foundation of the selection theory), (7) against the sexual 

 selection theory, particularly in its capacity as a supporting 

 prop of the natural selection theory, (8) against the reliance 

 by the selectionists on the homology or analogy which they 

 hold to exist between natural selection and artificial selec- 

 tion, and finally to consider those curiously positive and' 

 definite declarations of such radical anti-Darwinians as 

 Wolff, Korschinsky, and others that natural selection is a 

 vagary, having no claims to existence either on a basis of 



