" CONTRE-EVOLUTION " 



209 



The hoe and the plough have not altered very greatly inasmuch 

 as they have not lost their primitively honest character. And the 

 same applies to organs ; they become unrecognisable only in 

 dishonesty. To some extent Dr. Larger's realisations are the 

 same as mine, but, failing to be a consistent Bio-Economist, he 

 is apt to fall from one extreme into the other, forgetting in 

 particular that there is misuse as well as use and disuse, and a 

 corresponding diathesis and a corresponding abnormality. He 

 tells us, indeed : 



les outils dont nous parlons, finissent, non settlement par perdre 1'usage 

 auxquels ils etaient primitivement destines, mais par devenir un veritable 

 embarras pour les animaux qui en sont porteurs ! 



The tusks merely continue to grow because the diathesis 

 continues, i.e., because the inordinate appetite, the misuse, 

 continue. No wonder the elephant suffers from 



une simple hypertrophie hyperplasique de la dentine. . . Quant a 1'email, 

 on n'en peut, d'apres Neuville, constater la presence au microscope que 

 chez le jeune Elephant : il cesse d'exister des que I'animal avance en age 

 et il n'en reste quelques traces que tout-a-fait a la pointe. C'est la indubi- 

 tablement la structure typique et caract6ristique d'une dent d6gener6e 

 dont la formule est toujours celle-ci : " dentine, sans email." 



I would but add the following rider to " dentine sans email " : 

 " animal sans symbiose." 



The conclusion is now inevitable that Acromegaly is but the 

 expression of a parasitic diathesis as affecting a species or a genus. 

 Although Pathology has sometimes been acknowledged as to some 

 extent representing the seamy side of Biology, yet Biologists 

 have been exceedingly slow to make any practical application 

 of this truth. Either they have dreaded getting on to slippery 

 ground, or else they have too unscrutinisingly accepted as gospel 

 some fundamental yet erroneous assumptions made by the 

 pioneers of Biology. There cannot be the slightest doubt that 

 these pioneers too busy to deal with every aspect of the mighty 

 problem of evolution occasionally went sadly astray on physio- 

 logical and " sociological " matters. As a striking example, in 

 Darwin's remarkable introduction to Variation, there occurs 

 a description of a vicious circle of depredation in which what is 

 sociologically bad is quite obviously seen to be also physiologically 

 bad, and which is yet supposed to illustrate the norm of 

 " adaptation " by means' of which varieties or "incipient 

 species " eventually become converted into species. No one, 



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