DARWINISM ATTACKED. 39 



to his own understanding, however short of perfection and 

 omniscience that is, he is bound to answer the subsidiary 

 problems such as usefulness or non-usefulness on a basis of 

 his own seeing and understanding capacity. As a matter 

 of fact the indifference of many specific characteristics of 

 organisms is not denied by selectionists. Romanes 1X was 

 perhaps the first representative Darwinian, after Darwin 

 himself, to admit this. But many biologists say, further, on 

 a, basis of their experience as observers, that these very 

 indifferent, meaningless (as far as utility goes) mor- 

 phological characteristics and differences are much more 

 constant in their character than the obviously adaptive, i. e., 

 useful ones. However, as pointed out first by Niigeli, accord- 

 ing to the selection theory the characteristics of organisms 

 should be just in that degree the more constant, the more 

 useful they are. Hence there is here a serious discrepancy 

 between theory and fact. Darwin himself felt the force of 

 this objection and met it in a manner not at all acceptable 

 to the ultra-Darwinians, that is the strict selectionists of 

 post-Darwinian times. He admitted that these trivial, ap- 

 parently non-useful, but constant specific characters could 

 not be explained by natural selection, and must be due to a 

 fixation in the species of these characters at one time or 

 another through the nature of the organism and the influ- 

 ence of extrinsic influences ; a true Lamarckian or at least 

 anti-Weismannian * explanation. 



This objection to the selection theory based on the ad- 



* Students and readers who have not read Darwin recently, or 

 in the light of the controversy between the neo-Darwinians and the 

 neo-Lamarckians, that is, between those who disbelieve and those 

 who believe in the inheritance of acquired characters, will be sur- 

 prised to note on a careful re-reading of the "Origin of Species," 

 with this post-Darwinian sharp distinction in mind, how often Dar- 

 win calls on the Lamarckian factors to help his species-forming 

 theories out of tight places. Morgan in his "Evolution and Adap- 

 tation" points out many cases of this. 



