April 10, 1896.] 



SGIENGE. 



559 



partial co-adaptive variations, but must have 

 been acquired by intelligence and then in- 

 herited. This general position is dealt with in 

 the earlier article. 



It will be remembered, however, that the 

 force of the refutation of the Neo-Lamarckian 

 argument on this point depends on the assump- 

 tion, made in common with him, that some de- 

 gree of intelligence or imitative faculty is pres- 

 ent before the completion of the instinct in 

 question. To deny this is, of course, to deny 

 the contention that instinct is ' lapsed intelli- 

 gence,' or ' inherited habit. ' To assume it, how- 

 ever, opens the way for certain farther ques- 

 tions, which I may now take up briefly, citing 

 Romanes by preference as before. 



I. The argument from ' selective value ' has 

 a further and very interesting application by 

 Romanes. He uses the very fact upon which 

 the argument in my earlier paper was based to 

 get more support for the inheritance of habits. 

 The fact is this, that intelligence may per- 

 form the same acts that instinct does. So grant- 

 ing, he argues, that the intelligent performance 

 of these acts comes first in the species' history, 

 this intelligent performance of the actions serves 

 all the purposes of utility which are claimed for 

 the instinctive doing of the same actions. If 

 this be true, then variations which would secure 

 the instinctive performance of these actions do 

 not have selective value, and so the species 

 would not acquire them by the operation of 

 natural selection. By the Lamarckiau theory, 

 however, he concludes, the habits of intelligent 

 action give rise to instincts for the performance 

 of the same actions which are already intelli- 

 gently performed, the two kinds of function ex- 

 isting side by side in the same creature.* 



This is an ingenious turn, and raises new 

 questions of fact. Several things come to mind 

 in the way of comment. 



First. It rests evidently on the state of things 

 required by my earlier argument against the 

 Neo-Lamarckian claim that co-adaptation could 

 not have been gradually acquired by variation; 

 the state of things which shows the intelligence 

 preventing the ' incidence of natural selection ' 

 by supplementing partial co-adaptation. Ro- 

 manes now assumes that intelligence prevents 



*0p. cit., pp. li-Sl. 



the operation of natural selection on further 

 variations, and so rules out the origin of in- 

 stinct through that agency, or, put diiferently, 

 that actions which are of selective value when 

 performed intelligently are not of selective value 

 ,When performed also instinctively. But this 

 seems in a measure to contradict the argument 

 which is based on co-adaptations (examined in 

 the earlier paper), i. e., that instincts could not 

 have arisen by way of partial co-adaptations at 

 all. In other words, the argument from 'co- 

 adaptation' asserts that the partial co-adapta- 

 tions are not preserved, being useless; that from 

 selective value asserts that they are preserved 

 and, with the intelligence thrown in, are so 

 useful as to be of selective value. We have 

 seen that the latter position is probably the 

 true one; but that the inheritance of acquired 

 characters is then made unnecessarjf. 



Second. Assuming the existence side by side 

 in the same- creature of the ability to do intelli- 

 gently certain things that he also does instinc- 

 tively, it is extraordinary that Romanes should 

 then say that the instinctive '•eflexes have 

 no utility additional to that of the intelligent 

 performance. On the contrary, the two sorts 

 of performance of the same action are of very 

 different and each of extreme vitility. Reflex 

 actions are quicker, more direct, less variable, less 

 subject to inhibition, more deep-seated organic- 

 ally, and so less liable to derangement. Intel- 

 ligent actions — the same actions say — are, be- 

 sides the points of opposition indicated, and by 

 reason of them, more adaptable. Then there 

 is the remarkable diflference that intelligent ac- 

 tions are centrally stimulated, while reflex ac- 

 tions are peripherallj^ stimulated. I cannot go 

 into all these differences here ; but the case may 

 be made strong enough by citing certain diver- 

 gencies between the two sorts of performance, 

 with illustrations which show their separate util- 

 ities. 



1. Reflex and instinctive actions are less sub- 

 ject to derangement. Emotion, injury, tempo- 

 rary ailment, hesitation, aboulia, lack of infor- 

 mation, etc., may paralyze the intelligence; but 

 instinct and reflex action may keep the creature 

 alive in the mean time. What keeps dogs 

 alive after extended ablations of the brain cor- 

 tex? 



