Organic Selection 41 
processes of selection. It seems to me that, from the facts that sterile 
animal forms can adapt themselves to new vital functions, their 
superfluous parts degenerate, and the parts more used adapt them- 
selves in an ascending direction, those less used in a descending 
direction, we must draw the conclusion that harmonious adaptation 
here comes about without the cooperation of the Lamarckian 
principle. This conclusion once established, however, we have no 
reason to refer the thousands of cases of harmonious adaptation, 
which occur in exactly the same way among other animals or plants, 
to a principle, the active intervention of which in the transformation 
of species is nowhere proved. We do not require it to explain the 
facts, and therefore we must not assume it. 
The fact of coadaptation, which was supposed to furnish the 
strongest argument against the principle of selection, in reality yields 
the clearest evidence in favour of it. We must assume it, because no 
other possibility of explanation is open to us, and because these 
adaptations actually exist, that is to say, have really taken place. 
With this conviction I attempted, as far back as 1894, when the idea 
of germinal selection had not yet occurred to me, to make “harmonious 
adaptation” (coadaptation) more easily intelligible in some way or 
other, and so I was led to the idea, which was subsequently expounded 
in detail by Baldwin, and Lloyd Morgan, and also by Osborn, and 
Gulick as Organic Selection. It seemed to me that it was not 
necessary that all the germinal variations required for secondary 
variations should have occurred simultaneously, since, for instance, in 
the case of the stag, the bones, muscles, sinews, and nerves would be 
incited by the increasing heaviness of the antlers to greater activity 
in the individual life, and so would be strengthened. The antlers 
can only have increased in size by very slow degrees, so that the 
muscles and bones may have been able to keep pace with their 
growth in the individual life, until the requisite germinal variations 
presented themselves. In this way a disharmony between the in- 
creasing weight of the antlers and the parts which support and move 
them would be avoided, since time would be given for the appropriate 
germinal variations to occur, and so to set agoing the hereditary 
variation of the muscles, sinews and bones’. 
I still regard this idea as correct, but I attribute less importance 
to “organic selection” than I did at that time, in so far that I 
do not believe that it alone could effect complex harmonious adap- 
tations. Germinal selection now seems to me to play the chief part 
in bringing about such adaptations. Something the same is true of 
the principle I have called Panmiaxia. As I became more and more 
1 The Effect of External Influences upon Development, Romanes Lecture, Oxford, 
1894, 
