CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS SELECTION. 7l 



speedily than unconscious, but is subject to the serious danger of 

 weakening its proteges by inbreeding, if the selection be too rigid and 

 persistent. 



The unconscious selection by which the development of the pro- 

 tective characters of the Guatemalan types of cotton has been encour- 

 aged differs in no respect from the progress by which adaptive 

 evolution takes place in nature. The Indians have planted and har- 

 vested the crop, it is true, instead of the birds or other natural agents, 

 but they have been entirely unconscious of the struggle for existence 

 to which the cotton plant was being subjected by the presence of the 

 boll weevil. The Indians were only another factor, along with the 

 dry and moist climates, the keleps, and the turkeys. The problem 

 has been solved in a genuinely natural fashion, and affords an excel- 

 lent illustration of the nature of selective influence in evolution. 



Instead of representing the final possibilities of improvement 

 m characters which give protection against the boll weevil, the 

 Indian varieties of cotton may be looked upon rather as affording 

 materials which conscious selection can render still more valuable. 

 The proliferation character, for example, might never be brought to 

 uniform expression by unconscious selection, because the possession 

 of it would give the individual plant no advantage over its neighbors 

 in the production of seed. The proliferating plant might produce 

 no weevils itself, but the free movement of the insects would keep the 

 general average the same. Indeed, a plant might easily sacrifice all 

 its buds, set no fruit at all, and thus fail to perpetuate itself. Pro- 

 liferation can become a direct advantage to the individual plant only 

 under conscious selection. The full value of the newly ascertained 

 protective adaptations will not be known until they have had the 

 direct selective encouragement now commonly accorded to desirable 

 characters of other cultivated plants. 



It may appear remarkable that such definite and potentially valu- 

 able characters as the weevil-resisting adaptations of the Kekchi cot- 

 ton should have remained so completely unrecognized hitherto. The 

 explanation of this doubtless lies in the fact that cotton culture is 

 practiced in Central America largely by the Indians and very little 

 by the foreigners or the more intelligent part of the native community, 

 so that it had not received scientific study. Even the existence and 

 utility of the keleps, though apparently known to the Indians from 

 ancient times, had entirely escaped the attention of the European 

 residents of the country. That the Indians should have come to 

 recognize the keleps as beneficial and necessary to a full crop of cotton, 

 although not knowing that the weevils injure the cotton or that the 

 keleps eat the weevils, only shows in higher relief the completely 

 unconscious character of the selection conducted in this system of 

 primitive agriculture. The Indians of Alta Vera Paz are extremely 



