394 LOTSY, CURRENT THEORIES OF EVOLUTION. 
In this, I fully agree with JOHANNSEN. 
The development of an eggcell to an individual with its many and 
manyfold organs is one of the most amazing processes, of which 
we know, the many ,,Entwicklungsmechanische Studien” notwith- 
standing, practically nothing. The reason is that such studies can 
reveal, at the best, the mechanism but not the underlying causes 
of development. 
It seems to me impossible to consider morphogenesis as the 
result of a mere aggregation of mutually independent particles, it 
must ultimately depend on and result from the molecular structure 
of the eggcell. 
As a working hypothesis the gene-hypothesis is doubtless a 
valuable one, but it is utterly unable to give us an insight in what 
really happens, the conception is altogether too coarse, I would 
almost say, too naive for this purpose. 
An organism is not a mere aggregate of a limited number of 
mutually independent living particles, it is an entity and life is a 
property of the whole or of considerable parts of the whole not of | 
separate genes, just as the characters of an organism are characters 
of the whole. 
The fact that the same character, f.i. blue flower-color, is common 
to a great many different plants by no means warrants the con- 
clusion that it is caused in all those cases by an identical gene. 
The blue color is caused in all those organisms by particular 
molecular structures, which need not be identical at all, but all of 
which — different as they may be and doubtless are — break the 
light in such a way that our eye receives the impression which 
we call blue. . 
Coppersulphate is blue, the cloudless skye is blue, cobaltglass 
is blue, some silk goods are blue, yet nobody thinks of ascribing 
the blue color of all these objects to the presence of an identical 
„gen” in all of them. Nor can we say that in coppersulphate f.i. 
the blue color is caused by any particular constituent of it, sucha 
conclusion might be drawn if the removal of one constituent only, 
say of the copper present in it, caused the blue color to disappear, 
but coppersulphate looses its color not only after removal of the 
copper from it, but also after removal of the sulphur, of the oxygen or 
even of the mere crystallwater it contains, so that the character 

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