TO PROF. POULTON
Broadstone, Wimborne. July 27, 1907.
My dear Poulton,—Thanks for your very interesting letter. I am glad to hear you have a new book on "Evolution"[34] nearly ready and that in it you will do something to expose the fallacies of the Mutationists and Mendelians, who pose before the world as having got all wisdom, before which we poor Darwinians must hide our diminished heads!
Wishing to know the best that could be said for these latter-day anti-Darwinians, I have just been reading Lock's book on "Variation, Heredity, and Evolution." In the early part of his book he gives a tolerably fair account of Natural Selection, etc. But he gradually turns to Mendelism as the "one thing needful"—stating that there can be "no sort of doubt" that Mendel's paper is the "most important" contribution of its size ever made to biological science!
"Mutation," as a theory, is absolutely nothing new—only the assertion that new species originate always in sports, for which the evidence adduced is the most meagre and inconclusive of any ever set forth with such pretentious claims! I hope you will thoroughly expose this absurd claim.
Mendelism is something new, and within its very limited range, important, as leading to conceptions as to the causes and laws of heredity, but only misleading when adduced as the true origin of species in nature, as to which it seems to me to have no part.—Yours very truly,
ALFRED R. WALLACE.