Evolution Social and Organic

by Arthur M. Lewis

Weismann, however, refused to be put down. He insisted that in the absence of absolute certainty as to the cart wheel incident, they did not fulfill the first condition of scientific evidence, and Dr. Zacharias wisely admitted later, that this point was well taken. Prof. Poulton had described certain cats with extra toes which he had kept under surveillance for seven generations. “It would be equally justifiable,” says Weismann, “to derive cats with extra toes from an ancestor whose toes had been trodden on, as to derive the tailless cats of the Isle of Man from an ancestor of which the tail had been cut off by a cart passing over it, and thus to regard the existence of the race as a proof of the transmission of mutilations.”

Again Weismann points out that the absence of a tail may not be owing to the mutilation of the mother but to the inherent taillessness of an unknown father. He proceeds to relate how during the year that Dr. Zacharias came with his collection, “My friend, Prof. Schottlius brought me a kitten with an innate rudimentary tail, which he had accidentally discovered as one of a family of kittens at Waldkirch, a small town in the southern part of the Black Forest. A closer investigation resulted in the following rather unexpected discovery. For some time past, tailless kittens have frequently appeared in the families of many different mother cats at Waldkirch, and this fact is explained in the following manner. A clergyman, who lived for some time at Waldkirch had married an English lady who possessed a tailless male Manx cat. The probability that all the tailless cats in Waldkirch are more or less distant descendants of that male cat amounts almost to certainty. Since a male Manx cat has reached the Black Forest, it might equally well arrive at some other place.”

This very same year a popular scientific journal came to the rescue of the transmission theory with the following incident purporting to have taken place 22 years before, in 1864. “A pregnant merino sheep broke its right foreleg about two inches above the knee-joint; the limb was put in splints and healed a long time before the following March, when the animal produced young. The lamb possessed a ring of black wool from two to three inches in breadth round the place at which the mother’s leg had been broken, and upon the same leg.” When this incident was related to Weismann, he replied, “It is a pity that the black wool was not arranged in the form of the inscription ‘to the memory of the fractured leg of my dear mother.’”

Writing in the following year Weismann says, “Furthermore, the mutilations of certain parts of the human body, as practised by different nations from time immemorial, have not in a single instance, led to the malformation or reduction of the parts in question. Such hereditary effects have been produced neither by circumcision nor the removal of the front teeth, nor the boring of holes in the lips or nose, nor the extraordinary artificial crushing and crippling of the feet of Chinese women. No child among any of the nations referred to possesses the slightest trace of these mutilations when born; they have to be acquired anew in each generation.”

While it is undoubtedly true that much in Weismann’s position lacks experimental demonstration, it is equally true that when the heat of the discussion somewhat subsided, his theories were well to the fore, and they have since secured a wide acceptance among competent authorities. It is hardly to be expected that his two greatest critics, Spencer and Haeckel, would look with much favor on a theory the acceptance of which would make necessary the re-writing of those many volumes which constitute their lifework. Lankester, himself no mean authority, in translating Haeckel’s “History of Creation,” feels constrained to say in the preface, “I feel it due to myself to state that I do not agree with him as to a very large part of his views on classification, and as to his belief in the necessity of assuming the ‘transmissibility of acquired characters.’ Readers who have gained an interest in these questions from the brief statements of the present work must, without assuming that Professor Haeckel’s judgment is final, go on to study for themselves the works of Weismann and others which are mentioned with perfect fairness in these pages.”

And Joseph McCabe, the translator of his “Riddle of the Universe,” and “Last Words on Evolution,” has this to say in his introduction to the latter, written two years ago, “To closer students, who are at times impatient of the Lamarckian phraseology of Haeckel—to all, in fact, who would like to see how the same evolutionary truths are expressed without reliance on the inheritance of acquired characters,—I may take the opportunity to say that I have translated for the same publishers, Professor Guenther’s “Darwinism and the Problems of Life,” which will shortly be in their hands.”

It must be admitted that the older view is much less favorable to the Socialist position in sociology than the later theory of Weismann. It is a matter of some satisfaction that so great a critic as Romanes concedes the feasibility of Weismann’s theory while rejecting some of the conclusions which he draws from it. “If Weismann’s theory is true,” says Prof. David Starr-Jordan, “the whole literature of sociology will have to be rewritten!” And another writer insisted that Weismann had reopened the case for Socialism.

If it were true that the terrible results of the degrading conditions forced upon the dwellers in the slums were transmitted to their children by heredity, until in a few generations they became fixed characters, the hopes of Socialists for a regenerated society would be much more difficult to realize. In that case these unfortunate creatures would continue to act in the same discouraging way for several generations, no matter how their environment had been transformed by the corporate action of society. This much at any rate, Weismann has done for us, he has scientifically destroyed that lie.

In this respect, independent sociological experiments and investigations have arrived at the same conclusions as Weismann. Prof. John R. Commons by careful study, reached the following conclusions: That 1.75 per cent of the population of the United States are congenital defectives; that 3.25 per cent are induced defectives, that is, they have not inherited their deficiency; that 2 per cent are possessed of genius and will make their way under the hardest conditions; that 2 per cent are below the Aryan brain level; and that the remaining 91 per cent are normal persons who are neither good nor bad, brilliant nor stupid, criminal nor virtuous, and whose future is entirely decided by the environment which surrounds them during the first fifteen years of their life.

Herman Whittaker, a magazine contributor, states that during eight years in Canada 2,000 boys taken from the London slums by Dr. Barnado passed under his observation on a farm colony. And although most of them had served terms in jail, not more than one per cent reverted to their own former habits, or the habits of their parents.