“Selection does not (my italics) bring about transgressive variation in a general population.”
Indeed, Professor Morgan’s whole book, and one might say his whole work, is a moderate but sufficient destruction of the old orthodox Darwinian stuff. Mr. Wells is now becoming restive. “Who’s this chap Morgan? I haven’t heard of him. He’s a nobody?” Well, I am no student. I am only a general reader—but I should imagine that Professor Morgan was somebody, for he is the Professor of Experimental Zoology in the University of Columbia.
Shall I go on among these authorities whom Mr. Wells assures us don’t exist? We have Le Dantec, with his whole crushing book of 1909. Le Dantec is only a Frenchman, it is true, but, after all, he was at the time the newly-appointed Professor of General Biology at the University of Paris giving his lectures at the Sorbonne.
I might go right back to Nägeli, of whom certainly Mr. Wells has heard, for his work dates from some years before 1893—the date when Mr. Wells seems to have stopped making notes in class. But perhaps Mr. Wells would like the actual words of that authority—which again I quote (from a translation, because I cannot read German):—
“Animals and plants would have developed much as they did even had no struggle for existence taken place....”
Would Mr. Wells like to hear Korchinsky? It will be news for him:—
“Selection is in no way favourable to the origin of new forms.”
And again, from the same authority:—
“The struggle for existence, and the selection that goes with it, restricts the appearance of new forms, and is in no way favourable to the production of these forms. It is an inimical factor in evolution.”
Korchinsky may sound in Mr. Wells’s ears an outlandish name, but I do assure him the authority is not to be denied.