Darwinism and Race Progress

by John Berry Haycraft

Now there is no reason to suppose that these sexual cells residing in the bodies of the parent will be influenced by a change in the muscle or brain cells of the parent unless this change in some way or another influences the blood, the common go-between. But the blood is now known to be but a food and oxygen carrier, and an eliminator of used-up products. It is like a river laden with vessels carrying corn for the food of the big city, and nothing more. The life, the energy, the character of the body is the sum of the lives, the energies, and the characters of the cells—although these necessarily require the nourishment derived from healthy blood—just as the life of the city is the sum of the life of its citizens who require the nourishment of the corn.

[Constitutional Change may, though it rarely does, affect the Reproductive Cell.]

Let us suppose that an average healthy man during his lifetime acquires, by use, accident, or disease, some change in his right arm. There is no reason to suppose that the sexual cells, rather than any other cells in the body, will be affected. If, on the other hand, this local change in the arm affects the blood, depriving it of nutritive power, or casting into it obnoxious matter, then it is possible that all the cells of the body may be affected. We have many instances of such a thing, as when the blood and whole constitution are involved after maybe a primary local affection, and when, in consequence, the hair drops off, or marks and irregularities of the nails appear. In these cases the sexual cells may suffer from want of nourishment, or from what we may term a poison, and may produce less vigorous and perhaps diseased or malformed offspring, but they will show no tendency to develop in the offspring that primary local affection which caused ailment in the parent. But, as we shall see in the [next chapter], the sexual cells in most cases get off scot-free, and the most dangerous acquired constitutional diseases leave no trace of their passage upon the reproductive elements. It is indeed difficult to point to a case, with the notable exception of syphilis, in which acquired constitutional blood disorders leave any trace in the organisation of the progeny, and we are indeed fortunate that this is so.

There seems to be some evidence that we may stunt the growth of a plant or animal by insufficient or unsuitable food, and that all the cells of the body may thereby be reduced in size, the sexual cells among the rest, and that these reduced cells give rise to small progeny in the next generation. Here again the evidence in the case of animals seems rather doubtful, and rests on a few statements, such as that of De Quatrefages, that horses taken from Normandy to the hilly and less fertile country in Brittany become distinctly smaller in the course of three generations. In our own country large horses are found in the plains and small horses and ponies in the hilly districts of Wales and Scotland. But the obvious utility to man of small breeds in hilly districts, and of heavily-built horses on the plains, and the fact that horses have been bred for hundreds of years in view of their services to man, throws great doubt upon this particular evidence of De Quatrefages’, and we may well leave it out of account, unaccompanied as it is with evidence as to the total exclusion of the interbreeding of the Normandy with the Brittany variety.

On the other hand, among plants it really appears as if by adjusting the soil and climate you may produce stunted varieties, whose seed produce small plants. The poor and exposed ground of our hilltops are covered with dwarfed varieties of the bigger plants growing luxuriously in the adjacent plains, and a classical case mentioned by Lemaire[11] is that of the hemp which, removed from Piedmont to the less suitable soil of France, becomes a smaller variety, growing to only half its former height in the course of two or three generations. The enormous dwarfing that one can subject a plant to is illustrated in the case of the conifer, which the Japanese can cause to remain the size of a tiny shrub during its hundred years’ growth, by simply keeping the soil at the starvation edge, and by pruning the branches and roots.

It appears then to be pretty certain that every man and woman possesses a store of sexual cells, derived directly from the original sexual cells from which he or she was developed. These in the main are like the original cell, being as they are of its substance, but they show minor differences amongst themselves, and give rise in their turn to offspring no two of which are alike. These sexual cells, residing within the paternal or maternal body, are uninfluenced by the course of life led by that body, except, perhaps, in some few cases in which the whole system and the blood are impoverished, saturated with alcohol, or infected with the microbes of disease, which microbes in some cases, perhaps, directly attack the sexual cells.

[The Facts of Evolutive Selection known to the Gardener and Breeder.]

Scientific men are often very slow at arriving at a truth, and there are many instances of valuable knowledge held by sections of the people in perhaps an empirical fashion, which has at last found acceptance by the learned. The practical results of all this biological teaching has been in the hands of cattle-breeders and nurserymen for centuries. The various breeds of cattle have been produced by man, not by any new method of ventilating the cow-sheds, or by some freshly discovered patent fodder, but simply by selecting for breeding purposes those individuals that most suited the breeder’s purpose. The racing stallion was kept which most resembled a greyhound, the hog that most resembled a beer barrel, and the cow that gave the best combination of milk and flesh. The gardener produces the hundreds of new varieties placed every year in the market by keeping the seeds and propagating from any variety he may wish to perpetuate, and these varieties are always spontaneously occurring. He perfects his stock by selecting the seed only from the very best.

The testimony not only of the learned but of those who in their lives, unbiassed by any theory, have been engaged in modifying breeds of animals and plants, is unanimously in favour of the view that selection is the only, or, at any rate, by far the most powerful factor in producing racial change. So far these facts have had little or no application to the question of human race progress. People are still too much biassed by archaic anthropocentric ideas; they view man by himself, under his own special laws, and would often be shocked by an attempt to draw obvious parallels between him and the lower animals. Amongst the thinking few this attitude has changed, and broader and sounder views are rapidly gaining ground.