Darwinism and Race Progress

by John Berry Haycraft

We have instincts, right perhaps in the main, but these have been followed blindly. Pride in illustrious ancestry is most reasonable, and the wish to carry on the family name is allied to that praiseworthy egotism which makes every cat prefer her own kittens to any others. These natural instincts have, however, up to the present led us to desire wealth and position for our offspring rather than robust constitutions and mental activity. We have avoided in many cases, by what we term suitable marriages, poverty and inconvenience, yet in contracting these marriages we have sacrificed the organic possibilities of our children.

[The Stream of Life.]

The most superficial consideration of the question will convince us that the organic stream of life is that which is of all things the most permanent. We are so apt to lose sight of the ephemeral nature of rank and wealth. We forget that the gold and silver is constantly changing hands, the houses are being rebuilt, the old landmarks destroyed. Our individual thoughts and passions are, and are then no more; whole families, even races, disappear. Yet man is here to-day, he has come down from remote posterity, and some of us will give our blood in large measure to mankind as he will be found in future ages. In this stream of life the shepherd who weds a healthy, thrifty wife is of more account than an emperor who destroys the chances of his posterity by marriage with a sickly princess. Life is brain and muscle, wealth and position are apart and accessory. In marriage we must bear in mind its end and aim, for the individual lives only till he has reproduced himself; each generation lives only to produce the next. If these facts are once widely understood there can be little doubt that they will influence men’s actions in respect to marriage, and with a growing sense of obligation to others, the ratio of sickly and feeble-minded children may be diminished.

With the judicious selection of parents to be the race-producers, we need have no fear as to the care that modern civilisation and preventive medicine bestow upon the individuals. If the community undertakes its own selection we can dispense with the selecting influence of the micro-organism of whooping-cough, scarlet fever, or tubercle. Our remedies and our digested foods may be used with advantage to help the members of a robust and energetic stock through those dangers which must at all times beset them.

FOOTNOTE

[32] An Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to, and the Better Protection of, Children, August 26th, 1889, and previous Acts.

[APPENDIX.]

In [Chapter II.] we saw that many of the valuable and carefully reasoned results which Weismann had obtained are accompanied by much detailed speculation based upon an extremely limited fact basis. In his later writings especially, the reader who searches for the facts and reasoning which refer to such questions as the non-transmission of acquired characters will find everywhere an abundant commingling with speculations concerning the mechanical process of heredity. I have ventured in the appendix to sketch shortly this speculation of Weismann’s, and to give my own estimation of its value.

Weismann was not the first to speculate or found a mechanical theory of heredity; Darwin himself published a theory of “pangenesis,” and this was, I believe, the only piece of speculation of which Darwin was ever guilty. That he might picture to himself, by means of material particles, the views that he held of heredity, Darwin supposed that during their lifetime every cell of the parent disengages small living particles—gemmules—which find their way to and are stored up in the generative cells, ready to develop in the next generation into cells similar to those from which they came. This theory was actually framed to support those cases where Darwin supposed that acquired characters are transmitted, for he says in one of his replies to Huxley’s letters:[33] “I do not doubt your judgment is perfectly just, and I will try to persuade myself not to publish. The whole affair is much too speculative; yet I think some such view will have to be adopted when I call to mind such facts as the inherited effects of use and disuse,” etc. In the theory of pangenesis the gemmules residing in the body or somatic cells will be subject to such influences as affect the cells, and will naturally transmit any change to which they have been subjected to the offspring that they eventually build up. Darwin’s view may be graphically represented by [Fig. 2]. Since Darwin’s time most biologists have come to doubt whether there is any evidence that acquired characters are transmitted at all, and incline rather to view racial change as altogether due to inborn variations, some of which variations have an advantage over others; Darwin himself, as Huxley pointed out,[34] laid less weight on the influence of acquired habits in his later than in his earlier writings. Modern biologists tend, therefore, to be more Darwinian than Darwin in respect to their thoroughgoing adherence to the action of selective influence; but of necessity they discard his theory of pangenesis, which was a pictorial expression of Darwin’s lingering Lamarckian tendencies. Let me give some idea of what the Neo-Darwinians picture to themselves as the “process of heredity.” It has been known now for many years that every cell in the body, including the sperm cells and ova, are descended from a fertilised ovum. Of these cells of the body all obviously die except those sperm cells and ova which give rise to the next generation, and so on. We have, therefore, a continuing chain of actual organic matter linking every living form with those that are most ancestral and remote, and from these chains all the so-called living individuals that have ever existed have, as it were, been thrown off. Many have emphasised this point, Owen, Haeckel and others; but perhaps Francis Galton must be given much of the credit of clearly stating it as a fact to be remarked, though similar views have more recently been popularised among biologists by the delightful pen of Weismann. The “continuity of the germ plasm,” the title by which this view is generally known, expresses the fact that germ substance continues in an unbroken line from generation to generation; a man is similar to his parents because he develops out of a similar plasm. The continuity of germ plasm (stirp of Galton), like Darwin’s selection, is a fact, not a theory.