Luck, or Cunning, as the Main Means of Organic Modification

I SHALL perhaps best promote the acceptance of the two main points on which I have been insisting for some years past, I mean, the substantial identity between heredity and memo...

MR. HERBERT SPENCER wrote to the _Athenæum_ (April 5, 1884), and quoted certain passages from the 1855 edition of his “Principles of Psychology,” “the meanings and implications”...

When “Life and Habit” was first published no one considered Mr. Spencer to be maintaining the phenomena of heredity to be in reality phenomena of memory. When, for example, Prof...

WITHOUT raising the unprofitable question how Mr. Romanes, in spite of the indifference with which he treated the theory of Inherited Memory in 1881, came, in 1883, to be suffic...

OF the two points referred to in the opening sentence of this book—I mean the connection between heredity and memory, and the reintroduction of design into organic modification—...

SO much for the older view; and now for the more modern opinion. According to Messrs. Darwin and Wallace, and ostensibly, I am afraid I should add, a great majority of our most...

SINCE the foregoing and several of the succeeding chapters were written, Mr. Herbert Spencer has made his position at once more clear and more widely understood by his articles...

ONE would think the issue stated in the three preceding chapters was decided in the stating. This, as I have already implied, is probably the reason why those who have a vested...

THE position, then, stands thus. Common sense gave the inch of admitting some parts of the body to be less living than others, and philosophy took the ell of declaring the body...

WHAT, it may be asked, were our biologists really aiming at?—for men like Professor Huxley do not serve protoplasm for nought. They wanted a good many things, some of them more...

TO sum up the conclusions hitherto arrived at. Our philosophers have made the mistake of forgetting that they cannot carry the rough-and-ready language of common sense into prec...

SOME may perhaps deny that Mr. Darwin did this, and say he laid so much stress on use and disuse as virtually to make function his main factor of evolution.

MR. ALLEN, in his “Charles Darwin,” {168a} says that “in the public mind Mr. Darwin is commonly regarded as the discoverer and founder of the evolution hypothesis,” and on p. 17...

I HAVE said enough to show that Mr. Darwin claimed I to have been the originator of the theory of descent with modification as distinctly as any writer usually claims any theory...

I HAVE quoted in all ninety-seven passages, as near as I can make them, in which Mr. Darwin claimed the theory of descent, either expressly by speaking of “my theory” in such co...

IT is here that Mr. Grant Allen’s book fails. It is impossible to believe it written in good faith, with no end in view, save to make something easy which might otherwise be fou...

BEING anxious to give the reader a sample of the arguments against the theory of natural selection from among variations that are mainly either directly or indirectly functional...

“‘THE evil that men do lives after them” {239a} is happily not so true as that the good lives after them, while the ill is buried with their bones, and to no one does this corre...

AND now I bring this book to a conclusion. So many things requiring attention have happened since it was begun that I leave it in a very different shape to the one which it was...