The difficulty as to how individual differences or sports can become
fixed and perpetuated, if altogether useless, is evaded by those who
hold that such characters are exceedingly common. Mr. Romanes says that,
upon his theory of physiological selection, "it is quite intelligible
that when a varietal form is differentiated from its parent form by the
bar of sterility, any little meaningless peculiarities of structure or
of instinct _should at first be allowed to arise_, and that they should
then _be allowed to perpetuate themselves_ by heredity," until they are
finally eliminated by disuse. But this is entirely begging the
question. Do meaningless peculiarities, which we admit often arise as
spontaneous variations, ever perpetuate themselves in all the
individuals constituting a variety or race, without selection either
human or natural? Such characters present themselves as unstable
variations, and as such they remain, unless preserved and accumulated by
selection; and they can therefore never become "specific" characters
unless they are strictly correlated with some useful and important
peculiarities.
Pages:
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262