Search Results - The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online

17%

A162 Book: Seward, A. C. ed. 1909. Darwin and modern science. Essays in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The origin of species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Text Image PDF

memorable Congress I had undertaken to deliver the first address (September 18th) on the subject of Modern evolution in relation to the whole of science. I maintained that Darwin's theory not only solved the great problem of the origin of species, but that its implications, especially in regard to the nature of man, threw considerable light on the whole of science, and on anthropology in particular. The discovery of the real origin of man by evolution from a long series of mammal ancestors threw light

17%

A162 Book: Seward, A. C. ed. 1909. Darwin and modern science. Essays in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The origin of species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Text Image PDF

the modern State. He spoke of the theory of evolution as an unproved hypothesis, and declared that it ought not to be taught in the schools, because it was dangerous to the State. We must not, he said, teach that man has descended from the ape or any other animal. When Darwin, usually so lenient in his judgment, read the English translation of Virchow's speech, he expressed his disapproval in strong terms. But the great authority that Virchow had—an authority well founded in pathology and

17%

A162 Book: Seward, A. C. ed. 1909. Darwin and modern science. Essays in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The origin of species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Text Image PDF

is negative. The recapitulation theory originated as a deduction from the evolution theory and as a deduction it still remains. Let us before leaving the subject apply another test. If the evolution theory and the recapitulation theory are both true, how is it that living birds are not only without teeth but have no rudiments of teeth at any stage of their existence? How is it that the missing digits in birds and mammals, the missing or reduced limb of snakes and whales, the reduced mandibulo

17%

A162 Book: Seward, A. C. ed. 1909. Darwin and modern science. Essays in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The origin of species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Text Image PDF

-history has, with the progress of evolution, become longer and more complicated. Now there can be no doubt that the life-history of organisms has been shortened in the way above suggested, for cases are known in which this can practically be seen to occur at the present day. But the process of lengthening by the creation of new stages at the other end of the life-cycle is more difficult to conceive and moreover there is no evidence for its having occurred. This, indeed, may have occurred, as is

17%

A162 Book: Seward, A. C. ed. 1909. Darwin and modern science. Essays in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The origin of species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Text Image PDF

least as long as it is at the present time. The qualification implied by the words in italics is necessary, for it is clearly possible that the external conditions then existing were not suitable for the production of all the stages of the potential life-history, and that what we call organic evolution has consisted in a gradual evolution of new environments to which the organism's innate capacity of change has enabled it to adapt itself. We have warrant for this possibility in the case of the

17%

A162 Book: Seward, A. C. ed. 1909. Darwin and modern science. Essays in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The origin of species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Text Image PDF

believing, the Angiosperms came from a type with a flower resembling in its complexity that of Mesozoic Cycads, almost the whole evolution of the flower in the highest plants has been a process of reduction. The stamen, in particular, has undoubtedly become extremely simplified during evolution; in the most primitive known seed-plants it was a highly compound leaf or pinna; its reduction has gone on in the Conifers and modern Cycads, as well as in the Angiosperms, though in different ways and to a

17%

A162 Book: Seward, A. C. ed. 1909. Darwin and modern science. Essays in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The origin of species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Text Image PDF

passage through which the pollen entered; the open neck of the pollen-chamber protruded through the micropyle and itself received the pollen. We have met with an analogous case, at a more advanced stage of evolution, in the Bennettiteae (p. 208), where the wall of the gynaecium, though otherwise closed, did not provide a stigma to catch the pollen, but allowed the micropyles of the ovules to protrude and receive the pollen in the old gymnospermous fashion. The integument in the one case and the

17%

A162 Book: Seward, A. C. ed. 1909. Darwin and modern science. Essays in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The origin of species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Text Image PDF

men will drag after them those naturalists who have too firmly fixed in their heads that a species is an entity2. Mimicry was not only one of the first great departments of zoological knowledge to be studied under the inspiration of Natural Selection, it is still and will always remain one of the most interesting and important of subjects in relation to this theory as well as to evolution. In mimicry we investigate the effect of environment in its simplest form: we trace the effects of the

17%

A162 Book: Seward, A. C. ed. 1909. Darwin and modern science. Essays in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The origin of species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Text Image PDF

this predominance. Thus if the female appear in two different forms and the male in only one it will be twice as probable that she will happen to possess a sufficient foundation for the evolution of mimicry. (3) The appearance of melanic or partially melanic forms in the female has been of very great service, providing as it does a change of ground-colour. Thus the mimicry of the black generally red-marked American Aristolochia swallowtails (Pharmacophagus) by the females of Papilio swallowtails

17%

A162 Book: Seward, A. C. ed. 1909. Darwin and modern science. Essays in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The origin of species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Text Image PDF

is in itself an indication that the dispersing agencies avail themselves in a hap-hazard fashion of characters and capacities that have been developed in other connections2. Their utility in these respects is an accident in the plant's life3. He attributes this utility to a determining agency, an influence which constantly reappears in various shapes in the literature of Evolution and is ultra-scientific in the sense that it bars the way to the search for material causes. He goes so far as to

17%

A162 Book: Seward, A. C. ed. 1909. Darwin and modern science. Essays in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The origin of species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Text Image PDF

degree of development as those now existing. The fact was commented upon by Hooker2, but its full significance seems to have been scarcely appreciated. For it implied not merely that their evolution must have taken place but the foundations of existing distribution must have been laid in a preceding age. We now know from the discoveries of the last fifty years that the remains of the Neocomian flora occur over an area extending through 30 of latitude. The conclusion is irresistible that within this

17%

A162 Book: Seward, A. C. ed. 1909. Darwin and modern science. Essays in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The origin of species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Text Image PDF

biological evolution and psychological evolution is to be sought,—as Darwin fully realised,—in the phenomena of instinct, broadly considered. The term instinctive has also a psychological connotation. What is that connotation? Let us take the case of the swimming duckling or the pecking chick, and fix our attention on the first instinctive performance. Grant that just as there is, strictly speaking, no inherited behaviour, but only the conditions which render such behaviour under appropriate

17%

A162 Book: Seward, A. C. ed. 1909. Darwin and modern science. Essays in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The origin of species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Text Image PDF

summon to the task. It can only be dealt with here from a special point of view—that which may serve to illustrate the influence of certain mental factors on the course of evolution. From this point of view too much stress can scarcely be laid on the dominance of emotion during the period of courtship and pairing in the more highly organised animals. It is a period of maximum vigour, maximum activity, and, correlated with special modes of behaviour and special organic and visceral accompaniments

17%

A162 Book: Seward, A. C. ed. 1909. Darwin and modern science. Essays in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The origin of species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Text Image PDF

those which stand lower in the scale of mental evolution, but that they have an equally large or perhaps larger mass of instinctive raw material which may furnish the stuff to be elaborated by intelligent processes. There is, perhaps, a greater abundance of the primary tissue of experience to be refashioned and integrated by secondary modification; there is probably the same differentiation in relation to the determining biological ends, but there is at the outset less differentiation of the

17%

A162 Book: Seward, A. C. ed. 1909. Darwin and modern science. Essays in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The origin of species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Text Image PDF

advance than on the fact of their underlying community of nature. The conceptual intelligence which is especially characteristic of the higher mental procedure of man is more firmly distinguished from the perceptual intelligence which he shares with the lower animals—distinguished now as a higher product of evolution, no longer as differing in origin or different in kind. Some progress has been made, on the one hand in rendering an account of intelligent profiting by experience under the

17%

A162 Book: Seward, A. C. ed. 1909. Darwin and modern science. Essays in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The origin of species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Text Image PDF

finally because of the influence it would exert on the whole conception of existence. He wrote in his note-book in the year 1837: My theory would give zest to recent and fossil comparative anatomy; it would lead to the study of instinct, heredity, and mind-heredity, whole [of] metaphysics1. We can distinguish four main points in which Darwin's investigations possess philosophical importance. The evolution hypothesis is much older than Darwin; it is, indeed, one of the oldest guessings of human

17%

A162 Book: Seward, A. C. ed. 1909. Darwin and modern science. Essays in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The origin of species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Text Image PDF

given. Evolutionism and systematism are opposing tendencies which can never be absolutely harmonised one with the other. Evolution may at any time break some form which the system-monger regards as finally established. Darwin himself felt a great difference in looking at variation as an evolutionist and as a systematist. When he was working at his evolution theory, he was very glad to find variations; but they were a hindrance to him when he worked as a systematist, in preparing his work on

17%

A162 Book: Seward, A. C. ed. 1909. Darwin and modern science. Essays in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The origin of species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Text Image PDF

. The former always remains to a great extent an artificial world. Inventions change the face of its institutions. New modes of production revolutionise not only modes of government, but modes even of collective thought. Therefore it is that the evolution of society is controlled by laws special to it, of which the spectacle of nature offers no suggestion. If, however, even in this special sphere, it can still be urged that the evolution of the material conditions of society is in accord with

17%

A162 Book: Seward, A. C. ed. 1909. Darwin and modern science. Essays in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The origin of species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Text Image PDF

Cleverness and eloquence on both sides certainly had their share in producing the very great and general disturbance of men's minds in the early days of Darwinian teaching. But by far the greater part of that disturbance was due to the practical novelty and the profound importance of the teaching itself, and to the fact that the controversy about evolution quickly became much more public than any controversy of equal seriousness had been for many generations. We must not think lightly of that

17%

A162 Book: Seward, A. C. ed. 1909. Darwin and modern science. Essays in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The origin of species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Text Image PDF

. Such an argument ought to be used not to discredit the confident reason, but to illuminate and dignify its dark beginnings, and to show that at every step in the long course of growth a Power was at work which is not included in any term or in all the terms of the series. I submit that the more men know of actual Christian teaching, its fidelity to the past, and its sincerity in face of discovery, the more certainly they will judge that the stimulus of the doctrine of evolution has produced in