The Evolution Theory (Complete)
August Weismann
9781465656629
311 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Every one knows in a general way what is meant by the doctrine of descent—that it is the theory which maintains that the forms of life, animals and plants, which we see on our earth to-day, have not been the same from all time, but have been developed, by a process of transformation, from others of an earlier age, and are in fact descended from ancestors specifically different. According to this doctrine of descent, the whole diversity of animals and plants owes its origin to a transformation process, in the course of which the earliest inhabitants of our earth, extremely simple forms of life, were in part evolved in the course of time into forms of continually increasing complexity of structure and efficiency of function, somewhat in the same way as we can see every day, when any higher animal is developed from a single cell, the egg-cell, not suddenly or directly, but connected with its origin by a long series of ever more complex transformation stages, each of which is the preparation for, and leads on to the succeeding one. The theory of descent is thus a theory of development or evolution. It does not merely, as earlier science did, take for granted and describe existing forms of life, but regards them as having become what they are through a process of evolution, and it seeks to investigate the stages of this process, and to discover the impelling forces that lie behind it. Briefly, the theory of descent is an attempt at a scientific interpretation of the origin and diversity of the animate world. In these lectures, therefore, we have not merely to show on what grounds we make this postulate of an evolution process, and to marshall the facts which necessitate it; we must also try to penetrate as far as possible towards the causes which bring about such transformations. For this reason we are forced to go beyond the limits of the theory of descent in the narrow sense, and to deal with the general processes of life itself, especially with reproduction and the closely associated problem of heredity. The transformation of species can only be interpreted in one of two ways; either it depends on a peculiar internal force, which is usually only latent in the organism, but from time to time becomes active, and then, to a certain extent, moulds it into new forms; or it depends on the continually operating forces which make up life, and on the way in which these are influenced by changing external conditions. Which of these alternatives is correct we can only undertake to determine when we know the phenomena of life, and as far as possible their causes, so that it is indispensable to make ourselves acquainted with these as far as we can. When we look at one of the lowest forms of life, such as an Amœba or a single-celled Alga, and reflect that, according to the theory of evolution, the whole realm of creation as we see it now, with Man at its head, has evolved from similar or perhaps even smaller and simpler organisms, it seems at first sight a monstrous assumption, and one which quite contradicts our simplest and most certain observations. For what is more certain than that the animals and plants around us remain the same, as long as we can observe them, not through the lifetime of an individual only, but through centuries, and in the case of many species, for several thousand years? This being so, it is intelligible enough that the doctrine of evolution, on its first emergence at the end of the eighteenth century, was received with violent opposition, not on the part of the laity only, but by the majority of scientific minds, and instead of being followed up, was at first opposed, then neglected, and finally totally forgotten, to spring up anew in our own day.
