Supposed Action of Animal Intelligence.
The following passage briefly summarises Mr. Cope's position: "Intelligence is a conservative principle, and will always direct effort and use into lines which will be beneficial to its possessor. Here we have the source of the fittest, i.e. addition of parts by increase and location of growth-force, directed by the influence of various kinds of compulsion in the lower, and intelligent option among higher animals. Thus intelligent choice, taking advantage of the successive evolution of physical conditions, may be regarded as the originator of the fittest, while natural selection is the tribunal to which all results of accelerated growth are submitted. This preserves or destroys them, and determines the new points of departure on which accelerated growth shall build."[1]
This notion of "intelligence"—the intelligence of the animal itself—determining its own variation, is so evidently a very partial theory, inapplicable to the whole vegetable kingdom, and almost so to all the lower forms of animals, amongst which, nevertheless, there is the very same adaptation and co-ordination of parts and functions as among the highest, that it is strange to see it put forward with such confidence as necessary for the completion of Darwin's theory. If "the various kinds of compulsion"—by which are apparently meant the laws of variation, growth, and reproduction, the struggle for existence, and the actions necessary to preserve life under the conditions of the animal's environment—are sufficient to have developed the varied forms of the lower animals and of plants, we can see no reason why the same "compulsion" should not have carried on the development of the higher animals also. The action of this "intelligent option" is altogether unproved; while the acknowledgment that natural selection is the tribunal which either preserves or destroys the variations submitted to it, seems quite inconsistent with the statement that intelligent choice is the "orginator of the fittest," since whatever is really "the fittest" can never be destroyed by natural selection, which is but another name for the survival of the fittest. If "the fittest" is always definitely
- ↑ Origin of the Fittest, p. 40.
