How vitally it concerns both justice to Darwin and sound views of 'life generally that technical biology and lay understanding alike should face right in this matter!
But if natural selection is really unimportant as contrasted with evolution, how has it come to occupy so large a part of the stage? How is it that accredited expounders of evolution the world over have insisted that natural selection is the only genuine brand of Darwinism, and must be the corner-stone of Darwin's greatness?
The elements entering into the answer are manifold. Three have been indicated already. These may be summarized thus:
1. Undue weight has been attached to the fact that the idea of evolution did not originate with Darwin but is "old as thought itself." Absence of adequate experiential evidence for the truth of this vague idea until Darwin produced it, has not been given enough importance.
2. With the passage of time and our familiarization with the idea of evolution there has been a tendency to minimize the importance of the grip in which miraculous creation held men's minds up to the Darwinian era.
3. A wholly unwarranted importance has been attached to the part played by the natural selection hypothesis in promoting belief in the truth of evolution. Darwin became an evolutionist before he was a natural selectionist, and there is good reason for supposing the rest of us would have gone with him had he never thought of natural selection.
Other elements in the answer to our query must now be taken up. In the first place, Darwin himself placed a heavier burden of causal efficiency on his hypothesis than it is able to bear. This he at length acknowledged in his usual open, honest way. Perhaps his most positive statement to this effect is in "The Descent of Man."[2] It has often been quoted, though hardly enough heeded. He says:
I now admit, after reading the essay by Nägeli on plants, and the remarks' of various authors with respect to animals, more especially those recently made by Professor Broca, that in the earlier editions of my "Origin of Species" I probably attributed too much to the action of Natural Selection or the survival of the fittest. I have altered the fifth edition of the Origin so as to confine my remarks to adaptive changes in structure. I had not formerly sufficiently considered the existence of many structures which appear to be, as far as we can judge, neither beneficial nor injurious; and this I believe to be one of the greatest oversights as yet detected in my work.
But the mischief had been done, and Darwin's inability to remedy it troubled him not a little.
Let us see if there is anything either in his argument itself, or in his
