A rejoinder to Professor Weismann / by Herbert Spencer.

  • Spencer, Herbert, 1820-1903.
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A rejoinder to Professor Weismann / by Herbert Spencer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    18/32 (page 18)
    among these ants an organized social state. Unquestionably this organized social state pre-supposes a series of modifica- tions through which it has been reached. It follows, then, that there can be no rational interpretation without a preceding inquiry concerning that earlier state in which there were no castes, but only males and females. What kinds of individuals were the ancestral ants—at first solitary and then semi- social ? They must have had marked powers of offence and defence. Of predacious creatures, it is the more powerful which form societies, not the weaker. Instance human races. Nations originate from the relatively warlike tribes, not from the relatively peaceful tribes. Among the several types of individuals forming the existing ant community, to which, then, did the ancestral ants bear the greatest resemblance ? They could not have been like the queens, for these, now devoted to egg-laying, are unfitted for conquest. They could not have been like the inferior class of workers, for these, too, are inadequately armed and lack strength. Hence they must have been most like these Amazon ants or soldier-ants, which now make predatory excursions—which now do, in fact, what their remote ancestors did. What follows? Their co-adapted parts have not been produced by the selection of variations within the ant-community, such as we now see it. They have been inherited from the pre-social and early social types of ants, in which the co-adaptation of parts had been effected by inheritance of acquired characters. It is not that the soldier-ants have gained these traits; it is that the other castes have lost them. Early arrest of development causes absence of them in the inferior workers; and from the queens they have slowly disappeared by inheritance of the effects of disuse. For. in conformity with ordinary facts of development, we may conclude that in a larva which is being so fed as that the development of the reproductive organs is becoming pro- nounced, there will simultaneously commence arrest in the development of those organs which are not to be used. There are abundant proofs that along with rapid growth of some