Thursday, March 25, 2021
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More SCIENCE DENIALISM and HORRIBLE CREATIONISM and DEVIATIONIST LYSENKOISM from a nasty anti-Darwinian named Francis Darwin. Cancel him now!
No doubt if we take a severely logical view of the universe with Descartes, we may be obliged to admit that our actions are the direct inevitable result of what has previously occurred in the world, and that we are forced into a certain action just as inevitably as the mercury in a thermometer is forced to rise to a certain point. But this is a point of view which leads us no further, it is not an instrument of research. To get a point of view which is physiologically valuable we must retain the idea of spontaneity. What we do at a particular juncture depends on the nature of our previous experiences and actions. The “self” which seems to be spontaneous is the balance which weighs conflicting influences. It is for this reason that even in plant physiology we want the idea of an individuality, a something on which the past experience of the race is written and in which the influences of the external world are weighed. I do not of course imply conscious weighing, nor do I mean that the plant has memory in the sense that we have memory. But a plant has memory in Hering's and Butler's sense of the word, according to which memory and inheritance are different aspects of the same quality of living things. Thus in the movements of plants, as in the instincts of animals, the spontaneity of the individual has disappeared, the balance of profit and loss has been struck during the past experience of the species, and the individual acts by that unconscious memory we call inheritance.
Labels: Carver, Smarty-plants
¶ 10:28 AM
