The Limits of Organic Selection

The object of this paper is to set forth certain views as to the limits of the supplementary natural selection hypothesis recently proposed by Prof. James Mark Baldwin, Prof. C. Lloyd Morgan and myself as " Organic Selection." The line of thought which led me to Organic Selection was as follows: Tlhe distinctionl between the ontogenic and phylogenic variation was drawn in my mind in 1894,1 because it was evident in the current researches upon variation by Weldon, Bateson and others, and in the line of reasoning followed by Cope, Ryder, Scott, Osborn and other Neo-Lamarckians that the importance of such a distinction was being overlooked. There are three main types of variation': First, forthitous congenital variations which are the temporary and transitory fluctuations around a mean. Second, ontogevic variations2 which are the departures from normal or typical development t arising during ontogeny; they include all the effects of the reaction of the individual to new or disturbed conditions of life which rise in the course of individual growth and may disappear with the death of the individual; the mooted question whether ontogenic variations are or are not heritable does not affect their distinctness. Third, phylogenic variations, also congenital, which belong in the phylum, as observed principally in fossil series; they are stable and inheritable departures from ancestral types towards a new type; they correspond with the " mutations" of Wagner and Scott, i. e., they are departures