Science: One Against Darwin

Angry, desperately sincere, perfectly aware that the overwhelming weight of opinion was against him, a distinguished 69-year-old zoologist glared at his colleagues, raised his voice, bounced up & down on his heels last week at the British Association for the Advancement of Science convention in Norwich. It was just a century ago that Charles Robert Darwin, cruising in the Beagle, landed on the Galapagos Islands where his theories of organic evolution, transformation of species and natural selection began to take definite shape. Vastly irked last week was Dr. Ernest William MacBride, longtime professor of zoology at London’s Imperial College of Science, by the eulogies heaped upon Darwin’s name and work at Norwich.

“To my mind,” shouted Dr. MacBride, “the doctrine of natural selection is a complete fallacy—worse than a fraud!”

This outburst was greeted with laughter. Professor Edward Bagnall Poulton of Oxford suavely interposed:

“You realize, of course, my dear MacBride, that you stand against the opinion of practically the whole biological world.” It was not that Dr. MacBride could not stomach the fundamental fact of organic evolution. Probably no sane biologist, and certainly none of Dr. MacBride’s calibre, remains unconvinced that all complex forms of life have arisen from simpler organisms. It was the mode of evolution that Dr. MacBride disputed. He is an ardent Lamarckist, believing that certain acquired characteristics can be inherited. For that reason he sticks out like a heterodox thumb in Britain as Duke University’s venerable Professor William McDougall does in the U. S. Lamarckism began to fade from the evolutionary picture after 1900, when Johann Gregor Mendel’s work on the heredity of garden peas was rediscovered and the theatre of heredity was found to be in the genes and chromosomes of the germ cells. The classic experiment in disproof of Lamarckism is to snip off the tails of generation after generation of newborn mice. If this acquired lack of tail could be inherited, the mice should be born with smaller & smaller tails; but the baby mice persist indefinitely in appearing with fine long tails.

To Dr. MacBride, however, this does not show that habits acquired by an individual in adapting itself to new circumstances may not be inherited. Lately he reported on habit transmission in the British stick-insect. This creature feeds exclusively on privet, but on the verge of starvation will eat ivy. Dr. MacBride and his associates starved a number of the insects until they ate ivy, then tested succeeding generations. Of the parents only 10% would eat ivy in the first two days, but 80% of the offspring ate it in the same period, although they were isolated from birth and hence removed from possible parental suggestion.

Said Dr. MacBride last week: “If a parent acquired a habit after long and painful trials, his child will acquire the habit, not at birth, but after fewer trials. If that is true the whole problem of evolution is solved.”

If any other scientist present agreed with this, he held his peace. One of the most grotesque and completely discarded items of Darwin’s theory stemmed from his hesitating acceptance of Lamarckian ideas. Because Lamarck thought that the body and brain were in intimate contact with the germ-plasm, Darwin supposed that news of changed habits or structural modifications was carried to the reproductive organs by tiny “gemmules,” produced in every body cell and transported through the blood. Darwin’s natural selection, however, is in far better repute than it was 75 years ago as one of the prime channels through which evolution works. Darwin did not know the cause of variations—he had never heard of mutations, genes and chromosomes—but he himself said that without variation natural selection would be ineffective.

A difference in tone and trend of discussion is plainly discernible between the U. S. and British associations for advancing science. Generally speaking, the U. S. workers get together (twice a year) to present hard facts gathered from their test tubes, guinea pigs, cosmic ray counters. Thunder is likely to be stolen by whatever obscure young scientist pops up with the quaintest facts. On the other hand, when the British meet (once a year) they usually leave their facts & figures behind in the laboratory and let themselves goon the wind of theory and speculation. Where U. S. Science scrabbles at the latest frontier of discovery, British Science is more apt to sweep the whole domain of specialized knowledge with a philosophic eye, an eloquent tongue. Other discussions, reports and procedures at the Norwich meeting last week:

Primates Grounded. Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, president of the anthropology section, pointed to south-central Asia, where the tall but comparatively young Himalayas stand today, as the probable region where man first appeared. In this place last year the leader of Yale’s North India Expedition reported finding fossils of two new species of extinct apes, closer in structure to man than any other apes ever discovered, and remains of an Old Stone Age culture apparently 500,000 years old (TIME, May 21, 1934). Anthropologists do not assert that man evolved from a gorilla, chimpanzee or any other modern form of ape, but the majority believe he is the lineal descendant of giant, arboreal primates, now extinct, whose remains are fairly widespread in Europe, Africa and Asia. South-central Asia, millions of years ago, was covered with a luxuriant forest swarming with tree-living primates of all sorts. When the mountains thrust up, the wet monsoons from the south were cut off, the forests disappeared, and the primates were stranded on the ground, forcing modifications in the direction of man.

Heavy Neon. Isotopes are forms of the same element having different atomic weights. Most famed isotope is “heavy hydrogen” for which Columbia’s Harold Clayton Urey won last year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Dr. Gustav Hertz of Berlin’s Siemens Engineering Works told how he extracted 98% pure ”heavy neon” (atomic weight 22) from ordinary neon (atomic weight 20). The separation, accomplished with the help of mercury in a long series of connected flasks, was so ingenious that Dr. Hertz’s description of it was heartily clapped, and when he had finished Dr. Francis William Aston of Cambridge, who knows as much about isotopes as anyone, stepped up to shake his hand.

Polar Power. In Adelie Land, Antarctica, a howling river of “wind, 50 miles wide, blows off the plateau, month in & month out, at an average velocity of 50 m.p.h. As a source of power this compares favorably with 6,000 tons of water falling every second over Niagara Falls. “I will not further anticipate some H. G. Wells of the future who will ring the antarctic with power-producing windmills; but the winds of the Antarctic have to be felt to be believed, and nothing is quite impossible to physicists and engineers,” declared Professor Frank Debenham of Cambridge, president of the geography section, South Polar traveler, founder of the Polar Research Institute dedicated last year to the late heroic Robert Falcon Scott (TIME, Nov. 26).

President. Last year at Aberdeen, Sir Josiah Stamp, voluble economist, director of the Bank of England, chairman of the London, Midland & Scottish Railway, engaged in a spirited, if indirect, debate with Sir James Jeans. Sir Josiah contended in effect that science was causing too much technological unemployment, had better take a holiday (TIME, Sept. 17, 1934). This year at Norwich the same Sir Josiah was elected president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science for the coming year. Sir Josiah promptly proved that this honor had not changed him in the slightest by delivering a discourse which he has been delivering elsewhere lately on the dark lining behind the silver cloud of British economic recovery. “I do not think,” said he, “that our present building boom can last much longer.”