Abstract
THE annual Herbert Spencer lecture was delivered at Oxford on December 2 by the Linacre professor, Dr. G. C. Bourne. In the course of a brief historical sketch, the lecturer pointed out that evolutionary ideas were widely prevalent at the end of the eighteenth century, though, after being apparently routed by Cuvier, the doctrine remained for many years in abeyance. Herbert Spencer was a pioneer in the evolutionary revival. Not an original investigator in zoology or botany, he was yet a very earnest student of biological subjects. Evolution, in Spencer's view, was a cosmic process, consisting essentially in the passage of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous. Confronted with the difficulty of the transition from the non-living to the living, Spencer framed the theory of “physiological units” with their mutual interactions. This proved to be a fertile idea, and was adopted in one form or another by many subsequent investigators. In phylogeny there is a real advance from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous; in ontogeny, however, there are obvious difficulties in the way of this interpretation. These difficulties Herbert Spencer tried to meet by assuming for his units “polarities” of differing values, and a power of undergoing modification when subject to the influence of each other and of the environment. Hence a true epigenesis took place, and in this way he thought it possible to account for both o inheritance and variation. Acquired characters, he held, must be inherited; and on this basis he reared the fabric of the “synthetic philosophy.”
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The Development of Evolutionary Ideas . Nature 82, 167 (1909). https://doi.org/10.1038/082167a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/082167a0