Abstract
IN NATURE of October 24, 1889 (p. 621), appeared a criticism by Prof. Vines of my essays on heredity and allied subjects. I should be glad to reply briefly to his objections, and the more so as I hope thus to be able to place the scientific problems at issue in a somewhat clearer light. With regard to the immortality which I attribute both to the unicellular organisms and to the germinal cells of the multicellular, if I understand Prof. Vines aright, he does not attack the proposition itself, but has simply overlooked the explanation in my book of the way in which mortal organisms arose out of immortal in process of phyletic development,a process which must have taken place if the Protozoa have developed in the course of the world's history into the higher Metazoa,—“the first difficulty is to understand how the mortal heteroplastides can have been evolved from the immortal monoplastides.” My explanation was simply that which appears to be the true one for the origin of every higher differentiation— namely, the division of the cell-mass of the Protozoan, on the principle of the division of labour, into two dissimilar halves, differing in substance, and consequently also in function; from the one cell which performed all functions comes a group of several cells which distribute themselves over the work. In my opinion, the first such differentiation produced two sets of cells, the one the mortal cells of the body proper, the other the immortal germ-cells. Prof. Vines certainly believes in the principle of the division of labour, and in the part that it has played in the development of the organic world, as well as I; but it seems to him that this division of a unicellular being into somatic and germinal cells is impossible, and that my explanation of the process by dissimilar division is inadequate, because it strikes him as “absurd to say that an immortal substance can be converted into a mortal substance.”
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References
"Das Karyoplasma und die Vererbung: eine Kritik der Weismann'sche Theorie von der Continuität des Keimplasma's," Zeit. wiss. Zool., xliv. p. 228, 1886.
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WEISMANN, A. Prof. Weismann's Theory of Heredity. Nature 41, 317–323 (1890). https://doi.org/10.1038/041317g0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/041317g0
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