Abstract
DR. WILLIAM DICKSON LANG, who retires from the keepership of geology in the British Museum (Natural History) at the end of the year, has made notable contributions both to palaeontology and to geology. While occupied with curatorial duties he has studied especially polyzoans and corals, and in classifying them he has always sought for underlying principles. Like palaeontologists studying other groups, he soon recognized parallel lineages in the evolution of these fossils as he traced them through geological time, and he found corresponding grades in the same order in each parallel lineage, showing that there was a definite common trend, as he termed it. Natural selection, therefore, did not work on indefinite individual variations but on trends which were 'orthogenetic' or in a certain fixed direction. Dr. Lang contributed several valuable papers on this subject to the Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, and he summarized his results in discussions at the centenary meeting of the British Association in 1931.
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Dr. W. D. Lang, F.R.S. Nature 142, 907 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/142907a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/142907a0