The Biological Problem Of To-day Part 8

In many of the ant and termite colonies still greater differences exist between the different sets of individuals. In addition to males and females, there are s.e.xless workers, and these is many species are of two kinds, known as workers and soldiers. The divergences of structure among the three or four forms are shown, frequently by considerable differences in size, by the presence and absence of wings, by differences in the sense-organs, the brain, and the structure of the head. In the common ant--_Solenopsis fugax_, for instance, as Weismann quotes from Forel--the males have more than four hundred facets on their eyes, the females about two hundred, and the workers from six to nine. Many soldiers possess enormously large and heavy heads, with ma.s.sive jaws, and naturally, with the appropriate muscles much enlarged.

But as workers and soldiers, on account of the rudimentary state of their s.e.xual organs, cannot reproduce themselves, all the three or four kinds of ants in the colony must be developed from eggs deposited by the females. In this Weismann finds the most convincing proof of the omnipotence of natural selection, and, I venture to add, for the omnipotence of his doctrine of determinants.

He says (_Contemporary Review_, vol. lxiv., p. 313): 'It fortunately happens that there are animal forms which do not reproduce themselves, but are always propagated anew by parents which are unlike them. These animals, which thus cannot transmit anything, have nevertheless varied in the past, have suffered the loss of parts that were useless, and have increased and altered others; and the metamorphoses have at times been very important, demanding the variation of many parts of the body, inasmuch as many parts must adjust themselves so as to be in harmony with them.' 'None of these changes' (p. 318) 'can rest on the transmission of functional variations, as the workers do not at all, or only exceptionally, reproduce. They can thus only have arisen by a selection of the parent ants, dependent on the fact that those parents which produced the best workers had always the best prospect of the persistence of their colony. No other explanation is conceivable, and it is just because no other explanation is conceivable that it is necessary for us to accept the principle of natural selection.'

According to Weismann's conception, 'every part of the body of the ant'

(_loc. cit._, p. 326) 'that is differently formed in the males, females, and workers is represented in the germplasm by three (sometimes four) corresponding determinants; but on the development of an egg never more than one of these attains to value--_i.e._, gives rise to the part of the body that is represented--and the others remain inactive.' This structure of the germplasm Weismann attributes to the operation of selection. 'For in the ant state' (_loc. cit._, p. 326) 'the barren individuals or organs are metamorphosed only by the selection of the germplasm, from which the whole state proceeds. In respect of selection, the whole state behaves as a single animal. The state is selected, not the single individuals, and the various forms behave exactly like the parts of one individual in the course of ordinary selection.'

Naturally, from the views on the germplasm theory and on the doctrine of determinants that I have expressed in this book, I cannot accept the explanation Weismann thus gives of the facts. It is true that Weismann holds his own explanation to be the only conceivable explanation. 'For there are only two possible _a priori_ explanations of adaptations for the naturalist, namely, the transmission of functional variations and natural selection' (_loc. cit._, p. 336); 'but as the first of these can be excluded' (on account of the infertility of workers and soldiers), 'only the second remains.'

But are the alternatives really only as Weismann suggests? Is there no choice left for the naturalist?

When I was reading his _All-sufficiency of Natural Selection_, kindly sent me by the author, it came into my mind that I could not accept his dilemma.

For the different individuals in the insect states may be explained in a third way--in a way overlooked by Weismann. This third explanation is nothing more than the subject of all this treatise of mine. It is that, in obedience to different external influences, the same rudiments may give rise to different adult structures.

I am glad that the same answer has been made to Weismann's _All-sufficiency of Natural Selection_ by two biologists, Herbert Spencer and Emery, simultaneously with mine. Emery, a specialist upon the structure of ants, and Herbert Spencer, relying upon the investigations of several Englishmen, have sought to prove that the differences between the individuals in the colonies of ants, bees, and termites, have been slowly called into existence by the operation of external influences affecting the egg in its situation and food during development.

It has been shown fully by experiment and by observation that the fertilised eggs of the queen bee may become either workers or queens. This depends merely on the cell in the hive in which the egg is placed, and on what food the embryo is reared. In the specially large cells, known as queens' chambers, and with specially nutritious diet, they become queens.

With poor food, and in smaller cells, they become workers. Even if worker larvae be supplied in time with a richer diet, they may be turned into queens.

Similarly, the differences that exist among termites and ants, as Emery shows, may be described as polymorphism due to food. The Italian zoologist, Gra.s.si, has shown that termites have it in their power to alter the relative numbers of workers and soldiers, and to produce as many of the latter as may be required, and they are able to accelerate the s.e.xual maturity of other individuals by supplying nourishment suitable for stimulating the maturation of the genital organs.

Emery explains this polymorphism by attributing it to the general laws of growth in the insect organism under the influence of different external stimuli. He thinks that 'the production of workers depends upon a special capacity of the germplasm to respond to the abundance or scantiness of certain nutritive materials by a greater growth of certain parts of the body, and a lesser growth of other parts. Workers' food stimulates growth in the jaws and brain, r.e.t.a.r.ds growth in the wings and s.e.xual cells.

Queens' food has the opposite action.' There is a correlation between r.e.t.a.r.dation of the s.e.xual glands and acceleration of the development of the head, just as in vertebrates there is a correlation between the s.e.xual glands and the secondary s.e.xual characters. 'The characters by which the workers differ from the queens, therefore, are not innate, but are produced secondarily.'

Quite independently, but simultaneously, Herbert Spencer has suggested the same explanation as Emery. Moreover, he has used the conditions that exist among the state-forming insects as a strong argument against Weismann's doctrine of determinants. The observations of many careful persons, such as Charles Darwin, Emery, and others, show that in many species of ants the extreme types of individuals are connected by many intermediate forms.

(_Apud_ Emery, this is the case in many _Myrmicidae_, in most _Camponotidae_, and in _Azteca_.) These forms are transitional, not only in general size, but in the degree to which the genital organs have been arrested, and in the peculiarities of the jaws.

Spencer explains these transitional forms, and I agree with him, by supposing that the stoppage in food supply has taken place at different times after development has begun. ('It must happen that the stoppage of feeding will be indefinite.') Thus, the existence of transitional forms presents no difficulty on the theory of the agency of food. But how can the doctrine of determinants be applied to it? 'If he is consistent' (says Spencer, _Contemporary Review_, lxiv., p. 901), 'he must say that each of these intermediate forms of workers must have its special set of "determinants," causing its special set of modifications of organs; for he cannot a.s.sume that while perfect females and the extreme types of workers have their different sets of determinants, the intermediate types of workers have not. Hence we are introduced to the strange conclusion that, besides the markedly distinguished sets of determinants, there must be, to produce these intermediate forms, many other sets slightly distinguished from one another--a score or more kinds of germplasm, in addition to the four chief kinds. Next comes an introduction to the still stranger conclusion, that these numerous kinds of germplasm producing these numerous intermediate forms are not simply needless, but injurious--produce forms not well fitted for either of the functions discharged by the extreme forms, the implication being that natural selection has originated these disadvantageous forms. If, to escape from this necessity for suicide, Professor Weismann accepts the inference that the differences among these numerous intermediate forms are caused by arrested feeding of the larvae at different stages, then he is bound to admit that the differences between the extreme forms, and between these and perfect females, are similarly caused. But if he does this, what becomes of his hypothesis that the several castes are const.i.tutionally distinct, and result from the operation of natural selection?'

My course of thought leaves me with little to add to this criticism by Spencer. In this case, as in many others that I have pointed out, Weismann makes his usual mistake. He incorporates in the rudiment what really are stimuli coming from external conditions during the process of development; he makes a grave confusion between the rudiment and the conditions of its development.

In my view, in these cases of polymorphism in the colonies of insects Nature exhibits a series of most important experiments, and their plain meaning is that the same germinal material, when subjected to different external influences, may produce very different final products. When from the neutral germinal material of an insect egg there is produced a male or female creature, or a worker or soldier (as this or that influence acts), the process is no other, and presents no greater difficulties, than when an experimenter, taking the young bud of a plant, according to the conditions to which he subjects it, can turn it into a vegetative or into a reproductive shoot, a thorn or a root; no different to what occurs when the investigator, cutting into a _Cerianthus_, produces a second or third mouth, surrounded by tentacles, or in the case of _Cione_ surrounded by eye-spots.

It has been shown, I think, in these pages that much of what Weismann would explain by determinants within the egg must have a cause outside the egg.

The chief factors in the process of development we have found to be: (1) The multiplication of cells by division (growth as a moulding factor); (2) the relations of cells to their external environment (position in its widest sense as a factor); (3) the interrelations of the parts of a whole (cells, tissues, and organs) to one another and to the whole (correlative development). There remains to be considered the extent to which the germinal material in the egg determines the course of development of the organism. Here, before all things, it must be insisted that the individual nature of the cell determines the specific fas.h.i.+on in which the cell will react to the varying stimuli coming from varying conditions. The same agency produces very different results upon different organisms. These differences must be attributed to the differences in the nature (different intimate structure) of the active material.

Sachs speaks strikingly on this point (_Physiology of Plants_, p. 602): 'If the same external cause induces exactly opposite effects in the organs, the explanation of this must simply be sought in the different structure of the organs. If one organ, when illuminated from one side, becomes curved so as to be concave on the side turned towards the centre of light, while another becomes convex on that side, the cause can only lie in the internal structure of the organ. But it is just on such differences of structure that the great variety of reactions which the most different plant organs exhibit towards the same external influences depends; and, fundamentally, all that we term biology--the mode of life of organisms--depends upon the fact that different organisms react differently towards the same external influences, and these reactions differ not only qualitatively, but also quant.i.tatively, the finest gradations existing in both cases.'

For instance, in a plant-embryo roots are produced at the lower end under the influence of the soil and of gravity. But it is upon the specific nature of the protoplasm of different kinds of plants that the special shape of the whole root system depends: whether, for instance, the root system ramifies superficially or strikes deep into the soil; whether the rootlets grow quickly or slowly; in what fas.h.i.+on they fork, and whether or no they form special structures like bulbs.

Thus, even from my point of view, explanation of the process of development requires the a.s.sumption of the existence of different kinds of germinal material in different kinds of organisms. These germinal substances must be possessed of an extraordinarily complex organisation, and must be able to react in specific fas.h.i.+on--that is to say, in a fas.h.i.+on different in each species--to all the slightest internal and external stimuli encountered from time to time as the organisation becomes formed by cell division.

In this sense I agree with what Naegeli says:

'The egg-cells contain all actual specific characters as truly as the adult organisms; when they exist in the condition of eggs, organisms are as distinct from each other as in the adult condition. The species is present as truly in the fowl's egg as in the fowl, and the egg of a fowl differs as much from the egg of a frog as the fowl differs from the frog. Men, rodents, ruminants, invertebrates display more or less important and outwardly visible differences in const.i.tution; so also the s.e.xual cells to which they give rise, since they represent the rudiments of the future adults, must be different from each other in the const.i.tution of the rudiments, although we are not yet able to prove these differences by observation.'

In this a.s.sumption of a specific and highly-organized germinal substance with which a development begins, I agree with evolutionists; but in its details my conception is quite different from their conception. For I can ascribe to the germinal substance only such characters as are appropriate to the true nature of a cell, but I cannot ascribe to it the numerous characters that can come into existence only by the interrelations of many cells and the action of the environment.

Haacke, in his recently-published book (_Gestaltung und Vererbung)_, has expressed a doubt that my conception of development is, after all, a preformational theory. 'For preformation,' he says, 'it is not necessary to imagine that the egg contains a miniature of the adult. If only, like Hertwig, one a.s.sumes to be present in the germinal material a prearrangement of qualitatively different idioblasts, one has steered into the harbour of preformation with all sails set.'

In reply, I plead that, like Naegeli, De Vries, Driesch, and others, I have tried to blend all that is good in both theories. My theory may be called _evolutionary_, because it a.s.sumes the existence of a specific and highly-organised initial plasm as the basis of the process of development.

It may be called _epigenetic_, because the rudiments grow and become elaborated, from stage to stage, only in the presence of numerous external conditions and stimuli, beginning with the metabolic processes preceding the first cleavage of the egg-cell, until the final product of the development is as different from the first rudiment as adult animals and plants differ from their const.i.tuent cells.

To explain more clearly my conception of the nature of the process of development, especially in the relations that I conceive to exist between the rudiment and the adult, I shall conclude by reverting to my comparison between a human community and an organism.

As a man arises from an egg-cell by cell multiplication and cell differentiation, so the human community, a composite organism of a still higher nature, has arisen from separate human beings as its starting-point.

Culture and civilization are the wonderfully complicated results of the co-operation of many individuals united in society. By the manifolding of their relations and their combinations, men in society have brought about a higher complexity than man, left by himself, ever would have been able to develop from his own individual properties--a complexity that has arisen by the interaction of the same characters of many men in co-operation.

Similarly the activity of the egg in growth and cell-formation is an inexhaustible source of new complexity; for the self-multiplying systems of units, always binding themselves into higher complexes, continually enter into new interrelations, and afford the opportunity for new combinations of forces--in fact, of new characters.

Both cases--the course of the development of the egg-cell into a man, and of men into a state--depend upon epigenesis, not upon evolution.

The comparison may be carried into details.

The more complex and higher organisation of human society occurs in this fas.h.i.+on: of the numerous single individuals, all of which are endowed with the various incipient human characters, some individuals elaborate some incipient characters, others other characters, and these come to play correspondingly different parts. The special differentiation undergone by any individual depends upon the special place he comes to occupy in the whole of which he is a part, not upon really different organisation residing in him from his birth. Beside those characters which have developed specially in his case, there lie dormant the rudiments of all the characters possessed by men, and, under different conditions, these might have come to development.

Differentiation in multicellular organisms takes a similar course. Every cell, by doubling division of the egg, receives all the rudiments of its kind; of these rudiments, some in one set of cells, others in another, come to develop, according to the part of the whole in which the cells come to lie during the progress of the development, and according to the relations to the whole they come to a.s.sume. Thus, here they a.s.sume the characters of the external skin; there, they become gland-cells of the intestine; here, muscle-fibres; there, sense-cells or nerve-cells; in one place they serve the whole organism, in the form of blood-corpuscles, as agents for nutrition and respiration; there, becoming connective tissue or bone, they form skeletal elements of the body.

Thus, during the course of development, they are forces external to the cells that bid them a.s.sume the individual characters appropriate to their individual relations to the whole; the determining forces are not within the cells, as the doctrine of determinants supposes. The cells develop those characters that are suggested by their relation to the external world and their places in the whole organism.

But I must insist here that the subordination of the cells to the whole organism, in both multicellular animals and in plants, is much more complicated than that of the units to the human state. In the latter case, the individuals are separate from one another; they are independent organisms and are bound together only in social relations. None the less, consider how in a civilized state the apparently sovereign individual is conditioned in all his circ.u.mstances; how each change in the general state exercises an influence on the individual's disposition freedom of will, and method of life (dwelling, food, inst.i.tutions, health); then reflect how much greater in the animal and the plant is the domination of the whole, and the subordination of the units, as in them cell is directly joined to cell--indeed, in most cases united materially by threads of protoplasm. In such cases the self-sufficiency of the cell as an elementary, living organism is so far prevented, that it becomes a subordinate part, with its function in dependence on the whole.

One other point our comparison will make clearer: I refer to the relation of the specific nature of the rudiment to the specific nature of the product of the rudiment.

The different organisations and qualities of the communities formed by different animals may be explained by the special characters of the animals forming them. Those of the bee colonies depend on the nature of bees; of ant colonies on the nature of ants; of the societies of men on the nature of men; indeed, in the latter case we see how they differ as they are formed by Italians, Germans, Slavs, Turks, Chinese, or Negroes. Similarly, the specific organisation of the cell determines the kind of animal which may be built up by it.

In my theory two a.s.sumptions of totally contrasting nature are made: I a.s.sume a germplasm of high and specific organisation, and I a.s.sume that this is transformed into the adult product by epigenetic agencies. To a certain extent, therefore, I reconcile the opposition between evolution and epigenesis, these opponents so prominent last century.

But my theory does not pretend to explain all the many problems involved in the course of organic development. In this respect it differs from Weismann's doctrine of determinants, as that is a closed system, finding within itself a formal explanation of all development. So far it seems to me an abandonment of explanation rather than an explanation; for it explains by signs and tokens that elude verification and experiment, and that cannot encounter concrete investigation. His explanation is no more than a description, in other words, of the visible events of development.

To be more than this, it would be necessary to explain how in each case the bioph.o.r.es and determinants and ancestral plasms are const.i.tuted, and how they are arranged in the architecture of the germplasm so as to produce the development of the egg-cell in this or that fas.h.i.+on. It must, at the least, offer such possibilities as the structural formulae of chemists offer. But in the present stage of our knowledge Weismann's method is unpromising; it merely transfers to an invisible region the solution of a problem that we are trying to solve, at least partially, by investigation of visible characters; and in the invisible region it is impossible to apply the methods of science. So, by its very nature, it is barren to investigation, as there is no means by which investigation may put it to the proof. In this respect it is like its predecessor, the theory of preformation of the eighteenth century.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] The second section contains references to the following treatises:

C. V. NAEGELI: _Mechanisch-physiologische Theorie der Abstammungslehre_ (1884).

HERTWIG, OSCAR: _Lehrbuch der Entwicklungsgeschichte des Menschen und der Wirbelthiere_; 4th edit.

SACHS: _Lectures on Plant Physiology_; English edition, Clarendon Press.

VOECHTING: _Ueber die Theilbarkeit im Pflanzenreich und die Wirkung innerer und ausserer Krafte auf Organbildung an Pflanzentheilen._ _Pfluger's Archiv._, vol. xv., 1877.

Ibid.: _Ueber Organbildung im Pflanzenreich_, 1, 2; Bonn, 1878, 1884.

GOEBEL: _Beitrage zur Morphologie und Physiologie des Blattes._ _Bot.

Zeit._, 1880.