Abstract
CAN Mr. Wallace throw any light on Mr. Allen's somewhat extraordinary sentence: “I feel a genuine respect for every donkey I meet, when I remember that it was the mere accidental possession of an opposable thumb that gave my ancestors a start over his in the race for the inheritance of the earth towards the very close of the tertiary period.” I take Mr. Allen to be an evolutionist, but there is no place for accident in evolution, or in any other scientific theory. The “opposable thumb” must be the result of some conditioning factor, and this being so the word accident is quite out of place.
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Vignettes from Nature. Nature 25, 436 (1882). https://doi.org/10.1038/025436a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/025436a0
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