Acquired Characters and Stimuli

Abstract

IN my letter in NATURE of March 21, I pointed out the fact that Dr. Archdall Reid does harm by declaring that the term “acquired characters” as ordinarily used by biologists is not intelligible (is, in fact, nonsensical), giving as his reason that all characters are acquired. That is a “quibble”, because the term used by Lamarck (which has been translated as “acquired characters”) is “changements acquis”, and it is abundantly clear that the change spoken of by Lamarck is a change from the normal characters of a wild species. Such normal characters may be, of course, described as “acquired” when considered in comparison with those of the germ from which an individual develops. But that is not the comparison made by Lamarck or by anyone else who uses his term or the English modification of it, and it is a perversion of fact to pretend that it is. It is the plain fact that the acquired changes indicated by Lamarck are changes as compared with the normal characters of the species. There was no allusion in my letter to the terms “innate characters” or “congenital characters”. They, of course (as Dr. Reid says), do not mean the same thing as “congenital variation”. Dr. Reid in condemning them is beating a mannikin dragged in by himself, diverting attention from the matter in hand. The “acquired changes” or “acquired characters” of Lamarck are properly contrasted with normal characters and not with Dr. Reid's imaginary congenital characters. Considerations as to whether the blacksmith's arm or that of an ordinary man is “normal” are not to the point, since Lamarck was concerned with wild species of plants and animals, of which the “normal specific form” and the “normal specific environment” are understood and known in some detail.