NATURE AND LIFE

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVIII, Issue 52, 29 August 1914, Page 6

NATURE AND LIFE

The meeting of the British Association at tho Antipodes -is a great event which would have attracted something more like the attention that it deserves if it had not occurred when the minds of most men are filled with thoughts of war and preparations for war. It was a saying among the great masters of ancient warfare that "inter anna silent leges," which freely and colloquially interpreted means that lawp must take a back seat when arms are to the fore. The experience of the last month has indeed shown that war tends to put all other human affairs into the background. | Even at this distance the reverberation of the guns of Liege and Namur has made it difficult for the still small voice of science to get a hearing, but that voice j has* had many things to say that ore well i worthy of our attention, nevertheless. Not the least striking of its messages was contained in the presidential address lof Professor Bateson. "Various reasons," said an Oxford wit of a generation ago, "liave been assigned for the continued existence of the University of Cambridge," and one of the reasons given was that it should find room for candidates who are unable to pass the Oxford matriculation. Is it permissible to suggest that an even more important justification for 'the temerity of Cambridge University in continuing to exist may be found in the fact that, while her elder and somewhat condescending sister is immersed as ever in the study of philosophy and letters and the championship of lost causes under the spell of The en- V chantment of the Middle Ages, Cambridge can apply the exact methods of modern research to studies which Oxford prefers to speculate about, to toy with, or to ignore? The investigation of the problems of evolution and heredity in animals and plants is one of the studies which have been so treated at Cambridge. As Professor of Biology at Cambridge, Mr. Bateson once had the direction of the work, and he haa since specialised in these researches at Merton Park. An address from such a man on Heredity was in itself enough to make the Sydney meeting of the British Association memorable, and it was in accordance with the rigorous and practical methods of the school to which he belongs that he indulged to a comparatively alight extent in speculation, and that a considerable part of his speculation was designed to give fche matter a concrete form which should bring it home to our "business and bosoms."' It is now more than fifty years since "The Origin of Species" was sprung upon the world, and was treated both by sanguine adherents and frenzied assailants as though it had turned not only natural history but ethics and theology upside down. The theologian has since done much to accommodate himself to the new light, but Professor Bateson's address suffices to show tl;at the accommodation has not been all on one side. Darwin's own enunciation of his discovery was distinguished by the modesty and caution which wee among his most conspicuous characteristics. What he claimed to have established was that the boundaries of species were not primordially and immutably fixed, but are subject to modification by evolution, and that one of the agents in the process is natural selection. The arrogation for natural selection of a monopoly in the process was none of Darwin's doing, and it is well for his reputation that this should be so, for natural selection, after suffering an extravagant exaltation at tile hands of some of his disciples, is now very much in the shade. "For some," said Professor Bateson in another place, "the perception of the principle of natural selection atands out as Darwin's ' most wonderful achievement, to which all the rest is subordinate. Others, among whom I would range myself, look up to him rather as the first who plainly distinguished, collected, and comprehensively studied that new class of ovid.ence from which hereafter a true

understanding of the process of evolution may be developed." The essay from which this quotation was taken was written four years ago, but the attitude adopted in the address at Sydney is the same. There is no glorification of natural selection in either ; there is, on the contrary, the admission that it counts for very little. The results of more than fifty years of Darwinism, according to Professor Bateson, are chiefly negative. The evolution of species is to be accepted as established, but there is "little evidence as to how that evolution came about, and no clear proof that the process was continuing to any considerable degree at the present time" ; to which we may add that it would be highly unscientific to assume in the absence of express evidence that a cause which has no considerable operation at the present time was the chief cause, or even a potent cause, in previous ages. Professor Bateson proceeds to say that "our knowledge of nature and life is altogether too slender to warrant speculation on these fundamental subjects, but, though having regard to these theoretical aspects, we must confess such deep ignorance." For "speculation" read "dogmatising," and the statement is unexceptionable. Great indeed ,is the change wrought by a fuller knowledge in the tone of a science which a generation or two ago was answering one dogmatism with another ! With the more practical aspects of Professor Bateson's remarkable address we may take another opportunity of dealing.