Fleeming Jenkin 1867

Fleeming Jenkin 1867 [link]

• "the srtong will live and the weak will die" antes de Spencer 277-8
• Discutirá: a extensão da variabilidade, a eficiência da seleção natural, a passagem do tempo, a dificuldade de classificação, e os fatos menores 279
• Some persons seem to have thought his theory dangerous to religion, morality , and what not. Others have tried to laugh it out of court. We can share neither the fears of the former nor the merriment of the latter; and, on the contrary, own to feeling the greatest admiration both for the ingenuity of the doctrine and for the temper in which it was broached, although, from a consideration of the following arguments, our opinion is adverse to its truth. 279
• Infinitude da variabilidade. 280
• Se o homem não consegue produzir variações verdadeiras, como esperar que a natureza consiga (não importa o tempo que for)? 280 Poropõe uma esfera limitada de variação 282
• We hope this argument is now plain. However slow the rate of variation might be, even though it were only one part in a thousand per twenty or two thousand generations, yet if it were constant or erratic we might believe that, in untold time, it would lead to untold distance; but if in every case we find that deviation from an average individual can be rapidly effected at first, and that the rate of deviation steadily diminishes till it reaches an almost imperceptible amount 282-3
• Quando a variabilidade para e começa? Quando a reversão deixa de agir? 283
• Darwin parece negar a esfera 285
• The argument may be thus resumed. Although many domestic animals and plants are highly variable, there appears to be a limit to their variation in any one direction. This limit is shown by the fact that new points are at first rapidly gained, but afterwards more slowly, while finally no further perceptible change can be effected. Great, therefore, [page] 286 as the variability is, we are not free to assume that successive variations of the same kind can be accumulated. There is no experimental reason for believing that the limit would be removed to a great distance, or passed, simply because it was approached by very slow degrees, instead of by more rapid steps. 285-6
• Eficiência da SN 286
• Como a SN estimula diferença se seleciona os mais bem adaptados? Porque não selecionar os pais novamente? 286
• Variação primária e secundária. 286-7
• Pode funcionar em alguns casos de mudança de condições, mas não é sempre que isso acontece 287 
• "Admitting, therefore, that natural selection may improve organs already useful to great numbers of a species, does not imply an admission that it can create or develop new organs, and so original species." 288
• Estatpistica mostrando como as chances de modificação sem retorno ao tipo original são muito improváveis. Seguido de um exemplo muito racista 288-91
• A nova característica só faz diferença se não tiver relação proporcional com a quantidade de sangue do ancestral portador em seus descendentes. Algo para o qual não há provas. 292
• "it offers no explanation of the cause of the divergence from the progenitors, and still less of the mysterious faculty by which the divergence is transmitted unimpaired to countless descendants." O que origem significa? 292
• Critica a especulações explicativas 293
• Resumo
• We must distinguish several kinds of conceivable variation in individuals. 
• First, We have the ordinary variations peculiar to each individual. The effect of the struggle for life will be keep the stock in full vigour by selecting the animals which in the main [page] 294 are strongest. When circumstances alter, one special organ may become eminently advantageous, and then natural selection will improve that organ. But this efficiency is limited to the cases in which the same variation occurs in enormous numbers of individuals, and in which the organ improved is already used by the mass of the species. This case does not apply to the appearance of new organs or habits. 
• Secondly, We have abnormal variations called sports, which may be supposed to introduce new organs or habits in rare individuals. This case must be again subdivided; we may suppose the offspring of the sports to be intermediate between their ancestor and the original tribe. In this case the sport will be swamped by numbers, and after a few generations its peculiarity will be obliterated. Or, we may suppose the offspring of the sport faithfully to reproduce the advantageous peculiarity undiminished. In this case the new variety will supplant the old species; but this theory implies a succession of phenomena so different from those of the ordinary variations which we see daily, that it might be termed a theory of successive creations; it does not express the Darwinian theory, and is no more dependent on the theory of natural selection that the universally admitted fact that a new strong race, not intermarrying with an old weak race, will surely supplant it. So much may be conceded. 293-4
• Passagem do tempo 294
• Critica a geologia especulativa 295
• Argumentos termodinamicos até 300 Testes de idade por perda de calor da terra e do sol por Thomson. Sem tempo suficiente. 300-1
• Critica a argumentos especulativos, incluindo religiosos 304
• To resume the arguments in this chapter—
• Darwin's theory requires countless ages, during which the earth shall have been habitable, and he claims geological evidence as showing an inconceivably great lapse of time, and as not being in contradiction with inconceivably greater periods than are even geologically indicated,—periods of rest between formations, and periods anterior to our so-called first formations, during which the rudimentary organs of the early fossils became degraded from their primeval uses. In answer, it is shown that a general physical law obtains, irreconcilable with the persistence of active change at a constant rate; in any portion of the universe, however large, only a certain capacity for change exists, so that every change which occurs renders the possibility of future change less, and, on the whole, the rapidity or violence of changes tends to diminish. Not only would this law gradually entail in the future the death of all beings and cessation of all change in the planetary system, and in the past point to a state of previous violence equally inconsistent with life, if no energy were lost by the system, but this gradual decay from a previous state of violence is rendered far more rapid by the continual loss of energy going on by means of radiation. From this general conception pointing either to a beginning, or to the equally inconceivable idea of infinite energy in finite materials, we pass to the practical application of the law to the sun and earth, showing that their present state proves that they cannot remain for ever adapted to living beings, and that living beings can have existed on the earth only for a definite time, since in distant periods the earth must have been in fusion, and the sun must have been mere hot gas, or a group of distant meteors, so as to have been incapable of fulfilling its present functions as the comparatively small centre of the system. From the earth we have no very safe calculation of past time, but the sun gives five hundred million years as the time separating us from a condition inconsistent with life. 
• We next argue that the time occupied in the arrangement of the geological formations need not have been longer than is fully consistent with this view, since the gradual dissipation of energy must have resulted in a gradual diminution of violence of all kinds, so that calculations of the time occupied by denudations or deposits based on the simple division of the total mass of a deposit, or denudation by the annual action now observed, are fallacious, and that even as the early geologists erred in attempting to compress all action into six thousand years, so later geologists have outstepped all bounds in their figures, by assuming that the world has always gone on much as it now does, and that the planetary system contains an inexhaustible motive power, by which the vast labour of the system has been, and can be maintained for ever. We have endeavoured to meet the main objections to these views, and conclude, that countless ages cannot be granted to the expounder of any theory of living beings, but that the age of the inhabited world is proved to have been limited to a period wholly inconsistent with Darwin's views. 304-5
• Difficulty of classifcation 305
• Classificar tudo é dificil. até 307
• As combinações de caracterísitcas não são infinitas 307-10 Analogias até 312
• Se seres vivos são combinações de partes não é surpresa saber que eles podem ser organizados em um grado. Não é preciso uma teoria de transmutação pra isso 312-3
• Observed facts supposed do support Darwin's views
• All these maybes:
• The chief argument used to establish the theory rest on conjecture. Beasts may have varied; variation may have accumulated; they may have become permanent; continents may have arisen or sunk, and seas and winds been so arranged as to dispose of animals just as we find them, now spreading a race widely, now confining it to one Galapagos island. There may be records of infinitely more animals than we know of in geological formations yet unexplored. Myriads of species differing little from those we know to have been preserved, may actually not have been preserved at all. There may have been an inhabited world for ages before the earliest known geological strata. The world may indeed have been inhabited for an indefinite time; even the geological observations may perhaps give most insufficient idea of the enormous times which separated one formation from another; the peculiarities of hybrids may result from accidental differences between the parents, not from what have been called specific differences. 
• The general form of his argument is as follows:—All these things may have been, therefore my theory is possible, and since my theory is a possible one, all those hypotheses which it requires are rendered probable. There is little direct evidence that any these maybe's actually have been. 313
• As provas de Darwein não são cabais. Como explicar listras, penas e assim por diante 314-5 Além disso, como as premissas são falsas, mais provas não fazem muita diferença 316
• Questiona a falta de registro fóssil 317
• Geral
• These arguments are cumulative. If it be true that no species can vary beyond defined limits, it matters little whether natural selection would be efficient in producing definite variations. If natural selection, though it does select the stronger average animals, and under peculiar circumstances may develop special organs already useful, can never select new imperfect organs such as are produced in sports, then, even though eternity were granted, and no limit assigned to the possible changes of animals, Darwin's cannot be the true explanation of the manner in which change has been brought about. Lastly, even if no limit be drawn to the possible difference between offspring and their progenitors, and if natural selection were admitted to be an efficient cause capable of building up even new senses, even then, unless time, vast time, be granted, the changes which might have been produced by the gradual selection of peculiar offspring have not really been so produced. Any one of the main pleas of our argument, if established, is fatal to Darwin's theory. [...] Surely the time is past when a theory unsupported by evidence is received as probable, because in our ignorance we know not why it should be false, though we cannot show it to be true. Yet we have heard grave men gravely urge, that because Darwin's theory was the most plausible known, it should be believed. Others seriously allege that it is more consonant with a lofty idea of the Creator's action to suppose that he produced beings by natural selection, rather than by the finikin process of making each separate little race by the exercise of Almighty power. The argument such as it is, means simply that the user of it thinks that this is how he personally would act if possessed of almighty power and knowledge, but his speculations as to his probable feelings and actions, after such a great change of circumstances, are not worth much. If we are told that our experience shows that God works by laws, then we answer, 'Why the special Darwinian law?' A plausible theory should not be accepted while unproven; and if the arguments of this essay be admitted, Darwin's theory of the origin of species is not only without sufficient support from evidence, but is proved false by a cumulative proof. 317-8