But about 1887 a faction or school arose who criticized the main idea of
Darwin and Wallace and fell back on the Lamarckian factor of the
transmission of acquired characters as really the essential cause of
the process of evolution. Herbert Spencer, E.D. Cope and others did much
to criticize natural selection as inadequate to do what was attributed
to it, dwelling on the importance of the transmission of acquired
characters. Spencer even went so far as to declare, "either there has
been inheritance of acquired characters, or there has been no
evolution." These Neo-Lamarckians argued that natural selection alone
can neither explain the origin of varieties, nor the first steps in the
slow advance toward "usefulness." An organ must be already useful before
natural selection can take hold of it to improve it. Selection cannot
make a thing useful to start with, but only (possibly) make more useful
what already exists. Until the newly formed buds of developing limbs or
organs became decidedly "useful" to the individual or the species, would
they not be in the way, merely so many hindrances, to be removed by
natural selection instead of being preserved and improved? But, in this
view of the matter, they argued, what single organ of any species would
there be that must not thus have appeared long before it was wanted?
Or to use the pungent words quoted with approval by Hugo de Vries at the
end of his "Species and Varieties" (pp.
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