And Joseph McCabe, the translator of his “Riddle of the Universe,” and “Last Words on Evolution,” has this to say in his introduction to the latter, written two years ago, “To closer students, who are at times impatient of the Lamarckian phraseology of Haeckel--to all, in fact, who would like to see how the same evolutionary truths are expressed without reliance on the inheritance of acquired characters,--I may take the opportunity to say that I have translated for the same publishers, Professor Guenther’s “Darwinism and the Problems of Life,” which will shortly be in their hands.”
It must be admitted that the older view is much less favorable to the Socialist position in sociology than the later theory of Weismann. It is a matter of some satisfaction that so great a critic as Romanes concedes the feasibility of Weismann’s theory while rejecting some of the conclusions which he draws from it. “If Weismann’s theory is true,” says Prof. David Starr-Jordan, “the whole literature of sociology will have to be rewritten!” And another writer insisted that Weismann had reopened the case for Socialism.
If it were true that the terrible results of the degrading conditions forced upon the dwellers in the slums were transmitted to their children by heredity, until in a few generations they became fixed characters, the hopes of Socialists for a regenerated society would be much more difficult to realize. In that case these unfortunate creatures would continue to act in the same discouraging way for several generations, no matter how their environment had been transformed by the corporate action of society. This much at any rate, Weismann has done for us, he has scientifically destroyed that lie.
In this respect, independent sociological experiments and investigations have arrived at the same conclusions as Weismann. Prof. John R. Commons by careful study, reached the following conclusions: That 1.75 per cent of the population of the United States are congenital defectives; that 3.25 per cent are induced defectives, that is, they have not inherited their deficiency; that 2 per cent are possessed of genius and will make their way under the hardest conditions; that 2 per cent are below the Aryan brain level; and that the remaining 91 per cent are normal persons who are neither good nor bad, brilliant nor stupid, criminal nor virtuous, and whose future is entirely decided by the environment which surrounds them during the first fifteen years of their life.