Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited?. Ball William Platt

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СКАЧАТЬ This slight reduction may be much more than accounted for by such causes as disuse in the individual, human preference setting back the teeth, and partial transference of the much more marked diminution seen in female jaws. There is apparently no room for accumulated inherited effects of ancestral disuse. The number of jaws is small, indeed; but weighing them is at least more decisive than Mr. Spencer's mere inspection.

      The differences between Anglo-Saxon male jaws and Australian and Tasmanian jaws are most easily explained as effects of human preference and natural selection. We can hardly suppose that disuse would maintain or develop the projecting chin, increase its perpendicular height till the jaw is deepest and strongest at its extremity, evolve a side flange, and enlarge the upper jaw-bone to form part of a more prominent nose, while drawing back the savagely obtrusive teeth and lips to a more pleasing and subdued position of retirement and of humanized beauty. If human preference and natural selection caused some of these differences, why are they incompetent to effect changes in the direction of a diminution of the jaw or teeth? And if use and disuse are the sole modifying agents in the case of the human jaw, why should men have any more chin than a gorilla or a dog?

      The excessive weight of the West African jaws at the College of Surgeons is partly against Mr. Spencer's contention, unless he assumes that Guinea Negroes use their jaws far more than the Australians, a supposition which seems extremely improbable. The heavier skull and narrower molar teeth point however to other factors than increased use.

      The striking variability of the human jaw is strongly opposed to the idea of its being under the direct and dominant control of so uniform a cause as ancestral use and disuse. Mr. Spencer regards a variation of 1 oz. as a large one, but I found that the English jaws in the College of Surgeons varied from 1·9 oz. to 4·3 oz. (or 5 oz. if lost teeth were allowed for); Australian jaws varied from 2 oz. to 4·5 oz. (with no lost teeth to allow for); while in Negro jaws the maximum rose to over 5½ oz.4 In spite of disuse some European jaws were twice as heavy as the lightest Australian jaw, either absolutely or (in some cases) relatively to the cranium. The uniformity of change relied upon by Mr. Spencer is scarcely borne out by the facts so far as male jaws are concerned. The great reduction in the weight of female jaws and skulls evidently points to sexual selection and to panmixia under male protection.

      I think, on the whole, we must conclude that the human jaws do not afford satisfactory proof of the inheritance of the effects of use and disuse, inasmuch as the differences in their weight and shape and size can be more reasonably and consistently accounted for as the result of less disputable causes.

      DIMINISHED BITING MUSCLES OF LAP-DOGS

      The next example, the reduced biting muscles, &c., of lap-dogs is also unsatisfactory as a proof of the inheritance of the effects of disuse; for the change can readily be accounted for without the introduction of such a factor. The previous natural selection of strong jaws and teeth and muscles is reversed. The conscious or unconscious selection of lap-dogs with the least tendency to bite would easily bring about a general enfeeblement of the whole biting apparatus – weakness of the parts concerned favouring harmlessness. Mr. Spencer maintains that the dwindling of the parts concerned in clenching the jaw is certainly not due to artificial selection because the modifications offer no appreciable external signs. Surely hard biting is sufficiently appreciable by the person bitten without any visual admeasurement of the masseter muscles or the zygomatic arches. Disuse during lifetime would also cause some amount of degeneracy; and I am not sure that Mr. Spencer is right in entirely excluding economy of nutrition from the problem. Breeders would not over-feed these dogs; and the puppies that grew most rapidly would usually be favoured.

      CROWDED TEETH

      The too closely-packed teeth in the "decreasing" jaws of modern men (p. 13)5 are also suggestive of other causes than use and disuse. Why is there not simultaneous variation in teeth and jaws, if disuse is the governing factor? Are we to suppose that the size of the human teeth is maintained by use at the same time that the jaws are being diminished by disuse? Mr. Spencer acknowledges that the crowding of bull-dogs' and lap-dogs' teeth is caused by the artificial selection of shortened jaws. If a similar change is really occurring in man, could it not be similarly explained by some factor, such as sexual selection, which might affect the outward appearance at the cost of less obvious defects or inconveniences?

      Mr. Spencer points to the decay of modern teeth as a sign or result of their being overcrowded through the diminution of the jaw by disuse.6 But the teeth which are the most frequently overcrowded are the lower incisors. The upper incisors are less overcrowded, being commonly pressed outwards by the lower arc of teeth fitting inside them in biting. The lower incisors are correspondingly pressed inwards and closer together. Yet the upper incisors decay – or at least are extracted – about twenty times as frequently as the closely packed lower incisors.7 Surely this must indicate that the cause of decay is not overcrowding.

      The lateness and irregularity of the wisdom teeth are sometimes supposed to indicate their gradual disappearance through want of room in a diminishing jaw. But a note on Tasmanian skulls in the Catalogue of the College of Surgeons (p. 199) shows that this lateness and irregularity have been common among Tasmanians as well as among civilized races, so that the change can hardly be attributed to the effects of disuse under civilization.

      BLIND CAVE-CRABS

      The cave-crabs which have lost their disused eyes but not the disused eye-stalks appear to illustrate the effects of natural selection rather than of disuse. The loss of the exposed, sensitive, and worse-than-useless eye, would be a decided gain, while the disused eye-stalk, being no particular detriment to the crab, would be but slightly affected by natural selection, though open to the cumulative effects of disuse. The disused but better protected eyes of the blind cave-rat are still "of large size" (Origin of Species, p. 110).

      NO CONCOMITANT VARIATION FROM CONCOMITANT DISUSE

      It is but fair to add that these instances of the cave-crab's eye-stalk and the closely-packed teeth are put forward by Mr. Spencer with the more immediate object of proving that there is "no concomitant variation in co-operative parts," even when "formed out of the same tissue, like the crab's eye and its peduncle" (pp. 12-14, 23, 33). It escapes his notice, however, that in two out of his three cases it is disuse, or diminished use, which fails to cause concomitant variation or proportionate variation.

      THE GIRAFFE, AND NECESSITY FOR CONCOMITANT VARIATION

      Having unwittingly shown that lessened use of closely-connected and co-operative parts does not cause concomitant variation in these parts, Mr. Spencer concludes that the concomitant variation requisite for evolution can only be caused by altered degrees of use or disuse. He elaborately argues that the many co-ordinated modifications of parts necessitated by each important alteration in an animal are so complex that they cannot possibly be brought about except by the inherited effect of the use and disuse of the various parts concerned. He holds, for instance, that natural selection is inadequate to effect the numerous concomitant changes necessitated by such developments as that of the long neck of the giraffe. Darwin, however, on the contrary, holds that natural selection alone "would have sufficed for the production of this remarkable quadruped."8 He is surprised at Mr. Spencer's view that natural selection can do so little in modifying the higher animals. Thus one of the chief arguments with which Mr. Spencer supports his theory is so poorly founded as to be rejected by a far greater authority on such subjects. All that is needed is that natural selection should preserve the tallest giraffes through times of famine by their being able to reach otherwise inaccessible stores of foliage. The continual variability of all parts of the higher animals gives scope for innumerable СКАЧАТЬ