Читать книгу Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - Ball William Platt - Страница 10

Mr. Spencer also holds that most mental phenomena, especially where complex or social or moral, can only be explained as arising from use-inheritance, which becomes more and more important as a factor of evolution as we advance from the vegetable world and the lower grades of animal life to the more complex activities, tastes, and habits of the higher organizations (preface, and p. 74). But there happens to be a tolerably clear proof that such changes as the evolution of complicated structures and habits and social instincts can take place independently of use-inheritance. The wonderful instincts of the working bees have apparently been evolved (at least in all their later social complications and developments) without the aid of use-inheritance – nay, in spite of its utmost opposition. Working bees, being infertile "neuters," cannot as a rule transmit their own modifications and habits. They are descended from countless generations of queen bees and drones, whose habits have been widely different from those of the workers, and whose structures are dissimilar in various respects. In many species of ants there are two, and in the leaf-cutting ants of Brazil there are three, kinds of neuters which differ from each other and from their male and female ancestors "to an almost incredible degree."11 The soldier caste is distinguished from the workers by enormously large heads, very powerful mandibles, and "extraordinarily different" instincts. In the driver ant of West Africa one kind of neuter is three times the size of the other, and has jaws nearly five times as long. In another case "the workers of one caste alone carry a wonderful sort of shield on their heads." One of the three neuter classes in the leaf-cutting ants has a single eye in the midst of its forehead. In certain Mexican and Australian ants some of the neuters have huge spherical abdomens, which serve as living reservoirs of honey for the use of the community. In the equally wonderful case of the termites, or so-called "white ants" (which belong, however, to an entirely different order of insect from the ants and bees) the neuters are blind and wingless, and are divided into soldiers and workers, each class possessing the requisite instincts and structures adapting it for its tasks. Seeing that natural selection can form and maintain the various structures and the exceedingly complicated instincts of ants and bees and wasps and termites in direct defiance of the alleged tendency to use-inheritance, surely we may believe that natural selection, unopposed by use-inheritance, is equally competent for the work of complex or social or mental evolution in the many cases where the strong presumptive evidence cannot be rendered almost indisputable by the exceptional exclusion of the modified animal from the work of reproduction.

Ants and bees seem to be capable of altering their habits and methods of action much as men do. Bees taken to Australia cease to store honey after a few years' experience of the mild winters. Whole communities of bees sometimes take to theft, and live by plundering hives, first killing the queen to create dismay among the workers. Slave ants attend devotedly to their captors, and fight against their own species. Forel reared an artificial ant-colony made up of five different and more or less hostile species. Why cannot a much more intelligent animal modify his habits far more rapidly and comprehensively without the aid of a factor which is clearly unnecessary in the case of the more intelligent of the social insects?