The Fruitful Facets of Galton's Polyhedron 361
adaptive change. Selection, to Eimer, therefore became a negative force—an
eliminator of the unfit, once other factors had channeled a trend.
Eimer's 1890 subtitle neatly expressed his balanced view of external and
internal forces—"... the result of the inheritance of acquired characters according
to the laws of organic growth." The laws of organic growth act as internal
(structural) channels of orthogenesis; the catch phrase of the Lamarckian system
then identifies the primary external pusher. Natural selection therefore becomes
marginalized to the periphery of half a theory.
Eimer's low opinion of selection represents a common viewpoint among
evolutionists of his generation, as expressed in the most familiar of all late 19th
century critiques (see pp. 137-141)—the denial of "creativity" to natural selection
(viewed entirely as a negative force, while new and favorable features must arise
by some other "creative" process). Eimer places himself squarely in this
majoritarian tradition when he writes (1890, pp. 383-384): "Natural selection can,
as I have repeatedly remarked, create nothing new. It only so far contributes to the
growth of the organic world that it selects the forms which are most fitted for life,
and preserves them for the future action of new stimuli and of crossing... Thus
the power of selection lies chiefly in the promotion and diversification of organic
growth. It is ... only an indirect cause of the evolution of living beings."
Eimer's original contribution lay in his characterization and defense of the
creative force that could displace selection to such an insignificant periphery.
Eimer understood the crucial role of undirected variability in the logic of
Darwinian argument. He knew that his orthogenetic channels would derail the
Darwinian system by vesting creativity for change in the process of variation itself;
selection could then only speed up or hinder what internally generated
directionality had previously supplied. Eimer contrasts orthogenesis against
selectionism, while also reemphasizing the mechanistic, and non-vitalistic,
character of channeled variation:
This conclusion is in a certain sense opposed to Darwin's, since it
recognizes a perfectly definite direction in the evolution and continuous
modification of organisms, which even down to the smallest detail is
prescribed by the material composition (constitution) of the body.
According to this conclusion, the real Darwinian principle, that of selection
depending on utility, is only effective within the limits which are prescribed
by the material composition of the body, that is, by the fixed directions of
evolution. Accordingly there is nothing fortuitous, but everything in
evolution to the smallest detail is governed by laws (1890, p. 431).If the creative force of evolution resides in the process of directed variation
itself, then the nature of internal channeling assumes crucial importance. In the
absence of a documented mechanistic theory for the nature of inheritance, Eimer
and all leading orthogeneticists followed the empirical tradition of inducing
supposed regularities of channeled variation from common features of case studies.
Eimer presented his list, with varying numbers and orderings of categories, in all
his major publications (1890, pp. 28-30; 1897, pp. 18-21).