Heredity and Acquired Characters

Abstract

PROVIDED that biologists understand one another, it is, perhaps, not an insuperable barrier to the progress of biology that Sir Archdall Reid is unable to understand their terminology. I write merely to point out that though he seeks to teach biologists the proper use of terms, Sir Archdall Reid, in his letter in NATURE of January 6, contradicts himself in his own terminology. He states that even in human beings many characters do not develop in the least in response to functional activity, e.g. hair and external generative organs On the other hand, in man most characters develop wholly, or almost wholly, in response to that stimulus. Yet in another paragraph he asserts that all characters are necessarily innate, acquired, germinal, somatic, and inheritable in exactly the same sense and degree. If biologists recognise, as Sir Archdall Reid does, a difference between characters that develop in response to functional activity and those which do not, what need is there for him to ask biologists why they describe some characters as “innate,” “germinal,” and “inheritable,” and others as “acquired,” “somatic,” and “non-inheritable”?