The Note-Books of Samuel Butler

Contributions to Evolution

To me it seems that my contributions to the theory of evolution have been mainly these: 

1.  The identification of heredity and memory and the corollaries relating to sports, the reversion to remote ancestors, the phenomena of old age, the causes of the sterility of hybrids and the principles underlying longevity—­all of which follow as a matter of course.  This was Life and Habit. [1877.]

2.  The re-introduction of teleology into organic life which, to me, seems hardly (if at all) less important than the Life and Habit theory.  This was Evolution Old and New. [1879.]

3.  An attempt to suggest an explanation of the physics of memory.  I was alarmed by the suggestion and fathered it upon Professor Hering who never, that I can see, meant to say anything of the kind, but I forced my view on him, as it were, by taking hold of a sentence or two in his lecture, on Memory as a Universal Function of Organised Matter and thus connected memory with vibrations.  This was Unconscious Memory. [1880.]

What I want to do now [1885] is to connect vibrations not only with memory but with the physical constitution of that body in which the memory resides, thus adopting Newland’s law (sometimes called Mendelejeff’s law) that there is only one substance, and that the characteristics of the vibrations going on within it at any given time will determine whether it will appear to us as (say) hydrogen, or sodium, or chicken doing this, or chicken doing the other. [This touched upon in the concluding chapter of Luck or Cunning? 1887.]

I would make not only the mind, but the body of the organism to depend on the characteristics of the vibrations going on within it.  The same vibrations which remind the chicken that it wants iron for its blood actually turn the pre-existing matter in the egg into the required material.  According to this view the form and characteristics of the elements are as much the living expositions of certain vibrations—­are as much our manner of perceiving that the vibrations going on in that part of the one universal substance are such and such—­as the colour yellow is our perception that a substance is being struck by vibrations of light, so many to the second, or as the action of a man walking about is our mode of perceiving that such and such another combination of vibrations is, for the present, going on in the substance which, in consequence, has assumed the shape of the particular man.

It is somewhere in this neighbourhood that I look for the connection between organic and inorganic.