Heredity as Transmission of

Information:

Butlerian Intelligent Design

DONALD R. FORSDYKE

Centaurus (2006) 48, 133-148

Author Posting. Copyright: The Author 2006. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version (with some imposed editing) was published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. in Centaurus, 48:3, pp. 133-148. http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1600-0498.2006.00045.x

Abstract

1. Pococurante 

2. Samuel Butler in New Zealand

3. Samuel Butler in London

4. Heredity Equals Memory 

5. Memory as Stored Information

6. Variation

7. Lamarckism

8. Recent Controversy over "Intelligent Design" 

9. Conclusions

End Note on Dreams (Jan 2007)

End Note on Pernicious Anaemia (Apr 2010)

End Note (July 2010) - Commentary by Shaw

End_Note_(Nov_2010)_-_Darwins_Notebooks

End_Note_(Jan_2013)_-_Haeckels_Support_of_Semon

1. Pococurante

Slowly scanning the assembly before him, his stern gaze settled on one upturned face: "Pococurante!" Decades later Charles Darwin (1867) recalled the event: "I was at school at Shrewsbury under a great scholar, Dr. Butler; I learned absolutely nothing, except by amusing myself by reading and experimenting in chemistry. Dr. Butler somehow found this out, and publicly sneered at me before the whole school for such gross waste of time; I remember he called me Pococurante [a person concerned only with trifles], which, not understanding, I thought was a dreadful name."

2. Samuel Butler in New Zealand       

On Saturday October 1st 1859 Darwin (1809-1882) noted in his diary that he had finished correcting the proofs of his great work, The Origin of Species, which appeared in November (Bowlby 1990). That same Saturday, Dr. Butler's grandson, Samuel (1835-1902), sailed for New Zealand with Justus Liebig's Agricultural Chemistry and the aim of becoming a sheep farmer (Jones 1919, p. 74). Shortly after his arrival he obtained a copy of Darwin's book. Gregor Mendel is also likely to have obtained a copy in the early 1860s (Iltis 1932; Orel 1984). Thus, while Mendel was breeding peas and studying Darwin in Moravia, Samuel Butler was breeding sheep and studying Darwin in New Zealand. This inspired his first articles on evolution, which appeared in The Press of Christchurch and soon received the commendation of Darwin himself (Butler 1914a, pp. 149-154). The sheep breeding was financially successful. In 1864 Butler returned to England where he remained the rest of his life, becoming, in the words of one contemporary, "the most brilliant, and by far the most interesting of Darwin 's opponents." (Bateson 1909, p. 88).

    Here I review the concept of heredity as the transmission of stored information (memory) as introduced in the 1870s by Ewald Hering (1834-1918) and Samuel Butler. In the sense that the work of Mendel was quantally different from those of his intellectual ancestors but remains close to those of his intellectual posterity (Roberts 1929), so the work of Hering and Butler can now be seen as at the root of modern evolutionary bioinformatics (Forsdyke 2006). However, whereas Mendel's work escaped recognition for a "mere" thirty-five years, that of Hering and Butler has escaped modern commentators (Smith 1999; Smith 2000; Kay 2000) and lain hidden for over a century.

3. Samuel Butler in London

The man who gained posthumous prominence in the twentieth century as the author of Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh, was a grandson of Bishop Samuel Butler who was for many years the headmaster of Shrewsbury School in England. The Bishop's son Thomas and Charles Darwin were acquainted. Both attended the school and Cambridge University. Canon Thomas Butler said of Darwin that "he inoculated me with a taste for botany" (Jones, 1919, p. 12), but in 1854 he sent his son Samuel to Cambridge hoping he would enter the Church. Having studied mathematics and classics, Samuel graduated in 1858. Much to the consternation of his father, he declined to be ordained (Jones 1919, p. 61).

     Butler lived a short walk from what was then probably the greatest library in the world - that associated with the Reading Room of the British Museum. With a small assured income and, other than an annual visit to Italy, relatively inexpensive tastes, Butler had - what was denied the professional "men of science" whose writings he devoured - time. However, unlike the men of science, whom he came to challenge, his interests were not focused. He was attracted to painting and literature through which he hoped he might further his financial independence.

    In 1870 Butler collected together some earlier publications (Butler 1914a) with titles such as "Darwin Among the Machines," "The World of the Unborn," "The Musical Banks" and "An Erewhonian Trial," and wrote his most "successful" literary work, a satire on the materialism, pseudo-idealism and academic pretentiousness of his times - Erewhon (the title is close to "nowhere" backwards). It was completed in 1871 and went on sale in 1872 with the support of a loan to cover the publisher's expenses (Jones 1919, p. 149). The following seemingly convoluted paragraph on seed germination indicates the already advanced state of his evolutionary thought (Butler 1935):    

4. Heredity Equals Memory

Darwin's ideas were based on three fundamental principles - variation, heredity and natural selection (Darwin 1859). Variation caused an individual to differ in certain characters from others. Heredity caused characters to be transmitted from parents to children. Natural selection caused some individuals to survive and reproduce better than others. Of these three words - variation, heredity and natural selection - only the basis of the latter was understood. For the Victorians, heredity and variation were unknowns to be entrusted to researchers of future generations. The words "heredity" and "variation" were handles with which to manipulate these principles, irrespective of their underlying mechanisms.

    Initially heredity was seen as the process by which characters (which we would now call the phenotype) were passed forward from parent to child. However, unknown to Butler, in 1870 this perspective had been shifted by the physiologist Ewald Hering in Prague. Like Butler, Hering put the onus on the embryo, which remembers its parents. The newly formed embryo is a passive recipient of parental information (which we now call the genotype), and this information is used (recalled) by the embryo to construct itself (i.e. to regenerate phenotype from genotype). Heredity and memory are, in principle, the same. Heredity is the transfer of stored information. This powerful conceptual leap led to new territory. Evolutionary processes could thenceforth be thought of in the same way as mental processes. In a lecture delivered at the anniversary meeting of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna, Hering considered (Butler 1880, p. 131) that:

More simply, Butler (1985) wrote:

    Hering wanted his strictly materialist position be understood (Butler 1880, p. 99): "Both man and the lower animals are to the physiologist neither more nor less than the matter of which they consist." He held that ideas that disappeared from consciousness would be stored in some material form in the unconscious memory, from which they could be recalled to consciousness. Thus, "the physiology of the unconscious is no 'philosophy of the unconscious'" (Butler 1880, p. 113).

    Hering considered that actions that were repeated were more likely to be stored in memory, and hence more accurately recalled, than actions that were performed only once or twice. So practice-makes-perfect with respect both to psychomotor functions, such as reproducing music on the piano, and to hereditary functions, such as reproducing a cell from a parent cell, and reproducing an organism from either a parent organism (asexual reproduction) or parent organisms (sexual reproduction) (Butler 1880, p. 124):

Among the recollections of the germ would be instinctual (innate) actions. As far as we know, a pianist, having practiced a piece so well that it can be played virtually unconsciously, does not pass knowledge of that piece through the germ line to children. Yet, Hering held that some psychomotor activities of comparable complexity are passed on (Butler 1880, p. 126):

      Hering's lecture was noted with approval by the German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel (1876) in a book which was reviewed in Nature (Lankester 1876). Haeckel sent a copy to Charles Darwin, who forwarded it to his young research associate, the physiologist George Romanes (1848-1894; Darwin 1876). Butler learned of Hering's lecture in 1877 from Darwin's son, Francis (Jones 1919, p. 257), when telling him about the impending publication of Life and Habit, his first major evolution book (Butler 1878). This was to be warmly reviewed by Alfred Wallace in Nature (1879) as a "remarkable work," notable for its "originality" and "logical completeness," that was "in great part complementary" to Darwinian ideas. Unlike Hering, a scientist who had made a one-time sortie into the professionally hazardous area of evolutionary speculation, for the next two decades the polymathic Butler, while claiming disingenuously to "know nothing of science" (Butler 1878, p. 2), continued to develop his theme, frequently employing the technique of subject-object inversion of which he was a master. For example, Life and Habit contained the memorable phrase: "A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg" (Butler 1878, p. 134). In the twentieth century, zoologist Richard Dawkins was to argue similarly that a body is only a gene's way of making another gene (Dawkins 1976).

Butler's second major work, Evolution Old and New (1879), constituted a serious indictment of the failure of the Darwinists to acknowledge their intellectual antecedents - Comte Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707-1788), Doctor Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), and Chevalier Jean Baptiste Pierre de Lamarck (1744-1829) - later summarized as: "Buffon planted, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck watered, but it was Mr. Darwin who said, 'That fruit is ripe,' and shook it into his lap" (Butler 1887, p. 291). This, to put it mildly, did not please the Darwinians, particularly Romanes who, by virtue of his deep interest in evolution and mental function (Romanes 1884), was well prepared to understand Butler's work (Butler 1884). Charles Darwin, perhaps still smarting decades after being publicly accused of pococurantism by Butler's distinguished grandfather, was definitely not amused (Jones 1911).

5. Memory as Stored Information

Like other Victorians, Butler did not often use the word "information" in the context of heredity, but his third major work, Unconscious Memory (1880, p. 252), made clear his understanding of memory as stored information:      

In his fourth major work on evolution, Luck or Cunning, Butler (1887, p. 308) outlined the concept of information and its symbolic representation in a form conditioned by factors both internal and external:

    In a lecture in 1894 on "Thought and Language" attacking the views of Oxford philologist Friedrich Max Muller (1823-1900), Butler was more poetic (Butler 1914b, 162):

    While never using the word "information," in his "provisional theory of pangenesis" Darwin (1868) had written of "formative matter" and "formative elements," noting that "the child, strictly speaking, does not grow into the man, but includes germs which slowly and successively become developed and form the man." He equated "germs" with the "formative matter," which "consists of minute particles or gemmules." These were fundamental units each associated with a particular inherited character, and capable of independent multiplication by "self-division." Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, when further developing this, touched on the idea of information and anticipated Weismann in postulating separation of germ-line and soma (Galton 1872; Galton 1876). Today we can best equate gemmules with genes (Forsdyke 2001, p. 151). Butler (1878, p. 187) supposed "a memory to 'run' each gemmule," but, of course, he knew the material basis of the storage of inherited information no more than he knew the material basis of the storage of mental information. We now know that DNA is the former, but still have little understanding of the latter.

    If challenged, Butler would probably have speculated that both forms of storage were the same (Occam's principle). Current evidence does not support this. Just as segments of DNA (genes) contain the information for the assembly, by some chain of events, of the components of, say, a hand, so segments of DNA should contain the information for a particular pattern of cerebral "wiring" (an "anatomical plan of the ganglia;" see below) that would, by some chain of events, be manifest as a particular instinct. Can such germ-line memories relate to memories acquired during individual lifetimes ("cerebral alterations")? A year before Darwin's death in 1882, George Romanes pointed out (Butler 1884, pp. 247-248):

     Butler seems to have been the first to extrapolate, from the principle that "higher" forms of life have evolved from "lower" forms, that eventually, beyond man, machines made by man would take over the planet (Butler 1914a, pp. 179-185). Today we would equate this with computers. Man may be only a computer's way of making another computer. Butler's genius was in seeing that inheritance and mental function, like today's computers, are all "modes of memory" (Butler 1878, pp. 299-300):      

In his Mental Evolution in Animals, Romanes (1884) was happy to consider instinctual activities, such as bird migration and nest-making, as requiring inherited ("ready-formed") information:

     But, much to Butler's frustration, he would not move beyond this (Butler 1884, p. 236):

6. Variation

"Memory" refers either to the physiological process by which stored information is retrieved, or to the actual stored information itself. In the former sense, the storage of information is implicit. In the latter sense, memory is stored information. Whatever the sense, the concepts of memory and of stored information are very close. At some point in time information is selected and assigned to a store, and at a later point in time it may be retrieved. But storage of information is not enough. Information must be safely stored. To select and to store is not to preserve. Stored information must also be preserved information. When preservation is not perfect, there is variation. When there is variation, there can be both linear and branching evolution. Thus, in 1966 the US biologist George C. Williams defined a gene, not as a unit of function (observed as some phenotypic characteristic), but as a unit of preservation. This, and the related work of the Japanese biophysicist Akiyoshi Wada, are discussed elsewhere in much technical detail (Forsdyke 2004a, b; Lee, Mortimer and Forsdyke 2004; Forsdyke 2006).

      Apparently unaware of Joseph Hooker's "doctrine of creation by variation" (Hooker 1860, p. 315), Butler (1878, p. 263) declared that "the 'Origin of Variation,' whatever it is, is the only true 'Origin of Species'". However, he knew the underlying mechanisms by which Nature's expressions vary from generation to generation, no more than he knew the underlying mechanisms by which mental expressions vary from day to day. Nor did Butler know the scope of variation. Variation can only occur in that which already exists, and the nature of that which already exists, limits the scope of its variation. Just as the scope of a dice is limited by its structure, so the scope of variation of a living form is limited. From time to time a human is born with six fingers, but, as far as we know, no human has ever been born (or even conceived) with a hundred fingers, or with feathers (Bateson 1894).

      Butler often wrote of dice (e.g. see below). The variation in landing position of a balanced dice is random. The variation in landing position of an unbalanced dice is non-random. So, from first principles, it might be supposed that variation in living forms would be either a chance event, or biased. Whether unbiased or biased, a variation might be beneficial, deleterious, or somewhere in between. Within its scope, the dice of life might be multifaceted allowing fine gradations in variation that might appear continuous. Alternatively variations might be quite discrete (e.g. the usual six-sided dice), so appearing discontinuous. And would the dice of life be thrown? If so, by what agency? If not thrown, then any variation that occurred would be "spontaneous" and perhaps unbiased. If the dice of life were thrown, then there would be a thrower. Would this agency be internal or external to the organism? In either case, could the agency direct the bias to the adaptive advantage of the organism? In other words, could the agency "design" the organism?

       Among these alternatives, current evidence shows that variation is a spontaneous property of matter, but that it may be affected, both quantitatively and qualitatively, by external agents, such as radiation (Forsdyke 2001; 2006). Within its scope, variation is unbiased.  It is not directed. There is no design by means of variation, either internal or external. If an organism is closely adapted to its environment then a variation is unlikely to be beneficial. If the environment has recently changed dramatically, then a variation may more likely be beneficial. But variations, per se, do not occur "for the good of the organism" (teleology).

      However, the parallels he had drawn between memory and heredity suggested to Butler a set of alternatives that had some plausibility at the time. He opted for an agency internal to the organism that would, in small steps, bring about variations that would accumulate to the advantage of the organism. This set of alternatives had gained some scientific respectability both in England (e.g. Spencer), and in continental Europe (e.g. Karl Wilhelm von Nageli) and some came to call it "orthogenesis," implying an innate tendency to progressive development (Kellogg 1908). Butler's teleology rested on grounds that were both aesthetic and logical.

       Darwin 's argument that natural selection would cruelly send the weaker to the wall and select the fittest to survive sufficed "to arouse instinctive loathing; -- such a nightmare of waste and death is as baseless as it is repulsive" (Butler 1914b, p. 293). To buttress this feeling, Butler argued along the lines of Ernst Brucke (1861) who had viewed unicellular organisms as elementary versions of organisms considered higher in the evolutionary scale. Microscopic studies of unicellular organisms, such as amoebae, showed them to possess organelles analogous to the organs of multicellular organisms. Thus, an amoeba, far from being an amorphous mass of protoplasm, was seen to extrude "arms" (pseudopodia), fashion a "mouth", and digest it prey in a prototypic stomach (digestive vacuole). If it could achieve this degree of sophistication, then perhaps it could, in an elementary way, also think? Butler (1879, p. 40) was quite open with his premises:

When it served his purpose Butler (1914b, p. 301) often appealed to "people in ordinary life," or to "plain people":

      Thus, Butler downplayed chance ("luck") and championed an intrinsic capacity for bias ("cunning") as the means by which advantageous characters acquired by parents would be transmitted to their children. In short, he appealed to the doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characters that had been advocated in France by Lamarck (1809). Butler even went so far as to assert, in Romanes' words (Butler 1884, p. 248), "that a future individual while still in the germ has already participated -- in the cerebral alterations of its parents." However, like Hering, Butler maintained a strictly materialist position. He used the words "intelligent" and "design," often separately, and sometimes together (Butler 1879, p. 11), but never in a way as to suggest the involvement of an agency external to the organism (Butler 1914b, p. 253-254):

      Butler soared beyond the comprehension of most of his contemporaries on the wings of his conceptual insight that heredity was the transfer of stored information. The German zoologist Richard Semon (1859-1918) acknowledged Butler's influence in developing his "mneme" theory of memory (Hartog 1914; Russell 1916; Richards 1987; Schachter 2001). Dawkins (2003) was unaware of this when he suggested the word "meme" as a self-replicating element of culture, passed on by imitation. Although Butler's dalliance with Lamarckism has not won support, we recognize today that the robustness of the underlying idea led him closer to solutions to fundamental biological problems such as the origin of sex, the sterility of hybrids, and aging (Butler 1878, p. 296).

      For example, since parental gametes can transfer information to offspring only while the parents are reproductively active (i.e. young), Butler deduced that offspring would receive no information from parental gametes to help them cope with aging. Today, we consider this to be true, but for entirely different reasons - namely, that it is natural selection acting on the young, not on the old, that increases genetic fitness (as measured by number of descendents produced). Over evolutionary time, natural environmental hazards have often eliminated organisms before their reproductive lives are over. Thus, the germ-line normally does not contain information for extending lifespan long after the mean age of reproduction. Exceptions may occur in the case of species where grandparental care of offspring is important (e.g. man) and in species that, for various adaptive reasons have incidentally developed additional ways of protecting DNA against damages that can accelerate aging (e.g. a tortoise shell protects against predators, but should also be a very effective shield against natural radiation; Bernstein and Bernstein 1991).          

     For his time, Butler's correct equation of heredity with memory (i.e. the transfer of stored information) was beyond the pale, but his incorrect Lamarckism seemed plausible. Herbert Spencer was a strong supporter of this viewpoint and, at Darwin's behest, Romanes spent several years fruitlessly seeking to show that gemmules containing information for acquired characters could be transferred from normal parental tissues (soma) to the gonads (germ-line; Romanes 1896; Biggers 1991). And as late as 1909 Haeckel was proclaiming that "natural selection does not of itself give the solution of all our evolutionary problems. It has to be taken in conjunction with the transformism of Lamarck, with which it is in complete harmony".

7. Lamarckism       

In Scotland a professor of engineering, Fleeming Jenkin, noted that for "an impartial looker-on" the best way to question "the Darwinians" was to "admit the facts, and examine the reasoning" (Jenkin 1867). This seems to have been the approach taken by Butler. He did not himself read the primary literature. He relied on the facts provided by the Darwinians and their few opponents, especially Mivart (1871) (Butler 1887, p. 5). Although Butler was greatly disillusioned on finding that the men of science had not done their home-work regarding early sources (Butler 1879), he did not extrapolate this to the current literature. He assumed that they were conversant with the current literature and, where deemed relevant, made it known in their publications. He identified "one apparently very important problem which I do not at this moment see how to connect with memory, namely, the tendency on the part of offspring to revert to an earlier impregnation" (e.g. to appear more like the grandparents than the parents; Butler 1878, pp. 182-183). However, it is likely he did not know of the private correspondence between Darwin, Thomas Huxley and Joseph Hooker where they discussed Charles Naudin's studies of plant hybrids in France (Naudin 1856; Forsdyke 2001. p. 24). These indicated that parental characters might be inherited discretely (discontinuously), rather than blending (continuously) in their offspring. Thus, after a period of latency the characters might emerge unchanged in future generations, even though appearing to be absent in immediate offspring. Probably privy to this correspondence, Romanes later wrote to a friend (1894):

The prevailing view was that parental characters were blended in their offspring. Jenkin (1867), for example, saw members of a biological species as enclosed within a sphere and noted that there would always be a tendency for individuals to vary centripetally, rather than centrifugally:

Given blending inheritance, it was difficult to see how a rare new variant organism, even if personally advantaged by virtue of the variation, would find a mate with a similar variation. Rather, the variant (e.g. white) would be swamped by crossing with the abundant non-variant type (e.g. black) to produce a blend (e.g. grey). With further crossing with the non-variant type (black) the descendents of the variant would soon be indistinguishable from the original non-variant type. This latter point was emphasized by Jenkin (1867):

    Easy access to a mate with the same mutation had been a strength of the Lamarckist doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characters. According to Lamarck (and Butler) organisms subjected to the same environmental provocation would simultaneously adapt and so be in possession of the same variant character. Being colocalized in the same environment there would then be little difficulty in their finding a mate with the same adaptation (Butler 1879, pp. 342-343, 1914b, p. 250). But, unknown to most of the men of science (and hence to Butler), by 1865 Mendel had obtained good evidence for discontinuous, non-blending, inheritance.  Knowledge of Mendel's breeding studies with peas, and of Michael Guyer's studies of meiotic chromosomes, emerged in 1900 only two years before Butler's death (Bateson 1909; Bungener and Buscaglia 2003). Thus, although Butler was probably never aware of it, his arguments rested on unstable Lamarckist foundations.

There was also an anti-Lamarckian argument that Butler had acknowledged, but never satisfactorily dealt with (Butler 1878, p. 237). Among colonial insects there is often a much greater separation of the germ line from the soma than in other organisms. For example, the germ line is personalized in the form of the queen bee. The soma is personalized in the forms of the neuter worker bees. Through "use or disuse" the latter might come to strengthen or deplete characters in a Lamarckian fashion. But how could the corresponding Darwinian "gemmules" transfer back to their queen. Apart from recent work showing the systemic spread of RNA within a plant, which is probably an antiviral defense (Waterhouse, Wang and Lough 2001; Liu 2006), there is no evidence that gemmules (i.e. genes) can transfer from soma to germ line within a body, let alone between bodies (that do not interact sexually). Many of the phenomena associated with colonial insects have found satisfactory explanations in terms of modern selfish-gene theory (Dawkins 1976; 2003). The possibility of transgenerational inheritance involving transfer of epigenetic information is considered elsewhere (Forsdyke 2006, p. 323).

8. Recent Controversy over "Intelligent Design"

In the wake of various lawsuits over the teaching of Darwinian evolution, a major proponent of the so-called "intelligent design" (ID) alternative was recently given the opportunity to clarifying the issue in the "op-ed" section of The New York Times. It seemed possible that, once and for all, the "widespread confusion about what intelligent design is and what it is not" would be dispelled, and the case that ID "is not a religiously based idea" would be set out with irrefutable clarity. Sadly, the old arguments of the eighteenth century theologian William Paley, a distant relative of Butler, were dutifully repeated. Organic forms were just too complex to have arisen without some form of cognitive input, which to Paley, but apparently not to the ID movement, meant "God" (Behe 1996; Behe 2005). Not surprisingly, a critical response was provoked from the President of the US National Academy of Sciences (Alberts 2005):

Simply put, one party, having defined its own version of ID, declared that it was not religious, and so was scientific. The other party declared that all ID theories were religious, and so were not scientific. Neither party appeared aware that in the nineteenth century Samuel Butler had furnished Paley's argument with a non-supernatural, and what then appeared, a scientifically coherent, foundation. Since the balance of evidence turned strongly against it, Butlerian ID did not gain support. In particular, there was the doctrine of the non-inheritance of acquired characters, with separation of the cells of the germ line from those of the mortal soma, as argued by August Weismann (1904). However, Butlerian ID was a respectable scientific hypothesis in accord with the canons of its time. Butler's evolutionary ideas won the praise of Francis Darwin (1908; see also Jones 1911), the Cambridge biologist William Bateson (1909, p. 88), and other scientists (Hartog 1914; Russell 1916).

9. Conclusions

Butlerian intelligent design must be clearly distinguished from the "intelligent design" that is currently a subject of much controversy. Butlerian intelligent design had a coherent foundation that was not "based on supernatural explanations," and is part of the history of science. It can, and should, form part of science history curricula. Modern proponents of "intelligent design" do not invoke Butlerian roots, and provide no coherent alternative. The concept of information in the context of hereditary transmission has ancient roots (Delbruck 1971), and in 1863 the geologist Charles Lyell devoted an entire chapter to the subject. Darwin's (1868) pangenesis touches upon it. But the formulations of Hering and Butler go far beyond this. Despite fundamental errors, their nineteenth century views have an intrinsic robustness and may prove illuminating as in the twenty-first century the biosciences become increasingly information-based (Baldi 2001; Barbieri 2003; Yockey 2005; Forsdyke 2006).   

Acknowledgements

I thank Claus Emmeche for a helpful review. Queen's University hosts my web-pages where further background and full-text versions of some of the references may be found. Macmillan Reference Ltd. kindly placed my brief biographies of Mendel and Romanes online in the Nature Encyclopedia of Life Sciences, now made available by Wiley (http://els.wiley.com). The Project Gutenberg has made many of Butler's works available online (http://www.gutenberg.org).


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Haeckel, Ernst

      1876: Die Perigenesis der Plastidule oder die Wellenzeugung der Lebenstheilchen, Berlin:Reimer, pp. 40-4, 67, 77.

      1909: "Charles Darwin as an Anthropologist", in A. C. Seward (ed), Darwin and Modern Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 137-151.

Hartog, Marcus

      1914: "Samuel Butler and recent mnemic biological theories", Scientia 15, 38-52.

Hering, Ewald

      1870: Uber das Gedachtniss als eine allgemeine Function der organisirten Materie. Vienna: Karl Gerold's Sohn. ("On memory as a universal function of organized matter." A lecture delivered on May 30^th at the anniversary meeting of the Imperial Academy of Sciences at Vienna, translated by Butler "with the kind assistance of friends" in his 1880: Unconscious Memory, London: David Bogue, pp. 97-133. (Another, anonymous, translation, with some interesting differences, is in the 1896 Religion of Science Library issue cited next).

      1896: On Memory and the Specific Energies of the Nervous System, Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company for The Religion of Science Library.

Hooker, Joseph Dalton

      1860: "On the origination and distribution of vegetable species: introductory essay to the flora of Tasmania", American Journal of Science and Arts 29, 305-326.

Iltis, Hugo

      1932: Life of Mendel, London:Allen and Unwin, p. 103.

Jenkin, H. C. Fleeming

      1867: "The origin of species", The North British Review 46, 277-318.

Jones, Henry Festing

      1911: Charles Darwin and Samuel Butler. A Step Towards Reconciliation. London: Fifield.

1919: Samuel Butler Author of Erewhon (1835-1902). A Memoir, Vols. 1 and 2. London: Macmillan.

Kay, Lily E.

      2000: Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Kellogg, Vernon L.

      1908: Darwinism Today. A Discussion of Present-Day Scientific Criticism of the Darwinian Selection Theories, Together with a Brief Account of the Principal other Proposed Auxiliary and Alternative Theories of Species-Forming, New York:Holt, pp. 274-289.

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste

      1809: Philosophie Zoologique. Translated by Hugh Elliot as Zoological Philosophy, Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Lankester, Edwin Ray

      1876: "Perigenesis versus pangenesis - Haeckel's new theory of heredity", Nature 14, 235-238.

Lee, Shang-Jung, James R. Mortimer, and Donald R. Forsdyke

      2004: "Genomic conflict settled in favour of the species rather than the gene at extreme GC percentage values", Applied Bioinformatics 3, 219-228.

Liu, Yongsheng

2006: "Historical and modern genetics of plant graft hybridization", Advances in Genetics 56, 101-129.

Lyell, Charles

      1863: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation. Philadelphia: G. W. Childs, pp. 454-470.

Mendel, Gregor Johann

      1865: "Versuche uber Pflanzen Hybriden", Verhandlung des naturforschenden Vereines in Brunn 4, 3-47.

Mivart, St. George J.

      1871: On the Genesis of Species, London:Macmillan.

Naudin, Charles

     1856: "Observations constatant le retour simultane de la descendance d'une plante hybride aux types paternels et 
      maternels", Compte Rendu Academie Sciences, Paris 42, 628-636.

Orel , Vítĕzslav

      1984: Mendel, Translated by S. Finn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 69.

Richards, Robert J.

      1987: Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Ideas of Mind and Behaviour. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Roberts, H. F.

1929: Plant Hybridization before Mendel. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Romanes, Ethel

      1896: The Life and Letters of George John Romanes. London: Longmans, Green and Co., pp. 19-50, 223.

Romanes, George John

      1884: Mental Evolution in Animals, with a Posthumous Essay on Instinct by Charles Darwin, New York: Appleton , p. 131.

1894: Letter to Schafer, May 18, London: Welcome Museum of the History of Medicine.[Romanes died a few days later]

Russell, Edward Stuart

      1916: Form and Function, London: Murray, pp. 335-344.

Schachter, Daniel L.

      2001: Forgotten Ideas, Neglected Pioneers: Richard Semon and the Story of Memory, Psychology Press, Philadelphia.

Smith, John Maynard

      1999: "The idea of information in biology", The Quarterly Review of Biology 74, 395-400.

2000: "The concept of information in biology", Philosophy of Science 67, 177-194.

Wallace, Alfred Russel

      1879: "Organization and intelligence", Nature 19, 477-480.

Waterhouse, Peter M., Ming-Bo Wang, and Tony Lough

      2001: Gene silencing as an adaptive defence against viruses. Nature 411, 834-841.

Weismann, August

      1904: The Evolution Theory, Volume 1, London: Edward Arnold, p. 411.

Williams, George C.

      1966: Adaptation and Natural Selection, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Yockey, Hubert P.

       2005: Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life, Cambridge: Camb. Univ. Press. 

2. In Erewhon Revisited (1901), Butler writes: "I wish some one would write a book about dreams and parthenogenesis -- for that the two are part and parcel of the same story -- a brood of folly without father bred -- I cannot doubt." In his notebooks (Further Extracts from the Notebooks of Samuel Butler 1934), Butler declared: "Dreams are a mode of parthenogenesis when the vibrations pre-existing in the brain vivify up to a certain point but do so all wrong as though in a mental ovarian tumour, through want of fecundation by incoming vibrations from exterior objects."

3. Gregory Bateson in Mind and Nature (1979) takes this as Butler arguing: "As dreams are to thought, so parthenogenesis is to sexual reproduction. Thought is stabilized and tested against the template of external reality, but dreams run loose. Similarly, parthenogenesis can be expected to run loose; whereas zygote formation is stabilized by the mutual comparison of gametes."

Butler was born on 4th December 1835 and died of pernicious anaemia on 18th June 1902 at the age of 66. 18 years later George Hoyt Whipple (1878-1976; right) found that raw liver was curative. George Minot and William Murphy later showed the active principle was in liver juice, but it was not until 1948 that the active principle, Vitamin B12, was identified. In 1934 Whipple, Minot and Murphy received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. An independent observer has pointed out that, in appearance, GHW is remarkably like the author of these webpages (in a more sober mood). 

One searches in vain for the I-word -- Information -- among Charles Darwin's Notebook writings (circa 1840) that were inspired by the early 19th century literature he was deeply reading. Yet those he read, such as Edmund Blyth (1837. Magazine of Natural History), sometimes used the I-word [Notebook C]: "Whereas the human race is compelled to derive the whole of its information through the medium of the senses, the brute is, on the contrary, supplied with an innate knowledge of whatever properties belong to all the natural objects around, which can in anywise affect its own interests or welfare." The M-word -- Memory -- being stored information, occurs often; e.g.[Notebook M]: "Now if memory << of a tune & words can thus lie dormant, during a whole life time, quite unconsciously of it, surely memory from one generation to another, also without consciousness, as instincts are, is not so very wonderful." Occasionally Darwin used the K-word - Knowledge -- as when he considered the power of limb regeneration possessed by some animals [Notebook D]: