" {261} When it was said by Professor Ray
Lankester--who knows as well as most people what Lamarck taught--
that this was "flat Lamarckism," Mr. Wallace rejoined that it was
the survival of the modified individuals that did it all, not the
efforts of the young fish to twist their eyes, and the transmission
to descendants of the effects of those efforts. But this, as I said
in my book Evolution, Old and New, is like saying that horses are
swift runners, not by reason of the causes, whatever they were, that
occasioned the direct line of their progenitors to vary towards ever
greater and greater swiftness, but because their more slow-going
uncles and aunts go away. Plain people will prefer to say that the
main cause of any accumulation of favourable modifications consists
rather in that which brings about the initial variations, and in the
fact that these can be inherited at all, than in the fact that the
unmodified individuals were not successful. People do not become
rich because the poor in large numbers go away, but because they
have been lucky, or provident, or more commonly both.
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