THE ADVENT OF THE NEO-DARWINIANS

This particular sort of ignorance does not always or often matter. But
in Darwin's case it did matter. If Darwin had really led the world at
one bound from the book of Genesis to Heredity, to Modification of
Species by Selection, and to Evolution, he would have been a philosopher
and a prophet as well as an eminent professional naturalist, with
geology as a hobby. The delusion that he had actually achieved this
feat did no harm at first, because if people's views are sound, about
evolution or anything else, it does not make two straws difference
whether they call the revealer of their views Tom or Dick. But later on
such apparently negligible errors have awkward consequences. Darwin was
given an imposing reputation as not only an Evolutionist, but as _the_
Evolutionist, with the immense majority who never read his books.
The few who never read any others were led by them to concentrate
exclusively on Circumstantial Selection as the explanation of all the
transformations and adaptations which were the evidence for Evolution.
And they presently found themselves so cut off by this specialization
from the majority who knew Darwin only by his spurious reputation, that
they were obliged to distinguish themselves, not as Darwinians, but as
Neo-Darwinians.

Before ten more years had elapsed, the Neo-Darwinians were practically
running current Science. It was 1906; I was fifty; I published my own
view of evolution in a play called Man and Superman; and I found that
most people were unable to understand how I could be an Evolutionist
and not a Neo-Darwinian, or why I habitually derided Neo-Darwinism as
a ghastly idiocy, and would fall on its professors slaughterously in