George Bernard Shaw devoted one of his enormous Prefaces (in Back to Methuselah) to a passionate advocacy of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. His case was based not upon biological knowledge, of which he would cheerfully have admitted he had none. It was based upon an emotional loathing of the implications of Darwinism, that ‘chapter of accidents’: it seems simple, because you do not at first realize all that it involves. But when its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable
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