Pennies from Heaven, Fall into My Lap

When I set my new chapter-per-month schedule, I knew I'd socialize less, sleep less, watch less television—but I also knew I'd be unable to produce quality work without some dumb luck.  No researching for months and months before finding the best quotation in the history of everything; I'd need critical evidence self-glomerating into compelling arguments at breakneck speed.  You can understand, then, why I'm demoralized by my discovery of the isolation of New York "society" from American society at large.*  You can also understand why I'm elated that Edith Wharton underlined the following passage in Haeckel's The History of Creation:

Individuals can transmit, not only those qualities which they themselves have inherited from their ancestors, but also the peculiar, individual qualities which they have acquired in their own life.

Now, underscoring is no more of an endorsement than, say, linking, but it means establishing her familiarity with the neo-Lamarckian strain of evolutionary thought will be a cinch.  All I need do now is determine where she stands on these issues, and I'll be set.  I'll have this thing done in no time flat.  Already half-finished, it will be, sometime soon, I hope.

*The upper reaches barely even considered themselves American.  Wharton wrote of her friends, "we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass house."  The emphasis on "we" and use of the phrase "the Americans" point to future difficulties in establishing her take on social evolution, but as that milk's yet to be spilled, I'll save my tears for now.

Comments

[Dan Collins]

Hardy, being a hardheaded type and a strict Darwinian, set out the premise in, I think, Tess, that it was unfortunate that acquired experience was not heritable (a dubious premise for those of us who much enjoyed being college seniors during the Carter years). I'm certain that you've read Gould on paedomorphosis, but if not (and I wouldn't like to increase your reading load) you probably ought.

[Dan Collins]

Strike that. I mean high school seniors, of course.

[Adam Kotsko]

You do realize that evolution is just a theory, don't you?

[Dan Collins]

With a great deal of explanatory power with regards to the fossil record, and which,even in its strict Darwinian version, anticipated the properties of the recombinant properties of the chromosome. That's pretty good, as theories go.

[Adam Kotsko]

Dude, I was kidding.

[Dan Collins]

D'oh!

[Karl Steel]

How much of this hoohah about inherited traits comes out of justifications of a heritable aristocracy (and, for that matter, a heritable ignobility)? There's a nice summary of such theories as they appeared in the early 19th century in David Crouch's recent Birth of Nobility. I'm not trying to trapdoor you, by the way; it just struck me that the road to the discourses you're writing about may have been greased way back in the Middle Ages.

[Page]

*The upper reaches barely even considered themselves American. Wharton wrote of her friends, "we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass house."

Goes a long way toward explaining the Bush family (and their fellow travellers) and their support for NAFTA, GATT, outsourcing, in-sourcing (cheap immigrant labor), and imperialist military adventures.

[eb]

Are you familiar with this book? (I haven't finished it, incidentally, but I thought of it when I read about

the isolation of New York "society" from American society at large.