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This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution

A >> Alpheus Spring Packard >> Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution




"That varieties," he says, "may and do arise by the action of climatic
influences, and pass on to become species; and that species become, in
like manner, differentiated into genera, is abundantly indicated by the
facts of geographical distribution, and the obvious relation of local
forms to the conditions of environment. The present more or less
unstable condition of the circumstances surrounding organic beings,
together with the known mutations of climate our planet has undergone in
past geological ages, point clearly to the agency of physical conditions
as one of the chief factors in the evolution of new forms of life. So
long as the environing conditions remain stable, just so long will
permanency of character be maintained; but let changes occur, however
gradual or minute, and differentiations begin." He inclines to regard
the modifications as due rather to the direct action of the conditions
of environment than to "the round-about process of natural selection."
He also admits that change of habits and food, use and disuse, are
factors.

The same kind of inquiry, though on far less complete data, was extended
by the present writer[229] in 1873 to the moths, careful measurements of
twenty-five species of geometrid moths common to the Atlantic and
Pacific coasts of North America showing that there is an increase in
size and variation in shape of the wings, and in some cases in color, in
the Pacific Coast over Eastern or Atlantic Coast individuals of the same
species, the differences being attributed to the action of climatic
causes. The same law holds good in the few Notodontian moths common to
both sides of our continent. Similar studies, the results depending on
careful measurements of many individuals, have recently been made by
C. H. Eigenmann (1895-96), W. J. Moenkhaus (1896), and H. C. Bumpus
(1896-98).

The discoveries of Owen, Gaudry, Huxley, Kowalevsky, Cope, Marsh,
Filhol, Osborn, Scott, Wortmann, and many others, abundantly prove that
the lines of vertebrate descent must have been the result of the action
of the primary factors of organic evolution, including the principles of
migration, isolation, and competition; the selective principle being
secondary and preservative rather than originative.

Important contributions to dynamic evolution or kinetogenesis are the
essays of Cope, Ryder, Dall, Osborn, Jackson, Scott, and Wortmann.

Ryder began in 1877 to publish a series of remarkably suggestive essays
on the "mechanical genesis," through strains, of the vertebrate limbs
and teeth, including the causes of the reduction of digits. In
discussing the origin of the great development of the incisor teeth of
rodents, he suggested that "the more severe strains to which they were
subjected by enforced or intelligently assumed changes of habit, were
the initiatory agents in causing them to assume their present forms,
such forms as were best adapted to resist the greatest strains without
breaking."[230]

He afterwards[231] claimed that the articulations of the cartilaginous
fin-rays of the trout (_Salmo fontinalis_) are due to the mechanical
strains experienced by the rays in use as motors of the body of the fish
in the water.

In the line of inquiry opened up by Cope and by Ryder are the essays of
Osborn[232] on the mechanical causes for the displacement of the
elements of the feet in the mammals, and the phylogeny of the teeth.
Also Professor W. B. Scott thus expresses the results of his
studies:[233]

"To sum up the results of our examination of certain series of
fossil mammals, one sees clearly that transformation, whether in the
way of the addition of new parts or the reduction of those already
present, acts just _as if_ the direct action of the environment and
the habits of the animal were the efficient cause of the change, and
any explanation which excludes the direct action of such agencies is
confronted by the difficulty of an immense number of the most
striking coincidences.... So far as I can see, the theory of
determinate variations and of use-inheritance is not antagonistic
but supplementary to natural selection, the latter theory attempting
no explanation of the _causes_ of variation. Nor is it pretended for
a moment that use and disuse are the sole or even the chief factors
in variation."

As early as 1868 the Lamarckian factor of isolation, due to migration
into new regions, was greatly extended, and shown by Moritz Wagner[234]
to be a most important agent in the limitation and fixation of varieties
and species.

"Darwin's work," he says, "neither satisfactorily explains the
external cause which gives the first impulse to increased individual
variability, and consequently to natural selection, nor that
condition which, in connection with a certain advantage in the
struggle for life, renders the new characteristics indispensable.
The latter is, according to my conviction, solely fulfilled by the
voluntary or passive migration of organisms and colonization, which
depends in a great measure upon the configuration of the country; so
that only under favorable conditions would the home of a new species
be founded."

This was succeeded by Rev. J. T. Gulick's profound essays "On Diversity
of Evolution under One Set of External Conditions"[235] (1872), and on
"Divergent Evolution through Cumulative Segregation"[236] (1887).

These and later papers are based on his studies on the land shells of
the Hawaiian Islands. The cause of their extreme diversity of local
species is, he claims, not due to climatic conditions, food, enemies, or
to natural selection, but to the action of what he calls the "law of
segregation."

Fifteen years later Mr. Romanes published his theory of physiological
selection, which covered much the same ground.

A very strong little book by an ornithologist of wide experience,
Charles Dixon,[237] and refreshing to read, since it is packed with
facts, is Lamarckian throughout. The chief factor in the formation of
local species is, he thinks, isolation; the others are climatic
influences (especially the glacial period), use and disuse, and sexual
selection as well as chemical agency. Dixon insists on the "vast
importance of isolation in the modification of many forms of life,
without the assistance of natural selection." Again he says: "Natural
selection, as has often been remarked, can only preserve a beneficial
variation--it cannot originate it, it is not a cause of variation; on
the other hand, the use or disuse of organs is a direct cause of
variation, and can furnish natural selection with abundance of material
to work upon" (p. 49). The book, like the papers of Allen, Ridgway,
Gulick, and others, shows the value of isolation or segregation in
special areas as a factor in the origination of varieties and species,
the result being the prevention of interbreeding, which would otherwise
swamp the incipient varieties.

Here might be cited Delboeuf's law:[238]

"When a modification is produced in a very small number of
individuals, this modification, even were it advantageous, would be
destroyed by heredity, as the favored individuals would be obliged
to unite with the unmodified individuals. _Il n'en est rien,
cependant._ However great may be the number of forms similar to it,
and however small may be the number of dissimilar individuals which
would give rise to an isolated individual, we can always, while
admitting that the different generations are propagated under the
same conditions, meet with a number of generations at the end of
which the sum total of the modified individuals will surpass that of
the unmodified individuals." Giard adds that this law is capable of
mathematical demonstration. "Thus the continuity or even the
periodicity of action of a primary factor, such, for example, as a
variation of the _milieu_, shows us the necessary and sufficient
condition under which a variety or species originates without the
aid of any secondary factor."

Semper,[239] an eminent zooelogist and morphologist, who also was the
first (in 1863) to criticise Darwin's theory of the mode of formation of
coral atolls, though not referring to Lamarck, published a strong,
catholic, and original book, which is in general essentially Lamarckian,
while not undervaluing Darwin's principle of natural selection. "It
appears to me," he says, in the preface, "that of all the properties of
the animal organism, Variability is that which may first and most easily
be traced by exact investigation to its efficient causes."

"By a rearrangement of the materials of his argument, however, we
obtain, as I conceive, convincing proof that external conditions can
exert not only a very powerful selective force, but a transforming
one as well, although it must be the more limited of the two.

"An organ no longer needed for its original purpose may adapt itself
to the altered circumstances, and alter correspondingly if it
contains within itself, as I have explained above, the elements of
such a change. Then the influence exerted by the changed conditions
will be _transforming_, not _selective_.

"This last view may seem somewhat bold to those readers who know
that Darwin, in his theory of selection, has almost entirely set
aside the direct transforming influence of external circumstances.
Yet he seems latterly to be disposed to admit that he had
undervalued the transforming as well as the selective influence of
external conditions; and it seems to me that his objection to the
idea of such an influence rested essentially on the method of his
argument, which seemed indispensable for setting his theory of
selection and his hypothesis as to the transformation of species in
a clear light and on a firm footing" (p. 37).

Dr. H. de Varigny has carried on much farther the kind of experiments
begun by Semper. In his _Experimental Evolution_ he employs the
Lamarckian factors of environment and use and disuse, regarding the
selective factors as secondary.

The Lamarckian factors are also depended upon by the late Professor
Eimer in his works on the variation of the wall-lizard and on the
markings of birds and mammals (1881-88), his final views being comprised
in his general work.[240] The essence of his point of view may be seen
by the following quotation:

"According to my conception, the physical and chemical changes which
organisms experience during life through the action of the
environment, through light or want of light, air, warmth, cold,
water, moisture, food, etc., and which they transmit by heredity,
are the primary elements in the production of the manifold variety
of the organic world, and in the origin of species. From the
materials thus supplied the struggle for existence makes its
selection. These changes, however, express themselves simply as
growth" (p. 22).

In a later paper[241] Eimer proposes the term "orthogenesis," or direct
development, in rigorous conformity to law, in a few definite
directions. Although this is simply and wholly Lamarckism, Eimer claims
that it is not, "for," he strangely enough says, "Lamarck ascribed no
efficiency whatever to the effects of outward influences on the animal
body, and very little to their effects upon vegetable organisms."
Whereas if he had read his Lamarck carefully, he would have seen that
the French evolutionist distinctly states that the environment acts
directly on plants and the lower animals, but indirectly on those
animals with a brain, meaning the higher vertebrates. The same
anti-selection views are held by Eimer's pupil, Piepers,[242] who
explains organic evolution by "laws of growth, ... uncontrolled by any
process of selection."

Dr. Cunningham likewise, in the preface to his translation of Eimer's
work, gives his reasons for adopting Neolamarckian views, concluding
that "the theory of selection can never get over the difficulty of the
origin of entirely new characters;" that "selection, whether natural or
artificial, could not be the essential cause of the evolution of
organisms." In an article on "The New Darwinism" (_Westminster Review_,
July, 1891) he claims that Weismann's theory of heredity does not
explain the origin of horns, venomous teeth, feathers, wings of insects,
or mammary glands, phosphorescent organs, etc., which have arisen on
animals whose ancestors never had anything similar.

Discussing the origin of whales and other aquatic mammals, W. Kuekenthal
suggests that the modifications are partially attributable to mechanical
principles. (_Annals and Mag. Nat. Hist._, February, 1891.)

From his studies on the variation of butterflies, Karl Jordan[243]
proposes the term "mechanical selection" to account for them, but he
points out that this factor can only work on variations produced by
other factors. Certain cases, as the similar variation in the same
locality of two species of different families, but with the same wing
pattern, tell in favor of the direct action of the local surroundings on
the markings of the wings.

In the same direction are the essays of Schroeder[244] on the markings
of caterpillars, which he ascribes to the colors of the surroundings; of
Fischer[245] on the transmutations of butterflies as the result of
changes of temperature, and also Dormeister's[246] earlier paper.
Steinach[247] attributes the color of the lower vertebrates to the
direct influence of the light on the pigment cells, as does
Biedermann.[248]

In his address on evolution and the factors of evolution, Professor A.
Giard[249] has given due credit to Lamarck as "the creator of
transformism," and to the position to be assigned to natural selection
as a secondary factor. He quotes at length Lamarck's views published in
1806. After enumerating the primary factors of organic evolution, he
places natural selection among his secondary factors, such as heredity,
segregation, amixia, etc. On the other hand, he states that Lamarck was
not happy in the choice of the examples which he gave to explain the
action of habits and use of parts. "Je ne rappellerai par l'histoire
tant de fois critique du cou de la giraffe et des cornes de l'escargot."

Another important factor in the evolution of the metazoa or many-celled
animals, from the sponges and polyps upward from the one-celled forms or
protozoa, is the principle of animal aggregation or colonization
advanced by Professor Perrier. As civilization and progressive
intelligence in mankind arose from the aggregation of men into tribes or
peoples which lived a sedentary life, so the agricultural, building, and
other arts forthwith sprang up; and as the social insects owe their
higher degree of intelligence to their colonial mode of life, so as soon
as unicellular organisms began to become fixed, and form aggregates, the
sponge and polyp types of organization resulted, this leading to the
gastraea, or ancestral form from which all the higher phyla may have
originated.

M. Perrier appears to fully accept Lamarck's views, including his
speculations as to wants, and use and disuse. He, however, refuses to
accept Lamarck's extreme view as to the origin through effort of
entirely new organs. As he says: "Unfortunately, if Lamarck succeeded in
explaining in a plausible way the modification of organs already
existing, their adaptation to different uses, or even their
disappearance from disuse, in regard to the appearance of new organs he
made hypotheses so venturesome that they led to the momentary
forgetfulness of his other forceful conceptions."[250]

The popular idea of Lamarckism, and which from the first has been
prejudicial to his views, is that an animal may acquire an organ by
simply wishing for or desiring it, or, as his French critics put it, "Un
animal finit toujours par posseder un organe quand il le veut." "Such,"
says Perrier,[251] "is not the idea of Lamarck, who simply attributes
the transformations of species to the stimulating action of external
conditions, construing it under the expression of wants (_besoins_), and
explaining by that word what we now call _adaptations_. Thus the long
neck of the giraffe results from the fact that the animal inhabits a
country where the foliage is situated at the tops of high trees; the
long legs of the wading birds have originated from the fact that these
birds are obliged to seek their food in the water without wetting
themselves," etc. (See p. 350.)

"Many cases," says Perrier, "may be added to-day to those which
Lamarck has cited to support his first law [pp. 303, 346]; the only
point which is open to discussion is the extent of the changes which
an organ may undergo, through the use it is put to by the animal. It
is a simple question of measurement. The possibility of the creation
of an organ in consequence of external stimuli is itself a matter
which deserves to be studied, and which we have no right to reject
without investigation, without observations, or to treat as a
ridiculous dream; Lamarck would doubtless have made it more readily
accepted, if he had not thought it well to pass over the
intermediate steps by means of wants. It is incontestable that by
lack of exercise organs atrophy and disappear."

Finally, says Perrier: "Without doubt the real mechanism of the
improvement (_perfectionnement_) of organisms has escaped him
[Lamarck], but neither has Darwin explained it. The law of natural
selection is not the indication of a process of transformation of
animals; it is the expression of the total results. It states these
results without showing us how they have been brought about. We
indeed see that it tends to the preservation of the most perfect
organisms; but Darwin does not show us how the organisms themselves
originated. This is a void which we have only during these later
years tried to fill" (p. 90).

Dr. J. A. Jeffries, author of an essay "On the Epidermal System of
Birds," in a later paper[252] thus frankly expresses his views as to the
relations of natural selection to the Lamarckian factors. Referring to
Darwin's case of the leg bones of domestic ducks compared with those of
wild ducks, and the atrophy of disused organs, he adds:

"In this case, as with most of Lamarck's laws, Darwin has taken them
to himself wherever natural selection, sexual selection, and the
like have fallen to the ground.

"Darwin's natural selection does not depend, as is popularly
supposed, on direct proof, but is adduced as an hypothesis which
gains its strength from being compatible with so many facts of
correlation between an organism and its surroundings. Yet the same
writer who considers natural selection proved will call for positive
experimental proof of Lamarck's theory, and refuse to accept its
general compatibility with the facts as support. Almost any case
where natural selection is held to act by virtue of advantage gained
by use of a part is equally compatible with Lamarck's theory of use
and development. The wings of birds of great power of flight, the
relations of insects to flowers, the claws of beasts of prey, are
all cases in point."

Professor J. A. Thomson's useful _Synthetic Summary of the Influence of
the Environment upon the Organism_ (1887) takes for its text Spencer's
aphorism, that the direct action of the medium was the primordial factor
of organic evolution. Professor Geddes relies on the changes in the soil
and climate to account for the origin of spines in plants.

The botanist Sachs, in his _Physiology of Plants_ (1887), remarks: "A
far greater portion of the phenomena of life are [is] called forth by
external influences than one formerly ventured to assume."

Certain botanists are now strong in the belief that the species of
plants have originated through the direct influence of the environment.
Of these the most outspoken is the Rev. Professor G. Henslow. His view
is that self-adaptation, by response to the definite action of changed
conditions of life, is the true origin of species. In 1894[253] he
insisted, "_in the strictest sense of the term_, that natural selection
is not wanted as an 'aid' or a 'means' in originating species." In a
later paper[254] he reasserts that all variations are definite, that
there are no indefinite variations, and that natural selection "can take
no part in the origination of varieties." He quotes with approval the
conclusion of Mr. Herbert Spencer in 1852, published

"seven years before Darwin and Dr. Wallace superadded natural
selection as an aid in the origin of species. He saw no necessity
for anything beyond the natural power of change with adaptation; and
I venture now to add my own testimony, based upon upwards of a
quarter of a century's observations and experiments, which have
convinced me that Mr. Spencer was right and Darwin was wrong. His
words are as follows: 'The supporters of the development hypothesis
can show ... that any existing species, animal or vegetable, when
placed under conditions different from its previous ones,
immediately begins to undergo certain changes of structure fitting
it for the new conditions; ... that in the successive generations
these changes continue until ultimately the new conditions become
the natural ones.... They can show that throughout all organic
nature there is at work a modifying influence of the kind they
assign as the causes of specific differences; an influence which,
though slow in its action, does in time, if the circumstances demand
it, produce marked changes.'"[255]

Mr. Henslow adduces observations and experiments by Buckman, Bailey,
Lesage, Lothelier, Costantin, Bonnier, and others, all demonstrating
that the environment acts directly on the plant.

Henslow also suggests that endogens have originated from exogenous
plants through self-adaptation to an aquatic habit,[256] which is in
line with our idea that certain classes of animals have diverged from
the more primitive ones by change of habit, although this has led to the
development of new class-characteristics by use and disuse, phenomena
which naturally do not operate in plants, owing to their fixed
conditions.

Other botanists--French, German, and English--have also been led to
believe in the direct influence of the _milieu_, or environment. Such
are Viet,[257] and Scott Elliot,[258] who attributes the growth of bulbs
to the "direct influence of the climate."

In a recent work Costantin[259] shares the belief emphatically held by
some German botanists in the direct influence of the environment not
only as modifying the form, but also as impressing, without the aid of
natural selection, that form on the species or part of its inherited
stock; and one chapter is devoted to an attempt to establish the thesis
that acquired characters are inherited.

In his essay "On Dynamic Influences in Evolution" W. H. Dall[260] holds
the view that--

"The environment stands in a relation to the individual such as the
hammer and anvil bear to the blacksmith's hot iron. The organism
suffers during its entire existence a continuous series of
mechanical impacts, none the less real because invisible, or
disguised by the fact that some of them are precipitated by
voluntary effort of the individual itself.... It is probable that
since the initiation of life upon the planet no two organisms have
ever been subjected to exactly the same dynamic influences during
their development.... The reactions of the organism against the
physical forces and mechanical properties of its environment are
abundantly sufficient, if we are granted a single organism, with a
tendency to grow, to begin with; time for the operation of the
forces; and the principle of the survival of the fittest."

In his paper on the hinge of Pelecypod molluscs and its development, he
has pointed out a number of the particular ways in which the dynamics of
the environment may act on the characters of the hinge and shell of
bivalve molluscs. He has also shown that the initiation and development
of the columellar plaits in Voluta, Mitra, and other gasteropod molluscs
"are the necessary mechanical result of certain comparatively simple
physical conditions; and that the variations and peculiarities connected
with these plaits perfectly harmonize with the results which follow
within organic material subjected to analogous stresses."

In the same line of study is Dr. R. T. Jackson's[261] work on the
mechanical origin of characters in the lamellibranch molluscs. "The
bivalve nature of the shell doubtless arose," he says, "from the
splitting on the median line of a primitive univalvular ancestor;" and
he adds: "A parallel case is seen in the development of a bivalve shell
in ancient crustaceans;" in both types of shells "the form is induced by
the mechanical conditions of the case." The adductor muscles of bivalve
molluscs and crustaceans are, he shows plainly, the necessary
consequence of the bivalvular condition.

In his theory as to the origin of the siphon of the clam (_Mya
arenaria_), he explains it in a manner identical with Lamarck's
explanations of the origin of the wading and swimming birds, etc., even
to the use of the words "effort" and "habit."

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