a science in the precise meaning of the word, then it would never occur to it to change the world. We need not pause for long at the kind of developmental laws as represented by Herbert Spencer with his law of integration and differentiation and by Emanuel Chalupný42 with his ‘law of isolation’, about which the author declares that it is ‘not so much a sociological, biological, or psychological law, but rather the universal law of natural philosophy’. We explain development using laws of this type much in the same way as we explain the motion of a locomotive if we say that its wheels turn. The developmental theories that are closest to natural science are Lamarckism and Darwinism, or respectively – in a newer form – neo-Lamarckism and neo-Darwinism. We can, therefore, expect that these will contribute the most to clarifying our question. The thing that is especially valued about them is their ‘naturalness, clarity, and simplicity’. If we go on to ask what exactly makes them natural, clear, and simple, we will find that this is the minimum of demands that they make on a person’s ingenuity. Sufficient for these theories is the common and superficial human experience that can be expressed in these words: adaptation to given circumstances, the struggle for existence, chance. In principle, the two theories are mutually exclusive; however, when necessary, they have complemented each other. For a certain time Darwin himself explained the emergence of some new characteristics in a Lamarckian way, when he entrusted their selection and survival to the ‘struggle for existence’; however, other than this, Darwinism attributes a decisive role in the emergence of new characteristics to mere ‘chance’ – that is, to factors that have nothing in common with the struggle for existence and with the survival of animal species. In contrast to this, in many cases Lamarckism is understood only as the current opinion known as so-called psycho-Lamarckism – that is, the idea that psychological 42 Czech sociologist (1879–1958).
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