Bertie: Genetics is messy, as even Lord Emsworth found:
Black Berkshire sows cannot be made to measure!
All the more reason, when off the peg, to treasure
The occasional Empress - the suit that happens top fit.
Baggy or tight is the measure of Mendelian wit.¹
Jeeves: If the finer grades have eluded the breeder once,
They’ll elude in a series. He applies the laws of inheritance
With such tasteless want of finesse - and yet he expects
Delicate trends to emerge when Nature selects
Blindly on the basis of mutant characters. Once,
For an Empress, would be miraculous! A prosimian dunce
Can’t develop his wits by mutations unmastered in letters;
And the dearth of a theory of heredity adapted for trend-setters,
To explain the disparity in inherited variations and inheritors,
Makes ‘survival value’ a cloak for injustice. Did lemurs
Latch onto the importance of culture and intellectual improvement,
Never having thought before? Matched to their environment,
Why should they grow their brains? Ambition? A sorry
Reflection on lemurs is the thesis that their wits were too paltry
For the struggle and needed to evolve. Could any life at all
Be sustained by prosimians with a brain too crude for survival -
While a series of discrete mutations enlarged the skull
And, slowly but surely, the brain, the thumb, the mating call?
Bertie: Don’t hold your breath, dear Pongo, as you wait for the dawn
Of your own humanity: the plans have not been drawn
For the mutuality of animal factors, the interplay of gene,
Of which we know so little, knew less in the Eocene! ²
² Neo-Darwinism is reductionist because it focuses on the gene. Naturalists and Paleontologists (e.g. Eldredge, Gould, Dobzhansky, Mayr), who study large scale change see phenomena that cannot be reduced to variations in gene frequency (genes are unmastered in letters). As for “the disparity in inherited variations”? Why do some species remain static - living fossils like Limulus - while others evolve? (Don’t hold your breath, Pongo!) Change over geological time involves more factors than gene-centred inter-generational change. For the macro-evolutionary view, read Eldredge.