ABSTRACT
Darwin never believed that natural selection was the “exclusive” “means of modification”. But what were the other “means” that he thought about, and how did their intervention integrate with the effects of selection? The debate about the role of natural selection is one great source of difference between Darwin and his co-discoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace. But George Romanes, another disciple of Darwin, often blamed Wallace and others like Weismann for being extreme selectionists, or “ultra Darwinians”. For Romanes, the true mechanism for the origin of species was not natural selection, but physiological selection. Under such circumstances, can Romanes actually be considered the typical “Darwinian”?
