KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

Human Races 31
time also be able to change the organization to any arbitrary extent
(e.g. beyond the species boundary); or, for that matter, why it could
not have produced the organizational forms in the first place.
However, it is impossible to see how environmental conditions (e.g.
cold) should be able to effect heritable changes (e.g. a second layer of
feathers in birds) as if the climate could know what should be
changed in an organism. Kant thus concludes that all changes that
are adaptive for the organism must have been included in some way
in the original purposive organization. Adaptations to the environment
must have lain dormant but capable of development as
"germs" or "natural dispositions" in the original lineage. 25 They are
then induced to unfold by the appropriate environmental conditions,
but only already stored away characters can be called up by the
environment. Only pre-adapted changes already available as dispositions
can be transmitted. Only what itself has been inherited
can be passed on in generation: 26
Accident or universal mechanical laws cannot produce such mutual fit.
Therefore we must consider such occasional developments as preformed.
However even where nothing purposive is displayed, the mere ability to
propagate its particular acquired character is itself proof enough that a
special germ or natural disposition for the character was to be found in the
the organic creature. For external things can be occasional causes but not
productive causes of what necessarily is propagated and breeds true. Just as
little as accident or physical-mechanical causes can produce an organic
body can they add something to its generative power, that is, effect something
which propagates itself, if it is a particular shape or relation of the
parts.
On the example of the development of the human races from
an ancestral species which contained the dispositions to all the
presently given races, Kant introduces the additional hypothesis
that the unfolding of one particular disposition precludes the later
unfolding of other developmental possibilities. After the original dispersion
of humanity, humans have unfolded their innate capacities
25 In the first paper on race Kant in fact introduces a technical, terminological
distinction between "germs" [Keime] and "dispositions" [Anlagen]. The germs
determine "particular parts," and the dispositions determine "only the size or the
relation of the parts to one another" (Ak 2,434; W 6,17). However, he usually
speaks of both at the same time, and even on those occasions later on where he
mentions only one of them, there is no reason to believe that he is implying that the
other is not meant.
26 "Different Races of Men..." (W 6,18; Ak 2,435).