Excerpt from The Physical Basis of Heredity

That the fundamental aspects of heredity should have turned out to be so extraordinarily simple supports us in the hope that nature may, after all, be entirely approach able. Her much-advertised inscrutability has once more been found to be an illusion due to our ignorance. This is encouraging, for, if the world in which we live were as complicated as some of our friends would have us believe we might well despair that biology could ever become an exact science. Personally I have no sympathy with the statement that 'the problem of the method of evolution is one which the biologist finds it impossible to leave alone, although the longer he works at it, the farther its solution fades into the distance. On the contrary, the evidence of recent years and the methods by means of which this evidence is obtained have already in a reasonably short time brought us nearer to a solution of some of the import ant problems of evolution than seemed possible only a few years ago. That new problems and developments have arisen in the course of the work - as they are bound to do in any progressive science, as they do in chemistry and in physics for example - goes without saying, but only a spirit of obscurantism could pretend that progress of this kind means that we see the solution of our problem fading away into the distance.

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