Chapter II: Mr. Wells and the Creation of the World (1)

Mr. Wells sets out to recite not only History properly so-called, the known and conscious records of the human race, but also Pre-history, i.e. our knowledge, little as it is, of life on this earth prior to the advent of man or his predecessors, and of man himself prior to any surviving record.

In the department of Pre-history the first task which meets the writer is that of telling the order in which, according to the geological record, the rocks composing the earth’s surface were presumably laid down, and the order in which the vestiges of life appear in these rocks.

This task Mr. Wells has successfully performed. Anyone can put down the main known facts in their order, for it is a mere matter of reference to encyclopædias; but Mr. Wells has done so with concision, lucidity and accuracy: qualities which are apparent here as throughout the work. He is even careful to modify phrases which might be too absolute. For instance, he tells us that astronomers “give us reason to believe the slowing down of the rotation of the earth,” instead of saying, as many another would, “have proved....” He also acts with sense in giving very wide limits to the guesswork of modern physicists upon the scale of time by which we should judge the geological process, though he does not warn his readers, as he should do, that it is only guesswork, and that the deductions upon which it depends are taken from first principles, which are many of them incapable of verification and others mere hypotheses.

It is, perhaps, asking too much of our author to adopt a strictly scientific attitude: that is, to distinguish between hypothesis and proved fact. And this is particularly true of a study so full of hypothesis as geology. Men pretend to vastly more knowledge than they have in that branch of knowledge—as, for instance, on the rate of stratification. A man cannot but be influenced by his own time, and Mr. Wells is influenced by the unscientific loose thinking and insufficiently supported affirmations of his generation and place.

The chief mark of our time is a decline in the logical faculty, and with that decline goes an increasing inability to distinguish between what is proved, what is probable and what is possible only. It is in fields (such as Pre-history) where very little indeed is known, and where there is immeasurable room for making things up out of one’s head, that the distinction between fact and fancy is most easily lost. Only a minority in Europe have appreciated as yet how small a proportion of what passes for ascertained fact upon the remote past is really known, and how vast a proportion is based upon mere analogy or such quite unproved assumptions. Among our older men dogmatic affirmation of much that is already disproved, and much that is increasingly doubtful, continues. Such a profound remark as Ferrero’s “The men of the nineteenth century thought they knew everything, we know that they knew nothing,” would shock them to hear.

Allowing, then, for that natural tendency towards repeating in age what one was dogmatically taught in youth, Mr. Wells’s précis of the geological process is quite exceptionally good.

He also states clearly our present ignorance upon the origin of life; our failure, so far, to find a link between organic and inorganic; and even our inability to affirm—what is presumable upon analogy and was taken for granted in antiquity and during the Middle Ages—that living proceeds from dead matter.

All this done, however, Mr. Wells tackles the fundamental question of Creation—and here, at once, the fundamental weakness of the book appears: at its very outset on page 11.

The author becomes deeply concerned with a discussion peculiar to his own local society, and of a sort so childish that a thinking man has difficulty in taking it seriously: the discussion between the old-fashioned Protestant who thinks of creation as a sort of conjuring trick and the new-fashioned one who cannot believe in creation at all because he has discovered (rather late in the day) that things grow.

The old-fashioned Bible Christian thought that the Hen appeared mature in a twinkling, out of air, like the mango tree of the Indian jugglers. His newly enlightened son has discovered that it comes from an egg. Mr. Wells, upon this page 11, appears in the rôle of the newly enlightened, and is most earnest to convince his erring and belated fellows that life can have come into existence as a “natural” process: an idea which he conceives as repugnant to “religious” minds. It is astonishing that either of these two back-waters of culture should survive: the back-water of the Bible Christian enlightened by elementary “science,” which gets rid of a Creator, and the back-water of the not yet enlightened Bible Christian, who can’t think of creation except as the sudden appearance of familiar objects out of surrounding space. We may wonder with amusement what Mr. Wells would make of such a Catholic sentence as “God made this oak.” I suppose he would think it a confusion of acorns with God. He should read St. Thomas.

However, though the philosophy is pitiable, the précis of familiar facts in this summary of observed origins is very well done, and all these statements, though they are no more than what you may find in any popular textbook, are put much better than in most.

So much for Mr. Wells’s brief summary of the geological evidence as given in all our encyclopædias and books of reference. It is most readable, and accurately presents the ascending complexity of vegetable and animal life in the past.

But the man writing upon this process has another and far harder task to perform than the mere cataloguing of facts set down in textbooks. There comes a moment when he must try to solve a certain problem: when he must _think_. He must face a question which is as old as human enquiry, and which searches the very depths of his own nature and of the world around him. It is this:—

“Under the action of what Force did this difference between various kinds of living things come to be? Under what Cause did the organism differentiate and meet its environment, and develop into its myriad forms each fulfilling a function? What _mind_ was at work, if any; and if no _mind_, then what?”

_That_ question is the one capital enigma, the pre-eminent riddle of life set to the enquiry of man. For centuries upon centuries he has examined it and has found no reply, save in mystery.

A lifetime ago a group of men, intolerant of fundamental philosophical enquiry and intolerant of mystery, thought they had found the answer in a very simple and wholly mechanical method which explained Evolution in a new way. They called this method “Natural Selection,” and thereby—as they hoped—all necessity for design in the universe could be eliminated.

What that theory of Natural Selection was, I describe in a moment. It must suffice here to say that it made Evolution subject to blind chance—and that to-day it is quite dead.

It is characteristic of Mr. Wells’s work that now, in 1926, he still gives in all simplicity that exploded answer, which was so fashionable in the nineties. Mr. Bernard Shaw said the other day, with native charity, that no one under seventy still believed in Natural Selection. Page 16 of this new Part I of Mr. Wells’s book shows that Mr. Shaw estimated too highly the intelligence and culture of his contemporaries.

To trot out Natural Selection at this time of day as the chief agent in Evolution is almost like trotting out the old dead theory of immutable and simple elements in a popular chemistry. That is what was taught as chemistry when Mr. Wells was young, and Natural Selection was what was taught as the cause of differentiation between living beings when Mr. Wells was young. The one error is to-day nearly as obsolete as the other. There is still continuing the remains of an obstinate defence, urged by the strongest of human motives, religion: for there are still those who agree with Weissmann that Natural Selection must be maintained at all costs, and with no matter what fantastic affirmations, because “It is the only alternative to Design” in the Universe—that is, to God.

But there can be no doubt which way the battle has turned.

When Driesch said, twenty long years ago, “Darwinism is dead,” he was hardly premature.

To quote him now is to repeat a commonplace.

Let me not be misunderstood. I should not criticize Mr. Wells for ignorance if he had written thus: “Many explanations have been given of how Evolution has worked. The Ancients ascribed it to some inherent power in living things which they called ‘entelechy,’ i.e. the power to realize an end. The eighteenth century, led by Lamarck, tended at its close as did the earlier nineteenth to something similar, but emphasized the will and effort of the organism. In the mid-nineteenth century there was proposed by Darwin and Wallace a new mechanical explanation which got rid of design and of ‘an end’ to which organisms worked. Its authors called it ‘Natural Selection.’ For a short time it was so completely the fashion that it seemed impregnable. But Criticism soon began, and grew menacing by the end of the century. With the opening of the twentieth this Criticism had grown greater by far in volume and force, especially in America and on the Continent. To-day it seems overwhelming. None the less, I hold to those who with many modifications still maintain the old theory.”

But Mr. Wells did not write thus, with an appreciation of the position as it stands to-day. He set down Natural Selection in all its crudity as an admitted final truth, a piece of unquestioned modern science, and left his unfortunate readers under that impression.

To do that is morally inexcusable save on the plea of ignorance of all that vast bulk of criticism with which the average educated man is generally acquainted—at least as to its main results. And if he plead such ignorance as his excuse, then he admits himself quite unfitted to put forward even the simplest outline of Evolution to-day.

The point is one of first-class importance, for it illustrates at once the fixity and the weakness of that anti-Catholic—and irrational—spirit which will support any thesis however blown upon, so it be still of some service against the Christian Faith.

Let me give as briefly as possible the story of this old-fashioned theory of Natural Selection—which seemed so convenient for getting rid of God—and of its breakdown. I will first note the motives under which it arose during the mid-nineteenth century; next describe the theory itself; after that, give the arguments by which it was more and more shown to be untenable. Those arguments have long been familiar to all educated Europe.

Organic Genetic Evolution, i.e. the theory that one kind of living being arises from another kind, is as old as human observation and human thought. Common experience suggests it to everyone, because we know of no way in which living beings can appear upon earth save as the product of other living beings.

When, therefore, men first took notice of, say, donkeys and horses, or tigers and cats, they naturally said to themselves, “These things look as though they had a common ancestor.” The next step is to suppose that there would be a common ancestor to more widely different types. It is even admissible, though not probable, that all life on this earth sprang from one very simple origin. Our old Pagan forefathers—those of them who were civilized—discussed all this centuries ago, and the Fathers of the Christian Church spoke in the same terms.

Though criticism, and instruction in physical science as well, declined in the Dark Ages, and though popular imagination had then, as ever, a simple imagery, the idea was not so much contradicted or denied as neglected.

In the Middle Ages it reappears, very vaguely, under the conception of Mediate Creation. God is the Creator of every living thing. Yet every living thing has a parent or parents. That is an example of Mediate Creation; and it at once suggests the idea that groups as well as individuals might originate in the same way. Indeed, St. Thomas, the great teacher of the Middle Ages, by concluding exceptionally that the creation of Man was _not_ mediate, but direct, implies the possibility or probability of Mediate Creation for organisms other than Man.

With the growth of Modern Science in the eighteenth century full discussion of the Idea was revived, and from a hundred and fifty years ago Evolution was discussed throughout educated Europe. During the nineteenth century a great mass of evidence was accumulated in its favour, and to-day it is almost (but not quite) universally held by specialists who have authority to speak upon such matters.

It is true that the process Organic Evolution may have taken becomes more and more doubtful as modern research and debate advance.

Have the various species of Plants and Animals branched out from one original living cell or from many? It is uncertain.

Have the new origins of life appeared in succession and separately at long intervals of time? It is possible or probable.

Is transformism, that is, the change of one fully-developed mature and complex type into another, true? For instance, could a Reptile have changed into a Bird? Half a lifetime ago nearly everybody answered “Yes.” To-day—especially since the great work of Vialleton—more and more people are answering “No.”

These and any number of other doubts and criticisms—and some disproofs—have arisen in our time, though Evolution in the widest sense of the word—that is, the doctrine that living things are genetically connected, is still the main doctrine taught and held in Biology.

But Evolution in general is not the point. It involves no fundamental issue. It clashes with no theology or philosophy, unless we dignify by those terms an attachment to pictures of ready-made beasts in the family Bible. It is when men come to discuss _how_ the difference between varying types arose that we enter at once upon a quarrel between opposing philosophies, Christian and anti-Christian. No Catholic, nor indeed any man possessed of a philosophy, would trouble himself much over the confirmation or disproof of Evolution. Evolution simply means continuous growth; a tree growing from a seedling is an example of evolution; growth is the universal phenomenon apparent in ourselves and all organic life around us, and to discover it generalized is no shock, but rather an extension of the obvious.

But when we come to ask _how_ and _why_ the vast variety of living things past and present grew and differentiated as they did: whether a Spirit is at work or no: whether the process be intended or motiveless—_then_ the essential quarrel is engaged between those for whom the Universe is blind and those who see it to be the work of God.

That quarrel, which had long been acute in the general field of philosophy, became acute in the particular field of Biology in the late middle of the nineteenth century—over sixty years ago.

Darwin and Wallace and their school belonged to a generation—lived in a place and a time—to which the mysterious action of Will upon the Universe—and, indeed, any mystery—was incomprehensible. Mystery in any form the typical nineteenth-century “Liberal”—as he was called abroad—rejected; and it has been well said that his very politics were founded on the idea that even human life was not mysterious.

We must remember that they had but just escaped—most of their fellow-citizens were still plunged in—the base Puritan superstitions of the seventeenth century. The Vision, the Shrine, the Miracle, the Supernatural in Sacred Place and Thing, they had become too dull to grasp. It was inevitable that such particular rejections of mystery should lead at last to the more general rejection of Divine Action. At the same time they were in reaction against the old Puritan Bibliolatry, which, in their ignorance of Catholic truth, they thought of as “orthodoxy.”

It occurred to them, after doing a great deal of work upon the evidence for transformism—that is, for the change of one living type into another—that the (to them) impossible idea of Design could be eliminated; and it was under the more or less conscious action of a prejudice against Design that they propounded this theory of Natural Selection.

The process of their prejudice against Design moved as follows:

“We must never have recourse to Mind in order to explain the Universe; that would be ‘unscientific’; for to be ‘scientific’ is to allow for nothing but material causes. Therefore the appearance of separate kinds of living beings must come from blind chance, or at least _mechanically_. At all costs we must get rid of the idea of Design; of a desired End conceived and maintained in a Creative Will. Here is a theory which will make the whole process entirely mechanical and dead.” Incidentally, it made it possible to get rid of the necessity for a Creator. It was upon that aspect and use of the theory that the enemies of religion immediately seized, and it is precisely because it is supposed to get rid of God the Creator (and Judge) that some defence for Natural Selection is still being kept up, especially (in part from Patriotism) among Darwin’s fellow-citizens, but also abroad.

Darwin thought (and so did Wallace, who was a man of exactly the same type, belonging to the same generation and surroundings) that since the mysterious action of Will in the Universe was out of tune with his own mood, the evident order and purpose of organic life must be explained in another way, by the action of dead, unintelligent forces.

Whether God could create, did He choose, by the action of blind chance, trained theologians may decide. But it is obvious that if a system of blind chance were demonstrably true, those great modern intellects who say in their hearts “There is No God” have a powerful weapon, in the Theory of Natural Selection. They seized that weapon with gusto; and they are still desperately clinging to the handle though the business part of the instrument has long been battered shapeless by their conquering opponents.

Here I must pause to make an important point. I have said that the motives which made the first theorizers incline to an atheist solution were not consciously atheist. Indeed, it was characteristic of their generation that they could not define their own first principles. Further, they lived at a time when Christian principles were still powerful around them in the Protestant middle classes of England, and probably they honestly desired to combine incompatibles.

I want to make this point quite clear, because it is one upon which there has been a great deal of misunderstanding.

Neither Darwin nor Wallace, nor a host of other lesser known people who were all theorizing in much the same way a lifetime ago, were philosophic atheists after the type of the great Lucretius.[1] They were not of that calibre. None of them could think out a consistent philosophical theory, true or false. Most of them would have told you, in a muddle-headed sort of way, that they reverently believed in a Creator, while actively preaching the crudely mechanical and accidental processes which alone they could grasp.

Footnote 1:

It is more accurate to say of Lucretius that he did not deny the Gods:
only their action on our affairs. But the great Epicurean philosophy
of Antiquity was essentially Atheist, though in a form far nobler than
the vulgar “No Goddism” of yesterday.

But though these men characteristically confused themselves about what they did and did not ultimately believe (or rather feel) in religion—i.e. what their ultimate philosophy really was—any modern reader, especially any reader with the clear intelligence of the Catholic, can see what was running through their emotional brains. The idea of Design was intolerable to them. It was inextricably connected in their minds with what _they_ thought the word “Creation” meant. They had been taught in their childhood that “Creation” meant millions and millions of quite separate, mature, complicated things appearing suddenly, unconnected one with the other: magic full-grown oak trees without acorns to grow from.

To get rid of this folly they took refuge in another, and produced that theory of “Natural Selection” which seemed to them to account for the different types of living beings without having to admit a conscious and permanent Divine Intention. It seemed to them to solve, in a simple fashion any child could understand, the awful and ancient riddle which has perplexed Europe for certainly three thousand years, and perhaps much more. To the question, “How did differentiation among living organisms come to be”? they thought they had got the answer on what was virtually an atheist basis—a getting rid of intelligence from the Universe. They would not admit a Divine Plan of the oak tree and an inherent power, tending towards that end, implanted in the acorn. They called a profound view of this sort “mysticism,” using that word as a term of abuse—and using it, of course, in a totally wrong meaning. No, they would get their oak and elm out of some general parent tree without an Idea being at work, without Fiat, without an underlying Spirit.

So they propounded the theory of Natural Selection.

The theory of Natural Selection was this:

No living thing can possibly be _exactly_ like its parent: for every organism is individual. The difference may be very slight, but it is always present.

Now, it is also obviously true, from experience, that the conditions under which organic beings live—what is called their environment, i.e. their surroundings—change unceasingly. That again is necessarily true if the material Universe be, as it is, under the condition of Motion. These surroundings are perpetually changing slightly; sometimes they change suddenly and catastrophically, as, for instance, when there is a flood.

Now, some particular change—as, for instance, the climate getting gradually colder or wetter or dryer—will suit some particular small variation apparent in a certain proportion of any given set of organic beings. For instance, out of a million sheep-like animals, ten thousand must in different degrees have very slightly woollier coats than the common run, and, if the climate is slowly getting colder, this minority of woollier sheep are better suited to the change.

All organisms die; but those better suited to a particular surrounding condition have a greater chance of survival than those less suited. (This dreadfully self-evident truth was solemnly set down in an academic formula: it was called “Survival of the Fittest,” or, more clumsily, “Survival of the Fitter”!) Bit by bit, therefore, through the mechanical process of the slightly less fit specimens dying off more rapidly, and leaving presumably less progeny, while a small number of slightly more fit lived longer and presumably left more progeny inheriting their advantages, the type of animal could be, and was, by the blind action of matter and with no necessity for its own or any other will, and with no design in the process at all, adapted to the changing condition. Since conditions are always changing, organic types (i.e. living things, vegetable and animal) were perpetually conforming to their environment by this process of “Survival of the Fittest,” wherein a _mechanical_ process _inevitably_ and _blindly_ picked out—_selected_—(whence the term “Natural Selection”) those who were to survive and form a new type. In this fashion all organic things came to be what they are at any particular moment _and also to change perpetually into new things_.

This doctrine of Natural Selection was thus made to explain the diversity and the unity of the living world.

Let us see how some simple organism, living on the tidal belt of the sea-shore (between high and low water-mark), and able both to exist in the air and under water will, according to the doctrine of Natural Selection, differentiate out and produce a land animal. Out of a million of these organisms there are, perhaps, ten thousand in which you can discover some slight superiority, present in varying degrees among them, for standing a long dry spell. There are another ten thousand who show in varying degrees some tiny, almost imperceptible, superiority of standing a long spell without air under water. Raising of the land or the set of winds gives a season of abnormally low high tides. The animals just on the upper edge of the tidal belt die out for lack of their regular tidal supply of water, except some few who can, having the slight differential advantage apparent among them, stand the strain of living so long in the air. The progeny of these, again, will tend to survive according to the degree in which they can stand the lack of water about them. The less fit for air-life are gradually sifted out by this natural process; the more fit for air-life survive.

There is the theory of “Natural Selection” in its broadest outline. It was excellently adapted to the generation for which it was produced. It looked as simple as the old theory of Free Trade did in economics, or the old theory of Universal Suffrage in politics, or any other of the old crude mechanical conceptions born of the denial of mystery. It accounted for everything straightforwardly and at a blow. If you used its loose phraseology repeatedly, without ever gripping the full implication of the terms, without the capacity for holding a theory down hard and examining it closely, it seemed perfectly sufficient—and the old riddle was solved.

“Natural Selection,” “the Survival of the Fittest,” the very gradual and quite blind, purposeless, undesigned forcing of the living organism into correspondence with its material environment, the formation of the living thing by the pressure of the nonliving—of death—was sufficiently proved. All the old ideas of Design, the looking for mysterious forces at work in the world, and for a Mind behind it all in order to explain the suitability of each organ to its function, could be scrapped. There was no creative God required. Those who wanted to be rid of Him could (and did) say that men had only imagined such a Being from an ignorant projection of themselves on to the Universe. It was not life that transformed itself to meet and master matter, but (as Delage admirably put it in his refutation of Darwinism) matter which, through death, ordered life.

Such was the theory of Natural Selection.

Now, as we are about to examine why this theory of Natural Selection is untenable, and to discover why it burst after so very short a fashionable run, we must, by way of preliminary, clearly understand its implications. We must understand—what its original promoters did not—the things which, whether you know it or not, you are accepting when you accept Natural Selection. After that we can understand the arguments which have destroyed it.

Put as I have just put it, and as it used to be put in all the old-fashioned textbooks of Mr. Wells’s youth, it sounds not only simple, but convincing It is when one looks into what it implies that the old Darwinian theory of Natural Selection gets shaky.

THE IMPLICATIONS OF NATURAL SELECTION

(1) In the first place, note that, according to this theory, _there can be no stable type; there can be no fixity of species_. All is in flux. Environment is never exactly the same, even for two days at a time, let alone for two successive thousand years. Very long slow changes in climate, or any other factor of environment, would necessarily involve long, unceasing, slight transformation, never halting. The theory _necessarily_ demands a living world in a state of slow but _incessant_ transformation, with no fixed mature results at the end of development.

It is only by the loosest sort of thinking, and by substituting imagination for close reasoning, that the ideas of Natural Selection and permanent stable types can be reconciled.

Thus some have said that the Seal was “sifted out” by Natural Selection, got more and more suited to its habitat by “survival of the fittest,” until it had no further need for adaptation: it was at last perfectly adapted to the purposes of its life.

Well, one of the most pressing needs of the seal under the conditions of its life is to scramble on to the icefloes in order to escape from its most deadly enemy. It does so most clumsily and ineffectually by the help of its flappers. For countless generations Natural Selection has had time to work if it were capable of bettering that state of affairs by producing flappers more serviceable. It has not done so. Why? Not because the seal is “in equilibrium,” but because, however it may have evolved, it is now a fixed type: mature: it is what is and can now no longer change its fundamental structure.

It is true that Darwin and others talk vaguely of the process “reaching equilibrium,” but that, according to his own theory, is a contradiction in terms. Under Natural Selection there can be none such.

Darwin, Wallace, and the rest did not think clearly enough to see that this was so, but so it is. If a hare runs fast because it has developed its speed through an immense series of faster and faster hares who “survived” because their speed made them “fitter” to escape enemies, then the process demands that the speed shall continually increase. Your hare of 1925 that can cover the measured mile in three and a half must develop into your hare of A.D. 20,000 who can cover it in three: for there is no doubt whatsoever that an increase of speed has survival value. And he must be developing all the time. There is no escape from that conclusion, if the theory of Natural Selection held water: which it doesn’t.

That is the first necessary result of Natural Selection. If the theory of Natural Selection is true there are not now, and cannot have been in the past, _fixed types_ recognizable by marked and permanent characters.

(2) Next, observe that the theory of Natural Selection also demands a _regular_ progression, and _a very slow one_. It involves, for instance, the development of a land animal out of a water animal by an immense accumulation of exceedingly slight differences in each generation, favourable to a water animal’s longer and longer bouts of staying out of water. These exceedingly slight differences in each generation are presupposed to be only such as we always observe between parent and child. Darwinian Natural Selection as a prime cause can admit no rapid, startling changes.

For it presupposes a purely blind, unintentional, “sieve-like” action, not merely as killing off the unfit—which is obvious—but as producing gradually increasing fitness, with no inherent power in the organism for adaptation. According to Darwinian Natural Selection, what works the change is a vast number of successive tiny differences such as always appear between parent and progeny.

To turn out, for instance, the white bear of the Arctic from the general undifferentiated type of subfusc beardom you must have hardly perceptible steps beginning with the slightly lighter hue of a few bears, and proceeding gradually for æons and æons until only the pure white survived (though however one could get at _pure_ white by such a process it would have puzzled them to say!)

Natural Selection, then, imperatively demands for each species a slow ascension, a regular, inclined plane, produced over a prodigious space of time, in which the animal is getting whiter and whiter, or fleeter and fleeter, or what not, by infinitesimal degrees.

The theory of Natural Selection necessitates the presence, in all fossils, and even during any considerable historical period, of increasing progressive slight differences in type.

It is no good saying that Natural Selection might apply to new highly suitable variations coming at exactly the right moment to benefit the animal. Such variations indicate Design of some sort and Will. If the climate gets colder and very woolly types of an animal immediately begin to appear, that is not Natural Selection; that is a startling but obvious adaptation, due to some other cause, of organism to environment. It is the very negation of a blind, causeless, undefined, unwilled process which the theory of Natural Selection was intended to bolster up.

(3) Again, Natural Selection implies advance by the killing off of the organism not possessed of a specific advantage. How is it then that organisms not possessed of the advantage survive—as they certainly do—side by side with the advantaged and in the same environment? The Elephant’s trunk grew longer because the short-trunkites were killed off. What of the Tapir?

(4) Again, Natural Selection cannot allow itself to be ousted by any rival aid to development.

This is a very important point. The whole point of Natural Selection as the explanation of the difference between living beings is that it is mechanical. The moment you have to prop it up by saying “Animals with similar variations will tend to mate one with the other,” or “Striking change in environment will tend to produce corresponding variations,” you are abandoning Natural Selection, and covering up your retreat with mere verbiage. Why “tend”?

The theory of Natural Selection is a jealous god and it will admit no rival, nor even any support. You must make it your mainstay or give it up: for the whole point of it is that it permits you, if you will, to eliminate Will and Mind from the Universe. The moment you have to prop it up with some theory involving Will and Mind the essence of it disappears. Therefore does Weissmann, the most famous of its later defenders, ascribe to it “All-might” (to make a barbaric translation of his term) and desperately add that we “must” accept Natural Selection because the only alternative is design—that is God; the Inadmissible: the Dogmatically Denied.

Suppose a man to say, “No one threw that stone: it hit my window by the force of gravity.” Another then points out that a stone, merely falling, would have gone past the window, and that the stone, from the course it took, striking the window, must have been thrown by someone to take the glass at the angle it did. To this the man replies: “Well, yes, perhaps; but gravity influenced its course.” Clearly he has abandoned his case. He was arguing that the stone merely fell: that no Will or Design caused it to take the path it did. When he admits a thrower of the stone and merely brings in gravity as affecting the course of the stone he abandons his position altogether.

That is exactly parallel to the old-fashioned advocate of Natural Selection who reluctantly admits, on modern evidence—and mainly through the work of De Vries—great and rapid changes adapting animals to a new environment, but adds, “Anyhow, those that _don’t_ change will be killed off.” Of course they will! But that isn’t the point. The point is that the killing off of the unfit is proved _not_ to be the _agent_ of change. The climate gets colder. Much thicker fleeces begin to appear. Such animals as don’t show the new thick fleeces begin to die out. Obviously!—But that doesn’t explain why the thicker fleeces began to appear. If you admit Mutation (the name for rapid change) or Saltatory Evolution (Evolution by jumps) poor old Natural Selection goes by the board.

In the same way Natural Selection does not mean that, upon a change of environment, things unsuitable to the new condition tend to disappear. Of course they do.

If there is a flood, fishes survive, cattle are drowned. The fishes are fitter to survive the flood than the cattle. And if the flood lasted long enough, there would at the end of it be plenty of fish and no cattle. But to talk of that as “Natural Selection” is to use the same word in two different senses.

The theory of Natural Selection as the _agent_ of Evolution does not mean that floods drown cattle and don’t drown fish. We all know that. The theory means that successive floods turn cattle into fish—and that is a very different proposition!

The theory of Natural Selection does not mean that things die out when they cannot live; if it only meant that it would not be worth stating. It means that the chance of survival, through exceedingly small and inevitable slight differences between Parent and offspring, is the great cause producing the marvels in adaption and beauty and special action in a million forms which make up the life of this world. Its chief use has been to back up the denial of God, and now it has broken down the opponents of Design in the Universe must seek for a new reply.

They are still seeking it.

(5) Next note that the theory of Natural Selection implies a _continual accumulation of fresh advantages_; although for this there is no sort of necessity and, on a theory of blind chance, no possibility of such a thing. It is a mere gratuitous assumption with no reason behind it and all actual experiment against it. This is the point which Morgan (Professor of Experimental Zoology at Columbia University) so powerfully emphasizes in his critique of the Theory of Evolution which came out just after the war.

To apply the theory to that simple case of the animal on the tidal beach. Those with minute advantages over the average in the way of standing slightly longer immersion have survival-value over those who are only on or below the average. But why—by the mere blind selection of death—should the advantage _accumulate_ from generation to generation? Why should _new_ advantageous exceptions, each better than the last, appear in unbroken succession generation after generation?

(6) Lastly, there is the exceedingly important, the essential, point that, according to the theory of Natural Selection, _each slight successive change in the whole series must give its possessor a survival-value_. Not only must a fully formed flapper be an advantage (to a whale) over a leg, by the time it has become aquatic, but a half-formed flapper must be an advantage to the whale while it still uses the land. Clearly it was nothing of the kind. If transformism be true (which is not certain) then Design explains the leg into a flapper in spite of the intermediate disadvantages. If there is Design behind the transformation, if there is special protection for the heavily handicapped intermediate form, one can understand the possibility of it. Under Natural Selection it is impossible.

So much for the Implications of the Theory. I hope I have put them as clearly as may be, and accurately; not a very hard task, for it was an extremely crude and simple theory during its short life, and could be grasped (and refuted) by anyone.

Let me summarize these Implications.

(1) First, _Change must be continual and types must be always in a state of flux_. Stability of Type and Natural Selection form a contradiction in terms. You can have one or the other—but you cannot have both.

(2) Second, _Natural Selection inevitably implies that, on searching the records of Evolution, we shall find only gradual change_, proceeding continually, so that the ascending organisms follow, as it were, regular inclined planes showing no steps. The whole of Evolution should, under Natural Selection, prove to be of this kind. Thus you would have, say, tigers as they are now, gradually developing out of some tiger-like ancestor in the past by a regular and uninterrupted process, never achieving a fixed type but perpetually changing as time went on; and that perpetual change would be still going on to-day. The world about us would not show (as it does) a vast number of strongly separate types but a confused jumble of forms all melting one into the other.

(3) _Third_, Natural Selection presupposes Evolution through the killing off of individuals lacking certain advantages, _how then do other types continue still to be with us in spite of lacking these advantages?_

(4) Fourth, _Natural Selection must stand or fall of itself_. If you try to prop it up with Will or Design, inherent in the organism, or acting in any other fashion, you destroy its whole thesis. If you say, for instance, “the country becoming dryer, animals which _adapted themselves_ to the new conditions survived, and those that could not adapt themselves died out,” that is no example of Natural Selection _as an agent of Evolution_. For when you say “_Animals which adapted themselves_ to the new conditions,” you are presupposing some inherent power in the animal to adapt itself: you are presupposing a form of Will and Design, and thereby denying the purely mechanical action, the unintelligent “sieve,” of Natural Selection as an agent.

(5) Fifth, _Natural Selection presupposes, quite gratuitously, that new survival values will be perpetually and progressively appearing_. That sheep woollier than the average of a flock have survival value as the winters get colder is obvious: too obvious to need stating. But why should the next generation, under mere chance, produce a number of new still woollier variations, and the one after that yet another even woollier set; and so on indefinitely?

(6) Sixth, _Natural Selection presupposes that in every stage of the slow process of development by infinitesimal differences_, each _successive difference is more advantageous than the last and has a special survival value_.

A bird with fully formed wings has a survival value through being able to fly away from land enemies. But if it evolved from a reptile by Natural Selection, then each stage between the useful Reptilian fore-leg and the useful wing must have had a special advantage over the stage immediately preceding it. There must have been an advantage in the fore-leg getting stumpy, then in its getting stumpier, then its getting so stumpy that the beast couldn’t use it at all. And this must be true of every change in all the millions of tiny evolutionary changes proceeding through æons of time. All the way along, from the first signs of something which _later on_ will be an advantage to the mature type, through myriads of generations, from the first origins when the organ was as yet rudimentary to the last when it was perfected, every step must have had a survival value over the last. And this must apply not only to broad cases, such as the reptile’s fore-leg turning into the bird’s wing, but to every one of innumerable organs and to every part of each organ. Otherwise the theory breaks down.

The implications then of Natural Selection as the blind agent of development, “give one furiously to think.” Merely stated roughly as I have done here, they shake the ordinary man’s confidence in it. But when we come to ordered proofs against it, we shall find those proofs conclusive.

To these I now turn.

THE ARGUMENTS AGAINST NATURAL SELECTION

When one has to examine any proposition and see whether it be true or no, two radically distinct forms of reasoning present themselves to the mind.

(A) You may find the thing asserted to be in itself impossible, granted certain self-evident principles of thought. For instance, a man who died on the 16th of the month cannot have died of poison taken on the 20th of the month. Or again, the sum of certain payments cannot be less than some one of those payments. This method is called the _a priori_ method.

(B) The other approach made by reason to see whether a theory is true or false is the experimental one, that of positive evidence. You test, by the positive evidence at your disposal, whether the thing affirmed has really taken place or not. Sometimes the first of these methods is conclusive, in which case one has no reason to go any further. Sometimes, and more usually, the second is conclusive, and there is no opportunity or occasion to apply the first. For instance, if we are told that John Jones forged the will of a man who was born after John Jones’s death we know _a priori_ that the story is nonsense. But if John Jones is said to have forged the will of a man who died while John Jones was still alive, then we must go into the evidence of handwriting and all the rest of it.

The reason that people rightly and necessarily supplement _a priori_ reason in practical affairs by the experimental method is that _a priori_ conclusions depend for their value on the rigid certitude of their premises. E.g. a man who died on the 16th cannot have died of poison bought on the 20th. But are we sure that the 16th is really the date of his death? To test that we require actual evidence.

One can conclude absolutely against a false theory by either of these two methods of reasoning. But when they concur, when you find the theory to be false both _a priori_ and from the available evidence as well, then certitude could not be more certain: the combination of both methods of proof is overwhelming.

Now we shall see that this is exactly what happens in the case of this false theory of Evolution called Natural Selection. There are four crushing _a priori_ arguments disposing of it, and, after that, there is overwhelming positive evidence against it, of which the main divisions are three in number.

The four conclusive _a priori_ arguments are these:—

(1) Variations in nearly every case must continue to accumulate. Variations more and more advantageous must appear successively, Generation after Generation. This is not logically essential in every conceivable case, e.g. particoloured animals could grow whiter against snow. But in the vast majority of cases such accumulation is essential: e.g. to produce a taller type or to produce horns or to lengthen a tail.

Now the chances of such a regular series appearing by accident even in one case, let alone in millions, clearly approximate to zero.

(2) The advantageous differences making for survival are not of one kind in any particular case, but of an indefinitely large number (e.g. climate getting colder needs not only warmer coat, but power to digest new food, protective colouring so as not to show dark against snow, etc. An indefinitely large number of qualities). Now the chance of _all_ being combined (and co-ordinated) in a single individual, _without design, accidentally_—let alone of their thus appearing in many individuals _accidentally and without design_—approximates to zero. On the same line of reasoning the chances of co-ordination between all the vastly numerous parts of one complex creature by accident approximate to zero.

(3) The chances of _each_ very slight change being an advantageous one over the last in a series indefinitely prolonged of myriads or millions approximate to zero.

(4) Where more than one specially favoured progenitor is necessary to the production of an organism (e.g. among mammals, two, a male and female: with many plants three, a male and female and an insect go-between) the chance combination of such favoured progenitors _accidentally and without design_ diminishes with each generation in geometrical ratio and rapidly approximates to zero.

The decisive character of these _a priori_ arithmetical arguments will appear later.

Now for the arguments from evidence.

The arguments from evidence against Natural Selection come under three main heads:—

(1) Within humanly recorded historical experience no trace of such permanent progressive action is observable. There is no doubt of individual differences; there is also plenty of proof of slight changes swinging round the normal. There is manifest to every one differentiation of type: Negroes and Mongols among men for instance. But the main types are fixed. Negro and Mongol are both men. Man and other mature types are, within historical record, fixed. They are not on their way to becoming something else.

It is true that humanly recorded historical experience covers but a very brief fraction of the total time allowed for even the shortest estimates of the past of this world. None the less, it is sufficient to prove that types once achieved are permanent. Call it five thousand years (perhaps man-made prehistoric pictures may extend that limit), even that short period is enough to prove the existence of stable types. For if during five million years some animal form existing at the moment has been forever slowly changing by a process such that its present apparent fixity is an illusion, and is still proceeding to further slow changes indefinitely, then five thousand years ought to show a perceptible fraction of the movement; only a thousandth of it, no doubt, but one in a thousand is measurable: tiny, but measurable. Yet no fundamental change, still less any progressive change, is apparent. During all the _historical_ epoch fixity of type is invariable.

(2) The geological record, so far from showing types perpetually in a state of flux, presents us with Fixed Types and Nothing but Fixed Types. A Fixed Type does not mean a Type which had no other Type for its ancestors; nor one which never passed through immature stages before reaching maturity. Nor does it mean a type without collaterals. It means a type which, when mature, is repeated indefinitely.

(3) The geological record does not as a fact show gradually progressive change by imperceptible degrees like an inclined plane, but on the contrary, a series of leaps, like a number of steps.

There, in brief summary, is a table of the main arguments which have undermined the old theory of Natural Selection.

I will now take them one by one:

(1) The first _a priori_ argument against Natural Selection, that it presupposes quite arbitrarily that variations will accumulate, I have already dealt with.

(2) _The second_ a priori _argument against Natural Selection_:

_Natural Selection involves accidental survival-value not in one single feature but in many complex co-ordinated features all simultaneous and yet accidental. This without Design is mathematically impossible._

Natural Selection is usually spoken of by those who still put it forward for popular consumption in terms of _one_ advantageous difference: for instance, slightly greater speed, slightly better protective colouring, etc. This escape from the difficulty is duly repeated here by Mr. Wells. He gives us, as an example of the way in which Natural Selection would work, the climate becoming more snowy and, of a number of whity-brown animals, the whiter tending to survive in each generation, and the quality of whiteness tending, therefore, to increase. No better instance could be found of the way in which this book merely follows (and repeats) the mistakes of a generation ago. For that instance of the whity-brown animal is the regular old tag which always cropped up whenever this theory of Natural Selection was advanced.

It should surely have been evident, even to the originators of the idea (as it is now at last evident to everybody worth counting), that what you need in order to adapt (_a._) an animal to new circumstances, (_b._) any developing function of a particular species, (_c._) the development of many co-ordinated functions within one organism, is not one simple advantage, but _an indefinitely large number of advantages, all of which have to be co-ordinated if survival-value is to be obtained_.

When the climate gets colder, there will probably be more snow. But this is not the only thing that will happen. There will also be a change in the methods of progression over the surface of the earth. Paws advantageous for speed when there was no frost or snow may be disadvantageous when there is. There will also be a change in the things present for an animal to eat; many of the grasses and fruits present in the warmer time will presumably disappear and others better suited to the new, cold climate will increase. Again, a change of this kind does not take place in isolated fashion; it will be accompanied perhaps by longer nights in winter; probably by more cloudy skies, and by sudden floods in spring, and so on. Change of environment will nearly always mean not one, but a very great number of concomitant changes.

Change, then, in environment is always complex. But the organism which has to meet it is also complex, only because it _is_ an organism. Every living organism is highly complex. It is its very complexity, that is, the vast number of its parts and the mysterious co-ordination between them, which makes it a living organism, and distinguishes it from dead matter. Even the simplest organic cell is chemically of a highly complex nature, and its principle of continuity is so different from a simple mechanical process that no one has ever been able to lay down a formula for it. In plain words, the very nature of a living organism escapes us on account of its complexity.

Here, then, you have a complex organism, consisting of an indefinitely large number of parts, all of which must be co-ordinated to the changed environment; and you have also an environment which, when it changes, changes not in one, but in a very large number of respects.