Chapter II: Mr. Wells and the Creation of the World (2)

Now observe the inevitable, mathematical necessity of this relation. The environment changes not in one respect, or fifty, or a hundred, or a thousand, but in as many as you like to catalogue. The living animal consists not in one function, or a hundred, or a thousand, but in as many more as you care to examine. To every change of climate, or what not, there are an indefinitely large number of consequences. The organism has to be adapted to meet _all_ the changes. But that living thing also must, in order to have a special survival-value, discover, somehow, a corresponding change in all its own innumerable functions. When such and such a proportion of the organisms shows _one_ particular slight advantage for meeting _one_ aspect of the change, such an advantage helps this favoured proportion, _in that point only_, to survive. But, in order to have special survival-value, the organism must also show advantages in every other respect. The chance of _all_ these advantages coinciding in any one organism and _accidentally_ corresponding to the very numerous changes in environment, is mathematically indistinguishable from zero. The animals with whiter coats than the average are not (if the matter be left to chance) the same as those with paws slightly better suited for snow than the average; nor are either of these the same as those with slight survival advantage over the average in digesting changed food—and so on with any number of conditions. Left to chance the combination could not arise. Yet it does arise.

It is equally true that the adaptations of function to function within each organism are vast in number and could never have arisen from blind accident.

This is the unanswerable point brought out half a lifetime ago and increasingly emphasized ever since.

Wolff put it admirably in his attack on Darwinism as early as 1898: “One might possibly imagine the adaptation between one muscle cell and one nerve-end, through Selection among innumerable chance-made variations, but that such shall take place in a 1000 cases in one organism is inconceivable.” And another great biologist has well said: “What is the survival value of horns without the structure to support them and muscles to use them?” Strange that Mr. Wells should never have heard of all this!

Animals _are_ adapted, we know. They _do_ co-ordinate an indefinitely large number of internal conditions to meet a whole complicated bundle of external conditions. They also have a myriad adaptions within themselves necessary to their existence as organisms quite apart from external change. But this could not possibly happen from blind chance. The mathematical chances are millions and millions to one against the possibility of such a thing. Grant Design moulding all nature—that is, God,—and this process is explicable. Grant even an inherent power possessed by the living thing to attempt its own adaptation, and the process is explicable. Leave it to the mechanical explanation of Natural Selection, and it is impossible.

(3) _The third_ a priori _proof against Natural Selection_:

_Natural Selection presupposes that each new infinitesimal stage in development out of millions in each type, is, by blind chance, an advantage over the last. This is mathematically impossible._

This third _a priori_ proof that Natural Selection is a false theory lies in the simple consideration that it demands _each stage_ in millions of stages in millions of types to show a survival-value. The chances against this being possible are many, many more millions than the number of stages multiplied by the number of types. The chance of a penny coming down heads a hundred times in succession is vastly less than one in a hundred; and when it comes to myriads of times, the chance is approximately zero. The chance of a hundred pennies chucked by a hundred men in unison doing this is far less. In other words, it can’t happen by chance.

Let me return to the case of the bird. A bird has wings with which it can escape its enemies. If it began as a reptile without wings—when, presumably, it had armour or some other aid to survival—what of the interval? Natural Selection sets out to explain _how_ the evolutionary process changes a reptile’s leg into a bird’s wing. It does so by making the leg less and less of a leg for countless ages.

By the very nature of the theory _each stage_ in all these millions is an advantage over the last towards survival! The thing has only to be stated for its absurdity to appear. Compare the “get away” chances of a lizard at one end of the process or a sparrow at the other with some poor beast that had to try and skurry off on half-wings! or to fly with half-legs! The change took place?—No doubt. Some of our greatest Biologists say it didn’t and couldn’t. Most say it did. The hypothesis has much in its favour. But the change could not possibly have taken place by successive advantages any more than the turning of an egg into a full-grown hen takes place by successive survivals, or of a chrysalis into a moth.

Postulate a Design, say “Here was something in the making,” and the process is explicable, especially if fairly rapid so as to bridge over the dangerously weak stages of imperfection. Postulate Natural Selection, and it is manifestly impossible. Now Natural Selection wants that to happen not only with every kind of bird, but with every kind of living creature.

(4) _The fourth_ a priori _argument against Natural Selection_:

When two or more progenital agents are required, _Natural Selection, acting by blind chance alone, loses effect in geometrical proportion with each generation._

This argument is rather more difficult to follow than the first two, but it is worth understanding, because it is particularly strong, and because it was among the first rude blows against the Darwinian theory. Nägeli brought it out with crushing force as long ago as 1884—it is a commonplace with everyone—except Mr. Wells, who imagines (a great compliment!) that I made it up.

Where two or more progenitors are necessary, rare accidental advantages rapidly disappear in a few generations _if the process be left to chance_, as Natural Selection demands.

Suppose two progenitors required—as is the case with all animals—there are, of course, many cases in which the total number of factors necessary for the production of progeny is more than two and the argument far stronger, e.g. the pollen of one flower, the pistil of another flower, and the insect which acts as go-between. Take any proportion you like of slightly favoured specimens. Suppose out of a hundred individual males ten show in varying degrees the slight differentiation which gives them a survival-value under changing conditions of environment. It will not be anything like ten out of a hundred, and we have already seen that a _single_ advantage is useless. But we can afford to give this nonsense every advantage in argument, so we will consider only _one_ clear advantage and allow one-tenth of the males to have it. Now, suppose a similar number of females showing in varying degrees this slight valuable differentiation. _Upon the mechanical theory of Natural Selection_, the chances in favour of progeny inheriting that differentiation in the next generation are not one-tenth, but only one-tenth of one-tenth, i.e. one-hundredth. The chances of favoured progeny in the third generation are not one-hundredth, but one in ten thousand. In the fourth, the chances are already only one in a hundred million—which we may call zero.

The reason is clear. Here are a hundred male land birds compelled by change of environment to take to the water. Ten of them show an infinitesimal rudimentary webbing between the toes of their feet, and that is a first infinitesimal advantage in swimming. Ten hens are of the same kind. _Left to mere chance_ there is no reason why a season’s mating should allocate the web-footed male to the web-footed female. Each one of the ten males has nine chances to one of paring with a non-advantaged mate, and only one chance of mating with a hen similar to himself and possessing, as he does, this infinitesimal advantageous differentiation. On the average you would have only one couple in each hundred handing on in full even that first tiny advantage to their progeny with a corresponding tiny survival-value. In the case of eighteen others it would be halved, and in the case of a hundred and eighty-one, it would be absent. It is so with each generation. Each little infinitesimal advantage can only be _fully_ handed on to a fraction which is the square of the last, and in even _diminished_ form to a fraction smaller in proportion to the flock in the third generation than in the second. Long before you got anything like an even rudimentary webbed foot the tiny advantage would have been absorbed. The advantage, left to chance, sinks into the common stock.

There is no getting away from this conclusion by saying, “Oh! we’re not talking of individuals, we’re talking of great masses.” The masses are made up of individuals, and the mathematical argument is exactly the same whether you are dealing with a hundred or ten million.

These four _a priori_ arguments against the theory of Natural Selection as the agent of differentiation in species are as conclusive as arithmetic can make them, and there is really no need for any others—though many others have been urged—e.g. the mathematical chances against one special advantageous variation appearing by pure accident at exactly the time it was needed.

But, as I have said, apart from these _a priori_ and sufficient arguments, there are conclusive arguments drawn from actual evidence, and all this evidence is in favour of this _Fixed Type_. A fixed type would be an impossibility under Natural Selection: it goes with a Creator and with Design; and certainly it is true of the real world.

Natural Selection, if it had been the agent of Evolution, would have prevented the formation of fixed types.

In the old materialist days when Natural Selection was triumphing, its supporters used to say, as we have seen, that it acted “until equilibrium was reached by the organism conforming to its environment.” That was typical of their hiding the weakness of their case under vague phrases which, closely analysed, proved self-contradictory.

_If Natural Selection be the Agent of Evolution stability can_ never _be reached_. There is always some slight proportion of beings rather more suited to survive than the mass of its fellows, and that fact should cause a perpetual change rendering stability impossible.

A water-mammal has not “reached stability” when it can stay under water ten minutes, or an hour, or two hours. According to Natural Selection, it ought to progress unceasingly to longer and longer capacities of submersion. A swallow has not “reached stability” by Natural Selection when it flies sixty miles an hour; it ought to fly faster and faster with the process of time. It may well have reached stability in the sense that it is suited to its lot and makes no further effort. It may well have reached stability in the sense that its end has been achieved, its design completed. But if it got its fast flight only because a slightly faster minority of swallows always outlive and outbreed their slower rivals, by an assumed perpetual accumulation of little additions of speed, why should the process stop at the bird’s present capacity? Of course the series is a diminishing one. Each increment of speed is at a higher cost than the last. But no fast-flying bird has nearly reached a theoretical limit of speed—nor shows any tendency to reach it. Granted Design then an End,—a Fixed Type—a Normal to which individuals are planned and to which freak types tend to return—is explicable. Those who cannot bear the idea of Design, that is of a Creator implanting inherent powers, must try to invent some new theory which will allow of Fixed Types without Design. But if Fixed Types exist they cannot be due to Natural Selection, for Natural Selection and Fixed Types are contradictory terms.

If Natural Selection be true, then what we call a pig is but a fleeting vision; all the past he has been becoming a pig, and all the future he will spend evolving out of pigdom, and pig is but a moment’s phase in the eternal flux, while, all around us should be quarter-pigs, half-pigs, near-pigs, all-but-pigs, slightly super-pigs, just beginning—and so on. But there aren’t. There are just pigs. In other words, the evidence is all in favour of Fixed Types and all against a ceaseless process of change.

(1) We have the evidence of our senses that we are surrounded by Fixed Types, and are Fixed Types ourselves. We have all about us species, including man, which remain distinct species during all our experience and as far back as historical record can carry us.

(2) If that were not sufficient we have Fixed Types, and nothing but Fixed Types, in thousands and thousands (and continuing for what seem to be immense stretches of time) in the geological record.

(3) That same geological record shows us, not a gradual turning of one type into another, not a gradual ascent like an inclined plane—which Natural Selection would demand—but a series of steps with _sharp_ divisions between.

These three arguments from experience are conclusive.

1. _The First Argument from Evidence against Natural Selection:_

_The Fixed Type is apparent in all recorded human experience._

This is the argument based on human experience during the period of humanly recorded History, of which argument not nearly enough has been made.

For certainly 5000 years of this record types are fixed. That is not to say that maturity is not reached by growth, nor is it to say that a type cannot disappear. But it _is_ an affirmation that the conceptions of ceaseless flux, of the absence of form, of no maturity in characteristics and nature, are baseless. As, indeed, the mere evidence of our senses and of common sense acting on that evidence, must convince anyone who prefers reality to print. Tell the plain man that there is no such thing as a fox or a salmon or a human being, and he will laugh in your face. And he will be quite right.

We are told that the 5000 years or so of recorded History (if we count prehistoric relics the period is probably longer) are so brief that they are a mere flash, and that we cannot observe in that tiny section of an immensely long period the slight process of change over which Natural Selection has been at work. We are under the illusion that types are fixed because the few thousand years over which we can compare them are as nothing compared with the whole period of development. Types only _seem_ fixed to us in the same way as a revolving wheel _seems_ at rest when discovered by a flash of lightning: the period of vision is too brief for the motion to be appreciated.

But people who talk like that have not made the very simple calculation of dividing the total period of a particular development by the few thousand years over which our direct experience stretches.

Take, for instance, the theory of Natural Selection as applied to ourselves. We know that over all these 5000 years the human body has not progressively changed. There have been various sorts of men, of course, and variations also round the normal. But the norm is set. Now even those who have indulged in the wildest guesswork to allow for development do not give true man more than 50,000 years.[2] Now, one-tenth is a very sufficient fraction by which to measure any movement. If so highly differentiated and co-ordinated an organism as man has been subject to unceasing slow transformation during 50,000 years, and will go on changing slowly through the next 50,000, then certainly in one-tenth of that period some considerable change should be marked. None is so marked. Man, throughout those 5000 years, at least, is a certainly Fixed Type, as his own records and portraiture show.

Footnote 2:

Not to burden the text, I give in this footnote a few of the main
guesses. Sollas 15,000 from the beginning of the Magdalenian.
Waldmeyer 15,000 to 20,000 for true man. Boulay 10,000. Mainage (a
very high authority) 15,000 from the Chellean. Holst, less than 7,000.

2. _The Second Argument from Evidence:_

_Geological record is entirely in favour of Fixed Types._

The geological record also shows us nothing but Fixed Types. Each _may_ have come by a transition more or less rapid out of some other—but at any rate fixed they are, and the longer the time demanded by the modern geologist for his periods, the longer the Fixed Type can be proved to exist. Some few survive to-day from the very early days of life on this earth. It was hoped, when the theory of Natural Selection was first broached, that evidence would appear for continuous change. None has so appeared. On the contrary, the more fossil evidence we acquire the more definitely does it appear that the Fixed Type is the normal—indeed the only—recorded thing. Of connected transitional changes (perhaps because they were too rapid to affect the fragmentary record of the rocks) _none_ has been discovered. There are plenty of intermediary forms: there is not one connected series of changing forms passing one into the other.

All this evidence is no argument against transition. But it is damning evidence against the (a) very slow, (b) infinitesimally graduated, (c) continuous and unceasing transition or flux which Darwinian Natural Selection demands.

3. _The Third Argument from Evidence:_

_The geological record shows not a gradual unceasing development such as Natural Selection demands, but sharp steps._

If Darwinian Natural Selection were the means by which simple ascended to complex forms, this ascent would necessarily have been a regular, very slow and uninterrupted process, continually at work.

The lines of ascent would have appeared in the geological record as so many inclined planes. They appear, in point of fact, as so many steps—each composed of very, very long flats separated, each from the one below, by a clean gap or break.

This character in the geological record does not get weaker as we come to know more and more of that record. On the contrary, it becomes increasingly emphasized.

There is evidence suggesting development of one type from another, but no evidence at all for the extremely gradual and continuous change of one type into another. On the contrary, each step noted in the process is a Fixed Type. What proportion the (presumably) rapid periods of transition and change may have borne to the immensely long periods of stable type, we cannot tell; but we do know that stable type is the rule, and that the process of change from one type into another must, compared with the long periods of fixity, have been the brief exception.

Yet, in the face of evidence so considerable and so widely known, the talk of Natural Selection still survives in these popular manuals. As Dwight (Professor of Anatomy at Harvard) very well put it fifteen years ago, “Just at the time when the uneducated are prating about the triumph of Darwinism it is fast losing caste among men of Science.”

But if it be asked why so patently false a theory was so tenaciously defended for some years by serious authorities—is still defended by a diminishing few—the answer is that the defenders of Natural Selection were so preoccupied with a totally different discussion (to wit, the defence of Evolution in general) that they confounded the two.

In England and North America, more than anywhere else, there were many people a lifetime ago who, from some inherited superstition, did not want to admit the idea of growth, though growth was going on all about them. They did not want to admit that two kinds of tree might have come from an original common type of tree; still less that one kind of animal could come from another apparently different; although they had before their eyes the oak tree coming out of an acorn, and the frog out of a tadpole. They seemed to be unaware of the age-long controversy upon the matter; they had never heard, apparently, of the modern founders of the evolutionary hypothesis, especially Lamarck and Buffon: the former of whom had a much more rational theory than Darwin’s, and put it forward before Darwin was born. Still less had they heard of the theory of Evolution among the Ancients and the Fathers of the Church.

Therefore, when patient observers of the middle of the nineteenth century (of whom the best known was Darwin) accumulated a great quantity of evidence in favour of Evolution, quite a number of their contemporaries tried to stand out against that evidence. It became, in England, a sort of national debate. The defenders of the ancient theory of Evolution, finding themselves caught in a religious quarrel—of a most irrational type, it is true—were at the same time carrying on a conflict, quite novel and wholly their own, in favour of blind, mechanical, Natural Selection as the _agent_ of Evolution. Their special contribution, their only original idea, the only thing that properly can be called “Darwinism,” was Natural Selection—“the explanation of descent” (as Kohlbrugge, I read, has put it) “in terms of Materialism.” But in order to defend their new instrument of Natural Selection, they also had to support the old, old idea of Evolution. They confused the two together. Many still confuse them.

To this day, in discussing the matter with a woolly headed man, or with one who has not followed the matter closely, you will find him advancing these strong arguments, which certainly support Evolution, as though they also supported Natural Selection—with which last such arguments have nothing whatever to do. You will find people saying (for instance) that the exploded theory of Natural Selection must be true, because living organisms (including the human body) appear to show vestiges of ancient functions now atrophied. Such vestiges are properly advanced in defence of the general Evolutionary theory; they have no bearing whatever upon the essential point of _Agency_; and that alone is of real theological and therefore of fundamental interest.

For this great debate has one supreme query underlying it, which is this: whether we may see in the Universe a Creator and His Ends, or a blind Nothingness.

Natural Selection has been the theory used to do without God: the theory which crudely attempted to put the organic in terms of the mechanical and chance in the place of Design. It was a bubble which burst when it was touched by the finger of Reality.

I think I have said enough to show how strong are the considerations against Natural Selection, and why it is being more and more abandoned among Biologists as the Agent of Evolution.

But I am not writing this book as a treatise on such things. I am writing a criticism of Mr. Wells. And I would ask my reader in conclusion whether it is not remarkable to find Mr. Wells quietly taking Natural Selection for granted as the Agent of Evolution? Taking it for granted in 1926 as though we were still stuck fast at—say—1893?

Is it not remarkable to find a popular novelist swallowed whole when he propounds in Natural Science a theory which has been riddled for a generation? Is it not strange that he should take no account of such men as (to quote at random) Bateson, Eimer, Morgan, Delage, Le Dantec, Driesch, Dennert, Dwight, Nägeli, Sachs, Korchinsky, Wolff, Carazzi, Vialleton, Diamare, and a hundred others?

I pretend to no sort of special knowledge in these affairs.

I have no more than that general liberal education which Mr. Wells so greatly despises. Yet I have at least heard of these men and of their work, and I know, roughly, where discussion now stands.

For Mr. Wells it stands as it did over thirty years ago, with no knowledge of the revolution in thought in between!

I say that in a man professing to teach popular science, this degree of ignorance is quite inexcusable.[3]

Footnote 3:

Not to crowd these pages too much, I have relegated to a short
appendix at the end of this volume authorities and criticisms which
the readers may consult for examples of insufficient reading on the
part of our Author.