Chapter I: Part 1

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POCKET SERIES NO. 467
Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius

Evolution
Made Plain

John Mason

HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY
GIRARD, KANSAS

EVOLUTION MADE PLAIN

_The time has come when scientific truth must cease to be the property of the few--when it must be woven into the common life of the world.--Agassiz._

_Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, * * * but to weigh and consider.--Bacon._

_The man who will not investigate both sides of a question is dishonest.--Abraham Lincoln._

_Intolerance is the product of an ignorant, primitive mind. We should tolerate anything of an intellectual nature except intolerance. Freedom of opinion is the root, flower and fruit of liberty--its very essence.--Anonymous._

WHAT EVOLUTION IS AND IS NOT

Addison said, “The real substance of a bulky volume can be condensed into a small pamphlet.”; and it is believed that the fundamental principles of a great scientific discovery like evolution can be outlined in a few pages, and in a way so plain and in words so simple that any one who is at all interested can get a fairly good understanding of its scope. With this idea in mind an attempt is here made to explain evolution, to tell what some of its laws are and how they work, and to present briefly some of the evidences that support the doctrine.

Contrary to popular belief evolution is not confined to the origin of man, but it explains how all living things have become as we now see them, and how and why the most of them are being changed. It teaches that all living species of plants and animals, including man, also the thousands of extinct species which have left their fossil records in stratified rocks, have been developed from a few small and simple forms--probably one, and that a mere cell. And it shows, too, that this has been done by the operation of natural laws, the same laws we see in operation today.

Evolution does not teach that every living thing is “day by day, in every way, growing better and better.” On the contrary, it shows that many species deteriorate, are driven to the wall and become extinct, while only the best fitted survive. For instance, of the twenty-five orders of reptiles in the Jurassic period--known to the geologists by their fossils--only five have come down to our times. But out of the reptilian orders, then the highest forms of living things, have come the superior orders of later times--birds and mammals. And this is evolution.

We sometimes hear the statement that scientists are not in agreement in regard to evolution. The point of disagreement is in respect to the part played by natural selection in the development of species, and not as to whether or not evolution is a fact. The discussion is in regard to the _how_ of the fact and not the fact itself. No great scientist since Agassiz, who died in 1873, has opposed evolution.

Neither does evolution teach that one species may develop into another, as that the goat may develop into the deer, or that the ape may evolve into man. For one species to become another existing species it would have to take the back track to the point where the two species began to diverge and travel the other route--which of course would be impossible. This may help in getting the idea: the larger divisions and groups of animals (fishes, reptiles, mammals, etc.) may be compared to the main or primary branches of a tree, the families and orders (as the deer, the cat, and the dog) to the secondary branches growing from the primary ones, and the species to the further divisions of the secondary branches. Now we can see that one species can no more become another--that is, any now existing--than one branch of a tree can become another. A species can, in time, if subject to the proper conditions, split into varieties which, if developed far enough, may become distinct species. But no one of these species can be said to have been evolved from a contemporary species, for all have been changed, and the stock from which they came has ceased to exist as such. Each of the existing species would have a distinct name such as, for instance, cow, bison, Cape buffalo, yak. Now suppose the fossil remains of the common ancestor of the above-named species were found--what should it be called, cow, bison, Cape buffalo, or yak? It would be neither, for it would probably differ as much or more from them as they differ among themselves. Thus is laid to rest the idea that evolution is a theory that man was evolved from, or by way of, the monkey or the ape. They are as distinct species as is man himself.

GEOLOGICAL EVIDENCES OF PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT

All life on this globe is divided into two great classes, vegetable and animal. All animals belong to one or the other of two grand divisions: invertebrates (those without backbones) and vertebrates (the backboned). The latter class, comprising more than 30,000 known species, is subdivided into five great groups: fishes, frogs, reptiles, birds and mammals. At the top of the highest group, mammals (those which bring forth their young alive), is man. Birds and mammals were evolved from the reptiles--both offshoots of the same stock--and are contemporaneous in development and descent.

The various classes and groups of animals, both in the order of development from the simple to the complex and in the time of their arrival, are in the order named: first the small, one-celled animals (many species of which are found today) then more complex organisms of the invertebrate division, later the fishes, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals, including man.

The story told by the geologist is in perfect agreement with those laws of development which we call evolution. The lowest, simplest forms of life are the oldest as is shown by their fossil remains (bones, shells, etc.) found in stratified or water-laid rock. These fossils were deposited in sediment as it formed in sea and lake thousands and millions of years ago. In the movements of the earth’s crust the sediment of ancient sea and lake bottoms was raised above the water and became land, the sediment hardening into rock. All sediment is formed on a level, but in its up-heaval--generally slow, sometimes violent--it is often tilted at various angles exposing its edges. It is from this out-cropping, stratified rock (the sum of which is often several miles in depth) that forms the outer part of the earth’s crust that the geologist reads the story of creation.

The oldest or lowest water-laid rock is the archaean in which there are no fossils. Above this, in the stratum formed in a later period are found evidences of the beginnings of life. After millions of years of growth and development the shell fish, at the top of the invertebrate group, is produced. Then comes a period of uncounted millions of years in which the fishes, the lowest of the vertebrates, are being developed--millions of years to bridge the chasm between the two main divisions of the animal kingdom; millions of years to produce a backbone! Other long periods of time, filled with change and development, come and go--the age of the coal plant and of the frogs, succeeded by the age of reptiles, giant monsters, cold-blooded and of small brain, swarming sea and land. Long ages pass; the reptilian monsters have become extinct, leaving as their representatives only a few dwarfed species--the crocodile, the lizard, the snake, the turtle. Of mammals the lowest orders arrive first, followed by the more highly developed until finally man appears.

Naturally, fossils of land animals are few compared with those of marine animals. Practically all the remains of the latter sank and were covered with the slowly accumulating sediment, while the bones of the former only rarely were swept out to sea and lake. Rarest of all fossils are those of man. A few have been found antedating history by several thousand years, but we get a far more complete knowledge of our primitive ancestors from the tools and weapons that they left in sediment and drift before the dawn of the present era. We can trace his progress upward through all degrees of culture from the rude old stone age of a hundred thousand years ago, through the new stone age, the copper and bronze age, and the iron age to the beginning of written records.

Yet, so old is our planet and so long ago since life dawned on it--so long even since the first mammals appeared--that man’s arrival a hundred-or-so thousand years ago is but as yesterday. To paraphrase an illustration by Slade and Ferguson: “Suppose we take the earth as 365 million years old, and consider this period as a year, one million years being taken as a day.” Then, on this scale the vertebrates came into existence late in the summer or early fall, the mammals not earlier than the end of November, and “the whole period of man is not likely to have been further back than the evening of December 31st, and the earliest historic evidence (in Egypt) is not more than ten minutes before the last midnight.”--“the last midnight,” of course, being the present.

EVIDENCES OF EVOLUTION

Of the many evidences of the kinship of all animals including man only a few can be mentioned in this book. All animals, man included, are constructed on the same general plan. They have the same organs--brain, heart, lungs, digestive tract, nerves, skin--performing the same functions for the same purposes. The skeleton of man can be compared, bone for bone, with that of a monkey, bat or seal. The bat’s membranous wing is ribbed with bones corresponding to the bones of a monkey’s or a man’s hand. The wing of both the bat and the bird has one bone from the shoulder to the first joint, and two bones from the first to the second joint, like the fore leg of quadrupeds and the arm of man--thus proving that the fore leg, the arm and the wing are only modifications of the same limb. The biped bird and biped man are modified quadrupeds.

All the five hundred muscles of the human body correspond with the muscles of other mammals. Even the brain, wherein man differs most from the lower animals, has the same chief fissures and folds in both man and the animal nearest man, the orang-outang. Man and the other animals have the same five senses and the same sense organs. They in common have the same basic emotions, such as surprise, jealousy, pride, hatred, shame, anger, grief, affection, and a sense of the ludicrous. Bucks says, “So is man’s so-called human mind rooted in the senses and the instincts of all his ancestral species; and not only so, but these senses and instincts still live in him, making up, indeed, far the larger part of his current everyday life; while his higher psychical life is merely the outgrowth and flower of them.”

The old formula was: “Man is governed by reason; brutes by instinct.” But science has proved that lower animals are not guided altogether by instinct, that many of their actions are the results of mental activities remarkably similar to reasoning. On the other hand man himself has instinct--and well for him that he has, for his reason, as yet, is only partially developed. If we will but subtract from the sum of man’s actions, not only those prompted by instinct, but those also that result from habit, custom, prejudice, and the emotions of anger, revenge, vanity, and other elemental passions, we will not feel like crying from the housetops that “man is governed by reason.”

Man and the lower animals have similar diseases. He is liable to contract from, or communicate to them, such diseases as glanders, hydrophobia, cholera, tuberculosis. Drugs, tobacco and alcohol have the same effects on animals as on us.

Of course the dog, the ape, the horse and man do not perfectly agree in their corresponding parts and in their natures--if they did they would belong to the same species--but their similarities are so remarkable that they have a profound meaning for the thoughtful, however meaningless they may be to the thoughtless and the prejudiced.

In embryonic development are found evidences not only of man’s close relationship with all animals but of the long, long route he and they have travelled in their common descent from the simpler forms of life. Darwin says that the whole process of reproduction, from the first act of courtship by the male to the birth and nurturing of the young, is very much the same in all mammals.

The lowest forms of animal life, the one-celled animals, are without sex, and multiply by dividing into half, each half developing into a complete cell, which in turn is subjected to the same dividing process. Many species of these lowly organisms still exist, never having developed further than the unicellular stage. All higher forms, as of fishes, reptiles, birds, mammals, begin life at this point--as a single cell. The cell, germ, or ovum of an embryo (the young of a mammal before birth) when fertilized divides, forming two cells, the two divide into four, the four into eight, and so on, until there is a colony of similar cells enmassed, and with a little rod of tissue--the beginnings of the spinal column--running through. The embryo at this stage is passing beyond the lowest grand division, the invertebrates. Entering the vertebrate division the embryo passes into the fish group. Deep grooves, gill slits, appear on the side of the neck of the embryo and six pairs of arched branches of arteries arise, just as in fishes, as if to give blood to the gills. Later all but one of these pairs disappear. The arms and legs of the child, like the legs of all other embryos, begin to develop, and continue to do so for some time, on the same plan as the fins of fishes.

Further along in its development the embryo assumes all the characteristics of the quadruped even to the tail which in the human embryo at this stage is longer than its legs. During the sixth month the entire body of the human foetus, except the palms and soles, is covered with fine, woolly hair.

Thus far the human embryo has developed in the same way, has undergone the same changes, has passed through precisely the same stages as the embryo of other animals. In its further development it leaves them all behind except those nearest man. Its tail disappears, and it now has an opposable or thumb-like great toe which with the monkey and the ape is a permanent characteristic. It is only in the latest stages of development that the human embryo presents marked differences from the embryonic ape.

Of the fact that the embryo in its development from a single fertilized cell passes through all the stages representative of the principal animal divisions, and in a progressive order from the simple to the complex and highly developed, there is no explanation but that of heredity and descent--of descent of the higher animals from the lower with heredity transmitting the records of the remote ancestral stages. Each stage, as of the fish, the quadruped, the ape, is a sign board along the route of man’s descent. The nine months’ embryonic period of each of us is an epitome of the history of the race down to the human period.

Nor do the evidences of race-history as revealed by the child cease with its birth. The babe is nearer the lower mammals than is the adult man. When it acquires the use of its limbs it begins life as a quadruped. Its blundering attempts in learning to stand erect and walk is evidence of the fact that man’s peculiar mode of locomotion is a late acquirement. Like the lower animals the babe makes known its wants by means of natural language; it later acquires artificial or spoken language in the same slow, laborious way that it was acquired by the race. At the average age of three years the child has become self-conscious; his mind has passed the mental stage of all animals below man. Psychically he has become man.

In certain periods of youth the child is a tree-climber, a cave-digger, childish sports that hark back to periods passed through hundreds of thousands of years ago in the childhood of the race. At a certain stage his emotional nature has developed to the point that he is conscious of wrong-doing. This is what the old theologians called “the age of accountability.” If there is a grain of truth in the chaff-heap of Mosaic mythology the fall of Adam indicates the point in the development of the race when conscience had dawned and feelings of remorse had begun to stir within. Man had reached the age of accountability. But prior to the “fall” there was a rise.

Rudiments or vestiges are also evidences of the descent (or ascent) of the higher forms of life from the lower. Rudiments are incomplete parts of the body which have become arrested in their development, and which are now of no use, nor would now be of use if fully developed. They are relics handed down to us by the laws of heredity from a long-past age when they were well developed and useful to our lowly ancestors. Though we outgrow primitive conditions and stages of development we can not get rid of the past, but must drag it around with us as the snail drags its shell.

All the higher animals bear within their bodies the reminders of a humble origin, some of which are: The incisor teeth of certain grass-eating animals, so rudimentary as never to cut through; the small hoof points of the cow which do not touch the ground, and the rudimentary fifth and sixth teats on the hinder part of her udder; the splint bones in the horse’s leg--vestiges of toes when he was a three-toed animal; the scanty, downy hair that covers the human body.

Certain muscles by which animals can twitch the skin are inherited by some persons who can move the scalp and the ears. The sense of smell in civilized man has become almost rudimentary. The vermiform appendix is not only useless but often injurious. It points back to the time when our ancestors were strict vegetarians--grass-eaters. In the _os coccyx_ man carries about with him the rudimentary bones of a tail. This, with the fact that the human embryo at one stage has a tail longer than its legs, is Nature’s everlasting reminder that proud man’s remote ancestor was adorned with a tail.

In order to get as clear an idea as possible of man’s exact place in the animal scale we should note the points wherein man differs from his nearest relatives--the orang, the gorilla, the chimpanzee, the gibbon--as well as the points wherein he agrees with them. Here are the most obvious points of dissimilarity. Man walks erect, though in his first year he goes on all fours, while apes only occasionally walk, and that in a semi-erect position, their arms, longer than their legs, reaching the ground, knuckles touching. The nose of the ape is small, undeveloped; the canine teeth are very large; the mouth projects, and there is no chin. The entire body except the palms and soles is covered with hair. The brain capacity of the ape is less than half that of man.

On the other hand there are more points of similarity than of dissimilarity between man and the apes; and if the points wherein they differ be examined they will be found to be differences in degree rather than in kind. The higher apes are entirely without tails; the embryo of the ape, like the human foetus, loses its tail sometime before birth. The young ape (monkey also) is born in almost as helpless a condition as is the human babe. The female ape has two mammary glands (udders) and they are always on the chest. Adult apes have the same teeth as man--thirty-two in number, incisors, canines, premolars, molars. They have the same 200 bones, the same 500 muscles, the same organs and glands. On their toes and fingers they have flat nails, like man, instead of claws. On account of the ape’s opposable great toe they were formerly classed as four-handed; but this was an error. In all essential respects their legs terminate in feet. Like man they are bipeds, and like man they have two hands. The brain of the ape, though much smaller than man’s, as we would expect it to be, is constructed on the same general plan as his with the same main fissures and the same groups of cells. There is no “missing link” in the plan and structure of man’s brain, whatever difference there may be between his and the ape’s in capacity.

No scientist has ever been so foolish as to say that man and the apes belong to the same species. There are four species of the higher apes and one of man, though the one species of man is divided into five varieties, called “races.” Varieties differ less widely than species. Individuals within a variety also differ. Differences are no bar to unity if they are nullified and outweighed by similarities.

Finally, let us keep in mind that while man has departed from the ancestral type, developing in one direction, the apes have gone off in another and have acquired characteristics peculiarly their own. Resemblance in a babe and a young ape is far greater than in a man and an adult ape. The same is true of the young of all allied species. This divergence from birth of the adults of different species is strong evidence of a common origin.

These are only a few of the hundreds of evidences proving that man fits into the same creative scheme with the lower animals--proving that he, in common with them, has developed from still lower forms, and that, as a product of the creative forces of Nature, he is wholly subject to her laws.

CONNECTING LINKS

There is a greater unity of all life than the many divisions and sub-divisions of the analyst would seem to warrant. The dividing lines between the different classes, orders, families and species are more apparent than real, the barriers of separation not so impassable as appear at first sight.

To begin at the bottom, there is no hard and fast line drawn between living and non-living matter--or at least it is not always easy to say where the line should be drawn. Tyndall says, “The tendency of modern science is to break down the wall of partition between the organic and the inorganic, and to reduce both to the operation of forces which are the same in kind, but which are differently compounded.”

Passing on to the first grand division of life, it would seem that nothing could be plainer than the line of cleavage between vegetable and animal life. Yet there is a twilight zone between the two where each shades off toward the other, and which is inhabited by several living species of so doubtful a nature that scientists cannot agree as to which of the two great kingdoms they belong. These doubtful organisms are claimed by both the botanist and the geologist and are described in the textbooks of both. Really they do not belong to either division, but are simply organisms that have not risen in the scale of life to the diverging point of the animal and vegetable kingdoms.

Ascending the animal scale we come to the line separating the invertebrates from the vertebrates. Here, on the invertebrate side are species that have the beginnings of a backbone--an elastic smooth cord--and gill-slits, thus proving their relationship with the fishes, the lowest of the vertebrates.

The connecting link between the fish and the reptile groups is the amphibians--frogs, newts, salamanders, etc. The frog in its tadpole stage is a fish, but acquiring legs and lungs it becomes an air-breather, a land animal.

Between the reptile and the bird, and having certain characteristics of both, there are at least three extinct species, known by their fossils. One of these, archaeopteryx, had the skeleton and feathers of a bird and a reptile tail composed of twenty vertebrae. Another was a flying reptile with a bird-shaped head.

Reptiles (snakes, lizards, turtles, aligators, etc.) are cold-blooded, egg-laying animals. Birds retain the egg-laying characteristic of reptiles but are warm-blooded like the mammals. The latter differ from both birds and reptiles in producing their young alive and suckling them. Between the mammal and its ancestor, the reptile, but classed with the former is the duck-mole of Australia. It is an egg-laying, web-footed, duck-billed quadruped. After its young are hatched they are suckled in a sort of mammary pouch which is without nipples. Above the duck-mole, but so low in the mammal group that they are not really mammals are the marsupials (kangaroos, opossums, etc.). Their young are so immature at birth that they are for some time carried in a pouch by the mother.

We have now come to the last great chasm--that between man and the other mammals. As man belongs in the same group with them the chasm is not so great in the sum of physical characters as is that between the fish and the reptile groups, or between the reptiles and the mammals. In regard to man and the higher apes the dividing line, viewed from the stand-point of descent, is vertical rather than horizontal--like that between mammals and birds.

There are no species, extinct or extant, between man and the ape. It is not necessary for the proof of evolution that there should be. “Missing links” are not more required here than they are between birds and mammals which were evolved side by side from reptiles. If ten feet below the topmost bough of a tree there is another branch it is not necessary to show that there are, or have been, intermediate branches to prove that both grew from the same trunk. Missing links are required only _in the line of descent_.

Discoveries of the fossil remains of man are rare for many reasons. (1) Land animals rarely leave their remains in the sediment of sea and lake. (2) There is small chance of the sediment containing the fossils of recently arrived animals--more especially of man, the latest arrival--being lifted above the water level because of the slow movements of the earth’s crust. (3) Only those animal remains that are buried in localities where they will be impregnated with certain mineral salts will be preserved. (4) They must be able to resist those destructive agencies (especially erosion by water) that disintegrate the rock in which they are embedded if they are to come down to us as evidence. (5) Only a small part of the earth as yet has been searched, and nearly all the fossil discoveries have been accidental. For these reasons the geological record in respect to fossil evidences is far from complete. Yet from time to time new discoveries are filling in the gaps in the record.

Anthropologists present us with evidences of pre-historic races that were far lower than the lowest savage of today. Some of the evidences of man’s existence tens of thousands of years ago were known before Darwin set the world astir with his revolutionary discovery, and the old school geologists, like Hugh Miller, who had not been entirely weaned from scriptural literalism were sadly puzzled in regard to the evidences of these “pre-Adamites.”

Fossils have been found showing several gradations or stages in development intermediate between man and his pre-human ancestor--evidences which, if they do not completely bridge the chasm, stand as ruined pillars, broken arches, isolated spans of the bridge over which man was many hundreds of thousands of years in crossing.

The first skull discovered (sixty years ago) of the Neanderthal men was so entirely different from other pre-historic skulls that one scientist declared it was a mal-formation; but other fossils were found later that proved the peculiarities to be racial characteristics. These men, who lived in Europe down to thirty thousand years ago, were squat, bent-kneed, thick-skulled, almost chinless, and with ridge-like projections over deep-set eyes. In skull development they were lower than any savage of today.

Older than the Neanderthal race, and lower in the human scale, were the Heidelberg men, said to have been the first really human beings of whom we have fossil evidences. Judging from the age of the fossil beds they existed from 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.

Thirty years ago were found some of the fossil remains of a creature in Java, some forty feet below the surface, that show characters intermediate between the gorilla and the Neanderthal man; “the lowest human cranium yet described, very nearly as much below the Neanderthal as this is below the normal European.” This creature was named Pithecanthropus Erectus (erect ape-man).

Lack of space prevents even a brief description of other and intermediate types of man, such as the man of Spy, of Naulette, of Predmost, etc.

As the more man develops (becomes specialized) the farther he is removed from the lower animals, so, in tracing his descent toward his origin we find him approaching them, apes included, in general characteristics, for we approach the point of divergence.

Evolution is a fact. There is no doubt of that in the minds of those who have investigated the subject without prejudice and with the acquisition of truth as the sole aim. One may dispute a fact, but he cannot deny it out of existence. Those who feel a sense of shame for their close proximity to their cousin, the monkey, are advised to increase that distance by carrying to higher development those traits considered peculiarly human: Reason, a sense of justice, of broader sympathy, and tolerance.

By his great discovery Darwin delivered the heaviest solar plexus blow to human vanity it ever received. For this he deserves, and receives, the eternal gratitude of every right-thinking man and woman.

How was evolution brought about? What are its laws, and how do they work?

NATURAL SELECTION

When the farmer or the stock-breeder selects his seeds or his animals for propagating purposes he has an eye to a great natural law, heredity. He knows that scrub animals and the seeds of degenerate plants will stamp their inferiority upon their descendants. He has learned that like produces like, therefore he selects such seeds and animals as will produce those best suited to his purposes. He is not only guided by his knowledge of a great law of Nature, but in the main he is following her method in preserving and improving the breed. This method of changing and improving plants and animals under domestication is called artificial selection.

Plants and animals in the natural state are capable of multiplying at so enormous a rate that there is an incessant struggle for existence going on among them. If it were not for this fierce struggle with one another and with their enemies and other environmental forces in which the vast majority die early, the world would be overstocked. There is hardly a species of animal of which a single pair would not choke out all other animal life in a few generations by filling the world with its descendants if all of the one species were permitted to reach old age. If a pair of elephants (one of the slowest-breeding species of animals) should bring forth only six young ones, and all should live to be one hundred years old, their descendants in 750 years would number nineteen million--a number so great that they would form a closely-packed herd occupying forty-one square miles. The codfish produces nine million eggs a year. If each egg should develop into a mature fish, half of them females, in ten years the sea would be a solid mass of codfish.

This tendency to increase at so tremendous a rate, and the fact that no two individuals are exactly alike, supply the material and the conditions for the great law of natural selection to operate. Each individual must of necessity compete so fiercely with other individuals of the same species, and of allied species, and with enemies, with climate and changing conditions that out of the struggling many only a few live to propagate. Those individuals that vary from the mass in the right direction live; the others die, leaving few descendants, or none.

Though like produces like there are no two individuals exactly alike. If all of the same species were alike there would be no opportunity for the law of natural selection to operate. Nothing but chance would determine in the struggle for existence which individuals would live to propagate their species and which would die without descendants. Nor would it matter, so far as the species is concerned. But individuals do differ in their traits in some degree--Wallace has shown that variation usually amounts from ten to twenty, sometimes twenty-five, per cent of the varying part--and this variation, even if small, often spells the difference between an early death with no descendants and a long life with a numerous progeny.

By the law of heredity the descendants are endowed in a greater or less degree with the same life-saving characteristics of their parents. Each generation being subjected to this weeding-out process, and only a few of the best fitted individuals being selected to preserve the species, we can easily see that, as the generations come and go, those essential, life-saving characters or traits are being developed to a greater and greater degree. And this means change, modification of species.

With horn or tooth or claw or hoof or sting or poison or odor, among all the wild creatures that swim or crawl or run or climb or fly, the struggle for life and food and mate goes on today just as it has gone on for millions of years. Other factors in the struggle are alertness, agility, cunningness, sharpness of vision and hearing and smell, protective color of covering, fleetness of foot and wing, the degree of heat, the amount of moisture and the food supply.

The traits that survive are of course those that are the most useful in a given environment. (By environment is meant surroundings, all outside influences, the not-me of each individual.) A change of environment, of the conditions of life, calls for a re-adjustment of the traits most vital to the individual in the new environment. In one environment one highly developed trait would be most useful while in another some other character or set of characters would be the saving factor, because a change of environment means a change of weather conditions, of the food supply and the means of getting it, of enemies, etc.

From the foregoing brief outline it would seem that only a little exercise of reason is required of any one to see that natural selection operating in unlike environments would, in the course of many generations, produce from the same species types of animals (or plants) very unlike--not only unlike each other but unlike their parent species. At first these types derived from a common ancestor would be only varieties, but varieties are incipient species. Given sufficient time, and the intervention of natural barriers to prevent the crossing of extremes, and the creation of new species would be the natural result.

As a vivid illustration of how the law of natural selection works, and of how great is the sum of the results of its operation accumulated through many generations, let us observe one of many modifications an animal undergoes in its struggle for existence. To the question, “Why are animals of the arctic regions white?” we ought to be able, with what we already know of natural selection, to give the answer. Imagine those lands of snow and ice originally inhabited by animals of all colors from white to black, or even of all shades of one color, brown. The animals of what colors or shades, among the flesh-eaters, would have the least difficulty in stealthily approaching their prey, and so, be most apt to survive in the struggle against starvation? And which among the animals preyed on would run the least risk of detection and so be most likely to escape destruction? The answer to both questions, of course, would be, “Those whose colors most nearly conformed to the snowy background.” Imagine this process of culling out the darker colors continuing for many generations and we can understand that the whiteness of all arctic animals would be the inevitable result. We can also see why most wild animals of our regions are of colors that best harmonize with the brown earth and dead leaves. Let us keep in mind the fact that while we were observing the modification of one character, all the favorable variations, however slight, in every other character that could be of the least advantage to those creatures were being added up as fast as they appeared. After several generations, if for any cause the environment were undergoing a radical change, or if a species had migrated from a widely different one, a greatly modified animal would be the result. However, there can be no modification in an animal perfectly adapted to its environment--provided the environment does not change.

Every organ, and every other part of the body, internal and external, of every creature in the natural state is subject to modification by the law of natural selection, just as was the color of the hair or the feathers of polar animals.

Man’s method of improving plants and animals--artificial selection--interferes with the work of natural selection. For one thing, man makes a radical change in the environment of every plant and animal he domesticates; for another, man selects for other purposes than the one Nature has in view--that is, if it can be said that Nature has a purpose.

From the same parent stock man breeds one strain of cattle for beef, another for milk and butter; one variety of the horse for the saddle and another for draft purposes. Nature adapts the species to the environment--never the environment to the species--sacrificing those individuals that do not measure up to her standard. She seems to care only for the species, not for the individuals, or only for those individuals that give promise of a better species.

This secret wrung from Nature (natural selection as a factor in progressive development) is man’s most precious truth, for it is the key to his further progress.

To summarize: organisms tend to increase at a great rate; this intensifies the struggle for existence; organisms vary; in the struggle for existence the vast majority die early, leaving those that vary in the favorable direction to live and reproduce; this means change, progress. This is natural selection.

There is also De Vries’ “Mutations theory” which some scientists believe to have been an important factor in evolution. It is the theory that at times a species may progress by “jumps”--that is, that occasionally individuals come into existence that vary extremely from the mass, and that they may become the parents of a new species. It is on account of the relative value attached by some scientists to this theory and to natural selection that they disagree, and not in regard to whether or not evolution is a fact.

NATURAL SELECTION IN SOCIAL EVOLUTION

The law of natural selection, or of the survival of the fittest, is not confined to plant and animal life. Its sway is universal. Every thing that is born, spawned, hatched, sprouted, conceived, invented, or founded is tested by this law, and if found inefficient, unfit, is weeded out, leaving the fittest, the best, the truest to survive.

On the mental plane the law of the survival of the fittest is often restricted in its operation, and the struggle unnecessarily prolonged, because of the intolerance of those of the older, dominant belief. The world lags because they refuse to permit the new idea to meet the old on equal terms before the only court having jurisdiction over truth and error--the court of Reason.

Intolerant people--and they are legion--either lack faith in the power of truth to triumph over error, or they harbor a lurking doubt in their own minds in regard to the amount of truth embodied in the belief they so anxiously shield. They regard belief--their belief--as something to be protected at any cost. Freedom of opinion, intellectual honesty, truth itself must yield rather than _their_ belief be in jeopardy. They seem to think it more blessed to believe something they received at second hand than to investigate and know the truth. With them it’s “Believe so and so; open your mouths like young mocking-birds and swallow it, smack your lips and call it good.” For people of that mental type to tell us to think--why, that is never thought of.

This forcing one to subscribe to a doctrine through fear, or to accept an idea on authority, belongs to the medieval age. And we resent it--we whose minds have not been altogether shaped by the kingly, priestly authority of five hundred years ago. We say, “Give us the evidences of your belief; if they are sufficient we cannot help believing. Let us meet in fair discussion and compare evidences. Drop your intolerance. Let your idea stand or fall on its merits--that’s all we ask of ours. Let the law of natural selection have a chance to operate.”

Not belief, but truth, is the one essential, and when discussion reveals the evidence supporting it belief is attracted to it like steel filings to a magnet. O ye of little faith, doubt not that in a struggle for existence between truth and error the fittest, that is, truth, will survive and error be eliminated.

Truth crushed to earth will rise again--
The eternal years are hers--
While Error, wounded, writhes in pain
And dies among her worshippers.

“A lie on the throne is a lie, still, and truth in a dungeon is truth, still; and a lie on the throne is on the way to defeat, and truth in a dungeon is on the way to victory.”

“If there is anything that cannot stand the truth, let it crack.”

EVOLUTION AND THE BIBLE

The Bible itself contains evidences of evolution. As the Jews climbed up in the scale of civilization their ideals, their conception of what should constitute a God, also arose. It is a far cry from the ancient Hebraic conception of God, down through the prophets to the idea of divinity as taught by Jesus. Let the reader lay aside his prejudice, if any he has, be honest with himself, and compare Jehovah of the early Jews with Jesus’ portrayal of God as a father, as one whose synonym is live.

Jehovah, according to the early writers, was stern, wrathful, vengeful--“I will mock you in your calamities”; vain and jealous--“I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God”; cruel--hardening the hearts of his powerless victims in order to punish them for doing what they could not help doing, and according to Joshua, Jehovah commanded him to kill all his enemies, old and young, even the children, and he gave the captured wives of the enemy to the soldiers of the Jewish army; deceptive--“I have sent lying spirits unto Ahab”; in short, and in very truth, he was a god having all the frailties and imperfections of man, and not man at his best either.

Take the Genesis story of creation:--When Jehovah created Adam he knew (being an all-wise God) that Adam would fall. Therefore, Adam could not have done otherwise than to yield to temptation; for to have resisted would have proved God’s foreknowledge false. Then why pronounce a curse on one (and his billions of descendants) for doing what God’s foreknowledge made unavoidable?

Again it is said that when Jehovah made up his mind to destroy the human race “it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth”--that is, he had made a mistake, like you and I, and was sorry of it, like you and I. How like a man was Jehovah in his short-sightedness!

And this is a part of that story of the origin of man which we are asked to accept by the anti-evolutionists instead of the scientific explanation.

Before history there was mythology. Beyond the earliest ascertained historic facts of every people, of every early nation, was a mass of myths portraying its childish beliefs concerning its origin, its gods, its heroes, etc. The Jewish nation was no exception. Scriptural literalists, those who believe in the verbal inspiration of the Bible, know that all ancient peoples had their myths--all except the Jews. In the face of a million facts they still contend that the impossible stories of the early Jews are true as gospel--in fact that they are a part of the gospel.

The greatest obstacle to the popular acceptance of the doctrine of evolution is a belief in the verbal inspiration of the Bible and its literal interpretation. The more conservative or orthodox element of the churches regards the Bible as a direct quotation of the exact words of God. Their conception of inspiration is that the various writers merely held the pen while God caused it to move over the surface of the parchment tracing the characters that spelled his very words. The fact that the various books of the Bible are written in almost as many different styles would seem to disprove verbal inspiration to any thinking mind. Certainly, those books called the Bible are inspired, and in precisely the same sense as Shakespeare’s plays, Burns’ poems and Emerson’s essays are inspired--that is, the writers felt strongly an impulse to write; and in every instance the writings were stamped with the individuality of the author.

All inspiration is not on the same level--the higher the spirituality the deeper the source. For example, as one writer has pointed out, when Paul said, “Alexander the coppersmith did me much evil; the Lord reward him according to his works,” he was not inspired in the same sublime degree as was Jesus, when, rising above his own sufferings, he remembered his tormentors in the prayer: “Father, forgive them; they know not what they do.”

The belief in verbal inspiration has scotched the wheels of progress at every turn. Four hundred years ago those who taught the rotundity of the earth were denounced as heretics. It was a belief in verbal inspiration that inspired the church to force Galileo, who taught that the earth is not the center of the universe, but that it revolves around the sun, to make the recantation: “I, Galileo, being in my seventieth year, being a prisoner and on my knees before your eminences * * abjure, detest and curse the error and the heresy of the movement of the earth.” Even Newton’s great discovery of the law of gravitation was denounced as “subversive of natural, and inferentially, of revealed religion.”

A hundred years ago the use of anesthetics in childbirth was opposed in Scotland on the ground that it was seeking to remove the curse God had placed upon the daughters of Eve for her transgression.

King Charles of Spain declared that the digging of a canal across the isthmus of Panama, thus severing North and South America, would be a sin; for is it not written: “What God hath joined together let no man put asunder”?

In America the famous Rev. Cotton Mather wrote a letter to John Higginson informing him that the “general court” had given secret orders to a sea captain to waylay William Penn and the one hundred Quaker colonists--“heretics and malignants”--who were then on their way to Pennsylvania, capture the “ungodly crew” and sell them “to Barbadoes, where slaves fetch good prices in rum and sugar,” for in so doing “the lord may be glorified and not mocked on soil of this new country,” closing his pious letter with the felicitous phrase, “Yours in the bowels of Christ.”

In 1826 the school board of Lancaster, Ohio, refused to permit the use of the schoolhouse for a debate as to whether railroads were practicable. The letter reads: “You are welcome to the schoolhouse to debate all proper questions in, but such things as railroads and telephones (the possibility of which were talked then) are impossibilities and rank infidelity; there is nothing in the Word of God about them. If God designed that his intelligent creatures should travel at the frightful speed of 15 miles an hour He would have clearly foretold it through his holy prophets. It is a device of Satan to lead immortal souls down to hell.”

Is there needed stronger proof than this of the mental slavery to which the belief in verbal inspiration reduces its devotees?

Today those who oppose evolution for biblical reasons occupy the same absurd position as those who persecuted Galileo, denounced Newton, opposed the use of anesthetics in childbirth, thwarted the digging of a Panama canal, regarded the introduction of railroads and other industrial innovations as tricks of the devil to damn our souls, and approved the selling into slavery of the adherents of a rival Christian sect.

This medieval belief of verbal inspiration has filled the Christian world with strife and intolerance, and has drenched its soil with the blood of tens of thousands of “heretics.” It was this belief that for hundreds of years impelled whatever sect that had the power, be it Catholic or Protestant, to persecute, imprison, torture, burn, kill in every conceivable way those who differed with it in the interpretation of certain scriptural texts. This narrow, intolerant belief, the very negation of the Christ spirit, lives today--but, thanks to modern science and intellectual progress, its teeth are drawn.

Let us get this straight: evolution is not, in the slightest degree, opposed to religion; but it does conflict with the noxious growths of superstition and doctrinalism which half conceals religion. True Christianity will shine all the brighter with its concealments cleared away. The study of evolution broadens and enlarges one’s conception of religion. Those who are afraid that to accept evolution would cause them to “lose their faith” are already weak in faith.

Those who insist on, as of paramount importance, a belief in some mystical “plan of salvation,” including certain rites to be observed, are Paulinists rather than Christians. Scattered throughout Paul’s writings are expressions regarding the fall of Adam, the total depravity of man, the atoning blood of Christ, etc., which are harmless enough if regarded simply as rhetorical flourishes, but linked up in a finely wrought out scheme of redemption, and coupled with an insistence on the absolute necessity of belief in the same as the only means of individual salvation--why, this Pauline gospel has catered to human selfishness, has filled the world with theological disputations and sectarian strife, and has relegated into the background the great, yet simple spiritual truths of the lowly Nazarene. As a doctrine, its mysticism has a natural affinity with inherent superstition, dregs of which lie at the bottom of every human soul.

It is Jesus’ persistent insistence on the duty of each to serve humanity that made him a great religious teacher. And it is His teachings, if we heed them, that will “save” us, and not his shed blood; _that_ dried up within a few hours of his crucifixion. To say that we are “saved by the blood of the lamb” is a fine figure of speech, though a well-worn one. Of course, the martyrdom of Jesus adds emphasis to the truths he expounded, but it makes them not one whit truer than they were.

Will the verbal inspirationalists please tell us when God quit sending messages to the world couched in his own words? It may be that that kind of inspiration ceased before Paul began preaching. If so, Paul is no greater, _as an authority_, than Whitefield or Moody.

There is no reason why we should not read the Bible just as we would any other book, with reason enthroned.

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Evolution made plainChapter I: Part 1

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