Evolutionism

“ If it was potent enough to differentiate the enormous multitude of these animals in all other traits, why did it not vary the number of segments with which the primitive race was endowed? Is the law of evolution limited or unlimited? If it is limited in its effects, then there are patterns of animal structure which it has not modified, and the presence of which in hundreds of thousands of different species must be explained as a form of structure designed for some end that was to be common to a great multitude of different beings. ”

“ If we give the rein to our imaginations, and, taking the process of evolution as it is described to us, suppose that in the long course of countless ages the struggle for existence among very numerous individuals has led to gradual transformations of structure which the sexual selection has transmitted to offspring, and so a new animal has at length been formed through the successive "survivals of the fittest," we reach an animal of a new species, and that species, under no circumstances, produces any type but its own, so far as we have any means of knowledge. ”

“ But among the modern scientists who have propounded explanations of the origin of species, I distinguish those who do not, as I understand, deny that there was an intelligent Creator by whose will some form of animal life was originally called into being, but who maintain that the diversified forms of animal life which we now see were not brought into being by the special will of the Creator as we now know them, but that they were evolved, by a process called natural selection, out of some lower type of animated organism. ”

“ Vast as was the revolution effected in biology by the 'Origin of Species,' it was as nothing compared with the still wider, deeper, and more subtly-working revolution inaugurated by the announcement of man's purely animal origin. The main discovery, strange to say, affected a single branch of thought alone; the minor corollary drawn from it to a single species has already affected, and is destined in the future still [Pg 142] more profoundedly to affect, every possible sphere of human energy. ”

“ In the evolutionary theories of modern biology, it is precisely the problems of the origination of new species, and of the special character of the relations between the species and its environment by which this process is conditioned, that have attracted almost exclusive attention. And, with the steadily increasing success of evolutionary hypotheses in dealing with biological problems, there has naturally arisen a tendency to extend the application of the general concept of evolution far beyond the sphere in which it first originated. ”

“ So far as biology is concerned, the publication of the 'Origin of Species,' for the first time, put the doctrine of evolution, in its application to living things, upon a sound scientific foundation. It became an instrument of investigation, and in no hands did it prove more brilliantly profitable than in those of Darwin himself. ”

“ Yet the characteristic of the volume is that the author has seized the essential points of the great argument, and brought out, with unexampled success, the strength of what may be called the Darwinian position. The broad philosophic doctrine of Evolution he does not attempt to discuss, but limits his argument to the field of biology, to the Animal World in its Present State, the Phenomena of Reproduction, Historical and Paleontological Development, the Geological and Geographical Distribution of Life, Heredity, Reversion, Selection, Derivation, and Pedigree. ”

“ On the theory of the evolution of animal out of animal, we must suppose that at some time the secondary causes of natural and sexual selection have done their work. It ends in the production of a species which thereafter remains one and the same animal, and Nature has established a barrier to any sexual union with any other species. ”

“ But one difficulty with the evolution theory as the sole method by which the past or present inhabitants of the world have come into existence is that, so far as we can judge, it has done and completed its work just as effectually and finally as special creation appears to have terminated in certain forms, some of which are extinct and some of which are living. Take the Darwinian pedigree of man, as stated in a former chapter, or any other mode of tracing the supposed stages of animal evolution. ”

“ Among these there arises a struggle for existence, and hence what Darwin named natural selection.
"How will the struggle for existence"—I quote, with some omissions, the words of Darwin—"act in regard to variation? Can the principle of selection, which is so potent in the hands of man, apply under nature? I think that we shall see that it can act most efficiently. Let the endless number of slight variations and individual differences be borne in mind; as well as the strength of the hereditary tendency. ”

“ Since the appearance of Darwin’s Origin of Species, and after the great naturalist had converted the world to a belief in the general doctrine of evolution, there has arisen in the minds of many working naturalists a conviction that natural selection, or Darwinism as such, is only one of other evolutionary factors ”

“ I am, also, surprised at his thinking it immaterial whether species are absolute or not: whenever it is proved that all species are produced by generation, by laws of change, what good evidence we shall have of the gaps in formations. And what a science Natural History will be, when we are in our graves, when all the laws of change are thought one of the most important parts of Natural History. ”

“ It is now more than fifty years since Darwin gave the theory of natural selection to the world, and the conception of a gradual evolution has long ago become part of the currency of thought. Evolution for Darwin was brought about by more than one factor. ”

“ The methods pursued in studying variation in species, and its important accompaniment, heredity, consists in comparison, statistical examinations, cultural experiments, and crossbreeding.
Evolution is the process of differentiation accompanying the operations of nature. All the great naturalists before Darwin's time noted facts indicating this universal differentiation, but it required the particularly wide sweep of Darwin's mind to phrase and demonstrate it. ”

“ Darwin, it must be suitable to its circumstances, and the most suitable forms will prevail over and extirpate those which are less suitable. From these fruitful ideas are developed theories of evolution and natural selection which go far toward accounting for the existence of immense numbers of living creatures—plants and animals. ”

“ When we turn to a department in which human influence has largely or wholly shaped the phenomena, we find numerous special creations that are not attributable to the operation of any law of development or evolution such as is supposed to have led to the production of one species of animal out of another, or out of several previous species. ”

“ Let us turn to define Evolution—a word about which much ambiguity exists. In its narrower sense 'Evolution,' a term not at first used by Darwin, means the morphological and physiological variations of organic beings by the action of natural selection. It then came to be loosely applied to almost any specific theory about the origin and development of things. ”

“ Darwin calls “natural selection.” Nature, so to speak, selects the best individuals out of each generation to live. And not only so, but as these favoured individuals transmit their favourable qualities to their offspring, according to the fixed pg. 4laws of heredity, it follows that the individuals composing each successive generation have a general tendency to be better suited to their surroundings than were their forefathers. ”

“ Some who style themselves "Evolutionists" mean only that, as a matter of established fact, the organic world, the world of life, whether animal or vegetable, has been brought to its present condition by genetic development of one species from another, in the natural course of descent and through the operation of natural laws; and that as we see plants and animals of the same kind propagated one from another at the present day, so in the course of long ages the lower and simpler forms of life have given birth to the higher and more complex. ”

“ Here we see natural selection, with its iron and implacable rule, a real factor in the lives and development of these creatures, connected and increasing with an advancing animal evolution, but still only a term to express the modifying influences incidental to a struggle for existence. [33] In fact, natural selection is more an effect than a cause. ”

“ Of all the mischievous misconceptions of Darwin’s theory none have worked so much harm as that which regards natural selection as the active and efficient cause of evolution. Although evolution is an established fact, our knowledge of its processes are incomplete and must always remain so until we have solved that most vexed of all biological problems, the “causes of variation.” ”

“ On the principles, and by the light of the facts, now briefly summarised, we have been able, in the present chapter, to indicate how natural selection acts, how divergence of character is set up, how adaptation to conditions at various periods of life has been effected, how it is that low forms of life continue to exist, what kind of circumstances are most favourable to the formation of new species, and, lastly, to what extent the advance of organisation to higher types is produced by natural selection. ”

“ If you believed that dogs and cats and snakes and birds and beetles and oysters and whales and men and women were all separately designed and made and named in Eden garden at the beginning of things, and have since survived simply by reproducing their kind, then you were not an Evolutionist. If you believed, on the contrary, that all the different species are modifications, variations, and elaborations of one primal stock, or even of a few primal stocks, then you were an Evolutionist. ”

“ So it comes about that much that was once progressive in organic evolution has become an obstacle or a drag to psychozoic evolution; it is relatively retrogressive, and, from our present standpoint, bad. To take the simplest and most fundamental example: evolution by blind natural selection was the method of progress for organisms below man. Unceasing struggle and courage was the chief factor in producing the grandeur and strength of the lion, the swiftness and grace of deer, the brilliance and lightness of the birds. ”

“ Wherever educated people talked the conversation came round to the question of evolution. Were animals and plants the results of special creations, or were they, including man, the result of the gradual transformations of a few simple primitive types evolving under the stress of some such force as Darwin's natural selection? ”

“ How far Darwin's special idea of natural selection supplemented and rendered credible the earlier idea of descent with modification we shall see more fully when we come to treat of the inception and growth of his great epoch-making work, 'The Origin of Species;' for the present, it must suffice to point out that in the world into which he was born, the theory of evolution already existed in a more or less shadowy and undeveloped shape. ”

“ Darwin's masterly volume on the 'Origin of Species,' by the law of 'natural selection,' which now substantiates on undeniable grounds the very principle so long denounced by the first naturalists—the origination of new species by natural causes: a work which must soon bring about an entire revolution of opinion in favour of the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature."—Prof. ”

“ If the theory that the different species of animals now known to us have been evolved successively by descent from some primordial simplest form through modifications induced by change of habitation, of medium of life, and accumulation of new structures occurring through an immense period of time, be a sound hypothesis, the process which has evolved superior out of inferior organizations ought, in consistency with itself and with all its supposed conditions, to be capable of being reversed, so as to lead to the evolution of inferior out of superior organisms. ”

“ Thus the improvement and modification induced by natural selection would be enhanced and transmitted by the sexual selection. [24]
In regard to the operation of the two kinds of selection in the evolution of man from a lower form of animal, we find the theory to be this: That organic beings with peculiar habits and structure have passed through transitions which have converted the primordial animal into one of totally different habits and structure; that, in these transitions, organs adapted to one condition and mode of life have become adapted to another ”

“ Lastly, as a mere matter of logical definition, it is well-nigh self-evident that the theory of natural selection is a theory of the origin, and cumulative development, of adaptations, whether these be distinctive of species, or of genera, orders, families, classes, and sub-kingdoms. ”

“ Spencer that we owe the pellucid expression 'survival of the fittest,' which conveys even better than Darwin's own phrase, 'natural selection,' the essential element added by the 'Origin of Species' to the pre-existing evolutionary conception. ”

“ A much longer chapter will be required to describe the change which the advent of the Origin of Species has wrought in every department of science, and not of science only, but of philosophy. The principle of evolution, so early broached and so long discredited, has now at last been proclaimed and accepted as the guiding idea in the investigation of Nature. ”