Mr. Belloc objects to "The outline of history"

My first article upon Mr. Belloc’s Companion to the Outline of History dealt, much against my inclination and as charitably and amiably as possible, with the oddities of Mr. Belloc’s manner and method, and those remarkable non-existent “European authorities” to whom he appeals habitually in moments of argumentative stress. I do not propose to go on thus girding at Mr. Belloc. He is a Catholic apologist, endorsed by Catholic authorities, and there is matter of very great importance for our consideration in what he has to say about the history of life and mankind.

After his second paper is finished his abuse of me becomes merely incidental or indirect. He goes on to a staggering rush at Natural Selection. Let us see to where Catholic thought has got—if Mr. Belloc is to be trusted—in relation to this very fundamental matter.

It is Mr. Belloc’s brilliant careless way to begin most of his arguments somewhere about the middle and put the end first. His opening peroration, so to speak, is a proclamation that this “Natural Selection”—whatever it is—is “an old and done-for theory of Darwin and Wallace.” It is “a laughing-stock for half a generation among competent men.” Mr. George Bernard Shaw does not believe in it! G. B. S. among the Fathers! That wonderful non-existent “latest European work” which plays so large a part in Mr. Belloc’s dialectic is summoned briefly, its adverse testimony is noted, and it is dismissed to the safe again. And then there is a brief statement of how these two vile fellows, Darwin and Wallace, set out upon this reprehensible theorising. What a ruthless exposé it is of the true motives of scientific people!

And so having invented and then as it were visited and spat upon the derided and neglected tomb of Natural Selection and assured us that God, Mr. Shaw, “European opinion,” and all good Catholics are upon his side, Mr. Belloc plucks up courage and really begins to write about Natural Selection.

Natural Selection is Pure Common-Sense

What is this Natural Selection which has been dead for half a century, but which Mr. Belloc still exerts himself industriously through four long papers to kill all over again? It is the purest common-sense, the most obvious deduction from obvious facts. I have set out the idea as plainly as I could in the Outline of History Mr. Belloc is attacking. It is put so plainly there that, before he can begin to argue against it, he has to misstate it; he has to tell the story all over again in his own words and get it suitably askew. It was quite open to him to quote from my account, but he preferred to compile his own misstatement. Indeed, in all this argument against Natural Selection he never once quotes my actual words. He paraphrases throughout. He has put some words between inverted commas in one place, so as inadvertently to produce the impression that they are mine, but they are not mine.

Now the facts upon which the idea of Natural Selection rests are matters of universal knowledge. “Every species of living thing is continually dying and being born again as a multitude of fresh individuals”; that is the primary fact. No species seems to be perfectly adapted to its conditions, and even the happiest species tends to multiply until it is in a state of need and pressure. So far surely we are dealing with things beyond dispute. And next comes the fact of individuality. Every living unit is individual with a difference of its own. Every individual has its own distinctive differences, and each of these differences may or may not be an advantage or a disadvantage. Individuals with advantageous differences will generally get on better in life, prosper and so be able to breed more freely, than those with disadvantageous differences. Offspring have a tendency to repeat the distinctive differences of their parents. Therefore, taking a species as a whole by the million or billion or million billion—for few species of animals or plants are represented by fewer individuals than a million—there will be in each successive generation a greater number of individuals with the differences that are advantageous relative to the number with disadvantages. In other words, the average of the species will have moved more or less in the direction of the advantageous differences, whatever they may be, and however numerous they may be. If, for example, the species is chased and has to climb or run for it, there will be rather more good climbers and sprinters in the new generation. There may be other dangers and other needs; they will not affect the premium set on quickness and the fate of the slow. And if the circumstances of the species continue to press in the same direction, the movement of the average will be in the same direction in this respect for so long as they continue to press. Over a few score or even a few hundred generations, and under conditions not very strenuous, a species may not change very much. It may seem to be fixed in its general characteristics, just as the continents seem to be fixed in their general outline. But, as the range of time extends and the pressure of necessity continues, the change becomes more striking.

Natural Selection Has Nothing to Do with the Origin of Variations

That is the process of Natural Selection, the “laughing-stock” of Mr. Belloc’s mysterious conclave of “European” savants. Natural Selection has nothing to do with the reason for the differences between individuals. It has no more to do with those than gravitation has to do with the differences in the heaviness of different substances. But it is necessary to state as much here, because in some queer muddled way Mr. Belloc seems to be persuaded that it has. These differences may arise by pure chance; they may come about through the operation of complex laws, they may come in shoals and have their seasons. These things have nothing to do with Natural Selection.

Now, Wallace and Darwin were two excellent Europeans who happened to be interested in natural history. In spite of the sinister motives invented for them by Mr. Belloc, I doubt if any Catholic sufficiently educated to have read their lives will agree that they had even a latent animus against Catholic truth or even a subconscious desire to “get rid of a Creator” in their minds. They no more thought of “getting rid of a Creator” when humbly and industriously they gathered their facts and put fact to fact than an honest bricklayer thinks of “getting rid of a Creator” when he lays his bricks with care and builds a sound piece of wall. They went about the world studying natural history. They considered life with a patience and thoroughness and freedom from preconceptions beyond the imagination of a man of Mr. Belloc’s habits. They found no such “fixity of species” as he is inspired to proclaim. They found much evidence of a progressive change in species, and they saw no reason to explain it by a resort to miracles or magic. A Catholic priest of the Anglican communion named Malthus had written a very interesting and suggestive book upon over-population and the consequent struggle for existence between individuals. It turned the attention of both these diligent and gifted observers to just that process of Natural Selection I have stated. Independently both of them came to the conclusions that species changed age by age and without any necessary limits, and mainly through the sieve of Natural Selection, and that, given a sufficient separation to reduce or prevent interbreeding and a sufficient difference in the selective conditions at work, two parts of the same species might change in different directions, so as at last to become distinct and separate species.

Darwin’s book upon the subject was called The Origin of Species. It was a very modest and sufficient title. He did not even go to the length of calling it the origin of genera or orders or classes. He did not at first apply it to man.

This is the theory of the origin of species through Natural Selection. It was not pretended by either of these pioneers that Natural Selection was the sole way through which the differences of species came about. For example, Darwin devoted a considerable part of his working life to such collateral modes of differentiation as the hypothesis that Sexual Selection also had its share. Criticism has whittled down that share to practically negligible proportions, but I note the hypothesis here because it absolutely disposes of the assertion which Mr. Belloc hammers on the table, that the Theory of Natural Selection excludes any other modes of specific differentiation.

Testing the Theory

Very rapidly this conception of Natural Selection was extended by naturalists until it came to be regarded as the general process of life. They came to realise that all species, all genera, all classes of life, whatever else may be happening to them, are and always have been varying through the process of Natural Selection, some rapidly, some slowly; some so slowly as hardly to change at all through vast ages. I have stated the a priori case by which, given birth and death and individuality and changing conditions and sufficient time, it appears logically inevitable that the change and differentiation of species must occur, and must be now going on. If we had no material evidence at all it would still be possible to infer the evolution of species.

That a priori case has never been answered, and it seems to me unanswerable. But scientific men, with their obstinate preference for observation and experiment over mere logical gymnastics, rarely rest their convictions on a priori cases. A sustaining scepticism is a matter of conscience with them. To them an a priori case is merely a theory—that is to say, a generalisation under trial. For nearly three-quarters of a century, therefore, biologists have been examining whatever instances they could discover that seemed to contradict this assumption that the process of specific change under Natural Selection is the general condition of life. To this day this view is still called the Theory of Natural Selection, though to a great number it has come to have the substantial quality of an embracing fact.

It would have been amusing if Mr. Belloc had told us more of his ideas of the scientific world. Apparently he knows scarcely anything of museums or laboratories or the spirit and methods of research. And manifestly he has not the faintest suspicion of the way in which the whole world of vital phenomena has been ransacked and scrutinised to test, correct, supplement, amplify, or alter this great generalisation about life. He probably shares the delusion of most other men in the street, that scientific theories are scientific finalities, that they are supposed to be as ultimate as the dogmas of some infallible religion. He imagines them put over chiefly by asseveration, just as the assertions of a polemical journalist are put over. He has still to learn that theories are trial material, testing targets, directives for research. Shooting at established theories is the normal occupation of the scientific investigator. Mr. Belloc’s figure of the scientific investigator is probably a queer, frowsty, and often, alas! atheistical individual, poking about almost aimlessly among facts in the hope of hitting upon some “discovery” or “getting rid of a God.” He does not understand the tense relevance of the vast amount of work in progress. But for three-quarters of a century the thought and work of myriads of people round and about the world have borne directly or almost directly upon the probing, sounding, testing, of the theory of Natural Selection. It stands clarified and, it would seem, impregnable to-day.

Some Irrelevant Questions

Among questions bearing upon it but not directly attacking it has been the discussion of the individual difference. For example, are differences due to individual experiences ever inherited? Or are only inherent differences transmissible? What rôle is played by what one might call “normal,” relatively slight differences, and what by the “sports” and abnormal births in specific change? Do species under stress, and feeding on strange food or living in unaccustomed climates, betray any exceptional tendency to produce abnormality? Have there been, so to speak, storms and riots of variation in some cases? Can differences establish themselves while outer necessity remains neutral? Can variations amounting to specific differences in colour and form arise as a sort of play of the germ plasm and be tolerated rather than selected by nature? In what manner do normal differences arise? What happens to differences in cases of hybridisation? Here are sample questions that have been the seeds of splendid work and great arguments. Some of them were already under discussion in Darwin’s time; he was a pioneer in such explorations; many ideas of his have stood the test of time, and many suggestions he threw out have been disproved. When some casual “may be” of Darwin’s is examined and set aside, it is the custom of polemical journalists to rush about and proclaim to all who may be sufficiently ill-informed to listen that Darwin is “exploded.” Such explosions of Darwin are constantly recurring like gun-fire near a garrison town, and still he remains. None of these subsidiary questions affect the stability of this main generalisation of biology, the Theory of Natural Selection.

The actual attack and testing of the Theory of Natural Selection have yielded negative results. The statement of the theory may have been made finer and exacter, that is all. And yet the conditions of its survival have been very exacting. If the theory is to stand, the whole of plant and animal life in time and space must be arranged in a certain order. It must be possible to replace classification by a genealogical tree. Every form must fall without difficulty into its proper place in that tree. If it is true that birds are descended from reptiles or men from apes, then there must be no birds before the reptiles appear, and no men before apes. The geological record is manifestly a mere fragmentary history, still for the most part unread, but, however fragmentary it is, it must be consistent. One human skull in the coal measures blows the whole theory to atoms. The passage from form to form must be explicable by intermediate types capable of maintaining themselves; there may be gaps in the record, but there must be no miraculous leaps in the story. If an animal living in the air is to be considered as a lineal descendant of some animal living in the water, then the structure of the former bit by bit and step by step must be shown to be adapted, modified, changed about from that of the latter; it must have ears for water-hearing modified for air-hearing, and its heart and breathing arrangements must be shown to be similarly changed over, and so on for all its structure. All these requirements will follow naturally from the necessities of a process of Natural Selection. They follow logically upon no other hypothesis. They are not demanded, for example, by the idea of a Creator continually interfering with and rectifying some stately, unaccountable process of “Evolution,” which seems to be Mr. Belloc’s idea—so far as he ventures to display any idea of his own—in the matter. Such things as vestigial structures and a number of odd clumsinesses in living things—many still very imperfect adaptations to an erect position, for example—become grotesque in relation to such a view. A Creator who put needless or inconvenient fish structures into the anatomy of a land animal and made the whole fauna and flora of the land a patch-up of aquatic forms of life must be not so much a Divinity as a Pedant. But it is the burthen of the whole beautiful science of comparative anatomy that the structure of animals and plants, and their succession in time, fall exactly into the conditions defined by the Theory of Natural Selection. In the most lovely and intricate detail, in a vast multitude of examples, in plants and in animals alike, this theme of the adaptation of pre-existing structure is worked out.

We should in accordance with the Theory of Natural Selection expect to find traces of the ancestral form, not only in the lay-out of the adult animal, but in every phase of its life history, and that, in fact, is just what we do find. There is no more fascinating branch of comparative anatomy than embryology. Each life cycle we discuss tends to repeat the ancestral story, and only under the stress of necessity does it undergo modification at any point. There is little toleration in the life process for unnecessary divergencies. Economies are effected by short cuts and reductions, and special fœtal structures are granted reluctantly. So that even in man we find peeping through the adaptations imposed upon the human type by its viviparous necessities, and in spite of the advantage of every economy of force, memories, for example, of the gill slits, of the fish heart and kidney, of the reptilian skull, of the mammalian tail. I mention this fact in the Outline, and upon it Mr. Belloc comments in a manner that leaves one’s doubts poised between his honesty and his intelligence. He declares, which is totally untrue, that I “repeat the old Victorian tag”—I doubt if there ever was such a tag—that the embryo “climbs up the family tree.” He puts these words in inverted commas as though I have really adopted and used them, and for the life of me it is only by straining my charity to the utmost that I can accept that this was an accident. Of course every text-book of embryology for the last forty years has made it perfectly plain, as I have stated here, that the life cycle can be and is modified at any point, and that an embryo has much more serious work in hand than reciting its family history. It betrays its ancestral origins to analysis; but that is an altogether different matter. Mr. Belloc, however, is so densely ignorant himself upon these questions that he can imagine, or think it worth while to pretend to imagine and attempt to persuade his readers by the expedient of these inverted commas, that I entertain such a view. And then follow this, which I quote that the reader may the better understand a certain occasional acerbity in my allusions to Mr. Belloc:—

It is perfectly true that I have never heard of any Vailleton in biological science. Nor has anyone else. There is “no sich person.” Perhaps Mr. Belloc has not been able to read the manuscript of some adviser, or his memory may have played a trick upon him. Possibly he has in mind that eminent Victorian embryologist, Vialleton, who, so far from being the very newest thing in “European” biology, must now be getting on for seventy. He is half-way back to Haeckel, the originator of the family-tree idea, a German embryologist and not, as a matter of fact, the Victorian English Protestant Mr. Belloc supposes him to be. Possibly years and years ago some French student may have run away with the idea that embryos conscientiously repeat their phylogeny, and Professor Vialleton may have thought it well to discuss this idea in one of his books. It is not an idea I have ever entertained, much less stated, and its only interest here is that it gives Mr. Belloc a chance of showing how rudely he can set out his inaccuracies and his misconceptions.

But this is an incidental comment. I will reserve for my next section a consideration of the remarkable arguments—“crushing arguments” the enthusiastic cross-heads of his editor declare them to be—that Mr. Belloc produces against this view of life as being in a state of change under the action of Natural Selection, that I have put here before the reader.