Mr. Belloc objects to "The outline of history"

The chief arguments against the Theory of Natural Selection with which Mr. Belloc has favoured us are neatly set out by him in two triads. His passion for orderly arrangement is greater than his logic, and we shall find that the second and third arguments of his second triad are substantially the same. He is rather exceptionally ignorant of modern scientific literature, and his arguments do not cover all the countervailing considerations upon which systematic observation and research work have been based—the speculations of Dr. Fairfield Osborn would have been a godsend for him—but the things he has to say are conveniently simple; they embody some prevalent misconceptions, and they will be useful in accentuating the more salient points in my account of the theory given in my second paper.

He produces first certain remarkable a priori arguments—his “three a prior arguments.” The first is beautifully absurd. It is difficult to believe it is advanced in anything but a spirit of burlesque. He says that an advantage is not an advantage. He says that an advantage does not give an advantage unless it is combined with other advantages. You will think I am misrepresenting him. Then please read this:—

This is, so to speak, the short uncompleted form of the first argument. It is expanded later to a copiousness too great to admit of quotation. This expansion carries the statement right to its conclusion, that only an individual possessing all the possible differences that are advantageous at any particular time can survive. Otherwise its differences have no “survival value.” They may be advantages, but not sufficient advantages to score an advantage. I know this sounds tipsy, but there it is in black and white in Mr. Belloc’s wonderful Article V for any one to consult. It follows plainly that, except for a miracle, every species must be exterminated in every generation. I can see no other way out of it. No individual, he declares, can survive without the full set of advantageous differences, and the chance of any individual having the full set of advantageous differences, he declares after some abstruse verbal gestures, is zero. There is Mr. Belloc with his unfailing logic, his clear mathematical demonstration, and all the rest of it. There is the lucid Latin mind shining above my Nordic fog! Yet the previous generation got along without any of the set! And species do survive.

Did Mr. Belloc imagine he was saying something else? It is not for me to speculate. Helping out an antagonist in a controversy is apt to be resented. He has, I think, simply got into a muddle here, and he is not sufficiently self-critical to get out of it again. So he tries to muddle through. It is quite reasonable to say that when a species is under stress of changing conditions it is usual for the need for adaptation to be felt upon a number of points and not simply upon one, and that, since every advantage counts, the individuals with the greatest combination of advantageous differences have the best chances. But that does not alter the fact that even a single advantage is an advantage. What happens in nature is not an extermination of all who are not completely in the fashion of the new differences. That seems to be Mr. Belloc’s idea, but it is a wrong idea. What does happen is a diminution in each generation of the number of the disadvantaged in relation to the number of the advantaged. That is quite another affair. Mr. Belloc has not grasped this. His third a priori argument shows as much even more plainly than his first, and to that I shall presently come.

Mr. Belloc’s Mental Indigestion

I fancy this stuff he has written here is an outcome of an indigestion of Samuel Butler by Mr. Belloc. I should not have thought Mr. Belloc had read Samuel Butler, and I doubt if he has read him much. But there is a decided echo of Luck or Cunning in the one indistinct paragraph in which, without committing himself too deeply, Mr. Belloc seems to convey his own attitude towards the procedure of Evolution. “Design,” whatever that is, is at work, and Natural Selection is not. “There is an innate power possessed by the living thing to attempt its own adaptation.” It is quite a delusion apparently that rabbits that cannot run or sparrows that are not quick on the wing are killed off more frequently than the smarter fellows. That never happens, though to the atheistically minded it may seem to happen. If it happens, it would “get rid of a God.” But there are rabbits which, unlike Mrs. Micawber, do make an effort. You must understand that all creation, inspired by design, is striving. The good fungus says to itself, “Redder and more spots will benefit me greatly,” and tries and tries, and presently there are redder hues and more spots. Or a happily inspired fish says: “There is a lot of food on land and the life is more genteel there, so let me get lungs.” And presently it gets lungs. Some day Mr. Belloc must take a holiday in Sussex and flap about a bit and get himself some wings and demonstrate all this. But perhaps this is caricature, and Mr. Belloc when he talks about that “innate disposition” just means nothing very much—just an attempt or something. I will not pretend to understand Mr. Belloc fully upon this point.

Mr. Belloc’s Bird-Lizard

I will return to the essential misconception of the Theory of Natural Selection betrayed in this first a priori when I consider Mr. Belloc’s third feat of logic. But first let me glance at his second. In this he says, very correctly, that every stage in the evolution of a living creature must be a type capable of maintaining itself and every change must be an advantageous change. I have noted this very obvious point already in my second paper. But then Mr. Belloc instructs us that the chances of its being so are, for no earthly reason, zero—that fatal zero again!—and goes on to a passage so supremely characteristic that it must be read to be believed:—

Let us note a few things of which Mr. Belloc shows himself to be unaware in this amusing display of perplexity. In the first place he does not know that the Mesozoic reptiles most closely resembling birds were creatures walking on their hind-legs, with a bony structure of the loins and a backbone already suggestive of the avian anatomy. Nor is he aware that in the lowliest of living birds the fore-limbs are mere flappers, that the feathers are simpler in structure than any other bird’s feathers, and that the general development of a bird’s feather points plainly to the elongation of a scale. He has never learnt that feathers came before wings, and that at first they had to do, not with flying, but with protection against cold. Yet all this was under his nose in the Outline of History in text and picture. The transition from a quilled to a feathered dinosaur presents indeed no imaginative difficulties, and the earliest birds ran and did not fly. One of the earliest known extinct birds is Hesperornis, a wingless diving bird. It is figured on page 30, and there is another bird on page 34 that Mr. Belloc might ponder with advantage. A whole great section of living birds, like the ostrich and the emu, have no trace in their structure of any ancestral flying phase; their breast-bones are incapable of carrying the necessary muscular attachments.

But after the feather was fully developed it opened up great possibilities of a strong and light extension of the flapper, helpful in running or useful in leaps from tree to tree. Archæopteryx, another early bird, which is also figured in the Outline, has a sort of bat-wing fore-limb with feathers instead of membrane. It was a woodland creature, and flew as a flying fox or a flying lemur or even a bat flies. All these facts are widely known, and all that trouble about the half-leg, half-wing, dissolves before them. But consider what a hash they make of Mr. Belloc’s argument, and how pitifully it scurries off before them on its nondescript stumps of pretentious half-knowledge, half-impudence! So much for zero the second.

Troubles of Mr. Belloc as a Matrimonial Agent

The final of this wonderful trinity of a prioris is a repetition of an argument advanced ages ago by Queen Victoria’s Lord Salisbury, when he was President of the British Association. Even then it struck people that he had been poorly coached for the occasion. Assuming that one or two individuals have got all these “survival value” differences in the correct proportions—against which the chances are zero—how by any theory of Natural Selection are we to suppose they will meet, breed, and perpetuate them? So this argument runs. The chances are again declared to be zero, the third zero, and Mr. Belloc, I gather, calls in Design again here and makes his Creative Spirit, which has already urged these two individuals, lions, or liver flukes or fleas or what not, to make an effort and adapt themselves, lead them now to their romantic and beneficial nuptials, while the Theory of Natural Selection grinds its teeth in the background and mutters “Foiled again.”

But this third argument reinforces the first, in showing what is the matter with Mr. Belloc’s ideas in this group of questions. He has got the whole business upside down. I rather blame the early Darwinians in this matter for using so inaccurate a phrase as the “Survival of the Fittest.” It is to that phrase that most of Mr. Belloc’s blunderings are due. Yet he ought not to have been misled. He had a summary of modern views before him. He criticises my Outline of History, he abuses it, and yet he has an extraordinary trick of getting out of its way whenever it swings near his brain-case. I warn the readers of that modest compendium expressly (and as early as page 16) that the juster phrase to use is not the Survival of the Fittest, but the Survival of the Fitter. I do what I can throughout to make them see this question not in terms of an individual, but in terms of the species.

Yet Mr. Belloc insists upon writing of “the Fittest” as a sort of conspicuously competitive prize boy, a favourable “sport,” who has to meet his female equivalent and breed a new variety. That is all the world away from the manner in which a biologist thinks of the process of specific life. He sees a species as a vast multitude of individuals in which those without individual advantages tend to fail and those with them tend to be left to continue the race. The most important fact is the general relative failure of the disadvantaged. The fact next in order of importance is the general relative survival of the advantaged. The most important consequence is that the average of the species moves in the direction of advantageous differences, moving faster or slower according to its rate of reproduction and the urgency of its circumstances—that is to say, to the severity of its death-rate. Any one particular individual may have any sort of luck; that does not affect the general result.

I do not know what Mr. Belloc’s mathematical attainments are, or indeed whether he has ever learnt to count beyond zero. There is no evidence on that matter to go upon in these papers. But one may suppose him able to understand what an average is, and he must face up to the fact that the characteristics of a species are determined by its average specimens. This dickering about with fancy stories of abnormal nuptials has nothing to do with the Theory of Natural Selection. We are dealing here with large processes and great numbers, secular changes and realities broadly viewed.

I must apologise for pressing these points home. But I think it is worth while to take this opportunity of clearing up a system of foggy misconceptions about the Theory itself that may not be confined altogether to Mr. Belloc.

Mr. Belloc Comes to His Evidence

And now let us come to Mr. Belloc’s second triad of arguments—his arguments, as he calls them, “from Evidence.” The sole witness on Evidence called is his own sturdy self. He calls himself into the box, and I will admit he gives his testimony in a bluff, straightforward manner—a good witness. He says very properly that the theory of Natural Selection repudiates any absolute fixity of species. But we have to remember that the rate of change in any species is dependent upon the balance between that species and its conditions, and if this remains fairly stable the species may remain for as long without remarkable developments, or indulge in variations not conditioned by external necessities. The classical Lingula of the geological text-books, a warm-water shell-fish, has remained much the same creature throughout the entire record, for hundreds of millions of years it may be. It was suited to its submarine life, and hardly any variation was possible that was not a disadvantage. It swayed about within narrow limits.

This admission of a practical stability annoys Mr. Belloc; it seems to be a mean trick on the part of the Theory of Natural Selection. He rather spoils his case by saying that “according to Natural Selection” the swallow ought to go on flying “faster and faster with the process of time.” Until it bursts into flames like a meteor and vanishes from our world? And the Lingula ought to become more and more quiescent until it becomes a pebble? Yet plainly there is nothing in the Theory of Natural Selection to make the swallow fly any faster than its needs require. Excess of swiftness in a swallow may be as disadvantageous as jumping to conclusions can be to a controversialist.

But here is a statement that is spirited and yet tolerably fair:—

This overlooks the melancholy possibility of an extinction of Pigs, but it may be accepted on the whole as true. And against this Mr. Belloc gives us his word, for that upon examination is what his “Evidence” amounts to—that Types are Fixed. He jerks in capitals here in a rather convincing way. It is restrained of him, considering how great a part typography plays in his rhetoric, that he has not put it up in block capitals or had the paper perforated with the words: Fixed Types.

For weeks and months it would seem Mr. Belloc has walked about Sussex accumulating first-hand material for these disputations, and all this time the Pigs have remained Pigs. When he prodded them they squealed. They remained pedestrian in spite of his investigatory pursuit. Not one did he find “scuttling away” with a fore-limb, “half-leg, half-wing.” He has the evidence of his senses also, I may remind him, that the world is flat. And yet when we take a longer view we find the world is round, and Pigs are changing, and Sus Scrofa is not the beast it was two thousand years ago.

Mr. Belloc is conscious of historical training, and I would suggest to him that it might be an improving exercise to study the Pig throughout history and to compare the Pigs of the past with the Pigs of a contemporary agricultural show. He might inform himself upon the bulk, longevity, appetites, kindliness, and general disposition of the Pig to-day. He might realise then that the Pig to-day, viewed not as the conservative occupant of a Sussex sty, but as a species, was something just a little different as a whole, but different, definably different, from the Pig of two thousand or five thousand years ago. He might retort that the Pig has been the victim of selective breeding and is not therefore a good instance of Natural Selection, but it was he who brought Pigs into this discussion. Dogs again have been greatly moulded by man in a relatively short time, and, again, horses. Almost all species of animals and plants that have come into contact with man in the last few thousand years have been greatly modified by his exertions, and we have no records of any detailed observations of structure or habits of creatures outside man’s range of interest before the last three or four centuries. Even man himself, though he changes with relative slowness because of the slowness with which he comes to sexual maturity, has changed very perceptibly in the last five thousand years.

Mr. Belloc a Fixed Type

Mr. Belloc says he has not (“Argument from Evidence”). He says it very emphatically (“Crushing Argument from Evidence”—to adopt the phraseology of his cross-heads). Let me refer him to a recent lecture by Sir Arthur Keith (Royal Society of Medicine, Nov. 16, 1925) for a first gleam of enlightenment. He will realise a certain rashness in his statement. I will not fill these pages with an attempt to cover all the changes in the average man that have gone on in the last two or three thousand years. For example, in the face and skull, types with an edge-to-edge bite of the teeth are giving place to those with an overlapping bite; the palate is undergoing contraction, the physiognomy changes. And so on throughout all man’s structure. No doubt one can find plentiful instances to-day of people almost exactly like the people of five thousand years ago in their general physique. But that is not the point. The proportions and so forth that were exceptional then are becoming prevalent now; the proportions that were prevalent then, now become rare. The average type is changing. Considering that man only gets through about four generations in a century, it is a very impressive endorsement of the theory of Natural Selection that he has undergone these palpable modifications in the course of a brief score of centuries. Mr. Belloc’s delusion that no such modification has occurred may be due to his presumption that any modification would have to show equally in each and every individual. I think it is. He seems quite capable of presuming that.

Triumphant Demand of Mr. Belloc

Mr. Belloc’s next Argument from Evidence is a demand from the geologist for a continuous “series of changing forms passing one into the other.” He does not want merely “intermediate forms,” he says; he wants the whole series—grandfather, father, and son. He does not say whether he insists upon a pedigree with the bones and proper certificates of birth, but I suppose it comes to that. This argument, I am afraid, wins, hands down. Mr. Belloc may score the point. The reprehensible negligence displayed by the lower animals in the burial of their dead, or even the proper dating of their own remains, leaves the apologist for the Theory of Natural Selection helpless before this simple requisition. It is true that we now have, in the case of the camels, the horses, and the elephants, an extraordinary display of fossil types, exhibiting step by step the development and differentiation of species and genera. But this, I take it, rather concerns his Third than his Second Argument from Evidence.

A Magnificent Generalisation

The third argument is essentially a display of Mr. Belloc’s inability to understand the nature of the record of the rocks. I will assume that he knows what “strata” are, but it is clear that he does not understand that any uniform stratum indicates the maintenance of uniform conditions while it was deposited and an absence of selective stresses, and that when it gives place to another different stratum, that signifies a change in conditions, not only in the conditions of the place where the stratum is found, but in the supply of material. An estuary sinks and gives place to marine sands, or fresh water brings down river gravels which cover over an accumulation of shingle. Now if he will think what would happen to-day under such circumstances, he will realise that the fauna and flora of the stratum first considered will drift away and that another fauna and flora will come in with the new conditions. Fresh things will come to feed and wade and drown in the waters, and old types will no longer frequent them. The fossil remains of one stratum are very rarely directly successive to those below it or directly ancestral to those above it. A succession of forms is much more difficult and elusive to follow up, therefore, than Mr. Belloc imagines. And then if he will consider what happens to the rabbits and rats and mice on his Sussex estate, and how they die and what happens to their bodies, he may begin to realise just what proportion of the remains of these creatures is ever likely to find its way to fossilisation. Perhaps years pass without the bones of a single rabbit from the whole of England finding their way to a resting-place where they may become fossil. Nevertheless the rabbit is a very common animal. And then if Mr. Belloc will think of palæontologists, millions of years after this time, working at the strata that we are forming to-day, working at a gravel or sand-pit here or a chance exposure there, and prevented from any general excavation, and if he will ask himself what proportion of the rare few rabbits actually fossilised are likely to come to light, I think he will begin to realise for the first time in his life the tremendous “gappiness” of the geological record and how very childish and absurd is his demand for an unbroken series of forms. The geological record is not like an array of hundreds of volumes containing a complete history of the past. It is much more like a few score crumpled pages from such an array, the rest of the volumes having either never been printed, or having been destroyed or being inaccessible.

In his Third Argument from Evidence Mr. Belloc obliges us with a summary of this record of the rocks, about which he knows so little. I need scarcely note here that the only evidence adduced is his own inspired conviction. No “European” palæontologist or biologist is brought out of the Humbert safe and quoted. Here was a chance to puzzle me dreadfully with something “in French,” and it is scandalously thrown away. Mr. Belloc tells us, just out of his head, that instead of there being that succession of forms in the geological record the Theory of Natural Selection requires, there are “enormously long periods of stable type” and “(presumably) rapid periods of transition.” That “presumably” is splendid; scientific caution and all the rest of it—rapid periods when I suppose the Creative Spirit got busy and types woke up and said, “Turn over; let’s change a bit.”

There is really nothing to be said about this magnificent generalisation except that it is pure Bellocking. Wherever there is a group of strata, sufficiently thick and sufficiently alike to witness to a long-sustained period of slight alterations in conditions, there we find the successive species approximating. This is not a statement à la Belloc. In spite of the chances against such a thing occurring, and in defiance of Mr. Belloc’s assertion that it does not occur, there are several series of forms in time, giving a practically direct succession of species. Mr. Belloc may read about it and at the same time exercise this abnormal linguistic gift which sits upon him so gracefully, his knowledge of the French language, in Deperet’s Transformations du Monde Animal, where all these questions are conveniently summarised. There he will get the results of Waagen with a succession of Ammonites and also of Neumayr with Paludina, and there also he will get information about the sequence of the species of Mastodon throughout the Tertiary age and read about the orderly progress of a pig group, the Brachyodus of the Eocene and Oligocene. There is a touch of irony in the fact that his own special protégé, the Pig, should thus turn upon him and rend his Third Argument from Evidence.

More recondite for Mr. Belloc is the work of Hilgendorf upon Planorbis, because it is in German; but the drift of it is visible in the Palæontology wing of the London Natural History Museum, Room VIII. A species of these gasteropods was, during the slow processes of secular change, caught in a big lake, fed by hot springs. It underwent progressive modification into a series of successive new species as conditions changed through the ages. Dr. Klähms’ specimens show this beautifully. Rowe’s account of the evolutionary series in the genus Micraster (Q.J.M.S., 1899) is also accessible to Mr. Belloc, and he will find other matter to ponder in Goodrich’s Living Organisms, 1924. The finest series of all, longer in range and completer in its links, is that of the Horse. There is an excellent little pamphlet by Matthew and Chubb, well illustrated, The Evolution of the Horse, published by the American Museum of Natural History, New York, so plain, so simple, so entirely and humiliatingly destructive of Mr. Belloc’s nonsensical assertions, that I pray him to get it and read it for the good of his really very unkempt and neglected soul.

Thus we observe that Mr. Belloc does not know the facts in this case of Natural Selection, and that he argues very badly from such facts as he misconceives. It is for the reader to decide which at the end is more suitable as a laughing-stock—the Theory of Natural Selection or Mr. Belloc. And having thus studied this great Catholic apologist as an amateur biologist and arrived at the result, we will next go on to consider what he has to say about the origins of mankind—and Original Sin.