2. The Second Argument from Evidence:

Geological record is entirely in favour of Fixed Types.

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

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

3. The Third Argument from Evidence:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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