Belloc versus H. G. Wells and the Darwinists continued…
In the old materialist days when Natural Selection was triumphing, its supporters used to say, as we have seen, that it acted "until equilibrium was reached by the organism conforming to its environment". That was typical of their hiding the weakness of their case under vague phrases which, when closely analysed, proved self-contradictory.
If natural Selection be the Agent of Evolution stability can never be reached. There is always some slight proportion of beings rather more suited to survive than the mass of its fellows, and that fact should cause a perpetual change rendering stability impossible.
A water-mammal has not "reached stability" when it can
stay under water ten minutes, or an hour, or two hours. According to Natural
Selection, it ought to progress unceasingly to longer and longer capacities
of submersion.
A swallow has not "reached stability" by Natural Selection
when it flies at sixty miles an hour; it ought to fly faster in the process
of time. It may well have reached stability in the sense that it is suited
to its lot and makes no further effort. It may well have reached stability
in the sense that its end has been achieved, its design completed. But
if it got its fast flight only because a slightly faster minority of swallows
always outlive and outbreed their slower rivals, by an assumed perpetual
accumulation of little additions of speed, why should the process stop
at the bird’s present capacity?
Of course the series is a diminishing one. Each increment
of speed is at a higher cost than the last. But no fast-flying bird has
nearly reached a theoretical limit of speed — nor shows any tendency to
reach it.
Granted Design then an end — if Natural Selection be
true, then what we call a pig is but a fleeting vision; all the past he
has been becoming a pig, and all the future he will spend evolving out
of pigdom, and Fixed type — a Normal to which freak types tend to return
— is explicable. Those who cannot bear the idea of Design, that is of a
Creator implanting inherent powers must try to invent some new theory which
will allow of Fixed Types without Design. But if Fixed types exist they
cannot be due to Natural Selection, for Natural selection and Fixed Types
are contradictory terms.
If Natural Selection be true, then what we call a pig
is but a fleeting vision; all the past he has been becoming a pig and all
the future he will spend evolving out of pigdom, and pig is but a moment’s
phase in the eternal flux, while all around us should be quarter pigs,
half pigs, all but pigs, slightly super pigs, just beginning — and so on.
But there aren’t. There are just pigs.
In other words, the evidence is all in favour of Fixed
types and all against a ceaseless process of change.
The first Argument from Evidence against Natural Selection:
The Fixed type is apparent in all recorded human experience. This is the
argument based on human experience during the period of humanly recorded
history, of which argument not nearly enough has been made. For certainly
5000 years of this record types are fixed. That is not to say that maturity
is not reached by growth, nor is it to say that a type cannot disappear.
But it is an affirmation that the conceptions of careless flux, of the
absence of form, of no maturity in characteristics and nature are baseless.
As, indeed, the mere evidence of our senses and of common sense acting
on that evidence, must convince anyone who prefers reality to print.
Tell the plain man that there is no such thing as a fox
or a salmon, and he will laugh in your face. And he will be quite right.
We are told that the 5000 years or so of recorded history (if we count
prehistoric relics the period is probably longer) are so brief that they
are a mere flash, and that we cannot observe in that tiny section of an
immensely long period the slight process of change over which Natural selection
has been at work. We are under the illusion that types are fixed because
the few thousand years over which we compare them are as nothing compared
with the whole period of development.
Types only seem to be fixed in the same way as a revolving
wheel seems at rest when discovered by a flash of lightning: the period
of vision is too brief for the motion to be appreciated. But people who
talk like that have not made the very simple calculation of dividing the
total period of a particular development by the few thousand years over
which our direct experience stretches.
Take for instance the Theory of Natural Selection as
applied to ourselves. We know that over all these 5000 years the human
body has not progressively changed. There have been various sorts of men,
of course and variations around the normal. But the norm is set. Now even
those who have indulged in the wildest guesswork to allow for development
do not give true man more than 50,000 years.* Now, one tenth is a very
sufficient fraction by which to measure any movement. If so highly differentiated
an organism as man has been subject to unceasing slow transformation during
50,000 years, and will go on changing slowly through the next 50,000, then
certainly in one tenth of that period some considerable change should be
marked. None is so marked.
Man, throughout those 5000 years, at least, is a certainly
Fixed Type, as his records and portraiture show. *Sollas gives 15,000 from
the start of the Magdalenian. Waldmeyer 15,000 to 20,000 for true man.
Boulay 10,000. Mainage 15,000 from the Chellean. Holst less than 7,000.
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 today from the very early days of
life on this earth.
It was hoped, when the theory of Natural Selection was
first broached, that the evidence would appear for continual 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 is no argument against transition. But it is damning evidence against
(a) very slow, (b) infinitesimally graduated, (c) continuous and unceasing
transition or flux which Darwinian Selection demands.
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 about 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 to 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 its caste among men of Science."
But if he be asked why so patently false a theory was so tenaciously defended for some years by serious authorities — is still defended by 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.