The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

ESSENGE OF THE CONTROVERSIES ABOUT EVOLUTION

satisfied with Lamarckism as an explanation of it. (“Creative Evolution” with its élan vital was still to come.) These were Charles Darwin (1809-82) and Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913).

Tt is well to note here that Darwin did not “discover” Evolution, as many people suppose. Evolution is not Darwinism and Darwinism is not Evolution. The idea of Evolution is not only at least as old in modern thought as Lamarck, but adumbrations of it are clearly traceable in such ancient writers as Lucretius and Empedocles. But in the minds of Darwin and Wallace, looking for operating causes for the evolutionary process, the phrase of Malthus, “‘ the struggle for subsistence,”’ found a fruitful soil. Both realized a second great fact—for fact it is—in the general conditions of life, namely Natural Selection. Every living species is continually producing a multitude of individuals, many more than can all survive, varying more or less among themselves, and all competing against each other for food and a place in the sun. On the whole, Nature will let the better fitted ones live more abundantly and she will kill off the less happily constituted. The weaker will go to the wall; they will not breed so much ; the stronger and their offspring will prevail. Assuming that weakness and strength and, in general, fitness and unfitness are hereditable qualities—and that is the general persuasion—a species must be alwayson the grindstone, having its unsuitable strains eliminated and its suitable strains left in possession.

Now, let us be quite clear here ; speaking with precision, Natural Selection we say is not a theory but a fact. But does it, in connection with the small differences that occur between every individual and its peers and the distinctive resemblance of parent and child, suffice to account for the whole spectacle of Evolution? With or without that element of effort and hereditable acquirement which Lamarckism asserts? ‘There we come to speculative matter, to theories. Darwin thought it did. He did not contradict the Lamarckian hypothesis, but he added a new factor in the process, which factor he drew from Malthus. In 1859 he published a book which made an immense stir in the world, and he called it The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. We have insisted that Natural Selection is not a theory. But, on the other hand, this appeal to the fact of Natural Selection and the fact of hereditable variations as giving between them a full and sufficient explanation of the fact of Evolution, is a theory ;

it is the Darwinian Theory. To the majority of even highly educated people at that period, educated for the most part upon lines of a narrow religious orthodoxy, it brought home for the first time the neglected and repudiated fact of Evolution, and made it seem credible. Explanatory theory and fact to be explained appeared together in their minds, and so to this day, in common talk, Evolution, Darwinism, and Natural Selection are hopelessly mixed and muddled. It became the custom to speak of the Darwinian Theory, the Theory of Natural Selection, and the Theory of Evolution indifferently.

Moreover, Darwin and his associates drew attention to the particular aspect of the question of Evolution that had hitherto been in the background. He followed up his Origin of Species by a book upon The Descent of Man. He insisted that man was an animal and that if the facts of Evolution were true they applied to man. [If other living things had not been specially created but evolved, so, too, man must have been evolved. To do this was to challenge and bring into the discussion the whole world of contemporary theology. What had been a field of interesting speculation for naturalists became an arena of intense interest to the ordinary man.

Darwin’s publication was followed by furious controversies, in which Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) and Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) played notable parts in championing the evolutionary cause and defending Darwin and his views from misrepresentation. Huxley liked to call himself ** Darwin’s bull-dog.” But the controversies did much to darken counsel in these matters. The fact of Evolution had to be proved to most people, and many were only too eager to suppose that the defeat or qualification of the theory would abolish the fact. To many of them to the end of their days it remained a theory, and an unsound one at that. All sorts of secondary considerations have played their part in these disputes. There is, for example, a real dislike of the fact of Natural Selection on the part of such a fine and sympathetic nature as Mr. G. B. Shaw Ss. Tt seems to him unchivalrous and vile for science to recognize that the weakest do go to the wall. It is hitting the fellow who is down. In the philosophy of a wilful lifeforce it is natural the wish should be father to the thought. He wishes things were not so, and therefore he declares they are not so, and he does it with great charm, confidence, and conviction. It pleases Mr. Shaw to tell the world at regular intervals that Natural Selection has been “ exploded,” and it does

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