A Century of Evolution

...Evolution, as a process carried on unbrokenly from one generation to another, is therefore but a working hypothesis without experimental proof...

...And it is interesting to note that while Lamarck the evolutionist was not only a Catholic but actually obtained his early education at the Jesuit College at Amiens, Cuvier the anti-evolutionist, born in 1769 at Montbeliard, in the then Duchy of Wurttemberg, was brought up in the strictest tenets of Calvinism...

...Pointer pups are said sometimes to point without training, and holding the tail erect is said to be an acquired characteristic in dogs...

...Carl von Linne, better known as Linnaeus, the Swedish pioneer of systema-tology and nomenclature, used to classify plants according to the number of their stamens and pistils, and never got quite beyond putting one bush with another because both were obviously little trees, recognizing a hog as a hog because of its hoggish habits, and calling himself Carl because that was his name...

...He carried the idea too far...

...For all the higher forms of life, springing as they do from two parents, each with different characteristics, are hybrid in a broad sense, and the effects of hybridization reach everywhere in the organic realm...

...This much even biology, which has really nothing to do with the matter, would lead one to admit...

...Yet it can hardly be denied that he helped to lay the foundations for one of the most pernicious of present-day fallacies-the idea that nature somehow creates itself as it goes along, without a mystic force behind it...

...If not, the whole evolutionary idea might be cleared up, observed facts set forth as observed facts, likely theories as likely theories, flowery conjectures as flowery conjectures, and damnable nonsense as damnable nonsense...

...Lamarck, all things considered, and especially in comparison with some of his modern successors, was admirably free from unwarranted speculation...

...Must one be barred from admitting it simply because absurdities have been uttered in evolution's name...

...Lamarck, whose beauty of character has become a legend, thought that most changes were gradual...

...The units are certainly much smaller than he supposed...

...It must be admitted, however, that Buffon, though keeper of the royal gardens (now the Jardin des Plantes) at Paris, was merely a popular writer, and that his speculations were very superficial and put forward without either consistency or conviction...

...Everybody is an "evolutionist" in one sense or another...

...That his theory of "unit traits" was oversimplified is now generally admitted...

...Neither laid bare the cause of these variations...

...He was, in fact, but sixteen when, left free by the death of his father to choose his own career, he yielded to a youthful desire to play soldier and enlisted in the French army for the Seven Years' War...

...but the marvelous arrangement whereby the germ-cells are protected from contamination through the ordinary body-cells, make it plain that most of the toothache reaches us through the cradle and not from the genital tract...

...That variations are seldom useful except in fully developed groups, is a fact (beautifully developed by the French entomologist, Fabre) in itself sufficient to overthrow the main contention of Darwin that it was "survival value" which shaped an evolution proceeding by tiny changes...

...Perhaps a minimum of seven volumes was too much...

...This clearly indicates that he was weak in philosophy, however excellent in botany and in morals...

...Starvation indeed will kill, but it will not in itself create...

...The method, I believe, was inaugurated by Adam, who, as a practical gardener, knew what was most needed in this work-a-day world...

...Perhaps the evangelical pulpits of his day neglected to advertise him by ill-considered attacks upon his strong points and a display of total ignorance as to his weaknesses...

...Lamarck, then, is a very live subject for contemporary biography, though if one is looking for the genuine father of the modern evolutionary theory, I see no reason for ignoring George Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, whose evolutionary speculations preceded Lamarck's by more than thirty years...

...This is equivalent to saying that there was an effect without a cause, or that the mere process or history of the development was itself the cause, which is absurd...

...More and more it becomes apparent that the great name in biology is that of Mendel, who first laid bare the complicated but definite laws of heredity, so that the visible traits of hybrids may, as to their general average, be mathematically calculated in advance...

...Granted that one species is related by sap or by blood to another, and the question of classification becomes merely that of constructing a family tree...

...Mere need or desire will not produce a transmissible change of bodily structure, even if accompanied by active endeavor-not unless that need be noted elsewhere than within the organism itself, any more than the piety of parents suffices to rid their children of the curse of Adam...

...But such cases are limited in number, and all are questionable because of the darkness which surrounds each particular circumstance...

...Botany seems not to have been a plebian pursuit in those days, for Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de Lamarck, like his famous friend, Buffon, and his equally famous enemy, Georges Leopold Chretien Frederic Dagebert, baron de Cuvier, was of noble descent...

...It is enough if a series of family resemblances can be traced, no matter by what means they were brought about...

...For the very preface to this book assigns to the struggle for existence a prominent role in the production of new species, insists upon the necessity of geographical isolation for the preservation of distinct species, and even suggests the possible simian origin of man...

...Would it not even be possible to convince the modernist that the world was not in any sense created by the word "evolution" ? Here, I think, lies an interesting adventure for some very patient and daring writer, caring for no insult and looking for no glittering reward...

...Nor did either Lamarck or Darwin actually prove that diverse species have a common ancestor...

...The notion of "spontaneous generation," of something brought about by the force of surroundings, themselves with no force but their own (and that nil) has, unfortunately, hung about the subject of biological evolution ever since...

...He held that all natural history was a series of "catastrophies...

...But nature has yet to be caught in the act of producing one specifically different creature out of the loins of another...

...But the importance of his discovery of latent traits in hybrids-traits of a more remote ancestor which are carried invisible in a parent only to appear undiminished in subsequent offspring- has not been fully realized even yet...

...And so, though we find him extremely sensitive to those niceties with which creative force responds to the need for mutual adaptation among all things, and more especially of the living creature to its changing circumstances, we find him at the same time inventing the phrase "spontaneous generation...

...This is a very good law, but has the slight defect of not being true...

...They described an accomplished fact, a creation arranged like a hierarchy, with lower and simpler forms appearing earlier than those more complicated and developed...

...It would be a hardy writer who would contend that the eating of sour grapes has no tendency to set the children's teeth on edge...

...And when one comes to consider his monumental work, Le Systeme des Animaux sans Vertebres, first published in 1801, it is difficult to see how the word "evolution" ever came to be associated so exclusively with the name of Darwin...

...The bane of the modern evolutionary doctrine has always been the implication that the simian became human without anything in particular happening to it...

...How easily is a bush supposed a bearl How difficult for it to become one...

...As to man, the "evidence" consists solely in a bushel or so of very doubtful bones, tending to show that some men are somewhat more simian than others-which who shall dispute...

...The real reason why a whale is today called an animal rather than a fish is not because it has warm blood or breathes air, but because it is held to be more nearly related to land animals than it is to the finny tribe, its acquatic habits to the contrary notwithstanding...

...The facts as observed show a distressing tendency to explain themselves in other ways...

...Cetaceans which have abandoned the land for the water do seem to have had their legs transformed into fin-like members through the sheer force of trying to swim-or, as Lamarck was so fond of saying, through their "besoin...

...On several occasions this most interesting drama has been advertised as occurring, but in every instance subsequent investigations have shown that the parents were hybrids, crosses between allied forms, and that the supposed new species were but throw-backs, revealing ancestral traits temporarily repressed by mixed breeding...

...Nevertheless, to Lamarck belongs the honor of having first supplied biology with a working principle whereby all natural forms could be grouped and classified for the purpose of study...

...Forced to abandon Lamarck's contention that they were caused in great measure by the transmission of habits and structural changes acquired in response to environment, he attempted to get along with such fluctuations in form as just happened, depending upon environment to kill off such as were not wanted and to cherish and magnify those that were...

...Everything which has been acquired by the parents during life is most emphatically not transmitted to their children, otherwise we whose fathers and mothers were literate would never have had to learn to read...

...Both Darwin and Lamarck taught that the series of resemblances to be observed throughout nature are due to genuine inheritance, and both thought that the differences to be observed are due to the accumulation and preservation of those minor variations which make all children slightly unlike their parents...

...He seems not to have been sufficiently impressed by the fact that Creative Force is required not only to bring the individual into being, or to modify it in response to "besoin" or otherwise, but even to sustain it from moment to moment...

...Darwin did not even have a theory...

...But to me-though I am willing to bow to the theologians in this matter-it seems of less philosophical and religious importance than is generally supposed...

...He deserted his Jesuit college a little too soon...

...He might have found even this in Lamarck, but it was from the Essay on Population of Malthus, published in 1789, that he actually received the hint that starvation is chief weeder in nature's garden...

...The first evolutionist in this great sense was neither Lamarck nor Darwin, but Moses...

...But the longest does not become longer, either by stretching, a la Lamarck, or by the demise of the shorter, a la Malthus...

...Perhaps his chief title to fame is the friendship which he showed for Lamarck, securing his appointment as keeper of the herbarium in these same royal gardens, after having obtained for him the post of royal botanist and a commission to visit Holland, Germany and Hungary on a flower-hunting mission in 1781-1782...

...It may increase the general average of fitness, but not the maximum...

...The biologist's problem, however, is to show that one species ever did come from another in the sense of being physically born from it...

...A CENTURY OF EVOLUTION By HARVEY WICKHAM FRANCE has recently been celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the death of Lamarck, "the true founder of the doctrine of evolution," and considerable patriotic zeal has been shown in the endeavor to prove that "the most fecund hypothesis of modern times" is indeed French rather than English, and that Darwin has reaped a great deal of credit rightly due to another...

...If it be an advantage to calves to have long necks, and thus be able to feed upon the leaves in the trees of the pasture, the herd (theoretically) will tend to have long necks-as long as the longest...

...If now you wish to determine whether a given specimen is or is not of the bear family, you have but to find out the status of its ancestors among bears...

...That there are variable species and so-called intermediate forms, everybody knows...

...His "besoin" formula can so easily be construed as meaning that the act of swimming creates the organ with which to swim-as if the act could precede the agent...

...Science, however, demanded an underlying principle other than convenience, and Lamarck found it in the principle of heredity...

...Whether the dust of the ground out of which the body of Adam was made first passed through other forms, or not, is a question of great biological interest...

...For not only did Lamarck precede Darwin by many years, and excel him in many ways, but the "evolution" which the average man swears by smacks more of Lamarck than of Darwin...

...And the beauty of it all is that the theory works to the practical end of bringing order to an otherwise chaotic biology, whether an unbroken line of descent, beginning with a common ancestor and leading to whale and fish, is a fact or not...

...He was born at Bazentin-le-Petit, a village in Picardy, in 1744, the eleventh child of his parents...

...Something more than "besoin" was needed, even in earth's one blessed instance of such immaculate conception...

...The longer must be born, and starvation cannot become its father...

...Anyway, he is known today chiefly because of his "fourth law," which runs: Everything which has been acquired, impressed upon, or changed in the organization of individuals, during the course of their life, is preserved by generation and transmitted to the new individuals which have descended from those who have undergone these changes...

...It was Moses, too, who pointed out the common origin of all in the creative fiat of Deity...

...But the actual genesis of "mutations," or sudden leaps -that is, the circumstances under which they have taken place is-dare I use the word ?-unknown...

...With him they were largely "given," and rendered advantageous or disadvantageous by the nature of the environment...

...To Cuvier, the creative power of God could not be shown except in sudden upheavals...

...It is not a mere "link" that is missing, but a whole chain of evidence...

...The whale remains a vertebrate because it has a backbone, viviparous because it brings forth its young alive, a mammal because it has mammary glands-but these words belong to a more ancient classification which has been found to conform more or less to the new...

...The French contention has much in its favor...

...Or do we crave our "contest between science and religion," merely to relieve the tedium of our later years...

...In regard to species in general, the record shows such gaps that most biologists now look for sudden "mutations" rather than for heaps of accumulated, trifling variations to bridge them...

...And one would have to be singularly deficient, both in sight and perspicacity, who could pass through one of our natural history museums as now arranged without discovering that man looks more like one of the higher apes than like a tiger or a starfish...

...For it is not only necessary to show that a given individual has a given characteristic, but that he acquired it by heredity-and not only that, but to show that it was a post-natal acquirement of the ancestor and not inborn, or latent...