At the Deathbed of Darwinism | Page 3

organic being is striving to increase in geometrical ratio." If this tendency were to continue unchecked, the progeny of living beings would soon be unable to find standing room. Indeed, the very bacteria would quickly convert every vestige of organic matter on earth into their own substance. For has not Cohn estimated that the offspring of a single bacterium, at its ordinary rate of increase under favorable conditions, would in three days amount to 4,772 billions of individuals with an aggregate weight of seven thousand five hundred tons? And the 19,000,000 elephants which, according to Darwin, should to-day perpetuate the lives of each pair that mated in the twelfth century--surely these would be a "magna pars" in the sanguinary contest. When the imagination views these and similar figures, and places in contrast to this multitude of living beings, the limited supply of nourishment, the comparison of nature with a huge slaughterhouse seems tame enough. But reason, not imagination, as Darwin observes more than once, should be our guide in a scientific inquiry.
It is observed on careful reflection that Darwin's theory is endangered by an extremely large disturbing element, viz., accidental destruction. Under this term we include all the destruction of life which occurs in utter indifference to the presence or absence of any individual variations from the parent form. Indeed, the greatest destruction takes place among immature forms before any variation from the parent stock is discernible at all. In this connection we may instance the vast amount of eggs and seeds destroyed annually irrespective of any adaptive advantage that would be possessed by the matured form. And the countless forms in every stage of individual development which meet destruction through "accidental causes which would not be in the least degree mitigated by certain changes of structure or of constitution which would otherwise be beneficial to the species." This difficulty, Darwin himself recognized. But he was of opinion that if even "one-hundredth or one-thousandth part" of organic beings escaped this fortuitous destruction, there would supervene among the survivors a struggle for life sufficiently destructive to satisfy his theory. This suggestion, however, fails to meet the difficulty. For, as Professor Morgan points out, Darwin assumes "that a second competition takes place after the first destruction of individuals has occurred, and this presupposes that more individuals reach maturity than there is room for in the economy of nature." It presupposes that the vast majority of forms that survive accidental destruction, succumb in the second struggle for life in which the determining factor is some slight individual variation, e.g., a little longer neck in the case of the giraffe, or a wing shorter than usual in the case of an insect on an island. The whole theory of struggle, as formulated by Darwin, is, therefore, a violent assumption. Men of science now recognize that "egoism and struggle play a very subordinate part in organic development, in comparison with co-operation and social action." What, indeed, but a surrender of the paramountcy of struggle for life, is Huxley's celebrated Romanes lecture in which he supplants the cosmic process by the ethical? The French free-thinker, Charles Robin, gave expression to the verdict of exact science when he declared: "Darwinism is a fiction, a poetical accumulation of probabilities without proof, and of attractive explanations without demonstration."
2. The hopeless inadequacy of the struggle for life to account for adaptive structures has been dealt with at considerable length by Professor Morgan in the concluding chapters of the work already mentioned. We cannot here follow him in his study of the various kinds of adaptations, e.g., form and symmetry, mutual adaptation of colonial forms, protective coloration, organs of extreme perfection, tropisms and instincts, etc., in regard to the origin of each of which he is forced to abandon the Darwinian theory. It will suffice to call attention to his conclusions concerning the phenomena of regeneration of organs. By his research in this special field Professor Morgan has won international recognition among men of science. It was while prosecuting his studies in this field that he became impressed with the utter bankruptcy of the theory of natural selection which Darwinians put forward to explain the acquisition by organisms of this most useful power of regeneration. It is not difficult to show that regeneration could not in many cases, and presumably in none, have been acquired through natural selection (p. 379). If an earth worm (allolobophora foctida) be cut in two in the middle, the posterior piece regenerates at its anterior cut end, not a head but a tail. "Not by the widest stretch of the imagination can such a result be accounted for on the selection theory." Quite the reverse case presents itself in certain planarians. If the head of planaria lugubris is cut off just behind the eyes, there develops