At the Deathbed of Darwinism | Page 4

at the cut surface of the head-piece another head turned in the opposite direction. "These and other reasons," concludes Professor Morgan (p. 381), "indicate with certainty that regeneration cannot be explained by the theory of natural selection."
The ingenuity of the Darwinian imagination, however, will hardly fail to assign some reason why two heads are more useful than one in the above instance, and thus reconcile the phenomenon with Darwinism. For, according to Professor Morgan "to imagine that a particular organ is useful to its possessor and to account for its origin because of the imagined benefit conferred, is the general procedure of the followers of the Darwinian school." "Personal conviction, mere possibility," writes Quatrefages, "are offered as proofs, or at least as arguments in favor of the theory." "The realms of fancy are boundless," is Blanchard's significant comment on Darwin's explanation of the blindness of the mole. "On this class of speculation," says Bateson in his "Materials for the Study of Variation," referring to Darwinian speculation as to the beneficial or detrimental nature of variations, "on this class of speculation the only limitations are those of the ingenuity of the author." The general form of Darwin's argument, declared the writer of a celebrated article in the North British Review, is as follows: "All these things may have been, therefore my theory is possible; and since my theory is a possible one, all those hypotheses which it requires are rendered probable."
3. We pass now to the question of the possibility of building up a new species by the accumulation of chance individual variations. That species ever originate in this way is denied by the advocates of the evolutionary theory which is now superseding Darwinism. Typical of the new school is the botanist Hugo De Vries of Amsterdam. The "first-steps" in the origin of new species according to De Vries are not fluctuating individual variations, but mutations, i.e., definite and permanent modifications. According to the mutation theory a new species arises from the parent species, not gradually but suddenly. It appears suddenly "without visible preparation and without transitional steps." The wide acceptance with which this theory is meeting must be attributed to the fact that men of science no longer believe in the origin of species by the accumulation of slight fluctuating modifications. To quote the words of De Vries, "Fluctuating variation cannot overstep the limits of the species, even after the most prolonged selection--still less can it lead to the production of new, permanent characters." It has been the wont of Darwinians to base their speculations on the assumption that "an inconceivably long time" could effect almost anything in the matter of specific transformations. But the evidence which has been amassed during the past forty years leaves no doubt that there is a limit to individual variability which neither time nor skill avail to remove. As M. Blanchard asserts in his work, La vie des etres animes (p. 102), "All investigation and observation make it clear that, while the variability of creatures in a state of nature displays itself in very different degrees, yet, in its most astonishing manifestations, it remains confined within a circle beyond which it cannot pass."
It is interesting to observe how writers of the Darwinian school attempt to explain the origin of articulate language as a gradual development of animal sounds. "It does not," observes Darwin, "appear altogether incredible that some unusually wise ape-like animal should have thought of imitating the growl of a beast of prey, so as to indicate to his fellow monkeys the nature of the expected danger. And this would have been a first step in the formation of a language." But what a tremendous step! An ape-like animal that "thought" of imitating a beast must certainly have been "unusually wise." In bridging the chasm which rational speech interposes between man and the brute creation, the Darwinian is forced to assume that the whole essential modification is included in the first step. Then he conceals the assumption by parcelling out the accidental modification in a supposed series of transitional stages. He endeavors to veil his inability to explain the first step, as Chevalier Bunsen remarked, by the easy but fruitless assumption of an infinite space of time, destined to explain the gradual development of animals into men; as if millions of years could supply the want of an agent necessary for the first movement, for the first step in the line of progress. "How can speech, the expression of thought, develop itself in a year or in millions of years, out of unarticulated sounds which express feelings of pleasure, pain, and appetite? The common-sense of mankind will always shrink from such theories."
4. The hopes and fears of Darwinians have rightly been centered on the history of organic development as outlined in the geological