At the Deathbed of Darwinism | Page 3

can be had in the question of
evolution--does this evidence tell for or against the origin of existing
species from earlier ones by means of minute gradual modifications?
We must be content here with the briefest outline of the reply of
science to these inquiries.
1. Darwin invites his readers to "keep steadily in mind that each
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