At the Deathbed of Darwinism | Page 7

in these pages is to show that Darwinism will soon be a
thing of the past, a matter of history; that we even now stand at its
death-bed, while its friends are solicitous only to secure for it a decent
burial.
Out of the chaos of controversy which has obtained during the last four
decades there has emerged an element of truth--for there lurks a germ
of truth in most errors--which has gained almost universal recognition
among contemporary men of science, namely, the doctrine of Descent.
The fact that living organisms form an ascending series from the less
perfect to the more perfect; the further fact that they also form a series
according as they display more or less homology of structure and are
formed according to similar types; and, lastly, that the fossil remains of
organisms found in the various strata of the earth's surface likewise
represent an ascending series from the simple to the more
complex--these three facts suggested to naturalists the thought that
living organisms were not always as we find them to-day, but that the
more perfect had developed from simpler forms through a series of
modifications. These thoughts were at first advanced with some
hesitation, and were confined to narrow circles. They received,
however, material support when, during the fourth decade of the 19th
century the splendid discovery was made (by K. E. von Baer) that

every organism is slowly developed from a germ, and in the process of
development passes through temporary lower stages to a permanent
higher one. Even at that time many naturalists believed in a
corresponding development of the whole series of organisms, without
of course being able to form a clear conception of the process. Such
was the state of affairs when Darwin in the year 1859 published his
principal work, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.
In this work for the first time an exhaustive attempt was made to sketch
a clear and completely detailed picture of the process of development.
Darwin started with the fact that breeders of animals and growers of
plants, having at their disposal a large number of varieties, always
diverging somewhat from each other, choose individuals possessing
characteristics which they desired to strengthen, and use only these for
procreation. In this manner the desired characteristic is gradually made
more prominent, and the breeder appears to have obtained a new
species. Similar conditions are supposed to prevail in Nature, only that
there is lacking the selecting hand of the breeder. Here the so-called
principle of Natural Selection holds automatic sway by means of the
Struggle for Existence. All the various forms of life are warring for the
means of subsistence, each striving to obtain for itself the best
nourishment, etc. In this struggle those organisms will be victorious
which possess the most favorable characteristics; all others must
succumb. Hence those only will survive which are best adapted to their
environment. But between those which survive, the struggle begins
anew, and when the favoring peculiarities become more pronounced in
some, (by chance, of course) these in turn win out. Thus Nature
gradually improves her various breeds through the continued action of
a self-regulating mechanism. Such are the main features of Darwinism,
its real kernel, about which of course,--and this is a proof of its
insufficiency,--from the very beginning a number of auxiliary
hypotheses attached themselves.
Darwin's theory sounds so clear and simple, and seems at first blush so
luminous that it is no wonder if many careful naturalists regarded it as
an incontrovertible truth. The warning voice of the more prudent men
of science was silenced by the loud enthusiasm of the younger

generation over the solution of the greatest of the world-problems: the
genesis of living beings had been brought to light, and--a thing which
admitted of no doubt--man as well as the brute creation was a product
of purely natural evolution. The doctrine which materialism had
already proclaimed with prophetic insight, had at length been
irrefragably established on a scientific basis: God, Soul and
Immortality were contemptuously relegated to the domain of nursery
tales. What further use was there for a God when, in addition to the
Kant-Laplacian theory of the origin of the planetary system, it had been
discovered that living organisms had likewise evolved spontaneously?
How could man who had sprung from the irrational brute possess a soul?
And thus, finally, disappeared the third delusion, the hope of
immortality. For with death the functions of the body simply cease, as
also do those of the brain, which people had foolishly believed to be
something more than an aggregation of atoms. The body dissolves into
its constituent elements and serves in its turn to build up other
organisms: but as a human body it all turns to dust nor 'leaves a wrack