The case against evolution

by George Barry O'Toole

§ 9. Futile Evasions

Many and various are the efforts made to escape this issue. One group of scientists, for example, attempt to rid themselves of the difficulty by diverting our attention from the problem of a beginning of organic life in the universe to the problem of its translation to a new habitat. This legerdemain has resulted in the theories of cosmozoa or panspermia, according to which life originates in a favorable environment, not by reason of spontaneous generation, but by reason of importation from other worlds. This view has been presented in two forms: (1) the “meteorite” theory, which represents the older view held by Thomson and Helmholtz; (2) the more recent theory of “cosmic panspermia” advocated by Svante Arrhénius, with H. E. Richter and F. J. Cohn as precursors. Sir Wm. Thompson suggested that life might have been salvaged from the ruins of other worlds and carried to our own by means of meteorites or fragments thrown off from life-bearing planets that had been destroyed by a catastrophic collision. These meteorites discharged from bursting planets might carry germs to distant planets like the earth, causing them to become covered with vegetation. Against this theory stands the fatal objection that the transit of a meteorite from the nearest stellar system to our own would require an interval of 60,000,000 years. It is incredible that life could be maintained through such an enormous lapse of time. Even from the nearest planet to our earth the duration of the journey would be 150 years. Besides, meteorites are heated to incandescence while passing through the atmosphere, and any seeds they might contain would perish by reason of the heat thus generated, not to speak of the terrific impact, which terminates the voyage of a meteorite.

Arrhénius suggests a method by which microörganisms might be conveyed through intersidereal space with far greater dispatch and without any mineral vehicle such as a meteorite. He notes that particles of cosmic dust leave the sun as a coronal atmosphere and are propelled through intervening space by the pressure of radiation until they reach the higher atmosphere of the earth (viz. at a height of 100 kilometers from the surface of the latter), where they become the electrically charged dust particles of polar auroras (v.g. the aurora borealis). The motor force, in this case, is the same as that which moves the vanes of a Crookes’ radiometer. Lebedeff has verified Clerk-Maxwell’s conceptions of this force and has demonstrated its reality by experiments. It is calculated that in the immediate vicinity of a luminous surface like that of the sun the pressure exerted by radiation upon an exposed surface would be nearly two milligrams per square centimeter. On a nontransparent particle having a diameter of 1.5 microns, the pressure of radiation would just counterbalance the force of universal gravitation, while on particles whose diameter was 0.16 of a micron, the pressure of radiation would be ten times as great as the pull of gravitation. Now bacterial spores having a diameter of O.3 to O.2 of a micron are known to bacteriologists, and the ultramicroscope reveals the presence of germs not more than O.1 of a micron in size.[11] Hence it is conceivable that germs of such dimensions might be wafted to limits of our atmosphere, and might then be transported by the pressure of radiation to distant planets or stellar systems, provided, of course, they could escape the germicidal action of oxidation, desiccation, ultra-violet rays, etc. Arrhénius calculates that their journey from the earth to Mars would, under such circumstances, occupy a period of only 20 days. Within 80 days they could reach Jupiter, and they might arrive at Neptune on the confines of our solar system after an interval of 3 weeks. The transit to the constellation of the Centaur, which contains the solar system nearest to our own (the one, namely, whose central sun is the star Alpha), would require 9,000 years.

Arrhénius’ theory, however, that “life is an eternal rebeginning” explains nothing and leaves us precisely where we were. In the metaphysical as well as the scientific sense, it is an evasion and not a solution. To the logical necessity of putting an end to the retrogradation of the subalternate conditions, upon which the realities of the present depend for their actual existence, we have already adverted. Moreover, the reasons which induce the scientist to postulate a beginning of life in our world are not based on any distinctive peculiarity of that world, but are universally applicable, it being established by the testimony of the spectroscope that other worlds are not differently constituted than our own. Hence Schäfer voices the general attitude of scientific men when he says: “But the acceptance of such theories of the arrival of life on earth does not bring us any nearer to a conception of its actual mode of origin; on the contrary, it merely serves to banish the investigation of the question to some conveniently inaccessible corner of the universe and leaves us in the unsatisfactory condition of affirming not only that we have no knowledge as to the mode of origin of life—which is unfortunately true—but that we never can acquire such knowledge—which it is to be hoped is not true. Knowing what we know, and believing what we believe, ... we are, I think (without denying the possibility of the existence of life in other parts of the universe), justified in regarding these cosmic theories as inherently improbable.” (Dundee Address of 1912, cf. Smithson. Inst. Rpt. for 1912, p. 503.)

Dismissing, therefore, all evasions of this sort, we may regard as scientifically established the conclusion that, so far as our knowledge goes, inorganic nature lacks the means of self-vivification, and that no inanimate matter can become living matter without first coming under the influence of matter previously alive. Given, therefore, that the conditions favorable to life did not always prevail in our cosmos, it follows that life had a beginning, for which we are obliged to account by some postulate other than abiogenesis. This conclusion seems inescapable for those who concede the scientific absurdity of spontaneous generation, but, by some weird freak of logic, not only is it escaped, but the very opposite conclusion is reached through reasoning, which the exponents are pleased to term philosophical, as distinguished from scientific, argumentation. The plight of these “hard-headed worshippers of fact,” who plume themselves on their contempt for “metaphysics,” is sad indeed. Worsted in the experimental field, they appeal the case from the court of facts to that aprioristic philosophy. “Physic of metaphysic begs defence, and metaphysic calls for aid on sense!”

Life, they contend, either had no beginning or it must have begun in our world as the product of spontaneous generation. But all the scientific theories of cosmogony exclude the former alternative. Consequently, not only is it not absurd to admit spontaneous generation, but, on the contrary, it is absurd not to admit it. It is in this frame of mind that August Weismann is induced to confide to us “that spontaneous generation, in spite of all the vain attempts to demonstrate it, remains for me a logical necessity.” (“Essays,” p. 34, Poulton’s Transl.) The presupposition latent in all such logic is, of course, the assumption that nothing but matter exists; for, if the possibility of the existence of a supermaterial agency is conceded, then obviously we are not compelled by logical necessity to ascribe the initial production of organic life to the exclusive agency of the physicochemical energies inherent in inorganic matter. Weismann should demonstrate his suppressed premise that matter coincides with reality and that spiritual is a synonym for nonexistent. Until such time as this unverified and unverifiable affirmation is substantiated, the philosophical proof for abiogenesis is not an argument at all, it is dogmatism pure and simple.

But, they protest, “To deny spontaneous generation is to proclaim a miracle” (Nägeli), and natural science cannot have recourse to “miracles” in explaining natural phenomena. For the “scientist,” miracles are always absurd as contradicting the uniformity of nature, and to recur to them for the solution of a scientific problem is, to put it mildly, distinctly out of the question. Hence Haeckel regards spontaneous generation as more than demonstrated by the bare consideration that no alternative remains except the unspeakable scientific blasphemy implied in superstitious terms like “miracle,” “creation,” and “supernatural.” For a “thinking man,” the mere mention of these abhorrent words is, or ought to be, argument enough. “If we do not accept the hypothesis of spontaneous generation,” Haeckel expostulates, “we must have recourse to the miracle of a supernatural creation.” (Italics his—“History of Creation,” I, p. 348, Lankester’s Transl.) It would be a difficult matter, indeed, to cram more blunders into one short sentence! We will not, and need not, undertake to defend the supernatural here. Suffice it to say, that the initiation of life in inorganic matter by the Author of Life would not be a creation, nor a miracle, nor a phenomenon pertaining to the supernatural order.

The principle of the minimum forbids us to postulate the superfluous, and a creative act would be superfluous in the production of the first organisms. Inorganic nature contains all the material elements found in living organisms, and all organisms, in fact, derive their matter from the inorganic world. If, therefore, they are thus dependent in their continuance upon a supply of matter administered by the inorganic world, it is to be presumed that they were likewise dependent on that source of matter in their first origin. In other words, the material substrata of the first organisms were not produced anew, but derived from the elements of the inorganic world. Hence they were not created, but formed out of preëxistent matter. A creative act would involve total production, and exclude the preëxistence of the constituent material under a different form. A formative act, on the contrary, is a partial production, which presupposes the material out of which a given thing is to be made. Hence the Divine act, whereby organic life was first educed from the passive potentiality of inorganic matter, was formative and not creative. Elements preëxistent in the inorganic world were combined and intrinsically modified by impressing upon them a new specification, which raised them in the entitive and dynamic scale, and integrated them into units capable of self-regulation and reflexive action. This modification, however, was intrinsic to the matter involved and nothing was injected into matter from without. Obviously, therefore, the production of the first organisms was not a creation, but a formation.

Still less was it a miracle; for a miracle is a visible interposition in the course of nature by a power superior to the powers of nature. A given effect, therefore, is termed miraculous with express reference to some existing natural agency, whose efficacy it, in some way, exceeds. If there existed in inorganic nature some natural process of self-vivification, then any Divine interposition to produce life independently of this natural agency, would be a miraculous intervention. As a matter of fact, however, inorganic nature is destitute of this power of self-vitalization, and consequently no natural agency was superseded or overridden by the initial imparting of life to lifeless matter. Life was not ordained to originate in any other way. Given, therefore, this impotence of inorganic nature, it follows that an initial vivification of matter by Divine power was demanded by the very nature of things. The Divine action did not come into competition, as it were, with existing natural agencies, but was put forth in response to the exigencies of nature itself. It cannot, therefore, be regarded as miraculous.

Nor, finally, is there any warrant for regarding such an initial vivification of matter as supernatural. Only that is supernatural which transcends the nature, powers, and exigencies of all things created or creatable. But, as we have seen, if life was to exist at all, a primal animation of inanimate matter by Divine power was demanded by the very nature of things. Here the Divine action put forth in response to an exigency of nature and terminated in the constitution of living nature itself. Now, the effect of a Divine action, by which the natures of things are initially constituted, plainly pertains to the order of nature, and has nothing to do with the supernatural. Hence the primordial constitution by Divine power of living nature was not a supernatural, but a purely natural, event.

CHAPTER II
THE ORIGIN OF THE HUMAN SOUL

§ 1. Matter and Spirit

We live in an age in which scientific specialization is stressed as the most important means of advancing the interests of human knowledge; and specialism, by reason of its many triumphs, seems to have deserved, in large measure, the prestige which it now enjoys. It has, however, the distinct disadvantage of fostering provincialism and separatism. This lopsided learning of the single track mind is a condition that verges on paranoia, leads to naïve contempt for all knowledge not reducible to its own set of formulæ, and portends, in the near future, a Babel-like confusion of tongues. In fact, the need of a corrective is beginning to be felt in many quarters. This corrective can be none other than the general and synthetic science of philosophy; it is philosophy alone that can furnish a common ground and break down the barriers of exclusiveness which immure the special sciences within the minds of experts.

Scientists readily admit the advantage of philosophy in theory, but in practice their approval is far from being unqualified. A subservient philosophy, which accepts without hesitation all the current dogmas of contemporary science, is one thing, and a critical philosophy venturing to apply the canons of logic to so-called scientific proof is quite another. Philosophy of the latter type is promptly informed that it has no right to any opinion whatever, and that only the scientific specialist is qualified to speak on such subjects. But the disqualification, which is supposed to arise from lack of special knowledge, is just as promptly forgotten, when there is question of philosophy in the rôle of a pliant sycophant, and the works of a Wells or a van Loon are lauded to the skies, despite the glaring examples of scientific inaccuracy and ignorance, in which they abound.

This partiality is sometimes carried to a degree that makes it perfectly preposterous. Thus it is by no means an infrequent thing to find scientists dismissing, as unworthy of a hearing, a philosopher like Hans Driesch, who spent the major portion of his life in biological research, and combined the technical discipline of a scientist with the mental discipline of a logician. The chemist, H. E. Armstrong, for instance, sees in the mere label “philosopher” a sufficient reason for barring his testimony. “Philosophers,” jeers the chemist, with flippant irrelevance, “must go to school and study in the purlieus of experimental science, if they desire to speak with authority on these matters.” (Smithson. Inst. Rpt. for 1912, p. 528.) Such is his comment on Driesch, yet Driesch did nothing at all, if he did not do far more than Armstrong prescribes as a prerequisite for authoritative speaking. In James Harvey Robinson, on the contrary, we have an example of the tendency of scientists to coddle philosophers who assume a docile, deferential, and submissive attitude towards every generalization propounded in the name of natural science. In sheer gratitude for his uncritical acquiescence, his incapacitation as a nonspecialist is considerately overlooked, and he can confess, without the slightest danger of discrediting his own utterances: “I am not ... a biologist or palæontologist. But I have had the privilege of consorting familiarly with some of the very best representatives of those who have devoted their lives to the patient study of the matters involved in this controversy. I think I quite understand their attitude.” (Harper’s Magazine, June, 1922, p. 68.) By his own testimony he is a scientific amateur, but this does not, in the least, prevent him from “speaking with authority” or from being lionized in scientific circles as an evolutionary “defender of the faith.” Clearly, it is the nature of their respective views, and not the possession or absence of technical knowledge, which makes Robinson a favorite, and Driesch a persona non grata, with “the very best representatives” of contemporary science. “Science,” says a writer in the Atlantic Monthly (Oct., 1915), “has turned all philosophy out of doors except that which clings to its skirts; it has thrown contempt on all learning that does not depend upon it; and it has bribed the sketches by giving us immense material comforts.”

Here, however, we are concerned with the fact, rather than the justice, of this discrimination which the scientific world makes between philosopher and philosopher. Certain it is that Robinson has received no end of encomiums from scientists, who apparently lack the literary gifts to expound their own philosophy, and that his claim to represent the views of a large and influential section of the scientific world is, in all probability, entirely correct. It is this manifest approval of scientific men which lends especial interest to the remarks of this scientific dilettante, and we shall quote them as expressing the prevalent scientific view on the origin of man, a view which, with but slight variations, has persisted from the time of Darwin down to the present day.

“The recognition,” says Robinson, “that mankind is a species of animal, is, like other important discoveries, illuminating.” (Science, July 28, 1922, p. 74.) To refer to the recognition of man’s animality as a discovery is a conceit too stupid for mere words to castigate. Surely, there was no need of the profound research or delicate precision of modern science to detect the all too obvious similarity existing between man and beast. Mankind did not have to await the advent of an “enlightened” nineteenth, or twentieth century to be assured of the truth of a commonplace so trite and palpable. Even the “benighted” scholastics of medieval infamy had wit enough to define man as a rational animal. Indeed, it would be a libel on human intelligence to suppose that anyone, in the whole history of human thought, was ever sufficiently fatuous to dispute the patent fact that man is a sentient organism compounded of flesh, blood, bone, and sinew like the brute. The “discovery” that man is a species of animal dates from the year one of human existence, and it is now high time for the novelty of this discovery to be worn off.

Even as a difficulty against human superiority and immortality, the “recognition” is by no means recent. We find it squarely faced in a book of the Old Testament, the entire book being devoted to the solution of the difficulty in question. “I said in my heart concerning the estate of the sons of men ... that they might see they are themselves beasts. For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them; as the one dieth so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that man hath no preeminence above a beast; for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all return to dust. Who knoweth the spirit of man whether it goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast whether it goeth downward to the earth?” (Ecclesiastes, III: 18-21.) The sacred writer insists that, so far as the body is concerned, man and the brute stand on the same level; but what of the human soul? Is it, he asks, resolvable into matter like the soul of a beast, or is it a supermaterial principle destined, not for time, but for eternity? At the close of the book, the conclusion is reached that the latter alternative is the true solution of the riddle of human nature—“the dust returneth to the earth whence it was, and the spirit returneth to God who gave it.” (Ch. XII, v. 7.)

Centuries, therefore, before the Christian era, this problem was formulated by Ecclesiastes, the Jew, and also, as we shall presently see, by Aristotle, the coryphæus of Greek philosophy. Nay, from time immemorial man, contrasting his aspirations after immortality with the spectacle of corporal death, has appreciated to the full the significance of his own animality. Never was there question of whether man is, or is not, just as thoroughly an animal as any beast, but rather of whether, his animal nature being unhesitatingly conceded, we are not, none the less, forced to recognize in him, over and above this, the existence of a spiritual mind or soul, differentiating him from the brute and constituting him a being unique, despite the unmistakable homologies discernible between bestial organisms and the human body. Everywhere and always mankind as a whole have manifested, by the universal and uniquely human practice of burying the dead, their unswerving and indomitable conviction that man is spirit as well as flesh, an animal, indeed, yet animated by something not present in the animal, namely, a spiritual soul, deathless and indestructible, capable of surviving the decay of the organism and of persisting throughout eternity.

But, if the human mind or soul is spiritual, it is clear that it cannot be a product of organic evolution, any more than it can be a product of parental generation. On the contrary, each and every human soul must be an immediate creation of the Author of Nature, not evolved from the internal potentiality of matter, but infused into matter from without. The human soul is created in organized matter, but not from it. Nor can the Divine action, in this case, be regarded as a supernatural interposition; for it supplements, rather than supersedes, the natural process of reproduction; and, since it is not in matter to produce spirit, a creative act is demanded by the very nature of things.

Evolution is nothing more nor less than a transmutation of matter, and a transmutation of matter cannot terminate in the annihilation of matter and the constitution of non-matter or spirit. If nothing of the terminus a quo persists in the final product, we have substitution, and not transmutation. The evolution of matter, therefore, cannot progress to a point where all materiality is eliminated. Hence, whatever proceeds from matter, either as an emanation or an action, will, of necessity, be material. It should be noted, however, that by material we do not mean corporeal; for material denotes not merely matter itself, but everything that intrinsically depends on matter. The term, therefore, is wider in its sense than corporeal, because it comprises, besides matter, all the properties, energies, and activities of matter. Hence whatever is incapable of existence and activity apart from matter (whether ponderable or imponderable) belongs to the material, as distinguished from the spiritual, order of things. The soul of a brute, for example, is not matter, but it is material, nevertheless, because it is totally dependent on the matter of the organism, apart from which it has neither existence nor activity of its own.

In the constitution of the sentient or animal soul, matter reaches the culmination of its passive evolution. True, its inherent physicochemical forces do not suffice to bring about this consummation, wherewith its internal potentiality is exhausted. Nevertheless, the emergence of an animal soul from matter is conceivable, given an agency competent to educe it from the intrinsic potentiality of matter; for, in the last analysis, the animal soul is simply an internal modification of matter itself. But, if spirit is that which exists, or is, at least, capable of existence, apart from matter, it goes without saying that spirit is neither derivable from, nor resolvable into, matter of any kind. Consequently, it cannot be evolved from matter, but must be produced in matter by creation (i.e. total production). To make the human mind or soul a product of evolution is equivalent to a denial of its spirituality, because it implies that the human soul like that of the brute, is inherent in the potentiality of matter, and is therefore a purely material principle, totally dependent on the matter, of which it is a perfection. Between such a soul and the sentient principle present in the beast, there would be no essential difference of kind, but only an accidental difference of degree; and this is precisely what Darwin and his successors have spared no effort to demonstrate. James Harvey Robinson is refreshingly frank on this subject, and we will therefore let him be spokesman for those who are more reticent:

“It is the extraordinarily illuminating discovery (sic) of man’s animalhood rather than evolution in general that troubles the routine mind. Many are willing to admit that it looks as if life had developed on the earth slowly, in successive stages; this they can regard as a merely curious fact and of no great moment if only man can be defended as an honorable exception. The fact that we have an animal body may also be conceded, but surely man must have a soul and a mind altogether distinct and unique from the very beginning bestowed on him by the Creator and setting him off an immeasurable distance from any mere animal. But whatever may be the religious and poetic significance of this compromise it is becoming less and less tenable as a scientific and historic truth. The facts indicate that man’s mind is quite as clearly of animal extraction as his body.” (Science, July 28, 1922, p. 95—italics his.)

This language has, at least, the merit of being unambiguous, and leaves us in no uncertainty as to where the writer stands. It discloses, likewise, the animus which motivates his peculiar interest in transformistic theories. If evolution were incapable of being exploited in behalf of materialistic philosophy, Mr. Robinson, we may be sure, would soon lose interest in the theory, and would once more align himself with the company, which he has so inappropriately deserted, namely, “the routine minds” that regard evolution “as a merely curious fact of no great moment.” Be that as it may, his final appeal is to the “facts,” and it is to the facts, accordingly, that we shall go; but they will not be the irrelevant “facts” of anatomy, physiology, and palæontology. Sciences such as these confine their attention to the external manifestations of human life, and can tell us nothing of man’s inner consciousness. It does not, therefore, devolve upon them to pronounce final judgment upon the origin of man. For that which is the distinguishing characteristic of man is not his animal nature, that he shares in common with the brute, but his rational nature, which alone differentiates him from “a beast that wants discourse of reason.” We cannot settle the question as to whether or not man’s mind is “of animal extraction” by comparing his body with the bodies of irrational vertebrates. To institute the requisite comparison between the rational mentality of man and the purely sentient consciousness of irrational animals falls within the exclusive competence of psychology, which studies the internal manifestations of life as they are presented to the intuition of consciousness, rather than biology, which studies life according to such of its manifestations as are perceptible to the external senses. Hence it is within the domain of psychology alone, that man can be studied on his distinctively human, or rational, side, and it is to this science, accordingly, that we must turn in our search for facts that are germane to the problem of the origin of man and the genesis of the human mind. How little, indeed, does he know of human nature, whose knowledge of it is confined to man’s insignificant anatomy and biology, and who knows nothing of the triumphs of human genius in literature, art, science, architecture, music, and a thousand other fields! Psychology alone can evaluate these marvels, and no other science can be of like assistance in solving the problem of whether man is, or is not, unique among all his fellows of the animal kingdom.