APPENDIX
It is cumbersome to load a book intended for general reading with quotations from Authorities and a mass of footnotes. Moreover, a reader of intelligence desires to hear the arguments rather than a mere list of expert names.
On this account, in the first draft of this book (which appeared in the form of a series of articles in the Press), while giving some of the main arguments against the old Darwinian theory of Natural Selection, I omitted particular names, and only alluded in general terms to that mass of modern criticism, increasing in volume, which has undermined it.
Mr. Wells was foolish enough to write a hurried pamphlet in which he made the strange affirmation that my arguments against Natural Selection were of my own invention and that I cited no modern critics of Darwinism because no such critics existed: the intellectual movement of which I spoke was a figment of my brain, and I could quote no authorities supporting it.
From this it was clear, though astonishing, that Mr. Wells had undertaken to write popular stuff about Evolution without so much as a casual acquaintance with the advance of biology in our generation.
I therefore append here the names of some few among the many authorities upon biological science who have exposed the error of Natural Selection.
It is a short list, drawn up at random, and in no particular order of date, and containing only some forty odd names such as a man of quite ordinary general education like myself with only a general interest in such matters can jot down from memory. It could, of course, be extended indefinitely by anyone setting out to make a complete total of the first-class scholars who have left Darwinism the wreck it is to-day. I do not pretend, of course, to more than a very slight reading among any of these few. I give them only as sample names out of an increasing roll, professors in the great universities (Paris, Vienna, Leipzig, Harvard, Montpellier, Tübingen, Amsterdam, Columbia, Bologna, etc. etc.), a President of the British Association, men eminent in special research, and famous biologists who have determined the current of modern opinion in the course of my lifetime:—
Cuénot
Delage
Rosa (Daniele)
Kolliker
Diamiare
Carazzi (David)
Bateson
Chauffard
Henslow
Hyatt
Cope
Eimer
Piepers
Hartmann
De Vries
Nägeli
Packard
Jaeckel
Goette
Haberlandt
Sachs
Kassovittz
Stromer
Depéret
Vogt
Morgan
Davenport
Le Dantec
Fleischmann
Driesch
Dennert
Di Barnardo
Wigand
Woolf
Schmarda
Sergi
Pfeffer
Vialleton
Conn
Osborn
Dacqué
A few quotations may not come amiss:—
“We [biologists in general] have come to the conviction that the principle of Natural Selection cannot have been the chief factor in determining species....”
(Professor Bateson, President of British Association, 1914, speaking in Melbourne.)
“Natural Selection never explains at all the specifications of the animal and vegetable forms that are actually found....”
“For men of clear intellect Darwinism has long been dead....”
(Driesch.)
“We have now the remarkable spectacle that just when many scientific men are all agreed that there is no part [my italics] of the Darwinian system that is of any great influence, and that, as a whole, the theory is not only unproved, but impossible, the ignorant, half-educated masses have acquired the idea that it is to be accepted as a fundamental fact....”
(Dwight, Professor of Anatomy at Harvard University.)
“Selection does not [my italics] bring about transgressive variation in a general population....”
(Professor Morgan, Professor of Experimental Zoology at University of Columbia, writing in 1919.)
“Animals and plants would have developed much as they did even had no struggle for existence taken place....”
(Nägeli.)
“Selection is in no way favourable to the origin of new forms.”
“The struggle for existence, and the selection that goes with it, restricts the appearance of new forms, and is in no way favourable to the production of these forms. It is an inimical factor in evolution.”
(Korchinsky.)
“On the question of knowing whether Natural Selection can engender new specific forms, it seems clear to-day that it cannot.”
(Delage.)
“One could possibly imagine a gradual development of the adaptation between one muscle cell and one nerve-ending, through selection among an infinity of chance-made variations: but that such shall take place coincidentally in time and character in hundreds or thousands of cases in one organism is inconceivable.”
(Wolff, Beitrage zur Kritik der Darwinischen Lehre.)
“The Darwinian theory, favourably received till of late, has lost ground more and more, and may now be said to have failed.”
(Rosa, Professor of University of Padua, Lamarckismo, etc. Bulletin of the Italian Entomological Society, 1910.)
“In conclusion, we may say that the Darwinian theory has completely failed.”
(Carazzi, writing in 1919. See also his speech at Florence in November of the same year.)
“Never yet has it been possible to refer [to a common origin] methodically and without error any two types or even large groups.”
(Dacqué, Paleontologie Systematik und Descendenzslehre. Jena, 1911.)
“It is pretty clear that we must wholly abandon the Darwinian hypothesis.”
(Cuénot, La Génèse des Espèces Animales. 1921. Second edition.)
I think that is enough.