FOURTH MEETING
Evolution
I. The Place of Evolution in a Religious Enquiry:
a. We must believe in that, or in special creation.
1. Every religion has a theory of creation.
2. Evolution is a theory of creation.
b. It may throw light on the means of progress.
II. Evolution Means Descent of All Creatures from a Common One-celled Ancestral Form:
a. Physical proof of the theory:
1. In likeness of structure.
2. In rudimentary organs.
3. In geological records.
4. In the Law of Recapitulation.
III. Theories of the Process of Evolution:
a. Natural Selection:
1. Variations in all directions, and adaptation.
2. Adaptation a struggle for life.
α. For place.
β. For food.
γ. For protection, through imitative color or form.
3. The value of artificial selection as partly showing us the processes of natural selection.
4. What natural selection fails to explain.
b. The theory of Sexual Selection, and its shortcomings.
c. The auxiliary theory of Isolation.
IV. The Philosophical Significance of Evolution:
a. Evolution a self-evolving of uncreated life.
1. Wish, desire, love cause all change and creation.
2. Progress is from within, of our own will.
3. Change or re-birth necessitates death.
α. Death makes room for young.
β. We die for the sake of life.
b. Evolution and the aim of life:
1. Fitness and harmony the test of life.
2. It goes from likeness to unlikeness and recognition.
3. Pain, disease, death and changing standards of good and bad are the path of progress toward wholeness and understanding.
c. Evolution the simplest, clearest proof of relationship.
[Note.—For reference and illustrations, the first volume of Romanes’ “Darwin and After Darwin” is more convenient to use and show than Darwin’s own works.]