When it is charged that a transformed social environment will not solve the problem presented by the slum, the sweatshop and the jail, as Socialists assert, we are justified in nailing the statement as false, and a libel on human nature. And in so doing, we are not sentimental dreamers of dreams, crying for the moon, but rigid analysts and investigators, and, as Lassalle once proudly said, “We have behind us the science and the learning of our day.”
V.
DE VRIES’ “MUTATION.”
Orthodoxy received the most stunning blow ever given it, at the hands of Charles Darwin, and it is ever on the lookout for an opportunity to make reprisals. It is only necessary for some fledgling to challenge Darwin’s theory of the origin of coral reefs and offer some grotesque assumption in its place, and it is at once announced from a thousand pulpits that Darwinism,—that enemy of God and man—is dead.
Hugo DeVries, however, could hardly be called a fledgling, and the supporters of Darwin had real cause for apprehension, it would seem, when the rumor gained ground that no less a person than the Amsterdam professor had overthrown Darwin’s theory, and substituted one of his own.
Alas, this latest “death of Darwinism” was no more fatal than its numerous predecessors, as the following quotation from DeVries himself will show:
“My work claims to be in full accord with the principles laid down by Darwin.” And again, “To Darwin was reserved the task of bringing the theory of common descent to its present high rank in scientific and social philosophy.” And, “Notwithstanding all these apparently unsurmountable difficulties, (absence of experimental evidence since gathered) Darwin discovered the great principle which rules the evolution of organisms. It is the principle of natural selection. It is the sifting out of all organisms of minor worth through the struggle for life.”
The greater part of the adverse criticism, aimed at Darwinism applies only to the extravagant claims put forward by his overenthusiastic disciples; claims not to be found in the works of Darwin himself. As we shall see later, one of the greatest offenders in this respect was no less a person than the co-discoverer of the selection theory—Alfred Russell Wallace.
Of all the mischievous misconceptions of Darwin’s theory none have worked so much harm as that which regards natural selection as the active and efficient cause of evolution. Although evolution is an established fact, our knowledge of its processes are incomplete and must always remain so until we have solved that most vexed of all biological problems, the “causes of variation.”
As to the nature of these causes, natural selection is dumb. For its purpose, variation is simply assumed to be a fact, and Darwin’s acknowledged ignorance as to how variation is brought about is expressed in the term “spontaneous variation.” Until variation has played its part by producing new and various forms, selection has no function or office to perform. Then it simply decides which forms shall survive by destroying the rest. As Wigand has pointed out, selection does not do more than determine the survival of what is offered to it, and does not create anything new. As DeVries very strikingly puts it, “It is only a sieve, and not a force of nature, no direct cause of improvement, as many of Darwin’s adversaries, and unfortunately many of his followers also, have so often asserted. It is only a sieve which decides which is to live and which is to die.... With the single steps of evolution it has nothing to do. Only after the step has been taken, the sieve acts, eliminating the unfit.” Thus Prof. Cope’s point that Darwin’s theory does not explain the “origin” of the fittest, is well taken, or as Mr. Arthur Harris puts it, “Natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest.”