The case against evolution

by George Barry O'Toole

To save his argument from this antagonism of the facts, Darwin resorts to the ingenious expedient of distinguishing between rudimentary organs and nascent organs. Rudimentary organs are undeveloped organs, which are wholly, or partially, useless. They have had a past, but have no future. Nascent organs, on the contrary, are undeveloped organs, which “are of high service to their possessors” (“Descent of Man,” ch. I, p. 28, 2nd ed.). They “are capable of further development” (ibidem), and have, therefore, a future before them. He gives the following examples of rudimentary organs: “Rudimentary organs ... are either quite useless, such as teeth which never cut through the gums, or almost useless, such as the wings of an ostrich, which serve merely as sails.” (“Origin of Species,” 6th ed., ch. XIV, p. 469.) As an example of a nascent organ, he gives the mammary glands of the oviparous Duckbill: “The mammary glands of the Ornithorhynchus may be considered, in comparison with the udders of a cow, as in a nascent condition.” (Op. cit., ch. XIV, p. 470.)

Darwin admits that it is hard to apply this distinction in the concrete: “It is, however, often difficult to distinguish between rudimentary and nascent organs; for we can judge only by analogy whether a part is capable of further development, in which case alone it deserves to be called nascent.” (Op. cit., ch. XIV, p. 469.) For Darwin “judging by analogy” meant judging on the assumption that evolution has really taken place; for he describes rudimentary organs as being “of such slight service that we can hardly suppose that they were developed under the conditions which now exist.” (“Descent of Man,” ch. I, p. 29.)

He is somewhat perplexed about applying this distinction to the penguin: “The wing of the penguin,” he admits, “is of high service, acting as a fin; it may, therefore, represent the nascent state: not that I believe this to be the case; it is more probably a reduced organ, modified for a new function.” (“Origin of Species,” 6th ed., ch. XIV, pp. 469, 470.) In other words, there is scarcely any objective consideration by which the validity of this distinction can be checked up in practice. Like homology and convergence, like palingenesis and cænogensis, the distinction between rudimentary and nascent organs is a convenient device, which can be arbitrarily manipulated according to the necessities of a preconceived theory. It is “scientific” sanction for the privilege of blowing hot and cold with the same breath.

The assumption that atrophy and reduction are the inevitable consequence of disuse, or diminution of use, in so far as this decreases the flow of nourishing blood to unexercised parts, is certainly erroneous. Yet Darwin made it the premise of his argument from so-called rudimentary organs. “The term ‘disuse’ does not relate,” he informs us, “merely to lessened action of muscles, but includes a diminished flow of blood to the part or organ, from being subjected to fewer alternations of pressure, or from being in any way less habitually active.” (“Origin of Species,” 6th ed., p. 469.) As a matter of fact, however, we have many instances in which use has failed to develop and disuse to reduce organs in certain types of animals. As an example in point, we may cite the case of right-handedness among human beings. From time immemorial, the generality of mankind have consistently used the right hand in preference to the left, without any atrophy or reduction of the left hand, or over-development of the right hand, resulting from this racial practice. “The superiority of one hand,” says G. Elliot Smith, “is as old as mankind.” (Smithson. Inst. Rpt. for 1912, p. 570.) It is true that only about 6,000 years of human existence are known to history, but, if one accepts the most conservative estimates of glaciologists, man has had a much longer prehistory, the lowest estimates for the age of man being approximately 30,000 years. Thus W. J. Sollas tells us that the Glacial period, in which man first appeared, came to an end about 7,000 years ago, and that the men buried at Chapelle-aux-Saints in France lived about 25,000 years ago. His figures agree with those of C. F. Wright, who bases his calculations on the Niagara Gorge. The Niagara River is one of the postglacial streams, and the time required to cut its gorge has been calculated as 7,000 years. Gerard De Geer, the Swedish scientist, gives 20,000 years ago as the end of glacial and the commencement of recent or postglacial time. He bases his estimates on the sediments of the Yoldia Sea in Sweden. His method consists in the actual counting of certain seasonally-laminated clay layers, presumably left behind by the receding ice sheet of the continental glacier. The melting is registered by annual deposition, in which the thinner layers of finer sand from the winter flows alternate with thicker layers of coarser material from the summer flows. In warm years, the layers are thicker, in colder years they are thinner, so that these laminated Pleistocene clays constitute a thermographic as well as a chronological record. De Geer began his study of Pleistocene clays in 1878, and in 1920 he led an expedition to the United States, for the purpose of extending his researches. (Cf. Science, Sept. 24, 1920, pp. 284-286.) At that time, he claimed to have worked out the chronology of the past 12,000 years. His figure of 20,000 years for postglacial time, while very displeasing to that reckless foe of scientific caution and conservatism, Henry Fairfield Osborn, tallies very well with the estimates of Sollas and Wright. H. Obermaier, basing his computation on Croll’s theory that glaciation is caused by variations in the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit about the sun, which would bring about protracted winters in the hemisphere having winter, when the earth was farthest from the sun (with consequent accumulation of ice), gives 30,000 years ago as the date of the first appearance of man on earth. Father Hugues Obermaier, it may be noted, like Abbé Henri Breuil, is one of the foremost authorities on the subject of prehistoric Man. Both are Catholic priests.

All such computations of the age of man are, of course, uncertain and theoretical. Evolutionists calculate it in hundreds of thousands, and even millions, of years. After giving such a table of recklessly tremendous figures, Osborn has the hypocritical meticulosity to add that, for the sake of precision (save the mark!) the nineteen hundred and some odd years of the Christian era should be added to his figures. But, even according to the most conservative scientific estimates, as we have seen, man is said to have been in existence for 30,000 years, and the prevalence of right-handedness among men is as old as the human race. One would expect, then, to find modern man equipped with a gigantic right arm and a dwarfed left arm. In other words, man should exhibit a condition comparable to that of a lobster, which has one large and one small chela. Yet, in spite of the fact that the comparative inaction of the human left hand is supposed to have endured throughout a period of, at least, 30,000 years, this state of affairs has not resulted in the faintest trace of atrophy or retrogression. Bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, nerves, blood vessels, and all parts are of equal size in both arms and both hands. Excessive exercise may overdevelop the musculature of the right arm, but this is an individual and acquired adaptation, which is never transmitted to the offspring, e.g. the child of a blacksmith does not inherit the muscular hypertrophy of his father. Disuse, therefore, has not the efficacy which Lamarck and Darwin ascribed to it.

In fine, it must be recognized, once for all, that organisms are not-molded on a Lamarckian basis of use, nor yet on a Darwinian basis of selected utility. Expediency, in other words, is not the sole governing principle of the organic world. Neither instinctive habitude nor the struggle for existence succeeds in forcing structural adaptation of a predictable nature. Animals with different organic structure have the same instincts, e.g. monkeys with, and without, prehensile tails alike dwell in trees; while animals having the same organic structure may have different instincts, e.g. the rabbit, which burrows, and the hare, which does not, are practically identical in anatomical structure. Again, some animals are highly specialized for a function, which other animals perform without specialized organs, as is instanced in the case of moles, which possess a special burrowing apparatus, and prairie-dogs, which burrow without a specialized apparatus. Any system of evolution, which ignores the internal or hereditary factors of organic life and strives to explain all in terms of the environmental factors, encounters an insuperable obstacle in this remorseless resistance of conflicting facts.

Another flaw in the Darwinian argument from rudimentary organs is that it confounds, in many cases, apparent, with real inutility (or absence of function). Darwin and his followers frequently argued out of their ignorance, and falsely concluded that an organ was destitute of a function, merely because they had failed to discover its utility. Large numbers, accordingly, of highly serviceable organs were catalogued as vestigial or rudimentary, simply because nineteenth century science did not comprehend their indubitable utility. With the advance of present-day physiology, this list of “useless organs” is being rapidly depleted, so that the scientific days of the rudimentary organ appear to be numbered. At any rate, in arbitrarily pronouncing many important and functioning organs to be useless vestiges of a former stage in the history of the race, the Darwinians were not the friends of Science, but rather its reactionary enemies, inasmuch as they sought to discourage further investigation by their dogmatic decision that there was no function to be found. In so doing, however, they were merely exploiting the ignorance of their times in the interest of a preconceived theory, which whetted their appetite for discovering, at all costs, the presence in man of functionless organs.

Their anxiety in this direction led them to consider the whole group of organs constituting a most important regulatory and coördinative system in man and other vertebrates as so many useless vestigial organs. This system is called the cryptorhetic system and is made of internally-secreting, ductless glands, now called endocrine glands. These glands generate and instill into the blood stream certain chemical substances called hormones, which, diffusing in the blood, produce immediate stimulatory, and remote metabolic effects on special organs distant from the endocrine gland, in which the particular hormone is elaborated. As examples of such endocrine glands, we may mention the pineal gland (epiphysis), the pituitary body (hypophysis), the thyroid glands, the parathyroids, the islelets of Langerhans, the adrenal bodies (suprarenal capsules), and the interstitial cells of the gonads. The importance of these alleged useless organs is now known to be paramount. Death, for instance, will immediately ensue in man and other animals, upon extirpation of the adrenal bodies.

The late Robert Wiedersheim, it will be remembered, declared the pineal gland or epiphysis to be the surviving vestige of a “third eye” inherited from a former ancestor, in whom it opened between the parietal bones of the skull, like the median or pineal eye of certain lizards, the socket of which is the parietal foramen formed in the interparietal suture. If the argument is based on homology alone, then the coincidence in position between the human epiphysis and the median optic nerve of the lizards in question has the ordinary force of the evolutionary argument from homology. But when one attempts to reduce the epiphysis to the status of a useless vestigial rudiment, he is in open conflict with facts; for the pineal body is, in reality, an endocrine gland generating and dispersing a hormone, which is very important for the regulation of growth in general and of sexual development in particular. Hence this tiny organ in the diencephalic roof, no larger than a grain of wheat, is not a functionless rudiment, but an important functioning organ of the cryptorhetic system. We have no ground, therefore, on this score for inferring that our pineal gland functioned in former ancestors as a median eye comparable to that of the cyclops Polyphemus of Homeric fame.

In like manner, the pituitary body or hypophysis, which in man is a small organ about the size of a cherry, situated at the base of the brain, buried in the floor of the skull, and lying just behind the optic chiasma, was formerly rated as a rudimentary organ. It was, in fact, regarded as the vestigial remnant of a former connection between the neural and alimentary canals, reminiscent of the invertebrate stage. “The phylogenetic explanation of this organ generally accepted,” says Albert P. Mathews, “is that formerly the neural canal connected at this point with the alimentary canal. A probable and almost the only explanation of this, though an explanation almost universally rejected by zoölogists, is that of Gaskell, who has maintained that the vertebrate alimentary canal is a new structure, and that the old invertebrate canal is the present neural canal. The infundibulum, on this view, would correspond to the old invertebrate œsophagus, the ventricle of the thalamus to the invertebrate stomach, and the canal originally connected posteriorly with the anus. The anterior lobe of the pituitary body could then correspond to some glandular adjunct of the invertebrate canal, and the nervous part to a portion of the original circumœsophageal nervous ring of the invertebrates.” (“Physiological Chemistry,” 2nd ed., 1916, pp. 641, 642.)