The case against evolution

by George Barry O'Toole

With the close of the nineteenth century the hour hand of biological science had completed another revolution. One after another, the classic systems of evolution had passed into the discard, as its remorseless progress registered their doom. The last of these systems, De-Vriesianism, enjoyed a meteoric vogue in the first years of the present century, but it, too, has gone into eclipse with the rise of rediscovered Mendelism. Notwithstanding all these reverses, however, the evolutionary theory still continues to number a host of steadfast adherents.

Some of its partisans uphold it upon antiquated grounds. Culturally speaking, such men still live in the days of Darwin, and fail to realize that much water has passed under the bridge since then. It has other protagonists, however, who are thoroughly conversant with modern data, and fully aware, in consequence, of the inadequacy of all existent formulations of the evolutional hypothesis. Minds of the latter type are proof, apparently, against any sort of disillusionment, and it is manifest that their attitude is determined by some consideration other than the actual results of research.

This other consideration is monistic metaphysics. In defect of factual confirmation, evolution is demonstrated aprioristically from the principle of the minimum. The scope of this methodological principle is to simplify or unify causation by dispensing with all that is superfluous in the way of explanation. In olden days, it went by the name of Occam’s Razor and was worded thus: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem—“Things are not to be multiplied without necessity.” Evolution meets the requirements of this principle. It simplifies the problem of organic origins by reducing the number of ancestors to a minimum. Therefore, argues the evolutionist, evolution must be true.

As an empirical rule, the principle of the minimum is, no doubt, essential to the scientific method. To erect it into a metaphysical axiom, however, is preposterous; for simple explanations are not necessarily true explanations. In the rôle of aprioristic metaphysics, the principle of continuity is destructive, and tends to plane down everything to the dead level of materialistic monism. For those who transcendentalize it, it becomes the principle “that everything is ‘nothing but’ something else, probably inferior to it.” (Santayana.) To assert continuity, they are driven to deny, or, at least, to leave unexplained and inexplicable, the obvious novelty that emerges at each higher level of the cosmic scale. And thus it comes to pass that intelligence is pronounced to be nothing but sense, and sense to be nothing but physiology, and physiology to be nothing but chemistry, and chemistry to be nothing but mechanics, until this philosophical nihilism weeps at last for want of further opportunities of devastation. Its exponents have an intense horror for abrupt transitions, and resent the discovery of anything that defies resolution into terms of mass and motion.

Evolution smooths the path for monism of this type by transforming nature’s staircase into an inclined plane of imperceptible ascent. Hence Dewey refers to evolution as a “clinching proof” of the continuity hypothecated by the monist. For the latter, there is no hierarchy of values, and all essential distinctions are abolished; for him nothing is unique and everything is equally important. He affirms the democracy of facts and is blind to all perspective in nature. He is, in short, the enemy of all beauty, all spirituality, all culture, all morality, and all religion. He substitutes neurons for the soul, and enthrones Natural Selection in the place of the Creator. He sets up, in a word, the ideal of “an animalistic man and a mechanistic universe,” and offers us evolution as a demonstration of this “ideal.”

Vernon Kellogg objects to our indictment. “The evolutionist,” he says, “does not like being called a bad man. He does not like being posted as an enemy of poetry and faith and religion. He does not like being defined as crassly materialist, a man exclusively of the earth earthy.” (Atlantic Monthly, April 24, 1924, p. 490.) Apart from their object, the likes or dislikes of an evolutionist are a matter of indifference. What we want to know is whether his dislike is merely for the names, or whether it extends to the reality denoted by these names. Human nature has a weakness for euphemisms. Men may “want the game without the name,” particularly when, deservedly or undeservedly, the name happens to have an offensive connotation.

There are, no doubt, evolutionists who mingle enough dualism with their philosophy to mitigate the most objectionable aspects of its basic monism. In so doing, however, they are governed by considerations that are wholly extraneous to evolutionary thought. Indeed, if we take Kellogg’s words at their face value (that is, in a sense which he would probably disclaim), it is in spite of his philosophy that the evolutionist is a spiritualist. “And just as religion and cheating,” reasons Kellogg, “can apparently be compassed in one man, so can one man be both evolutionist and idealist.” (Loc. cit., p. 490.) If this comparison holds true, the evolutionist can be an idealist only to the extent that he is inconsistent or hypocritical, since under no other supposition could piety and crime coëxist in one and the same person.

Be that as it may, the majority of evolutionists are avowed mechanists and materialists, in all that concerns the explanation of natural phenomena. “That there may be God who has put his Spirit into men” (Kellogg, ibid., p. 491), they are condescendingly willing to concede. And small credit to them for this; for who can disprove the existence of God, or the spirituality of the human soul? Nevertheless, it is impossible, they maintain, to be certain on these subjects. Natural science is in their eyes the only form of human knowledge that has any objective validity. Proofs of human spirituality they denounce as metaphysical, and metaphysics is for them synonymous with “such stuff as dreams are made of,” unworthy to be mentioned in the same breath with physical science—“Es gibt für uns kein anderes Erkennen als das mechanische, ... Nur mechanisch begreifen ist Wissenschaft.” (Du Bois-Reymond.)

In practice, therefore, if not in theory, the tendency of evolution has been to unspiritualize and dereligionize the philosophy of its adherents, a tendency which is strikingly exemplified in one of its greatest exponents, Charles Darwin himself. The English naturalist began his scientific career as a theist and a spiritualist. He ended it as an agnostic and a materialist. His evolutionary philosophy was, by his own confession, responsible for the transformation. “When thus reflecting,” he says, “I feel compelled to look to a first cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man, and I deserve to be called a Theist. This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I remember, when I wrote the ‘Origin of Species’; and it is since that time that it has very gradually, with many fluctuations, become weaker. But then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animals, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions? I can not pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I, for one, must be content to remain an Agnostic.” (“The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin,” edited by Francis Darwin, 1887, vol. I, p. 282.)

Darwin likewise exemplifies in his own person the destructive influence exercised upon the æsthetic sense by exclusive adherence to the monistic viewpoint. Having alluded in his autobiography to his former predilection for poetry, music, and the beauties of nature, he continues as follows: “But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found that it nauseated me. I have also lost my taste for pictures and music.... I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did.... My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts; ... if I had to live my life again, I would have made it a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would have been kept alive through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” (Op. cit., vol. I, pp. 81, 82.)