Illogical Geology, the Weakest Point in the Evolution Theory

by George McCready Price

And surely it is scarcely necessary in this enlightened age to point out how completely this vitiates any biological argument (such as that of Darwinism) which has incorporated into its system the results of such illogical reasoning, or which in any way is dependent upon the conclusions of such a theory of geology. In view of the laws of evidence, which every intelligent person is supposed to understand now-a-days, surely some strange things passed for scientific proof during the nineteenth century. For, as we have seen, the earlier geologists did little better than assume the succession of life bodily; than Agassiz and his contemporaries arranged the details and the exact order of these successive life forms by comparison with the embryonic life of the modern individual; and now the evolutionists of our day, led by such men as Spencer and Haeckel with their "phylogenetic principle," prove their theory of evolution by showing that the embryonic life of the modern individual is only "a brief recapitulation, as it were, from memory," of the (assumed) geological succession in time. Surely this will some day make a more amazing record for posterity than those of phlogiston or the epicycles of Ptolemy.

If I am now asked: What do the rocks have to tell us, in view of the fact that they refuse to testify to a life succession? I can only say that we are not as yet in a position to decide this question. There are several other matters connected with the character and mode of occurrence of the fossils, which are almost equally important with anything already considered, in forming a true scientific induction regarding this matter. These facts must be considered in subsequent chapters. Already, however, we can say this much, that we have in the rocks almost as complete a world, in some respects vastly more complete, than the living world of to-day. With the life succession theory repudiated, we have still to deal with the fossils themselves which have been thus systematically classified; but this geological series becomes only the taxonomic or classification series of an older state of our present world, buried somehow and at some time or times in the remote past—the how and the when of which we have not as yet the means to determine.

But I think we are now prepared to enter the mazes of the biological argument, and to study the subject of extinct species, which by many is supposed to furnish a line of independent evidence in favor of the life succession theory.

[CHAPTER VII]
EXTINCT SPECIES

Let us now test the value of this assumed life succession by another very simple question. In "Eocene times," so we are told, England was a land of palms, with a semi-tropical flora and fauna. In fact at this time, cycads, gourds, proteads (like the Australian shrubs and trees), the fig, cinnamon, screw-pine, and various species of acacias and palms, abounded in England and Western Europe; while turtles, monkeys, crocodiles, and other sub-tropical and warm-temperate forms were equally abundant. Then again, in the Pleistocene deposits of the same countries, we find various species of elephant and rhinoceros, with a hippopotamus, lion, and hyena, identical with species now living in the tropics, "although," as Dana says, "these modern kinds are dwarfs in comparison."

Now, how are we to prove that these various forms of animal life did not exist together in these countries at the same time as the trees and plants before mentioned?

Lions and monkeys, hippopotami and crocodiles, with elephants, hyenas, and rhinoceroses, now live beneath the palms, mimosas, acacias, and other tropical plants represented in the Eocene and Miocene beds. What is there to hinder us from believing that they all lived there together in that olden time? Surely it would be the very irony of scientific fate if forms now so closely connected in life should in death be so divided. Or, to present it in another form, why should we be asked to believe that these acacias, cinnamons, palms, etc., lived and died ages or millions of years before the lions, elephants, rhinoceroses and hippopotami, came into existence to enjoy their shade; and then, after these unnumbered ages had dragged their slow length along and vanished into the dim past, and all these semi-tropical plants had shifted to the tropics or been turned into lignite, these lions, elephants, and hippopotami came into existence in these same localities, when no such plants existed anywhere in Europe?

Surely we ought to expect some pretty substantial evidence for such a violation of "the observed uniformity of nature." We generally boast that we have outgrown the crude ideas of the earlier years of the science when they spoke of "ages" of limestone making or of sandstone making; but it seems that some of us have not yet attained to that broad view of the essential unity of nature in which the flora and fauna of our world are seen to be just as indissolubly connected with each other. But nature could as easily be persuaded to produce for a whole age nothing in the way of rock but limestone or conglomerate, as to adjust her powers to such an unbalanced state of affairs as is spoken of above, with the animals in one age and the complementary plants in another.

But in considering this question as to why the Eocene plants and the Pleistocene animals may not be supposed to have lived contemporaneously together, we are brought face to face with the second supposed argument in favor of there having been a succession of life on the globe. The answer given is that all the animals of these "early" Tertiary beds are extinct species, also very many of the plants; while the hyena, lion, hippopotamus, etc., of the Pleistocene are identical with the living species, and even the mammoth is so closely like its nearest surviving relative, the Asiatic elephant (E. indicus), that these also might be classed as identical.[33]