Illogical Geology, the Weakest Point in the Evolution Theory

by George McCready Price

This point being considered by many as so important, and having such a vital connection with the whole life succession theory, we must go into the matter somewhat in detail, even at the risk of appearing rather technical to some.

If the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic strata are often of enormous extent, spreading in vast sheets over wide regions, so that their stratigraphical order in any particular district is quite readily made out, it is in most cases altogether different with the Tertiary and Pleistocene deposits. For these resemble one another so much in everything except their fossils, and occur so generally in detached and fragmentary beds, holding no stratigraphical relation to one another, that Lyell devised the plan of distinguishing them from one another and arranging them in the accustomed order of successive ages, by their relative percentages of living and extinct mollusca. With only unimportant changes, Lyell's divisions are still followed in classifying off the Tertiary and post-Tertiary beds. Those with all the species extinct, or less than 5 per cent. living, are classed as Eocene; those containing few extinct forms, or nearly all living species, are classed as Pleistocene or post-Tertiary. The Miocene and Pliocene represent the intermediate grades, and all are supposed to be a true chronological order. It goes without saying that in actual practice it is often so extremely difficult to adjust these differences that beds are assigned to an "early" or a "late" division on general principles by what the literary critics would call "tact" or "intuition," rather than by the strict percentage system, though for these large and important divisions of Tertiary and post-Tertiary rocks, these are absolutely the only professed grounds on which the subdivisions are distinguished and arranged in the customary order of time.

In the words of Dr. David Page:

"As there is often no perceptible mineral distinction between many clays, sands and gravels, it is only by their imbedded fossils that geologists can determine their Tertiary or post-Tertiary character."[34]

Now to say that a set of beds, ninety-five per cent. of whose fossils belong to extinct species, and only five per cent. are now living, must be vastly older than another set where these percentages are reversed, i.e. where the species are nearly all living, seems at first thought an eminently reasonable idea, and we immediately begin to imagine the long ages it must have taken for these exceedingly numerous and apparently vigorous species to wear out and become extinct in the alleged ordinary way by the merciless struggle for existence with forms more fitted to survive.

But it is hardly necessary to point out that all this is based on the assumption of Uniformity in its most extreme type, a doctrine which not only denies that these living forms are merely the lucky survivors of tremendous changes in which their contemporaries perished, but which in essence is taking for granted beforehand the very point which ought to be the chief aim of all geological inquiry, viz., How did the geological changes take place? It would not be considered a very scientific procedure for a coroner, called upon to hold a post mortem, to content himself with interesting statistics about the percentage of people who die of old age, fever, and other causes, while there was clear and decisive evidence that the poor fellow had been shot. In this case, as in geology, it is not merely the result that is wrong, but the whole method of investigation. For, as in the latter case we don't want to know how people generally die, but how this particular person actually did die, so, in our study of geology, we do not wish to know merely the rate at which changes of surface and extinctions of species are now going on, and then project this measure backward into the past as an infallible guide, but we wish to know for sure just what changes of this nature have taken place. A true induction is, I think, capable of deciding very positively whether or not the tools of nature have always worked at the same rate and with the same force as at present; and this method of arranging the fossils in supposed chronological order on the percentage basis mentioned above, is only an extreme form of methods claiming to be inductive which in this age of the world ought to be considered a shame and a disgrace, because, as Howorth says, they are based, "not upon induction, but upon hypotheses," and have "all the infirmity of the science of the Middle Ages."

Then again, it occurs to us, that this method, of attaching a time-value to percentages of extinct or living species, would make the sub-fossil remains of the bison on the Western prairies almost infinitely older than those of the lion, hippopotamus, etc., in the Pleistocene beds of Europe; for (except for some few specimens artificially preserved, and which may be ignored in this connection) the bison is to-day absolutely extinct, while the Pleistocene mammals are found by the thousand in the proper localities and show no signs of surrender in the struggle for existence. Similar comparisons might be made between the great wingless birds of Madagascar, Mauritius and New Zealand, and the many cases of "persistent" forms which have survived unchanged from Carboniferous, Silurian, or Cambrian times, a period of time which, in the language of the current geology, means quite a large fraction of eternity. But all of these considerations show that the mere fact of certain species being extinct and others being now alive, is no trustworthy guide in determining the relative age of their remains, until we first find out how they happened to become extinct.

The inquiry as to the how and the when (relatively) is an absolutely essential preliminary in any such investigation; and is inseparably united in nature with the general question of how the great geological changes have taken place in the past. Of course, if everything like a world-catastrophe is a priori denied; if, in other words, it is settled from the first that all these fossils living and extinct did not live contemporaneously with each other, the living ones being simply the lucky survivors of stupendous changes in which the others perished, then all pretense of a scientific investigation of the subject is at an end. If a coroner has it settled beforehand that an accident or a murder could not possibly have occurred, then his profession of a candid post mortem examination is only a farce; for he does not hold it to find out anything, since he knows everything essential about it beforehand. Uniformitarians would certainly make poor coroners, or for that matter poor investigators of law or history, or anything else.

Will some one please give us a reasonable explanation of why the lion, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, and elephant shifted from England to the tropics? Or will they explain how, at this same general time, some elephants and rhinoceroses got caught in the merciless frosts of Northern Siberia so suddenly that their flesh has remained untainted all these centuries, and is now, wherever exposed, greedily devoured by the dogs and wolves?

An abundant warm-climate vegetation once mantled all the polar regions, and its fossils have been found just about as far north as explorers have ever gone; while Dana says that, "The encasing in ice of huge elephants, and the perfect preservation of the flesh, shows that the cold finally became suddenly extreme, as of a single winter's night, and knew no relenting afterwards."[35]