“He doesn’t know that Vailleton of Montpellier has knocked the last nail into the coffin of that facile and superficial Victorian shortcut (and blind alley). He has probably never heard of Vailleton, and when he does he will suspect him for a foreigner. That is what I mean by being provincial and not abreast of one’s time.”
It is perfectly true that I have never heard of any Vailleton in biological science. Nor has anyone else. There is “no sich person.” Perhaps Mr. Belloc has not been able to read the manuscript of some adviser, or his memory may have played a trick upon him. Possibly he has in mind that eminent Victorian embryologist, Vialleton, who, so far from being the very newest thing in “European” biology, must now be getting on for seventy. He is half-way back to Haeckel, the originator of the family-tree idea, a German embryologist and not, as a matter of fact, the Victorian English Protestant Mr. Belloc supposes him to be. Possibly years and years ago some French student may have run away with the idea that embryos conscientiously repeat their phylogeny, and Professor Vialleton may have thought it well to discuss this idea in one of his books. It is not an idea I have ever entertained, much less stated, and its only interest here is that it gives Mr. Belloc a chance of showing how rudely he can set out his inaccuracies and his misconceptions.
But this is an incidental comment. I will reserve for my next section a consideration of the remarkable arguments—“crushing arguments” the enthusiastic cross-heads of his editor declare them to be—that Mr. Belloc produces against this view of life as being in a state of change under the action of Natural Selection, that I have put here before the reader.
III
MR. BELLOC AS A SPECIMEN CRITIC OF NATURAL SELECTION
The chief arguments against the Theory of Natural Selection with which Mr. Belloc has favoured us are neatly set out by him in two triads. His passion for orderly arrangement is greater than his logic, and we shall find that the second and third arguments of his second triad are substantially the same. He is rather exceptionally ignorant of modern scientific literature, and his arguments do not cover all the countervailing considerations upon which systematic observation and research work have been based—the speculations of Dr. Fairfield Osborn would have been a godsend for him—but the things he has to say are conveniently simple; they embody some prevalent misconceptions, and they will be useful in accentuating the more salient points in my account of the theory given in my second paper.
He produces first certain remarkable a priori arguments—his “three a prior arguments.” The first is beautifully absurd. It is difficult to believe it is advanced in anything but a spirit of burlesque. He says that an advantage is not an advantage. He says that an advantage does not give an advantage unless it is combined with other advantages. You will think I am misrepresenting him. Then please read this:—
“(1) The advantageous differences making for survival are not of one kind in any particular case, but of an indefinitely large number (e.g., climate getting colder needs not only warmer coat, but power to digest new food, protective colouring so as not to show dark against snow, etc., an indefinitely large number of qualities). Now the chance of all being combined (and co-ordinated) in a single individual, without design, accidentally, let alone of their thus appearing in many individuals accidentally and without design, approximates to zero.”
This is, so to speak, the short uncompleted form of the first argument. It is expanded later to a copiousness too great to admit of quotation. This expansion carries the statement right to its conclusion, that only an individual possessing all the possible differences that are advantageous at any particular time can survive. Otherwise its differences have no “survival value.” They may be advantages, but not sufficient advantages to score an advantage. I know this sounds tipsy, but there it is in black and white in Mr. Belloc’s wonderful Article V for any one to consult. It follows plainly that, except for a miracle, every species must be exterminated in every generation. I can see no other way out of it. No individual, he declares, can survive without the full set of advantageous differences, and the chance of any individual having the full set of advantageous differences, he declares after some abstruse verbal gestures, is zero. There is Mr. Belloc with his unfailing logic, his clear mathematical demonstration, and all the rest of it. There is the lucid Latin mind shining above my Nordic fog! Yet the previous generation got along without any of the set! And species do survive.
Did Mr. Belloc imagine he was saying something else? It is not for me to speculate. Helping out an antagonist in a controversy is apt to be resented. He has, I think, simply got into a muddle here, and he is not sufficiently self-critical to get out of it again. So he tries to muddle through. It is quite reasonable to say that when a species is under stress of changing conditions it is usual for the need for adaptation to be felt upon a number of points and not simply upon one, and that, since every advantage counts, the individuals with the greatest combination of advantageous differences have the best chances. But that does not alter the fact that even a single advantage is an advantage. What happens in nature is not an extermination of all who are not completely in the fashion of the new differences. That seems to be Mr. Belloc’s idea, but it is a wrong idea. What does happen is a diminution in each generation of the number of the disadvantaged in relation to the number of the advantaged. That is quite another affair. Mr. Belloc has not grasped this. His third a priori argument shows as much even more plainly than his first, and to that I shall presently come.