Three main issues are raised by Dr. Downey, and they are all acutely interesting ones: the Historical Fall of Man, the Origin of Religion, and the rôle of the Catholic Church in restraining knowledge.
The issue of the Fall has been made a very important one in Catholic theology. In the Outline I discuss some consequences of this insistence upon the Fall in the account given of the moral disorganisation of the middle and later nineteenth century. I may be profoundly wrong, but I share a now widespread belief that there is no evidence of anything in the nature of a moral Fall, such as Catholic theology requires, in human history; that, on the contrary, there is now a pressure of evidence, which I find irresistible, towards the belief that the human species arose through a quite natural series of changes, side by side with various kindred species of apes and man-like creatures, out of a monkey-like ancestry deriving itself through vast periods of time from reptilian and fish-like progenitors. Most interesting of all the species related to men are these man-like creatures, the Neanderthal men, who also made fires and shaped huge flint implements and buried their dead. I give these facts as I conceive them, and Dr. Downey finds it necessary to treat my description as though it was a complete argument designed to state and prove the human family tree, and to pretend that, when I mention such intermediate types between ape and man as Pithecanthropus, I mean that they are genetically intermediate. It is, I submit, rather girlish to write in this fashion: “We are thrilled to think that in this chapter Mr. Wells is at last about to solve the knotty problem of our simian ancestry.” I do not believe Dr. Downey was thrilled a bit. Dr. Downey heads one page “Exit the Ape Ancestor Theory”—it is what the London journalist would call a streamer headline—because he has found an article by Major Thomas Cherry pointing out the many reasons there are for doubting a very close genetic connection between man and the living arboreal anthropoids. This eager headline is followed on the next page by a still more eager comment, by which Dr. Downey comes one of those controversial croppers that will happen in this sort of fragmentary discussion. He quotes Major Cherry, “the specialised monkey foot may be ruled out as a stage in the ancestry of man,” and adds, “sad blow to Mr. Wells with his diagrammatic picture of ‘foot of man and gorilla.’” On several occasions in his criticism of the Outline Dr. Downey uses the dramatic phrase, “one rubs one’s eyes.” Well, if he will rub his eyes again and have a good look at that picture and read the context, he will find that it is given to show the difference, not the resemblance, of the two feet, and that the “sad blow” recoils with some severity upon himself. Because it shows that I at any rate am tied to no brief, and have no hesitation in giving a piece of evidence that may seem to qualify the general drift of my story.
If Dr. Downey, by the bye, had looked up the current edition of the Outline, he would not have found that figure. It has gone, and the section has been recast so as to include an excellent note by Mr. R. I. Pocock which makes it simpler and clearer.
I hope, if Catholics will not accept and use The Outline of History, they will give us one of their own, and when they do there will be no part I shall read with greater interest and curiosity than the part devoted to these curious subhuman creatures and the account of the Fall that occurred, if I read Dr. Downey aright, between the disappearance of Neanderthal Man and the appearance of the Cro-Magnon people in Europe. Both Dr. Downey and Mr. Belloc make a great fuss because I have given pictures of Pithecanthropus and the Neanderthal Man, and because there is an imaginative picture by Sir Harry Johnston of “Our Neanderthaloid ancestor” in the Newnes edition. They point out that these pictures are made up with only a few bones and theories to go upon. They are. They are to help the imagination of the weaker brethren, and they pretend to do no more than that. But it was amusing to read this objection in Dr. Downey’s pamphlet just after a visit to the Vatican, where portraits of Adam and Eve and the snake who tempted them occur in some profusion. I have seen at Cava di Tirrene a hair of the Virgin Mary, a bone of St. Matthew, and a number of other osseous and horny fragments of saints and divine persons, very reassuring evidence of the material truth of the Catholic religion, but I have still to learn of any vestiges of Adam to compare with the thigh bone, the teeth and the skull fragments of Pithecanthropus. If Catholicism is to avail itself of illustration, I do not see why Mr. Belloc and Dr. Downey should display this iconoclastic fervour towards a secular history.
Dr. Downey follows Mr. Belloc in a curious disposition to score a point by declaring that this or that view of mine is twenty-five years old, quite out of date: “Mr. Wells has not kept pace with the rationalist movement,” and so forth. I do not understand this passion in Catholics for the latest mental wear; for my own part, if a thing is convincing to me, I do not care when it was first believed nor who has given it up. I thought that was the way with Catholics too. But Mr. Belloc assured the readers of the Dublin Review that Natural Selection had not been believed in for twenty-five years; it was quite a discarded idea. If the intellectual smart set regards Natural Selection as out of date, that shows merely that the intellectual smart set has taken leave of common sense. The proposition is invincible that, given a species in which the individuals reproduce in greater or less abundance young with individual differences, and sooner or later die, and in which the individual young favour their individual parents, then in every generation the individuals less adapted to survive and reproduce are, as a rule, likely to die sooner and to bear fewer offspring than the individuals more adapted to these ends, and therefore that, conditions remaining constant, the average specimen of the species must become more and more perfectly adapted as time goes on to the conditions of its existence. And equally invincible is the proposition that a permanent change of conditions must involve a change in the average of a species to which no apparent limit is set short of perfect adaptation, and the parallel proposition that the average specimens of each of two sections of a species living under widely different conditions of survival, and separated from each other, must ultimately become widely different. I write of this not, as Dr. Downey says, with the “full-blooded confidence of the Sciolist,” but with the assurance of a normally sane man. If anyone can start from the premises I have just given and arrive at any other than the conclusion at which I have arrived, there is need for a psychological Einstein.
It does not affect this question a jot that Mr. Bateson, always something of an enfant terrible among biologists, celebrated the centenary of Charles Darwin, and the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species, by writing in a collection of pious contributions to Darwin’s memory that “the time is not ripe for a discussion of the Origin of Species.” That was just Mr. Bateson’s fun. He himself has discussed it immensely. But he has discussed it from the point of view of the cause of the individual difference, and the theory of Natural Selection is not concerned with that. Natural Selection is merely a logical deduction from the facts of inheritance and individual difference. It explains neither, and no clear-headed biologist has ever thought that it did.
Both Mr. Belloc and Dr. Downey are indeed in a hopeless muddle between the discussion of the origin of variations and the question of the reaction of a variable species to its environment. Among all these biological questions they are helplessly at sea. I doubt if they have ever looked into a biological book except in a state of controversial prepossession. At the moment I am unable to verify Dr. Downey’s quotation from Mr. Bourne’s Animal Life and Human Progress (1919), in which Mr. Bourne is made to say that the “extinction of the less fit and the survival of the fittest no longer commands the universal assent of zoologists,” but I am disposed to think that it must be clipped in some way. This sentence, I guess, is only the tail of a sentence. As it stands it is nonsense. [My guess, I find on returning to England, is correct. Even the authorship of the book is improperly ascribed to Professor (not Mr.) Bourne. It is a collection of papers by various hands. The passage in Professor Bourne’s paper runs as follows:—
“I have been at some pains to convince you that the current doctrine that evolution in animals and plants depends upon a ratio of increase so high as to lead to unrestricted competition among the individuals of a species, and in consequence to a Struggle for Existence, with extinction of the less fit and Survival of the Fittest, no longer commands the universal assent of zoologists. Indeed it has been severely undermined by the discoveries of recent years.”
Dr. Downey quotes from the words “extinction of the less fit” to the end.
I do not wish to accuse Dr. Downey of any deliberate attempt to deceive in this misquotation. He did not understand the point Professor Bourne was driving at—generally he shows little or no grip upon these biological questions. Professor Bourne here is not discussing Natural Selection at all; he is discussing the entirely different question of whether there is normally a bitter struggle for existence between the individuals of the same species. If Dr. Downey had read on he would surely have grasped the idea—for Professor Bourne is very plain and simple—that a species may undergo natural selection without any struggle for existence between individuals at all. But Dr. Downey did not, I think, read on. He just took the words that seemed to suit his purpose—rather carelessly—and threw the book down. It is a little tedious, however, that one should have to verify the quotations of an antagonist in this way.]