And this is the only condition on which we can give credit to the second doctrine of dogmatic Darwinism. Its second principle, indeed, proves to be absolutely inadequate to explain the origin of any other kind of specific properties whatever.
I cannot enter here into the whole subject of Darwinian criticism.[145] Our aims are of a positive character, they desiderate construction and only use destruction where it is not to be avoided. So I shall only mention that dogmatic Darwinism has been found to be unable to explain every kind of mutual adaptations, e.g. those existing between plants and insects; that it can never account for the origin of those properties that are indifferent to the life of their bearer, being mere features of organisation as an arrangement of parts; that it fails in the face of all portions of organisation which are composed of many different parts—like the eye—and nevertheless are functional units in any passive or active way; and that, last not least, it has been found to be quite inadequate to explain the first origin of all newly formed constituents of organisation even if they are not indifferent: for how could any rudiment of an organ, which is not functioning at all, not only be useful to its bearer, but be useful in such a degree as to decide about life or death?
It is only for one special feature that I should like to show, by a more full analysis, that dogmatic Darwinism does not satisfy the requirements of the case. The special strength of Darwinism is said to lie in its explaining everything that is useful in and for organisms; the competitive factor it introduces does indeed seem to secure at least a relative sort of adaptedness between the organism and its needs. But in spite of that, we shall now see that Darwinism fails absolutely to explain those most intimate organic phenomena which may be said to be the most useful of all.
Darwinism in its dogmatic form is not able to explain the origin of any sort of organic restitution; it is altogether impossible to account for the restitutive power of organisms by the simple means of fluctuating variation and natural selection in the struggle for existence. Here we have the logical experimentum crucis of Darwinism.
Let us try to study in the Darwinian style the origin of the regenerative faculty, as shown in the restitution of the leg of a newt. All individuals of a given species of the newt, say Triton taeniatus, are endowed with this faculty; all of them therefore must have originated from ancestors which acquired it at some time or other. But this necessary supposition implies that all of these ancestors must have lost their legs in some way, and not only one, but all four of them, as they could not have acquired the restitutive faculty otherwise. We are thus met at the very beginning of our argument by what must be called a real absurdity, which is hardly lessened by the assumption that regeneration was acquired not by all four legs together, but by one after the other. But it is absolutely inevitable to assume that all the ancestors of our Triton must have lost one leg, or more correctly, that only those of them survived which had lost one! Otherwise not all newts at the present day could possess the faculty of regeneration! But a second absurdity follows the first one; out of the ancestors of our newt, which survived the others by reason of having lost one of their legs, there were selected only those which showed at least a very small amount of healing of their wound. It must be granted that such a step in the process of selection, taken by itself, would not at all seem to be impossible; since healing of wounds protects the animals against infection. But the process continues. In every succeeding stage of it there must have survived only those individuals which formed just a little more of granulative tissue than did the rest: though neither they themselves nor the rest could use the leg, which indeed was not present! That is the second absurdity we meet in our attempt at a Darwinian explanation of the faculty of regeneration; but I believe the first one alone was sufficient.
If we were to study the “selection” of the faculty of one of the isolated blastomeres of the egg of the sea-urchin to form a whole larva only of smaller size, the absurdities would increase. At the very beginning we should encounter the absurdity, that of all the individuals there survived only those which were not whole but half; for all sea-urchins are capable of the ontogenetical restitution in question, all of their ancestors therefore must have acquired it, and they could do that only if they became halved at first by some accident during early embryology. But we shall not insist any further on this instance, for it would not be fair to turn into ridicule a theory which bears the name of a man who is not at all responsible for its dogmatic form. Indeed, we are speaking against Darwinism of the most dogmatic form only, not against Darwin himself. He never analysed the phenomena of regeneration or of embryonic restitution—they lay in a field very unfamiliar to him and to his time. I venture to say that if he had taken them into consideration, he would have agreed with us in stating that his theory was not at all able to cover them; for he was prepared to make great concessions, to Lamarckism for instance, in other branches of biology, and he did not pretend, to know what life itself is.
Darwin was not a decided materialist, though materialism has made great capital out of his doctrines, especially in Germany. His book, as is well known, is entitled “The Origin of Species,” that is of organic diversities, and he himself possibly might have regarded all restitution as belonging to the original properties of life, anterior to the originating of diversities. Personally he might possibly be called even a vitalist. Thus dogmatic “Darwinism” in fact is driven into all the absurdities mentioned above, whilst the “doctrine of Darwin” can only be said to be wrong on account of its failing to explain mutual adaptation, the origin of new organs, and some other features in organic diversities; the original properties of life were left unexplained by it intentionally.
DARWINISM FAILS ALL ALONG THE LINE
The result of our discussion then must be this: selection has proved to be a negative factor only, and fluctuating variation as the only way in which new properties of the organisms might have arisen has proved to fail in the most marked manner, except perhaps for a few merely quantitative instances. Such a result betokens the complete collapse of dogmatic Darwinism as a general theory of descent: the most typical features of all organisms remain as unexplained as ever.