It is cumbersome to load a book intended for general reading with quotations from Authorities and a mass of footnotes. Moreover, a reader of intelligence desires to hear the arguments rather than a mere list of expert names.
On this account, in the first draft of this book (which appeared in the form of a series of articles in the Press), while giving some of the main arguments against the old Darwinian theory of Natural Selection, I omitted particular names, and only alluded in general terms to that mass of modern criticism, increasing in volume, which has undermined it.
Mr. Wells was foolish enough to write a hurried pamphlet in which he made the strange affirmation that my arguments against Natural Selection were of my own invention and that I cited no modern critics of Darwinism because no such critics existed: the intellectual movement of which I spoke was a figment of my brain, and I could quote no authorities supporting it.
From this it was clear, though astonishing, that Mr. Wells had undertaken to write popular stuff about Evolution without so much as a casual acquaintance with the advance of biology in our generation.
I therefore append here the names of some few among the many authorities upon biological science who have exposed the error of Natural Selection.
It is a short list, drawn up at random, and in no particular order of date, and containing only some forty odd names such as a man of quite ordinary general education like myself with only a general interest in such matters can jot down from memory. It could, of course, be extended indefinitely by anyone setting out to make a complete total of the first-class scholars who have left Darwinism the wreck it is to-day. I do not pretend, of course, to more than a very slight reading among any of these few. I give them only as sample names out of an increasing roll, professors in the great universities (Paris, Vienna, Leipzig, Harvard, Montpellier, Tübingen, Amsterdam, Columbia, Bologna, etc. etc.), a President of the British Association, men eminent in special research, and famous biologists who have determined the current of modern opinion in the course of my lifetime:—
Cuénot
Delage
Rosa (Daniele)
Kolliker