Is transformism, that is, the change of one fully-developed mature and complex type into another, true? For instance, could a Reptile have changed into a Bird? Half a lifetime ago nearly everybody answered “Yes.” To-day—especially since the great work of Vialleton—more and more people are answering “No.”
These and any number of other doubts and criticisms—and some disproofs—have arisen in our time, though Evolution in the widest sense of the word—that is, the doctrine that living things are genetically connected, is still the main doctrine taught and held in Biology.
But Evolution in general is not the point. It involves no fundamental issue. It clashes with no theology or philosophy, unless we dignify by those terms an attachment to pictures of ready-made beasts in the family Bible. It is when men come to discuss how the difference between varying types arose that we enter at once upon a quarrel between opposing philosophies, Christian and anti-Christian. No Catholic, nor indeed any man possessed of a philosophy, would trouble himself much over the confirmation or disproof of Evolution. Evolution simply means continuous growth; a tree growing from a seedling is an example of evolution; growth is the universal phenomenon apparent in ourselves and all organic life around us, and to discover it generalized is no shock, but rather an extension of the obvious.
But when we come to ask how and why the vast variety of living things past and present grew and differentiated as they did: whether a Spirit is at work or no: whether the process be intended or motiveless—then the essential quarrel is engaged between those for whom the Universe is blind and those who see it to be the work of God.
That quarrel, which had long been acute in the general field of philosophy, became acute in the particular field of Biology in the late middle of the nineteenth century—over sixty years ago.
Darwin and Wallace and their school belonged to a generation—lived in a place and a time—to which the mysterious action of Will upon the Universe—and, indeed, any mystery—was incomprehensible. Mystery in any form the typical nineteenth-century “Liberal”—as he was called abroad—rejected; and it has been well said that his very politics were founded on the idea that even human life was not mysterious.
We must remember that they had but just escaped—most of their fellow-citizens were still plunged in—the base Puritan superstitions of the seventeenth century. The Vision, the Shrine, the Miracle, the Supernatural in Sacred Place and Thing, they had become too dull to grasp. It was inevitable that such particular rejections of mystery should lead at last to the more general rejection of Divine Action. At the same time they were in reaction against the old Puritan Bibliolatry, which, in their ignorance of Catholic truth, they thought of as “orthodoxy.”
It occurred to them, after doing a great deal of work upon the evidence for transformism—that is, for the change of one living type into another—that the (to them) impossible idea of Design could be eliminated; and it was under the more or less conscious action of a prejudice against Design that they propounded this theory of Natural Selection.
The process of their prejudice against Design moved as follows:
“We must never have recourse to Mind in order to explain the Universe; that would be ‘unscientific’; for to be ‘scientific’ is to allow for nothing but material causes. Therefore the appearance of separate kinds of living beings must come from blind chance, or at least mechanically. At all costs we must get rid of the idea of Design; of a desired End conceived and maintained in a Creative Will. Here is a theory which will make the whole process entirely mechanical and dead.” Incidentally, it made it possible to get rid of the necessity for a Creator. It was upon that aspect and use of the theory that the enemies of religion immediately seized, and it is precisely because it is supposed to get rid of God the Creator (and Judge) that some defence for Natural Selection is still being kept up, especially (in part from Patriotism) among Darwin’s fellow-citizens, but also abroad.