For it presupposes a purely blind, unintentional, “sieve-like” action, not merely as killing off the unfit—which is obvious—but as producing gradually increasing fitness, with no inherent power in the organism for adaptation. According to Darwinian Natural Selection, what works the change is a vast number of successive tiny differences such as always appear between parent and progeny.
To turn out, for instance, the white bear of the Arctic from the general undifferentiated type of subfusc beardom you must have hardly perceptible steps beginning with the slightly lighter hue of a few bears, and proceeding gradually for æons and æons until only the pure white survived (though however one could get at pure white by such a process it would have puzzled them to say!)
Natural Selection, then, imperatively demands for each species a slow ascension, a regular, inclined plane, produced over a prodigious space of time, in which the animal is getting whiter and whiter, or fleeter and fleeter, or what not, by infinitesimal degrees.
The theory of Natural Selection necessitates the presence, in all fossils, and even during any considerable historical period, of increasing progressive slight differences in type.
It is no good saying that Natural Selection might apply to new highly suitable variations coming at exactly the right moment to benefit the animal. Such variations indicate Design of some sort and Will. If the climate gets colder and very woolly types of an animal immediately begin to appear, that is not Natural Selection; that is a startling but obvious adaptation, due to some other cause, of organism to environment. It is the very negation of a blind, causeless, undefined, unwilled process which the theory of Natural Selection was intended to bolster up.
(3) Again, Natural Selection implies advance by the killing off of the organism not possessed of a specific advantage. How is it then that organisms not possessed of the advantage survive—as they certainly do—side by side with the advantaged and in the same environment? The Elephant’s trunk grew longer because the short-trunkites were killed off. What of the Tapir?
(4) Again, Natural Selection cannot allow itself to be ousted by any rival aid to development.
This is a very important point. The whole point of Natural Selection as the explanation of the difference between living beings is that it is mechanical. The moment you have to prop it up by saying “Animals with similar variations will tend to mate one with the other,” or “Striking change in environment will tend to produce corresponding variations,” you are abandoning Natural Selection, and covering up your retreat with mere verbiage. Why “tend”?
The theory of Natural Selection is a jealous god and it will admit no rival, nor even any support. You must make it your mainstay or give it up: for the whole point of it is that it permits you, if you will, to eliminate Will and Mind from the Universe. The moment you have to prop it up with some theory involving Will and Mind the essence of it disappears. Therefore does Weissmann, the most famous of its later defenders, ascribe to it “All-might” (to make a barbaric translation of his term) and desperately add that we “must” accept Natural Selection because the only alternative is design—that is God; the Inadmissible: the Dogmatically Denied.
Suppose a man to say, “No one threw that stone: it hit my window by the force of gravity.” Another then points out that a stone, merely falling, would have gone past the window, and that the stone, from the course it took, striking the window, must have been thrown by someone to take the glass at the angle it did. To this the man replies: “Well, yes, perhaps; but gravity influenced its course.” Clearly he has abandoned his case. He was arguing that the stone merely fell: that no Will or Design caused it to take the path it did. When he admits a thrower of the stone and merely brings in gravity as affecting the course of the stone he abandons his position altogether.