THE ARGUMENTS AGAINST NATURAL SELECTION
When one has to examine any proposition and see whether it be true or no, two radically distinct forms of reasoning present themselves to the mind.
(A) You may find the thing asserted to be in itself impossible, granted certain self-evident principles of thought. For instance, a man who died on the 16th of the month cannot have died of poison taken on the 20th of the month. Or again, the sum of certain payments cannot be less than some one of those payments. This method is called the a priori method.
(B) The other approach made by reason to see whether a theory is true or false is the experimental one, that of positive evidence. You test, by the positive evidence at your disposal, whether the thing affirmed has really taken place or not. Sometimes the first of these methods is conclusive, in which case one has no reason to go any further. Sometimes, and more usually, the second is conclusive, and there is no opportunity or occasion to apply the first. For instance, if we are told that John Jones forged the will of a man who was born after John Jones’s death we know a priori that the story is nonsense. But if John Jones is said to have forged the will of a man who died while John Jones was still alive, then we must go into the evidence of handwriting and all the rest of it.
The reason that people rightly and necessarily supplement a priori reason in practical affairs by the experimental method is that a priori conclusions depend for their value on the rigid certitude of their premises. E.g. a man who died on the 16th cannot have died of poison bought on the 20th. But are we sure that the 16th is really the date of his death? To test that we require actual evidence.
One can conclude absolutely against a false theory by either of these two methods of reasoning. But when they concur, when you find the theory to be false both a priori and from the available evidence as well, then certitude could not be more certain: the combination of both methods of proof is overwhelming.
Now we shall see that this is exactly what happens in the case of this false theory of Evolution called Natural Selection. There are four crushing a priori arguments disposing of it, and, after that, there is overwhelming positive evidence against it, of which the main divisions are three in number.
The four conclusive a priori arguments are these:—
(1) Variations in nearly every case must continue to accumulate. Variations more and more advantageous must appear successively, Generation after Generation. This is not logically essential in every conceivable case, e.g. particoloured animals could grow whiter against snow. But in the vast majority of cases such accumulation is essential: e.g. to produce a taller type or to produce horns or to lengthen a tail.
Now the chances of such a regular series appearing by accident even in one case, let alone in millions, clearly approximate to zero.