Now observe the inevitable, mathematical necessity of this relation. The environment changes not in one respect, or fifty, or a hundred, or a thousand, but in as many as you like to catalogue. The living animal consists not in one function, or a hundred, or a thousand, but in as many more as you care to examine. To every change of climate, or what not, there are an indefinitely large number of consequences. The organism has to be adapted to meet all the changes. But that living thing also must, in order to have a special survival-value, discover, somehow, a corresponding change in all its own innumerable functions. When such and such a proportion of the organisms shows one particular slight advantage for meeting one aspect of the change, such an advantage helps this favoured proportion, in that point only, to survive. But, in order to have special survival-value, the organism must also show advantages in every other respect. The chance of all these advantages coinciding in any one organism and accidentally corresponding to the very numerous changes in environment, is mathematically indistinguishable from zero. The animals with whiter coats than the average are not (if the matter be left to chance) the same as those with paws slightly better suited for snow than the average; nor are either of these the same as those with slight survival advantage over the average in digesting changed food—and so on with any number of conditions. Left to chance the combination could not arise. Yet it does arise.
It is equally true that the adaptations of function to function within each organism are vast in number and could never have arisen from blind accident.
This is the unanswerable point brought out half a lifetime ago and increasingly emphasized ever since.
Wolff put it admirably in his attack on Darwinism as early as 1898: “One might possibly imagine the adaptation between one muscle cell and one nerve-end, through Selection among innumerable chance-made variations, but that such shall take place in a 1000 cases in one organism is inconceivable.” And another great biologist has well said: “What is the survival value of horns without the structure to support them and muscles to use them?” Strange that Mr. Wells should never have heard of all this!
Animals are adapted, we know. They do co-ordinate an indefinitely large number of internal conditions to meet a whole complicated bundle of external conditions. They also have a myriad adaptions within themselves necessary to their existence as organisms quite apart from external change. But this could not possibly happen from blind chance. The mathematical chances are millions and millions to one against the possibility of such a thing. Grant Design moulding all nature—that is, God,—and this process is explicable. Grant even an inherent power possessed by the living thing to attempt its own adaptation, and the process is explicable. Leave it to the mechanical explanation of Natural Selection, and it is impossible.
(3) The third a priori proof against Natural Selection:
Natural Selection presupposes that each new infinitesimal stage in development out of millions in each type, is, by blind chance, an advantage over the last. This is mathematically impossible.
This third a priori proof that Natural Selection is a false theory lies in the simple consideration that it demands each stage in millions of stages in millions of types to show a survival-value. The chances against this being possible are many, many more millions than the number of stages multiplied by the number of types. The chance of a penny coming down heads a hundred times in succession is vastly less than one in a hundred; and when it comes to myriads of times, the chance is approximately zero. The chance of a hundred pennies chucked by a hundred men in unison doing this is far less. In other words, it can’t happen by chance.
Let me return to the case of the bird. A bird has wings with which it can escape its enemies. If it began as a reptile without wings—when, presumably, it had armour or some other aid to survival—what of the interval? Natural Selection sets out to explain how the evolutionary process changes a reptile’s leg into a bird’s wing. It does so by making the leg less and less of a leg for countless ages.
By the very nature of the theory each stage in all these millions is an advantage over the last towards survival! The thing has only to be stated for its absurdity to appear. Compare the “get away” chances of a lizard at one end of the process or a sparrow at the other with some poor beast that had to try and skurry off on half-wings! or to fly with half-legs! The change took place?—No doubt. Some of our greatest Biologists say it didn’t and couldn’t. Most say it did. The hypothesis has much in its favour. But the change could not possibly have taken place by successive advantages any more than the turning of an egg into a full-grown hen takes place by successive survivals, or of a chrysalis into a moth.