All this evidence is no argument against transition. But it is damning evidence against the (a) very slow, (b) infinitesimally graduated, (c) continuous and unceasing transition or flux which Darwinian Natural Selection demands.
3. The Third Argument from Evidence:
The geological record shows not a gradual unceasing development such as Natural Selection demands, but sharp steps.
If Darwinian Natural Selection were the means by which simple ascended to complex forms, this ascent would necessarily have been a regular, very slow and uninterrupted process, continually at work.
The lines of ascent would have appeared in the geological record as so many inclined planes. They appear, in point of fact, as so many steps—each composed of very, very long flats separated, each from the one below, by a clean gap or break.
This character in the geological record does not get weaker as we come to know more and more of that record. On the contrary, it becomes increasingly emphasized.
There is evidence suggesting development of one type from another, but no evidence at all for the extremely gradual and continuous change of one type into another. On the contrary, each step noted in the process is a Fixed Type. What proportion the (presumably) rapid periods of transition and change may have borne to the immensely long periods of stable type, we cannot tell; but we do know that stable type is the rule, and that the process of change from one type into another must, compared with the long periods of fixity, have been the brief exception.
Yet, in the face of evidence so considerable and so widely known, the talk of Natural Selection still survives in these popular manuals. As Dwight (Professor of Anatomy at Harvard) very well put it fifteen years ago, “Just at the time when the uneducated are prating about the triumph of Darwinism it is fast losing caste among men of Science.”
But if it be asked why so patently false a theory was so tenaciously defended for some years by serious authorities—is still defended by a diminishing few—the answer is that the defenders of Natural Selection were so preoccupied with a totally different discussion (to wit, the defence of Evolution in general) that they confounded the two.
In England and North America, more than anywhere else, there were many people a lifetime ago who, from some inherited superstition, did not want to admit the idea of growth, though growth was going on all about them. They did not want to admit that two kinds of tree might have come from an original common type of tree; still less that one kind of animal could come from another apparently different; although they had before their eyes the oak tree coming out of an acorn, and the frog out of a tadpole. They seemed to be unaware of the age-long controversy upon the matter; they had never heard, apparently, of the modern founders of the evolutionary hypothesis, especially Lamarck and Buffon: the former of whom had a much more rational theory than Darwin’s, and put it forward before Darwin was born. Still less had they heard of the theory of Evolution among the Ancients and the Fathers of the Church.