I pointed out, as hundreds have pointed out before me, that Darwinism obviously breaks down from the fact that it demands each step in evolution to be an advance in survival value over the last. There again it is a plain matter of arithmetic that the chance of this happening accidentally is impossible. Mr. Wells is so confused in mind that he quotes as a bad example what I said about the reptile and the bird. He seems to think that the argument is upset by the fact that there are intermediate forms and that in these intermediate forms the fore legs lose their function before they become wings. If one could prove such a transformation—which one cannot, it is mere hypothesis—it would have nothing to do with Natural Selection; it would be simply an example of transformism. What I say (and what is obviously true in a myriad instances) is that between the foot of the land animal and the flapper of the whale, between the powerfully defensive and aggressive great ape and the weak, more intelligent man, there must be stages (if the transition ever took place) where the organism was at a positive disadvantage, and that consideration blows Darwinian Natural Selection to pieces.
When Korchinsky calls selection through the struggle for existence a factor inimical to evolution, he is saying exactly that; and, I repeat, hosts of men great and small, of high authority like these Professors or of no authority like myself, have been repeating that obvious bit of common sense for something like a lifetime, though it would seem that for some extraordinary reason Mr. Wells has never heard of it.
He makes the same sort of mistake about my third argument, which was that rare variations would, under the action of pure chance, necessarily be soon reabsorbed in the mass, and disappear. He thinks I invented this argument in 1926.
Great Heavens! It is perhaps the most widely known of all Nägeli’s famous seven objections to Natural Selection which were formulated before Mr. Wells left off reading on these subjects. He ought to have been acquainted with them even in the elementary class work of his youth, however little he might later read of more modern work.
Has Mr. Wells never heard that this was the very argument which compelled the first serious modification of the Darwinian theory, and began its breakdown? I suppose not—Any more than he has heard that what he foolishly calls “my” first argument seriously shook Weissmann’s position—that most formidable of the Darwinian remnant—and that as long ago as 1896 Weissmann did, if I am not mistaken, in the preface to his book virtually admit that it could not be got over.
And so on. I could write a whole book upon that rather dreary and negative subject, the abysmal lack of acquaintance Mr. Wells shows with the thought of his time. I could expose him here in the matter of Couenot, or of Vialleton’s book, as I exposed him in the Manchester Guardian, or print in detail quotations from Carazzi, which I leave for another occasion.
But I think I have said enough to expose Mr. Wells’s pretence of reading in modern biology.
The bubble is pricked and has burst.
III
MR. WELLS’S IGNORANCE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
The Third mark of Mr. Wells’s outburst against me I have called his amazing ignorance upon the Catholic Church. That ignorance is, of course, still more apparent in his book. But I am concerned here only with the way in which it appears in his pamphlet. He inherits the old prejudice—flourishing strongly in the best No-Popery days—that for some unexplained reason a Catholic is opposed to that most interesting intellectual activity, the pursuit of physical knowledge. He envisages the Catholic Church as teaching an inchoate heap of unconnected doctrines, each of them highly concrete, each of them flagrantly impossible, and the chief of them an historical statement that in a particular place and at a particular time, to wit, in the neighbourhood of Baghdad 5930 years ago, there took place the Fall of Man. He has no conception that we object to a book like his and to methods such as he uses because we use the human reason, and are all brought up to know that the human reason is absolute in its own sphere.