Life: Its True Genesis

by Horatius Flaccus

These evolutionists manifestly get the cart before the horse in their category of cosmological events. It is not inert matter organizing itself into life, nor any mode of physical or chemical action, nor any mere manifestation of motion or of heat, nor any other conceivable correlation of natural forces. None of these has enabled us to penetrate the mysterious inner-chamber of life itself. For reasons obviously connected with our own welfare, He, from whom alone are "the issues of life," seems to have ordained that we should fathom the depths of both physical and chemical force, and beneficently wield and direct them to our own uses. But this vital force; this something that stands apart from and is essentially different from all other kinds of force, is of a nature that baffles all our efforts to approach. The power to grasp it, or even to penetrate in the slightest degree its mysteries, is delegated to none. All attempts to lay bare this principle of vitality, or level the barriers that separate it from physical or chemical action, have utterly failed. We know no more of its essence now than was known a thousand years ago, and know no less than will be known a thousand years hence. To become masters of the mystery, we must enter the impenetrable veil within which the Infinite Intelligence of the universe presides,--who, we are told, "sendeth forth his spirit, and we are created, who taketh away our breath, we die and return to our dust." [[36]] We are just as much bewildered in respect to this vital principle in our classifications of the myriads of little creatures careering over the field of the microscope, as when we turn to the most marked formations of genera and species in geological distribution. The great trouble with Mr. Darwin's vinculum is, that its weakest links are precisely where the strongest should be found, and vice versa. With a candor rarely displayed by a writer who is spinning a theory, he admits this. The geological record is not what he would have it to be. Whole chapters are gone where they are most needed, and nature's lithography seems constantly at fault. Independent species are now and then springing up where derivatives should be looked for, while derivatives are everywhere disappearing in non-derivatives. Many of the middle Tertiary molusca, and a large proportion of the later Tertiary period, are specifically identical with the living species, of to-day. What has "natural selection" been doing for this family in the last million years or more? Manifestly nothing, and less than nothing, for some of the species have dropped out altogether.

These facts, and hundreds of others like them, are constantly obtruding themselves upon our attention to show, in harmony with the Bible Genesis, the immutability of species--the absolute fixity of types--rather than their variability, as claimed. If nature abhors anything more than a vacuum, it is manifestly any marked transition from fixed types, and she thunders her edicts against it in the non-fertility of all hybrids. The doctrine of variation lacks the all-essential element of continuity, and is oftener at war with the theory of the "selection of the fittest," than it is with the selection of the "unfit." The leap from Lepidosirens to Amphibians is no greater than the interval between any two species of animals or plants yet discovered, either fossil or living. The intervals are as numerous as the species themselves, and everywhere constitute great and sudden leaps, or such transitional changes as "natural selection" could not have effected independently of intervening forms--those that nowhere exist in nature, and never have existed, if we are to credit geologic and paleontologic records. There is everywhere similarity of structure, but not identity; and the nearer we approach to identity of structure the wider the divergence in similarity of characteristics. A bird may be taught to talk and sing snatches of music. But no monkey has ever been able to articulate human sounds, much less give them rhythmical utterance.

Take the case of the wild pigeon, a subject that especially delights Mr. Darwin. Most of the deviations are confined to the domesticated breeds, and none of these rank in strength, hardiness, capability of flight, or symmetry of structure, with the wild or typical bird. There are well-defined deviations, but no sensible improvements, except to the eye of the bird-fancier. The deviations are simply entailed weaknesses, or the very reverse of what should appear from the "selection of the fittest." The fact undeniably is, that these variations are almost wholly abnormal--mere exaggerated characteristics, induced in the first instance, perhaps, by high cultivation and close in-and-in breeding.

Turn these abnormal varieties loose, let them go back to the aboriginal stock, and these characteristics will rapidly disappear; that is, they will ultimately lose themselves or melt away in the original type. Mr. Darwin admits that the tendency will be to reversion, but he insists, manifestly without any positive proof therefor, that the greater tendency is to new centres of attraction, and not necessarily the primitive one. But this is mere assumption--sheer begging the question on his part,--since all the oscillations are incontestibly about the original or type centre.

The same may be said of the typical races of men, like the negro and wild Indian of our prairies. You may lift them out of their primitive condition--temporarily suspend, if you please so to put it, their primordial attraction,--but, left again to themselves, they will go back to the original type; that is, their offspring will again infest the jungles and roam their native hunting-grounds. The process here is the very reverse of the Darwinian theory. Reversion, as a rule, follows the degeneracy of types, instead of there being any favorable homogeneous result, springing from a new centre of attraction. The Indian makes a splendid savage, but a very poor white man. Think of Red Jacket taking the part of Mercutio in the play or enacting the more valiant role of Falstaff in King Henry the Fourth. An infusion of white blood does not help the matter, but rather makes it worse. Generally, the meanest Indian on the continent is your half-breed, and among the negroes there is no term so expressive of the contempt of that race, as that applied by them to a mulatto. The present condition of Mexico affords a striking exemplification of this law of reversion. The inheritable characteristics or variations, produced from an infusion of Spanish blood, are rapidly disappearing--the native blood whipping out the European. The potency is in the inferior blood, simply because it is the predominating one. The result has been no homogeneous new race, but a reversion, now manifestly in progress, to the type centre or aboriginal stock. And the curse pronounced by Ezekiel upon mongrel tribes--"woe unto the mingled peoples" may have a significance in this connection worth considering; but it manifestly falls outside the scope of our present inquiry.

In considering the embryological structure of man, and the homologies he therein presents to the lower animals, Mr. Darwin thus conclusively (in his judgment) remarks: "We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World."

But Mr. Darwin's pronominal "we," in this connection, admits of qualification. He can hardly speak for all the scientific world at once. The philosophical maxim of Sir Isaac Newton--hypotheses non fingo--I build no hypotheses, make no suppositions, but adhere to facts--has a few followers still left. But what are Mr. Darwin's facts? Has he yet discovered the caudal man, except as the ever-fertile Mr. Stanley heard of one in Africa? And where is his monkey that first lost the prehensile power to climb trees? For bear in mind that it was the loss of this prehensile power that resulted in the caudal atrophy of our monkey progenitors, who became men simply because they were tailless monkeys! They had lost their power to climb trees, and accordingly had no longer any use for tails to let themselves down from the limbs. A "beneficent necessity" therefore, according to Mr. Emerson, dropped the tail as something decidedly "unfit." For the simplest tyro in Darwinian philosophy will see that the loss of the Catarrhine monkey's tail, if it ever occurred, could not have resulted from the "selection of the fittest." The deeper Emersonian philosophy of the "rejection of the unfit," affords the only solution of the difficulty, and then only on the assumption that the tail is an unfit appendage for the monkey.

With the loss of his tail, in the light of this new genesis, the monkey necessarily ceased to be arboreal in his habits. He could no longer subsist on the fruits and nuts of trees, or take refuge therein from his enemies. He had to go to work and make weapons to defend himself--to construct tools--make and set traps, live on his wits, and not on his prehensile power to climb trees. He soon discovered, of course, that the longest pole knocked the persimmon. This was his first intellectual stride towards the future Edison. From the simplest sort of Grahamitic philosopher he passed into the robust, beef-eating Englishman. But this was not all. As an arboreal gymnast, he was manifestly on his way to more masterly feats of agility than ever,--those dependent, not on muscular function, but on the nervous action of the brain and spinal marrow. Necessity became with him the "mother of invention," and how admirably he improved under this maternal instructor we are left to infer from the paramount conclusion of Mr. Darwin, that the demoralized monkey became the incipient man!

But this conclusively accounts for only one of the many anatomical differences between man and his caudal progenitor. For why should the loss of his tail have resulted in the changed chemistry of the monkey's brain? or in the increased involutions of his brain even? The specific differences between the present and ancestral types are very numerous and demand separate classification. Their variability runs through every bone, muscle, tissue, fibre, nerve. Their blood corpuscles are not the same. The chemistry of their bones essentially differs. The nerves are differently bundled and differently strung. In intonations of voice--symmetry of arms, legs, chest--hairlessness of body, and aquatic and land habits, the frog is a much nearer approach to man than the monkey, as all caricaturists, delineating aldermanic proportions, will agree. And Mr. Darwin might have immortalized himself by deriving the builders of the ancient pile-habitations and other primitive water-rats and croakers of the Swiss lakes, from this tailless batrachian. For everybody knows, or thinks he knows, how the frog lost his tail. If he didn't wag it off, he certainly absorbed its waggishness as a distinguishing characteristic of the "coming man"--the future Artemas Wards and Mark Twains of the race. This ancestral origin will also account for the otherwise unaccountable proclivity of all human juveniles to play at the game of leap-frog! Besides, it would have relieved Mr. Darwin from one of the greatest perplexities he has had to encounter. As he derives man from a hairy quadruped, the absence of hair on the human body, is a phenomenal fact that gives him great trouble. He agrees that it does not result from "natural selection," as he says "the loss of hair is an inconvenience and probably an injury to man." Nor does he suppose it to result from what he calls "correlated development." He is more puzzled over this problem of divestiture than any other, and finds the solution of it only in "sexual selection." That is, he assumes that among our semi-human progenitors, far back in the Tertiary or some other period, some female monkeys were less hirsute than others, and that they naturally preferred males possessing similar characteristics. These divergencies were thus commenced, and, by continuous "sexual selection," the infirmity (for such he regards the loss of hair) was propagated until the race was almost entirely denuded or bereft of this covering. In the same way he accounts for nearly all the differentiations of the race, among the various tribes now or formerly inhabiting the earth. All have sprung from the same semi-human progenitors--apes that lost their capacity to subsist as apes, and hence found it necessary to subsist as men!

The law of degeneracy has, therefore, had quite as much to do with human origins as that of progressive development. In fact, it is the paramount law from a Darwinian stand-point. For the loss of hair and of the prehensile power to climb trees are both conceded by Mr. Darwin to be serious defects and drawbacks in the ape family.