Heredity is only a name for certain vital phenomena. It it not a material entity; it has no weight, length, breadth nor thickness; no constructive force; no intellect, memory nor will-power; nor any power to generate force nor motion. Nor has it any power to assemble the atoms and cells; nor to group and arrange them in such a manner as to form the body, its organs and parts. Nor can “heredity” “breathe the breath of life” into the fertilized ovum nor create a soul for the embryo body.
“Heredity” does all its work by and through the fertilized ovum. It has identically the same properties and potentialities that this ovum has, no more nor less. Surely this ovum has no knowledge of the bodies of its parents, nor of their organs and parts; nor can it have any memory of a thing that it never knew; nor has it any inherent power to reproduce the bodies of its parents or either of them.
It is impossible to explain and account for this universal sameness of all human bodies without assuming that each of them was made by one and the same hand, namely: Almighty God. We cannot doubt that He directly and specially created every human being that ever lived on our planet.
Sec. 47. Proposition 14. Creator’s Supervision of the Development and Growth of the Embryo is Necessary to Produce the Human Body
The watchmaker makes one piece of a watch at a time; but every organ and part of the embryo body grows all the time. Thus the body and all its internal organs and parts; and both arms, hands, legs and feet are growing continuously until it is grown. If the growth of each organ and part of the body were not so regulated as to keep pace with every other organ and part, there would be no proper proportion among them. One arm and hand would be larger and longer than the other; one leg larger and longer than the other; the five segments in the femur would not meet and unite to form the complete bone. (Johnson’s Cyclopedia 7, p. 553.)
If there were no extraneous supervising architect to adjust and correlate each organ and part to every other, there would be no harmony of form, size, nor structure in the edifice. Surely, the atoms and cells in the right leg would have no knowledge of the form, size, nor structure of the left; and no organ, nor any part of the body, would have any power to adjust itself, automatically, to any other.
Sec. 48. Proposition 15. Each Human Body is Specially Endowed with Life
Neither the spermatozoön nor the ovum is a living creature, for neither of them has the power to take and assimilate food; nor to develop and grow, alone. But when they unite and fuse, this combination begins to live, it absorbs and assimilates food or nourishment, develops, divides and produces an infinite number of daughter-cells. The atoms in the fertilized ovum are identically the same that were in the spermatozoön and ovum before the fusion occurred. Perhaps these atoms form new chemical combinations. But we cannot believe that any possible combination of atoms could automatically take on the energies and phenomena of life. Any good chemist can make the same combination of atoms that is found in the fertilized ovum; but his combination would not absorb and assimilate food, it would not live, develop nor grow.