Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith / Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity

by Robert Patterson

The first great gap is the abyss between death and life. No human power can cross it. How could the chemical actions of dead matter infuse vitality into the first germ, or bud of a plant? For chemical actions are the antagonists of life, and constantly laboring to destroy the living organism, and finally they succeed. There is no process of evolution known to man which can carry evolution across this abyss. But till evolution crosses this gulf it can not even begin to operate. This first abyss is its grave.

But, supposing life begun in the plant first, as the theory requires, there is another gap between the life of the plant and that of the animal; for all animal life is sustained by another sort of food than that which feeds the vegetable. The vegetable feeds solely on chemical, unorganized matters; the animal solely on matter organized, on some plant, or on some other animal which feeds on plants. No animal can live on the food of plants. Here then is another gap which can not be bridged over, nor crossed; for the plant in process of conversion into an animal is in process of starvation, and when the process is about to be completed, it will end like the miser's horse, whose master diminished his oats Darwinianly, a single grain a day, until he had brought him to live on just one grain per day, when, alas! the victim of the experiment died. And so ends evolution experiment No. 2.

Then we come on a multitude of gaps, breaks in the uniformity of nature, called for by the evolutionists, between the species which will not breed together. There ought to be no such species on the theory; or, if there are, there ought to be a multitude of intervening varieties toning down the interval; for instance, between the horse and the cow, and between the sheep and the hog. All the ingenuity of all the evolutionists has been tasked in vain to produce any instance of the confusion of two such species, or of the production of a new true species by the intermixture of blood. But they might just as well try to convert iron into gold, or sulphur into carbon. In fact, evolution is the modern physiological form of the old chemical superstition, alchemy, substituting for the transmutation of metals the problem of the transmutation of animals.

It were endless to attempt to exhibit the impossibilities of crossing the gaps between the water-breathing fish and the air-breathing animal; between the flying-bird and the quadruped; between instinct and education; between brute selfishness and maternal affection; between the habits of the solitary and those of the gregarious, and those of the colonial insects and animals. No one of these is accounted for satisfactorily by the theory of evolution. But space forbids the attempt.

We only cite one other gulf which the theory can not cross: the gulf between the brute and the man. We should rather say the three gulfs; for between man's body and that of the brute there is a gap which Natural Selection can not cross; another between man's intellectual powers and those of brutes; and the third, and widest of all, between his conscience and their brutal appetites.

The gulf between man's body and that of any brute is marked along the whole line, from the solid basis of the feet, enabling him to stand erect, look upward and behold the stars; along the line of the stiff backbone, maintaining the dignified posture; to the hands, on which treatises have been written, displaying their wonderful superiority over those of all other creatures, and enabling man to do what no other animal has done, to fill the world with his handiworks, and alter the very face of nature with his ax, and spade, and steam engine. His tongue and organs of articulate speech alone, were there no other characteristic, proclaim him different from all other animals; none of those resembling him in outward form making the slightest attempts toward articulate language or being able to do so.

Man alone, of all the animals, possesses no natural covering, but is exposed naked to the inclemency of the elements. What little hair he possesses is chiefly on the breast, where it is of little use as a covering, and on the head, which in other animals is never better protected than the body. Mr. Darwin alleges that the first men were hairy, like apes. Well, how did they lose their hair? Not by Natural Selection, which only perpetuates profitable variations; but the loss of hair to an ape would be as unprofitable as the loss of your clothes to you. Not by Sexual Selection, for there is not the slightest evidence that nudity was ever popular in apedom. We have undoubted evidence, in the two bone needles found with the bones of the man of Mentone, that the primeval men were naked, and complete proof that Natural Selection could not effect such a disadvantageous change had they been hairy. Here, then, we have an inferiority to other animals in the animal structure, strangely at variance with the general superiority, and only to be accounted for as an educational provision.

But chiefly in the human head does the great outward distinction appear. The brain is the great instrument with which the mind works. You can gauge the strength of Ulysses by his bow, and the bulk of the giant by the staff of his spear, which was like a weaver's beam. The brain of the largest ape is about thirty two cubic inches. The brains of the wildest Australians are more than double that capacity. They measure from seventy-five inches to ninety. Europeans' brains measure from ninety to one hundred inches. There are instances of Esquimaux measuring over ninety. Even the brain of an idiot is double the size of that of the orang-otang. But how did man get this extraordinary development of brain, far beyond his necessities? For the cave man of Mentone, who hunted the bison, had as good a head as Bismarck. Natural Selection could not develop an ape's brain in advance of his necessities. But here we have a prophetic structure; man's head developed far in advance of his necessities. Here is a power at work superior to Natural Selection.

With such an instrument man has gone to work and supplied his deficiencies. Inferior to many animals in strength and speed, he has manufactured weapons, and subdued them all, asserting himself as the lord of creation, conquering even the mighty mastodon, and piercing the huge Caledonian whale with his reindeer harpoon. He has remedied his want of hair by the manufacture of clothing from the spoils of his victims. He has rendered himself independent of the weather by the shelter of his house. He has ceased to be dependent on the spontaneous fruits of the forest by the cultivation of the soil, and so has become a cosmopolite, confined to no province of creation. He has constructed ships, and provisioned them for long voyages, and visited, and colonized every coast of Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Australia. He has formed civilized societies with laws, government, and religion. He has leveled roads, navigated rivers, tunneled mountains, dug navigable canals, constructed steamboats, built railroads, invented electric telegraphs, and steam printing presses; and generally he has developed ideas of society, nationality, and of the universal brotherhood of man, not only not possible under the laws of Natural Selection, but in the most direct contrariety to those laws, which work only for the benefit of the individual. Never under those laws could any great community of animals be formed, never could they obtain the notion of representative government, never combine their powers for any national enterprise, nor could the most hairy and muscular-tailed of Mr. Darwin's ancestors secure subscribers sufficient to warrant him in starting even a county newspaper.

But it is in the moral sense which enables man to distinguish right from wrong, the conscience, which forbids and reproves the unbridled indulgence of the animal appetites, that we observe the grand distinction between man and the brute. There is nothing in the writings of evolutionists more pitiable than their attempts to degrade conscience into a mere gregarious instinct, an outcome of utility to the tribe, and to pleasurable sensations, resulting from the exercise of the social instincts. It would appear that these writers had so sophisticated their own minds that they have ceased to understand the fundamental, world-wide difference between right and gain, between duty and pleasure. "Do justice, though the heavens fall," could never be evolved by Natural Selection. That is the law of the sharpest tooth, and the longest claws, and the biggest bull; the Napoleonic theology, whose god is always on the side of the strongest battalions; the law of the perdition of the weak, and the survival of the strongest. In obedience to its laws the birds forsake their parents as soon as they can shift for themselves; the herd tramples down the wounded deer; the wolves devour their wounded brothers; the queen bee puts her sisters to death, and the neuters sacrifice all the males of the hive. In obedience to the laws of Natural Selection, the males fight for the most attractive females, and keep as many as they can, and form societies on that basis.