Evolution: An Investigation and a Critique

by Theodore Graebner

The electric battery in certain fishes is so palpable a case of design that Charles Darwin admitted his inability to account for it by Natural Selection. The electric ray, or torpedo, for instance, has been provided with a battery which, while it closely resembles, yet in the beauty and compactness of its structure, it greatly exceeds the batteries by which man has now learned to make the laws of electricity subservient to his will. In this battery there are no less than 940 hexagonal columns, like those of a bee's comb, and each of these is subdivided by a series of horizontal plates, which appear to be analogous to the plates of the batteries used in automobiles. The whole is supplied with an enormous amount of nervous matter, four great branches of which are as large as the animal's spinal cord, and these spread out in a multitude of thread-like filaments round the prismatic columns, and finally pass into all the cells. "A complete knowledge of all the mysteries which have been gradually unfolded from the days of Galvani to those of Faraday, and of many others which are still inscrutable to us, is exhibited in this structure." Well may Mr. Darwin say, "It is impossible to conceive by what steps these wondrous organs have been produced. We see the purpose—that a special apparatus should be prepared; but we have not the remotest notion of the means employed. Yet we can see so much as this, that here again, other laws, belonging altogether to another department of nature—laws of organic growth—are made subservient to a very definite and very peculiar purpose.' [tr. note: sic on punctuation]

"The new-born kangaroo," says Professor Owen, "is an inch in length, naked, blind, with very rudimental limbs and tail; in one which I examined the morning after the birth, I could discern no act of sucking; it hung, like a germ, from the end of the long nipple, and seemed unable to draw sustenance therefrom by its own efforts. The mother accordingly is provided with a peculiar adaptation of a muscle (cremaster) to the mammary gland, by which she can inject the milk from the nipple into the mouth of the pendulous embryo. Were the larynx of the creature like that of the parent, the milk might, probably would, enter the windpipe and cause suffocation: but the larynx is cone-shaped, with the opening at the apex, which projects, as in the whaletribe, into the back aperture of the nostrils, where it is closely embraced by the muscles of the 'soft palate.' The air-passage is thus completely separated from the fauces (mouth), and the injected milk passes in a divided stream, on either side the base of the larynx, into the oesophagus. These correlated modifications of maternal and foetal structures, designed with especial reference to the peculiar conditions of both mother and off-spring, afford, as it seems to me, irrefragable evidence of creative forsight. The parts of this apparatus cannot have produced one another; one part is in the mother, another part in the young one; without their harmony they could not be effective; but nothing except design can operate to make them harmonious. They are intended to work together; and we cannot resist the conviction of this intention when the facts first come before us."

We cannot stop to pass in review the structural marvels of the human eye and ear, of the digestive organs, and circulatory system of animals, of adaptations of fishes to the watery element. But we must mention an outstanding feature of all animal life, the evident likeness of plan upon which the entire kingdom of sentient life is constructed. From amoeba and other infusorial animals of simplest structure, through coral and oyster, bird, reptile, to mammals, there is an evident gradation, many structures being represented in entire great groups of living beings, such as the air-breathing lung. Here is a grand plan of animal life, which permits us to classify all living things into a system. There are classes and subclasses, orders or families, suborders, tribes, sub-tribes, genera, species, and varieties, just as in the world of plants and even, according to their atomic weight, among the elements. We see in all this, Creative Design. The evolutionist believes that he can percive [tr. note: sic] stages of progress. Similarity of plan is interpreted as proof that there is a common origin. Are we to admit, in the face of all that has been said about the fixity of species (to mention only this), the reasonableness of such an assumption? Does orderliness and plan argue for development? The steam-engine is a machine of remarkable structure. It has had, in one sense of the term, a wonderful "evolution." It is based on certain principles, the foundation one of which is the expansibility of steam, and its ability, when confined in a cylinder, to give motion to a piston. The steam-engine was first used for pumping, then for turning machinery, then for propelling boats, and now its crowning department is seen in the locomotive. There is a plan, a likeness, a similarity, which runs through all steam-engines, whether they be found in the mine, in the mill, beneath the deck of the steamship, or on the railroad track. But the locomotive is not formed from the mine engine; it is made new, and is a distinct type. And yet, the same principles are seen in both. Even so it is with the genera of animals. The whale and the elephant both have backbones, jointed limbs, warm blood, and a hundred homologous organs. They are both mammals, both are sagacious, and are gifted with acute senses. But otherwise they are unlike as the monster locomotive that pulls the heavy train over the Sierras, and the compound engines of the Vaterland. Similarity of structures argues powerfully for unity of plan, but by no means proves identity of origin.

The evidence of design in nature conflicts with the idea that all things in the organic domain have come to be what they are by chance. But it agrees perfectly with the Christian view of animal nature. What is that? It is that God created the different classes of existences in the strict sense; that is, that he created them separate classes and species, each with its own peculiarities and habits, while, at the same time, they rise one above the other in general and steady order, with certain general organs and functions, which run through nearly all except the lowest classes, each higher class having also some distinct and additional peculiarities not found in those below it. In other words, to the Christian the steadily ascending scale in the work of creation is only the unfolding or development of the great plan of creation that was in the mind of God. He believes that God did not create one or more simple cells or germs, and cause all higher forms to be evolved from them, interfering only once or twice (when the backbone appeared, the nourishing breast, the mind of man, etc.), but that he, in the execution of his plan, created successively as distinct orders and species those things and beings which now exist as distinct orders and species, and many of which have become extinct. This is the Story of Creation as given in Genesis: Each plant, each animal, created in its own place in the scale of living thing, but each created as a species,—"after their kind," the phrase repeated after each creative act of the third, fifth, and sixth day, except with reference to man, who was not created as a "species" but after the image of God.

But the evidences of design are yet of a higher nature than we have so far considered. There is not only Creative Intelligence at work in the pollen of flowers, the breathing of sponges, and the eagle's orb of vision; Mind dominates the universe as a whole. Everywhere there is law and periodic, rhythmical motion. The Lord, speaking to Job, refers to the "measures" of the earth, the "lines" which He has stretched upon it. He asks, concerning the heavenly bodies: "Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? Or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?" And Job answers: "I know that Thou canst do everything."

And so there is a Reign of Law in the dew on the grass (Job 38, 28), and in the revolutions of the heavenly bodies. The Universe is ruled by Mind.

Professor Koelliker (Leipsic) says in his work "Ueber die Darwinsche Schoepfungstheorie" (1904): "The development theory of Darwin is not needed to enable us to understand the regular harmonious progress of the complete series of organic forms from the simpler to the more perfect. The existence of general laws of nature explains this harmony, even if we assume that all beings have arisen separately and independent of one another. Darwin forgets that inorganic nature, in which there can be no thought of a genetic connection of forms," that one form of crystal, for instance, arose out of another, "exhibits the same regular plan, as the organic world (of plants and animals), and that, to cite only one example, there is as much a natural system of minerals as of plants and animals." We can go a step farther and say that there is system and orderly design even in the position and movements of the stars,—which certainly have not been evolved one from the other.

More marvellous still, we are permitted to believe that there is an identity of plan connecting the arrangement of atoms in a molecule and the position of the stars and planets. Dr. Charles Young, Professor of Astronomy in Princeton College, says in his larger text-book upon his special theme that "our planetary system (the sun and planets) is not a mere accidental aggregation of bodies," that "there are a multitude of relations actually observed which are wholly independent of gravitation." In other words, in the position and motions of the planets there are evidences of design which cannot be accounted for by natural law. We shall point out an instance of such arrangement,—the progressive distance of the planets from the sun, as first discovered by Titius of Wittenberg, and later (in 1772) brought to the attention of the scientific world, by Johann Bode, the celebrated German astronomer. It is exhibited by writing a line of nine 4's and then placing regularly increasing numbers under the several 4's, beginning with the second. Thus 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, 96, 192, and 384, each increased by 4, will give the resultant series, 4, 7, 10, 16, 28, 52, 100, 196, 388. These numbers divided by 10 are approximately the true distance of the planets from the sun in terms of the radius of the earth's orbit, with the exception of Neptune. Hence there is, in the arrangmeent of the planets, as orderly a system as we have noted with reference to the leaves on a plant. Any rational man on earth, finding an orderly system of materials arranged in such relation by such means, would instantly conclude that it must be due to intelligence and not to mere chance.

Now, it is a remarkable fact that in the so-called Periodic Law of the elements constituting matter the same relation is observed. Of the eighty elements, no two now known have exactly the same capacity to resist heat, and no two atoms of the same elements have the same weight as compared with an atom of hydrogen. But these differences in resistance to heat and in weight, are not haphazard, but are so regularly progressive that they can be arranged in a series of regularly progressive increasing intervals. Most marvellous of all, however, when these differences in specific gravity are examined, we find that they bear a close resemblance to the arrangement of the planets in progressive distances from the sun. "There appears to be one law for atoms and for worlds."

Again we ask, when there is such orderly arrangement and plan throughout nature, should the orderly plan of plant and animal life be regarded as a proof of evolution? Certainly, atoms have not evolved from atoms, nor planets from planets.