RUSTY BLACKBIRD OR GRACKLE.
(Scolecophagus carolinus).
⅔ Life-size.
FROM COL. CHI. ACAD. SCIENCES.
WHAT EVOLUTION MEANS.
If any person devoted his time to the correction of popular errors, there is no probability that he would have any spare moments for eating or sleeping. The serious aspect of the present condition of popular knowledge, however, is the apparent absence of desire upon the part of many young people to grasp the principles of natural science. I am not exaggerating when I say that there are plenty of fairly educated persons in every large city who deny that man is an animal, and who insist that a whale must be a fish, because it lives in the sea.
Everybody professes to be aware in a sort of unconscious way that the theory of Evolution was invented by Mr. Darwin, and patented by Mr. Spencer, the most important points in the doctrine being that all men are descended from monkeys which had lost their tails, that the fittest survived, and that there is a “missing link” between man and his ancestors.
These ideas have little foundation in fact. Darwin no more discovered Evolution than Edison discovered electricity; we are not descended from any existing ape, with or without a tail, and no competent person ever asserted that we were; and there are good reasons for saying that such palaeontological “links” as are missing are not of the greatest possible importance. In short, whatever is evolutionary in the popular mind, is a burlesque upon the evolutionist’s true opinions.
Charles Darwin was born in 1809, on the same day as Lincoln, but, long before Darwin’s time, evolution had become a recognized force in science. Kant, who lived from 1724 to 1804, and Laplace (1749-1827) had worked out the development of the sun and the planets from white-hot gas. Lyell (1797-1875) had worked out the evolution of the earth’s surface to its present condition; and Lamarck (1744-1829) had shown that there is evidence of the descent of all animals, as well as all plants, from a few ancestors by gradual modification. Again, Herbert Spencer, during Darwin’s lifetime, began to work out the growth of mind from the most simple beginnings to the highest development of human thought.
The philosophies of the ancients were all of them founded upon limited observation; they were merely speculative fancy-pictures evolved from the author’s own consciousness. Modern science, however, is of quite a different character. It has relegated certain fundamental propositions to a region called “the Unknowable” (this means at present unknowable), and it permits everybody to explain these propositions by means of any hypotheses which may occur to him. In other words, modern science does not deal with such phenomena as are at the present day outside the range of the human intellect; and I venture to warn the reader that speculation concerning matters upon which we have as yet no scientific data is waste of time. Modern science is founded upon investigation and observation, and the evidence is always weighed as carefully and as impartially as are the statements of witnesses in a law court.
One naturally asks: “What is Evolution?” “Continuous change according to certain fixed laws,” is a reply which may have some value, although it is quite insufficient. A technical definition, given by Mr. Spencer, is as follows:
“An integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent heterogeneity, to a definite, coherent homogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.” Anybody who will think about this definition will be able to appreciate its meaning, provided a good dictionary is at hand.
Evolution is not another word for Development, and Mr. Spencer has carefully distinguished the one from the other; but the details are too technical for notice in this paper. Evolution may be regarded as “a general term for the history of the steps by which any living being has acquired the morphological and physiological characters which distinguish it.” Development is “the process of differentiation by which the primitively similar parts of a living body become more and more unlike one another.” Both definitions are Huxley’s.