5. “That certain fossil transitional forms are absent which might have been expected to be present.
6. “That some facts of geographical distribution supplement other difficulties.
7. “That the objection drawn from the physiological difference between ‘species’ and ‘races’ still exists unrefuted.”
Our readers will readily understand that, if species, or rather individual animals, were originated by natural law, and if that law be “natural selection,” the action of “natural selection” must be able to explain not only the production of the animal as a whole, but of its several organs, both when they have reached the point of maximum utility, and at all stages previous thereto.
Mr. Mivart shows that it does not accomplish this; that it does not account for “the incipient stages of useful structures, e. g. the heads of flatfishes, the baleen of whales, vertebrate limbs, the laryngeal structures of the new-born kangaroo, the pedicellariæ of echinoderms”; and thus he established his first charge on purely scientific grounds, as a scientist writing for scientists. The other charges are equally well sustained. It would, however, require the rewriting of Mr. Mivart’s book to follow him through all his facts and arguments, and we must beg again to refer the reader who would study the matter in detail, to the book itself.
Another series of objections brought forward by Mr. Mivart against the same theory is equally well sustained—objections that go to show that “it cannot be applied at least to the soul of man,” as Mr. Darwin has applied it.
Here, again, everyone will see that, if the human soul is not created by God, it, too, must have been gradually evolved from what, for lack of a more convenient term, though not without protest, we must call an animal soul, by the process of natural selection; and therefore there is nothing in man’s soul which was not in the ape’s—the same faculties, moral and intellectual, in kind, different only in degree. This question Mr. Mivart discusses in a separate chapter on “Evolution and Ethics.”
The result of the discussion he thus sums up:
1. “Natural selection could not have produced, from the sensations of pleasure and pain experienced in brutes, a higher degree of morality than was useful; therefore it could have produced any amount of ‘beneficial habits,’ but not an abhorrence of certain acts as impure and sinful.
2. “It could not have developed that high esteem for acts of care and tenderness to the aged and infirm which actually exists, but would rather have perpetuated certain low social conditions which obtain in some savage localities.