The Creator, and what we may know of the method of creation

by W. H. Dallinger

But having reached this conclusion, we are at once compelled to ask, What is the origin of this unceasing continuity of variation in all living things? this power to become constantly adapted to change of environment, and for ever, in the fittest form, to survive? Is not this palpably a creative method? Is it not the emergence in time and history of the thought and will of the Creative Power in the beginning?—one of the processes that lay enfolded in the very purpose of the production of heaven and earth, and which as a prevised method only awaited ‘the fulness of time’ to come inevitably into play?

The earth, as is well known, and we have already pointed out, is constantly subject to minute, as well as to smaller cyclic and great secular, changes. Nothing but an ability to become adapted through all duration to current and recurrent changes, could have made a continuity of the living population of the globe possible. We have found the principal ‘law’ of those adaptive changes. But because we have learned the nature of the law or method, by which throughout all time, these changes have been brought about; and because the method appears self-acting like the balance wheel of a chronometer, must we argue that there is no design either in the method or its results? That will not satisfy the constant demands of reason. Finding the law according to which a projectile moves, must not be confounded with the cause of its motion.

‘Natural selection’ cannot originate anything. Variation does not explain itself. Why is it a property of all living things to vary indefinitely and in all directions? The Darwinian law has no existence without it; but that ‘law’ no more accounts for this tendency, than the law of falling bodies explains gravitation, or shows why it acts as it does.

It is easy to explain the law of the compensations of a chronometer balance, or a compensating clock pendulum; but that does not account for their existence.

The law of ‘inheritance,’ the likeness of progeny to parents, is, like the law of variation, universal. But why is it so? If it were not so, there could be no survival of the fittest. Yet it is no more explained by the discovery of that law, than the nature of that which thinks, is explained by a discovery of the laws of thought.

Selection implies alternatives to select from. The splendid organic mechanism of all the animals of the earth, with their perfect relations to their sphere, could as a whole, only have been brought about by means that started for, and led to, that goal. ‘The law by which structures originate is one thing; those by which they are restricted, directed, or destroyed is another.’[34]

Then, because the horse becomes specialized and adapted to its circumstances in a remarkable manner, leaving evidence in the rocks of long severed but successive epochs, of the very manner in which it was created as we know it; and because we have proof that this method is practically self-acting, shall we stultify reason by assuming that in its self-action there is no design? that as a great rhythmic law it had no origin? that, because to our powers of observation it is automatic, it explains its own existence? or that it strips the mind, by this very automatism, of any necessity for, or right of, having its origin explained? None of these assumptions are congruous; they surely violate the fundamental principles of thought.

We may be enabled no longer to say of any structure that it is a ‘final cause;’ our insight is not deep enough for that; but an equally powerful weapon in defence of theism takes its place: I designate it ‘CONCURRENT ADAPTATION;’ that is, fitness, for ever, throughout all time and all space; and fitness absolutely constant amidst all changes. Adaptation is universally concurrent with existence; and whether we have to account for it by sudden and unexplained action, or by the slow operation of laws, is a matter of no essential moment: it is there.

Nothing, for example, can be more certain, than the powerful influence exerted on the coloration and morphology of flowers, all over the earth, by the visits of insects. The insects assiduously visit flowers for food, or nectar; and by their visits the pollen of one flower is carried to the stigmatic surface of another: so effecting cross fertilization. The contrivances for making insect agency efficient, are so numerous, so palpable, and so exquisitely perfect as to entrance the observer. One flower has its nectar in a tube, to reach which the proboscis of the visiting insect must touch and split a delicate tissue and expose the moist adhesive surfaces of a couple of pollen masses, which adhere to and are carried away by the insect, in such a position that, in visiting another flower of the same species, it must deposit the pollen where alone it can do its fertilizing work.

Another flower is so contrived, that to reach the nectar, the visiting insect must touch a sensitive surface causing the rupture of a tissue, which confines a pollen mass; but, on the rupture of the tissue, this flies out like an arrow at the unbidden guest; and an adhesive end sticks to the insect, which is startled away; but, visiting another flower of a like kind, deposits, in the right place, the fertilizing pollen it unconsciously carries.