The Origin of Vertebrates

by Walter Holbrook Gaskell

At the same time, the geological record was looked upon as too imperfect to afford any real help; it was said, and is said, that the Cambrian and pre-Cambrian periods were so immense, and the animals discovered in the lower Silurian so highly organized, as to compel us to ascribe the origination of all the present-day groups to this immense early period, the animals of which have left no trace of their existence as fossils.

In consequence of, or at all events following upon, the supposed failure of embryology and of geology to solve the problem of the sequence of evolution of animal life, a new theory has arisen, which goes very near to the denial of evolution altogether. This is the theory of parallel development. It discards the old picture of a genealogical tree with main branches arising at different heights, these again branching and branching into smaller and smaller twigs, and substitutes instead the picture of the ribs of a fan, every rib running independently of every other, each group represented by a rib reaching its highest development on the circumference of the fan and coming nearer and nearer to a common point at the handle of the fan. This point of convergence, where all the groups ultimately meet, is so far back as to reach to the lowest living organisms.

This, in my opinion, unscientific and inconceivable suggestion has arisen largely in consequence of a conception which has become firmly fixed in the minds of very many writers on this subject—the conception that in the evolution of every group, the higher members of the group are the most specialized in the peculiarities of that group, and it is impossible to obtain a new group with different peculiarities from such specialized members. If, then, a higher group is to arise from a lower, it must arise from the generalized members of that lower group, in other words, from the lowest members or those nearly akin to the next lower group.

Similarly, the highest members of this latter group are too specialized, and again we must go to the more generalized members of the group. In this way each separate specialized group is put on one side, and so the conception of parallel development comes into being.

The evidence given in this book dealing with the origin of vertebrates strikes at the foundations of this belief, for it presents an image of the sequence of evolution of animal forms in orderly upward progress, caused by the struggle for existence among the members of the race dominant at the time, which brought about the origin of the next higher group not from the lowest members of the dominant group, but from some one of the higher members of that group.

The great factor in evolution has been throughout the growth of the central nervous system; from that group of animals which possessed the highest nervous system evolved up to that time the next higher group must have arisen.

In this way we can trace without a break, always following out the same law, the evolution of man from the mammal, the mammal from the reptile, the reptile from the amphibian, the amphibian from the fish, the fish from the arthropod, the arthropod from the annelid, and we may be hopeful that the same law will enable us to arrange in orderly sequence all the groups in the animal kingdom.

This very same law of the paramount importance of the development of the central nervous system for all upward progress will, I firmly believe, lead to the establishment of a new and more fruitful embryology, the leading feature of which will be, as suggested in the last chapter, not the attempt to derive from the blastula three germ-layers common to all animals, but rather two sets of organs—those which are governed by the nervous system and those which are not—and thus by means of the development of the central nervous system obtain from embryology surer indications of relationship than are given at present.

The great law of recapitulation, which asserts that the past history of the race is indicated more or less in the development of each individual, a law which of late years has fallen somewhat into disrepute, owing especially to the difficulty of interpreting the embryological history of the vertebrate, is triumphantly vindicated by the theory put forward in this book. Each separate vertebrate organ, one after the other, as shown in the last chapter, indicates in its development the manner in which it arose from the corresponding organ of the arthropod. There is no failure in the evidence of embryology, the failure is in the interpretation thereof.

So, too, my theory vindicates the geological method. There is no failure here; on the contrary, the record of the rocks proclaims with startling clearness not only the sequence of evolution in the vertebrate kingdom itself, but the origin of the vertebrate from the most highly-developed invertebrate race.