IIMR. WELLS AS BIOLOGIST

I comenow to what is the pith of Mr. Wells’s whole pamphlet. It is evidently the matter upon which he is most pained; it is also the matter on which he has most woefully exposed his lack of modern reading.

Through page after page—thirteen whole pages—he slangs and bangs away at me—because I have exposed his ignorance of modern work upon Darwinism.

There are in this furious attack two quite distinct points: first, his accusation that I pose as being a man having special learning, with European reputation in such affairs (very silly nonsense!); secondly, his treatment of the arguments which I have put before my readers against the old and exploded theory of Darwinian Natural Selection, upon which theory, remember, all these popular materialists still desperately rely in their denial of a Creative God and of Design in the universe.

As to the first point: there can be no question of my having put on airs of special knowledge in any of these affairs. Not only have I not pretended to any special knowledge on geology or pre-history, or biology: I have not even pretended to special knowledge on matters where I have a good deal of reading in modern and mediæval history. When I took up the atheist challenge presented by Mr. Wells’s book, I did so as a man of quite ordinary education, because it was amply evident on a first summary reading of it that the writer was not a man of even average education. I pretend to no more than that working acquaintance with contemporary thought which is common to thousands of my kind, and I think it the more shame to Mr. Wells that with no expert training I can make hay of hispretensions. Any man of average education, reading and travel could have done the same.

Suppose somebody were to write a little popular manual on chemistry with the object of showing that there is no God, and were to say of the Atom that it had existed from all eternity, because it had no lesser parts, but was eternally simple and indivisible. The man of ordinary education would at once reply: “Have you never heard of the Electron?” He would be justified in putting it much more strongly, and in saying, “Is it conceivable that you are so hopelessly out of date that you have never heard of the Electron and of the modern theory of the Atom?”

This does not mean that the person asking this most legitimate and astonished question would be posing as an expert in chemistry; it would simply mean that in ordinary conversation with his fellows he was abreast of his time. Any of us whatsoever, even if he read no more than newspaper articles, would have a right to say, “My good fellow, you are out of court with your absurd old-fashioned simple Atom.”

Now suppose the person whom he had thus most justly criticised were to lose his temper and say, “You are making up all this about electrons out of your own head! You do not quote a single modern authority by name in favour of this new-fangled theory of yours about electrons! The reason you do not quote any name or authority is that you can’t! There are no such names!” Would he not have delivered himself into the hands of his opponent?

That is precisely what Mr. Wells has done. He has shown himself utterly ignorant of all modern work in his own department, and he must not cry out too loud at the consequences of his rashness.

Why on earth Mr. Wells challenged me to give names opposed to the old Darwinian position I cannot conceive. It was a tactical blunder, so enormous that I can make nothing of it, save on the supposition that he, being a sincere man, does honestly believe no modern destructive criticism of Natural Selection—let alone of Transformism—to be in existence.

So much for my pose of great learning. I pose to about as much learning in the matter as anyone among thousands of my own sort who by current reading keep abreast of the mere elements of modern thought.

Now let us turn to the main point.

So there has been no destructive criticism of the old Darwinian hypothesis? So there are no names to be quoted against the particular distinctively Darwinian invention of Natural Selection? Indeed!

Let us see.

There is a certain Professor Bateson, who has left on record the followingjudgment:—

“We” (biologists in general) “have come to the conviction that the principle of Natural Selection cannot have been the chief factor in determining species....”

And who is this Professor Bateson, Mr. Wells will ask (perhaps with some contempt)?

Well, he was the President of the British Association when it met in Melbourne in 1914, and the sentence I have just quoted dates from that year.

Now let us turn to something totally different. I give it, not in German, which I cannot read, but in what I believe to be an adequatetranslation:—

“Natural Selection never explains at all the specifications of the animal and vegetable forms that are actually found....”

And who is the unknown fellow I have got hold of here? Driesch: and his conclusion is much older than that which we have from Professor Bateson. Here, again, from the same insignificant little fellow, we have this—thirty whole yearsago:—

“For men of clear intellect Darwinism has long been dead....”

“Oh!” I can hear Mr. Wells saying, “but who is this Driesch?” Well, he stands among the greatestof the German biologists to all educated men. But Mr. Wells has never heard of him.

There is yet another German who put it more strongly still, for he actually gave a title to his book which is, being interpreted,The Death-bed of Darwinism. And who was he? He was only a person called Dennert.

Here Mr. Wells will, I am sure, protest and say, “Oh, this Dennert you tell me about is surely extreme.” I am rather inclined to agree. But that is not the point. He wanted modern authorities, and I am giving him a few. Mr. Wells had never heard of Dennert.

Let us turn toDwight:—

“We have now the remarkable spectacle that just when many scientific men are all agreed that there isno part(my italics) of the Darwinian system that is of any great influence, and that as a whole the theory is not only unproved, but impossible, the ignorant, half-educated masses have acquired the idea that it is to be accepted as a fundamental fact....”

Who is this fellow Dwight? cries Mr. Wells. Whoever heard of him? I do not know whether Mr. Wells has ever heard of him, but he wrote in the year 1918. And he happened to hold the position of Professor of Anatomy at Harvard University.

At it again! In the year 1919 there was published by a certain Professor Morgan (who, very rightly, is a great admirer of Darwin as the founder of popular modern interest inevolution):—

“Selection doesnot(my italics) bring about transgressive variation in a general population.”

Indeed, Professor Morgan’s whole book, and one might say his whole work, is a moderate but sufficient destruction of the old orthodox Darwinian stuff. Mr. Wells is now becoming restive. “Who’s this chap Morgan? I haven’t heard of him. He’s a nobody?” Well, I am no student. I am only a general reader—but I should imagine that Professor Morgan was somebody,for he is the Professor of Experimental Zoology in the University of Columbia.

Shall I go on among these authorities whom Mr. Wells assures us don’t exist? We have Le Dantec, with his whole crushing book of 1909. Le Dantec is only a Frenchman, it is true, but, after all, he was at the time the newly-appointed Professor of General Biology at the University of Paris giving his lectures at the Sorbonne.

I might go right back to Nägeli, of whom certainly Mr. Wells has heard, for his work dates from some years before 1893—the date when Mr. Wells seems to have stopped making notes in class. But perhaps Mr. Wells would like the actual words of that authority—which again I quote (from a translation, because I cannot readGerman):—

“Animals and plants would have developed much as they did even had no struggle for existence taken place....”

Would Mr. Wells like to hear Korchinsky? It will be news forhim:—

“Selection is in no way favourable to the origin of new forms.”

And again, from the sameauthority:—

“The struggle for existence, and the selection that goes with it, restricts the appearance of new forms, and is in no way favourable to the production of these forms. It is an inimical factor in evolution.”

Korchinsky may sound in Mr. Wells’s ears an outlandish name, but I do assure him the authority is not to be denied.

Or would he like Cope, as long ago as 1894? He at least, I believe (I am only quoting from the books of others), was pretty definite upon the impossibility of the rudimentary forms having survival values. Or,shall we have Delage—yet another Continental name, and a Professor in thesesubjects?—

“On the question of knowing whether Natural Selection can engender new specific forms, it seems clear to-day that it cannot.”

That is straightforward; that is not of yesterday; that is as old as 1903.

Do let me fire one more shot at Mr. Wells—it is such fun!

I take hotch-potch from a page printed a whole nineteen years ago, this further set of names out of a much larger number theregiven:—

“Von Baer, Hartmann, Packard, Jeckel, Haberlandt, Goette, von Sachs, Kassowitz, Eimer.”

I quote not my own list (for I am quite incompetent here), but the words of a first-class authority who draws up this list, including many other names, andends:—

“Perhaps these names mean little to the general reader” (Mr. Wells being here the general reader). “Let me translate them into the Professors of Zoology, of Botany, of Paleontology, and of Pathology, in the Universities of Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Strasbourg, Tubingen, Amsterdam, etc. etc.”

“And who writes thus?” Asks Mr. Wells (getting a little nervous)—why, only one of the principal and most serious critics in Biology of nineteen years ago, and with a chair in Stanford University.

I should have no difficulty in adding to the list. I have quoted here more or less haphazard and hastily from my very general and superficial reading. But surely when a man tells you that you have no authorities behind you, and that you are making things up out of your own head, even such a list as this must sound pretty startling to him. Mr. Wells had no idea of its existence. If he had he would not have questioned it.

I have no quarrel with ignorance of this kind, as such.There is no particular reason why any general writer, myself or Mr. Wells, or Jones or Brown or Robinson, should have even this amount of knowledge on a special department of modern science. But then, if he hasn’t, he shouldn’t write about it; still less should he say that the authorities alluded to don’t exist—that their names cannot be quoted, because there are none, and that the arguments advanced by me were made up by an ignorant man who had no expert work from which to quote.

Now that last sentence leads me to yet another thrust of the battering ram which I am bringing against poor Mr. Wells. He says that the arguments I have advanced against Natural Selection are of my own imagining.

So the arguments I have put forward (only a few main arguments out of many) were made up out of my own head, and have no support from authority? I have no acquaintance with the names or general conclusions of any experts in these affairs? It would be, indeed, astonishing if I had acted thus, seeing that nothing was easier than for me to write to any friend engaged in biological study and get the amplest information. I did not do so, because there was no necessity to do so. That liberal education—which Mr. Wells derides—was sufficient.

Really, Mr. Wells here flatters me too much! He does not know that the arguments were not mine but the main arguments which have been set forward by a host of competent authorities, and which have proved so damaging that even the remaining defenders of Darwinism have had to modify their position.

Thus my first argument is the well-known one of accident being quite unable to explain the co-ordination of variations necessary to adaptation.

The point is this, that not only one accidental advantageous variation which might give an animal a better chance of survival has to be considered, but the general adaptation ofallthe organism to new conditions; not only that, but the marvellous adaptation of thousands upon thousands of special relations within complex organisms such as are the higher animals. Left to chance, such co-ordination would be impossible. The chance of avast number of favourable variations all arriving togetherby accidentapproximates to zero. It is a mere matter of arithmetic.

That argument in Mr. Wells’s judgment is “burlesque,” “beautifully absurd,” and so forth. But the judgment is not passed on him by me (who make no pretence to anything but the most general reading on these affairs). It is passed by such an authority, for instance, as Wolff. It is clear that Mr. Wells has never heard of Wolff; yet it is, I believe, now nearly eighteen years since Wolff brought out this argument, and for all I know many another clear-headed man had preceded him; certainly a great many have followed.

I do not pretend to have read Wolff; I have not. But I have read the significant quotations from him, and even if I had not done so I should, as a man of general education, have known at least what his position was. Shall I quote a single (translated) sentence? (Mr. Wells with his wide command of languages may look it up in the original, called, I believe,Beitrage zur Kritik der Darwinischen Lehre):—

“One could possibly imagine a gradual development of the adaptation between one muscle-cell and one nerve-ending, through selection among an infinity of chance-made variations; but that such shall take place coincidently in time and character in hundreds or thousands of cases in one organism is inconceivable.”

My second argument is equally a commonplace with educated men, and in saying that I am the author of it Mr. Wells is again flattering me a great deal too much, and again betraying his own astonishing lack of acquaintance with the subject he professes to teach.

I pointed out, as hundreds have pointed out before me, that Darwinism obviously breaks down from the fact that it demands each step in evolution to be an advance in survival value over the last. There again it is a plain matter of arithmetic that the chance of this happening accidentally is impossible. Mr. Wells is soconfused in mind that he quotes as a bad example what I said about the reptile and the bird. He seems to think that the argument is upset by the fact that there are intermediate forms and that in these intermediate forms the fore legs lose their function before they become wings. If one could prove such a transformation—which one cannot, it is mere hypothesis—it would have nothing to do with Natural Selection; it would be simply an example of transformism. What I say (and what is obviously true in a myriad instances) is that between the foot of the land animal and the flapper of the whale, between the powerfully defensive and aggressive great ape and the weak, more intelligent man, there must be stages (if the transition ever took place) where the organism was at a positive disadvantage, and that consideration blows Darwinian Natural Selection to pieces.

When Korchinsky calls selection through the struggle for existence a factor inimical to evolution, he is saying exactly that; and, I repeat, hosts of men great and small, of high authority like these Professors or of no authority like myself, have been repeating that obvious bit of common sense for something like a lifetime, though it would seem that for some extraordinary reason Mr. Wells has never heard of it.

He makes the same sort of mistake about my third argument, which was that rare variations would, under the action of pure chance, necessarily be soon reabsorbed in the mass, and disappear. He thinks I invented this argument in 1926.

Great Heavens! It is perhaps the most widely known of all Nägeli’s famous seven objections to Natural Selection which were formulated before Mr. Wells left off reading on these subjects. He ought to have been acquainted with them even in the elementary class work of his youth, however little he might later read of more modern work.

Has Mr. Wells never heard that this was the very argument which compelled the first serious modification of the Darwinian theory, and began its breakdown? I suppose not—Any more than he has heard that whathe foolishly calls “my” first argument seriously shook Weissmann’s position—that most formidable of the Darwinian remnant—and that as long ago as 1896 Weissmann did, if I am not mistaken, in the preface to his book virtually admit that it could not be got over.

And so on. I could write a whole book upon that rather dreary and negative subject, the abysmal lack of acquaintance Mr. Wells shows with the thought of his time. I could expose him here in the matter of Couenot, or of Vialleton’s book, as I exposed him in theManchester Guardian, or print in detail quotations from Carazzi, which I leave for another occasion.

But I think I have said enough to expose Mr. Wells’s pretence of reading in modern biology.

The bubble is pricked and has burst.

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