The further evolution of man : a study from observed phenomena

Preface

I WISH to record that the thoughts and ideas ex¬ pressed in this work owe their origin largely to the stimulation and encouragement received through association with the fine intellectual vigour and acumen of the minds of the Shakespeare Club of Melrose (where I practised for many years the profession of medicine) from the year of its origin in 1884-85 until I ceased active membership in 1912. It is not intended to convey the impression that all the members did or do agree with the general trend of this book, or with individual expressions of opinion contained in it. What I do wish to convey is that but for association with such minds it would never have been possible for me to produce this volume, and that if there is any merit in it I desire to express my grateful thanks to one and all of the members past and present. I desire to thank especially the Rev. John L. King, M.A., for a long time the able Secretary, for his views on good and evil,'’ punishment,” and “ im¬ prisonment.”

My indebtedness to Paulin is apparent throughout. His masterly attack on the Darwinian hypothesis

Preface

provided the basis of the argument. Chapters III and V may be said to be wholly his.^

W. HALL CALVERT, m.d.

“The Laurels,”

Melrose.

^ “No Struggle for Existence; No Natural Selection.” George Paulin. Edinburgh, T. T. Clark, 1908.

Contents

CHAPTER

I. Introduction ....

II. Darwinism .....

Chapter I Introduction

Being a disdple of iEsculapius, my thoughts have been constantly directed towards such matters as the evolutionary process in nature, the science of biology, the laws which regulate the relation¬ ship of the various species, and the origin and destiny of Man.

After much study and thought I have been forced to the conclusion that the Darwinian hypothesis, like many other creeds of science which have held the minds of men for generations, can remain an article of faith no longer, and must wane before the search¬ light of truth. There are many arguments and dis¬ coveries which have told against it, and which will be examined in detail ; but the most potent is the discovery by Paulin of the applicability of the law of the ‘‘ can¬ nibal habit in the male ” to all prolific species of carnivora and herbivora, and his complete exposure of the fallacy of the doctrine of Malthus, which Darwin homologated, and said “ applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdom.’'

If the former is true, there can be no “ survival of the fittest,” depending upon a “ struggle for exist¬ ence ” ; natural selection no longer operates as a law of nature ; and its inapplicability to the ** genus homo sapiens ” becomes evident. Moreover, the downfall of the Malthusian doctrine has shaken Darwinism to its foundations, and we are assured that its collapse is certain and cannot be long delayed.

Darwin attempts no explanation of how life origi¬ nated on the globe ; he does not boldly say, like Haeckel, that certain atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, under the influence of sunlight, combined fortuitously to form living protoplasm. As he could not account for it, he ought logically to have admitted a special creative act in order to explain the origin of life. Pasteur*s law of omne vivum ex vivo” holds the field. As Professor Bergson says:

chemical synthesis has never succeeded in recon¬ structing anything but the waste products of vital activity.” As living protoplasm has never been produced from its organic elements, Darwin was bound to admit that life could not exist without a special creative act. The more particularly do we realise this since Pasteur’s demonstration that life does not exist except from pre-existing life. It may be said that Darwin should not be asked to say how life originated. All he knew was that life began on the earth some time, and he had only to deal with living matter as he found it. But it ought to be remembered that, without demonstration of any kind, he assumes the evolution of man upwards through all the intermediate forms directly from the primeval protoplasmic unit or cell by the operation of a law which he calls natural selection. We hold that this law cannot be proved to rest on established and observed phenomena. Surely if he is allowed this much of a hypothesis, we are entitled to ask for some proof of the primeval origin in the form of this protoplasmic unit. He must satisfy us as to the beginning ; this he makes no attempt to do ; he assumes the Amoeba without any account of its origin, and then postulates the theory, that by means of the struggle for existence, and the survival of the fittest, natural selection produced a graduated scale of beings which, by a process of evolu¬ tion, gives us every variety of species from the onecelled protozoon up to the beauty of the world — the paragon of animals — the supreme and complicated

genus homo sapiens.

In regard to the latter we can look forward to a brighter outlook once we discard the dread influence of Darwin and Malthus upon his fate. The teaching of the former meant that existence for him must ever mean a struggle, constant and unvarying, wearing out his “ little life in toil and pain, until its “ fitful fever ” ends in death ; that of the latter, that only by means of war, pestilence, and famine, and all causes, whether of a moral or physical nature, which tend pre¬ maturely to weaken the human frame,” can the popu¬ lation be prevented from outrunning the means of subsistence. As he said, it would be difficult to name any check that did not come under some form of vice or misery.” If this were true, woe betide the fate of man. It could only increase his misery as the ages roll, and of necessity all hope of a brighter and happier future would have to be abandoned. Every bene¬ factor of the race, such as Lord Lister, ** the great Life-Saver,” as he has been so appropriately named, could only be considered a traitor to humanity. No doubt Malthus and his followers would so con¬ sider him, but to-day we take a different view. Lord Rosebery lately delivered an oration on the science and art of medicine, and among other things is reported to have said : Let them take the great names of history — the great conquerors, the Caesars, the Charlemagnes, the Napoleons, the Wellingtons — the names before whom they all bent the knee. They, willingly or not, unconsciously or not, had been banes and injuries to the generations in which they lived. Let them take one single name from their profession, that of Lister, and balance it against those great historical figures who had devoted their lives and energies to conquest and to bloodshed. Did any intelligent human being hesitate to which side of the balance the universal gratitude of mankind was due ?

In this connection it may not be inappropriate to recall the fact that Mr. Gladstone, in one of his inspired moments, looked forward with prophetic eye to the time when the medical man would be the prime factor in the State.

Believing that Darwinism, Malthusianism, and natural selection — so long the accepted creeds of science — have been weighed in the balances and found wanting, our next endeavour was to look for some hope of a brighter future for humanity, and this we found in the study of history, which revealed a spiritual evolu¬ tion, of slow advance certainly, and found its origin among men, with the advent of the altruism of the teachings of Jesus.

When we recall the words of Huxley, probably in himself the finest combination of scientific attain¬ ment, logical faculty, and honesty of purpose, the world has ever known : '*1 do not hesitate to express the opinion that if there is no hope of a large improve¬ ment of the condition of the greater part of the human family ; if it is true that the increase of knowledge, the winning of a great dominion over nature, which is its consequence, and the wealth which follows upon that dominion, are to make no difference in the extent and intensity of want with its concomitant physical and moral degradation among the masses of the people, I should hail the advent of some kindly comet, which would sweep the whole affair away, as a desirable consummation ; when we recall these words, and realise “ the sorrow and the sighing of the world,’" it is time to investigate the laws which are said to allow of no escape from the present misery and to test their infallibility or otherwise.

The question at once arises : “ Is a higher evolution possible to man ? If so, how is it to be obtained ? Is it actually in process now ? ” We all know that in our Western civilisation, notwithstanding the awfulness of the condition of the “ submerged tenth,” or, as we might more justly say, the submerged third, a social amelioration is going on, slow it is, to be sure, but it is there ; and the standard of living is rising almost imperceptibly. The movement in this direction is gain¬ ing strength, and, without fear of contradiction, we are entitled to say, will gain momentum of such force that ere long it will prove irresistible.

In regard to the evolution of man, we think history teaches that physically and intellectually he cannot be said to have reached a higher development than he had attained between two and three thousand years ago, during the period of the great Greek civilisation when Plato, Socrates, Sophocles, Phidias, and many other great names too numerous to mention, enriched that marvellous age. If that is so, is there any further form of evolution possible ? We are of opinion that Mr. Benjamin Kidd, in his book Social Evolution,” has proved that since the dawn of the Christian era a process of evolution has been going on which has moulded the history of our Western civilisation, and is now, more markedly than ever before, influencing the social welfare of humanity. In other words, a spiritual evolution is now operating, affecting not only the relationship of man to man, but directing the State in the devising of measures for the betterment of society, and this in spite of man's primeval instinct of self-preservation, which he has understood hitherto was the only operating force, the only motive which weighed in men’s minds, under the teaching of the laws of Darwin and Malthus. Since men’s minds have become permeated by the altruism of Christianity, the whole history of legislation, more particularly recently, in this our Western civilisation, has demonstrated the gradual negation of this prime motive.

We have then every reason to believe that this altruistic spirit — this spiritual evolution — will increase with overwhelming force as time goes on, and must, by means of a gradual amelioration of the condition of the people, more particularly the poor and needy, end in the “ ideal state,” where the aim and the reward of each will be to work for all to the best of his ability, and at the same time never forgetting the interests of the generations which are to follow. A most necessary part of this social betterment of the race will be the security for every member of the State of sufficient leisure in which he may cultivate to the highest his physical, intellectual, and spiritual development.

We hold that it must be evident that this ideal state ” is impossible without the negation of individual wealth or property, and inherent in this is the annihila¬ tion of the gold standard. That this is capable of accomplishment is evident from the self-abnegation of many men of great possessions,” in helping the cause of the poor, the wretched, the overwrought, and the overstrained with the weary bitterness of life ” ; and from the lives of self-sacrifice of the millions who, humble and nameless, the straight hard pathway trod,” and have died — following the example of the

Founder of our religion, that others might live. And we must not forget that the whole trend of modern legislation is in the direction of raising all round the standard of living of those least able to help them¬ selves.

No doubt it is essential to such a change in the body politic that men’s views of property and “ many possessions ” must undergo profound alteration. They must come to a realisation of the brevity of human life and the futility of purely material things :

I made me great works ; I builded me houses ; I planted me vineyards : . . . I gathered me also silver and gold. . . . Then I looked on all . . . and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit.”^ Nothing can be more conducive to the development of this aspect of truth than a study, deep and constant, of the thoughts of the great minds of the past, for it is these that impress us forcibly with the sublime wisdom of the scriptural teaching: “The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are unseen are eternal.” No doubt such a proposition as is here given forth will meet with much scorn and derision, but we must never forget that “ God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.”

Many may be inclined to believe that such ideas are inappropriate and inconsistent in a work pretending to proceed on scientific lines. I can only say that in this volume I have never consciously departed from what I believe to be the scientific method in the con¬ sideration of the observed phenomena of nature, and I only ask to be judged without prejudice and in a spirit of toleration.

In conclusion, I wish to state that the aim of this volume is to prove that the social amelioration of mankind is a necessity of the spiritual evolution in

^ Ecclesiastes ii. 4, 8, ii.

B process in our Western civilisation, and that from a consideration of scientific data in regard to the laws which regulate the universe and the world of living matter, and more particularly the history of mankind, we are justified in believing, or rather compelled to the belief, that the plan of the universe and the graduated scale of living organisms upon the earth is the result of design on the part of an eternal, all-wise, in¬ telligent, omnipotent, directing Power, “ who maketh for righteousness/’^ And further, we are forced to adopt the logical outcome of this position — the teleo¬ logical view of the universe, which means an evolu¬ tionary plan pointing to the final goal so beautifully expressed in the noble lines of the late Laureate :

“ That God, which ever lives and moves.

One God, one law, one element.

And one — far-off divine event.

To which the whole creation moves.”

1 Matthew Arnold, “ Literature and Dogma.”

Chapter II Darwinism*

Darwin stated that, in nature, individual variations were constantly being produced ; some of these were successful or permanent ; others not so, and evanescent ; some injurious, and there¬ fore also transitory. He called this process “ natural selection ” ; it is a necessary complement of the “ survival of the fittest.’' The process, to put it briefly, is this : In nature the struggle causes the weak to die and the strong to live in virtue of greater strength, or cunning, or greater power of flight whether on land, water, or air. Each species acquires some attribute which enables it to overcome another and thus secure the food by which it lives ; the constant struggle forces nature to make special efforts to endow its various forms with attributes which will make them more certain of survival. The forms acquiring these attri¬ butes unite and perpetuate themselves — the others are slain or starved and disappear. Natural selection by means of the struggle for existence brings about the “ survival of the fittest,” and as a result we have the evolutionary process in nature.

It cannot be admitted that Darwin has any right to claim the evolutionary process as his own. It had been anticipated by other men of science, notably by Lamarck, but until the publication of the “ Origin of Species ” it had never seized the public mind. His theory and processes were accepted almost unani-

* The Editor of the “Westminster Review” has kindly given his consent to the incorporation in this work of the article on “ Darwinism” published in his Journal in April, 1911.

mously by the scientific men of his day. There is no doubt he was a man of the very greatest powers of observation, of wide culture, fine literary style, and of a high and noble character. These all combined to aid greatly the acceptance of his views.

In this country they have met with little opposition. The Church at first stood out, but unfortunately its ministers did not possess the scientific knowledge necessary to defend their position, and the result has been that the theory has been largely absorbed by the ecclesiastics. In Germany alone, so far as I know, have scientific men actually been bold enough to attack this established scientific creed. Professor von Hartman is reported to have said : ''In the first decade of the twentieth century it has become apparent that the days of Darwinism are numbered.” Amongst its latest opponents are such savants as Eimer, Gustav Wolf, De Vries, Hoocke, Von Wellstein, Reinicke, and many others. Professor von Fleischmann maintains that " the Darwinian theory of descent has not a single fact to confirm it in the realm of nature, that it is not the result of scientific research, but purely the product of the imagination.”

In this country I do not know of any men of science who do not agree with Darwin — at least there are none who have openly dissented. Some years ago I read an article by the Reverend Professor Henslow which was decided in its opposition. Among other things he wrote : '" The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection ' was published in 1859. Up to the present day it is an indisputable fact that not a single variety or species of any wild animal or plant has ever been proved to have had its origin by means of ‘ natural selection.' ” In 1908 a book was published in Edin¬ burgh entitled ''No Struggle for Existence ; No Natural Selection,” by George Paulin. I believe this to be the only strong onslaught on Darwinism which has been produced. Although Paulin is not by training a scientific man he has a strong logical faculty, and I am of opinion that his arguments are of such force as to destroy the basis on which the theory rests. He admits a “struggle for existence,’' but not in the Darwinian sense, and maintains that there is no such thing as every individual of every species fighting continually with its neighbour in order to secure sufficient food by which to maintain life ; and that nature has made special provision for the elimination of all excess of reproduction. Darwin supposed they were slain in internecine strife ; Paulin proves that no such state of things exists ; that, in fact, as far more are born than ever can or do survive, the process of elimination takes place long before the individual reaches maturity or can propagate his kind. He proves also that individual variations play no part in this process, and that nature does not make use of individual variations to originate new forms.

Darwin admits his ignorance of the method of elimi¬ nation of excess of reproduction. He writes : ‘'A struggle for existence follows from the high rate at which all organic beings tend to increase. Hence as more individuals are produced than can possibly sur¬ vive, there must in every case be a struggle for exist¬ ence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life.” Now, when we look around, do we find starvation working havoc among creatures unable to find food from being less fitted than their fellows to struggle for it ? Do we find the reign of tooth and claw everywhere prevailing, as it must if Darwin is right. Darwin left out of account that Nature might have some means of eliminating her superfluous numbers without suffering and without

I!

internecine strife. He supported his belief in the struggle for existence by bringing forward the fact that the various carnivora are very prolific, and that the means by which their numbers are kept within due bounds are so “ obscure ’’ that in no single instance have they come within the scope of man’s knowledge. Darwin admits his ignorance of the method, and formu¬ lates a hypothesis to get over the difficulty.

Before going further at present in the direction of showing how nature eliminates her excess, we may point out that Paulin altogether denies that there is such a thing as the “survival of the fittest ” ; that what we find is really the survival of the average, as all varia¬ tions tend to be destroyed by the potent influence of marriage.^ Man can by a process of selection originate new breeds, but he cannot make them permanent. He must be unremitting in his selection, otherwise the strong generic influence will be too much for him. Man by selection has produced many varieties of pigeon. In regard to this Darwin writes : “ With pigeons, however, we have another case, namely, the occasional appearance in all the breeds of slaty blue birds, with two black bars on the wing, white loins, and a bar at the end of the tail, with the outer feathers externally edged near their bases with white. As all these marks are characteristic of the native stock pigeon, we presume no one will doubt this is a case of reversion, and not of a new yet analogous variation appearing in the several breeds.” Now we think it will be agreed this is not a case of reversion at all ; the explanation is that the generic characters have over¬ come and replaced the individual variations, which have by man’s accumulation become the char¬ acteristics of a breed derived from a form still extant,

^ Marriage is here used in the scientific sense, meaning the union of the sexes.

and from which their derivation has been of very recent date. Individuals belonging to different breeds, such as the Tumbler, the Runt, the Carrier, the Bart, the Pouter, the Turbit, the Jacobin, the Trumpeter, the Laugher, and the Fantail, come into the world devoid of their proper characters as such, and differing in no respect from the wild wood-pigeon, their common ancestor. There is nothing so evanescent as these individual variations ; in a state of nature they are immediately destroyed by the potent influence of marriage. Let us take another instance : man has by careful selection been able to produce on the one hand the race-horse, on the other, the heavy and powerful draught-horse. If the process of selection is not most carefully guarded in either variety, their particular characteristics disappear very rapidly and nature at once brings back the average type. The same is true of the various classes into which man is artificially divided. Mr. Galton has pointed this out in regard to the heredity of genius. Remarkable sons succeed remarkable parents, and nephews of the first dis¬ tinguished man display as great, if not greater talents than himself. But of many cases adduced, in none is the inheritance carried beyond the fourth generation, and he also points out that the highest display of genius is found in the first or second genera¬ tion, after which decadence sets in.

Again, Darwin founded his theory largely upon the geological record, but out of his own mouth we think this particular argument may be confuted. He especially insists upon the minuteness of the develop¬ mental accretion which occurs when each new variety is produced, and upon the great number of these necessary to the formation of a new species and upon the long lapse of time required for each infinitesimal change or variation. The same process is gone through with every evolutional variety, until in the long result of time a form emerges so far modified from the original as to take rank as a new species. Thus a measureless gulf of time has been traversed before one species has succeeded to another, and numberless have been the intermediate varieties which have been extinguished. That no intermediate forms had ap¬ peared among the many distinct specific forms was a surprise to Darwin, and he could only account for their absence by showing the imperfection of the geological record. As these intermediate forms must have been infinitely more numerous than the perma¬ nent forms, we think it may be held that the absence of the intermediate is truly most remarkable and is alone sufficient to confute Darwin’s explanation of how the evolutionary process works.

In the geological strata a true fish is sometimes found in the midst of molluscs and crustaceans. The first fish that so appears is, in regard to its external form and internal structure, as perfectly developed as the later fish forms, having no correspondence with any antecedent type and preceded by no half-way form, prophetic of its emergence. Then we may ask how were mammals developed from fish forms ? How did the earliest mammalia come into being without father or mother, without having their appearance on the stage of organic life heralded by a series of forms in the making from the fish to the mammal ? It would be not less than miraculous that while finished forms were yielded to geological research in large and growing numbers, not a single series of intermediate forms, pointing to the origin of a perfect generic type, should emerge.

In this connection we may consider for a moment the Neanderthal skull — the most brutal of all known human skulls— found near Dusseldorf in the valley of the Rhine. This was held to be the veritable missing link between the higher apes and man. But Huxley, that most accurate and honest of scientists, declared it to be human, and Wright, an American, in “ Man and the Glacial Period,’’ declared it to be a skull which still has representatives among all nations, and as a matter of fact was a close reproduction of that of Bruce, the Scots king. As was said in an article in the

Scotsman ” of 22nd December, 1908, on this subject : “ This is, of course, very unpalatable news for us, and just like the impudence of these Americans.”

Recently there has been discovered another of these so-called links with our anthropoid ancestors at Chapelle-aux-Saints in France. But the oldest re¬ mains yet found cannot be said to be the precursor of man ; they are only man himself. Such is the opinion of all scientific men capable of judging, and as, accord¬ ing to Darwin, there must have been millions upon millions of intermediate forms bridging the abyss between the anthropoid and the “ genus homo sapiens,” are we not entitled to cry, “ Lo ! where are they ? ” And the only answer to our enquiry is.

No one knows.”

Professor Arthur Keith in the Hunterian lectures, delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons, in dealing with the evolution of man, says : At what point of geological history these two kinds of ‘ Man ’ had been evolved from a common stock there is as yet no evidence, but a good deal of light can be thrown on the problem by a study of the African anthropoids — the gorilla and the chimpanzee. Although these modern anthropoids did not stand in the way of human descent, there could be no question that their ancestral stock did, for the resemblance between man and the African anthropoids were so many and so close that they could only be explained by a common origin.”

Judging this statement from the purely scientific standpoint, one is warranted in describing it as most unwarrantable. It is one thing to say the skeleton of the anthropoids and man closely resemble one another and suggest to the mind the possibility that the one might have been evolved from the other, but to boldly postulate a common ancestor, without a single trans¬ mission form, where the variations from the one to the other must have been innumerable, and continued through long ages, shows an assurance which, with all due deference, we are entitled to consider proceeds more from a desire to bolster up a theory sadly lacking support from the observed phenomena of nature than from belief in the evidence. Further, we are entitled to state that observations of this kind eventually do no good in supporting prevailing creeds, and in the long run bring discredit upon the work of those whose aim is to extend the province and beneficence of science.

Dealing with this point, Huxley writes (“ Man’s Place in Nature ”) : The granting of the polygenetic premises does not in the slightest degree necessitate the polygenetic conclusion. Admit that the negroes, the Australians, the Negritos, and the Mongols are distinctive species or genera, and you may yet with perfect consistency be the strictest of monogenists and even believe in Adam and Eve as the primeval parents of all mankind,” and adds : “ it is to Mr. Darwin we owe this discovery.” This we can accept in so far as it admits that all races of mankind have probably come from one common stock. But we can get no * further back than the ancestral stock of “genus homo sapiens.” There is no geological evidence of transition forms, which must be demonstrated before we can accept the evolution of man from the anthropoids.