A companion to Mr. Wells's "Outline of history"Belloc, Hilaire
History
A companion to Mr. Wells's "Outline of history"
Belloc, Hilaire
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George), 1866-1946. Outline of history
2. _The Second Argument from Evidence:_
_Geological record is entirely in favour of Fixed Types._
The geological record also shows us nothing but Fixed Types. Each _may_
have come by a transition more or less rapid out of some other—but at
any rate fixed they are, and the longer the time demanded by the modern
geologist for his periods, the longer the Fixed Type can be proved to
exist. Some few survive to-day from the very early days of life on this
earth. It was hoped, when the theory of Natural Selection was first
broached, that evidence would appear for continuous change. None has so
appeared. On the contrary, the more fossil evidence we acquire the more
definitely does it appear that the Fixed Type is the normal—indeed the
only—recorded thing. Of connected transitional changes (perhaps because
they were too rapid to affect the fragmentary record of the rocks)
_none_ has been discovered. There are plenty of intermediary forms:
there is not one connected series of changing forms passing one into the
other.
All this evidence is no argument against transition. But it is damning
evidence against the (a) very slow, (b) infinitesimally graduated, (c)
continuous and unceasing transition or flux which Darwinian Natural
Selection demands.
3. _The Third Argument from Evidence:_
_The geological record shows not a gradual unceasing development such as
Natural Selection demands, but sharp steps._
If Darwinian Natural Selection were the means by which simple ascended
to complex forms, this ascent would necessarily have been a regular,
very slow and uninterrupted process, continually at work.
The lines of ascent would have appeared in the geological record as so
many inclined planes. They appear, in point of fact, as so many
steps—each composed of very, very long flats separated, each from the
one below, by a clean gap or break.
This character in the geological record does not get weaker as we come
to know more and more of that record. On the contrary, it becomes
increasingly emphasized.
There is evidence suggesting development of one type from another, but
no evidence at all for the extremely gradual and continuous change of
one type into another. On the contrary, each step noted in the process
is a Fixed Type. What proportion the (presumably) rapid periods of
transition and change may have borne to the immensely long periods of
stable type, we cannot tell; but we do know that stable type is the
rule, and that the process of change from one type into another must,
compared with the long periods of fixity, have been the brief exception.
Yet, in the face of evidence so considerable and so widely known, the
talk of Natural Selection still survives in these popular manuals. As
Dwight (Professor of Anatomy at Harvard) very well put it fifteen years
ago, “Just at the time when the uneducated are prating about the triumph
of Darwinism it is fast losing caste among men of Science.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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