Birds and Nature Vol. 09 No. 5 [May 1901]: Illustrated by Color PhotographyVarious
History
Birds and Nature Vol. 09 No. 5 [May 1901]: Illustrated by Color Photography
Various
Birds -- Periodicals; Natural history -- Periodicals
“I need offer no argument for Evolution, since to doubt evolution is to
doubt science, and science is only another name for the truth.”
Professor Marsh meant, of course, not that evolution is to be taken “on
trust,” but that it has been so thoroughly proved that new arguments in
support of it are unnecessary.
Concerning Natural Selection, sometimes called Darwinism, the late
Professor Huxley said (quotation from Darwin’s “Life”): “I venture to
affirm that so far as all my knowledge goes, all the ingenuity and all
the learning of the hostile critics have not enabled them to adduce a
single fact of which it can be said this is irreconcilable with the
Darwinian theory.”
I occasionally hear the old argument that species are immutable—that a
species is something which never changes. It seems a little late in the
day to revive this contention, but it is necessary to be prepared with a
reply. The critics of Darwin’s theory of “the Origin of Species by
Natural Selection” have always refused to give a tangible definition of
the word “species,” and, as a result, the real difficulty turns upon
that point. What is a species? Linnaeus said: “There are as many species
as an infinite Being created at the beginning,” a statement which is a
confession of faith, and not a scientific definition. We must remember,
of course, that Linnaeus died as long ago as 1778. The truth is that all
the various tests for species have proved faulty, that of the fertility
of hybrids having little more value than many of the other so-called
“tests.” In classification, the word “species” means the lowest
subdivision to which a name is usually applied, and to aid the
zoologist’s or botanist’s memory, some system of classification is, I
need not say, an absolute necessity.
According to the view of the anti-evolutionists, most of whom are not
scientific men, descendants of a common ancestor must belong to the same
species. Nevertheless, the late Mr. Romanes has shown that the rabbits
of Porto Santo, an island in the Atlantic, about twenty-five miles from
Madeira, descended from the European stock of nearly 500 years ago, will
no longer breed with their continental cousins.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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