Darwiniana : Essays — Volume 02Huxley, Thomas Henry
Science
Darwiniana : Essays — Volume 02
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882; Evolution (Biology)
Finally, with respect to the development of the moral sense out of the
simple feelings of pleasure and pain, liking and disliking, with which the
lower animals are provided, I can find nothing in Mr. Wallace's reasonings
which has not already been met by Mr. Mill, Mr. Spencer, or Mr. Darwin.
I do not propose to follow the Quarterly Reviewer and Mr. Mivart through
the long string of objections in matters of detail which they bring against
Mr. Darwin's views. Every one who has considered the matter carefully will
be able to ferret out as many more "difficulties"; but he will also, I
believe, fail as completely as they appear to me to have done, in bringing
forward any fact which is really contradictory of Mr. Darwin's views.
Occasionally, too, their objections and criticisms are based upon errors of
their own. As, for example, when Mr. Mivart and the Quarterly Reviewer
insist upon the resemblances between the eyes of _Cephalopoda_ and
_Vertebrata_, quite forgetting that there are striking and altogether
fundamental differences between them; or when the Quarterly Reviewer
corrects Mr. Darwin for saying that the gibbons, "without having been
taught, can walk or run upright with tolerable quickness, though they move
awkwardly, and much less securely than man." The Quarterly Reviewer says,
"This is a little misleading, inasmuch as it is not stated that this
upright progression is effected by placing the enormously long arms behind
the head, or holding them out backwards as a balance in progression."
Now, before carping at a small statement like this, the Quarterly Reviewer
should have made sure that he was quite right. But he happens to be quite
wrong. I suspect he got his notion of the manner in which a gibbon walks
from a citation in "Man's Place in Nature." But at that time I had not seen
a gibbon walk. Since then I have, and I can testify that nothing can be
more precise than Mr. Darwin's statement. The gibbon I saw walked without
either putting his arms behind his head or holding them out backwards. All
he did was to touch the ground with the outstretched fingers of his long
arms now and then, just as one sees a man who carries a stick, but does not
need one, touch the ground with it as he walks along.
Again, a large number of the objections brought forward by Mr. Mivart and
the Quarterly Reviewer apply to evolution in general, quite as much as to
the particular form of that doctrine advocated by Mr. Darwin; or, to their
notions of Mr. Darwin's views and not to what they really are. An excellent
example of this class of difficulties is to be found in Mr. Mivart's
chapter on "Independent Similarities of Structure." Mr. Mivart says that
these cannot be explained by an "absolute and pure Darwinian," but "that an
innate power and evolutionary law, aided by the corrective action of
natural selection, should have furnished like needs with like aids, is not
at all improbable" (p. 82).
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