Evolution: An Investigation and a CritiqueGraebner, Theodore
Religion
Evolution: An Investigation and a Critique
Graebner, Theodore
Evolution; Religion and science
Concerning the modifications of structure and the instincts necessary to
produce the web of the spider, Fairhurst quotes the following from
Orton's _"Zoology."_ "Spiders are provided at the posterior end with two
or three pairs of appendages called spinnerets, which are homologous
(correspond structually) [tr. note: sic] with legs. The office of the
spinnerets is to reel out the silk from the silk-glands, the tip being
perforated by a myriad of little tubes through which the silk escapes in
excessively fine threads. An ordinary thread, just visible to the naked
eye, is the union of a thousand or more of these delicate streams of
silk. These primary threads are drawn out and united by the hind legs."
From this we see that two special glands, capable of secreting a soft
material that can be readily drawn into the finest threads of the
greatest strength, requiring no perceptible time for drying, and two to
four spinnerets perforated by more than a thousand of the smallest
apertures, and hind legs modified so that they can be used to draw out
the web through the spinnerets, and also the instincts which enable the
spider to use its web to advantage, must all have been evolved. To
evolve the silk glands would have required, as for most other organs, a
long period of incipiency, during which they would have been useless.
We can not assume that a substance so exceptional in its character as
the web of the spider could have been suddenly produced by evolution.
But the glands would be useless without spinnerets. The hypothesis asks
us to assume that two or three pairs of legs that were probably at one
time useful for locomotion became so modified that they could perform
the function of spinnerets. But in what conceivable way could
locomotive legs have become so modified and pierced with more than a
thousand apertures through which the web is drawn? And how could these
organs serve their purpose while the complex instincts required for
their functioning were only in course of development?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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