But however indispensable the selection principle may be to a philosophy which proposes to banish the Creator from creation, its scientific insolvency has become so painfully apparent that biologists have lost all confidence in its power to solve the problem of organic origins. It is recognized, for example, that natural selection would suppress, rather than promote, development, seeing that organs have utility only in the state of perfection and are destitute of selection-value while in the imperfect state of transition. Again, the specific differences that diversify the various types of plants and animals are notoriously deficient in selection-value, and therefore the present differentiation of species cannot be accounted for by means of the principle of natural selection. Finally, unless one is prepared to make the preposterous assumption that the environment is a telic mechanism expressly designed for shaping organisms, he is under logical necessity of admitting that the influence of natural selection cannot be anything else than purely destructive. There is, as Wilson points out, no aprioristic ground for supposing that natural selection could do anything more than maintain the _status quo_, and as for factual proofs of its effectiveness in a positive sense, they are wholly wanting. Professor Caullery of the Sorbonne, in his Harvard lecture of Feb. 24, 1916, assures us that, “since the time of Darwin, natural selection has remained a purely speculative idea and that no one has been able to show its efficacy in concrete indisputable examples.”