Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith. Robert Patterson
to confuse the distinctions of species He established.
God has fixed a barrier against the mixture or confusion of species by cross breeding, by ordaining the sterility of hybrids. Mr. Darwin labors in vain to explain away this great fact. It can not be explained into conformity with the evolution theory; for in that theory all species are only breeds or varieties of one species, and ought to increase their fertility by cross breeding. With all scientific naturalists, as with all people of common sense, this proves that species have a distinct existence in nature, and that the Creator has ordained the continuance of their distinct existence; which is the denial of evolution.
When Mr. Darwin retreats into the geologic ages, and confessing that his principle has ceased to be operative now in our world, and refers us to them for such evolution of one species from another, he abandons the fundamental principle of his school—the uniformity of nature—and falls back on Christian ground the necessity for supernatural origins. He virtually admits the death or superannuation of Natural Selection, since it has retired from the business of species-making.
But when we go back to those old geologic ages, we find that species were then not only as distinct as now, but that the distinctions were even bolder and more visible. Many of them have ceased to exist, but they have left their shells, their petrified casts, and their bones, by which we can see that they stood apart in well-defined groups, without any such blending and confusion as the evolution theory asserts. Over three thousand species are already classified. Between every two of them there ought to be, on Mr. Darwin's showing, a hundred intermediate variations at the least; and between some of the more widely separated forms there ought to be thousands of intermediate varieties; as for instance between the bear and the whale; and a still greater number between the mollusk with its external shell, and the vertebrate with its internal skeleton. And we ought to find these intermediate forms closely connected with their parents and their children. For intermediate forms in another continent could not be the connecting links between the mollusks and vertebrates of a distant country, say of England. In the same strata in which we find the two ends of the chain, and lying between the two ends of the chain, we ought to find the connecting links. And we ought to find a hundred connecting links for every specimen of distinct species, since Mr. Darwin alleges that they must have lived and died somewhere; and we have seen they must have lived and died right there where they were born, and where they begot their progeny. The geological strata ought to be full of connecting links.
But when we come to look for them they are not there. Geology knows nothing about them. It has plenty of distinct, well-defined species—trilobites, and ammonites, and echinoderms, palms, ferns, firs, and mosses, all sorts of quadrupeds from a mouse to a mastodon, and all just as clean-cut and well-defined as the species of existing animals. Mr. Darwin can not find his connecting links between the species, which ought to have been a hundred times more plentiful than the species they connected. These connecting links are missing links. He ought to be able to overwhelm his opponents, and bury them under mountains of the bones of intermediate species. But all his friends can do is to suggest about half a dozen, while he needs three hundred thousand. He can not pay half a cent on the dollar. In his grief he turns round and abuses the defectiveness of the geological record, which he says he could never have suspected of being so defective but for this failure to meet his drafts. But he need not blame the geological record for not preserving bones of animals which never lived. Geology says there never was any such confusion of species as evolution asserts.
But not only does the general structure of the web of nature present a clearly striped pattern, instead of the mottled gray of the theory—neither the beginning, nor the middle, nor the end is like what the evolution theory would produce.
The gradation does not begin, as the theory asserts and demands, with the monads. On the contrary, we find that there are four kingdoms of animal life—in an ascending scale—the radiate, or starfish; the mollusk or oyster; the articulate, or insect; and the vertebrate, or animals with backbones. Now the evolution ought to have begun at the bottom, with the radiate, the coral, and the starfish; it should have gone upward, the coral developing into the oyster, and the oyster into the lobster, and the lobster into the salmon, and so on. But instead of that we discover, away down in the Silurian strata, at the very beginning of life, all the four kingdoms—the radiates, the mollusks, the articulates, and the fish! Evidently, then, there was no such beginning of the world as evolutionists suppose.
Then as we work upward along the line of march, and of the development of the divine idea, we observe that when new species were introduced, they did not work up slowly from small and weak beginnings; beginning with dwarfs and growing up to giants; but, on the contrary, the giants head the column. The geological books are full of them—sharks forty feet long, frogs as big as oxen, ichthyosaurus and plesiosaurus of fabulous proportions—were not their skeletons preserved—pterodactyles, or bats, as big as a dog, the mastodon giganteus, beside which an ordinary modern elephant is like a Shetland pony beside a dray horse, ferns as big as oak trees, and mosses eighteen inches in diameter, shell fish of the nautilus order the size of dinner plates, and crustaceans, cousins to the lobster, three feet long. And all this at the very first start in life of these respective families, and in overwhelming multitudes. That was no age of small beginnings, and small progressive improvements. On the contrary, these old families, like some other old families, seem to have rather lost rank, and bulk, and influence; at least their modern representatives cut no such figure in the world as their predecessors.
As we proceed along the line we meet gaps which slay the theory of genealogical descent altogether. A gap is fatal to it. If a family dies out, that is the end of it. You can not resuscitate it after a few centuries, and go on with that breed; much less can you pick up a breed quite different, and attach it to your old genealogy. But in the line of evolution we meet these fatal gaps; and no evolutionist has bridged them, because they can not possibly be bridged.
The first great gap is the abyss between death and life. No human power can cross it. How could the chemical actions of dead matter infuse vitality into the first germ, or bud of a plant? For chemical actions are the antagonists of life, and constantly laboring to destroy the living organism, and finally they succeed. There is no process of evolution known to man which can carry evolution across this abyss. But till evolution crosses this gulf it can not even begin to operate. This first abyss is its grave.
But, supposing life begun in the plant first, as the theory requires, there is another gap between the life of the plant and that of the animal; for all animal life is sustained by another sort of food than that which feeds the vegetable. The vegetable feeds solely on chemical, unorganized matters; the animal solely on matter organized, on some plant, or on some other animal which feeds on plants. No animal can live on the food of plants. Here then is another gap which can not be bridged over, nor crossed; for the plant in process of conversion into an animal is in process of starvation, and when the process is about to be completed, it will end like the miser's horse, whose master diminished his oats Darwinianly, a single grain a day, until he had brought him to live on just one grain per day, when, alas! the victim of the experiment died. And so ends evolution experiment No. 2.
Then we come on a multitude of gaps, breaks in the uniformity of nature, called for by the evolutionists, between the species which will not breed together. There ought to be no such species on the theory; or, if there are, there ought to be a multitude of intervening varieties toning down the interval; for instance, between the horse and the cow, and between the sheep and the hog. All the ingenuity of all the evolutionists has been tasked in vain to produce any instance of the confusion of two such species, or of the production of a new true species by the intermixture of blood. But they might just as well try to convert iron into gold, or sulphur into carbon. In fact, evolution is the modern physiological form of the old chemical superstition, alchemy, substituting for the transmutation of metals the problem of the transmutation of animals.
It were endless to attempt to exhibit the impossibilities of crossing the gaps between the water-breathing fish and the air-breathing animal; between the flying-bird and the quadruped; between instinct and education; between brute selfishness and maternal affection; between the habits of the solitary and those of the gregarious, and those of the colonial insects and animals. No one of these is accounted for satisfactorily by the theory of evolution. But space forbids the attempt.