The Darwinian And Other Theories About Physical Life

( Originally Published 1909 )

No intelligent person can fail to be interested in the great question, what makes physical matter living matter? This question has been the oldest, and still re-mains the latest topic of scientific discussion. It is well, therefore, to recognize at the outset why no agreement has been reached on the subject. It is chiefly be-cause living matter constantly ceases to be so. If it were not for death, we could study life as we would any other phenomenon. But wholly different from any other great reality in this world, life is and is not, leaving us quite unable to say what that is which departs with death. Matter may change from one form to another until it may become invisible; but every part of it can be then experimentally ac-counted for. Not so with life. It goes at death no one knows where, and never does it return to that matter which it once made living, whether it be in a flower, in an insect, or in a man.

In the face of this mystery one natural conclusion was that life is like nothing else, and coming originally from its Creator, it entered the various living forms on earth as they were ready made for it. Milton in his Paradise Lost describes the process itself of this making as quite parallel to the hand-made productions of us human beings, and this conception of the word " create " still holds its place in the common term creatures, applied to animals as the most living of things. This unique event of the creation of living forms was readily supposed to have had a historical date not very far back in time.

But the modern science of geology made this explanation quite out of the question, at least so far as its conception of the term, to create, is concerned. Geology presents a very readable narrative of past life on this globe, based on records so safely preserved in rocky strata, that whether they tell of great trees, of giant animals, of small insects, or of delicate ferns, the complete life history of each can now be given.

This story summed up proves to a certainty that the history of life on this earth is a very long one, with many chapters, each chapter abounding with illustrations picturing a great variety of forms both vegetable and animal. At first it was supposed that these forms differed so from chapter to chapter that most of them were altogether new when they first appeared. It is now, however, generally admitted that this is not so. Instead a continuous line of descent links the whole succession of living forms from the latest back to the earliest, until we cannot but infer that no form of earthly life ever came into existence without its own living parentage. This deduction is rendered probable by the fact that the former puzzles of tracing any community of origin between widely separated living forms existing at present on the earth, is being gradually solved by the discovery of geological records showing that one form after the other formerly existed where their nearest of kin now no longer live. In other words, geology re-cords not only great mutations but also great migrations of both plants and animals.

But the chief interest of this geological history of earthly life lies in its demonstrations of a prolonged and gradual course of development from earlier simpler to later more specialized forms. Now we are just as free to investigate the causes of this progressive development as we are to follow the history of this earth as a planet. Without doubt natural laws have presided as much over the one as over the other, and Science is quite within her legitimate province in her investigation of either of these sets of phenomena.

As this progressive development could not have been spontaneous, a number of theories have been advanced from time to time to explain its cause or causes. The theory, however, which has attracted by far the most attention was that promulgated by Charles Darwin in his great work, The Origin of Species, published in 1858. Because of its great merits of simplicity and apparent adequacy to explain the problem, supported as that explanation was by a striking array of scientific evidence, it was hailed with much enthusiasm as all that could be asked for. An illustration is found in the following passage from the book, In Starry Realms, by Sir Robert Ball, an eminent astronomer, published afterwards, which concludes with this estimate of the Darwinian theory: " I would liken," he says, " the voyage of the Beagle (during which Darwin began his studies) to the immortal voyage of Columbus. In each case a new world was discovered. . . . Astronomers were the first evolutionists. They had sketched out a majestic scheme of evolution for the whole system, and now they are rejoicing to find that the great doctrine of Evolution has received an extension to the whole domain of organic life by the splendid genius of Darwin." After describing how the astronomer went about completing his evolution of worlds, he proceeds : " His work being done, he now hands over the continuance of the history to the biologist. The lifeless earth is the canvas on which has been drawn the noblest picture that modern science has produced. It is Darwin who has drawn this picture. He has taken up the history of the earth at the point where the astronomer left it and he has made discoveries which have influenced thought and opinion more than any other discoveries that have been made for centuries. . . . The method Darwin adopts is of the most captivating simplicity. When the history of science in our century comes to be written, the interest will culminate in the supreme discovery of Natural Selection."

The enthusiasm of Sir Robert Ball then leads him on to extend the principle of Darwinism, which as usual he loosely speaks of as synonomous with evolution, to surmising that very little is needed now to suppose that life had a spontaneous origin from matter. " Can it be possible that the wondrous and complex phenomena known as life are purely material? Unusual, indeed, must be the circumstances which will have brought about such a combination of atoms as to form the first organic being. But great events are always unusual. It is not necessary to suppose that such an event as the formation of an organized being shall have occurred often. If in the whole course of millions of years past it has once happened, whether on land or in the depths of the ocean, that a group of atoms, few or many, have been so segregated as to have the power of assimilating outside material, and the power of producing other groups more or less similar to themselves, we have but little more to demand of the theory of Spontaneous Generation. The more we study the nature of matter, the less improbable will it seem that organic beings should have so originated."

As a commentary upon these exultant words of an astronomer, written in 1892, we would merely cite a sentence from a communication by the eminent botanist, Sir Thistleton Dyer, F.R.S., to the leading English scientific journal Nature, July 30, 1896. " The Darwinian theory of Organic Evolution seems hardly to have a convinced supporter left [in England] except Mr. Alfred R. Wallace and myself ! " (Dyer). This communication was written after a prolonged discussion just held at the Linnean Society, in which many of the leading English biologists took part, with the result of revealing a state of opinion among those gentlemen which Mr. Dyer pathetically laments. Of course Mr. Dyer does not mean that there are no Darwinians surviving in England but Mr. Wallace and himself. Instead of that, the public highways especially are crowded with individuals with Sir Robert Ball's notions. What Mr. Dyer means is that there are now only two identifiable specimens remaining of the kind among biologists. Had Sir Robert Ball but a moderate acquaintance with biology, he would have known that even in 1892 there was a rapidly spreading conviction among the only kind of men who have a claim to speak authoritatively on the subject, that the Darwinian theory is hopelessly inadequate to explain the course of development of living forms, for so thoroughgoing an evolutionist as Professor Karl Pearson, F.R.S., says, " It can explain no more than fringes of evolution," and that every year even these fringes are being materially curtailed. Moreover, that Mr. Ball had as little right to leave his telescope and deliver himself, as above cited, about spontaneous generation, as a biologist would have to tell what he thought about the planet Venus after trying to observe it with a one-twelfth inch oil immersion lens of his microscope, is sufficiently illustrated by the words on this subject of one of the greatest biologists of the age, Professor Carl Wilhelm von Nägeli of Munich, who says, " That the distance which separates man from the lowest bacterium is far less than the distance between the lowest bacterium and inorganic matter! " Then as to the " supreme discovery of Natural Selection " accounting for the origin of species, Professor Nägeli remarks, that Natural Selection might have been of use to prune some leaves from the biological tree, but that it was totally unable to give origin to the smallest twig thereof.

The Darwinian theory, as is well known, first postulates an inherent tendency to spontaneous variation in all directions, in living organisms, plant or animal, and secondly, that those variations will survive which prove advantageous to the organism in the struggle for existence with either competing living forms or with the conditions of its environment. All changes, therefore, which finally lead to distinct species come simply by the elimination of the less adapted by the better adapted to their surroundings. This latter proposition, or the survival of the fittest by Natural Selection, of course assumes that an organism, once acquiring an advantage, would transmit it to its descendants. Natural Selection would be of no avail in producing varieties, and their species, unless inheritance comes in to so establish a variation. The trans-mission of advantageous characters, therefore, is one of the great original pillars of the Darwinian edifice.

But it should be noted here that biology, or the science of life, is no simple thing by any means. Instead its domain is so vast and varied that by an unavoidable necessity its cultivation can be carried on only by great numbers of hard-working specialists, such as zoölogists, naturalists, botanists, entomologists, embryologists, paleontologists, anatomists, physiologists, pathologists, physicians, etc., every one of whom has something important to say about the development and laws of life. On any other highly complex subject ex-pert opinion is most sensibly asked, but in biology only such opinion is worth any-thing. And it is but the simple truth to say that at present the opinion of such experts in all the different fields of biological research is preponderately adverse to the claims of the Darwinian theory, and is steadily growing more so. A few citations, out of many more which our limits forbid our quoting, from the writings of leading European and American biologists will suffice to make this plain.

Professor Wilhelm Roux of the University of Jena is one of the foremost original investigators in this field in Europe. In his latest work of some two thousand pages, entitled Mechanism and Biology, before advancing his own remarkable views, he first labors to demolish the Darwinian theory as one would clear the ground of tree stumps be-fore building a house, which he does by showing the extreme difficulty of accounting by simple natural selection for the in-numerable adaptations, carried out into the finest detail, which are met with in all the organs of the vertebrate body. We cannot go over the whole case which Roux makes out, but will only quote this sentence from a review of his book by Mr. E. W. McBride, a leading member of the younger school of English naturalists : " It must be admitted that Professor Roux has brought together a most powerful case against the doctrine of the all-sufficiency of natural selection, and we feel sure that his arguments will awaken a sympathetic chord in the minds of many, if not most, zoologists, among whom there is a general feeling that we want more than natural selection."

Professor H. F. Osborn of Columbia University, in an elaborate paper which attracted wide attention both in this country and in Europe, read before the American Association of Science, August, 1894, on the " Rise of Mammalia," sums up with the conclusion that " The point is that a certain trend of development is found in each species leading to an adaptive or to an inadaptive final issue, but extinction, or survival of the fittest, seems to exert little influence en route."

No name stands higher among working biologists than that of Professor Oscar Hertwig of Berlin. But in his ponderous volume on Epigenesis he does not conceal his contempt for the Darwinian theory by Natural Selection, and similar repudiations of it are reported with each succeeding year. Thus Professor Von Hartmann says, " that in the first decade of the twentieth century it has become apparent that the days of Darwinism are numbered. Among its latest opponents, besides many others, are such savants as Eimer, Professor of Zoölogy in the University of Tübingen; Gustave Wolff ; De Vries, Professor of Botany in the University of Amsterdam; noodle, and Fleischmann. Professor Fleischmann of the University of Erlangen maintains that the Darwinian theory of descent has not a single fact to confirm it in the realm of Nature, that it is not the result of scientific research but purely the product of the imagination." Professor G. Henslow, F.R.S., says:

" It is now half a century since Darwin's work on the Origin of Species by Natural Descent has been published. Up to the present day it is an undisputable fact that not a single variety or species of any wild animal or plant has ever been proved to have had its origin by means of natural selection."

The eminent Russian botanist, H. Korchinsky, labors to prove that natural selection, to use an American phrase, does not select worth a cent, but if anything prevents the formation of new species. His five propositions, which we have no room to quote, by which he claims to show that natural selection has no real power to select, contrast greatly with the expressions of some writers who imagine that natural selection has been operating through infinite time in the past. But as the remains of multicellular living forms occur first only in the lower Cambrian rocks, from that date to this period is but a speck in infinite time. But granting this restricted period, numbers of biologists maintain that the supposed powers of environment are more destructive than selective, or, as Dr. Morier says, the proper term for them is natural Extermination rather than natural Selection. Among the countless copepods which a whale sifts for food out of sea water, what difference does it make if some of the copepods had become more developed than others or not ; they all would have to go together down the whale's throat.

Among American biologists the opponents of the theory of natural selection are no less numerous. As Professor V. L. Kellogg * of the Leland Stanford University of California, in his elaborate work entitled Darwinism To-day, says, page 90: " Men using, or rather testing, these theories every day in their work in field and laboratory, find selection insufficient to explain the conditions that their observation and experiments reveal to them. These men are students in all the lines of biological work, whether zoologists, botanists, paleontologists or animal and plant breeders. From all these lines of work come increasing complaints ; selection can-not explain for me what I see to exist. From some the cry is more bitter; selection is a delusion and false guide. I reject it utterly. For me [Kellogg] I re-peat this is an objection of much significance and importance that the biological experimentalists, the students of variation and heredity, of life mechanics, are finding the rigid theory of selection's control of all processes and phenomena a rack on which they will no longer be bound."

But we need not weary the reader with more of such citations, or with long lists of the names of authorities, which, how-ever well known to students of biological literature, to the general reader would convey as little information as they would to a Chinaman. All we would remark is that these criticisms of Darwinism do not come from amateurs, but from qualified experts. It is to be regretted that some of them, especially in Germany, show that there can be as acrid an odium scientificum as ever there was an odium theologicum, for one professor intimates that there can be no Darwinian except he be afflicted with a congenital inability to think clearly, while another says that a believer in natural selection must have softening of the brain.

The chief credit which historically will attach to the name of Charles Darwin is that more than any one else in our times he established the conviction among biologists that the processes of life are as completely subject to natural laws as are all other processes in the world. He also possessed in an eminent degree a fair and open mind towards opponents, while he pursued his course of observation and experiment in the spirit of an ideal scientific investigator. Full appreciation of these personal traits was widely expressed at the recent celebration of the centenary of his birth by the leading biologists of Europe. At a like gathering in America, the chair-man,* Professor H. F. Osborn, while re-marking that " there is no denying that there is to-day a wide reaction against the central feature of Darwin's thought," yet eloquently sets forth the lasting honor which will attach to Darwin's name in the world of science.

Certain great discoveries, however, about the mechanism of life, which every one should know and which should be taught in our schools, have done much to-wards modifying the views of biologists on the Darwinian theory.

The physical basis of life is a sticky sub-stance called protoplasm, and when its relation to living growth was first discerned its spontaneous generation seemed as possible as it did to Sir Robert Ball. This conception, however, was very temporary, so that Huxley always winced in after life at the mention of Bathybius, a term which he invented for an imaginary ooze lining the ocean bottom and which he fancied might generate the first beginnings of protoplasm. But on investigating the protoplasm in cells, instead of being a jelly-like thing of simple construction, it proved to be the most complex substance in the world, of such infinite complexity that biologists are all equally lost in trying to imagine it. Because, it turns out, that all forms of life, no matter how large they may grow afterwards, have to begin as specks of protoplasm visible only by high-power microscopes. There is no help for it: without a microbic beginning no form of life, great or small, is a universal law. The sulphur bottom whale of the Pacific, though he may bulk afterwards and weigh as much as 3000 men, yet first starts in his one microscopic primordial cell just as a towering oak also does. All biological investigation, therefore, had to be shifted from adult living forms to their first beginnings, when only a microscope can see them, with the result of a corresponding shrinkage in the belief of many Darwinians. When sheep, dogs, fowls, and such like familiar creatures were the objects of study, it was comparatively easy to trace the origins of their many variations, and to illustrate these by the products of selection by human breeders. But when the search for the secret of all physical life led first to a microscopic cell, and then to a much smaller body in the cell called its nucleus, and then to far minuter things in the nucleus called the chromatin rods, the whole question of natural selection, along with many other like questions, seemed in danger of being lost both to sight and to conception.

But the original Darwinians were soon to experience another severe strain. Professor August Weismann, the eminent biologist of the University of Freiburg, announced as the result of his observations that no physical change occurring in the body of either a plant or animal during its lifetime can be transmitted to its descendants.

To an ordinary mind this assertion seems ruinous to the whole Darwinian edifice, which was first based on the trans-mission to offspring of advantageous variations to help them in their struggle for existence. Herbert Spencer at once took the alarm at Weismann's declaration and exclaimed that without the transmission of acquired characters there could be no evolution, and like expressions came from others and continued down to Sir Francis Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, who in his inaugural address as president of the British Association of Science, at its meeting in Dublin last year, declared that true Darwinism must wage a war to the knife against this dictum of Weismann. The weight of opinion, however, among biologists seems at present to favor this contention of Weismann, that acquired characters are not transmitted, but when he proceeds to show how he is as good a Darwinian as anybody by his purely speculative views of what comes out of the chromatin rods in the nucleus, he falls foul of an equally eminent biologist, Oscar Heft-wig, who complains that Weismann leads us into an invisible world, in which there is no foothold for research, and with no foundation of fact.

This is only a sample of the interchange of personal compliments which has been going on between different authorities in biology for the last twenty years. The only agreement is that every one believes in evolution, but as to the process of evolution there is an all-round disagreement, with no prospect of a satisfactory substitute for the Darwinian theory in sight.

The only alternative theories which have attracted much notice are the once celebrated Lamarckian theory, and the more modern theory of Orthogenesis. Lamarckianism, in distinction from the natural selection of Darwinism, has Use and Disuse for its principle. By constant use living parts grow and by disuse they atrophy. It was by constant stretching that, in the course of generations the giraffe's neck became so long, and likewise the legs and bill of the crane as it waded in the mud for its food. It was in degeneration from disuse, however, that this theory had its strongest arguments, just where the Darwinian theory is weakest, for natural selection does not account for degeneration, because nothing would select degeneration as advantageous, while the eyeless fishes in the rivers of the Mammoth Cave afford direct evidence of the loss of organs by disuse. The Lamarckian theory, therefore, is much simpler than the Darwinian, if only it were in accord with facts, which it is not, except as just stated in the case of atrophies. No native tendency to strong arms in the children of blacksmiths is discernible. Moreover, Lamarckianism depends even more than Darwinism on the inheritance of acquired characters, and if such are not inherited, the whole theory falls.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of biologists, such as von Nägeli and the late Professor Eimer, along with the American paleontologists, Cope, Osborn, Whitman, and a number of others, have become so convinced of the inadequacy of either the Darwinian or the Lamarekian theories to explain everything that they are sure of the existence of some other important factors in the processes of evolution, though these have not yet been demonstrated. They find development often following lines which seem predetermined for it to follow before either natural selection or use could have exerted any influence. The facts on which this doctrine of predetermination, or orthogenesis as it is called, are based, are very numerous and are wholly inexplicable on any hypothesis yet framed to account for them. The only objection which has been advanced to orthogenesis is that it is unsatisfactory to confess ignorance instead of trying to guess what we are ignorant of. But as all admit that the territory of the Unknown in biology is great, and its boundaries not even discernible, this objection does not seem sensible.

But the general reader should be on his guard now against too hasty conclusions. When he compares the confident tone with which Tyndall, in 1874, speaks of matter as eternal, and containing in it the promise and potency of life, with the words of Sir George Darwin, uttered from the same chair of president of the British Association of Science in 1905, that the elements of matter have had neither an eternal past, nor will they have an eternal future, and that the mystery of life is as impenetrable as ever, he may suppose that these learned people know of no certainty. When in addition he hears little else than a confusing din of controversy among biologists about their theories, he may then think that this once awesome divinity of Science is after all not unlike Dickens' portentous Mrs. Harris.

But nothing could be more untrue, and therefore unjust. Neither men of science nor any one else have reason to doubt that all phenomena in Nature, including those of physical life, are due to natural causes, which science, therefore, has every right to investigate. Thus if something beyond Nature's powers is to be found anywhere it would be in the mysterious processes of cell growth in an animal body. There every different cell finds its own exactly proper place, a brain cell in the brain, a secreting cell in a gland and never in a muscle, and so on in beautiful adjustments without number, as if some great intelligent agency presided over the whole ordering. But unfortunately this quasi-supernatural superintendent sometimes makes serious mistakes in his operations. What is a common wart? It is a mistake in nutrition, which if dark in color should be cut out, at least in elderly people, because no one can tell when it may turn into a well-named malignant growth. Likewise all tumors have no business to be where they are found, but particularly those dread cancers and sarcomas which kill by growing just where they please in defiance of all order or superintendence. Moreover, that some very general law of perverted nutrition is here at work, is proved by cancerous tumors occurring in all kinds of vertebrates, sheep, oxen, lions, tigers, mice, and even in fishes. But more than that we can artificially change the whole process of development by shaking or detaching the primitive layers from one another, so that four frogs will grow where but one frog should, while each of these frogs, though perfect, yet will be only one-fourth the size of the ordinary frog.

Wholly different, however, in origin from cancerous growths are some tumors found in the bodies of young persons who, on their account, rarely live beyond their twentieth year. These tumors are called embryomas and are usually large, but on being examined are found to consist, as the anatomist Bland Sutton, F.R.S., describes them, of an utterly confused heap of every tissue of the body, either general or special: cartilage, bone, gland, muscle and nerve cells, besides hairs and streaks of the choroid membrane of the eye—all mixed up without a single attempt at arrangement. The explanation is that this awful thing started originally as a twin, but be-coming enclosed in a bodily cavity of its fellow, the unnatural physical conditions under which its processes of growth were placed caused it to make a sorry mess of them.

Living processes, therefore, are living enough, and nothing but life can originate them; but after that it is physical conditions which determine how they shall live.