Catastrophism and Evolution
The theory of evolution dates back to the age of classic Greece, one of its proponents having been Anaximander, and from time to time philosophers have offered the evolutionary explanation of the origin of the multiple forms of life on earth, as opposed to the theory of special creation or the permanency of living forms from the day of Creation. Lamarck (1744 – 1829) thought that acquired characteristics were transmissible by heredity and thus might lead to the appearance of new forms of life. In 1840, the year that Agassiz’s Ice Age theory was published, an anonymously printed work, Vestiges of Creation – written by Robert Chambers – caused a stir that did not subside for years. It was bitterly attacked by every British scientist for teaching that human beings are “the children of apes and the breeders of monsters,” in the words of one critic, the president of the Geological Society, Adam Sedgwick. Darwin later acknowledged that the brunt of the attack against his own theory was absorbed by Vestiges.
What was new in Darwin’s teaching was not the principle of evolution in general but the explanation of its mechanism by natural selection. This was an adaptation to biology of the Malthusian theory about population growing more quickly than the means of existence. Darwin acknowledged his debt to Malthus, whose book he read in 1838. Herbert Spencer and Alfred R. Wallace independently came to the same views as Darwin, and the expression “survival of the fittest” was Spencer’s.
Darwin wrote his theory with the point of his pen directed against the theory of catastrophism. He hardly expected that no opposition would come from the side he attacked, otherwise he would not have expended so many arguments in combating catastrophism and in subscribing so completely to Lyell’s theory of uniformity in lifeless nature. As it turned out, most of the attacks against Darwin came from the Church, which could not agree that man had risen from inferior beings. The Church held to the dogmas of creation in six days less than six thousand years ago, and of the primal sin of Adam, to redeem humankind from which, the Son of Man came into this world; also to the view that beasts have no souls and therefore a barrier stands between man and animal.
The emotions of this protracted controversy were spent on the issue: Is there evolution or is there not? More and more scientists subscribed to evolution; religious minds clung to the belief that there had been no change since the creation of the world. Actually the debate was between liberals and conservatives in the matter of science. The radicals did not participate; for catastrophism was dying out with the generation of the founders and classicists of geological science. Cuvier died in 1832; in England, geologists like Buckland of Oxford and Sedgwick of Cambridge, set in their belief in Mosaic tradition, ascribed the ubiquitous vestiges of the catastrophe to the action of the Deluge. But they could not point to a satisfactory physical cause of such catastrophe, and expert estimate made it obvious that, had all the clouds over the earth emptied themselves simultaneously, the earth would not have been covered by even one foot of water.
Then the geological record showed that there had been not one but several deluges. Lyell wrote in a letter: “Conebeare [geologist and Bishop of Bristol] admits three deluges before the Noachian! and Buckland adds God knows how many catastrophes besides, so we have driven them out of the Mosaic record fairly.” 1 Sedgwick, according to Lyell, “decided on four or more deluges.” 2 In his last address as president of the Geological Society, Sedgwick admitted that his religious beliefs caused him to propagate a philosophic heresy: “I think it right, as one of my last acts before I quit this Chair, thus publicly to read my recantation. We ought, indeed, to have paused before we adopted the diluvian theory, and referred all our old superficial gravel to the action of the Mosaic Flood. For of man, and the works of his hands, we have not yet found a single trace among the remnants of a former world entombed in these deposits.” 3
So where were the remains of the sinful population? Cuvier taught that man’s remains were never found with those of extinct animals. Lyell also declared in the first edition of his Principles that man was created after all the extinct animals passed away; and not until 1858, a year before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, did the finds in the Brixham cave shatter this belief in the non-coexistence of man and extinct, or “antediluvian,” animals.4 In the year of the Origin, the leading English geologists were finally convinced by J. B. de Perthes, a notary of Abbeville in France, who for twenty years found only deaf ears, that human artifacts (worked flint) and extinct animals are met in the same formations, side by side. This opened wide the doors to Darwin’s theory. By that time the doubts of the catastrophists, who could not understand why there were signs of more than one deluge and why there should be no human bones left of all the sinful generation that perished in the Flood, had already brought about the abandonment of the theory of catastrophism, a theory that appeared to be in conflict with the Mosaic record.
Thus it happened that the entire controversy for and against Darwinism failed to respond to the challenge of Darwin, who tried to show that what appeared to be the result of global catastrophes could be explained as the product of slow changes multiplied by time, with no violence intervening. The opposition was concentrated against the idea of evolution and in support of special creation. Insisting that all animals were created in the forms in which they are found in our days, the opponents of evolution waged their battle on geologically indefensible ground.
But why did Darwin oppose the idea of great catastrophes in the past, contrary to his own field observations, and subscribe to the theory of uniformity of geological events in all ages and in the present? For species to evolve as a result of incessant competition and struggle for survival, all the way from the simplest forms to Homo sapiens and other advanced organisms, an enormous span of time is required. The teaching of catastrophes appeared to make the story of the world very short: if the Deluge occurred less than five thousand years ago, then, following the book of Genesis, Creation took place less than six thousand years ago. In order to have at the disposal of the evolutionary process the almost unlimited time needed, Darwin accepted Lyell’s teaching; and whereas Lyell tried to show that the usual agents – such as rivers carrying sediment – act with comparative speed, Darwin liked to stress their sluggishness. He wrote: “Therefore a man should examine for himself the great piles of superimposed strata, and watch the rivulets bringing down mud, and the waves wearing away the sea-cliffs, in order to comprehend something about the duration of past time.” The waves of the sea reduce a rock particle by particle, and if a visible change is produced, it requires many thousands of years.
“Nothing impresses the mind with the vast duration of time, according to our ideas of time, more forcibly than the conviction thus gained that subaerial agencies which apparently have so little power, and which seem to work so slowly, have produced great results.” 5 Darwin even went so far as to suggest that “he who can read Sir Charles Lyell’s grand work on the Principles of Geology … and yet does not admit how vast have been the past periods of time, may at once close this volume (Origin of Species).” 6
The Geological Record and Changing Forms of Life
His thesis of the origin of species by natural selection Darwin supported by reference to (1) variations in domestic animals, especially when the breeder deliberately develops a certain desirable feature; (2) the anatomical similarity of many related species; and (3) the geological record. However, though breeders have created new races or variations, they have created no new animal species. In the anatomy of living creatures “the distinctness of the specific forms, and their not being blended together by innumerable transitional links, is a very obvious difficulty” (Darwin); and thus the entire weight of proof was placed on the geological record.
This record shows, however, The Forms of Life Changing Almost Simultaneously throughout the World – the title of a section in The Origin of Species. Darwin wrote: “Scarcely any palaeontological discovery is more striking than the fact that the forms of life change almost simultaneously throughout the world.” This appears baffling, because according to his theory “the process of modification must be slow, and will generally affect only a few species at the same time; for the variability of each species is independent of that of all others.” Could it not have been a sudden change in physical conditions that altered the forms of life at one and the same time throughout the world? Darwin answers, No. “It is, indeed, quite futile to look to changes of currents, climate, or other physical conditions, as the cause of these great mutations in the forms of life throughout the world, under the most different climates.” If the climate or other physical conditions changed in one part of the world, how could this alter forms of life in all the other parts of the world? That a change in physical conditions could have occurred all over the world at one and the same time, Darwin did not even take into consideration. What kind of an answer to his problem, therefore, could Darwin propose?
“Blank intervals of vast duration, as far as the fossils are concerned, occurred. … During these long and blank intervals I suppose that the inhabitants of each region underwent a considerable amount of modification and extinction. …” Hence the parallelism of changes in fauna and flora in similar strata around the world is not a true time-parallelism. “The order would falsely appear to be strictly parallel.”
Darwin then considered The Absence of Numerous Intermediate Varieties in Any Single Formation, and wrote: “If we confine our attention to any one formation, it becomes much more difficult to understand why we do not therein find closely graduated varieties between the allied species which lived at its commencement and at its close.” And he found the answer in the conjecture that “although each formation may mark a very long lapse of years, each probably is short compared with the period requisite to change one species into another.”
Furthermore, the geological record shows The Sudden Appearance of Whole Groups of Allied Species (the title of another section in The Origin of Species). “The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations, has been urged by several palaeontologists – for instance, by Agassiz, Pictet, and Sedgwick – as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of species. If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of evolution through natural selection. For the development by this means of a group of forms, all of which are descended from some one progenitor, must have been an extremely slow progress; and the progenitors must have lived long before their modified descendants.”
Darwin explained this observation, too, by the incompleteness of the geological record, which, because of the lacunae, gives, the appearance of sudden changes.
The geological record of extinction of species is discussed under the heading, On Extinction. Darwin wrote: “The extinction of species has been involved in the most gratuitous mystery.” What took place is “apparently sudden extermination of whole families or orders.” According to his theory, “the extinction of a whole group of species is generally a slower process than their production,” and yet some groups were exterminated “wonderfully sudden.” Here, once more, Darwin thought that the imperfection of the geological record may in some cases simulate the suddenness of the extinction; but he acknowledged in other cases his inability to explain the spontaneity of the extinction of some species. He still wondered, as in the days of his South American travels, why horses had disappeared in pre-Columbian America where they had every favorable condition for propagation: and in a letter to Sir Henry H. Howorth he acknowledged his inability to explain the extinction of the mammoth, a well-adapted animal. But in general the deficiency of the geological record was invoked to explain the apparent spontaneity of extinction as well as the suddenness with which new species seem to have arrived on the scene.
According to the theory of natural selection, chance variations or new characteristics among individuals of a species, if beneficial, are exploited in the struggle for survival and, being inheritable, may by accumulation lead to the origin of a new species. Because of the chance nature of these new characteristics and therefore also of the origin of the new species, Darwin assumed “that not only all the individuals of the same species have migrated from some one area, but that allied species, although now inhabiting the most distant points, have proceeded from a single area – the birthplace of their early progenitors. … The belief that a single birthplace is the law seems to me incomparably the safest.”
Darwin explained the migration of plants from continent to continent and from mainland to islands by the transportation of seeds in the intestines of birds; the migration of mollusks, by observed instances of small shells clinging to the legs of migrating birds. This method of dispersion does not account for the geographical distribution of larger animals unable to fly or swim across the sea, or traverse climatic zones unsuitable for the species.Since animals of such species are found in very distant parts of the globe, divided by oceans, Darwin was led to maintain that “during the vast geographical and climatal changes which have supervened since ancient times, almost any amount of migration is possible.” This makes necessary the existence of land connections or “land bridges” between islands and mainlands and between all continents. But to these geographical and climatal changes, the Ice Age included, Darwin ascribed “a subordinate” role in shaping the development of the animals; they played an important role only in the migration of the animals.
Where the land is continuous, as in the Americas, Darwin accounted for the fact that identical animals live in higher latitudes of the Southern and Northern hemispheres, though they are absent in temperate and tropical latitudes, by resorting to a theory which assumes that the glacial periods in the Northern and Southern hemispheres were not simultaneous but consecutive. When a glacial period was descending upon the north, animals migrated slowly to the south, toward the equator; when the glacial period ended, and the climate in the subtropics became hot, some animals returned to the north, others remained in the subtropical regions, climbing the cool mountains. When the next glacial age – this time advancing from the south – arrived, the animals on the mountains came down, and when this age also ended, some of them moved to the south, while others again retreated to the mountains. Thus identical animals are found in the cooler regions of both the Northern and Southern hemispheres. (At present this view of consecutive glacial periods in the Northern and Southern hemispheres has hardly any adherents.)
The theory of evolution by natural selection could not do well without the theory of the ice ages. It needed the Ice Age theory to explain the provenience of the same species in the Southern and Northern hemispheres separated by the Torrid Zone; it needed it even more to account for the phenomenon of drift. Erratic blocks could have been explained, with some straining, by the action of icebergs.
But drift, or accumulation of clay, boulders, and sand that in many places fills valleys hundreds of feet deep, could not have been brought in by icebergs; and, finally, icebergs, in order to be produced in great numbers, themselves required extended glaciers from which they could break off. Darwinian evolution needed the Ice Age theory in order to supplant the tidal wave theory-which is a catastrophic notion.
Darwin accepted Agassiz’s teaching, though not in its original form with a catastrophic beginning of the ice ages. But Agassiz rejected Darwin’s theory. The reason for this he saw in the skeletal remains of ancient fish, a field in which he was an authority. In many instances the fish of extinct species were better developed and further advanced in their evolution than later species, the modern included. Among mammals, too, many better-developed species became extinct. But these difficulties in the way of the evolutionary theory were less strongly felt in the heat of the fight against the opponents who insisted on a six-thousand-year-old world and the immutability of species.
Darwin’s theory represented progress as compared with the teachings of the Church. The Church assumed a world without change in nature since the Beginning. Darwin introduced the principle of slow but steady change in one direction, from one age to another, from one eon to another. In comparison with the Church’s teaching of immutability, Darwin’s theory of slow evolution through natural selection or the survival of the fittest was an advance, though not the ultimate truth.
The story of his experiences is told by his contemporary and adherent, Thomas Huxley. Darwin was “held up to scorn as a ‘flighty’ person, who endeavours ‘to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation,’ and whose ‘mode of dealing with nature’ is reprobated as ‘utterly dishonourable to Natural Science.’” Thus Huxley quoted from an article by Bishop Wilberforce in the Quarterly Review of July 1860. Huxley also wrote in 1887: “On the whole, then, the supporters of Mr. Darwin’s views in 1860 were – numerically extremely insignificant. There is not the slightest doubt that, if a general council of the Church scientific had been held at that time, we should have been condemned by an overwhelming majority. And there is as little doubt that, if such a council gathered now, the decree would be of an exactly contrary nature.”
Darwin’s Origin of Species, Huxley went on, “was badly received by the generation to which it was first addressed, and the outpouring of angry nonsense to which it gave rise is sad to think upon. But the present generation will probably behave just as badly if another Darwin should arise, and inflict upon them that which the generality of mankind most hate – the necessity of revising their convictions. Let them, then, be charitable to us ancients; and if they behave no better than the men of my day to some new benefactor, let them recollect that, after all, our wrath did not come to much, and vented itself chiefly in the bad language of sanctimonious scolds. Let them as speedily perform a strategic right-about-face, and follow the truth wherever it leads. The opponents of the new truth will discover, as those of Darwin are doing, that, after all, theories do not alter facts, and that the universe remains unaffected even though texts crumble.” 7
The Mechanism of Evolution
Natural selection – the Darwinian mechanism of evolution – is simultaneously destructive and constructive. In the struggle for existence it eliminates all the unfit among the members of a species; and it destroys the species that cannot compete with others for the limited resources of livelihood. The winners in this struggle are those individuals that because of some characteristic-or favorable variation-have an edge over other competitors. “Under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species” (Darwin).
As shown on previous pages, the annihilation of many individuals and of entire species in the animal kingdom took place, not only under circumstances of competition, but under catastrophic conditions as well. Entire species with no sign of degeneration suddenly came to their end in paroxysms of nature. Yet extinction of a species through starvation or extermination by enemies also takes place: Moa, the gigantic flightless bird of New Zealand that stood twelve feet high, was destroyed several centuries ago. The whooping cranes of North America were reduced by 1953 to twenty-one individuals. Natural selection cannot account for the wholesale destruction of many genera and species at one time; it may occasionally be the agent exterminating single species. But can natural selection create new species?The geological record presents evidence that in the past animals lived that do not live any longer; and also that, of the forms living today, many did not exist in the past. Then how did they come into being?
The animal and plant kingdoms are subdivided into phyla, and these into classes, orders, families, genera, and finally species. A species can be recognized this way; the mating of members of two different species generally does not produce offspring, and when it does, such offspring is sterile (horse and ass, and their offspring; the mule). Thus all the human race is but one species; and all races of dogs, so dissimilar in their body structures, are members of one species. There are hundreds of thousands of species in the animal kingdom and also in the plant kingdom.
In the theory of evolution all forms of life evolved by gradual emergence from the same most primitive, one-cell living beings.
Chance variations occur in members of every species-no two individuals are entirely identical. These variations are inheritable. As already explained, the favorable variations – those that are helpful in the struggle for existence – may accumulate to such a degree that, according to Darwin, a new species originates, the members of which can have no fruitful progeny with the members of the parental species.
Since the first scientific observations were made, no truly new animal species has been observed to come into being. The year after publication of The Origin of Species, Thomas Huxley wrote: “But there is no positive evidence, at present, that any group of animals has, by variation and selective breeding, given rise to another group which was, even in the least degree, infertile with the first.” 8 A few years later Darwin wrote in a letter (to Bentham) : “The belief in natural selection must at present be grounded entirely on general considerations. … When we descend to details … we cannot prove that a single species has changed; nor can we prove that the supposed changes are beneficial, which is the groundwork of the theory.” 9 And at the end of the century Huxley found himself compelled to make the statement: “I remain of the opinion … that until selective breeding is definitely proved to give rise to varieties infertile with one another, the logical foundation of the theory of natural selection is incomplete. We still remain very much in the dark about the causes of variation. …” 10
In selective breeding the breeder creates conditions not found in wild life; and new races or varieties of animals created by selection and isolation revert to their ancestral unselected forms as soon as they are turned free; thus when dogs of various breeds mate they give birth to mongrels which resemble their common ancestors. Despite all their efforts, breeders have not been able to cross the true frontier of a species. Then how could a new species originate in chance variations and through crossbreeding in wild life? And how could so many new species be produced that they number, together with the extinct, in the millions? And how could a human being, so complicated, evolve, not just from common ancestors with the primates (apes), but from common ancestors with winged insects and crawling worms? The evolutionists drew more checks on time.
Then, too, the chance character of variations, when they first appear in an individual, makes the envisaged progress especially difficult. Darwin professed ignorance as to the cause of these variations or new characteristics appearing in individuals; and it was generally understood that chance variations, in the vast majority of cases, must be in the nature of defects: in a complicated and balanced organism a chance variation would probably be a hindrance, not a benefit. Then by what rare accidents could ever more perfected species have originated?
Various theories have been offered – one of them being évolution créatrice by Henri Bergson – that assume the existence of a guiding principle in evolution, which replaces the chance and accident in variations; these theories are often united under the name “orthogenesis”, the best known of such ideas. The adherents of orthogenesis claim the existence of a plan and a goal. But since, in such a theory, Providence enters into action, and to make nature independent of it was a major objective of the theory of evolution as opposed to the teaching of special creation, after some deliberation orthogenesis, or creative evolution, met largely with rejection. The orthogeneticists could argue that many traits, when they first appeared, must have been entirely useless, yet not senseless if they were destined to become useful after many generations. Then why should these traits have gone on developing from age to age, finally to become an asset to the species, unless orthogenesis was in action; why should the pocket of the kangaroo have increased in size through many generations until it could be used for carrying baby kangaroos?
The obvious difficulty in explaining the evolutionary process by chance variations brought about the revival of Lamarckism. In 1809, the year Darwin was born, Lamarck had published his Philosophie zoologique, in which he offered a theory of evolution through the appearance of new traits and faculties in response to usage; usage in response to need; and need as the consequence of changes in physical surroundings. These new acquired traits, he assumed, were inheritable. Lamarck also taught uniformity, and thus he was an opponent of his contemporary, Cuvier, who taught catastrophism. Charles Darwin, generous to Alfred R. Wallace, whom he declared to be an independent discoverer of the theory of natural selection, never agreed, despite the admonitions of Lyell and Huxley, to acknowledge his debt to Lamarck; in a letter to Lyell he referred to Lamarck’s book as “absurd” and “rubbish,” and also as a “wretched book.” 11However, Darwin offered the theory of pangenesis, according to which every cell in the body of an animal or plant sends a gemmule, an invisible image of the parent cell, to the germ cells. In this way Darwin intended to interpret heredity. Thus he went even farther than Lamarck in making the cells of the body the carriers of heredity, which amounts to hereditary transmission of acquired traits. The theory of pangenesis is definitely rejected by everyone.
In the battle that went on among the representatives of different schools in evolution, the neo-Darwinists, led by August Weismann, attacked the neo-Lamarckists; and by cutting off the tails of mice in succeeding generations, Weismann could show that acquired traits are not inheritable. Actually, he did not prove that much: the loss of tails by cutting is not a habit or trait acquired through usage or need. It was Weismann who really disproved Darwin’s pangenesis theory, not Lamarck, but he properly stressed that the carriers of hereditary traits are in the germ plasma, or in spermatozoa and ova; the soma, or the body, is created in each successive generation by the germ plasma, and only changes in the plasma are inheritable. The chance variations of Darwin are such changes in the germ plasma and are therefore inherited; the response of the body to external agents would not create inheritable traits and therefore must be of no value in evolution.
On evolution as a geological fact all agreed, but on the mechanism of evolution the disagreement has been fundamental. The majority of evolutionists have rejected the idea that acquired characteristics are inheritable; but Lamarck’s ideas found followers in the East, in Michurin, who experimented on plants, and for a time in Pavlov, who experimented on animals, and not long ago in the dominant school of thought in Russia.
The neo-Darwinists deny that physical surroundings can give rise to new species; they may bring about changes in an organism, but the acquired characteristics are not inheritable. Can, then, natural selection or competition with other animals create new species? The classic example of a giraffe with the longest neck surviving when leaves are left only high on the trees does not prove that giraffes with longer necks would become a separate species. And, in any event, under the described conditions no new race would evolve: the female giraffes, which are smaller in stature, would die out before the male competitors, and there would be no progeny; but should there be progeny, the young giraffes would probably die because they would be unable to reach the leaves.
The position of Darwinists would be much stronger if a new animal species would appear, even if only in controlled breeding.
Darwin claimed that the process of the appearance of new species is very slow, but he also maintained that the process of extinction of a species is even slower. 12Nevertheless, some species of animals have expired before the eyes of the naturalists, but no new one has appeared. The theory of natural selection, even the very fact of the evolvement of one species from another, needed proof. Some scientists went so far as to say that possibly the entire development plan has already reached its permanent stage, and the geological records tell only of the road to that stage, evolution no longer taking place.
One part of the Darwinian theory of selection has been generally abandoned: it is the idea of sexual selection as a factor in evolution. In natural selection the competition is for the means for existence. In sexual selection – a theory developed in The Descent of Man (1871) – the competition is among the males for acceptance by a female. Darwin thought to explain the origin of various secondary sexual characteristics, such as ornamentation and color of feathers in birds, by saying that they were the results of gradual selection, through many generations, of traits attractive in the eyes of the female. But it was shown that when the colorful wings of male butterflies were cut off and in their stead female wings, often without the characteristic coloring, were glued to the body of the male butterfly, the female did not object to the approach of the male. She failed to discriminate against male butterflies with no wings at all. Also it was observed that some male fish fertilize the fish eggs, having all the male coloring characteristic of such season, but without the female fish being present or aware of the act of fertilization. The theory of sexual selection to a certain degree had the same fate as the theory of gemmules. But the theory of natural selection would not yield its position unless a better explanation of the evolutionary mechanism could be given.
Mutations and New Species
The first ray of light came at the turn of the century, when Hugo De Vries, a Dutch botanist, observed spontaneous mutations in the evening primrose. The plant, without a recognizable cause, would show new characteristics unobserved in its ancestors. Although De Vries claimed that these mutations amount to what may be called “little species,” they have not caused the primrose to pass beyond the frontier of its species. However, it was demonstrated that variations within a species do appear in a spontaneous manner, and rather suddenly, and not, as Darwin thought, by minute progressions from generation to generation. Huxley was correct in urging Darwin not to adhere so dogmatically to his belief that nature does not make jumps – natura non facit saltum. 13De Vries showed that variations are in the nature of jumps, and from this he developed the mutation theory of evolution.
De Vries, while working on his theory, was as yet unaware of Gregor Mendel’s investigations in genetics, already published as a paper in 1865, only six years after The Origin of Species. Mendel’s work, unknown to Darwin and his followers in the nineteenth century, was rediscovered by De Vries and independently by E. Tschermak and by K. Correns in 1900, the same year that De Vries wrote down his theory of mutations. By carefully observing crossings between varieties of the garden pea and counting the strains through consecutive generations and the transmission of single traits, Mendel established the fundamental laws of genetics or inheritance of somatic characteristics. The entire work on evolution since the beginning of this century is based on genetics and Mendel’s laws. Ironically, Mendel was an Augustine monk and made his basic contribution at a time when the war between science and the Church was raging, following the publication of Darwin’s main work. The spontaneous variations in mutants can be followed through as hereditary factors in successive generations of offspring. The genes in the germ plasma are the carriers of the traits, and a variation (mutation) in a gene would cause a variation (mutation) in the offspring. But, generally, only single variations appear at a time; they may lead to new races, not to new species.
Spontaneous mutations are far too few and insufficient in magnitude to bring about the appearance of new species and to explain how the world of animals came into existence. Despite all spontaneous variations no new species of mammals are known to have been created since the close of the Ice Age. In 1907, V. L. Kellogg of Stanford University came to the following conclusion: “The fair truth is that the Darwinian selection theories, considered with regard to their claimed capacity to be an independently sufficient mechanical explanation of descent, stand today seriously discredited in the biological world. On the other hand, it is also fair truth to say that no replacing hypothesis or theory of species forming has been offered by the opponents of selection which has met with any general or even considerable acceptance by naturalists. Mutations seem to be too few and far between; for orthogenesis we can discover no satisfactory mechanism; and the same is true for the Lamarckian theories of modification by the cumulation, through inheritance, of acquired or ontogenic characters.” 14
Kellogg also observed that one group of scientists “denies in toto any effectiveness or capacity for species forming on the part of natural selection, while the other group, a larger … sees in natural selection an evolutionary factor capable of initiating nothing, dependent wholly for any effectiveness on some primary factor or factors controlling the origin and direction of variation, but capable of extinguishing all unadapted, unfit lines of development. … For my part,” Kellogg concluded, “it seems better to go back to the old and safe Ignoramus standpoint.” Thus the entire problem was shunted back to the place it occupied before The Origin of Species.
Evolution is the principle. Darwin’s contribution to the principle is natural selection as the mechanism of evolution. If natural selection, sharing the fate of sexual selection, is not the mechanism of the origin of species, Darwin’s contribution is reduced to very little – only to the role of natural selection in weeding out the unfit.
H. Fairfield Osborn, a leading American evolutionist, wrote: “In contrast to the unity of opinion on the law of evolution is the wide diversity of opinion on the causes of evolution. In fact, the causes of the evolution of life are as mysterious as the law of evolution is certain.” 15And again: “It may be said that Darwin’s law of selection as a natural explanation of the origin of all fitness in form and function has also lost its, prestige at the present time, and all of Darwinism which now meets with universal acceptance is the law of the survival of the fittest, a limited application of Darwin’s great idea as expressed by Herbert Spencer.” 16
These were not the opinions of single evolutionists, but generally held views. William Bateson, a leading English evolutionist, in his address before the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1921, said: “When students of other sciences ask us – what is now currently believed about the origin of species we have no clear answer to give. Faith has given place to agnosticism. … Variation of many kinds, often considerable, we daily witness, but no origin of species…. I have put before you very frankly the considerations which have made us agnostic as to the actual mode and processes of evolution.” 17
L. T. More, in a series of guest lectures delivered at Princeton University, asked: “If natural selection is a force which can destroy but cannot create species and if the reasons for this destruction are unknown, of what value is the theory to mankind? … The collapse of the theory of natural selection leaves the philosophy of mechanistic materialism in a sorry plight.” 18
On De Vries’s theory of evolution by mutations More said: “The idea is destructive to scientific theory, as it really does away with the whole idea of continuity which should be the basis of an evolution theory. … The thought at once occurs that each of the surprising breaks in the paleontological record, such an one as separates the reptile from the feathered bird, may have been taken at a single leap during an overstimulated period of nature.” 19
De Vries made observations of spontaneous mutations in plants; a decade later T. H. Morgan found spontaneous mutations in Drosophila melanogaster, the vinegar fly, including various colorings of the eyes and various lengths of wings, and many other changes in progeny not present in any of the ancestors. H. J. Muller, by subjecting the vinegar fly to the action of x-rays, increased the frequency of mutations one hundred and fifty times. It was also found that some chemicals and temperatures close to the limits that the insect organism can endure may act as mutation-provoking agents.
Muller concluded that spontaneous mutations are “usually due to an accidental individual molecular or submolecular collision, occurring in the course of thermal agitation,” and this is indicated “by the amount of rise in the frequency of mutations that is observed when the temperature is raised, so long as temperatures normal to the organism are not transgressed. Since chemical changes similar to but more extreme than those of thermal agitation may also be produced by x-rays and other high-energy radiation and by ultra-violet, it is not surprising that mutations like the so-called ‘spontaneous’ ones can be induced in great abundance by these means, and that the number of these mutations is, in general, proportional to the number of physical ‘hits’ caused by the radiation.” 20
The origin of mutations in the evening primrose, observed by De Vries, like every other spontaneous mutation, must be ascribed to one of those irritants acting directly on the genes. It could have been the result of hits by cosmic rays; only it must be shown why the evening primrose is more susceptible to such an agent than most other plants.
The practical absence of x-rays in surrounding nature caused this powerful agent of mutations in laboratories to be regarded as not operative in spontaneous mutations and therefore also not in the process of evolution. Muller stressed this point. However, an x-ray component is present in radium radiation. At the beginning of the present century it was noticed that tadpoles or embryonic frogs in the presence of a tube containing radium give rise to various freaks.21 Radioactivity and cosmic radiation are agents present in nature, one of terrestrial, the other of extraterrestrial, origin.
If, as the experiments with the vinegar fly demonstrated, a mutation of some gene can produce a wingless fly, many mutations simultaneously or in quick succession would be quite able to transform an animal or plant into a new species. In the bomb craters of London new plants, not previously known on the British Isles, and possibly not known anywhere, were seen to sprout. “Rare plants, unknown to modern British botany, were discovered in the bomb craters and ruins of London in 1943.” 22It appears that the thermal action of bomb explosions was the cause of multiple metamorphoses in the genes of seeds and pollens. If this is so, then the statement made earlier that no new species has been observed in the process of making its first appearance must be retracted.
It must be retracted anyway, so far as the plant (not animal) kingdom is concerned, in view of the claims made by a certain school of plant geneticists that now and then some plants may produce an abnormal offspring with a double number of chromosomes and, further, that, though hybrids in plants, as in animals, generally have no offspring, hybrids from the double-chromosome parents may occasionally produce a true new species: it can reproduce itself indefinitely, but it cannot reproduce by crossing with the original species, or if it does the offspring resulting from the crossbreeding is sterile. An alkaloid (colchicine) from the roots of the autumn crocus, when applied to cells in the process of division, helps to produce cells with twice the normal number of chromosomes. Thus a fertile cross between the radish and the cabbage was achieved, and the proponents of “cataclysmic evolution” claim that chance appearance of double-chromosome plants was responsible in the past for the origin of cultivated wheat, oats, sugar cane, cotton, and tobacco, and will permit production in the laboratory of a grain that would combine the desirable qualities of both wheat and rye.
What causes a plant to produce spontaneously an offspring with a double number of chromosomes is not yet sufficiently known; and most probably, again, thermal, chemical, or radioactive agents are involved.
Cataclysmic Evolution
“When, therefore, the earth, covered with mud from the recent flood, became heated up by the hot and genial rays of the sun, she brought forth innumerable forms of life, in part of ancient shapes, and – in part creatures new and strange.” – Ovid: Metamorphoses (transl. F. J. Miller) [GPT Analysis]
An enormous expansion of radioactivity in bygone ages was postulated by various theorists as an explanation of great oscillations in climate in the past; the thermal effect of widespread radioactivity is likewise claimed as a motive force by the author of the modern version of the theory of drifting continents (Du Toit). It appears to me that if such radioactivity really occurred its mutation effect could not have failed to take place too.
Cosmic rays or charges, hitting nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere, transform this element into radiocarbon. These charges, arriving from outside the earth, are very strong per particle, averaging several billions of electron volts and sometimes carrying a potential of a hundred billion electron volts. As comparatively few such rays or charges hit our atmosphere, their general effect is not spectacular.
But it is conceivable that, where a cosmic ray or charge hits a gene of germ plasma, a biological mutation takes place, comparable to the physical transmutation of the elements. After all, the genes, like any proteins, are biochemical compounds composed of carbon, nitrogen, and a few other elements. Should a somatic chromosome be hit by a powerful charge, it might at worst cause disorganized growth and be the origin of a neoplasma; but if the genes of the germ plasma should be the target of a collision with a cosmic ray or secondary radiation, a mutation in the progeny might ensue; and should many such hits occur, the origin of a new species, most probably incapable of individual or genetic life, but in some cases capable, could be expected. Thus, increased radioactivity coming from outside this planet or from the bowels of the earth could be the cause of the spontaneous origin of new species. Should an interplanetary discharge take place between the earth and another celestial body, such as a planet, a planetoid, a trail of meteorites, or a charged cloud of gases, with possibly billions of volts of potential difference and nuclear fission or fusion, the effect would be similar to that of an explosion of many hydrogen bombs with ensuing procreation of monstrosities and growth anomalies on a large scale.
What matters is that the principle that can cause the origin of species exists in nature. The irony lies in the circumstance that Darwin saw in catastrophism the chief adversary of his theory of the origin of species, being led by the conviction that new species could evolve as a result of competition with accidental characteristics serving as weapons only if almost limitless time were at the disposal of that competition, with no catastrophes intervening. Now exactly the opposite is true: competition cannot cause new species to evolve. Mutations in single traits and the resulting new varieties within a species are caused by radiation hitting some gene, as did the x-rays in the experiments on the vinegar fly; it is a hit, or a collision, or a miniature catastrophe. In order for a simultaneous mutation of many characteristics to occur, with a new species as a resultant, a radiation shower of terrestrial or extraterrestrial origin must take place. Therefore we are led to the belief that evolution is a process initiated in catastrophes. Numerous catastrophes or bursts of effective radiation must have taken place in the geological past in order to change so radically the living forms on earth, as the record of fossils embedded in lava and sediment bears witness.
How would this understanding of evolution meet the facts, and especially those facts that always appeared to be in discord with the theory of natural selection?
The fact that some organisms, like foraminifera, survived all geological ages without participating in evolution, a point of perplexity in the theory of natural selection, would be explained by catastrophic evolution in which many species would be destroyed, others would be subjected to multiple mutations, and some specimens of species would escape mutations and procreate their old form.
The fact that the geological record shows a sudden emergence of many new forms at the beginning of each geological age does not require the artificial explanation that the records are always defective; the geological records truly reflect the changes in the animal and plant worlds from one period of geological time to the next. Many of the new species evolved in the wake of a global catastrophe, at the beginning of a new age, were entombed in a subsequent paroxysm of nature at the end of that age.
The fact that in many cases the intermediary links between present-day species are missing, as well as those between various species of the geological record, a vexing problem, is understandable in the light of sudden and multiple variations that gave rise to new species.
It was objected that if a new characteristic appeared in only a single animal, as the theory of natural selection claims, or even in a few animals of the same species, it would disappear in succeeding generations through interbreeding unless the new animal had been protected by isolation on secluded islands. However, in catastrophic evolution, the simultaneous mutation of many genes could produce a new species at the first fertilization; all the offspring of a litter could be affected similarly. And it is not inconceivable that in more than one creature of the same species, under similar circumstances of radiation, similar changes in the genes would occur; so in the x-ray experiments on Drosophila, similar mutations occurred in more than one fly.
The objection to the theory of natural selection, that the developed plan in a new species must appear suddenly or the race would expire – as in the case of the kangaroo pockets – is answerable within the framework of catastrophic evolution; however, the purposefulness of animal structures will remain a problem deserving of as much wonder as, for instance, the purposeful behavior of leucocytes in the blood that rush to combat a noxious intruder.
The fact stressed by Agassiz that numerous earlier species of fish showed a more highly developed organism when compared with later species of fish can be explained by the destruction of earlier forms, not in the process of competition, but in upheavals against which superior structure is no defense.The observation that healthy species of animals, like mammoths, with no sign of degeneration suddenly became extinct greatly troubled the evolutionists. This fact is unexplainable by natural selection or the principle of competition; not so by the catastrophic intervention of nature.
The fact that at several stages of the past many animals of various species and many species in toto were rather suddenly exterminated, in conflict with the idea of slow extinction in natural selection, conforms with the theory of cataclysmic evolution.
The enigmatic observation that the larger animals were particularly subject to extinction – the giant mammals that succumbed at the end of the Tertiary, and again in the Pleistocene, as earlier the dinosaurs did – is comprehensible if one thinks of the better chances smaller animals have of finding refuge from the ravages of nature.
Natural selection had its role, too, but not in procreating new species; it was a decisive factor in the survival or dying out of new forms in the struggle for existence, not only between individuals, races, species, and orders, but also against the elements. In natural selection all those forms were weeded out that could not meet competition or the rapidly changing conditions of a world in upheaval.
The origin of new species from old could be caused by the processes that can be duplicated in laboratories – by excessive radiation or some other irritant in abnormal doses, thermal or chemical, all of which must have taken part in natural catastrophes of the past, and could have played a role in building new species, as the case of new plants in the bomb craters appears to indicate.
The theory of evolution is vindicated by catastrophic events in the earth’s past; the proclaimed enemy of this theory proved to be its only ally. The real enemy of the theory of evolution is the teaching of uniformity, or the non-occurrence of any extraordinary events in the past. This teaching, called by Darwin the mainstay of the theory of evolution, almost set the theory apart from reality.
Great catastrophes of the past accompanied by electrical discharges and followed by radioactivity could have produced sudden and multiple mutations of the kind achieved today by experimenters, but on an immense scale. The past of mankind, and of the animal and plant kingdoms, too, must now be viewed in the light of the experience of Hiroshima and no longer from the portholes of the Beagle.23
References
- Life: Letters and Journals, I, 253.
- Ibid.
- C. C. Gillispie: Genesis and Geology (1951), pp. 142-43; Sedgwick: Presidential Address (1831), Proceedings of the Geological Society, I, 313.
As early as 1832, Sir Henry T. de la Beche in his Geological Manual, p. 173, claimed the coexistence of man with extinct animals, because caverns closed by “fragments of rock transported from a distance” contain the remains of man and extinct animals: “he existed previous to the catastrophe which overwhelmed him and them.” - The Origin of Species, Chap. X.
- Ibid.
- Thomas H. Huxley: On the Reception of the Origin of Species, printed as Chap. XIV of the first volume of The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. by his son Francis Darwin, in the Appleton edition of the Works of Charles Darwin.
- Thomas H. Huxley: The Origin of Species (1860), reprinted in his Darwiniana, Collective Essays (1893), II, 74.
- Darwin: Life and Letters, ed. Francis Darwin, II, 210.
- Huxley: Darwiniana, Collective Essays (1893), II, Preface.
- Darwin: Life and Letters, II, 199; L. T. More: The Dogma of Evolution (1925), p. 172.
- The Origin of Species, Chapter XI.
- Darwin: Life and Letters, 11, 27.
- V. L. Kellogg: Darwinism Today (1907), p. 5.
- Henry Fairfield Osborn: The Origin and Evolution of Life (1917), p. ix.
- Ibid., p. xv.
- William Bateson: Evolutionary Faith and Modern Doubts, Science, LV, 55.
- More: The Dogma of Evolution (1925), p. 240.
- Ibid., p. 214.
- Muller: The Works of the Genes, in H. J. Muller, C. G. Little, and L. H. Snyder: Genetics, Medicine and Man (1947), p. 27.
- R. H. Bradbury: Radium and Radioactivity in General, Journal of the Franklin Institute, Vol. CLIX, No. 3 (1905).
- Botany, Britannica Book of the Year, 1944, p. 117.
- The ship on which Charles Darwin as a young naturalist made his voyage around the globe.
GPT Analysis
I tasked ChatGPT to evaluate Metamorphoses in the context of cataclysmic cycles and cosmogenic mutagenesis.
Ovid’s depiction of the reemergence of life after the flood aligns more closely with the aftermath of a cataclysm than a primeval act of creation. The emphasis on both “ancient shapes” and “creatures new and strange” suggests a renewal or reconfiguration of preexisting life rather than an original act of creation ex nihilo. This distinction places Ovid’s narrative in the realm of cyclical destruction and regeneration, consistent with many ancient cosmologies and now echoed in modern theories of evolution and extinction events.
Key Points Supporting a Cataclysmic Interpretation:
- The Flood as a Reset Mechanism:
- The flood is portrayed as a purging force, erasing much of what existed before. Such an event mirrors real-world catastrophic events, like asteroid impacts or massive volcanic eruptions, which reset ecosystems and biodiversity.
- In this framework, life does not emerge from nothing but from the remnants of what survived, altered by the conditions of the catastrophe.
- Ancient Shapes and New Forms:
- The return of “ancient shapes” suggests continuity, akin to the survival of resilient species or forms through cataclysmic events.
- The emergence of “creatures new and strange” aligns with the idea of adaptive radiation or rapid evolutionary diversification filling ecological niches left vacant by the catastrophe.
- A World Transformed:
- Ovid’s narrative describes a world profoundly altered by the flood, requiring life to reassert itself under new conditions. This echoes the aftermath of mass extinctions in Earth’s history, such as the Permian-Triassic or Cretaceous-Paleogene events, where new forms dominated post-cataclysm ecosystems.
- Solar Energy as a Mutagenic Catalyst:
- The Sun’s “hot and genial rays” acting on the mud could symbolize a naturalistic process—cosmic or solar radiation interacting with Earth’s altered environment to spur mutation and variation. This suggests that new life forms arise not through divine fiat but through environmental and physical forces acting on the remnants of the old.
- Mythological Patterns Reflecting Geohistorical Realities:
- The mythological framework may encode humanity’s collective memory of real cataclysmic events, such as floods, volcanic eruptions, or asteroid impacts. These memories could be reinterpreted as cycles of destruction and rebirth, emphasizing resilience and transformation.
Theoretical Parallels with Cataclysmic Evolution:
- Mass Extinctions and Evolutionary Bursts:
Just as Metamorphoses narrates the renewal of life after a great flood, the fossil record shows that mass extinction events are followed by bursts of evolutionary innovation. The coexistence of ancient and new species is a hallmark of these periods.- Survivors and Innovators:
- Some life forms survive relatively unchanged (“ancient shapes”), as they are well-adapted to a wide range of conditions.
- Other niches are filled by new, rapidly evolving forms, driven by mutation and environmental pressures—a process mirrored in Ovid’s “new and strange creatures.”
- Environmental Shifts as Drivers of Change:
Post-cataclysm environments are dynamic and often drastically different from what came before. Ovid’s flood story captures this idea, with the Sun and Earth’s mud symbolizing the interplay of forces driving renewal and transformation.Conclusion: A Cataclysmic Framework
Ovid’s narrative is more evocative of the aftermath of a global cataclysm than a primordial creation event. It reflects a deep understanding—mythological yet resonant with scientific insights—of how life persists, transforms, and adapts in response to massive disruptions. By emphasizing both continuity (ancient forms) and novelty (new creatures), Ovid’s work metaphorically prefigures modern theories of evolution, extinction, and the resilience of life in the face of upheaval.
“Jutting out of the canyon wall, almost immediately overhead, was the forward portion of a large and very ancient vessel. A curved stem head swept up from its prow. Along both sides of the vessel were clearly discernible circular marks in the wood, quite possibly left by shields which at one time had been attached to the vessel. Mrs. Botts is not sure what kind of an ancient ship she and her husband, and an old prospector, saw in the desert canyon. It could have been
Phoenician, or it could have been Roman, but she feels that it was Viking.”
In July 1947 a Swedish deep-sea expedition left Göteborg on the Albatross for a fifteen-month journey around the world to investigate the bottom of the seas on the seventeen thousand miles of the ship’s course with the help of a newly constructed vacuum core sampler. In the sediment that covers the rocky bottom of the oceans the expedition found, in the words of its leader, H.Pettersson, director of the Oceanographic Institute at Göteborg, “evidence of great catastrophes that have altered the face of the earth.”
“The end of Bretton Woods allowed for an unprecedented ability to manage systemic shocks, including those potentially arising from geomagnetic and planetary cycles. While this connection remains speculative, the timing of the dollar’s decoupling and the NMDP’s acceleration suggests a deeper interrelation between human systems and Earth’s dynamic processes. Could this flexibility be a necessary adaptation for navigating a period of intensified geophysical upheaval?”
“It is accepted that the geomagnetic field resembles that of a dipole (or bar magnet) located at the earth’s center. This theoretical representation accounts for about 90% of the geomagnetic field and provides geophysicists with the familiar diagram showing magnetic lines of force exiting one polar region and entering the other. This neat portrait of the geomagnetic field is marred in practice by several important anomalies that cast doubt upon the almost universally accepted view that the geomagnetic field is a product of dynamo action.”
“When the fated day of deluge comes, after what fashion will the earth for the most part be over whelmed by the waves? Will it be by the strength of Ocean and the rise of the outer sea against us? Or will the rain descend uninterruptedly, and will summer be cut out of the year while persistent winter bursts its clouds and pours down endless masses of water? Or will earth herself open new reservoirs and shed forth rivers more abundantly? Or will a single cause be insufficient to produce such a catastrophe, and all the methods conspire together, the rains descending and the river floods rising, and the seas hurrying in hot haste from their place all agencies in concert bent upon the one aim, the destruction of the human race? The last is the truth.” – Seneca (65 AD)
“Could erosion have swept whole continents clean? And where did all these sediments go? Mainstream science believes that its armory of fossil succession, radiometric dating, and episodic erosion and sedimentation, caused by changing sea levels and the rising and subsiding of land are more than sufficent. It is a matter of opinion whether these accepted processes can cope with the sheer number and magnitudes of the gaps in the Stratigraphic Record.”
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