A Few Thoughts on the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin wrote for a generation who had not accepted evolution and who could not imagine the descent of man from a primate ancestor, let alone a simple cell organism. Darwin did his work so well that his notion of “descent with modification” is now universally accepted as the order of nature in the organic world. Today, scientists and naturalists can hardly realize the novelty of this idea, or that their fathers considered it a scientific heresy to be condemned rather than seriously discussed.
Yet it is also true today that a fierce wave of opposition to Darwin’s theory of evolution has been leveraging its power on the scientific community. Those who object to Darwin’s theory do so mostly on the basis of religious belief. But the few in the scientific community who disagree with the theory of evolution do so largely on the basis of how the change of species occurred, not that change itself occurred.The objectors minimize the fact of natural selection and instead ascribe it to laws of variation, heredity, of use and disuse, and of intelligence. These views and objections have been raised by the school of laboratory naturalists, to whom the peculiarities and distinctions of species, as such, their distribution and their affinities, have little interest as compared with the problems of histology and embryology, of physiology and morphology. While their work in these departments of science is important, it is not the kind of research that enables one to form a sound judgment on the issues involved in the action of the law of natural selection. These rest mainly on the relations of species to species in a state of nature rather than on the anatomy or physiology of organs.
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