12 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



the problem of organic origins. It is recognized, for example, 

 that natural selection would suppress, rather than promote, 

 development, seeing that organs have utility only in the state 

 of perfection and are destitute of selection-value while in the 

 imperfect state of transition. Again, the specific differences 

 that diversify the various types of plants and animals are 

 notoriously deficient in selection-value, and therefore the 

 present differentiation of species cannot be accounted for by 

 means of the principle of natural selection. Finally, unless 

 one is prepared to make the preposterous assumption that the 

 environment is a telic mechanism expressly designed for shap- 

 ing organisms, he is under logical necessity of admitting that 

 the influence of natural selection cannot be anything else than 

 purely destructive. There is, as Wilson points out, no aprior- 

 istic ground for supposing that natural selection could do 

 anything more than maintain the status quo, and as for 

 factual proofs of its effectiveness in a positive sense, they 

 are wholly wanting. Professor Caullery of the Sorbonne, in 

 his Harvard lecture of Feb. 24, 1916, assures us that, "since 

 the time of Darwin, natural selection has remained a purely 

 speculative idea and that no one has been able to show its 

 efficacy in concrete indisputable examples." 



Considerations of this sort induced not only Neo-Lamarck- 

 ians, but many non-partisans as well, to take the field against 

 the Darwinian Selection Principle. Thus Spencer's caustic at- 

 tack became a forerunner of others, and eminent biologists, 

 like Fleischmann, Driesch, T. H. Morgan, and Bateson, have 

 in turn poured the vials of their satire upon the attempts of 

 Neo-Darwinians to rehabilitate the philosophy of natural 

 selection. Wm. Bateson warns those, who persist in their 

 credulity with reference to the Darwinian account of organic 

 teleology, that they "will be wise henceforth to base this faith 

 frankly on the impregnable rock of superstition and to abstain 

 from direct appeals to natural fact." This admonition forms 

 the conclusion of a scathing criticism of what he styles the 

 "fustian of Victorian philosophy." "In the face of what we 



