46 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



sort do, indeed, adjust the organism to its external environ- 

 ment, but they are innate and not acquired. Hence they are 

 often spoken of as preadaptations; for they precede, in a 

 sense, the organism's contact with the environing element to 

 which they adjust it. They may possibly, it is true, have been 

 acquired in the distant past, but they have now a specific 

 germinal foundation, and no one was ever privileged to wit- 

 ness their initial production de novo. The whale, for example, 

 though fundamentally a warm-blooded mammal, is super- 

 ficially a fish, by reason of such a preadaptation to its marine 

 environment. Preadaptation is of common occurrence, espe- 

 cially among parasites, symbiotes, commensals, and inquilines. 

 Wasmann cites innumerable instances of beetles and flies so 

 profoundly modified, in accommodation to their mode of life 

 as guests in termite nests, that the systematist hesitates to 

 classify them under any of the accepted orders of insects. 

 Here the adaptive modification so disturbs the underlying 

 homology as to make of these creatures taxonomical ambigui- 

 ties. In the case of Termitomyia, he tells us, "the whole de- 

 velopment of the individual has been so modified that it 

 resembles that of a viviparous mammal rather than that of a 

 fly." ("The Problem of Evolution," pp. 14, 15.) 



Such modifications, however, amount to major, and not 

 merely minor, differences. We are not dealing, therefore, with 

 varietal distinctions here, but with specific, generic, and even 

 ordinal differences. With reference to the phenomenon of adap- 

 tive modification,^ three things, consequently, are worthy of 

 note: (1) it has the semblance of being adventitious to the un- 



* It may be remarked, in passing, that experimental genetics and 

 mutation furnish no clue to the origin of adaptive characters. The 

 Lamarckian idea alone gives promise in this direction. Orthogenesis 

 leaves unsolved the mystery of preadaptation; yet only orthogenetic 

 systems of evolution can be constructed on the basis of genetical facts. 

 "Mutations and Mendelism," says Kellogg, "may explain the origin of 

 new species in some measure, but they do not explain adaptation in 

 the slightest degree." {Atlantic Monthly, April, 1924, pp. 488, 489.) 

 We have seen in the previous chapter that they are impotent to ex- 

 plain in any measure the origin of new species. 



