58 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



(Cf. Physiology, ed. of 1920, p. 1084,) In a word, the theory 

 of heredity, which seeks to strip inheritance of its uniqueness 

 as a vital process by identifying it with the more general phys- 

 icochemical processes occurring in the organism, is a ground- 

 less speculation, that, far from explaining, flouts the very ob- 

 servational data which it pretends to elucidate. Kurz und gut! 

 to requite the mechanist, Schafer, with his own Danielesque 

 phrase, here, as elsewhere, the mechanists have succeeded in 

 extracting from the facts, not what the facts themselves pro- 

 claim, but what preexisted in their own highly-cultured imag- 

 inations so well-stocked with cogs, cranks, ball bearings, and 

 other sesthetic imagery emanating from polytechnic schools 

 and factories. 



But in arguing from the existence of parallelism in the 

 inorganic world to its possibility in the organic world, we 

 are less liable to displease the mechanists than those other 

 extremists, the neo-vitalists, who will be prone to deny all 

 parity between living, and inanimate, matter. Fortunately, 

 we are in a position to appease the scruples of the latter by 

 referring to the facts of convergence as universally accepted 

 evidence that the phenomenon of parallelism occurs in animate, 

 no less than inanimate, nature. Admitting, therefore, that the 

 laws of organic morphology are of a higher order than those 

 which regulate atomic, molecular, and multimolecular struc- 

 ture, these facts attest, nevertheless, that parallelisms arise 

 in organisms of separate ancestry which are due, not to hered- 

 ity, but to the uniform action of universal morphogenetic 

 forces. Hence general laws can be invoked to account for 

 organic uniformities with the same right that they are 

 invoked to account for resemblances existing between the 

 various members of a chemical "family" like the Halogens. 

 And why should this not be so? Organisms have much in 

 common that transcends any possible scheme of evolution and 

 that cannot be brought into alignment with the position arbi- 

 trarily assigned them in the evolutionary family-tree. They 

 all originate as single cells. Their common means of growth 



