60 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



all know that the whales have the general form of the fish, al- 

 though they are mammals, and going more into details we 

 know that the whale's flipper is on the same general plan 

 as that of the ancient saurians. . . . The origin of the eye, ac- 

 cording to evolutionary doctrines, has been a very difficult 

 problem, which gets worse rather than better the more you 

 do for it. Even if we could persuade ourselves that certain 

 cells blundered along by the lucky mating of individuals in 

 whom they were a bit better developed than in the others 

 till they came to form a most complicated organ of sight, it 

 would be a sufficient tax on our credulity to believe that this 

 could come off successfully in some extraordinary lucky spe- 

 cies; but that it should have turned out so well with all kinds 

 of vertebrates is really too much to ask us to swallow. But 

 this is not all: eyes are very widely spread among different 

 classes of invertebrates. More wonderful still, the eyes of cer- 

 tain molluscs and Crustacea are on stalks, and this is found 

 also in various and very different families of fishes. How 

 did this happen? Was it by way of descent from the molluscs 

 or the Crustacea? If not, how could chance have brought 

 about such a similar result in diverse forms?" {Op. cit., pp. 

 233-236.) 



It may be objected that the resemblances of convergence 

 are superficial analogies, not to be confounded with funda- 

 mental homologies. This contention may be disputed; for, as 

 we shall see in the next chapter, there are cases where the 

 convergence is admittedly radical, and not merely superficial. 

 The distinction, moreover, between shallow and basic char- 

 acters is somewhat arbitrary, and its validity is often ques- 

 tionable. When the skeletal homology that relates the 

 amphibia to the mammals, for instance, is traced to the root 

 of the vertebrate family tree, we find it all but disappearing 

 in a primitive Amphioxus-like chordate, whose so-called skele- 

 ton contains no trace of bone or cartilage. Hence, if we go 

 back far enough, the homologies of to-day become the con- 

 vergences of a geological yesterday, and we find the vertebrate 



