62 . THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



customary with evolutionists to regard homologous characters 

 as the tenaciously persistent heritage of primeval days, and 

 to look upon adaptational characters as adventitious and ac- 

 cessory to the aforesaid primitive heritage, the supposedly 

 older and more fundamental characters fail to give, by the 

 manifestation of greater fixity, any empirical evidence what- 

 ever of their being more deeply or firmly rooted in the heredi- 

 tary process than the presumably newer adaptational char- 

 acters. We have, therefore, no experimental warrant for 

 appropriating homologous, rather than adaptational, char- 

 acters to the process of inheritance. "It is sometimes 

 asserted," says Goodrich, "that old-established charac- 

 ters are inherited, and that newly begotten ones are not, 

 or are less constant, in their reappearance. This state- 

 ment will not bear critical examination. For, on the one 

 hand, it has been conclusively shown by experimental breeding 

 that the newest characters may be inherited as constantly as 

 the most ancient. . . . While, on the other hand, few charac- 

 ters in plants can be older than the green color due to chloro- 

 phyll, yet it is sufficient to cut off the light from a germinating 

 seed for the greenness to fail to appear. Again, ever since 

 Devonian times vertebrates have inherited paired eyes; yet, 

 as Professor Stockard has shown, if a little magnesium chlo- 

 ride is added to the sea water in which the eggs of the fish 

 Fundulus are developing, they will give rise to embryos with 

 one median cyclopean eye! Nor is the suggestion any hap- 

 pier that the, so to speak, more deep-seated and fundamental 

 characters are more constantly inherited than the trivial or 

 superficial. A glance at the organisms around us, or the 

 slightest experimental trial, soon convinces us that the appar- 

 ently least important character may reappear as constantly 

 as the most fundamental. But while an organism may live 

 without some trivial character, it can rarely do so when a 

 fundamental character is absent, hence such incomplete indi- 

 viduals are seldom met in Nature." {Science, Dec. 2, 1921, 

 p. 530.) 



