HOMOLOGY AND ITS INTERPRETATION 63 



But, whether it be upon, or beneath, the surface, similitude 

 of any kind suffices to establish our contention that in- 

 heritance is not the only similifying influence present in or- 

 ganisms, and that resemblance is perfectly compatible with 

 independence of ancestry. We have, therefore, an alternative 

 for inheritance in the explanation of organic uniformities, and 

 by the admission of this alternative, which, for the rest, is 

 factually attested by the universally acknowledged phenomena 

 of convergence, the inference of common descent from struc- 

 tural resemblance is shorn of the last remnant of its demon- 

 strative force, as an a posteriori argument. 



But a still more serious objection to the evolutionary inter- 

 pretation of homology and preadaptation arises from its 

 intrinsic incoherency. Evolution, as previously stated, is as- 

 sumed to be the resultant of a twofold process, namely, in- 

 heritance and variation. The first is a conservative and 

 similifying process, which transmits. The second is a progres- 

 sive and diversifying process, which diverts. To the former 

 process are due the uniformities of homology, to the latter the 

 deviations of adaptation. Upon the admission of evolutionists 

 themselves, however, neither of these processes behaves in a 

 manner consistent with its general nature, and both of them 

 are flagrantly unfaithful to the principal roles assigned to 

 them. Nowadays the hereditary process transmits adapta- 

 tional, as well as homologous, characters. If, then, adapta- 

 tional characters are more recent than homologous characters, 

 there must have been a time when inheritance ceased to simi- 

 lify and become a diversifying process by transmitting what 

 it did not receive from the previous generation. There were 

 times when, not content with simply reiterating the past, it 

 began to divert former tendencies into novel channels. In 

 other words, inheritance becomes dualized into a paradoxical 

 process, which both perpetuates the old and appropriates the 

 new. The same inconsistency is manifest in the process of 

 variation, which capriciously produces convergent, no less 

 than divergent, adaptations. In two fundamentally identical 



