68 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



he says: "I find three more or less contradictory systems of 

 geologic thought . . . standing side by side in Britain. I shall 

 call one of them Catastrophism, another Uniformitarianism, 

 the third Evolutionism." ("Lay Sermons," p. 229.) Obvi- 

 ously, then, fixism is separable from the hypothesis of 

 repeated catastrophes alternating with repeated "creations." 

 Stated in proper terms, it is at one with evolutionism in re- 

 jecting as undemonstrated and improbable the postulate of 

 reiterated cataclysms. It freely acknowledges that, in the ab- 

 sence of positive evidence of their occurrence, the presumption 

 is against extraordinary events, like wholesale catastrophes. 

 It sanctions the uniformitarian tenet that ordinary cosmic 

 processes are to be preferred to exceptional ones as a basis 

 of geological explanation, and it repudiates as unscientific any 

 recourse to the unusual or the miraculous in accounting for 

 natural phenomena. Its sole point of disagreement with evo- 

 lutionism is its refusal to admit organic changes of specific 

 magnitude. It does, however, admit germinal changes of 

 varietal magnitude. It also recognizes that the external char- 

 acters of the phenotype are the joint product of germinal fac- 

 tors and environmental stimuli, and admits, in consequence, the 

 possibility of purely somatic changes of considerable profun- 

 dity being induced by widespread and persistent alterations in 

 environmental conditions. Like Darwin, the uniformitarian 

 fixist ascribes the origination of organic life to a single vivi- 

 fying act on the part of the Creator, an act, however, that 

 was formative rather than creative, because the primal forms 

 of life, whether few or many, were all evolved through Divine 

 influence from preexistent inorganic matter. Unlike Darwin, 

 he ascribes the continuation of organic life to generative proc- 

 esses that were univocal {generationes univocae) , and not 

 gradually-equivocal {generationes paulatim aequivocae). In 

 the next chapter, we shall see that, in attributing the initial 

 formation of species to a Divine act, neither Darwin nor the 

 creationists exposed themselves to the charge of explaining 

 the "natural" by means of the "miraculous." And, as for 



