90 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



complete facts) , ''that we know the mode of origin of the hu- 

 man species; our knowledge of human evolution has reached 

 a point not only where a number of links are thoroughly- 

 known but the characters of the missing links can be very 

 clearly predicated." {Science, Feb. 24, 1922.) We will not 

 dispute his contention; for it is perfectly true, that, in each 

 and every case, all the missing details can be so exactly predi- 

 cated that the resulting description might well put to shame 

 the account of a contemporary eyewitness. The only diffi- 

 culty is that such predication is the fruit of pure imagination. 

 Scientific reconstructions, whether in the literary, plastic, or 

 pictorial, form, are no more scientific than historical novels are 

 historical. Both are the outcome of a psychological weakness 

 in the human makeup, namely, its craving for a ''finished 

 picture" — a craving, however, that is never gratified save at 

 the expense of the fragmentary basis of objective fact.* 



In calling into question, however, the scientific value of the 

 so-called "scientific reconstruction," so far as its pretensions 

 to precision and finality are concerned, it is not our intention 

 to discredit those tentative restorations based upon Cuvier's 

 Law of Correlation, provided they profess to be no more than 

 provisional approximations. Many of the structural features 

 of organisms are physiologically interdependent, and there is 

 frequently a close correlation among organs and organ-sys- 

 tems, between which no causal connection or direct physiologi- 

 cal dependence is demonstrable. In virtue of this principle, 

 one structural feature may connote another, in which case it 

 would be legitimate to supply by inference any missing struc- 

 ture implied in the actual existence of its respective correlative. 

 But if any one imagines that the law of correlation enables 

 a scientist to restore the lost integrity of fossil types with any 

 considerable degree of accuracy and finality, he greatly over- 

 estimates the scope of the principle in question. At best it 

 is nothing more than an empirical generalization, which must 

 not be pressed to an extent unwarranted by the inductive 

 process, that first established it. "Certain relations of struc- 

 '•'- See Addenda. 



