126 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



earlier record should become accessible to us, it could not be 

 expected to throw much light on the problem of organic 

 origins. Most of the primordial sediments have long since 

 been sapped and engulfed by fiery magmas, while terranes 

 less deep have, in all probability, been so metamorphosed that 

 every trace of their fossil contents has perished. The sub- 

 Archaean beginnings of life will thus remain shrouded for- 

 ever in a mystery, which we have no prospect of penetrating. 

 Hence it is the exposed portion of the geological column which 

 continues and will continue to be our sole source of informa- 

 tion, and it is preeminently on this basis that the evolutionary 

 issue will have to be decided. 



Yet what could be more enigmatic than the rock record as 

 it stands? For in nature it possesses none of that idealized 

 integrity and coherence, with which geology has invested it 

 for the purpose of making it understandable. Rather it is a 

 mighty chaos of scattered and fragmentary fossiliferous forma- 

 tions, whose baffling complexity, discontinuity, and ambiguity 

 tax the ingenuity of the most sagacious interpreters. Trans- 

 formism is the key to one possible synthesis, which might 

 serve to unify that intricate mass of facts, but it is idle to 

 pretend that this theory is the unique and necessary corollary 

 of the facts as we find them. The palaeontological argument 

 is simply a theoretical construction which presupposes evolu- 

 tion instead of proving it. Its classic pedigrees of the horse, 

 the camel, and the elephant are only credible when we have 

 assumed the "fact" of evolution, and even then, solely upon con- 

 dition that they claim to approximate, rather than assign, the 

 actual ancestry of the animals in question. In palaeontology, 

 as in the field of zoology, evolution is not a conclusion, but an 

 interpretation. In palaeontology, otherwise than in the field of 

 genetics, evolution is not amenable to the check of experi- 

 mental tests, because here it deals not with that which is, but 

 with that which was. Here the sole objective basis is the mu- 

 tilated and partially obliterated record of a march of events, 

 which no one has observed and which will never be repeated. 



