148 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



rather as materials for the regeneration of chlorophyll than 

 as materials out of which sugars are directly synthesized. 



A new theory has been proposed by Dr. Oskar Baudisch, 

 who seems to have sensed the irrelevance of the formaldehyde 

 hypothesis, and to have sought another solution in connection 

 with the chromogen group of chlorophyll. He finds a more 

 promising starting-point in formaldoxime, which, he claims, 

 readily unites with such metals as magnesium and iron and 

 with formaldehyde, in the presence of light containing ultra- 

 violet rays, to form organic compounds analogous to the 

 chromogen complexes in chlorophyll and haemoglobin. Oximes 

 are compounds formed by the condensation of one molecule 

 of an aldehyde with one molecule of hydroxylamine 

 (NH2OH) and the elimination of a molecule of water. Hence 

 Dr. Baudisch imagines that, given formaldoxime (HaCiN'GH), 

 magnesium, and ultra-violet rays, we might expect a spon- 

 taneous formation of chlorophyll leading eventually to the 

 production of organic life. "It is his theory that life may 

 have been caused through the direct action of sunlight upon 

 water, air, and carbon dioxide in the ancient geologic past 

 when, he believes, sunlight was more intense and contained 

 more ultra-violet light and the air contained more water 

 vapor and carbon dioxide than at the present time." {Sci- 

 ence, April 6, 1923, Supplement XII.) 



This is the old Spencerian evasion, the fatuous appeal to 

 "conditions unlike those we know," the unverified and un- 

 verifiable assumption that an unknown past must have been 

 more favorable to spontaneous generation than the known 

 present. In archseozoic times, the temperature was higher, 

 the partial pressure of atmospheric carbon dioxide greater, 

 the percentage of ultra-violet rays in sunlight larger. Such 

 contentions are interesting, if true, but, for all that, they 

 may, "like the flowers that bloom in the spring," have noth- 

 ing to do with the case. Nature does not, and the laboratory 

 cannot, reproduce the conditions which are said to have brought 

 about the spontaneous generation of formaldoxime and its pro- 



