152 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



spontaneous or artificial. "Far be it from any man of science," 

 he says, "to affirm that any given set of phenomena is not a fit 

 subject of inquiry and that there is any limit to what may be 

 revealed in answer to systematic and well-directed investiga- 

 tion. In the present instance, however, it appears to me that 

 this is not a field for the chemist nor one in which chem- 

 istry is likely to afford any assistance whatever." In any 

 case, the idea that a chaos of unassorted elements and un- 

 directed forces could succeed where the skill of the chemist 

 fails is preposterous. No known or conceivable process, or 

 group of processes, at work in inorganic nature, is equal to 

 the task. Chance is an explanation only for minds insensible 

 to the beauty and order of organic life. 



Darwin inoculated biological science with this Epicurean 

 metaphysics, when, in his "Origin of Species," he ascribed 

 discriminating and selective powers of great delicacy and 

 precision to the blind factors of a heterogeneous and variable 

 environment. He compared natural selection to artificial se- 

 lection, and in so doing, he was led astray by a false impli- 

 cation of his own analogy — "I have called this principle," 

 he says, "by which each slight variation, if useful, is pre- 

 served, by the term natural selection, in order to mark its 

 relation to man's power of selection." ("Origin of Species," 

 6th ed., c. Ill, p. 58.) Having likened the unintelligent and 

 fortuitous selection and elimination exercised by the environ- 

 ment to the intelligent and purposive selection and elimination 

 practiced by animal breeders and horticulturists, he pressed 

 the analogy to the unwarranted extent of attributing to a 

 blind, lifeless, and impersonal aggregate of minerals, liquids, 

 and gases superhuman powers of discretion. To preserve 

 even the semblance of parity, he ought first to have expur- 

 gated the process of artificial selection by getting rid of the 

 element of human intelligence, which lurks therein, and viti- 

 ates its parallelism with the unconscious and purposeless 

 havoc wrought at random by the blind and uncoordinated 

 agencies of the environment. If inorganic nature were a vast 



