362 THE CONCEPT OF EVOLUTION 



by analytic emancipation or exfoliation of originally complex 

 buds. An Italian naturalist has at great length sought to 

 show that reptiles evolved from birds, not birds from reptiles, 

 and the backboneless from the backboned, not the other way 

 round. This reads like a modern version of the suggestion 

 made by Plato in the Timseus that the whole organic world 

 might be formed by degradation from man who was created 

 first. No one has taken these heretical views very seriously, 

 if only for the reason that the rock record is wholly against 

 such an interpretation of what has occurred. A general 

 survey shows that amphibians appeared after fishes, and 

 reptiles after ampihibians, and birds after reptiles. A more 

 detailed survey of particular lineages, like that of horses 

 or elephants, shows that the earlier forms in the series are 

 the more generalised. 



But while a crude topsy-turvy view must be dismissed 

 without hesitation, some find good reason to pause before 

 rejecting the idea that the process of evolution may have 

 been analytic not synthetic. We must remember that the 

 concrete problem of accounting for any of the leading types of 

 organisms or any of the so-called big lifts in evolution is 

 extraordinarily difficult and very far from solution. We 

 must remember that it is extremely difficult to suggest a 

 theory of the origin of the distinctively new. We must 

 remember that in the cases of evolution that are nearest to us, 

 namely in domestic animals and cultivated plants, what is 

 suggested by the facts is not synthetic complexifying but 

 analytic simplification. We are delightedly familiar with 

 the range of colours in modern Sweet Peas, but have we 

 realised the Mendelian conclusion that these are all due to 

 an unpacking of the inheritance of the wild ancestor — which 

 was brought from Sicily at the end of the seventeenth ccn- 



