Page:The World's Most Famous Court Trial - 1925.djvu/262

258 as a result of special creation, One can simply say, "God did it," and not ask why. But such explanations do not satisfy modern minds. On the other hand, their explanation in terms of evolution give reasonableness and consistency to a large body of facts. The fossils appear in such an order in time as to constitute evidence for evolution. Existing animals are distributed over the surface of the earth in a manner that confirms their geological origins.

The facts of physiology tell a similar story. Life and the living stuff is the same sort of thing wherever we find it, thus lending support to the idea that it has all descended from the same primitive source from which it has inherited its resemblances. A more striking line of physiological evidence is the recently discovered chemical resemblance between the blood of animals previously supposed to be closely related on grounds of their anatomical similarities, for example, apes and monkeys, birds and reptiles and the like. Two entirely independent lines of evidence are here found to interlock to such an extent that evolution is the one reasonable interpretation.

Finally there is the evidence from experimentation: Evolution has taken place before the eyes of men, during the period since animals and plants were first domesticated. The changes have not been profound, because the ten or twenty thousand years since the first animals and plants seem to have been brought under domestication is a brief span of time for evolutionary modification. But it is clear that such modification has occurred and is today occurring under the direction of skillful breeders. The modern science of genetics is beginning to solve the problem of how evolution takes place, although this question is one of extreme difficulty.

The foregoing summary of the various lines of evidence is hopelessly inadequate, since books could be written on each. The point to be appreciated is that all the multitudinous facts of biology hang together in a consistent fashion when viewed in terms of evolution, while they are meaningless when considered as the arbitrary acts of a creator who brought them into existence all at once a few thousand years in the past. Modern biology has developed around two major generalizations, the cell doctrine, and the doctrine of organic evolution. Modern evolutionism dates not from Darwin's "Origin of Species," published in 1859, but from the historic Naturello of Buffen, the first volume of which appeared in 1749, and from the work of the other philosopher-naturalists of the eighteenth century. It is a sad commntcomment [sic] upon the state of popular information that the practical facts of biological science are everywhere acknowledged, while the status of its greatest philosophical generalization remains so commonly unknown. In view of its implications and applications, the doctrine of evolution is second to none in modern thought it has been established by a gradual but irresistible accumulation of facts.

At this point we may examine a common misunderstanding with reference to evolution and the work of Charles Darwin. Suppose we begin with an analogy, illustrating what many be termed the fact, the course and the causes in a progressive series of events. A ship leaves a European port and sails across the Atlantic to New York harbor. We may distinguish between: (1) The fact that the ship actually crossed the ocean, instead of being "created" in the harbor of New York; (2) the course the ship may have pursued, whether direct or indirect, and the like; and (3) the causes that made the ship go, whether an internal propelling force like steam or electricity, an external force like wind or current or even direction by wireless. Compared with the doctrine of evolution, we have: (1) the fact of evolution, as representing the historical series of events; (2) The course followed in evolution, for instance, whether the land vertebrates arose from the fish-like ancestors, birds