Mr. Darwin did not invent evolution any more than
George Stephenson invented the steam-engine, or Mr. Edison the electric
telegraph. We are not descended from men with tails, any more than we
are descended from Indian elephants. There is no evidence that we have
anything in particular more than the remotest fiftieth cousinship with
our poor relation the West African gorilla. Science is not in search of
a 'missing link'; few links are anywhere missing, and those are for the
most part wholly unimportant ones. If we found the imaginary link in
question, he would not be a monkey, nor yet in any way a tailed man. And
so forth generally through the whole list of popular beliefs and current
fallacies as to the real meaning of evolutionary teaching. Whatever most
people think evolutionary is for the most part a pure parody of the
evolutionist's opinion.
But a more serious error than all these pervades what we may call the
drawing-room view of the evolutionist theory. So far as Society with a
big initial is concerned, evolutionism first began to be talked about,
and therefore known (for Society does not read; it listens, or rather it
overhears and catches fragmentary echoes) when Darwin published his
'Origin of Species.' That great book consisted simply of a theory as to
the causes which led to the distinctions of kind between plants and
animals. With evolution at large it had nothing to do; it took for
granted the origin of sun, moon, and stars, planets and comets, the
earth and all that in it is, the sea and the dry land, the mountains and
the valleys, nay even life itself in the crude form, everything in fact,
save the one point of the various types and species of living beings.
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