A new book by Dr. Austin H. Clark, of the Smithsonian Institution, refutes with convincing evidence a great deal that has long passed as scientific orthodoxy. Though denying creationism, it brings the scientific world back nearer and nearer to the record of Genesis.
The village of Yazki Khas, in Persia, 130 high and 900 feet long, inhabited to-day, as it has been for untold centuries since the site was chosen, because of its inaccessibility to assailants.
There is an old proverb to the effect that it does not matter so much how fast you travel, but rather which way you are headed. In this respect we can say that the case of modern biology is quite hopeful. For ever since its shameful speculative debauch in the seventies and eighties and nineties of the nineteenth century, every single discovery that it has made has helped to bring this and the other related sciences back a little nearer each time to the only trustworthy record that we have of the beginnings of our world, the first chapter of Genesis.
TIME FOR DARWIN’S FUNERAL ORATION
At the turn of the century, or some thirty years ago, the laws of Mendelism were given to the world. From these laws we learn that the various characters of all living things are always transmitted as separable unit characters from parent to offspring. In one presidential address in 1914 and again in another in 1921, Dr. William Bateson, one of the foremost of modern biologists, called a halt to a vast amount of useless speculation by declaring that, although we witness a great deal of contemporary variation among plants and animals, yet we do not see in our modern world anything at all resembling the origin of a new species. And now, in this year 1930, we have the president of the Zoology Section of the British Association, at its recent meeting at Bristol, England, quoting with approval the declaration of the distinguished Continental biologist, Dr. Hans Przibram, to the effect that probably every species of animal above the protozoa may have developed independently of all the others from a distinct species of protozoa. If some three decades ago a prominent German scientist could issue a book entitled “At the Deathbed of Darwinism,” surely it is now high time for some one to speak its funeral oration. Requiescat in pace.
The very latest theory spoken of above, which was placed before the assembled British men of science at their recent meeting last September, that all the modern species have each developed independently from some primitive protozoan form, without being in any way more nearly related than this would imply, is essentially the idea set forth in a very learned work entitled “Nomogenesis,” by Dr. Leo S. Berg, professor of ichthyology in the state university of Leningrad, Russia. This work was translated and published in England in 1926; and in it Dr. Berg defends the idea that our modern organisms “have developed from tens of thousands of primary forms.” It seems a great twisting of language to speak of this theory as a sort of evolution. It may not be quite the old orthodox doctrine of special creation, but it seems much nearer to the idea of direct creation than it is to anything taught by Darwin and the cocksure evolutionists of a half century ago.
A closely related line of thought is taught by Dr. Austin H. Clark, of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C., in his recent book, “The New Evolution: Zoogenesis” (1930). Clark is one of the prominent officials connected with Science Service at Washington, and is thus one of the foremost men of science in America. His specialty is the deep-sea invertebrates, for he has been associated with several deep-sea expeditions in various parts of the world. But his book is revolutionary in its ideas, and directly refutes with convincing evidence a great deal that has long passed as scientific orthodoxy. All this is as it should be; for as Huxley used to say, science commits suicide whenever it adopts a creed. The progress of discovery must inevitably compel a revision of old scientific beliefs and teachings; and since Darwinism at one jump some two generations ago adopted a line of teaching as antagonistic to the Bible doctrine of creation as could possibly be conceived, all the discoveries since must be expected to bring the scientific world back nearer and nearer to the record of Genesis.
EVOLUTION’S CHANGING VIEWPOINT
And this is what we are actually witnessing. Were it not for the still-popular belief in the geological theory of successive “ages,” represented by the alleged successive types of life, modern biological science would now be approximately back to the record of Genesis, that all the distinct types of life originated at approximately the same time by the creative fiat of Jehovah—which for us, or from the scientific point of view, simply means that they originated by some mysterious method not known to science.
Clark denies creationism, his book never mentions God or Christianity in any way whatever. He seems afraid to stir up the religious issue, just as he resolutely dodges the problem of the origin of life, though he is very emphatic in affirming that the law of life only from life “has no exceptions and it is inconceivable that there should be exceptions.”—Page 164.
It would be easy to quote from Clark’s book very emphatic declarations in direct conflict with many cherished beliefs of the evolutionists. But it is not so easy to state Clark’s teachings in such a way as to make them seem self-consistent. For he labors under the handicap of still believing in the popular geological theories about the successive kinds of life that are said to have peopled the earth one after another. He is extremely critical of much that hitherto has passed for biology; but he has taken over quite uncritically the incredible and unscientific theories taught in the name of geology by Lyell and his followers. Accordingly, we need not expect to find that Clark has himself reached a self-consistent scheme. He claims to be an evolutionist; but his evolution has lost most of its familiar aspects, and seems grotesque in many respects, though its author thinks that he is holding strictly and sternly to the facts as now known by modern discoveries.
PROBLEM OF ORIGINS APPROACHED
Our author approaches the problem of origins from the point of view of the great major groups of the animals, usually called the phyla; and he says that the profound distinctions between them have been overlooked or ignored. In Darwin’s day, scientists recognized less than a dozen of these phyla, or larger groups. With our increasing knowledge since Darwin’s time, we have been compelled to increase this number; and Clark now makes them twenty. These phyla are groups of animals so distinct from one another that not by the highest stretch of the imagination can one be supposed to have been derived from any of the others. There are no intergrades or intermediates between any of them known to science either in the living or in the fossil state. As he expresses it: “If we are willing to accept the facts at their face value, which would seem to be the only thing to do, we must believe that there never were such intermediates, or in other words that these major groups from the very first bore the same relation to each other that they do at the present day.”—Page 168.
And again: “All of the phyla or major groups seem to be of simultaneous development—at least we have no evidence that it was otherwise.”—Page 168.
He has been driven to this conclusion because all but one of these major groups have been found represented by typical specimens that are found as fossils in the Cambrian rocks, which, according to the accepted scheme of evolutionary geology, are the verySeven“oldest” of the fossiliferous rocks. As Clark expresses it, “From the very first beginnings of the fossil record, the broader aspects of the animal life upon the earth have remained unchanged.”—Page 100. In other words, away back at the very dawn of the geological record, a starfish, a crustacean, a jointed worm, or a brachiopod, or any of the others, could be recognized as distinct from any of the other kinds, and could just as unmistakably be recognized as belonging to the modern similar forms. And we must remember that this conclusion has been forced upon our modern geologists in spite of the fact that they have had a free hand, an open field, and the entire world to pick from in arranging their pretty little artificial scheme of a chronological order among the fossils. But even so, they have to acknowledge sadly that all of the great major types of life seem to start together ready-made at the very dawn of “geological time.”
BRANCHING TREE UNFIT ILLUSTRATION
Those who have visited any of our big museums are familiar with the groups of animals there displayed as illustrating what is termed the evolution of such animals as the horse, the elephant, or the camel. These groups, of course, are very artificial arrangements of these animals, though to the uninitiated they present a very convincing array of specimens in an alleged chronological order, thus apparently proving an evolutionary development, if we do not keep in mind that the geologists have nothing but the wish as the father of the thought that the little four-toed animal, called by a figure of speech a “horse,” was any older than the larger one which was indeed a real horse like the ones living to-day. Yet even with these fossils thus artificially arranged in an alleged chronological order, Clark tells us that the pedigree(?) of these animals is “frequently interrupted by gaps of various widths, and these gaps are often very broad.”—Page 180.
The existence of these notable gaps, he says, makes the popular illustration of a branching tree very untrue and misleading. “The twigs of the tree do not actually join the branches, and the branches do not join the main trunk; and besides, the main trunk itself is not continuous.”—Pages 180, 181.
But after repeating over and over again the fact that there are no intergrades or intermediates between the various phyla, he proceeds to say about the same for the classes, which are the next lower divisions of the animal kingdom. These also, he says, as a general rule, “are entirely distinct from each other and do not intergrade.”—Page 221. And the next subdivisions, or the classes, he tells us, exhibit the “same phenomenon” of wide gaps, though in a “less extreme form.”—Page 222. “Abrupt discontinuities, becoming progressively less and less pronounced, may be followed further into the suborders, families, genera, and species.”—Page 222. All this is very candid, but very difficult to reconcile with the theory of organic evolution. Certain it is that, instead of our advancing knowledge reducing the size and number of the gaps between the types of animals and plants, as the older evolutionists always said would be the case, it is becoming very evident that the more we really know about the various kinds of life the wider and the more in number these gaps become.
“Man,” says Dr. Clark, “is not an ape, and in spite of the similarity between them, there is not the slightest evidence that man is descended from an ape.”—Page 224. Also, “In the light of all the evidence available at the present time, there is no justification in assuming that such a thing as a ‘missing link’ ever existed, or indeed could ever have existed.”—Pages 226, 227. And he quotes with full approval a very notable paper by Gerrit S. Miller, Jr., in the latest volume of the Reports of the Smithsonian Institution, which is a most devastating argument against the scientific value of the usual arguments based upon the famous Java skull and the Piltdown skull.
AN ACT OF FAITH
I was about to write, “Exit evolution” at the end of this article. But not so. A belief in evolution will still be held by the thousands and the millions, in spite of the clearest and most irrefutable arguments exposing its unscientific character. Why? Because most people believe in evolution as an act of faith. It is a sort of religion with them. It is an illustration of the “will to believe,” rather than an example of the following of logic or reason. As the late Mr. Bradley expressed it, such a theory is merely the finding of bad reasons for what such people believe upon instinct. Man has been said to be a “logical animal;” but it is difficult to convince one of this idea who has read widely in the history of scientific theories. For the history of science gives abundant examples of false ideas which have seized suddenly upon the educated part of mankind, and which have taken decades or even generations to shake off, even after the scientific evidence was abundant and unmistakable that these ideas were nothing but mistakes or blunders. The theory of organic evolution is running true to form in this respect; but we now have ample evidence that it also is only a sad blunder or mistake, destined, like all the others before it, if time should last long enough, to be outgrown and cast upon the dust heap of discarded and outgrown hypotheses.
Yet one result abides. All this discussion, all this concentration of expert study upon the problem of the origin of plants and animals, is directing the attention of the people of this generation to the great primal truth of a real creation back at the beginning of things. An ever-increasing emphasis upon this great primal truth seems to be a vital part of God’s plan for our day. And the reader of this article would do well to give heed to all the other truths that cluster8around this primal truth of a real creation; for the Sabbath has been given by Jehovah to serve as a badge to distinguish those who believe God’s record of a literal creation from the many millions who think they have found another method of explaining the origin of things that is “just as good.” The evidence of the developing history of biology and geology is that man cannot invent a scheme of origins that can stand the acid test of factual discovery; nor can he construct any scheme as reasonable and consistent as that recorded in the first chapters of the Bible.
