EVOLUTION AND GEOLOGY by George McCready Price

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Mar 22, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 12.

EVOLUTION AND GEOLOGY

By George McCready Price

XVI. EXTINCT SPECIES.

BEFORE continuing further this examination of the primary facts in Geology, I pause a moment to get our bearings regarding the relation of this subject to those special truths of the Bible due to the world at the present time.

I have been showing the folly of the Evolution doctrine, by removing its supposed foundation in Geology; for Evolution depends upon Geology, and the prime postulate of Geology is that there has been a succession in the life upon the globe. But, as this notion has been shown to be without a vestige of support in nature, the foundation for every possible scheme of Evolution is thus removed once and forever.

It may be that for many of my readers the language and arguments of this phase of science are unfamiliar, and hence not easily comprehended. But I do not know any good reason why this should always be so, or why this subject of Geology is not as interesting in itself and as important in its bearings on the truth for this time as, say, any phase of ancient history, a subject which has been much discussed and is fairly understood by most of us. For surely no doctrinal error is more widespread among the educated classes, none has been more firmly fixed in solid "facts," than this idea of science having proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that life has been on our globe for long, long ages, and has come about gradually in a successive order from the low to the high. But I think that without boasting I can say that the arguments already set forth in these studies (with those to follow) put this idea utterly out of court as a scientific proposition, for any person capable of appreciating the evidence. Hence, in view of the universality of the belief in this geological myth, and in view of the other fact that these articles completely expose the groundlessness of such a notion, I think I can with some reasonableness appeal to my readers to study this subject until they master it, even tho it should take some intellectual effort to do so. The effort will be well repaid.

An Important Study.

But the reason why this subject is so unfamiliar is quite evident. There are, it is true, numerous books published professing to refute the Evolution doctrine, but neither in the English nor any other language (so far as I am aware) is there a shred of argument along these lines directed against the successive ages of Geology. Hence, tho the believers in the Evolution theory are familiar with the terms and arguments of Geology, the believers in Creation, as told in Genesis, are not thus familiar with them, because they have never taken pains to study a subject so replete with fancy and so barren of useful facts, as they regarded it. But now, with Geology seen to be, not the friend and ally of Evolution, but the only means of successfully refuting it, I feel sure that all intelligent Bible students will take an unwonted interest in this science.

We all need to become firmly grounded in the absolute truth of the # Literal Week of Creation, because only thus can we really get a firm hold upon the Sabbath. As a well-known author said:

The assumption that the events of the first week required thousands upon thousands of years, strikes directly at the foundation of the fourth commandment. It represents the Creator as commanding men to observe the week of literal days in commemoration of vast, indefinite periods. This is unlike His method of dealing with His creatures. It makes indefinite and obscure that which He has made very plain. It is infidelity in its most insidious, and hence, most dangerous, form; its real character is so disguised that it is held and taught by many who profess to believe the Bible.—"Patriarchs and Prophets," p. 111.

In our future studies of Geology we shall find every additional fact acquired, or principle mastered, to be only another proof of the reality of the Deluge, and thus also (indirectly) of the reality of a literal Creation. Hence, I feel sure that we will all take up this study of Geology with renewed interest, and that ere long, to the believers in the fourth commandment at least, it will be the best understood and most interesting of all the sciences.

A Matter of Consistency.

We may now proceed with our subject where we left it last week. Let us test the scientific value of this assumed life-succession by another very simple question. In "Eocene times," so they tell us, England was a land of palms. In fact at this time, cycads, gourds, proteads (like the Australian shrubs and trees), the fig, cinnamon, screw-pine, and various species of acacias and palms, abounded in England and western Europe; while turtles, monkeys, and huge mammals like some that still luxuriate in sub-tropical and warmly-temperate regions, were equally abundant. Then again, in the Pleistocene deposits of the same countries, we find various species of elephant and rhinoceros, with a hippopotamus, lion, and hyena identical with species now living in the tropics, "altho," as Dana says, "these modern kinds are dwarfs in comparison." Now how are we to prove that these various forms of animal life did not exist together in these countries at the same time as the trees and plants before mentioned? Lions and monkeys, hippopotamuses and hyenas, with elephants and rhinoceroses, now live beneath the palms, acacias, and other tropical plants represented in the Eocene and Miocene beds. What is there to hinder us from believing that they all lived there together in that olden time? Surely it would be the very irony of scientific fate if forms now so closely connected in life should in death be so divided. Or, to present it in another form, why should we be asked to believe that these acacias, cinnamons, palms, etc., lived and died ages or millions of years before the lions, elephants, rhinoceroses, and hippopotamuses came on the stage to enjoy their shade; and then, after these unnumbered ages had dragged their slow length along and vanished into the dim past, and all these semitropical plants had shifted to the tropics or been turned into lignite, these lions, elephants, and hippopotamuses came into existence in these same localities, when no such plants existed anywhere in Europe? Surely they ought to give us some pretty substantial reasons for such a violation of the "observed uniformity of nature." Geologists generally boast that they have outgrown the crude ideas of the earlier years when they spoke of "ages" of limestone making or of sandstone making; but it seems that they have not yet attained to that broad view of the essential unity of nature where the flora and fauna of our world are seen to be just as indissolvably connected with each other. For nature could as easily be persuaded to produce for a whole age nothing in the shape of rock but limestone or conglomerate, as to accommodate her powers to such an unbalanced state of affairs as is spoken of above.

But in considering our question as to why the Eocene plants and the Pleistocene animals may not be considered as living contemporaneously together, I think I can imagine the answer that will be given. It is the sole shadow of an argument that I have ever seen put forth to defend such an idea, and moreover, it is, I think, the only defense possible. They will say that all the animals of these "early" Tertiary beds are extinct species, also very many of the plants; while the hyena, lion, hippopotamus, etc., of the Pleistocene are

Identical with the Living Species,

and some are beginning to think the mammoth (E. primigenus) possibly the direct ancestor of its nearest surviving relative, the Asiatic elephant (E. indicus). This being so important a point and having such a vital connection with the whole question of the life-succession idea, I may be allowed to go into the subject somewhat at length, even at the risk of appearing technical to the ordinary reader.

The Testimony of the Fossils.

We all know that these Tertiary and Pleistocene deposits so much resemble one another in everything except their fossils, and occur generally in such detached and fragmentary beds, holding no relations of superstition to one another, that Charles Lyell devised the plan of distinguishing them from one another and arranging them in the accustomed order of time by their relative percentages of extinct and living mollusca. With only slight changes Lyell's divisions are now distinguished on the following basis as given by Dana:

Eocene period: no species or less than 5 per cent. living.
Miocene period: 20 to 40 per cent. living.
Pliocene period: more than half the species living."—"Manual," p. 880.

In the still more "modern" post-Tertiary or Pleistocene the plants and invertebrates "are, with a rare exception, living species, while the mammals are nearly all extinct."—Id., p. 997.

In the words of Dr. David Page, a well-known Scottish Geologist: As there is often no perceptible mineral distinction between many clays, sands, and gravels, it is only by their imbedded fossils that geologists can determine their Tertiary or post-Tertiary character."—"Introductory Text-Book of Geology," p. 189.

An Unsafe Hypothesis.

Now to say that a set of beds, ninety-five per cent. of whose fossils belong to extinct species and only five per cent. are now living, must be vastly older than another set of beds where these percentages are absolutely reversed, i. e. where the species are nearly all living, seems at first thought an eminently reasonable idea,

and we immediately begin to imagine how long it must have taken for these exceedingly numerous and apparently vigorous species to wear out and become extinct in the traditional way by the merciless struggle for existence with forms more "fit" to survive. But it is hardly necessary to point out how all this presupposes Uniformity, a doctrine which we have found to be not only a point-blank denial of the Biblical Deluge, but even from the scientific standpoint a problem to be investigated and decided according to the evidence of the rocks, not a thing to be taken for granted previous to all investigation. But it then occurs to us that the same methods of reasoning would make the sub-fossil remains of the bison (B. americanus) on the Western prairies almost infinitely older than those of the lion, hippopotamus, etc., in the Pleistocene beds of Europe; for (except for some few specimens artificially preserved and which may be ignored in this connection) the bison is to-day absolutely extinct, while the Pleistocene mammals are still abundant in the tropics and show no signs of surrender in the struggle for existence. Similar comparisons might be made with the great wingless birds of Madagascar, Mauritius, and New Zealand, all tending to show that the mere fact of certain species being extinct, and others being now alive, is no trustworthy guide in determining the relative age of their remains, until we first find out how they happened to become extinct.

Test Question for Geologists.

Query: Will the geologists please give us a reasonable explanation of how the lion, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, and elephant shifted from England to the tropics? Or will they explain how the mammoth and rhinoceros got caught in the merciless frost of northern Siberia so suddenly that their flesh has remained untainted all these years, and is now, whenever exposed, greedily devoured by the dogs and wolves?

"Beeches, oaks, palms, poplars, walnuts, limes, magnolias, hazel, holly, black thorn, logwood, hawthorn, ivy, vines, and many evergreens, besides numerous conifers, among which was the Sequoia, allied to the gigantic Wellingtonia of California," all grew at one time in Spitzbergen, Iceland, and Greenland, and even within eleven degrees of the pole. Baron Toll and all the more recent investigators agree that the mammoth, rhinoceros, and other animals preserved in the ice of Siberia lived where we now find their remains, or in 75° north latitude, and Flower and Lydekker say that "the further north the more numerous do they become" ("Mammals, Living and Extinct," p. 430); while Dana says that "the encasing in ice of huge elephants, and the perfect preservation of the flesh, shows that the cold finally became suddenly extreme, as of a single winter’s night, and knew no relenting afterward."—"Manual," p. 1007. (Professor Dana has italicized the word "suddenly.")

If they can explain this sudden change of climate over half the world or so, without violating their uniformitarian creed, it may not be overpresumptuous in us to suggest that perhaps this same cause, whatever it was, was competent to bring about a good many other changes, and the extinction of numerous other species which they so often tell us must imply the lapse of untold ages of time. The economizing of energy is worth considering in such cases; on this point I may have something more to say in the sequel. The principle I wish to insist on here is that the mere fact of certain species being alive, and others extinct, gives no clue whatever as to the relative age of their remains, until we first ascertain why, how, and when this extinction was brought about. Ignoring for the present the Biblical information regarding the Deluge, we shall presently see that there is ample scientific evidence that a sudden and radical change in the climate of the northern regions (the whole world in fact) has occurred since man was upon it; but no allowance, so far as I know, has ever been made for this as a powerful cause of extermination of all forms of life. But in the utter absence of any such explanation as to how and when, the presence of ten, fifty, or a hundred per cent. of extinct forms in a set of beds is manifestly of no scientific value in determining age. It would be just as reasonable and as scientifically accurate to try to arrange the books of the Greek and Latin classics in chronological order according to the percentage of their words which have survived into the English language.

(Continued next week.)