CREATION BY EVOLUTION
to-day, however skeptical and inquiring he may be, who has any doubt as to the fact of organic evolution, yet no one would assert that it can be demonstrated as one might demonstrate the law of gravitation, or the conservation of matter and energy, or the development of a chick out of a drop of living matter on the top of the yolk of the egg. But how can a conclusion be accepted without hesitation if it is not rigorously demonstrable? The answer is that the evolution-idea is a master key that opens all locks into which we can fit it, and that we do not know of a single fact that can be said to be in any way contradictory. Like Wisdom, the evolution-idea is justified of its children.
A great zoölogist once said that he was willing to stake the validity of the evolution-idea on the evidence afforded by butterflies, and he was quite right. Any fact about an animal or a plant may be an evidence of evolution when we know enough about it. What makes the general idea of evolution convincing is its satisfactoriness in interpretation. It is always borne out by the facts. We repeat the phrase “the general idea of organic evolution” because this must be distinguished from any particular theory in regard to the factors that have operated in the process. In regard to the factors or causes of evolution there is, and there may well be, difference of opinion among naturalists, for the inquiry is as young as it is difficult; but it is unfair and confused to use this admission of uncertainty as to causes as if it implied any hesitation in regard to the fact of an age-long evolutionary process in which many of the highly finished and very perfect types of animals are shown by the rock record to be preceded by a succession of animals in less finished stages.
There is eloquence in the evidence from the rock record. As ages passed there was a gradual emergence of finer and
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