CREATION BY EVOLUTION
forms? For these large tortoises cannot swim. On Albemarle Island the isolation is probably topographic; it is due to barriers formed by the rugged volcanic surface. When Darwin, as a young man, visited these islands during the voyage of the Beagle he was greatly struck by the fact that each island seemed to have its own kind or species of giant tortoise, and he tells us that he felt himself “brought near to the very act of creation.” This was one of the experiences that made Darwin an evolutionist.
But think also of the anatomical evidence. It is interesting to compare a number of fore limbs—our own arm, a bat’s wing, a whale’s flipper, a horse’s fore leg, a bird’s wing, a turtle’s paddle, a frog’s small arm and a giant giraffe’s at the other extreme. They are very different, and yet when we scrutinise them we find the same fundamental bones and muscles and blood-vessels and nerves. “How inexplicable,” Darwin said, “‘is the similar pattern of the hand of man, the foot of a dog, the wing of a bat, the flipper of a seal, on the doctrine of independent acts of creation! How simply explained on the principle of the natural selection of successive slight variations in the diverging descendants from a single progenitor.” Few zoölogists of today would use Darwin’s words “how simply explained,” for we are aware of factors he did not know of, and some of the factors he believed in very strongly are not unanimously accredited today. But all would agree that the evolution-idea illumines the deep identities, amid great superficial diversities, that are disclosed when we consider, let us say, the classes of backboned animals.
Another anatomical argument is to be found in the frequent occurrence of vestigial structures in animals and in ourselves. Useless dwindled relics of the hind limbs of a whale are found buried deep below the surface. In the
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