EVOLUTION 1

EVOLUTION 1
Everybody nowadays talks about evolution. Like electricity, the cholera
germ, woman's rights, the great mining boom, and the Eastern Question,
it is 'in the air.' It pervades society everywhere with its subtle
essence; it infects small-talk with its familiar catchwords and its
slang phrases; it even permeates that last stronghold of rampant
Philistinism, the third leader in the penny papers. Everybody believes
he knows all about it, and discusses it as glibly in his everyday
conversation as he discusses the points of racehorses he has never seen,
the charms of peeresses he has never spoken to, and the demerits of
authors he has never read. Everybody is aware, in a dim and nebulous
semi-conscious fashion, that it was all invented by the late Mr. Darwin,
and reduced to a system by Mr. Herbert Spencer--don't you know?--and a
lot more of those scientific fellows. It is generally understood in the
best-informed circles that evolutionism consists for the most part in a
belief about nature at large essentially similar to that applied by
Topsy to her own origin and early history. It is conceived, in short,
that most things 'growed.' Especially is it known that in the opinion of
the evolutionists as a body we are all of us ultimately descended from
men with tails, who were the final offspring and improved edition of the
common gorilla. That, very briefly put, is the popular conception of the
various points in the great modern evolutionary programme.

It is scarcely necessary to inform the intelligent reader, who of course
differs fundamentally from that inferior class of human beings known to
all of us in our own minds as 'other people,' that almost every point in
the catalogue thus briefly enumerated is a popular fallacy of the
wildest description. 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.
Long before Darwin's book appeared evolution had been a recognised force
in the moving world of science and philosophy. Kant and Laplace had
worked out the development of suns and earths from white-hot
star-clouds. Lyell had worked out the evolution of the earth's surface
to its present highly complex geographical condition. Lamarck had worked
out the descent of plants and animals from a common ancestor by slow
modification. Herbert Spencer had worked out the growth of mind from its
simplest beginnings to its highest outcome in human thought.

But Society, like Gallio, cared nothing for all these things. The
evolutionary principles had never been put into a single big book, asked
for at Mudie's, and permitted to lie on the drawing-room table side by
side with the last new novel and the last fat volume of scandalous court
memoirs. Therefore Society ignored them and knew them not; the word
evolution scarcely entered at all as yet into its polite and refined
dinner-table vocabulary. It recognised only the 'Darwinian theory,'
'natural selection,' 'the missing link,' and the belief that men were
merely monkeys who had lost their tails, presumably by sitting upon
them. To the world at large that learned Mr. Darwin had invented and
patented the entire business, including descent with modification, if
such notions ever occurred at all to the world-at-large's speculative
intelligence.