Darwin’s Theory of Evolution: Does it Still Hold up?
November 3rd, 2009
If the distinctions between the higher groupings we call Classes and Sub-kingdoms may be accounted for in the same way is a much more difficult question. The assorted differences that distinguish the fish, reptiles, birds and mammals from one another, though vast, still seem of a similar nature as those which tell apart a mouse from an elephant or a swallow from a goose. But the vertebrate animals and the insects are so vastly distinct in their form and structure and in the very plan of their bodily structure, that protesters may not unreasonably question whether the creatures can all have been derived from one common ascendant by way of the very same natural laws that explain the specialization of the assorted species of birds or of reptiles.
Antecedent to Darwin, the broad majority of naturalists held fast to the theory that species were ontological, and had not been descended from other species by any process known to us. There was, then, no inquiry relating to the lineage of families, orders, and classes, given that the “origin of species” was thought to be an unsolvable problem. This has all transformed. The entire scientific and literary world accepts, as a matter of popular knowledge, the origin of species from other allied species by the commonplace process of natural birth.
We might require that a true theory will enable us to grasp and implement in some detail those changes in the form, structure, and relations of animals and plants which are transformed in short periods of time, geologically speaking, and which are now going on around us. We may expect this theory to explain with satisfaction most of the small-scale and superficial divergences which distinguish one species from another. And, finally, we may expect that it describe many difficulties and to reconcile many incongruities in the overly complex phylogenetic relations and relations of living things. Darwin’s theory achieves these requisites. It shows how, by way of some of the most universal and ever-acting laws in nature, new species are necessarily created, while the old species become extinct. Evolution theory likewise enables us to realize how the perpetual processes of these laws during the long periods is calculated to bring about those greater differences exhibited by the distinct genera, families, and orders into which all living things are classified by naturalists.
To depart for a minute from this serious matter, I will point you to some superb evolution humor that has appeared in the last few years. Much needed comic relief in the evolution-creationism debate.
