Darwin, Before and After

Abstract

THAT Darwins particular hypothesis of natural selection operating upon small and random variations is incapable by itself of explaining the evolution of living organisms would be admitted even by Do Julian Huxley. That its widespread acceptance and exaggeration did grievous harm to the racial and political life of mankind is an easily arguable thesis. Dr. R. E. D. Clark in the present volume goes much further than either of these statements. He sets himself to denounce the whole concept of creative evolution—"every theory of evolution", he concludes (p. 145), "has failed in the light of modern discovery"—and to demonstrate not only that the evidence is against it but also that it conflicts with the principle of entropy or, as he calls it, "morpholysis", upon which "not merely physics but all science depends" (p. 150). In so doing he begins with the Greeks, has hard things to say about Cud-worth and Spinoza, describes the conflict over preformation and epigenesis and. the coming of belief in the fixity of species, and so arrives at the forerunners of Darwin. Then his study becomes more detailed. He makes much of Darwin's youthful vagaries, assigns to him psychological and religious conflicts, and treats his ill-health and his theory of evolution as the outcome of the sense of guilt. He describes somewhat confusedly the publication of the "Origin of Species" and the causes of its influence ; and in a vigorous chapter entitled "Good Squib" makes it responsible for irreligion and 'big business', for racial oppression and the glorification of war, for Marx and Nietzsche, Hitler and Mussolini. Finally, he devotes two chapters to showing that evolution is contrary both to biological science and to physics, and a final one to qualifying much of what he has previously said by drawing a distinction between two uses of the word evolution, whereby he admits abundant evidence that "over long periods of time species undergo changes"but argues that this does not involve any ultimate increase in complexity.

Darwin, Before and After

The Story of Evolution. By Robert E. D. Clark. (Second Thoughts Library No. 1.) Pp. 192. (London : Paternoster Press, 1948.) 6s.