(_d_) Comparative physiology, moreover, has, up to the present time, done nothing to forbid the extension of this doctrine to man’s body. No single instance has yet been adduced of the transformation of one animal species into another, either by natural or artificial selection; much less has it been demonstrated that the body of the brute has ever been developed into that of man. All evolution implies progress and reinforcement of life, and is unintelligible except as the immanent God gives new impulses to the process. Apart from the direct agency of God, the view that man’s physical system is descended by natural generation from some ancestral simian form can be regarded only as an irrational hypothesis. Since the soul, then, is an immediate creation of God, and the forming of man’s body is mentioned by the Scripture writer in direct connection with this creation of the spirit, man’s body was in this sense an immediate creation also.
For the theory of natural selection, see Darwin, Origin of Species, 398-424, and Descent of Man, 2:368-387; Huxley, Critiques and Addresses, 241-269, Man’s Place in Nature, 71-138, Lay Sermons, 323, and art.: Biology, in Encyc. Britannica, 9th ed.; Romanes, Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution. The theory holds that, in the struggle for existence, the varieties best adapted to their surroundings succeed in maintaining and reproducing themselves, while the rest die out. Thus, by gradual change and improvement of lower into higher forms of life, man has been evolved. We grant that Darwin has disclosed one of the important features of God’s method. We concede the partial truth of his theory. We find it supported by the vertebrate structure and nervous organization which man has in common with the lower animals; by the facts of embryonic development; of rudimentary organs; of common diseases and remedies; and of reversion to former types. But we refuse to regard natural selection as a complete explanation of the history of life, and that for the following reasons:
1. It gives no account of the origin of substance, nor of the origin of variations. Darwinism simply says that “round stones will roll down hill further than flat ones” (Gray, Natural Science and Religion). It accounts for the selection, not for the creation, of forms. “Natural selection originates nothing. It is a destructive, not a creative, principle. If we must idealize it as a positive force, we must think of it, not as the preserver of the fittest, but as the destroyer, that follows ever in the wake of creation and devours the failures; the scavenger of creation, that takes out of the way forms which are not fit to live and reproduce themselves” (Johnson, on Theistic Evolution, in Andover Review, April, 1884:363-381). Natural selection is only unintelligent repression. Darwin’s Origin of Species is in fact “not the Genesis, but the Exodus, of living forms.” Schurman: “The _survival_ of the fittest does nothing to explain the _arrival_ of the fittest”; see also DeVries, Species and Varieties, _ad finem_. Darwin himself acknowledged that “Our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound.... The cause of each slight variation and of each monstrosity lies much more in the nature or constitution of the organism than in the nature of the surrounding conditions” (quoted by Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 280-301). Weismann has therefore modified the Darwinian theory by asserting that there would be no development unless there were a spontaneous, innate tendency to variation. In this innate tendency we see, not mere nature, but the work of an originating and superintending God. E. M. Caillard, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893:873-881—“Spirit was the moulding power, from the beginning, of those lower forms which would ultimately become man. Instead of the physical derivation of the soul, we propose the spiritual derivation of the body.”