. God's two books; or, Plain facts about evolution, geology, and the Bible . ve cre-ations, on the instalment plan. Darwin could never havefound a half dozen schoolboys to listen to him, if the Gei-kies and Dana, Lyell and Hutton, Smith and Cuvier, hadnot for several generations got the educated public to acceptas science the absurd pretensions of their geology. But before touching on this second of the assumptionsof Darwinism about geological time, we wish to say a fewbrief words regarding the third; viz., that the general re-sults of variation must tend always in an upward the c
. God's two books; or, Plain facts about evolution, geology, and the Bible . ve cre-ations, on the instalment plan. Darwin could never havefound a half dozen schoolboys to listen to him, if the Gei-kies and Dana, Lyell and Hutton, Smith and Cuvier, hadnot for several generations got the educated public to acceptas science the absurd pretensions of their geology. But before touching on this second of the assumptionsof Darwinism about geological time, we wish to say a fewbrief words regarding the third; viz., that the general re-sults of variation must tend always in an upward the contrary, all our experience tends to show thatdegeneration has marked the history of every living formsince their ancestors were embalmed in the rocks at the timeof the deluge. Or, even considered abstractly, the variationsinduced or perpetuated by an unsuitable environment, suchas of food, climate, etc., must inevitably tend toward thedegeneration of every organic type thus affected. Naturalselection, or the survival of the fittest, may tend to delay or 56 GODS TWO BOOKS. HERBERT SPENCER He spent a lifetime endeavoring to build up a Synthetic Phi-losophy of the universe, in which the evolution of man from thelower animals is one of the incidents. It had a certain voguewhile he lived, but like Haeckels works, it is rapidly losing itspopularity, and will lome day be relegated to the lumlier-roomof science, if it is not there already. See Dennerts At theDeath-bed of Darwinism, pages 24. 25. GODS TWO BOOKS 67 partly to neutralize this tendency of a hard environment tobring about degeneration of the type, but the invariable ten-dency of an unfavorable environment in either plants oranimals is not to develop, but to degrade.^ Coming back now to the subject of geological time, wemust content ourselves in this chapter with an effort to makeplain the connection and logical relation between geologyand Evolution. The merits of the former as a science,and the facts of the true geology —
Size: 1425px × 1753px
Photo credit: © Reading Room 2020 / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, booksubjectreligionandscience
