66
The Fundamentals the same individual, with the most important organs ©f the body (such as brain and heart) imperfectly or not at all developed, and an animal “more like the larvae of the existing marine Ascidians than any other known form”, God made one protoplastic cell and disappeared. That cell was a vege table, and, as all cells are microscopic, invisible. I t was also hermaphroditic. I t contained hairs and rootlets, nuclei and nucleoli, mother stars and daughter stars, grouping, advanc ing and retreating, as if dancing quadrilles. And, as the story goes, this one cell has been the father and mother of all living creatures. Natural selection, aided only by sexual selection and accident, has evolved them, by almost imper ceptible degrees. Evidently Darwin and Wallace followed what they thought the line of least resistance in introducing God before the first living germ, for, otherwise, there must have been degene ration to satisfy present conditions. But was it not an error in another regard? While they were in the business of making gods, it would have been easy to have allowed for three—one for plants, one for brutes, and one for men. Nobody was looking. They might have done it, but, as it is, there is a dead lift at each beginning. “We may feel sure,” explains Mr. Darwin, “that any vari ation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favorable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called natural selection or the survival of the fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection and would be left either a fluctuating element, as perhaps we see in certain polymorphic species, or would ultimately become fixed, owing to the nature of the organism and the nature of the conditions”. ( “Origin of Species,” Vol. I, page 121.) Natural selection is destruc tion and preservation. All “injurious” differences and varia tions are destroyed and some individuals with “favorable”
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker