That is the process of Natural Selection, the “laughing-stock” of
Mr. Belloc’s mysterious conclave of “European” savants. Natural
Selection has nothing to do with the reason for the differences between
individuals. It has no more to do with those than gravitation has to
do with the differences in the heaviness of different substances. But
it is necessary to state as much here, because in some queer muddled
way Mr. Belloc seems to be persuaded that it has. These differences
may arise by pure chance; they may come about through the operation of
complex laws, they may come in shoals and have their seasons. These
things have nothing to do with Natural Selection.
Now, Wallace and Darwin were two excellent Europeans who happened to
be interested in natural history. In spite of the sinister motives
invented for them by Mr. Belloc, I doubt if any Catholic sufficiently
educated to have read their lives will agree that they had even a
latent animus against Catholic truth or even a subconscious desire to
“get rid of a Creator” in their minds. They no more thought of “getting
rid of a Creator” when humbly and industriously they gathered their
facts and put fact to fact than an honest bricklayer thinks of “getting
rid of a Creator” when he lays his bricks with care and builds a sound
piece of wall. They went about the world studying natural history.
They considered life with a patience and thoroughness and freedom
from preconceptions beyond the imagination of a man of Mr. Belloc’s
habits. They found no such “fixity of species” as he is inspired to
proclaim. They found much evidence of a progressive change in species,
and they saw no reason to explain it by a resort to miracles or magic.
A Catholic priest of the Anglican communion named Malthus had written
a very interesting and suggestive book upon over-population and the
consequent struggle for existence between individuals. It turned
the attention of both these diligent and gifted observers to just
that process of Natural Selection I have stated. Independently both
of them came to the conclusions that species changed age by age and
without any necessary limits, and mainly through the sieve of Natural
Selection, and that, given a sufficient separation to reduce or prevent
interbreeding and a sufficient difference in the selective conditions
at work, two parts of the same species might change in different
directions, so as at last to become distinct and separate species.
Darwin’s book upon the subject was called _The Origin of Species_.
It was a very modest and sufficient title. He did not even go to the
length of calling it the origin of genera or orders or classes. He did
not at first apply it to man.
This is the theory of the origin of species through Natural Selection.
It was not pretended by either of these pioneers that Natural Selection
was the sole way through which the differences of species came about.
For example, Darwin devoted a considerable part of his working life
to such collateral modes of differentiation as the hypothesis that
Sexual Selection also had its share. Criticism has whittled down that
share to practically negligible proportions, but I note the hypothesis
here because it absolutely disposes of the assertion which Mr. Belloc
hammers on the table, that the Theory of Natural Selection excludes any
other modes of specific differentiation.