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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 August 2010
Declarations of Anti-Evolutionists
HAVING considered some of the arguments which are usually adduced in support of Evolution, we may now proceed to examine certain of the objections which are urged against it. But as it would require a large volume for anything approaching a detailed presentation of the reasons advanced for the acceptance of Evolution, so, likewise, would it demand far more space than can here be afforded for even a cursory discussion of the difficulties which anti-evolutionists have raised against a theory which, they contend, is discredited both by sound philosophy and the incontestable facts of science. “The theory is easy,” declared De Quatrefages, “but the application is difficult; hence it is that those transformists who have attempted this application have invariably found that their hypotheses have led to conditions which are inadmissible.”
The distinguished French savant, Dr. Charles Robin, is even more pronounced in his views. Evolution, he asserts, is at best but “a poetical accumulation of probabilities without proofs, of seductive explanations without demonstration.”
As to the defenders of the theory of Evolution, they are accused of drawing universal conclusions from particular premises; of mistaking resemblance for blood relationship; of confounding variability with transmutability, and of falsely proclaiming the existence of a genealogical succession where there is nothing more than a hierarchy of organic forms. Anti-evolutionists may not, indeed, deny the possibility of the derivation of higher from lower forms of life; they impugn the reality of such derivation.
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