The Modern Synthesis of Evolution with Genetics (ePub)

We have to date from 1859 (On the Origin of Species) as the beginning of modern thought. For what Charles Darwin did was to offer a world-picture totally different from that which had satisfied the mind of humankind before that date. We had supposed that it was a world of order, moving under divine guidance and omnipotent intelligence to a just and perfect fulfillment in which every virtue would find its fit reward. But Darwin, without attacking any creed, described what he had seen. Suddenly the world and nature seemed to be only a place of slaughter and strife in which birth was an accident, and only death was a certainty. Nature became natural selection: that is, a struggle for existence. And not for existence only, but for mates and power, and a ruthless elimination of the unfit. The surface of the Earth seethed with warring species and competing individuals. Every organism was the prey of some larger beast, and every life was lived at the expense of some other life. Great natural catastrophes came, and millions of living things were weeded out and killed. This was evolution. Darwin had reduced a human to an animal fighting for his transient mastery of the globe. Man was no longer the son of God; he was the son of strife. His wars made the fiercest brutes ashamed of their amateur cruelty. The human race was no longer the favored creation of a benevolent deity. It was a species of apes, which the fortunes of variation and selection had raised to a precarious dignity, and which in its turn was destined to be surpassed and to disappear. Man was not immortal. He was condemned to death from the hour of his birth. Imagine the strain upon the minds brought up with the tender ideas of youth and forced to adapt themselves to the harsh and bloody picture of a Darwinian world. Is it any wonder that the old faith is fighting fiercely for its life. Do the victors (the evolutionist) sit sadly amid the ruins, secretly mourning their triumph, yearning f