The Evolution of Man, V.2 by Ernst Haeckel (comprehension books .TXT) 📕

But the further question now arises: "Whence came these first amoebae with which the history of life began at the commencement of the Laurentian epoch?" There is only one answer to this. The earliest unicellular organisms can only have been evolved from the simplest organisms we know, the Monera. These are the simplest living things that we can conceive. Their whole body is nothing but a particle of plasm, a granule of living albuminous matter, discharging of itself all the essential vital functions that form the material basis of life. Thus we come to the last, or, if you prefer, the first, question in connection with evolution--the question of the origin of the Monera. This is the real question of the origin of life, or of spontaneous generation.

We have neither space nor occasion to go further in this

Chapter into

the question of spontaneous generation. For this I must refer the reader to the fifteenth chapter of the History of Creation, and especially to the second book of the General Morphology, or to the essay on "The Monera and Spontaneous Generation" in my Studies of the Monera and other Protists.* (* The English reader will find a luminous and up-to-date chapter on the subject in Haeckel's recently written and translated Wonders of Life.--Translator.) I have given there fully my own view of this important question. The famous botanist Nageli afterwards (1884) developed the same ideas. I will only say a few words here about this obscure question of the origin of life, in so far as our main subject, organic evolution in general, is affected by it. Spontaneous generation, in the definite and restricted sense in which I maintain it, and claim that it is a necessary hypothesis in explaining the origin of life, refers solely to the evolution of the Monera from inorganic carbon-compounds. When living things made their first appearance on our planet, the very complex nitrogenous compound of carbon that we call plasson, which is the earliest material embodiment of vital action, must have been formed in a purely chemical way from inorganic carbon-compounds. The first Monera were formed in the sea by spontaneous generation, as crystals are formed in the mother-water. Our demand for a knowledge of causes compels us to assume this. If we believe that the whole inorganic history of the earth has proceeded on mechanical principles without any intervention of a Creator, and that the history of life also has been determined by the same mechanical laws; if we see that there is no need to admit creative action to explain the origin of the various groups of organisms; it is utterly irrational to assume such creative action in dealing with the first appearance of organic life on the earth.

This much-disputed question of "spontaneous generation" seems so obscure, because people have associated with the term a mass of very different, and often very absurd, ideas, and have attempted to solve the difficulty by the crudest experiments. The real doctrine of the spontaneous generation of life cannot possibly be refuted by experiments. Every experiment that has a negative result only proves that no organism has been formed out of inorganic matter in the conditions--highly artificial conditions--we have established. On the other hand, it would be exceedingly difficult to prove the theory by way of experiment; and even if Monera were still formed daily by spontaneous generation (which is quite possible), it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to find a solid proof of it. Those who will not admit the spontaneous generation of the first living things in our sense must have recourse to a supernatural miracle; and this is, as a matter of fact, the desperate resource to which our "exact" scientists are driven, to the complete abdication of reason.

A famous English physicist, Lord Kelvin (then Sir W. Thomson), attempted to dispense with the hypothesis of spontaneous generation by assuming that the organic inhabitants of the earth were developed from germs that came from the inhabitants of other planets, and that chanced to fall on our planet on fragments of their original home, or meteorites. This hypothesis found many supporters, among others the distinguished German physicist, Helmholtz. However, it was refuted in 1872 by the able physicist, Friedrich Zollner, of Leipzig, in his work, On the Nature of Comets. He showed clearly how unscientific this hypothesis is; firstly in point of logic, and secondly in point of scientific content. At the same time he pointed out that our hypothesis of spontaneous generation is "a necessary condition for understanding nature according to the law of causality."

I repeat that we must call in the aid of the hypothesis only as regards the Monera, the structureless "organisms without organs." Every complex organism must have been evolved from some lower organism. We must not assume the spontaneous generation of even the simplest cell, for this itself consists of at least two parts--the internal, firm nuclear substance, and the external, softer cellular substance or the protoplasm of the cell-body. These two parts must have been formed by differentiation from the indifferent plasson of a moneron, or a cytode. For this reason the natural history of the Monera is of great interest; here alone can we find the means to overcome the chief difficulties of the problem of spontaneous generation. The actual living Monera are specimens of such organless or structureless organisms, as they must have boon formed by spontaneous generation at the commencement of the history of life.

Under the guidance of the biogenetic law, and on the basis of the evidence we have obtained, we now turn to the interesting task of determining the series of man's animal ancestors. Phylogeny us a whole is an inductive science. From the totality of the biological processes in the life of plants, animals, and man we have gathered a confident inductive idea that the whole organic population of our planet has been moulded on a harmonious law of evolution. All the interesting phenomena that we meet in ontogeny and paleontology, comparative anatomy and dysteleology, the distribution and habits of organisms--all the important general laws that we abstract from the phenomena of these sciences, and combine in harmonious unity--are the broad bases of our great biological induction.

But when we come to the application of this law, and seek to determine with its aid the origin of the various species of organisms, we are compelled to frame hypotheses that have essentially a DEDUCTIVE character, and are inferences from the general law to particular cases. But these special deductions are just as much justified and necessitated by the rigorous laws of logic as the inductive conclusions on which the whole theory of evolution is built. The doctrine of the animal ancestry of the human race is a special deduction of this kind, and follows with logical necessity from the general inductive law of evolution.

I must point out at once, however, that the certainty of these evolutionary hypotheses, which rest on clear special deductions, is not always equally strong. Some of these inferences are now beyond question; in the case of others it depends on the knowledge and the competence of the inquirer what degree of certainty he attributes to them. In any case, we must distinguish between the ABSOLUTE certainty of the general (inductive) theory of descent and the RELATIVE certainty of special (deductive) evolutionary hypotheses. We can never determine the whole ancestral series of an organism with the same confidence with which we hold the general theory of evolution as the sole scientific explanation of organic modifications. The special indication of stem-forms in detail will always be more or less incomplete and hypothetical. This is quite natural. The evidence on which we build is imperfect, and always will be imperfect; just as in comparative philology.

The first of our documents, paleontology, is exceedingly incomplete. We know that all the fossils yet discovered are only an insignificant fraction of the plants and animals that have lived on our planet. For every single species that has been preserved for us in the rocks there are probably hundreds, perhaps thousands, of extinct species that have left no trace behind them. This extreme and very unfortunate incompleteness of the paleontological evidence, which cannot be pointed out too often, is easily explained. It is absolutely inevitable in the circumstances of the fossilisation of organisms. It is also due in part to the incompleteness of our knowledge in this branch. It must be borne in mind that the great majority of the stratified rocks that compose the crust of the earth have not yet been opened. We have only a few specimens of the innumerable fossils that are buried in the vast mountain ranges of Asia and Africa. Only a part of Europe and North America has been investigated carefully. The whole of the fossils known to us certainly do not amount to a hundredth part of the remains that are really buried in the crust of the earth. We may, therefore, look forward to a rich harvest in the future as regards this science. However, our paleontological evidence will (for reasons that I have fully explained in the sixteenth chapter of the History of Creation) always be defective.

The second chief source of evidence, ontogeny, is not less incomplete. It is the most important source of all for special phylogeny; but it has great defects, and often fails us. We must, above all, clearly distinguish between palingenetic and cenogenetic phenomena. We must never forget that the laws of curtailed and disturbed heredity often make the original course of development almost unrecognisable. The recapitulation of phylogeny by ontogeny is only fairly complete in a few cases, and is never wholly complete. As a rule, it is precisely the earliest and most important embryonic stages that suffer most from alteration and condensation. The earlier embryonic forms have had to adapt themselves to new circumstances, and so have been modified. The struggle for existence has had just as profound an influence on the freely moving and still immature young forms as on the adult forms. Hence in the embryology of the higher animals, especially, palingenesis is much restricted by cenogenesis; it is to-day, as a rule, only a faded and much altered picture of the original evolution of the animal's ancestors. We can only draw conclusions from the embryonic forms to the stem-history with the greatest caution and discrimination. Moreover, the embryonic development itself has only been fully studied in a few species.

Finally, the third and most valuable source of evidence, comparative anatomy, is also, unfortunately, very imperfect; for the simple reason that the whole of the living species of animals are a mere fraction of the vast population that has dwelt on our planet since the beginning of life. We may confidently put the total number of these at more than a million species. The number of animals whose organisation has been studied up to the present in comparative anatomy is proportionately