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So much of evolution in this sense as can be proved, is in harmony with the Bible account of the creation of plants, animals and man. The false theory of evolution is called the monophyletic, which teaches that all species of plants and animals including man, developed from one cell or germ which came by creation or spontaneous generation.
In like manner, Häckel also gives us the stem-branches of all the types, classes and orders of the organisms, and forms from them a very acceptable hypothetical pedigree; or if we prefer to suppose a polyphyletic rather than a monophyletic origin of species hypothetical pedigrees of the whole organic world.
He leaves us to choose between monophyletic and polyphyletic evolution, but himself inclines towards the latter, associating with it a rehabilitation of Wigand’s theory of the primitive cells. But evolution does not go on ad libitum or ad infinitum, for the capacity for differentiation and transformation gradually diminishes.
And within the same group we find the contrasts of believers in monophyletic and believers in polyphyletic evolution, the mechanists and the half-confessed or thoroughgoing vitalists, the preformationists and the believers in epigenesis. Opinions differ even more widely in regard to the rôle of the “struggle for existence” in the production of species.
If it has made itself master of the general evolution idea, then descent, even in its most gradual, continuous, monophyletic form, affects it not at all. It can then look on, perhaps not with joy, but certainly without anxiety, at Dubois’ monkey-man and Friedenthal’s chimpanzee.
Are we not compelled to adopt what is called the monophyletic hypothesis, that is, that our line of descent started from one pair, male and female, somewhere in the vast stretch of geologic or biologic time, and to reason that, had that pair been out of the race, we should not have appeared? Can we narrow life to a single point, a single cell, in the past?
Is it really possible that any man could bring himself to place credence in such a marvellous series of occurrences? Monophyletic or polyphyletic evolution, whichever, if either, it may have been, presents no difficulty on the creation hypothesis. The Divine plan might have embraced either method.
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