Environment and heredity / by Olive Dickinson Maguinness.

  • Maguinness, Olive Dickinson.
Date:
[1940]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Environment and heredity / by Olive Dickinson Maguinness. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The existence in the rocks of fossils proving the previous existence of animals and plants very different from exist ing ones was serious evidence against the fundamentalist view, i.e. the literal interpretation of the story of creation in the first chapter of Genesis. Extravagant theories of “ catastrophism ” were brought forward to explain the presence of the fossils. It was suggested that the world had experienced vast local cataclysms which had destroyed all living things over large areas ; these parts of the earth had then been repeopled by plants and animals spreading from neighbouring parts. Later, separate creations were postulated to account for the different types of plants and animals found in the successive layers of the earth’s crust, the previous types being supposed to have been destroyed by cataclysms. It seems obvious to us now that such theories have no ring of truth. What are we to think of the suggestion of another writer, unwilling to question the literal truth of Genesis, that Providence placed the fossils in the rocks to rebuke man’s curiosity ? The only satisfactory explanations of the existence of fossils is a theory of organic evolution. Interesting fossil evidence for evolution is that of so- called “ missing links,” such as the fossil animal Archad opter yx of the Secondary period, which has points of resemblance to both reptiles and birds. The forms of existing plants and animals, and their distribution, also present us with facts which only a theory of organic evolution can satisfactorily explain. It was, indeed, facts of distribution which first suggested the idea of evolution to Charles Darwin during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle (1831-36). He was impressed by the similarity, but not the identity, of form between the turtles of the mainland of South America and those of 15