Orthodoxy received the most stunning blow ever given it, at the hands of Charles Darwin, and it is ever on the lookout for an opportunity to make reprisals. It is only necessary for some fledgling to challenge Darwin’s theory of the origin of coral reefs and offer some grotesque assumption in its place, and it is at once announced from a thousand pulpits that Darwinism,—that enemy of God and man—is dead.

Hugo DeVries, however, could hardly be called a fledgling, and the supporters of Darwin had real cause for apprehension, it would seem, when the rumor gained ground that no less a person than the Amsterdam professor had overthrown Darwin’s theory, and substituted one of his own.

Alas, this latest “death of Darwinism” was no more fatal than its numerous predecessors, as the following quotation from DeVries himself will show:

“My work claims to be in full accord with the principles laid down by Darwin.” And again, “To Darwin was reserved the task of bringing the theory of common descent to its present high rank in scientific and social philosophy.” And, “Notwithstanding all these apparently unsurmountable difficulties, (absence of experimental evidence since gathered) Darwin discovered the great principle which rules the evolution of organisms. It is the principle of natural selection. It is the sifting out of all organisms of minor worth through the struggle for life.”

The greater part of the adverse criticism, aimed at Darwinism applies only to the extravagant claims put forward by his overenthusiastic disciples; claims not to be found in the works of Darwin himself. As we shall see later, one of the greatest offenders in this respect was no less a person than the co-discoverer of the selection theory—Alfred Russell Wallace.

Of all the mischievous misconceptions of Darwin’s theory none have worked so much harm as that which regards natural selection as the active and efficient cause of evolution. Although evolution is an established fact, our knowledge of its processes are incomplete and must always remain so until we have solved that most vexed of all biological problems, the “causes of variation.” As to the nature of these causes, natural selection is dumb. For its purpose, variation is simply assumed to be a fact, and Darwin’s acknowledged ignorance as to how variation is brought about is expressed in the term “spontaneous variation.” Until variation has played its part by producing new and various forms, selection has no function or office to perform. Then it simply decides which forms shall survive by destroying the rest. As Wigand has pointed out, selection does not do more than determine the survival of what is offered to it, and does not create anything new. As DeVries very strikingly puts it, “It is only a sieve, and not a force of nature, no direct cause of improvement, as many of Darwin’s adversaries, and unfortunately many of his followers also, have so often asserted. It is only a sieve which decides which is to live and which is to die.... With the single steps of evolution it has nothing to do. Only after the step has been taken, the sieve acts, eliminating the unfit.” Thus Prof. Cope’s point that Darwin’s theory does not explain the “origin” of the fittest, is well taken, or as Mr. Arthur Harris puts it, “Natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest.”

It was around this question of the “causes” of variation that the Neo-Lamarckians and the Weismannians fought their battle, the former insisting, as we have seen, that variation was caused by the hereditary transmission of acquired characters, while Weismann maintained that variation arose solely through the combining of two portions of differing germ-plasm contributed by two different individuals, and producing a new individual unlike either,—a “variation” from both. While whatever there was of victory fell to Weismann, neither side has experimentally proven its case, and we are still in the dark as to the “causes of variation.” Our ignorance is still cloaked in the convenient word “spontaneous;” to Darwin’s “spontaneous variation” we now add DeVries’ “spontaneous mutation.”

It is another tribute to Darwin’s caution and insight that he recognized the possibility of variations arising either suddenly, as DeVries asserts they do, or gradually as DeVries denies.

Not only did Alfred Russell Wallace seek to limit the operation of natural selection in certain fields, in order to make room for his spiritualist theories—an adventure which failed dismally—but he denied the sudden appearance of new species or sub-species, thereby restricting Darwinism, as he understood it, to the origin of new species by the gradual accumulation of those almost imperceptible variations usually described as “fluctuations.” Whatever conflict there may be between Darwinism and mutation must be ascribed to Wallace. As DeVries clearly recognizes, Darwin is in no way responsible. “Darwin,” says DeVries, “recognized both lines of evolution.”

The difference between “fluctuations” and “mutation” is illustrated by DeVries recalling Galton’s simile of a polyhedron—an example of which is a solid piece of glass covered with many small flat faces. When it comes to rest on any particular face, it is in stable equilibrium. Small disturbances may make it oscillate, but it returns always to the same face. These oscillations are like fluctuating variations. A greater disturbance may cause the polyhedron to roll over on to a new face, where it comes to rest again, only showing the ever present fluctuations around the new center. The new position corresponds to a mutation. One of the disabilities of this illustration is that some fluctuations represent a greater disturbance from the given position than some mutations. The essential difference is that in the fluctuation it rocks back again while in the mutation it remains on a new base.

Everybody has heard something of the famous evening primrose which gave DeVries his first and most conclusive evidence of mutation. At Hilversum near Amsterdam, he discovered a large number of the plants of the evening primrose, named Lamarckiana after Lamarck. It is an American plant imported to Europe. It often escapes from cultivation and in this case DeVries says it had escaped from a park. It had run wild ten years. A year after first noticing them DeVries observed two new forms which he at once recognized as two new elementary species.

In the test conditions of his own garden, in an experiment covering thirteen years, he observed over fifty thousand of the Lamarckiana spread over eight generations and of these eight hundred were mutations divided among seven new elementary species. These mutations, when self-fertilized, or fertilized from plants like themselves, bred true to themselves, thus answering the test of a real species. DeVries also watched the field from which his original forms were taken, and saw that similar mutations occurred there so that they were not in any way due to cultivation.

Thus has the modest mutating primrose contributed its quota to the solution of that riddle of the universe which, until it is solved, will always command a paramount position in the thoughts of men.

DeVries discourages the notion that mutations are always occurring everywhere, which might seem to be one of the inferences from his theory, and his twenty-fourth lecture of the series, delivered before the University of California is entitled “The Hypothesis of Periodic Mutations.” The common primrose, he says, seems to be immutable at present, and argues that it must have had a mutatory period sometime in the past, when, perhaps, the evening primrose was not mutating. He says: “All the facts point to the conclusion that these periods, of stability and mutability, alternate more or less regularly with one another.”

He deals the Neo-Lamarckians a heavy blow by his denial of “direct” adaptation, and he greatly strengthens their opponents when he asserts that mutation takes place, not only in useful directions, but in all directions, leaving natural selection to destroy the unfit. This is a restatement of Darwin’s conception, followed by Weismann, of “fortuitous” variations, and is contrary to the notion of Spencer and Haeckel, that variations are mainly in the direction of adaptation to environment, as a result of animals exerting themselves in that direction.

This point is well stated by DeVries in the following passage,—“This failure of a large part of the productions of nature deserves to be considered at some length. It may be elevated to a principle, and may be made use of to explain many difficult points of the theory of descent. If in order to secure one good novelty nature must produce ten or twenty or perhaps more bad ones at the same time, the possibility of improvements coming by pure chance must be granted at once. All hypotheses concerning the direct causes of adaptation at once become superfluous, and the great principle enunciated by Darwin once more reigns supreme.”

Another difficulty which DeVries claims to have solved by his theory, is the supposed contradiction between the physicist and the biologist as to the time allowed by the former and the time required by the latter, for the evolution of animals.

Lord Kelvin asserted the age of the earth to be between twenty and forty million years. George Darwin estimates the separation of the moon from the earth as having taken place some fifty-six million years ago. Gekie estimated the existence of the solid crust of the earth as at most hundred million years. Joly, by calculating the amount of dissolved salts, and Dubois by the amount of lime, estimated the age of the rivers, Joly giving as probable fifty-five and Dubois thirty-six millions of years.

“All in all,” concludes DeVries, “it seems evident that the duration of life does not comply with the demands of the conception of very slow and continuous evolution.” Mutation, with its sudden leaps, has no such difficulty, and,—“The demands of the biologists and the results of the physicists are harmonized on the ground of the theory of mutation.”

In order properly to estimate the sociological significance of DeVries’ theory it will be necessary to go back more than a century, and observe the sociological import of the leading biological ideas of that period.

And here let us remark, that nobody knows better than we do the danger of transplanting, without criticism, biological theories into the field of sociology. Nevertheless, our opponents have never lost an opportunity to twist and distort science, if perchance by any possibility it could be made to contradict anything that had so much as the semblance of Socialism. We, however, have always insisted on the weakness of reasoning by mere analogy and have kept to those general laws which have been worked out separately in sociology.

The principle now about to be applied belongs to this latter class. It is the most luminous principle ever employed in the interpretation of the phenomena of society. This principle is that the intellectual life of a people is determined by its mode of wealth production and the social classes arising therefrom.

Jean Lamarck, the first great modern apostle of evolution, died in poverty because he advocated a theory that appeared to contradict the interests of the ruling class of his time. He had against him all that survived of feudal interests, which was intensely theological, and although his theory really favored the bourgeoisie, that class was not yet aware of it.

Cuvier was the lion of that day, for he managed the remarkable feat of adapting science to the ideas, not only of the increasing bourgeoisie, but also of the diminishing feudal power. He pleased the feudal regime, such of it as remained, by denying evolution, and endorsing its theology. This made his theories welcome also among those shrewd early capitalists, as the English, who realized more quickly than their fellows, that religious belief might constitute as great a prop for one ruling class at it had already been for another.

But in his capacity of scientific reflection of the class interest of his masters, Cuvier’s masterpiece was his “cataclysmic theory.” According to this theory, organisms were not the result of evolution, but they were now just as when they issued from the hands of the Creator. The difference between existing forms, and those creatures whose story is preserved in the rocks, was explained by a series of cataclysms or catastrophes by which, at certain widely separated periods, all living forms were destroyed, and a completely new stock was created to take their places.

It would be impossible to conceive a better scientific justification of the French revolution than Cuvier’s theory presented. For many decades before that event these rising commercialists had groaned under the yoke of feudal dues and feudal restraints of trade. Nothing could be more to their wishes than a sudden social “cataclysm” that would destroy the feudal system with its trade despising and plundering nobility, and exalt its own trading class to fill the vacancy. And when this had been accomplished, and that same nobility had been sent to the guillotine, it was great consolation to have on Cuvier’s authority, that this method of sudden violence had no less a precedent than the methods of the Almighty in suddenly destroying the living things in his own universe.

Cuvier’s theory however, almost died with him, for the violent desires of the bourgeoisie were short lived. When it realized the completeness of its own victory, and that the next “cataclysm” would mean its own overthrow and the enthronement of some successor, cataclysms lost favor and were frowned down. Preachers of sudden and violent changes were now regarded as the enemies of society, and Cuvier’s once lauded theory of cataclysms was sneered at as a relic of the dark ages. What the capitalist class wanted now was peace, and long life, and above all, no disturbances.

And it was just at this point that Darwin came forward with a theory that seemed made to order. True this theory spoke of evolution and change, but the change was so slow it was impossible to notice it. A million years was as ten minutes to this theory, and if it took as long for one class in society to displace another, or for one social regime to succeed another, as it does for one species to develop from another, the capitalists and their heirs had nothing to apprehend for a thousand generations. There was nothing sudden about this theory, quite the contrary. In fact the real difficulty was to see how anything managed to change at all.

As for that part of it which spoke of the survival of the fittest, what could be clearer than that these self-made men were themselves the fittest. It was, of course equally clear that the degraded working class, lacking the cleverness to rise, was destined to be eliminated as unfit, by the laws of nature.

For half a century this argument of slow evolution has done valiant service as an antidote for Socialism, and the present ruling class would like to retain it forever.

But no ruling class ever was or ever can be wholly omnipotent. The capitalists of to-day can no more hinder the process of social evolution, with its resulting march of ideas, than they can intercept gravitation or divert the tides. They are being driven blindly to their fate by social forces which are beyond their command.

They are in the midst of social powers which mock their puny efforts to administer. Contradictions arise which cannot continue. As soon as a capitalist country is over-stocked with wealth, poverty prepares to stalk abroad.

But amid all this confusion, something moves on, a something which we sometimes call the spirit of the age. Society grows restless and instinctively anticipates a coming change. A new class rises into prominence and begins to realize its strength and develop its intelligence.

The ruling class still proclaims its will, but cannot always execute it. Colorado, Idaho, and Haywood are proof of that. The mental development of this new class has reached the point where it has become an intellectual factor in the national life. Its voice is listened to by publishers of books. It establishes its own press. It publishes a literature of its own. It creates its own platform. It reaches into the future and demands control of its own destiny.

And now see how all this is reflected in the scientific world. It is no longer true that species require thousands of years for the simplest change. We are now informed that change takes place by sudden leaps. At one single step a new species appears and begins its existence. There is therefore, no longer anything in biological science to contradict the Socialist position that a new society may be born of a sudden revolution.

Mutation, the savants tell us, runs in periods, alternating with periods of apparent stability. Then if we are not supported we are at any rate not contradicted, when we assert that in social development, periods of economic evolution, with apparent social stability, are followed by periods of social revolution when the entire social superstructure is transformed.

It is no longer necessary to assume countless millions of years for the evolution of living forms. A plant enjoys a period of apparent stability, then it reaches a point where it “explodes” and gives birth to new species. If a plant, why not a society? At least there is nothing in the example of the plant that will furnish an argument against such an idea.

If the history of biological science for the last half a century were to be written by a Socialist, who had no scruples about wresting the record so as to support his Socialist theories, he would have nothing to gain by changing a single line.

There is nothing in that history to contradict us when we assert the probability or the certainty, of a social revolution. Who, that looks about him, can fail to see that death is plainly branded in the brow of the existing social order? Its legal, political, and financial institutions are tied together with rotten thread. It is already outliving its usefulness, and when it goes it will have few mourners. But millions will hail with joy that social mutation which will kindle the fires of human liberty, and create, if not a new Heaven, at least, a new earth.