Science and Morals and Other Essays by Sir Windle Bertram Coghill Alan (e book reading free .TXT) 📖

non-physical; that is, immaterial. This is what emerges from our discussion, and so far as science goes to-day it must be admitted that neither of these explanations can be said to be accepted generally by men of science or proved—perhaps even capable of proof—by scientific methods. If we know little or nothing about the mechanism of inheritance, can we and do we know anything about the laws under which it works, or has it any laws? Or are its operations a mere chance-medley? It is hardly necessary to ask the latter question, for chance-medley could not lead to regular operations—operations so regular that a court of law may act upon their evidence. Yes: we answer to the first question very lightly but without perhaps always thinking what that affirmative answer implies, a point to be considered in a moment. It may at once be said that we do now know a good deal about the laws under which inheritance works itself out, and that knowledge, as most people are now aware, is due to the quiet and for a time forgotten labours of Johann Gregor Mendel, once Abbot of the Augustinian Abbey of Brünn, a prelate of that Church which loud-voiced ignoramuses are never tired of proclaiming to have been from the beginning even down to the present day the impassioned and deadly enemy of all scientific progress. Mendel saw that former workers at inheritance had been directing their attention to the tout ensemble of an individual or natural object; his idea was analytical in its nature, for he directed his attention to individual characteristics, such as stature or colour, or the like. And having thus directed his attention and confined his labours mainly to plants, since the study of generations of most animals is too lengthy a process for one man to carry out, he did in fact discover that there are very definite laws, capable even of numerical statement, under which inheritance acts. There is no need to explain or discuss them here: suffice it to say that there are such laws,[34] as is now admitted by an overwhelming majority of the biologists of to-day. Mendel's facts were hidden in a somewhat obscure journal; they lay dormant, much to his annoyance, during his lifetime. Years after his death his papers were unearthed, and his discoveries have been proclaimed as being as fundamental to biology as those of Newton and Dalton to other sciences.

There are, then, laws. That means one of two things: either that these laws arose by chance-medley, or that some one enacted them. It seems impossible, when one surveys the orderly operations of Nature, among which are those conducted under the laws known by the name of their discoverer, Mendel—it seems wholly impossible that these operations arose by chance-medley. To me, at any rate, any such explanation is wholly unthinkable. But if it be an impossible explanation, as I and many thousands, not to say millions, of other persons believe, then there is no other way out of it than that these operations must have been planned by some one; in other words, that there must have been a Creator and Deviser of the world.

People hide from this explanation, and one of the favourite sandbanks in which this particular kind of human ostrich plunges its head is "Nature." "Nature does this," and "Nature does that," forgetting entirely the fact that "Nature" is a mere personification and means either chance-medley or a Creator, according to the old dilemma. There is a very curious example of this inability or unwillingness to admit—perhaps even to understand—the force of this argument exhibited by those to whom one would suppose that it would come home with overpowering force: I mean, of course, the Mendelians.

The most learned of these, and one of the most open-minded of men, hints in one place that though he does not think it necessary himself to believe it, yet it might at least be suggested that, if in a certain organism we find things so placed that a certain combination is bound to emerge in a certain generation, such a state of affairs might have been prearranged. Now, if it was prearranged, the awful fact emerges that there must have been an arranger; in other words, a creative power. This explanation is taboo in certain circles. But one may reasonably ask, "What then?" Is it really suggested that these orderly sets of occurrences may occur not once or twice only but thousands and thousands of times, and this may all happen by chance? A very distant acquaintance with the mathematics of probability will show that this is a wholly untenable theory. We are generally answered by some purely verbal explanation, like the personification of "Nature" already alluded to.

Thus, in a recent discussion on inheritance in a Presidential Address to the British Association, to which I have already alluded, the writer with whose explanation I have just been dealing states that he thinks it "unlikely" that the factors of inheritance are "in any simple or literal sense material particles," and proceeds thus: "I suspect rather that their properties depend on some phenomenon of arrangement." Now, in the first place, this is no explanation at all, for the mechanism of inheritance must be either material or immaterial. If there is a phenomenon of "arrangement" there must be something to be "arranged," and this something can hardly be other than material if it is to be "arranged" at all. But let that pass. What is far more important is to remember that if a thing is to be "arranged" there must be somebody to "arrange" it, for chance-medley cannot "arrange" anything in an orderly manner; or if it could do so once, cannot be supposed capable of doing it a second time in a precisely similar manner, not to say capable of doing it countless thousands of times.

If we go into a great museum our first idea, perhaps our last, concerns the arrangement found therein. But it may safely be said that no sane person ever entertained that idea without being perfectly aware that the arrangement was made by human hands, controlled, in the last resort, by the brain of the curator of the museum. Now, in a sense, the living body is a museum containing specimens of different kinds of cells. There are brain-cells, liver-cells, bone-cells, scores of different varieties of cells, and all of them, so to speak, are arranged in their appropriate cases.

If we go to the brain-case we can search it through and through without finding a liver-cell, any more than we should find a typical brain-cell embedded in the marrow of one of the bones. The different specimens all occupy their appropriate positions. How did they get there? The future animal, like animals of all kinds, including man, commences as a single cell. All save a few interesting but at present negligible cases are composed of elements drawn from male and female parents. This cell divides up into a multitude of others. At first these are to all appearances identical, but later they begin to differentiate, at first into three classes and afterwards into the multitude of different cells of which the body is composed. Further, these groups of cells become aggregated in appropriate groups, cells of one kind uniting with cells of the same kind and with no others. Here we have to do with arrangement, consummately skilful arrangement, an arrangement which practically never fails, for, leaving aside the case of monstrosity, a consideration of which would detain us too long, not merely are the various cells all placed in their proper positions, as we have seen, but their aggregation, the individual, is so formed as to belong to the proper compartment of that large museum, the world—the same compartment as that occupied by his progenitors. Neither the particulate nor the chemical theories help us here. The mnemic would, but it has its initial and insuperable difficulty, pointed out in another article in this volume, that, as you must have an experience before you can remember it, it in no way accounts for the first operation of arrangement. As to the material explanations, particulate or chemical, they amount to something like this: you have half a cart-load of bricks from one yard and half a cart-load from another, and when the bricks are dumped down in an appropriate place they form a little house, just like those occupied by the managers of the brickyards. So they may, but no one in his sense supposes that they will thus arrange themselves of their own power. Some one must arrange them. Who arranges the tiny bricks of which the animal body consists, or what arranges them? To revert to our previous example of the garden; suppose that we bring back from that which we desire to copy a bag of seeds representing all the plants which it contains. We have a plot of land of the same size as our example; we dig it and we dung it and then we scatter our seeds perfectly haphazard over its surface. What are the odds as to their coming up in an exactly similar pattern to those in the other garden. Mathematicians, I suppose, could calculate the probabilities, but they must be infinitesimally small. Yet in the case of the animal the pattern is always observed.

It is quite useless for any one, however eminent an authority he may be, to dismiss the matter by saying "It is a phenomenon of arrangement," for that begs the whole question. A Martian visitor taken to Westminster Abbey and told that its construction was a "phenomenon of arrangement" might be expected to turn a scornful eye upon his cicerone and reply, "Any fool can see that, but who arranged it?"

Hence, though wild horses would not drag such an admission from many, we are irresistibly compelled to adopt the theory of a Creator and a Maintainer also of nature and its operations—so-called—if we are to escape from the absurdities involved in any other explanation. Thus there are very important and fundamental matters to be deduced from the very little which we know about inheritance, just as there are from a hundred and one other lines of consideration related to this world and its contents. We do not know very much—it may fairly be said we know nothing as to the vehicle of inheritance. We know a little, but it is still a very little even in comparison with what we may yet come to know as the result of careful and long-continued experiment, about the laws of inheritance. What we do learn from our knowledge, such as it is, is the fact that we can give no intelligent or intelligible explanation of the facts brought before us except on the hypothesis of a Creator and Maintainer of all things.

FOOTNOTES: