Lately I have been collecting old books on Evolution, both for and against. It is interesting to me to see what has changed since then and what hasn’t. Anyway, I received a new one recently and it just happened to open up on a particular page when I picked it up that I just so happened to find extremely interesting.

Beginning a chapter on “Organic Evolution,” the author of this book writes:

“”There still exists a very widespread confusion as to the exact import of evolution…It was only when Darwin, by his masterly marshalling of an abundance of carefully collected facts, showed how the origin of species could be conceived to have actually taken place by means of Natural Selection, that the world accepted evolution as a fact. Indeed, the fight between Evolutionists and Anti-Evolutionists turned in the beginning exclusively upon the question whether the transformation of species advocated by Darwin for all living beings, including man, was true or not. It is Darwin’s merit to have established evolution as an irrefutable fact of science. ‘There is, however,’ as Romanes insisted, ‘a great distinction to be drawn between the fact of evolution and the manner of it, or between the evidence of evolution as having taken place somehow, and the evidence of the causes which have been concerned in the process.’ In other words, the facts of evolution are quite independent of any theory which may be brought forward to explain them. ‘Even if it be fully proved,’ says Romanes, ‘that the causes which they [the biologists] have hitherto discovered, or suggested, are inadequate to account for all the facts of organic nature, this would in no wise logically compel them to vacate their theory of evolution in favour of the theory of creation.’”

Unfortunately, there still exists a very widespread confusion today concerning the difference between biological evolution as a scientific fact and particular theories that describe how it happened and in what way or through what paths. Hence the old and mistaken comment, oft repeated, that Evolution is “just a theory.” But the fact that some kind of organic evolution has historically occurred has been widely accepted since as early as Darwin’s seminal work.

This passage certainly sounds like something that I might read today in a modern book on evolutionary theory, which has advanced quite a bit since Darwin’s day. Nonetheless, this particular book, titled The First Principles of Evolution and written by S. Herbert, was published in 1915. However, as you probably noticed, he uses quotations from a person named Romanes. This is actually George J. Romanes, and the quotations come from Romanes’ book Darwin and After Darwin, which was published in 1897!

So why is it that we have progressed so far since 1897 and yet so little? There really is no excuse anymore.