Creation by Evolution/Foreword
FOREWORD
By Henry Fairfield Osborn
In this volume leading biologists of England and America, men distinguished in many special lines of research, are coöperating in a great endeavor to give the full meaning of the word “evolution.” No word in any language at the present time is so comprehensive as this; few words are so misunderstood.
The original import of the word “evolution”—to unfold or to unroll, as a flower is unfolded—is too restricted, because, as theoretically presented in Lloyd Morgan’s doctrine of emergence and as practically proved by palaeontologists in both the invertebrate and the vertebrate world since the time of Waagen, evolution is far more than the unfolding of something that already exists, as the germ develops and unfolds in the beauty of a rose; evolution is the incessant appearance of new qualities, new characters, new powers, new beauties, for which there is no antecedent in experience or no evident promise in the germ itself.
We almost feel the need of returning to the wonderfully adaptive language of the Greeks in an attempt to discover a new word or combination of words which shall better express all the many forms. of activity Nature is now revealing far more clearly than when, in a relatively early and simple state of biologic knowledge, the word evolution was chosen as more appropriate than mutation or transformisme. If from Greek sources a new word could be borrowed or coined, it should certainly express the new principle that is implied in Lloyd Morgan’s “emergence,” in Bergson’s evolution créatrice, in Osborn’s “creative evolution,” or in “creation by evolution,” the title of the present volume.
This originative and creative principle of emergence, of creative evolution, appears to be lacking in the lifeless universe, even as revealed by the recent and most marvelous discoveries in physics and chemistry, and in astronomy.
Are not new physical elements compounded by the simplification or complication of older physical elements, to give rise to new forms, but without the creation of new forces? Is there not invariably in the physical and material world antecedence and consequence, cause and effect? Are we not, therefore, facing in the biological world a new recognition of the order of Nature in the incessant creative, emergent evolution of new forms, of new characteristics, of new powers? Consequently the addition of new powers and new properties seems peculiarly distinctive of life.
Such questions, such problems, such contrasts as these show that Darwinism, broad and manifold in its implications as the term has become, is only one aspect of the whole evolution of life; there are many other and newer aspects, unknown to Darwin and not implied in the term “Darwinism,” or even in the far more comprehensive term “evolution.” As Einstein follows Newton, so some great philosopher of biology will follow Darwin, and the new biology of the future will be even more inspiring than the biology revealed by the many and able contributors to the present volume.