Creation by Evolution/The Record of the Rocks

by Francis Arthur Bather

Layout 2

THE RECORD OF THE ROCKS

By Francis Arthur Bather

Keeper of Geology, British Museum (Natural History); President Geological Society

When the celebrated Huxley was near the beginning of his career he was very cautious about accepting evolution, and, among other wise warnings, he said that he saw no evidence for it in fossils. At that time Huxley had not specially studied fossils or geology. Later in life he was appointed palaeontologist to the Geological Survey of Great Britain, and he then had studied fossils to such good effect that he was elected President of the Geological Society of London. The more he learned about fossils, the more did he change his early opinion, so that in 1881, when he lectured to the British Association at York, he was impelled to say: “If the theory of Evolution had not already been put forward, palaeontologists would have had to invent it.”

The great Swiss-American naturalist Louis Agassiz had a more profound knowledge of certain groups of fossils than any other scientific man of his day. He saw that their distribution in the rocks showed a definite succession and followed certain laws. There was no meaningless scattering—“a tale told by an idiot . . . signifying nothing”—but a history as logical as any that has been written about human affairs. In any group, such as the fishes, which he himself studied, the succession of forms was so orderly and so connected that he even went so far as to speak of their “genealogy” as something that, though not yet worked out, would eventually be discovered. So many of the philosophical ideas of Louis Agassiz are those of the modern evolutionist that it must always seem strange to us that he never accepted the theory in any practical form.

This is a strange contrast—that of Huxley and Agassiz—Huxley, hard, logical, walking on the strait and narrow path, adhering strictly to fact, ended as a champion of evolution; Agassiz, with marvellous intuition, with broad views and wide-ranging imagination, remained its opponent. Huxley, who demanded proof for every hypothesis, was driven to his conclusion by the cumulation of evidence. Agassiz, quite ready to accept an unprovable, transcendental explanation, remained as he was, and the tide of science passed hist heories by.

No doubt Huxley in 1881 had a far larger body of evidence to his hand than Agassiz had in 1857; and it may be that Agassiz, had he lived till then, would have found in evolution (though not necessarily in Darwin's explanation) the groundwork of his own metaphysical laws and hypotheses. We today, with half-a-century of additional and indescribably more accurate and detailed knowledge of fossils, can not merely endorse Huxley’s statement but can extend and elucidate it.

Notwithstanding, there are people who, having enough knowledge of geology to speak its language, can still deny the evidence. They assert that palaeontologists are arguing in a circle, and their own argument is somewhat as follows: William Smith the land-surveyor, who is known as the Father of English Geology, observed (so they say) a few strata or layers of rock in part of that little island of Britain and found therein a definite succession of fossils. Thereupon geologists jumped to the conclusion that the same succession held good everywhere else. If they discovered that it did not, but that the order was reversed, or that there were great gaps, then they explained such exceptions by saying that the rocks had been overturned or that large portions of them had been removed, and so on. On this assumed succession of the fossils the palaeontologists based a number of lines of descent of the extinct animals and plants and claimed that the changes were due to evolution. Links were admittedly missing, but sometimes a fossil was found that fitted into one of these supposed breaks; then the palaeontologists put it in and called it fresh evidence for evolution; and if the geological age did not quite suit their theory, they said the geologists were wrong, and that there must have been some disturbance of the rocks. In short, the theory was based on the succession of fossils in the rocks, and the succession of the rocks was deduced from the theory. A vicious circle if ever there was one!

So far the critics, but it is somewhat difficult to make out what explanation they would themselves give of the facts presented by the fossils. They do not deny that fossils are the remains of extinct animals. They seem to suppose that the ringed trilobites, the coiled ammonites, the armoured fishes of the Old Red Sandstone, the scaly bony fishes of the Chalk, the monstrous dinosaurs, the huge horned mammals, the great marine ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, and hundreds of other forms unknown to us today, all lived at the same time, though in different regions or different situations, and that the rocks are a sort of hotch-potch in which their remains occur anyhow.

This explanation, or any other conceivable interpretation of our critics’ views, only raises more difficulties and is hopelessly inconsistent with the most readily ascertained facts revealed in any quarry or coast section. But until it is put in clearer form it is not worth discussion. It will be more to the point to see what really is the nature of the argument which these critics travesty.

When I was at school at Winchester, which is one of the oldest cities of England, new drains were laid down and a deep trench was dug along a street in ground that had never been disturbed before. (Fig. 1.) Passing this trench every

Fig. 1.—Section exposed in a city street.

day, I acquired many articles that the workmen threw out. Just below the latest road metal they found coins of the Georges and fragments of china; at a lower level they turned up a bit of green glazed mediaeval earthenware; below this, among other Roman remains, was a piece of the red ware known as Samian; still lower was a fragment of the rough black earthen pottery made in Britain before the Romans came. These objects, which I still possess, with various coins and other things, were all in such an order that the historically oldest lay at the greatest depth. From a layer below these I obtained a piece of hard bone, shaped before the age of iron into a stout pin; and below this again was found a fine stone implement.

No one can doubt that in this old street of Winchester the ground had gradually risen layer by layer, and that each layer contained objects dropped by successive generations of men who lived while it was forming. From these facts alone one could learn much of the history of Winchester and could reconstruct that succession of cultures which, as we know from other facts (not to mention written documents), is applicable to at least the whole of England. These coins and pots and tools are fossils, and their orderly succession is everywhere the same, unless, indeed, the ground has been disturbed by subsequent building operations.

Fig. 2.—Diagrammatic section across the London basin.

If we dig deeper we shall come, it may be, to layers of gravel and brick-earth, as we do in London (Fig. 2); then to stiff clay, and below that to other harder rocks. Except perhaps in the upper gravels, we no longer come across the remains of man, but we find the bones and the shells of other animals, and these, we note, occur in just such regular succession as did the coins and pots. Are we not bound to make a similar inference and to say that the fossils indicate successive layers of rock and a succession of animal inhabitants? We do indeed find that the more closely we study any thickness of rock the more does each successive layer prove to contain its characteristic fossils. These layers can be seen and measured and traced across country, and so far as they have been traced their succession is the same. When we come to a gap (say the English Channel) and when we find that the succession of fossils on the other side is the same, must we not suppose that the succession of the rocks (say in France) is the same as in England?

In this way, step by step, it has been possible to pass from one country to another, until the stratified rocks of the whole world have been correlated or linked up just as the succession of Emperors in China can be correlated with the Kings of England. There are difficulties, no doubt, owing to large gaps like the Pacific Ocean, or to the readily intelligible fact that some animals live in the sea and others on land or in fresh water; also to the fact that there are differences between the inhabitants of arctic and tropical climates. But, so long as attention is limited to fossils of similar nature, these difficulties rarely obtrude. One finds, for example, in the State of New York and in Quebec a clear succession of fossils precisely comparable to the succession in Great Britain.

It is perfectly true that there are places where a rock (A) overlying another (B) contains fossils that elsewhere are found to lie below B. But we shall generally find that such places show signs of disturbance of the rocks. If we admit (as everyone does) that the fossils found in the Alps, the Rockies, and the Himalayas are the remains of sea-animals, then we recognize that these mountain chains must have been raised from the sea-floor by forces so enormous that they could not help crushing, crumpling, and overturning the rocks. There are plenty of obvious evidences that this has happened, and it may well have happened in places where the signs are not so obvious. Tremendous though these movements seem by our pygmy human standards of comparison, it is well to remember that the greatest ups and downs on the surface of the earth are relatively less than the irregularities on the skin of an orange. Now picture to yourself the rocks of the Alps before they were folded and raised, and you will see that they must have occupied a greater area, as a folded tablecloth does when you smooth it out. Thus you can appreciate that some of these masses of rock have been shoved many miles and thrust over other masses. Naturally, in such a process the original succession has been disturbed.

Now the evidence for these movements does not entirely depend on the fossil remains of living creatures. Such folding and thrusting can be followed in the rocks of Finland, which contain no fossils at all. But the presence of fossils in the rocks, if we admit the evidence from undisturbed areas, is of much help in working out the succession of the disturbed rocks. The evidence is of just the same nature as that on which we rely in tracing the history of some ancient cathedral that has often been partly pulled down and rebuilt.

The evolutionist does not base his conclusions on evidence from these disturbed areas, where indeed the fossils are too often shattered and obscure. He is content to take the far larger areas of the earth, where the succession is clear and the rocks are only a little tilted. Wherever in such a succession we are able to trace the history of a single group of organisms, we find it perfectly continuous and regular. Gaps there may be, but the more we explore and study the fewer are the gaps. This continuous history always shows a gradual change from the oldest to the newest forms, and at no point is it possible to say that there was an entirely new creation.

It is not easy to find a great thickness of rock that was laid down continuously through many thousands of years. Almost everywhere there are breaks, due either to some cessation of the supply of rock-material or to the washing away by sudden local currents of rock already deposited. Or again, though rock may have been laid down without pause, the conditions may have changed, so that, for example, sandstone is succeeded by fine-grained clay or shale, and this again by limestone. With the change of conditions there was a change in the character of the animal and plant communities living on the sea bottom or in the waters above. Some creatures live at one depth, some at another; one kind prefers a sandy bottom, another prefers a limy ooze, and so on. Consequently, where a great thickness of rock consists of layers differing in composition, it is not possible to trace a single race of animals up through the whole sequence in any limited region. The race migrated and its descendants must be sought elsewhere.

One of the best examples of a rock that was laid down continuously through a long period of time and yet retained its general character is the Chalk of southern England and northern France. This soft limestone was laid down in a relatively shallow and apparently calm sea, and it contains many fossils of marine animals. Among these fossils sea-urchins are very common, and a careful study has been made of one particular genus of heart-shaped sea-urchin named Micraster. A. W. Rowe, a physician of Margate, devoted his holidays to collecting these heart-urchins from the Chalk of England, foot by foot. He was able to show that what appeared to be a distinct species found at the bottom of the Chalk gradually changed into a different species found at the top. This change is almost imperceptible, but it can be traced in every part of the fossil shell, and it takes place in the same way in all parts of the country. Here is an example of evolution caught in the act. If we were to take a set of photographs of these fossils from the base of the series to the top, and copy them on a cinematograph film we could see evolution taking place before our eyes.

Let us remember that this change of one species into another took thousands of years, probably hundreds of thousands; then we shall not expect to find evidence that similar changes have taken place during the brief span of historical time.

One should note also, both in this case and in others that are equally well established, how very regular is the course of the change. A drunken man staggers along, veering from one side of the road to the other, stumbling and stopping at random. His aim is not visible; his course cannot be foreseen. How different is the flight of an arrow towards its mark; rising from the archer's bow, and then sinking in one gentle unbroken curve till it pierces the bull's-eye! This mathematical regularity is due to the momentum imparted by the bow and to the pull of gravity; any deflections due to the wind can be allowed for and calculated. Of like nature, and no less due to natural causes, is the regular change of an evolving series of animals. But whatever may be its cause, the regularity is such that the palaeontologist can predict the existence of forms still unknown, but required, on his theory, to fill a gap or to extend the series backward. Such forms have often been found in accordance with his prediction. This power of correct prediction is generally held to be the strongest proof of any scientific theory.

For these reasons palaeontologists are bound in honesty to accept evolution; but equally in honesty they must confess that they do not yet know all its laws or all its causes. That they disagree upon what they do not know does not prove their testimony false if they agree upon what they do know.

REFERENCES

• Bather, F. A. Fossils and Life: Address to the Geological Section of the British Association. Rept. Brit. Assoc, 1920.
• Huxley, T. H. The Rise and Progress of Palaeontology. Nature, Vol. XXIV, pp. 342–346, 1881.
• Price, G. McCready. Evolutionary Geology and the New Catastrophism. Published by the author at Watford, Herts, 1927.
• Rowe, A. W. An Analysis of the Genus Micraster, etc. Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, Vol. IV, pp. 494–547, 1899.
• Smith, William. Strata Identified by Organised Fossils, (etc.). London, 1816. The bearing of Smith’s work is elucidated in an Address at Bath on July 10, 1926, by F. A. Bather, published by the Royal Lit. and Sci. Inst., Bath.

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“Everywhere is ceaseless change. Nowhere is there perfect adjustment and harmony, always a constant becoming, a never-ceasing growth. The world is never finished, never a flawless work of art, but always striving toward perfection, taking its course, it may be, toward that one far-off divine event toward which the whole creation moves.”—F. L. Darrow.

Fossil remains show that none of the plants or animals of the distant past were like those of to-day. They prove that species have altered since the beginning; and the farther back in time we find the remains the more imperfect, the series showing a gradual improvement in forms.—Editor.