CREATION BY EVOLUTION
The other view is that offered by the theory of evolution—that all living things now in existence have arisen by natural descent, with modifications, from ancestors that might be traced back, step by step, to unknown simple forms of life.
By its very nature, the hypothesis or doctrine of special creation was helpless to explain the facts shown by the distribution of animals and plants on the earth. On the other hand, if the new theory failed to offer a satisfactory explanation of these facts it would thereby be shown to be inadequate and improbable.
Geographic Distribution in the Light of the Evolutionary Hypothesis
If the evolutionary hypothesis is true, then the present arrangement of living things on the surface of the earth, strange and inexplicable as some of its features may seem to be, must have been the necessary outcome of the whole vast series of changes—geographical, climatic, and biological—through which the earth has passed during unimaginably long periods of geological time. And it may be said, in anticipation, that the present distribution of animals is, in a broad and general sense, explained by what we know of the earth’s history as it is revealed by geology and palaeontology. Where explanation is lacking it is invariably due to our ignorance of parts of that history, and we may reasonably expect that the solution of any problem concerning a particular animal or group of animals will be found when all of that history shall have been deciphered. A great many new facts have been discovered since Darwin wrote, and these, as a whole, are strongly confirmatory of the hypothesis of evolution.
The mode of procedure followed in solving such a problem may be best illustrated by a single concrete example,
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