CREATION BY EVOLUTION
Much the same considerations apply to insects. In Madeira and in Kerguelen Land, a small group of volcanic islands in the Antarctic Ocean, there are large numbers of insects that are unable to fly. Madeira has 393 species of insects that are not found elsewhere, of which 178 species are incapable of flight. These species could not have reached the island in their present flightless state.
When all the facts here presented are taken together—the facts of the animal life of the continents and of the islands—it must appear to any unprejudiced mind that the evolutionary theory offers by far the most probable explanation of them. The alternative theory can offer no solution of problems of geographic distribution. If the theory of evolution were false it would surely be in conflict with the facts of the geographical distribution of plants and animals. When the distribution of a group is inexplicable by the theory of evolution we find that we have not yet deciphered the history of that group. After its history is made known its present distribution is manifestly the inevitable result of a natural sequence of events.
We have already deciphered much of what may be called the geographic history of the earth—the history of the many gradual changes that have taken place in the form and the extent of its lands and seas, as well as in its climate—and it is these changes that have determined in large part the distribution of its animals. All the facts discovered show reasonable natural succession; nowhere can we find evidences of sudden creation; and all are simply explained by the theory of evolution.
LIST OF BOOKS RECOMMENDED
- Brauer, August. Tiergeographie und Abstammungslehre, in Die Abstammungslehres, Jena, 1911.
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