Whether the differentiations between the high groupings we call Classes and Sub-kingdoms is be accounted for in the same way is a much more difficult question. The clear differences which discriminate the fish, reptiles, birds and mammals from each other, although sizable, nonetheless appear to be of the same nature as those which distinguish a mouse from an elephant or a swallow from a grouse. But the vertebrate animals and the insects are so radically distinct in their form and structure and in the very plan of their structure, that dissidents may not wonder whether it true that they can all have been derived from a single common ascendant by means of the very same laws that explain the distinction of the different species of birds or of reptiles.

Prior to the work of Darwin, the vast majority of natural scientists held fast to the notion that species were ontologically extant, and had not been derived from other species by any action accessible to us. There was, then, no interrogation relating to the origination of families, orders, and classes, since the “origin of species” was thought to be an unsolvable problem. This has all transformed. The total scientific and literary world assumes, as a thing of commonplace knowledge, the origin of species from other related species by the general process of natural birth.

What we may require that a true theory will endow us to apprehend and follow up in some detail those changes in the form, structure, and relations of animals and plants which are transformed in short periods of geologic time and which we can observe now at present time. We may expect our theory to explain satisfactorily most of the small and superficial divergences which identify one species from another. And, finally, we may expect that it explain many troubles and to concord many incongruities in the excessively complex kinships and relations of living things. All this the Darwinian Theory undoubtedly does. It demonstrates how, by way of some of the most universal and ever-acting laws in nature, new species are necessarily produced, while the old species become extinct. Evolution theory likewise enables us to realize how the continuous processes of these laws during the long periods is calculated to bring about those greater divergences represented by the distinct genera, families, and orders into which all living things are classified by natural scientists. There is a lot of dissension on this, in the evolution creationism argument, as well as some fine evolution humor for much needed comic relief.

Posted by admin as Education, Online History, Science Resources at 12:24 PM CST

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