Biological Symmetry and Evolution
The concordance in the quantifiable symmetries among animals is one of the stupendous laws of nature. The circumstances in which species vie for life occur within certain restrains where no obstacles prevent their larger dispersion leads to the further theory that these restrains were ascribed to them from the beginning. We should arrive at the final conclusion that the order that dominates in nature is intentional, that it is determined by the restrains laid out on the first day of creation, and that it has been preserved unchanged through ages with no other adjustments than those which the higher intellectual powers of man allow him to impose on some few animals more closely associated with him.
The views of some of the most preeminent and influential philosophers and scientists of the pre-Darwinian age look to us now to be altogether out-of-date and even positively ridiculous; but they nonetheless present the mental condition of even the most civilized section of scientists on the matter of the nature and origin of species. Many make it clear that despite the great knowledge and adroit thinking of Lamarck, and the more general exposition of the subject by the author of the Vestiges of Creation, there had never been a passable explanation of the ancestry of any one species from another. These leading natural scientists had expressed their belief that species sprang up as mere assortments, and that the species of each genus were all derived from a common ancestor. However, not one of them explained the law or the method that created the change. This was still “the great mystery.”
Regarding the additional inquiry of how far this common lineage could be expressed had hardly come up for discussion at all. They thought that, while the very first step on the path of “transmutation of species” had not been reached, and it was rather useless to contemplate as to how far it might be possible to travel in the same direction or where the road would ultimately lead.
There is a great deal of controversy on this, of course, in the evolution creationism debate, which we see exploding in recent years in all quadrants of science, religion, philosophy and the arts. An Oprah Winfrey creationism controversy is among the most surprising of these.
