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Geology and the Recapitulation Theory

A study in Circular Reasoning

By George McCready Price

This article, originally from The Bulletin of Deluge Geology, (date
unknown), is one of a collection of articles by Price in Report on
Evolution, published in 1971 by C. Wm. Anderson of Malverne N.Y.

Definitions and Assumptions

Two sources of error in scientific work which are more or less common
are hasty induction and reasoning in circles.

Hasty induction is also called incomplete induction, sometimes called
jumping to a conclusion. However, since no human being can ever hope
to have in hand all the data concerning any large prohlem, any
induction about the larger problems of the world runs the risk of
being incomplete. But conclusions from incomplete data may later
become justified by additional facts. For example, when Columbus
sailed west, he had only very scanty facts on which to base his
conclusion that he might find land in that direction. The outcome
precludes our blaming him for his incomplete induction; instead we
say, "How wonderful: what a brilliant intuition." Similarly, William
Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, announced that
all animals come from an egg, or an ovum. We now know that he was
right. But at that time (1651), nearly three hundred years ago, nobody
had ever seen the ovum of any mammal. Harvey was just making a hasty
but clever induction and happened to be right. In this case also, we
commend him for his shrewd insight, his intelligent grasp of
fundamentals. His induction was based on incomplete data, but turned
out to be completely correct.

But reasoning in circles is very different. It is identical with
trying to lift oneself by one's bootstraps. When used in any line of
scientific work, it becomes the one unpardonable, logical sin, the one
that hath never forgiveness. It makes one look ridiculous; it shows a
lack of mental clearness, a mental blind spot, an incapacity for
seeing and judging evidence.

Circular reasoning can get us nowhere. Not only are all conclusions
thus reached absolutely worthless, but they are a disgrace to those
who indulge in these mental acrobatics, no matter how the facts may
turn out in the end. Even if the same conclusion is afterwards reached
in another and perfectly legitimate manner, we still throw away the
first method and have nothing but blame for the one who may have
reached the right conclusion in this whirligig fashion; because we all
instinctively feel that there must be something wrong with one who can
indulge in such queer tricks of the mind. He may be merely indulging
in wishful thinking, or may be trying to fool us deliberately. Which
of these are we to think of in this case?

But let us in this paper start with some fundamentals. All study of
the natural sciences involves some assumptions: hence it is highly
important that all our assumptions be rigidly sound. In physics and
chemistry, for instance, we have to assume that the things which we
examine are genuine entities, also that our minds are capable of
estimating their "properties" or their behavior. Many other
assumptions are made in these basic sciences of physics and chemistry,
and we hope they are all sound and correct.

In geology, of course, we have to make all the same assumptions with
which we start to study physics and chemistry; but then we go on to
make some additional assumptions which are much more speculative or
even contrary to fact. One is that the present behavior of the ocean,
the atmospere, and of all the other features of nature are a true
measure of all that has ever happened in the past; whereas the members
of this Society believe that there is ample evidence to the contrary.
They believe that something must have happened to our earth in the
long ago which was radically different from the more or less orderly
procedure of nature with which we are acquainted in our modern world.

Another doctrine of geology as commonly taught, which we declare is a
pure assumption (or perhaps a wretchedly incomplete induction), is
that the various forms of life (plants and animals) have been
appearing on the earth in a serial order of increasing size and
complexity of oranization, the process covering many millions of
years, and that geologists have acquired the skill to know the
relative ages of these different kinds of plants and animals, so that
whenever any of these typical "index fossils" as they are called are
discovered, the geologists can immediately assign the rocks in which
they occur to their proper stage in the long-drawn-out geological
ages. All this, I repeat, is an unfounded assumption; the arrangement
of these index fossils in an alleged historical order is a purely
artificial process: and the entire scheme is a direct denial of the
Bible account of the absolute contemporaneity of all the various forms
of life from the very beginning. [Ref 1]

It will be our task in the present paper to study some of the events
in the history of the rise of this succession-of-life theory of the
fossils, to see some of the sad slips in logic made by the early
geological pioneers. Were they merely making hasty inductions or were
they also indulging in circular reasoning?

The Early Work of Agassiz

First we must go back over a hundred years ago, to a time when Louis
Agassiz, as a young man, was struggling for his first recognition as a
man of science. He had been studying medicine, but in the meantime was
ever more interested in various lines of natural science. He made his
first reputation by his studies of fishes, living and fossil, the
opportunity for much of this work having been placed in his hands by
no less a person than Baron Cuvier. On January 18, 1830, when young
Louis was not yet quite 23 years of age, we find him writing to his
brother as follows:

Add to this that just now there is a real need of this work [on
fossil fishes], for the determination of the different geological
formations. Once before, at the Heidelberg meeting, it had been
proposed to me; the Director of the mines at Struasbourg, M. Voltz,
even offered to send me at Munich the whole collection of fossil
fishes from their museum. [Ref 2.]

Here the was a very young man, brilliant and aggressive, who had moved
about from one museum and university to another in Switzerland and
southwest Germany, and even as far as Paris, who by a comparison of
various fossil fishes undertakes to determine the chronology of the
geological deposits of the entire world from the comparatively few
specimens which were available for him. He was not concerned with the
stratigraphic sequence in the field of one bed above another; partly
because fossil fishes are usually found in great shoals, as in life,
and one has to to another locality, perhaps many miles away, to find
another fish bed. But he was undoubtedly much more influenced by the
then prevailing doctrine, as taught by Cuvier, the great leader in all
these studies, that all the fossils, without exception, belonged to
extinct species. There had been a great many successive creations and
catastrophes, so Cuvier taught, and all the fossils belonged to a
long-vanished world, with no natural connection with the animals now
living. Hence Agassiz felt quite free to arrange his specimens in any
way he thought would best illustrate that scheme of ideal development
in the plan of creation which he thought must be the correct one. [Ref
2a]

Geology, as we now know it, was just then beginning. The first volume
of Lyell's "Principles of Geology" appeared a little later in this
same year, 1830, and the second volume two years later. But Lyell
himself was not at this time particularly concerned with problems
about the relative sequence of the fossils. In fact, no comprehensive
scheme about the relative sequence of the fossils for the world as
whole had yet been suggested by anybody, though a few very local
stratigraphic successions of beds had been worked out in various parts
of the British Isles and on the Continent. Hence Agassiz thought that
he had a free hand and a completely open field. By his study of the
various specimens which he could examine in a few museums, he worked
out what he regarded as the ideal classification series, though it
happened to differ considerably from the classification series then
accepted; and on the basis of this a priori system of classification
he undertakes to place his fossil specimens in their correct
geologicaI order. In short, according to Agassiz, the geological
series of the fossils is just an old-time classification or taxonomic
series, and the one should parallel the other.

Two and a half years later, or in July, 1852, we find him writing from
Paris to Alexander von Humboldt the following enthusiastic statement
of his work and his methods of reasoning:

What was my joy and surprise to find that the simplest enumeration
of the fossil fishes according to their geological succession, was
also a complete statement of the natural relations of the families
among themselves: that one might therefore read the generic
development of the whole class [of fishes] in the history of
creation, the representation of the genera and species in the
several families being therein determined; in one word, that the
genetic succession of the fishes corresponds perfectly with their
zoological classification, and with just that classification
proposed by me. The question therefore in characterizing formations
is no longer that of the numerical preponderance of certain genera
and species, but of distinct structural relations, carried through
all the formations according to a definite direction, following
each other in an appointed order, and recognizable in the organisms
as they are brought forth.... If my conclusions are not overturned
or modified through some later discovery, they will form a new
basis for the study of fossils. [Ref. 3]

This new basis for the study of the fossils by making their geological
classification correspond with their zoological or taxonomic
classification, is very decisively and confidently set forth in a
statement in his preface to the large work of five magnificently
illustrated volumes entitled, "Researches on Fossil Fishes," issued
between 1855 and 1843. I quote the translation given by his wife:

I have succeeded in expressing the laws of succession and of the
organic development of fishes during all geological epochs, and
science may henceforth, in seeing the changes in this class from
formation to formation, follow the progress of organization in one
great division of the animal kingdom, through a complete series of
the ages of the earth. [Ref. 4]

Now let no one say that this is not the recapitulation theory. I admit
that it is not a direct and obvious part of that theory: but for
anyone who wishes to get at the psychological foundations of this
theory, this work by Agaasiz will be seen as a prime essential for the
building up of the geological series of the fossils, without which
there could never have been any thought of the embryo repeating or
recapitulating the geological history of its ancestors. Hence this
pioneer work by Agassiz, in his purely artificial scheme of arranging
the fossil fishes to fit what he regarded as the ideal classification
series, is of prime importance both for geology and for that theory of
recapitulation which became so large a factor in the work of Darwin
and Haeckel in convincing the world about their theory of organic
evolution.

The Work of d'Orbigny

But Agassiz had worked only with the fishes, and fishes are after all
not the most important of the "index fossils." The shells, both
brachiopods and mollusks, together with such other invertebrates as
trilobites, are considered more important than the vertebrare fishes
in determining the "age" of the strata. What about the methods of
Agaasiz when applied to these other fossils?

The man who seems to have been the first to apply this same method to
the study of certain kinds of mollusks (ammonites) was Alcide
d'Orbigny (1802-1857), a contemporary of Agassiz, and ultimately
becoming professor of paleontology in the Museum of Natural History in
Paris. Like Agassiz, d'Orbigny was a disciple and admirer of the great
Baron Cuvier, who was over thirty years their senior and died in 1852.
But all three of these men believed in many successive creations and
world destructions as the cause of the fossils. Zittel, the standard
historian of geology, says:

D'Orbigny supposed that organic creation had been completely
renewed twenty-seven or twenty-eight times. [Ref. 5]

The folowing summary of d'Orbigny's methods is given by Henry
Fairfield Osborn in an elaborate article in the "Encyclopaedia
Britannica":

He recognized the fact that the shells of mollusks, which grow by
successive additions, preserve unchanged the whole series of
changes of their individual development so that each shell of a
Cretaceous ammonite, for example, represents five stages of
progressive modification as follows: the first is the periode
embryonnaire, during which the shell is smooth: the second and
third represent periods of elaboration and ornamentation; the
fourth is a period of initial degeneration; the fifth and last a
period of degeneration when ornamentation becomes obsolete and the
exterior smooth again. [Ref. 6]

Of course, since he was not an evolutionist, he did not claim that the
living pearly nautilus, which is the modern representative of the
fossil ammonites, is the lineal representative of the kinds found in
the Mesozoic beds. But he did classify the fossil ammonites (and by
implication all other shell fossils) according to this scheme of
comparison with the individual development of typical modern specimen,
which is the geological aspect of the full recapitulation theory.
Neither he nor Agassiz went the whole journey; let us give them them
the benefit of the doubt and say that they saw the ridiculousness of
using the modern embryonic development of the individual to help prove
evolution, when this same modern individual development has already
been used to arrange the fossil specimens in an alleged chronological
order. To put it more briefly, we hope they could have seen the
absurdity of using ontogeny to prove evolution, after this same
ontogeny had been used to construct their phylogeny, -though of course
we are here using these terms anachronously, for the words had not yet
been invented by Haeckel.

Agassiz's "Essay on Classification"

Here we must consider some of the outstanding teachings of Agassiz in
his "Essay on Classification," published first in 1857, though it was
the culmination of what he had been teaching in his classes and in
popular lectures for several years previously. I have stated that
Agassiz started out by dealing with living and fossil fishes, and at
that time he had only two sets or series of facts to compare, first
the classification series (his new scheme being considerably different
from the one in ordinary use at that time), and second, the geological
series as he then arranged the fossils, Agassiz's theory being that
the two series ought to correspond. As his studies continued and
enlarged, he wanted to include all other kinds of fossils, and he
seems to have been the first to make use of the embryonic development
of the individuals of the various groups for comparison with the
fossils, though I have been unable to find the exact date at which he
began this use of embryology. But it must have been well over
twenty-five years before his "Essay on Classification" that he had
started his life-time work of comparing the three parallelisms, as he
termed them, the modern classification series, the geological series
of the fossils, and the embryonic series or the successive stages of
the "typical" individual in each of the great groups of animals; for
now his ambition was to make his comparisons embrace all the animal
kingdom.

I shall let Dr. Percy E. Davidson give a summary of the results of
Agassiz in his work on classification:

As his interest broadened to include the systematic classification
of the whole animal world, Agassiz relied more and more upon the
facts of embryology to make good the deficiencies of fossil remains
and to prevent the confusion, inevitable as he believed, from an
examination of anatomical differences alone. In 1857 he wote, 'I
satisfied myself long ago that embryology furnishes the most
trustworthy standard to determine the relative rank among animals.'

In the system ultimately evolved by Agassiz, descriptive of what he
believed to be the natural order, there were four great
parallelisms, or systems of relationship. These were (1) a
parallelism between the geological succession of animals and their
relative standing or structural gradation; (2) a parallelism
between the geological succession of animals and the individual
development of their living representatives; (3) a parallelism
between the relative rank or gradation of animals and their
individual development; and (4) these several series were again
related to geographical distributon. Thus-[quoting Agassiz
himself]:

'...the phenomena of animal life correspond to one another, whether
we compare their rank as determined by structural complication with
the phases of their growth, or with their succession in past
geological ages; whether we compare this succession with their
embryonic growth, or all these different relations with each other
and with the geographical distribution of animals upon earth. The
same series everywhere!' [Ref. 7]

Of course, in Agassiz's enthusiastic description of his four
parallelisms to his students and in his writings, he never called
attention to the fact that only one of these four series, the
embryonic development of the individual, has an honest-to-goodness
objective reality; all the others are artificial, mere constructs of
the mind and made by human arrangement and manipulation. How
perpetually has the classification system been adjusted to fit the
discoveries or the whims of the classifier, and how perpetually has
the alleged geological succession of the fossils been adjusted to fit
both the clasification series and the embryonic, and how constantly
may the geographical diatribution be arranged to suit any one's fancy!
There is only the one, the embryonic development, which cannot be
manipulated or "doctored" by human caprice in the interests of some
preconceived theory. Unfortunately, even the embryonic development of
one group does not always correspond very closely to that of other
somewhat related groups, as Haeckel found out to his sorrow, giving
occasion for him and his followers to charge nature with confusing or
even falsifying the phylogenic record. [Ref. 8] Accordingly, what a
tangle of confusion was served up before a confiding and admiring
world, when Agassiz presented them with these four parallelisms, as he
called them, "The same series everywhere!"

No one is likely to question my statement that the geographical
distribution of animals is a highly artificial idea. Indeed, any mind
that can take seriously such an idea as anything more than a whim or a
fancy, must have some mental axe to grind. The classification series
seems more like a narural arrangement; but at which end shall we
hegin? Why must we necessarily begin with the amoeba and run up to
man? Why may we not begin with man and and arrange all animal life in
descending complexity down to the amoeba? Surely there is no finality
about the one method as compared with the other,-except in the mind of
someone who has long been obsessed with the docrrine of organic
evolution.

The Artificial Character of the Geological Series

But many will indignantly resent the idea that the geological series
is an artificial one. It is the object of the present paper to prove
this proposition, and from this proof to show the circular reasoning
in taking this artificially constructed history of life on the earth
("phylogeny") as the backbone of the whole evolution theory, whenever
the embryonic series is compared with it.

It is now well over a hundred years since geologists began to follow
the lead of William Smith in classifying the strata according to the
fossils found in them, instead of according to their mineral content,
as previously taught by A.G. Werner. Yet only the very few who are
intimately acquainted with the century-long history of geology since
that day realize how repetedly, I might almost say perpetually, during
this time the stratigraphic position of certain sets of beds which
seemed perplexing in the field has been settled by studies of their
fossils. Museum collections of fossils always contain many specimens
which have been picked up by local village collectors, who could not
always he expected to remember correctly just what locality furnished
each of the many individual specimens which they have gathered.
Sometimes, indeed, rare specimens which may have been found lying
loose on the top of the ground may have found their way into museum
collections; for atmospheric weathering of such exposed specimens is a
very slow process, and many splendid looking fossils have been found
in this way. Thus uncertainties have more than once been injected into
collections which have been used in the "momentous" decisions of
paleontologists in deciding just how a certain set of beds should be
placed in the geological series.

In any clearly defined locality, of course, the relative age of the
beds is a simple malter of stratigraphical succession, at least so far
as the processes of laying down the materials are concerned. As I have
pointed out elsewhere, [Ref. 9] we have no authority to say that the
materials in three successive beds, limestone, sandstone, and
conglomerate, for example, may not all have been in existence
contemporaneously before any of the beds were deposited. And if this
is true concerning the materials composing the beds, it is also just
as true concerning the fossils contained in them. If trilobites are
found in the limestone, dinosaurs in the sandstone, and elephant bones
in the conglomerate, it is nothing but a pure, unfounded assumption to
say that all three kinds of animals could not have been living
contemporaneously before their remains were deposited in this serial
order. [Ref. 10] Hence, while the order of superposition does show the
order of deposit, or the sequence in which the beds were laid down, it
cannot tell us a thing about the relative age of the materials
composing the beds, nor about the relative age of the fossils found
within them. We must first assume something like a succession of life
on the globe or a long series of creations on the installment plan, as
taught by Cuvier, d'Orbigny, and Agassiz, before we can say that the
trilobites actually lived before the dinosaurs and the latter before
the elephants.

Stratigraphy can tell us the relative order of the beds for only a
limited area, often for only a very limited area. The beds on opposite
sides of any mountain range can never be correlated by stratigraphy,
not to mention the beds in countries separated by an ocean. In
thousands of instances beds only a mile or two apart can never be
traced together by either their lithological structure or their
fossils contained in the beds are always used to decide the matter.
The many notorious cases of "deceptive conformitys" and so-called
"thrust faults," prove that the fossils are always the criteria of the
age of a set of beds; and when an evolutionary minded geologist is
armed with the conviction that he knows the true order in which the
beds ought to be found, and then has at his command such devices as
"deceptive conformities" and "thrust faults" to help him out in any
difficulty, it must be confessed that it is exceedingly difficult to
get him in a logical corner.

It would be tiresome to cite illustrative examples to show how the
fossils have constantly been used to decide about the correct position
(in the geological series) of any specific set of beds. I mean its
position as compared with other beds in distant parts of the world.
This would help to show the constructive or artificial character of
the geological series, by illustrating how the imposing geological
succession of the fossils from all parts of the world has been built
up through the years. It may be more in accord with this brief
discussion of a very large subject to go back and give a few more
facts about the way in which embryology and taxonomy were employed in
the work of adjusting the geological succession, and then the way in
which the results thus attained were used as propaganda to help
"prove" the general theory of evolution.

We have already seen how Agassiz, in the year 1830, was writitig his
brother about the great need there was for the work which he was then
doing about fossil fishes, "for the determination of the different
geological formations." This method of using the classification
principles of the various groups of animals for the determination of
the ideal order of the different geological formations was, however,
soon supplemented by the use of embryology for the same purpose. And
we have seen how "Agassiz relied more and more upon the facts of
embryology to make good the deficiencies of fossil remains, and to
prevent the confusion, inevitable as he believed, from an examination
of anatomical differences alone." [Ref. 11]

We have also seen how d'Orbigny used the embryonic comparisons in the
case of mollusk shells for the same purpose. But it was Alpheus Hyatt
(1838-1902), an ardent disciple of Agassiz who went further than his
master and accepted the theory of evolution, who first (1866) applied
this principle to the study of fossil ammonites. As Henry Fairfield
Osborn tells us, "He [Hyatt] showed that from each individual shell of
an ammonite the entire ancestral series may be reconstructed." [Ref.
12]

Splitting Species

With the modern classification series and the embryonic series both
now enlisted in making "good the deficiencies of fossil remains," the
work of adjutsting the fossiliferous "record" for all the various
groups of animals went forward rapidly. Darwin had taught the world
that varieties and races are constantly diverging more and more into
species and genera, so that "species" are largely imaginary groups,
and anyway they are (so he said) only temporary stages in the
transformation of races into the higher categories. Hence, the
botanists and zoologists felt themselves justified in splitting up the
long recognized species into much smaller units, whenever it seemed
convenient to do so. This vogue for splitting species was not long in
taking on with the paleontologists and geologists, for in the case of
the fossils there are few of the other checks on classification
besides mere outward form: and when embryology stands as mentor in the
study of fossil fishes, or shells, or what not, it becomes very easy
to find a new "species" to fit almost any theory.

Zittel tells us how this tendency toward splitting species has worked
out in the case of brachiopods, which are among the oldest known
fossils. Thomas Davidson's work dealing with "British Fossil
Brachiopods" (1870-1885) set a high standard in the study of this
group; but the subsequent workers in this field had come more
completely under the influence of the recapitulation theory. And
Zittel tells the results as follows:

Whereas Davidson in his systematic treatment allowed for a
considerable extent of variability in his definitions of genera and
species, the new direction of research guided by Hall, Clarke, and
Beecher in North America, and by Waagen and Bittner in Europe,
tries to restrict generic and specific definitions within the
narrowest possible limits, in order to enhance the value of fossil
brachiopods for the characterization of stratigraphical horizons. A
systematic review of all known brachiopods forms an introductory
chapter in the comprehensive monograph of Palaeoloic types which
has been published by Hall and Clarke. The number of genera has
been greatly increased, and in many cases species have been
elevated to the rank of genera. A new classification was proposed
in 1889 by Beecher, in which it has been the author's aim to bring
the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of the group into more
apparent correspondence, and to apply the differences in the beak
region more often for systematic distinctions. [Ref. 13]

It is not always that the paleontologists have acknowledged so
unashamedly their recapitulation leanings in the matter of their
classification of the fossils. In other groups the same methods have
been followed, though not so plainly acknowledged. [Ref. 14.]  But in
this very large and important group of the brachiopods, whose fossils
are so frequently used in the naming and classification of the beds of
the Paleozoic, these specialists try to restrict "generic and specific
definitions within the narrowest possible limits, in order to enhance
the value of fossil brachiopods for the characterization of
stratigraphical horizons;" and the announced aim has been "to bring
the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of the group into more
apparent correspondence.

And when the ontogenetic and the phylogenetic development have been
thus brought into more apparent correspondence, the followers of
Darwin and Haekel can then point to these facts as helping to prove
the general theory of organic evolution. Was there ever a more perfect
example of reasoning in a circle?

Oppel and Buckman Subdividing the Ammonites

These principles may be illustrated by the history of the study of
fossil ammonites, as carried on by Oppel and Buckman.

Carl Albert Oppel (1831-1865), who preceded Zittel in the chair of
Paleontology in the University of Munich, south Germany, and who died
at the age of thirty-four, devoted his life to the study of the
various subdivisions of the Jurassic system, as shown by the special
guide-fossils or index-fossils in the various museums of Germany,
France, and England, all of which localities he visited and compared.
He was a careful observer of the details concerning the fossils, and
undertook to compare not only the large subdivisions of these
localities by means of their fossils, but also the smallest groups of
the strata.

Setting aside all lithological features, Oppel deduced from his
observations a series of paleotological horizons which he termed
zones, each of which represented the definite age-limit of some
leading fossil type or types. 'A zone,' he says, 'is characterized
as a definite paleontological horizon by a consistent occurrance in
it of certain species which do not occur in the preceding or
succeeding neighborhood zones.' [Ref. 15]

And if Oppel had been able to visit the Gondwana beds of India, the
Karoo of South Africa, as well as the Jurassic beds of Australia,
South America and Russia, he could doubtless have still further
subdivided his "zones," from the slight differences which he would
find among the index-fossils in these distant localities. For as
William Berryman Scott says, some of the same identical fossils found
in Europe are also found occurring in these distant places; and "even
the minuter divisions, the substages and zones of the European Jura,
are applicable to the classification of the South American beds." Why
not? Since this system of index-fossils over-rides all other criteria,
Zittel himself acknowledging above that under it the paleontologists
"set aside all lithological features," and since this system of
index-fossils becomes nothing but an old-time taxonomic system of the
life of the ancient world, why should it not be just as applicable to
South America or Australia or Timbuktu as to Europe?

An Englishman, who lived up until only a few years ago, and who had
many increased opportunities from wide portions of the globe, has
carried the scheme to even greater detail.

Sidney Savory Buckman (1860-1929), became fascinated with the work of
making fine subdivisions in both the paleontological and the
stratigraphical analysis, as the only effective method of recognizing
the genetic relationships between the different grades of fossils. He
multiplied greatly the genera and species among the ammonites. I quote
from a recent review of his work:

His paleontological studies soon convinced him that the simple
stratigraphical principles of William Smith could be applied with
much greater precision than had hitherto been attempted. This led
to a great deal of stratigraphic subdivision, so that the
thirty-three Jurassic zones of Oppel became elaborated into a
system of about four hundred zones. [Ref. 16]

By the simple device of seeking to separate the sedimentary history
from the biological history of the fossils, he was able to devise a
dual nomenclature for the subdivisions of geological time, one for the
strata per se and the other for the fossils, by which he seemed to
avoid the absurdities of minute fossil onion coats for the entire
world to correspond to the minute "zones" which he named.

Working on this principle [of having a two fold nomenclature, one
set of names for the strata and another for the fossils], Buckman
produced his biological chronology of the Jurassic  period, in
which the period is divided into forty-five ages and about four
hundred hemerae or biological time units. [Ref. 17]

It would exhaust my time and your patience to go into the history of
the other  important groups which have been used as "index-fossils."
The trilobites and graptolites of the Ordovician have been favorite
subjects for the making of minute subdivisions, and thus for tracing
out alleged evolutionary pedigrees for those groups. As all the
trilobites and graptolites are probably extinct, there are no modern
kinds with which to check up by their embryology or otherwise on the
evolutionary theories proposed for them; in this way paleontologists
can avoid the embarrassment which as come to the students of
gastropods and pelecypods, in which groups, as one writer remarks,
so-called "ancestral forms" "...are all too frequently preceded by
their theoretical descendants." [Ref. 18]  Even the ammonites
themselves seem to have occasioned difficulties, for L.F. Spath is
quoted as saying:

It may be necessary to assume an inverted geological order, if our
views of the biological order [in time] of the ammonites are to
continue to be governed by the discredited 'laws' of
recapitulation. [Ref. 18a]

How the Geological Sequence is Adjusted

But these instances of finding "index fossils" in very troublesome
positions, or in the "inverted" order of sequence, take on a familiar
look to those who are acquainted with the "pioneer colonies" of
Barrande, the "recurrent faunas" of Ulrich, and the notorious
"deceptive conformities" and "thrust faults" found almost everywhere,
the last-mentioned being known as "nappes" by the Swiss geologists.
What a great cloud of witnesses are now arising to refute the theory
of an invariable sequence in which the fossils are always found in all
parts of the globe!

Two factors of a more general nature,  however, need to be kept in
mind when dealing with the fossils assembled from various parts of the
world for the purpose of comparing evolutionary pedigrees, these two
factors tending to show the artificial nature of all such work.

(1) The profuse numbers of some of these creatures (trilobites,
ammonites, etc.) which are often found together in a specific locality
frequently preclude the possibility of dealing with individual
specimens in the matter of classifying or "dating" the beds where they
occur; so that the scientist falls back on the average or general
aspect of the entire lot, to determine just where the bed should be
classed in the geological "column." And we all  know how the personal
factor always looms very large in work of judging the average or
general aspect of any large number of specimens.

(2) As deposits of these invertebrate fossils occur in almost every
part of the world, the wide separation of these deposits makes
correlation by stratigraphy quite out of the question; hence the
scientists have to fall back on what they regard as the general
principles of the subject. And since all geologists are already
convinced evolutionists, and believe in the correctness of using the
embryonic development as more or less of a guide in classifying all
animals, living and fossil, it is too much to expect that those who do
the classifying of the fossils would not do so in conformity with the
general principles of the evolution doctrine. Human nature being what
it is, we may regard it as a foregone conclusion that geologists and
paleontologists should look at their facts through the colored
specacles of Darwin and Lyell.

The wise words of one of our most thoughtful modern scientific writers
are well worthy of consideration in this connection:

The history of thought shows that false interpretations of observed
facts enter into the records of their observation. Thus both
theory, and received notions as to fact, are in doubt. [Ref. 19]

And again by the same writer:

Every scientific memoir in its record of the 'facts' is shot
through and through with interpretation. [Ref. 20]

Prof. F.C.S. Schille,of Oxford University, also has emphasized the
truth that all reports of scientific "facts" always contain more or
less of theory. [Ref. 21] This is not because the scientisits
reporting them are unreliable, but because human nature is what it is.
No one can escape more or less of bias in every report about what he
regards as scientific "facts."

Zittel, who is usually so candid and fair in his judgments, seems to
blame some modern paleontologists for not making a freer use of the
parallelisms of embryology and taxonomy in their studies of the
fossils. At least, that is how I understand his statements as given
below. He tells how August Schenk (1868-1891) brought in a reform in
the study of paleontology by his sound knowledge of living plants, so
that "now," says Zittel, "the author of a paper on any department of
paleophytology is expected to have a sound knowledge of systematic
botany."

But he immediately goes on to make the following complaint:

It cannot be said that paleozoology has yet arrived at this
desirable standpoint.

He names a large number of imminent men, like Cuvier, Owen, Huxley,
and others who were also well acquainted with living animals as well
as with the fossils.

But comparatively few individuals have such a thorough grasp of
zoological and geological knowledge as to enable them to treat
paleontological researches worthily, and there has accumulated a
dead weight of stratigraphical-paleontological literature wherein
the fossil remains of animals are named and pigeon-holed solely as
an additional ticket of the age of a rock deposit, with a willful
disregard of the much more difficult problem of their relationships
in the long chain of existence.

The terminology which has been introduced in the innumerable
monographs of special fossil faunas in the majority of cases makes
only the slenderest pretext of any connection with recent
systematic zoology; if there is a difficulty [regarding genetic
relationships], then stratigraphical arguments are made the basis
of a solution [that is, new specific or generic names are given to
the fossils]. Zoological students are, as a rule, too actively
engaged and keenly interested in building up new observations to
attempt to spell through the arbitrary paleontological conclusions
arrived at by many stratigraphers, or to revise their labors from a
zoological point of view. [Ref. 22]

In this quotation Zittel may be right in condemning the common custom
of coining new names for the fossils just because they are fossils,
this custom being a hang-over from the days of Cuvier, when all the
fossils were always regarded as extinct species, even though they
seemidentical with certainliving forms which look just like them. I
have no sympathy for this custom; for it has made mountains of
difficulty for those who desire to gain a truthful knowledge of the
ancient world which lies buried in the rocks beneath our feet. But he
shows his strong evolutionary bias when he chides certain scientists
for using their fossils "solely as an additional ticket of the age of
a rock-deposit, with a willful disregard of the much more difficult
problem of their relationships in the long chain of existence." He
evidently thinks that one line of evolutionary relationship worked out
by means of the very familiar method of comparisons with the taxonomic
series and embryonic series would be worth almost any number of
specimens "named and pigeon-holed solely as an additional ticket of
the age of a rock deposit." In other words, he cides these scientists
for not using their fossils to help work out the evolutionary evidence
for their particular groups of animals.

But in the other quotation given above Zittel has no word of blame for
what he calls the new direction of research, in which the
paleontologists split up fossil species and genera "within the
narrowest possible limits, in order to enhance the value of fossil
brachiopods [and presumably other fossils also] for the
characterization of stratigraphical horizons," in an openly avowed aim
of bringing "the ontogenic and [the] phylogenetic development of the
group into more apparent correspondence."

Here then we have a peep at the inside story of how the geological
series, or the phylogenic series, as the evolutionists like to call
it, has been built up. We remember how William Smith and Lyell laid
the foundations by dating the rocks according to their fossil
contents, which was assuming the succession of life to begin with,
that is, was assuming the main outlineof the evolution theory. Then we
remember how Agassiz taught the world to adjust the fossils by
comparisons with both the embryonic and the taxonomic series. And now
we find that modern geologists and paleontologists try to split their
fossil species and genera as finely as possible, "in order to enhance
the value of fossil brachiopods [and other fossils] for the
characterization of stratigraphical horizons," in an openly declared
effort "to bring the ontogenic and the phylogenetic development of the
group into more apparent correspondence." [Ref. 23]

In view of all this, how can anyone object when I say that the
geological series is a highly artificial affair, built up by using
both the taxonomic and embryonic series as guides and comparisons? And
then, what are we to think of using this constructed geological series
as the standard with which to compare the embryonic development ofman
and other animals, in an attempt to prove the theory of evolution? It
almost makes one dizzy to think of the whirligig logic involved in
such a performance.

When scientists are on a wrong track entirely in any particular line,
about the only way for them to get right is for them to travel on to
the very end, to convince them, that they are running up a blind
alley. The advocates of the recapitulation theory seem now to be at
about the end of their blind alley. About the only recent  attempt to
save the recapitulation theory is G.R. De Beer's "Embryos and
Ancestors" (London, 1940), which is reviewed by Dr. Cyril B. Courville
in a comprehensive paper dealing with this subject. Summing up De
Beer's book Courville says:
Thus, seventy-five years after the formulation of the biogenetic law
[the recapitulation theory], it is castigated [by De Beer] as an
obstruction to genuine advance in the science of embryology.
According to De Beer, there remains only 'the possibility of a
causal analytic study of the variability and genetics of ontogenic
processes.' In other words, embryology has thus far failed to
prove either the theory of recapitulation or to support decisively
the parent theory of organic evolution. [Ref. 24]

But the main thesis of the present paper is that the geological series
has itself been artificially built up partly by comparison with the
embryonic development, and hence that it is not legitimate to invoke
geology again to prove the  main theory of evolution. In order to
better understand all this, it will be well to go back again to the
early work of Louis Agassiz and see what ideas he really taught and
what came out of them.

How Agassiz Prepared the Way for Evolution

We have seen that Agassiz was the first to use fishes, modern and
ancient, for the classification of the various geological horizons.
Zittel tells us that he was also the first to use the embryonic
development to evaluate or classify the many geological subdivisions
or "horizons." Zittel says;

Agassiz was the first scientist who, in discussing the geneology of
fishes, pointed out the correspondence between the characters of
the different forms succeeding one another in time, and the
characters of successive phases passed through by an organism
during embryonic development. [Ref. 25]

Agassiz could not get the world to adopt his new scheme for
classifying fishes largely based on the scaly skeleton; scientists
thought the system already proposed by Cuvier was much better. And yet
his methods of comparing the parallelisms of the embryonic development
with the taxonomic and the geological, made a great hit with the
scientific world, and under Haekel and others these parallelisms
became one of the most convincing arguments in support of the theory
of organic evolution, which Agassiz always detested and fought to his
dying day. [Ref. 26]

Joseph Le Conte, who had studied under Agassiz at Harvard and  later
became professor of geology at the University of California, has left
us an enthusiastic praise of Agassiz as the man who taught the world
many of the most fundamental ideas of the doctrine of evolution,
though he himself refused to travel the road to the inevitable end. I
shall let Le Conte speak for himself:

Now, I think it can be shown that to Agassiz, more than to any
other man, is due the credit of having established the laws of
succession of living forms in the geological history of the
earth-laws upon which must rest any true theory of evolution. Also,
that to him, more than to any other man, is due the credit of
having perfected the method (method by comparison) by the use of
which alone biological science has advanced so rapidly in modern
times. [Ref. 28]

Le Conte proceeds to explain the meaning of the taxonomic or
classification series, the embryonic or ontogenetic series, and the
geological orphylogenic series. Cuvier was the founder of comparative
anatomy; but he worked only with the first of these series, the
taxonomic. Von Baer and Agassiz, Le Conte says, added comparison in
the embryonic series also, and then compared these two series with
each other, and used the facts of embryology to help develop a
"correct" classification of animals.

If Von Baer was the first announcer, Agassiz was the first great
practical worker by this method. Last and most important of all, in
its relation to evolution, Agassiz added comparison in the geologic
or phylogenic series. The one grand idea underlying Agassiz's
wholelife-work, was the essential identity of the three series, and
therefore the light which they must shed on one another.... In
other words, during his whole  life, Agassiz insisted that the laws
of embryonic development (ontogeny) are also the laws of geological
succession (phylogeny). Surely this is the foundation, the only
solid foundation, of a true theory of evolution. [Ref. 29]

Such is the language of one who wanted to praise Agassiz for doing so
much to help lay the foundation of the evolution theory.

Conclusion

In closing this paper let us consider again just what the four series
used by Agassiz really mean. They are:
1. The classification series, made by arranging or listing the
present-day animals from the amoeba to man, that is, from the
simple to the complex.
2. The embryonic series, actually made by nature in developing the
one-celled ovum into the mature individual, oyster, or horse, or
man.
3. The geological series of the "index fossils," or typical
fossils, from the Cambrian formation on through the whole list up
to the Pleistocene or the Modern.
4. The geographical distribution series.

How can anyone deny that No. 2 is the only series actually made by
nature, and that the others are all made by the mind and arrangement
of man? True, in the case of No. 1, the animals all really exist; but
the arrangement of them in a series is an artificial process; it could
just as well be reversed, and dozens of different methods have been
adopted in arranging the series, for there is no finality about any of
them. No. 3, or geological  series, is similarly an artificial
arrangement. Granting that the fossils exist in the strata, we must
still confess that the work of arranging them from widely scatered
localities into the so-called geological "column" is an artificial
act. When we consider how perpetually the fossils from the various
localities have been adjusted in the series by comparisons with both
the taxonomic series and the embryonic, and then how frequently other
adjustments have had to be made because of such puzzles as "deceptive
conformities" and "thrust faults," surely every candid mind must
acknowledge that the geological series as we know it is a highly
artificial arrangement. And of course, any series made to illustrate
geological distribution is purely artificial and nothing else.

Of course, those who believe in evolution are convinced that the
geological series represents an actual historical event or series of
events prolonged over long periods of time, and that it is only
certain human limitations or difficulties which stand in the way of
making the geological series correspond to the reality of the earth's
history. The members of this Society deny all this, and believe that
the fossils represent contemporary floras and faunas which were
overwhelmed by one gigantic world-disaster. I need not here try to
give our reasons for thus affirming the contemporary relationship of
the fossils in contradistinction to their historical succession during
long periods of time; the evidence for this is scattered through many
books by the present writer.

But the vital point which I am trying to make is this: Agassiz had
only one series of phenomena, the embryonic, which has an
honest-to-goodness reality in nature; all the others are artificial,
the work  not of nature but of the human mind and human planning. Then
what circular reasoning, what hasty induction, to take any comparisons
of these four series as supposed evidence for the theory of evolution.

It all sums up to this: The geological series of the fossils is an
artificial arrangement, constructed for the world as a whole  largely
by the help of comparison with both the taxonomic and embryonic
series. It assumes the evolutionary series of life instead of proving
it. Accordingly, to compare the embryonic growth of the individual
with its supported ancestry in the geological series, as is done in
the recapitulation theory, and to use this comparison as evidence for
organic evolution, iscircular reasoning of the most extreme kind,
Clear thinking people cannot be expected to give any heed to such
perversions of logic.

Verily, the mills of the logic of science grind slowly, but they grind
exceedingly small.
_________________________________________________________________

Notes and References

1. Suppose it were proved that in 60 or 75 per cent of instances, for
the world as a  whole, Paleozoic fossils occur physically lower in the
strata than do the Mesozoic, and that the Mesozoic occur in a similar
proportion below the Tertiary, there would be other ways of explaining
these facts instead of inferring a geological successsion of life.
These facts are in no way inconsistent with a Flood as the cause of
the fossils.

2. Agassiz, Elizabeth Cary; Louis Agassiz, His Life and
Correspondence, Boston, 1886, 2 vols., pp. 123, 124.

2a. It should be remembered that young Agassiz, as well as Cuvier and
the other pioneers in this line of geology and biology, thought they
were studying out the method of creation, instead of the method of the
destruction of the animals and plants of the world. They all expressly
or implicitly denied the Flood as the cause of the fossils; instead
they assumed that the fossils would reveal successive stages in the
original creation. And they then (particularly Agassiz) assumed that
they knew how an ideal series of creations probably took place, and
they arranged the fossils accordingly. This is the whole dominating
idea of the life-work of Agassiz, the idea which he industriously
taught to the world, and which became the most important mental
concept as the foundation of the theory of organic evolution.

3. Id., pp. 203, 204.

4. Id., p. 243.

5. History of Geology and Paleontology, London, Walter Scott, 1901, p.
507.

6. Eleventh Edition, Vol XX, p. 583.

7. The Recapitulation Theory and Human Infancy, New York, 1914, p. 10.

8. After quoting some strong statement from the best historian of
biology, Nordenskiold, to the effect that Haekel's illustrations for
his book were always drawn by himself and were designed exclusively to
prove one single alleged fact and that they "were naturally schematic
and without a trace of scientific value," Dr. Cyril B. Courville, in a
recent paper well remarks: "It is thus evident that Haekel's objective
was to prove the 'law of biogenesis,' and the chief attention which he
gave to its deficiencies was to coin words to cover them." ("Bulletin
of Deluge Geology," Vol 1,  1941, p. 39).

9. The Pan-American Geologist, March, 1937, pp. 117-128.

10. If anyone feels certain that the trilobites, dinosaurs, and
mastodons could not have been living thus contemporaneously, he must
have gained this assurance from some other source than their
occurrence in the strata. What other source of assurance does he have?
Obviously, this whole idea is an evolutionary assumption pure and
simple. It is injected into the study of the rocks and the fossils, it
is not derived from them.

11. Davidson, Percy E., The Recapitulation Theory, p. 10.

12. Encyclo. Brit., Eleventh Edition, Vol xx, p. 583.

13. Zittel, K.V., History of Geology and Paleontology, London, Walter
Scott, 1901, p. 400.

14. Any one acquainted with geology knows that the series of fossil
horses, or  elephants, or camels, etc., which make such "convincing"
displays for evolution in the museums, were never found together in
any vertical sequence, but invariably have been assembled from
scattered localities and artificially arranged in this alleged
historical sequence. Such exhibits are just evolutionary propaganda.
They make an "imposing" display in more than one sense of the word.

15. Zittel, History, etc., p. 509.

16. Science, July 26, 1929, pp. 87, 88.

17. Science, July 26, 1929, pp. 87, 88.

18. Nature, March 17, 1928.

18a. Quoted by G.R. De Beer, Embryos and Ancestors, 1940, p. 8.

19. Whitehead, Alfred North; Process and Reality, 1929, p. 19.

20. Id., p. 22.

21. In a personal letter to me about my little book, "The
Geological-Ages Hoax," Prof. Schiller wrote: "I found your contention
interesting and a beautiful illustration of the possibility of putting
an alternative interpretation on even the best established 'facts'
(which always contain 'theories')."

22. Zittel, Karl Alfred von, History of Geology and Paleontology,
1901, pp. 375, 376.

23. Zittel, Op. Cit., p. 400.

24. Bulletin of Deluge Geology, vol 1, no. 2, 1941, p.56.

25. History of Geology and Paleontology, p. 411.

26. Agassiz is reported to have said to Prof. A.S. Packard, one of his
former students: The greatest mistake of my scientific life has been
in fighting the theory of evolution. I saw that it was coming for
years, and my "essay on Classification" was written partly to
forestall it. I believed it all wrong, but now I see that it will
prevail." (Reported by J.S. Kingsley, of the University of California,
Science, February 27, 1925, pp. 234-235.) For those who believe that
the popularity of a scientific theory is a proof of its truthfulness,
this will seem like a recantation by Agassiz in his old age.

28. Evolution and Its Relation to Religious Thought, Appleton, 1899,
p. 38. Italics as in the original.

29. Evolution, etc., p. 43. Italics as in the original.

Other Works by Price:

Illogical Geology

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