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... , perhaps because he has more scientific evidence than he had at his disposal on other topics. Darwin uses the example of the neuter worker ants. His reasoning for the neuter gender, on the surface, is much the same as the reasoning for all of the arguments presented to him. He says that he can find neuter insects explicable if such insects had been social, and it had been profitable to the community that a number should have been annually born capable of work, but incapable of procreation [He] can see no very great difficulty in this being affected by natural selection. (p. 236) This is not the end for this argument though. Darwin then puts forth the question, that if a creature is neuter, how does it pass along to its progeny the variations it has acquired. The easy and correct answer is that it doesnt.
Then how can this be answered by natural selection? Moreover, how can the neuter variant have been passed along and slowly adapted over the ages? It is in defense of this line of questioning that Darwin truly shines. He states that the selection not only involves the individual but the family as a whole. A parent does not pass its genetic information and its beneficial variance to only one of its progeny; it passes it to all of them. There fore if it is beneficial to the community of ants to pass along the variation of producing sterile creatures than there is no reason that it should not be.
And in this encoding for the sterile creatures more variation begins to exist than we can begin to see how sterile females and fertile females can gradually, over the years, become further and further apart from one another. To drive this point home, Darwin points out that in the same nest of ants he found two bodies of sterile workers in the same nest, differing not only in size, but in their organs of vision, yet connected by some few members in an intermediate condition. (p. 240) To then tie the whole thing together, Darwin defends the concept of an ant being sterile being beneficial to the community. Since the worker ant is not a trained animal and since the worker ant has no manufactured tools, it must therefore rely on instinct. If this ant had been fertile and had this ant been along to intermingle with the rest of the community then the natural instincts used by the worker would be lost in the interbreeding. Therefore it is most beneficial to have worker ants be neuter. Darwin has in my mind wholly and completely defended this point.
He has combined his theory with an inescapable scientific fact. If a person releases a balloon it will float wherever the wind will take it. But if that same person were to tie it to a rock then that balloon is going nowhere. That is what Darwin has very effectively done in this section. He has taken his theory and tied it to fact. The last and what I feel to be the strongest argument I am going to talk about is the classic missing link argument.
Why is it that the worlds plants and animals have been changing ever-so-slightly over the last million years, yet we can find only what we believe to be the beginning and the end? Where, throughout these millions of years of change and variance, did the bodies of the intermediaries go? This is the strongest argument for the creationist viewpoint. I say this for two reasons: one, its a very good question, and two, no one in Darwin's day and no one in ours has a good answer.
Where, indeed, did the bodies go? Darwin, on page 173 states that the best answer he can come up with is that the fossilized remains of our lineage is somewhere under the sea. their remains being imbedded and preserved to a future age only in masses of sediment sufficiently thick and extensive to withstand an enormous amount of future degradation Whilst the bed of the sea is stationary or is rising, or when very little sediment is being deposited, there will be blanks in our geological history. This is why I think this is the most profound argument that the creationists have.
When the best argument Darwin can come up with, while scientifically feasible, is a little flat. Darwin's secondary response to this query is a little better than the first because it at least plays on his theory and ties it back together. His response states that the theory of natural selection proposes that variation is a long drawn out process. If a person were to find the remains of an animal from thousands of years ago, there would be little or no difference between it and its present day cousins.
Therefore, the only reason we have not yet found an intermediary is that we have not yet dug deep enough. Throughout his treatise, Darwin has presented his theory, presented the arguments, and defended himself against those arguments. In most of the cases, I feel he has done a sufficient job at defending his word. In the majority of cases he had scientific proof and a viable answer to back him up. But of course I could not say in good faith that he was one hundred percent. Sometimes his arguments fell a little flat and at other times he sounded a bit trite as if he were challenging others to come up with a better answer.
And in some ways I hope he was. In the meantime, however, I think he could have done a better job. I am an evolutionist. I have always been an evolutionist.
And I cannot foresee anything short of the hand of god changing my mind (which would be a whole other can of worms considering I am an atheist). For years now I have known the premise of Darwin's theory of natural selection. And for years now I have blindly believed it. Having read his book, I can still say that I believe in evolution, and I believe in Darwin's work.
But if there was ever a doubt in my mind it was only because Darwin put it there. It is because of this that I truly think Darwin was fair in the utmost sense of the word. Had he not been fair, which he could have been, he could have made a most convincing argument. But he stated every question in his theories and did his best to rebut.
And I feel that in his rebuttal, he was convincing indeed.
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