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Nice Kitty
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Join Date: Sep 2002
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Organs And Instincts: The Bee-Hive
The difficulty of tracing a line of development along which any known organism could have come into being, or any of its special members or parts could have originated, is immensely increased when we take into consideration a highly specialized creature, such as the honey-bee, which is also endowed with unique instincts requiring for their exercise a corresponding unique structural organization. In such case the theory has to account, not only for the evolution of an exceedingly complicated mechanism, but also for the simultaneous development of equally complicated instincts, dependent upon that very mechanism, and impossible of being obeyed without it. And it has further to account for the preservation of both mechanism and instincts through the long era of inutility. And?to add one impossibility to another?we have here a case in which, not the life of the individual only but that of the entire community depends upon the exercise of those instincts and the functioning of that mechanism. Where and what were the honey-bees during the centuries of time which Natural Selection would require for the evolution of those instincts and their necessary mechanism? Evolution attempts not to give an answer.
But the difficulties in this case have not yet been fully stated; for in the swarm of bees we find three distinct classes?queens, workers and drones. Each of these classes is absolutely necessary to the life of the swarm, and each has structural peculiarities and instincts radically different from the other two. The workers, which are undeveloped females, constitute the largest and most important class. Their organic structure is highly specialized to fit them for the many and various operations they have to perform; and their instincts are correspondingly complex. How and from what could such a marvelously specialized creature have been evolved?
The evolutionist can give no answer that is worthy of a moment?s notice. But the wonder of this largest and most important class of the bee-community is that, both in organization and in instinct, they are diverse from both their parents; for they are the offspring of queens and drones. It is vital to the theory of Evolution that the characteristics of parents should pass to their off-spring. But here is a highly organized creature which has an organic structure and a complex set of instincts possessed by neither of its parents! Whence then comes the honey-bee? It does not transmit its wonderful characters to its offspring, for it has none. And if a worker-bee should lay an egg (as occasionally happens) the offspring is invariably a drone. Clearly then, the worker bees are not the product of Evolution; and their existence and renewal from generation to generation, from parents unlike themselves, is a standing contradiction to Evolution.
The Beaver
Prof. Fairhurst, in his able work already quoted, (Organic Evolution Considered) calls attention to the remarkable example of instinct manifested by the beaver. We quote:
"It lives in communities and constructs dams, sometimes as long as three hundred yards, stretching across shallow streams of water. These dams are built of sticks of wood, generally about three feet long and six or seven inches in diameter, which the animal cuts with its teeth. The sticks are put in the water and are held in position by means of mud, stones and moss, which are placed upon them. The dams are ten or twelve feet thick at the base; and when the streams are wide the dams are made to curve upstream against the current, thus producing a structure better able to resist the force of the stream. The amount of labor necessary to construct a large dam is enormous. Moreover, it requires an incredible number of logs of wood, and great skill in engineering.
"Near the dams the beavers build their houses. Each house is about seven feet in diameter in the interior, and three feet high in the center. The walls are of great thickness. Each lodge is large enough to accommodate five or six beavers.
"The outside is plastered with mud and carefully smoothed; and the mud is renewed each year in order to keep the house in good repair. All the houses of the colony are surrounded by a ditch which contains water; and each lodge is connected by a passageway with the ditch.
"As a supply of food for the winter, the beavers store up a large number of logs under the water, the bark of which they consume.
"Thus we find in this case an organized community, working for the common good, both in constructing the dam and the ditch, and also in storing up food; and then making special preparation for living in small groups by constructing their lodges and connecting them with the ditch.
"Here we see highly developed instincts which look to the future good of the organism. The building of the dam, the digging of the ditch, the storing of the food, are all done to meet future emergencies. It is evident that the construction of the dam could not have been evolved gradually, for a dam must be of sufficient extent to be useful ere Natural Selection could act.
"Are we to presume that beavers experimented for countless generations, thereby building up the instinct which leads them to construct the dam? If so, upon what ground can we explain the preservation of the incipient instinct until sufficiently developed to be of practical use? In what way could they have known in advance that a dam would serve their good? Shall we assume that their instinct led them, in the first instance, to construct a dam, they not having had any experience whereby an instinct of that kind could be evolved?
If the instinct existed without having been developed by experience, then we cannot account for it by Evolution" ?And we may interrupt our quotation to say that the instinct must have existed in advance of the building of the first dam, else obviously it would never have been built. "If evolved, then we must assume that the first dam made was of sufficient use to give its makers an advantage in the struggle for existence, and that the instinct which led to its construction was transmitted to their offspring.
"Manifestly then, in accounting for the evolution of this instinct, we of necessity begin with an instinct that is already useful; and thus we assume the existence of that for which we are trying to account. We are obliged to assume that, in a single generation, a beaver or colony of beavers was produced, which had a new instinct, sufficiently developed to enable them to build a useful dam; and that, in consequence of this, they themselves were the better preserved; and that the instinct was transmitted to the offspring. If all this could have happened in a single generation, it is evident that no question need be raised as to the possibility of future evolution.
"Besides this, the construction of a ditch for water around the several lodges required a different instinct, serving another purpose. Its evolution involves similar difficulties."
The examples considered above are not exceptional; for we could never exhaust the strange instincts of insects alone, of the origin of which it is impossible to account upon the theory of Evolution.
The question of the development of instincts, along with that of special organs, required for those peculiar instincts, and in their turn utterly useless without the latter, is a question which the evolutionist is unable to face.
Mr. Darwin himself says there exist "cases of instincts almost identically the same in animals so remote in the scale of nature, that we cannot account for their similarity by inheritance from a common progenitor, and consequently must believe that they were independently acquired through Natural Selection" (Origin of Species, p. 226).
But Mr. Darwin himself realized that, to believe a thing so utterly unreasonable, and so contrary to all known facts and experience, would require credulity of a most uncommon sort; for he said: "Many instincts are so wonderful that their development will probably appear to the reader a difficulty sufficient to overcome my whole theory."
True enough. For in this we can thoroughly agree with Mr. Darwin. But inasmuch as Mr. Darwin was evidently himself aware of the incredibility of his theory, we wonder how he could expect others to accept it. What the whole extraordinary situation demonstrates most conclusively is, that there is no mind so capable of believing the incredible; as that which is pleased to call itself "the scientific mind," and that there is no person in the world so irrational as the "rationalist."
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