Darwinism's unsettled mechanism and evolution's accepted occurrence
because Darwinism is demonstrated, but it isn't
The force of this denial depends on what ‘Darwinism’ includes. A revealing near-contemporary comparison is William Bateson's ‘Heredity and Variation in Modern Lights,’ published in A. C. Seward's Darwin and Modern Science (1909; inspected in the Project Gutenberg transcription). Bateson challenges selection's ability to explain the production of hereditary novelties, yet treats evolution itself as certain. His closing discussion distinguishes evolution's occurrence from the still obscure causes of adapted differentiation. Earlier he credits natural selection with representing evolution through demonstrable processes, while denying its unlimited explanatory power. Bateson, chapter V, opening discussion and conclusion.
This makes Chesterton's polemic historically intelligible without making every possible reading of it defensible. Dispute about the sufficiency of a mechanism does not establish that descent never occurred, still less that Christianity follows. The paragraph supplies no definition deciding between those claims. Bateson is a comparison published the following year, not an identified source or a reply to Chesterton.
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