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                         THE USES OF DIVERSITY

                            G. K. Chesterton
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                                  1920


The idea of the Missing Link was not at all new with Darwin; it was not
invented merely by those vague but imaginative minor poets to whom we
owe most of our ideas about evolution. Men had always played about with
the idea of a possible link between human and bestial life; and the very
existence---or, if you will, the very non-existence---of the centaur or
the mermaid proves it. All the mythologies had dreamed of a half-human
monster. The only objection to the centaur and the mermaid was that they
could not be found. In every other respect their merits were of the most
solid sort. So it is with the Darwinian ideal of a link between man and
the brutes. There is no objection to it except that there is no evidence
for it. The only objection to the Missing Link is that he is apparently
fabulous, like the centaur and the mermaid, and all the other images
under which man has imagined a bridge between himself and brutality. In
short, the only objection to the Missing Link is that he is missing.

[Still true, one hundred years later. ---dkt]