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By Root 1767 0

is evidence that it is not some farseeing intention that has created those astonishing adaptations, but mere historical accident. “He must be a dull man,” Darwin seems to exclaim, “who can examine the exquisite structure of a [honey] comb, so beautifully adapted to its end, without enthusiastic admiration” (p.186). This is positively Paleyan, but Darwin moves not up to intelligent design but down to the material. “All this beautiful work can be shown, I think, to follow from a few very simple instincts” (p. 186). Pushed by Paleyan observation and recognition of “adaptation,” Darwin goes on to show, through a combination of even more intense observation and some geometry, that the “exquisite structure” develops as a result of “natural selection,” after all.

Not content to detect adaptation everywhere, Darwin perceives that there are many phenomena in the organic world that are not adaptive. In fact, one of the central moves of his method of argument (and of his scientific spirit) is to resist the tendency to see identity and adaptation everywhere. Unlike Paley, he is extraordinarily sensitive to anomalies. Where the basic structures of language depend on similarities so that very different things can be identified with the same name, Darwin immediately notices differences. As opposed to the systematists (and natural theologians), for whom similarities were the key to explanation, for Darwin the fact of differences is the key. It is not only that every individual creature is in some way or other different from others in his “species,” though these differences, which are variations, may ultimately lead to much larger changes. Darwin also asks, for example, why is it that some woodpeckers live in places with no trees so that their pecking equipment would seem distinctly nonadaptive? If all organisms were designed for their niches in nature, this seems a very odd design, indeed. Here is where history becomes essential. The woodpecker’s identity is linked to genealogy, not to divine fiat.

Although Darwin, as much as Paley, is stunned by the miracles of adaptation, he has to explain not only the adaptations (as Paley did) but something yet more difficult, the fact that there seem to be many things, vestigial organs, for example, that do not help either the organism or the humans who observe it. For Darwin, then (and this despite many contemporary Darwinians’ sense that all organic characteristics are adaptive), there are aspects of organisms that Paley ignored: nonadaptive elements. The wonder of Darwin’s world is multiplied by its apparent anomalies, that there should be “geese and frigate-birds with webbed feet, either living on the dry land or most rarely alighting on the water; that there should be long-toed corncrakes living in meadows instead of in swamps; that there should be woodpeckers where not a tree grows; that there should be diving thrushes, and petrels with the habits of auks” (p. 156). If the world seems to show signs of design, why should there be so much evidence of absence of design? This problem is exacerbated by Darwin’s perception that “perfection” cannot really exist in nature. He talks much of “perfection,” uses the word a great deal, but its significance is always relative to particular conditions and particular places. We ought not to marvel, he says, “if all the contrivances in nature be not ... absolutely perfect” (p. 371 ).

Darwin goes for the simplest explanation as he sees it, and this is not God. “To my mind,” he concludes, “it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual” (p. 383). Darwin invokes the “Creator,” but leaves him out of the work of life and death, which, like everything else in nature, is governed by “secondary causes.” The Creator may impress his laws on matter, but the laws of matter are all that are revealed by the phenomena Darwin investigates. The absence