Evolution, Old New | Page 5

differ from him,
for reasons which will appear presently. I believe in an organic and
tangible designer of every complex structure, for so long a time past, as
that reasonable people will be incurious about all that occurred at any
earlier time.
Professor Clifford, again, is a fair representative of opinions which are
finding favour with the majority of our own thinkers. He writes:--
"There are here some words, however, which require careful definition.
And first the word purpose. A thing serves a purpose when it is adapted
for some end; thus a corkscrew is adapted to the end of extracting corks
from bottles, and our lungs are adapted to the end of respiration. We
may say that the extraction of corks is the purpose of the corkscrew,
and that respiration is the purpose of the lungs, but here we shall have
used the word in two different senses. A man made the corkscrew with
a purpose in his mind, and he knew and intended that it should be used
for pulling out corks. But nobody made our lungs with a purpose in his
mind and intended that they should be used for breathing. The
respiratory apparatus was adapted to its purpose by natural selection,
namely, by the gradual preservation of better and better adaptations,
and by the killing-off of the worse and imperfect adaptations."[6]
No denial of anything like design could be more explicit. For Professor
Clifford is well aware that the very essence of the "Natural Selection"
theory, is that the variations shall have been mainly accidental and
without design of any sort, but that the adaptations of structure to need
shall have come about by the accumulation, through natural selection,
of any variation that happened to be favourable.
It will be my business on a later page not only to show that the lungs
are as purposive as the corkscrew, but furthermore that if drawing corks
had been a matter of as much importance to us as breathing is, the list
of our organs would have been found to comprise one corkscrew at the
least, and possibly two, twenty, or ten thousand; even as we see that the
trowel without which the beaver cannot plaster its habitation in such
fashion as alone satisfies it, is incorporate into the beaver's own body
by way of a tail, the like of which is to be found in no other animal.

To take a name which carries with it a far greater authority, that of Mr.
Charles Darwin. He writes:--
"It is scarcely possible to avoid comparing the eye with a telescope. We
know that this instrument has been perfected by the long-continued
efforts of the highest human intellects; and we naturally infer that the
eye has been formed by a somewhat analogous process. But may not
this inference be presumptuous? Have we any right to declare that the
Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man?"[7]
Here purposiveness is not indeed denied point-blank, but the intention
of the author is unmistakable, it is to refer the wonderful result to the
gradual accumulation of small accidental improvements which were
not due as a rule, if at all, to anything "analogous" to design.
"Variation," he says, "will cause the slight alterations;" that is to say,
the slight successive variations whose accumulation results in such a
marvellous structure as the eye, are caused by--variation; or in other
words, they are indefinite, due to nothing that we can lay our hands
upon, and therefore certainly not due to design. "Generation," continues
Mr. Darwin, "will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection
will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go
on for millions of years, and during each year on millions of
individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical
instrument might be thus formed as superior to one of glass, as the
works of the Creator are to those of man?"[8]
The reader will observe that the only skill--and this involves
design--supposed by Mr. Darwin to be exercised in the foregoing
process, is the "unerring skill" of natural selection. Natural selection,
however, is, as he himself tells us, a synonym for the survival of the
fittest, which last he declares to be the "more accurate" expression, and
to be "sometimes" equally convenient.[9] It is clear then that he only
speaks metaphorically when he here assigns "unerring skill" to the fact
that the fittest individuals commonly live longest and transmit most
offspring, and that he sees no evidence of design in the numerous slight
successive "alterations"--or variations--which are "caused by
variation."

It were easy to multiply quotations which should prove that the denial
of "purposiveness" is commonly conceived to be the inevitable
accompaniment of a belief in evolution. I will, however, content myself
with but one