Chapter VI Statement of the Question at Issue (_continued_)
SO much for the older view; and now for the more modern opinion. According to Messrs. Darwin and Wallace, and ostensibly, I am afraid I should add, a great majority of our most prominent biologists, the view taken by Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck is not a sound one. Some organisms, indeed, are so admirably adapted to their surroundings, and some organs discharge their functions with so much appearance of provision, that we are apt to think they must owe their development to sense of need and consequent contrivance, but this opinion is fantastic; the appearance of design is delusive; what we are tempted to see as an accumulated outcome of desire and cunning, we should regard as mainly an accumulated outcome of good luck.
Let us take the eye as a somewhat crucial example. It is a seeing-machine, or thing to see with. So is a telescope; the telescope in its highest development is a secular accumulation of cunning, sometimes small, sometimes great; sometimes applied to this detail of the instrument, and sometimes to that. It is an admirable example of design; nevertheless, as I said in “Evolution Old and New,” he who made the first rude telescope had probably no idea of any more perfect form of the instrument than the one he had himself invented. Indeed, if he had, he would have carried his idea out in practice. He would have been unable to conceive such an instrument as Lord Rosse’s; the design, therefore, at present evidenced by the telescope was not design all on the part of one and the same person. Nor yet was it unmixed with chance; many a detail has been doubtless due to an accident or coincidence which was forthwith seized and made the best of. Luck there always has been and always will be, until all brains are opened, and all connections made known, but luck turned to account becomes design; there is, indeed, if things are driven home, little other design than this. The telescope, therefore, is an instrument designed in all its parts for the purpose of seeing, and, take it all round, designed with singular skill.
Looking at the eye, we are at first tempted to think that it must be the telescope over again, only more so; we are tempted to see it as something which has grown up little by little from small beginnings, as the result of effort well applied and handed down from generation to generation, till, in the vastly greater time during which the eye has been developing as compared with the telescope, a vastly more astonishing result has been arrived at. We may indeed be tempted to think this, but, according to Mr. Darwin, we should be wrong. Design had a great deal to do with the telescope, but it had nothing or hardly anything whatever to do with the eye. The telescope owes its development to cunning, the eye to luck, which, it would seem, is so far more cunning than cunning that one does not quite understand why there should be any cunning at all. The main means of developing the eye was, according to Mr. Darwin, not use as varying circumstances might direct with consequent slow increase of power and an occasional happy flight of genius, but natural selection. Natural selection, according to him, though not the sole, is still the most important means of its development and modification. { 81a} What, then, is natural selection?