100 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as
at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every
production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate
every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many
contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when
we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing of the labor, the
experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when
we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from
experience, will the study of natural history become!
By contrast, Darwin's chief quarrel with creationism resides not so much in its
provable falseness, but in its bankrupt status as an intellectual argument— for a
claim of creation teaches us nothing at all, but only states (in words that some
people may consider exalted) that a particular creature or feature exists, a fact
established well enough by a simple glance: "Nothing can be more hopeless than to
attempt to explain the similarity of pattern in members of the same class, by utility
or by the doctrine of final causes ... On the ordinary view of the independent
creation of each being, we can only say that so it is;—that it has so pleased the
Creator to construct each animal and plant" (p. 435).
Moreover, and more negatively, creation marks the surrender of any attempt
to understand connections and patterns. We express no causal insight whatever
when we say that taxonomic order reflects the plan of a creator— for unless we can
know the will of God, such a statement only stands as a redundant description of
the order itself. (And God told us long ago, when he spoke to Job from the
whirlwind, that we cannot know his will—"canst thou draw out leviathan with a
hook?") Darwin, an ever genial man in the face of endless assaults upon his
patience, directed several of his rare caustic comments against the ultimate idea
stopping claim that God so made it, praise his name. Darwin notes, for example,
that horses are sometimes born with faint striping on their hides. A creationist can
only assert that God made each equine species of zebras, horses, and asses alike,
with such tendencies to vary and thereby to display, if only occasionally, the more
comprehensive type.
lessly exploit, the historian's central concern for social context and the multifarious sources
of intellectual arguments. But I am an internalist at heart, though wearing the sheep's cloth-
ing of my own Darwinian heritage with its emphasis on external adaptation, part by part. I
love to follow the logic of argument, to treat a great text as Cuvier considered an organism—
as an integrity, held together by sinews of logic (whatever the social or psychological origin
of any particular item). I love to explore these connections, and to grasp the beauty of the
totality. Thus, I prefer to practice the rather old-fashioned technique of explication des textes
(see my longer rationale and attempt in Gould, 1987b, on Burnet, Hutton and Lyell). For this
exercise, the first edition, despite its hurried composition as the scourge of Ternate breathed
down Darwin's neck, represents the most coherent document, before all subsequent,
externally-driven "adaptations" to critical commentary fixed the flaws and hedged the
difficulties. Errors and inconsistencies build vital parts of integrity; I may share Cuvier's
concern with necessary connections, but not his belief in optimal design. True integrity, in a
messy world, implies rough edges, which not only have a beauty of their own, but also
provide our best evidence for the logic of argument.