The Essence of Darwinism and the Basis of Modern Orthodoxy 101
Evolution, on the other hand, supplies a true cause for an anomaly by positing
community of descent with retention of ancestral states by heredity— something
that might be tested in many ways, once we understand the mechanics of
inheritance. (The following passage appears just before Darwin's summary to
Chapter 5 on laws of variation.) Darwin lambastes the creationist alternative as
causally meaningless: "To admit this view is, as it seems to me, to reject a real for
an unreal, or at least for an unknown, cause. It makes the works of God a mere
mockery and deception; I would almost as soon believe with the old and ignorant
cosmogonists, that fossil shells had never lived, but had been created in stone so as
to mock the shells now living on the sea-shore" (p. 167).
If we must locate our confidence about evolution in evidence for history— in
part directly from the fossil record, but usually indirectly by inference from
modern organisms—by what rules of reason, or canons of evidence, shall history
then be established? Darwin's "long argument," in my view, can best be
characterized as a complex solution to this question, illustrated with copious
examples. We must first, however, specify the kinds of questions that cannot be
answered. Many revealing statements in the Origin circumscribe the proper realm
of historical inference by abjuring what cannot be known, or usefully
comprehended under current limits. Darwin, for example, and following Hutton,
Lyell and many other great thinkers, foreswore (as beyond the realm of science) all
inquiry into the ultimate origins of things.* In the first paragraph of Chapter 7 on
instincts, for example, Darwin writes (1859, p. 207): "I must premise, that I have
nothing to do with the origin of the primary mental powers, any more than I have
with that of life itself." Darwin invoked the same comparison in discussing the
evolution of eyes, one of his greatest challenges (and firmest successes). He states
that he will confine his attention to transitions in a structural sequence from simple
to complex, and not engage the prior issue—answerable in principle, but beyond
the range of knowledge in his day—of how sensitivity to light could arise within
nervous tissue in the first place (1859, p. 187): "How a nerve comes to be sensitive
to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated." Most
crucially, and in a savvy argument that saved his entire system in the face of con-
temporary ignorance on a central issue, Darwin argues over and over again that we
may bypass the vital question of how heredity works, and how variations arise—
and only illustrate how evolution can occur, given the common-
*I have been both amused and infuriated that this issue still haunts us. I understand
why American fundamentalists who call themselves "creation scientists," with their usual
mixture of cynicism and ignorance, use the following argument for rhetorical advantage:
(1) evolution treats the ultimate origin of life; (2) evolutionists can't resolve this issue; (3)
the question is inherently religious; (4) therefore evolution is religion, and our brand
deserves just as much time as theirs in science classrooms. We reply, although
creationists do not choose to listen or understand, that we agree with points two and
three, and therefore do not study the question of ultimate origins or view this issue as part
of scientific inquiry at all (point one). I was surprised that Mr. Justice Scalia accepted this
fundamentalist argument as the basis for his singularly inept dissent in the Louisiana
creationism case, Edwards v. Aguillard (see Gould, 1991b).