The Essence of Darwinism and the Basis of Modern Orthodoxy 115
of resemblance in the volcanic nature of the soil, in climate, height, and size
of islands, between the Galapagos and Cape de Verde Archipelagos: but
what an entire and absolute difference in their inhabitants! The inhabitants
of the Cape de Verde Islands are related to those of Africa, like those of the
Galapagos to America. I believe this grand fact can receive no sort of
explanation on the ordinary view of independent creation; whereas on the
view here maintained, it is obvious that the Galapagos Islands would be
likely to receive colonists... from America; and the Cape de Verde Islands
from Africa; and that such colonists would be liable to modifications—the
principle of inheritance still betraying their original birth place (pp. 397-
399).
Finally, in rereading the Origin, I was struck by another, quite different, use
of the argument from imperfection—one that had entirely escaped my notice
before. Darwin showed little sympathy for our traditional and venerable attempts
to read moral messages from nature. He almost delighted in noting that natural
selection unleashes a reign of terror that would threaten our moral values if we
tried—as we most emphatically should not—to find ethical guidelines for human
life in the affairs of nature. But I hadn't realized that he sometimes presents the
apparent cruelties of nature as imperfections pointing to evolution by natural
selection—imperfections relative to an inappropriate argument about morality to
be sure, but imperfections that trouble our souls nonetheless, and may therefore
operate with special force as suggestive arguments for evolution:
Nor ought we to marvel if all the contrivances in nature be not, as far as we
can judge, absolutely perfect; and if some of them be abhorrent to our ideas
of fitness. We need not marvel at the sting of the bee causing the bee's own
death; at drones being produced in such vast numbers for one single act,
and being then slaughtered by their sterile sisters; at the astonishing waste
of pollen by our fir trees; at the instinctive hatred of the queen bee for her
own fertile daughters; at ichneumonidae feeding within the live bodies of
caterpillars; and at other such cases. The wonder indeed is, on the theory of
natural selection, that more cases of the want of absolute perfection have
not been observed (p. 472).
I may have burdened readers with too much detail about Darwin's arguments
for inferring history, but method inheres in this extended madness. My general
argument holds that the Origin should be understood as a book encompassing two
opposite, but complementary, poles of science at its best and most revolutionary—
first, as a methodological treatise proving by example that evolution can be tested
and studied fruitfully; and second, as an intellectual manifesto for a new view of
life and nature. As a methodological treatise, the Origin focuses upon the palpable
and the small—arguing that uniformitarian extrapolation into geological scales can
render all evolution. We may therefore avoid any appeal to "higher" forces that
cannot be studied directly because they work only in the untestable immensity of
deep time, or occur so