140 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
such a force could also work like Brahma, the creator (in Wilson, 1970, p. 369).
E. D. Cope, chief American critic and exponent of neo-Lamarckism, chose a
sardonic title to highlight Darwin's supposedly fatal weakness in claiming a
creative role for natural selection. He called his book The Origin of the Fittest
(1887)—a parody on Darwin's "survival of the fittest," and a motto for what
natural selection could not accomplish. Cope wrote: "The doctrines of 'selection'
and 'survival' plainly do not reach the kernel of evolution, which is, as I have long
since pointed out, the question of 'the origin of the fittest.' This omission of this
problem from the discussion of evolution is to leave Hamlet out of the play to
which he has given the name. The law by which structures originate is one thing;
those by which they are restricted, directed, or destroyed, is another thing" (1887,
p. 226).
We can understand the trouble that Darwin's contemporaries experienced in
comprehending how selection could work as a creative force when we confront the
central paradox of Darwin's crucial argument: natural selection makes nothing; it
can only choose among variants originating by other means. How then can
selection possibly be conceived as a "progressive," or "creative," or "positive"
force?
In resolving this paradox, Darwin recognized his logical need, within the
basic structure of his argument, to explicate the three main requirements and
implications of an argument for selection's creativity: (1) the nature of variation;
(2) the rate and continuity of change; (3) the meaning of adaptation. This
interrelated set of assertions promotes natural selection from mere existence as a
genuine, but secondary and negative, mechanism to domination as the primary
cause of evolutionary change and pattern. This set of defenses for selection's
creativity therefore ranks as the second of three essential postulates, or "minimal
commitments" of Darwinian logic.
As the epitome of his own solution, Darwin admitted that his favored
mechanism "made" nothing, but held that natural selection must be deemed
"creative" (in any acceptable vernacular sense of the term) if its focal action of
differential preservation and death could be construed as the primary cause for
imparting direction to the process of evolutionary change. Darwin reasoned that
natural selection can only play such a role if evolution obeys two crucial
conditions: (1) if nothing about the provision of raw materials— that is, the sources
of variation—imparts direction to evolutionary change; and (2) if change occurs by
a long and insensible series of intermediary steps, each superintended by natural
selection—so that "creativity" or "direction" can arise by the summation of
increments.
Under these provisos, variation becomes raw material only—an isotropic
sphere of potential about the modal form of a species. Natural selection, by
superintending the differential preservation of a biassed region from this sphere in
each generation, and by summing up (over countless repetitions) the tiny changes
thus produced in each episode, can manufacture substantial, directional change.
What else but natural selection could be called "creative," or direction-giving, in
such a process? As long as variation only supplies raw