262 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
In this section I shall contrast the two great texts of these alternative
traditions—Paley's Natural Theology (1802) with Agassiz's Essay on
Classification (1857). The two works dovetail with remarkable symmetry in their
opposition: Paley the British adaptationist vs. Agassiz the continental formalist.
One might almost believe that the two works were explicitly written to flesh out
(and fully clothe) the central dichotomy of form, with each awarded exactly half
the totality. In a curious sense, this lack of contact almost allows the two texts to
speak to each other—as if they formed a sand painting with one (Paley for
temporal priority) filling in half the area up to an elaborate and jagged boundary,
and the other then pouring sand of a different color right up to the previous
boundary, leaving no space between at the contact. I am puzzled that these two
texts have not been explicitly contrasted before.
Details of Design William Paley and British Functionalism: Praising God in the
GOD IN THE DETAILS OF DESIGN
Just a few years before Paley wrote his Natural Theology in 1802, Coleridge's
Ancient Mariner (1798) proclaimed his hard-won message to a wedding feast, and
to the world:
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.Paley probably appreciated the sentiments and surely longed to extend the
argument. He entertained no doubt that all things proclaimed God's existence. But
he believed that we must be able to learn more if we hope to use natural theology
as a strategy of exegesis. That is, we must also be able to infer important aspects of
God's nature and character from the works of creation.
The search to infer God's attributes from general features of natural objects
led Paley to open his book with one of the most famous images in all English
literature—a strong competitor with Adam Smith's "invisible hand" (a line also
found in Paley, 1803, p. 344) and Darwin's tangled bank or tree of life. The good
Reverend, crossing a heath on shank's mare, bumps his foot against a stone, feels
the pain, but learns nothing about the origin of rocks because the object is too
simple and too disordered to reveal a source of production. But if he should then
kick a watch, he would surely know that the timepiece had been fashioned by a
purposeful agent:
When we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not
discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a
purpose, e.g. that they are formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and
that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day... The inference,
we think, is inevitable; that the watch must have had a maker; that there
must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or
artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually