Internalism and Laws of Form 267
His arguments span two chapters (15 on relations and 16 on compensations),
treating the phenomenon always viewed as crucial and primary by advocates of
structural constraint—stable correlations among parts of the body.
Since Paley's main argument holds that intricate contrivance implies a
contriver, two main rebuttals might be offered in principle: (1) the adaptations
exist, but they originated by a natural process of evolution, not by creative acts of a
deity; (2) organisms were created, but adaptation does not permeate or even
dominate their form.
Since Paley never imagined the alternative of natural change by selection or
weeding out, he confines his refutation of adaptive evolution to the "Lamarckian"
principle of use and disuse. (I doubt that Paley, writing in 1802, knew Lamarck's
work directly, since his French colleague had just begun to publish evolutionary
views. But use and disuse, as an item of folk wisdom, frequently entered the
arguments of evolutionists.) Paley begins empirically by pointing out that centuries
of disuse do not cause organs to disappear, though modesty leads him to cloak a
classic case entirely in untranslated Latin: "The mammae of the male have not
vanished by inusitation; nee curtorum, per multa saecula, Judaeorum propagini
deest praeputium" [nor has the foreskin of Jews become any shorter in offspring
through many centuries of circumcision] (p. 446).
Paley then asks, more theoretically, how any natural evolution of useful
structures could be attributed to a stimulus structurally unrelated to biological
form, and often inorganic. The eye is a contrivance for perceiving light, but light
cannot make an eye. "Yet the element of light and the organ of vision, however
related in their office and use, have no connection whatever in their original. The
action of rays of light upon the surfaces of animals has no tendency to breed eyes
in their heads. The sun might shine forever upon living bodies without the smallest
approach towards producing the sense of sight" (p. 317).
When two structures have been similarly fashioned for a common purpose by
a strengthening of one and a weakening of the other (the subject of Paley's
"compensations" in chapter 16), natural adjustment by evolution might be
defended (as when an elephant elongates its trunk to compensate a shortness of
neck). But Paley denies this "best case" by the standard argument that intermediary
stages could not be well designed: "If it be suggested, that this proboscis may have
been produced in a long course of generations, by the constant endeavor of the
elephant to thrust out his nose, (which is the general hypothesis by which it has
lately been attempted to account for the forms of animated nature), I would ask,
how was the animal to subsist in the meantime, during the process, until this
elongation of snout were completed? What was to become of the individual, whilst
the species was perfecting?" (p. 299).
If the first alternative (adaptation, but by evolution) can be thus refuted, how
can the second possibility (creation, but with adaptation secondary or absent) be
dismissed as well? Paley now meets the formalist alternative face-to-face—