Charles Darwin 9do is select rigorously and breed only from the desired forms. Darwin was well
placed to pick up on this information. The Darwins lived in rural England and the
younger generation of Wedgwoods could afford to play at gentlemen farming, so
Charles was able to tap into the lore of the breeders. (Something at that time being
much pursued and discussed, given its significance in the Agricultural Revolution,
a necessary concomitant to the Industrial Revolution.)
But does it make sense to convert the artificial world of the breeders into a
universal force for change in nature? It certainly does. It was here that Darwin’s
Cambridge, Anglican background came into play. If we can say that his later
deism made Darwin an evolutionist, we can say that it was his earlier theism that
made him a Darwinian, meaning the man of the mechanism. Darwin just knew
that the selection hypothesis had to be on the right track. Again Archdeacon
Paley figures in the story. Previously he was important for his contributions to
revealed theology, miracles and their meaning. Now, moving from faith to reason,
it was natural theology that came into play. Paley’sNatural Theology[1809], with
the detailed discussion of the argument from design, was taken as absolutely basic
by Darwin. In the case of the Galapagos animals, it had been the meaning of
their distributions that had been at issue. Now it was the very organization of
organisms themselves that was important. Paley emphasized that organisms are
not just thrown together. They are as if designed — Paley thought because they
are designed. Organisms show adaptation, or to use the language that stayed
with Darwin all of his life, they show “final cause.” The hand and the eye show
purpose, function, end, to the cause of helping their possessors. It was just this
teleological aspect of the living world to which selection spoke. The breeder of
pigs, for instance, wants bigger and fatter pigs, to suit his ends. The size and
the fatness are not incidental — they are designed, just like the eye seems to be.
Selection is a final-cause-producing mechanism.
But still Darwin could not see how to get selection to work in nature. If any-
thing, the selective powers of breeders seem limited and perhaps transitory. Then
at the end of September 1838, Darwin read a very conservative political tract by
another Anglican clergyman, the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus. In hisPrin-
ciple of Population(Darwin read the sixth edition of 1828) Malthus argued that
food supplies will always be outstripped by population pressure. The latter tend
to go up geometrically (1, 2, 4, 8,... ), whereas the former go up just arithmetically
(1, 2, 3, 4,... ). There will inevitably be struggles for existence, for only a few can
survive. This means that grandiose plans for state welfare are doomed to failure.
If you feed the poor in this generation, you will only have more in the next. (In
person, Malthus was a gentle man, who cared deeply for his parishioners. He saw
his calculations as demonstrating God’s providence. If there were no stimulus to
action, then we would simply spend our days doing nothing. As it is, we had
better get up and work for our bread.)
Under pressure, Malthus had conceded that the struggles could be avoided, if
only people would practice “prudential restraint” — namely not marrying too early
and so forth. (Despite the fact that Aldous Huxley’sBrave New Worldrefers to