The Essence of Darwinism and the Basis of Modern Orthodoxy 127
tion. To explicate this issue, we must reemphasize the roles of William Paley and
Adam Smith in the genesis of Darwin's system—using Smith to overturn Paley.
Adaptation and the "creativity of natural selection," as discussed in the next
section, represent Darwin's evolutionary translation of Paley's chief concern with
excellence in organic design. But the substitution of natural selection for God as
creative agent, while disruptive enough to Western traditions, does not express the
primary feature of Darwin's radicalism. To find this root, we must pursue a
different inquiry about the locus of selection. After all, selection might operate at
the highest level of species, even communities of species, for the direct production
of order and harmony. We would then, to be sure, need to abandon God's role as an
immediate creator, but what a gentle dispensation compared with Darwin's actual
proposal: for if the agency of selection stood so high, God could be
reconceptualized as the loving instigator of the rules. And the rules, by working
directly for organic harmony, would then embody all that Paley sought to illustrate
about God's nature.
Darwin's inversion of Paley therefore required a primary postulate about the
locus of selection. Selection operates on organisms, not on any higher collectivity.
Selection works directly for the benefit of organisms only, and not for any larger
harmony that might embody God's benevolent intent. Ironically, through the action
of Adam Smith's invisible hand, such "higher harmony" may arise as an
epiphenomenal result of a process with apparently opposite import—the struggle
of individuals for personal success. Darwin's revolution demands that features of
higher-level phenomenology be explained as effects of lower-level causality—in
particular, that the struggle among organisms yield order and harmony in the polity
of nature.
Darwin's theory therefore presents, as the primary underpinning for its radical
import in philosophy, a "reductionist" account of broadest-scale phenomena to a
single causal locus at a low level accessible to direct observation and experimental
manipulation: the struggle for existence among organisms. Moreover, this claim
for organismal agency expresses Darwin's chief desideratum at each focus of his
theory—at the methodological pole for tractability, and at the theoretical pole for
reversal of received wisdom. Darwinians have often acknowledged the
descriptively hierarchical character of nature—and some commentators have been
misled to view Darwinism, for this reason, as hierarchical in mechanism of causal
action as well. But Darwinism tries to explain all these levels by one locus of
causality—selection among organisms. Strict Darwinism is a one-level causal
theory for rendering nature's hierarchical richness. The major critique of our times,
in advocating hierarchical levels of causality, therefore poses a fundamental
challenge to an essential postulate of Darwin's system.
Consider four aspects and demonstrations of Darwin's conviction about the
exclusivity of selection on organisms:
EXPLICIT STATEMENTS. Darwin did not passively "back in" to a claim for the
organismic level as a nearly exclusive locus. He knew exactly what he had asserted
and why—and he said so over and over again. Statements that