Internalism and Laws of Form 261
alternatives. Very few creationists could imagine that species might be purposely
ill formed, or constructed in a disorganized fashion. With these attributes—purpose
and order—as part of a cultural heritage, the basic explanations for organic form
could be reduced to two major alternatives, expressing the primacy of one or the
other overarching principle for a rational and benevolent world. These principles
have been called structuralism and functionalism, order and teleology, laws of
form and adaptation, Unity of Type and Conditions of Existence. These poles set
the dichotomy that Darwin expanded by introducing history (see last section), but
never really fractured because the new axis of time could also be divided into
structural vs. functional explanations for ancestral forms. This dichotomy
continues to set an important agenda for evolutionary theory at the opening of a
new millennium, especially since the overly adaptationist Modern Synthesis
(representing a temporary triumph of the functionalist pole—see Chapter 7) has
yielded to a pluralism of structuralist alternatives as partners rather than subsidiary
forces (Chapters 10 and 11).
In this light, I find it fascinating that the oldest tradition in modern natural
history—the natural theology of so many pre-Darwinian biologists*—also existed
in two primary versions, expressing the two poles of the same dichotomy. Since
Darwin built his evolutionary theory in continuity with the pole favored by a long
English heritage—the adaptationism of William Paley—this subject cannot be
dismissed as an arcane issue from a forgotten past, but remains a vital presence in
our daily concerns (by our own fundamental evolutionary criterion of genealogy
and phyletic heritage!). For we still struggle with adaptation and constraint just as
Paley and Agassiz contrasted the comparable positions in natural theology: "the
creator foresaw the needs of each species and created just those organs that were
necessary to carry them out" vs. "God had in the beginning established laws, and
nature was left to unfold in accordance with them" (characterizations of Appel,
1987, p. 7). Do not Fisher vs. Wright, or Cain and Maynard Smith vs. Goodwin
and Kauffman carry on the same debate, evolutionarily transmogrified of course?
Natural theology held, as a central premise, that the works of nature not only
demonstrated God's presence, but could also reveal his character as well. We could
learn about him, not only persuade ourselves that he exists. Paley's full title (1802)
reads: Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the
Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature. From this shared premise, two
traditions proceeded, both "preadapted" to a later evolutionary transformation.
*Not all biologists, by any means, favored the arguments of natural theology. Our
anglophone parochialism leads us to emphasize this attitude, which held greater sway in
Protestant Britain than elsewhere (and had much less influence in Catholic France). Many
of the continental formalists, for example, maintained little enthusiasm for such direct
providentialism, and tended either towards a pantheism of uncaring (if pervasive) divine
presence, sometimes even to materialism (Geoffroy as a child of the Enlightenment), or
at least towards the less radical notion that God made nature's laws and then bowed out of
her affairs.