Luck or Cunning?

Some may perhaps deny that Mr. Darwin did this, and say he laid so much stress on use and disuse as virtually to make function his main factor of evolution.

If, indeed, we confine ourselves to isolated passages, we shall find little difficulty in making out a strong case to this effect.  Certainly most people believe this to be Mr. Darwin’s doctrine, and considering how long and fully he had the ear of the public, it is not likely they would think thus if Mr. Darwin had willed otherwise, nor could he have induced them to think as they do if he had not said a good deal that was capable of the construction so commonly put upon it; but it is hardly necessary, when addressing biologists, to insist on the fact that Mr. Darwin’s distinctive doctrine is the denial of the comparative importance of function, or use and disuse, as a purveyor of variations,—­with some, but not very considerable, exceptions, chiefly in the cases of domesticated animals.

He did not, however, make his distinctive feature as distinct as he should have done.  Sometimes he said one thing, and sometimes the directly opposite.  Sometimes, for example, the conditions of existence “included natural selection” or the fact that the best adapted to their surroundings live longest and leave most offspring; {156a} sometimes “the principle of natural selection” “fully embraced” “the expression of conditions of existence.” {156b} It would not be easy to find more unsatisfactory writing than this is, nor any more clearly indicating a mind ill at ease with itself.  Sometimes “ants work by inherited instincts and inherited tools;” {157a} sometimes, again, it is surprising that the case of ants working by inherited instincts has not been brought as a demonstrative argument “against the well-known doctrine of inherited habit, as advanced by Lamarck.” {157b} Sometimes the winglessness of beetles inhabiting ocean islands is “mainly due to natural selection,” {157c} and though we might be tempted to ascribe the rudimentary condition of the wing to disuse, we are on no account to do so—­though disuse was probably to some extent “combined with” natural selection; at other times “it is probable that disuse has been the main means of rendering the wings of beetles living on small exposed islands” rudimentary. {157d} We may remark in passing that if disuse, as Mr. Darwin admits on this occasion, is the main agent in rendering an organ rudimentary, use should have been the main agent in rendering it the opposite of rudimentary—­that is to say, in bringing about its development.  The ostensible raison d’etre, however, of the “Origin of Species” is to maintain that this is not the case.

There is hardly an opinion on the subject of descent with modification which does not find support in some one passage or another of the “Origin of Species.”  If it were desired to show that there is no substantial difference between the doctrine of Erasmus Darwin and that of his grandson, it would be easy to make out a good case for this, in spite of Mr. Darwin’s calling his grandfather’s views “erroneous,” in the historical sketch prefixed to the later editions of the “Origin of Species.”  Passing over the passage already quoted on p. 62 of this book, in which Mr. Darwin declares “habit omnipotent and its effects hereditary”—­a sentence, by the way, than which none can be either more unfalteringly Lamarckian or less tainted with the vices of Mr. Darwin’s later style—­passing this over as having been written some twenty years before the “Origin of Species”—­the last paragraph of the “Origin of Species” itself is purely Lamarckian and Erasmus-Darwinian.  It declares the laws in accordance with which organic forms assumed their present shape to be—­“Growth with reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life and from use and disuse, &c.” {158a} Wherein does this differ from the confession of faith made by Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck?  Where are the accidental fortuitous, spontaneous variations now?  And if they are not found important enough to demand mention in this peroration and stretto, as it were, of the whole matter, in which special prominence should be given to the special feature of the work, where ought they to be made important?

Mr. Darwin immediately goes on:  “A ratio of existence so high as to lead to a struggle for life, and as a consequence to natural selection, entailing divergence of character and the extinction of less improved forms;” so that natural selection turns up after all.  Yes—­in the letters that compose it, but not in the spirit; not in the special sense up to this time attached to it in the “Origin of Species.”  The expression as used here is one with which Erasmus Darwin would have found little fault, for it means not as elsewhere in Mr. Darwin’s book and on his title-page the preservation of “favoured” or lucky varieties, but the preservation of varieties that have come to be varieties through the causes assigned in the preceding two or three lines of Mr. Darwin’s sentence; and these are mainly functional or Erasmus-Darwinian; for the indirect action of the conditions of life is mainly functional, and the direct action is admitted on all hands to be but small.

It now appears more plainly, as insisted upon on an earlier page, that there is not one natural selection and one survival of the fittest, but two, inasmuch as there are two classes of variations from which nature (supposing no exception taken to her personification) can select.  The bottles have the same labels, and they are of the same colour, but the one holds brandy, and the other toast and water.  Nature can, by a figure of speech, be said to select from variations that are mainly functional or from variations that are mainly accidental; in the first case she will eventually get an accumulation of variation, and widely different types will come into existence; in the second, the variations will not occur with sufficient steadiness for accumulation to be possible.  In the body of Mr. Darwin’s book the variations are supposed to be mainly due to accident, and function, though not denied all efficacy, is declared to be the greatly subordinate factor; natural selection, therefore, has been hitherto throughout tantamount to luck; in the peroration the position is reversed in toto; the selection is now made from variations into which luck has entered so little that it may be neglected, the greatly preponderating factor being function; here, then, natural selection is tantamount to cunning.  We are such slaves of words that, seeing the words “natural selection” employed—and forgetting that the results ensuing on natural selection will depend entirely on what it is that is selected from, so that the gist of the matter lies in this and not in the words “natural selection”—­it escaped us that a change of front had been made, and a conclusion entirely alien to the tenor of the whole book smuggled into the last paragraph as the one which it had been written to support; the book preached luck, the peroration cunning.

And there can be no doubt Mr. Darwin intended that the change of front should escape us; for it cannot be believed that he did not perfectly well know what he had done.  Mr. Darwin edited and re-edited with such minuteness of revision that it may be said no detail escaped him provided it was small enough; it is incredible that he should have allowed this paragraph to remain from first to last unchanged (except for the introduction of the words “by the Creator,” which are wanting in the first edition) if they did not convey the conception he most wished his readers to retain.  Even if in his first edition he had failed to see that he was abandoning in his last paragraph all that it had been his ostensible object most especially to support in the body of his book, he must have become aware of it long before he revised the “Origin of Species” for the last time; still he never altered it, and never put us on our guard.

It was not Mr. Darwin’s manner to put his reader on his guard; we might as well expect Mr. Gladstone to put us on our guard about the Irish land bills.  Caveat lector seems to have been his motto.  Mr. Spencer, in the articles already referred to, is at pains to show that Mr. Darwin’s opinions in later life underwent a change in the direction of laying greater stress on functionally produced modifications, and points out that in the sixth edition of the “Origin of Species” Mr. Darwin says, “I think there can be no doubt that use in our domestic animals has strengthened and enlarged certain parts, and disuse diminished them;” whereas in his first edition he said, “I think there can be little doubt” of this.  Mr. Spencer also quotes a passage from “The Descent of Man,” in which Mr. Darwin said that even in the first edition of the “Origin of Species” he had attributed great effect to function, as though in the later ones he had attributed still more; but if there was any considerable change of position, it should not have been left to be toilsomely collected by collation of editions, and comparison of passages far removed from one another in other books.  If his mind had undergone the modification supposed by Mr. Spencer, Mr. Darwin should have said so in a prominent passage of some later edition of the “Origin of Species.”  He should have said—­“In my earlier editions I underrated, as now seems probable, the effects of use and disuse as purveyors of the slight successive modifications whose accumulation in the ordinary course of things results in specific difference, and I laid too much stress on the accumulation of merely accidental variations;” having said this, he should have summarised the reasons that had made him change his mind, and given a list of the most important cases in which he has seen fit to alter what he had originally written.  If Mr. Darwin had dealt thus with us we should have readily condoned all the mistakes he would have been at all likely to have made, for we should have known him as one who was trying to help us, tidy us up, keep us straight, and enable us to use our judgments to the best advantage.  The public will forgive many errors alike of taste and judgment, where it feels that a writer persistently desires this.

I can only remember a couple of sentences in the later editions of the “Origin of Species” in which Mr. Darwin directly admits a change of opinion as regards the main causes of organic modification.  How shuffling the first of these is I have already shown in “Life and Habit,” p. 260, and in “Evolution, Old and New,” p. 359; I need not, therefore, say more here, especially as there has been no rejoinder to what I then said.  Curiously enough the sentence does not bear out Mr. Spencer’s contention that Mr. Darwin in his later years leaned more decidedly towards functionally produced modifications, for it runs:  {161a}—­“In the earlier editions of this work I underrated, as now seems probable, the frequency and importance of modifications due,” not, as Mr. Spencer would have us believe, to use and disuse, but “to spontaneous variability,” by which can only be intended, “to variations in no way connected with use and disuse,” as not being assignable to any known cause of general application, and referable as far as we are concerned to accident only; so that he gives the natural survival of the luckiest, which is indeed his distinctive feature, if it deserve to be called a feature at all, greater prominence than ever.  Nevertheless there is no change in his concluding paragraph, which still remains an embodiment of the views of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck.

The other passage is on p. 421 of the edition of 1876.  It stands:- “I have now recapitulated the facts and considerations which have thoroughly” (why “thoroughly”?) “convinced me that species have been modified during a long course of descent.  This has been effected chiefly through the natural selection of numerous, successive, slight, favourable variations; aided in an important manner by the inherited effects of the use and disuse of parts; and in an unimportant manner, that is, in relation to adaptive structures, whether past or present, by the direct action of external conditions, and by variations which seem to us in our ignorance to arise spontaneously.  It appears that I formerly underrated the frequency and value of these latter forms of variation as leading to permanent modifications of structure independently of natural selection.”

Here, again, it is not use and disuse which Mr. Darwin declares himself to have undervalued, but spontaneous variations.  The sentence just given is one of the most confusing I ever read even in the works of Mr Darwin.  It is the essence of his theory that the “numerous successive, slight, favourable variations,” above referred to, should be fortuitous, accidental, spontaneous; it is evident, moreover, that they are intended in this passage to be accidental or spontaneous, although neither of these words is employed, inasmuch as use and disuse and the action of the conditions of existence, whether direct or indirect, are mentioned specially as separate causes which purvey only the minor part of the variations from among which nature selects.  The words “that is, in relation to adaptive forms” should be omitted, as surplusage that draws the reader’s attention from the point at issue; the sentence really amounts to this—­that modification has been effected chiefly through selection in the ordinary course of nature from among spontaneous variations, aided in an unimportant manner by variations which QUa us are spontaneous.  Nevertheless, though these spontaneous variations are still so trifling in effect that they only aid spontaneous variations in an unimportant manner, in his earlier editions Mr. Darwin thought them still less important than he does now.

This comes of tinkering.  We do not know whether we are on our heads or our heels.  We catch ourselves repeating “important,” “unimportant,” “unimportant,” “important,” like the King when addressing the jury in “Alice in Wonderland;” and yet this is the book of which Mr. Grant Allen {163a} says that it is “one of the greatest, and most learned, the most lucid, the most logical, the most crushing, the most conclusive, that the world has ever seen.  Step by step, and principle by principle, it proved every point in its progress triumphantly before it went on to the next.  So vast an array of facts so thoroughly in hand had never before been mustered and marshalled in favour of any biological theory.”  The book and the eulogy are well mated.

I see that in the paragraph following on the one just quoted, Mr. Allen says, that “to the world at large Darwinism and evolution became at once synonymous terms.”  Certainly it was no fault of Mr. Darwin’s if they did not, but I will add more on this head presently; for the moment, returning to Mr. Darwin, it is hardly credible, but it is nevertheless true, that Mr Darwin begins the paragraph next following on the one on which I have just reflected so severely, with the words, “It can hardly be supposed that a false theory would explain in so satisfactory a manner as does the theory of natural selection, the several large classes of facts above specified.”  If Mr. Darwin found the large classes of facts “satisfactorily” explained by the survival of the luckiest irrespectively of the cunning which enabled them to turn their luck to account, he must have been easily satisfied.  Perhaps he was in the same frame of mind as when he said {164a} that “even an imperfect answer would be satisfactory,” but surely this is being thankful for small mercies.

On the following page Mr. Darwin says:- “Although I am fully” (why “fully”?) “convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume under the form of an abstract, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists,” &c.  I have not quoted the whole of Mr. Darwin’s sentence, but it implies that any experienced naturalist who remained unconvinced was an old-fashioned, prejudiced person.  I confess that this is what I rather feel about the experienced naturalists who differ in only too great numbers from myself, but I did not expect to find so much of the old Adam remaining in Mr. Darwin; I did not expect to find him support me in the belief that naturalists are made of much the same stuff as other people, and, if they are wise, will look upon new theories with distrust until they find them becoming generally accepted.  I am not sure that Mr. Darwin is not just a little bit flippant here.

Sometimes I ask myself whether it is possible that, not being convinced, I may be an experienced naturalist after all; at other times, when I read Mr. Darwin’s works and those of his eulogists, I wonder whether there is not some other Mr. Darwin, some other “Origin of Species,” some other Professors Huxley, Tyndal, and Ray Lankester, and whether in each case some malicious fiend has not palmed off a counterfeit upon me that differs toto caelo from the original.  I felt exactly the same when I read Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister”; I could not believe my eyes, which nevertheless told me that the dull diseased trash I was so toilsomely reading was a work which was commonly held to be one of the great literary masterpieces of the world.  It seemed to me that there must be some other Goethe and some other Wilhelm Meister.  Indeed I find myself so depressingly out of harmony with the prevailing not opinion only, but spirit—­if, indeed, the Huxleys, Tyndals, Miss Buckleys, Ray Lankesters, and Romaneses express the prevailing spirit as accurately as they appear to do—­that at times I find it difficult to believe I am not the victim of hallucination; nevertheless I know that either every canon, whether of criticism or honourable conduct, which I have learned to respect is an impudent swindle, suitable for the cloister only, and having no force or application in the outside world; or else that Mr. Darwin and his supporters are misleading the public to the full as much as the theologians of whom they speak at times so disapprovingly.  They sin, moreover, with incomparably less excuse.  Right as they doubtless are in much, and much as we doubtless owe them (so we owe much also to the theologians, and they also are right in much), they are giving way to a temper which cannot be indulged with impunity.  I know the great power of academicism; I know how instinctively academicism everywhere must range itself on Mr. Darwin’s side, and how askance it must look on those who write as I do; but I know also that there is a power before which even academicism must bow, and to this power I look not unhopefully for support.

As regards Mr. Spencer’s contention that Mr. Darwin leaned more towards function as he grew older, I do not doubt that at the end of his life Mr. Darwin believed modification to be mainly due to function, but the passage quoted on page 62 written in 1839, coupled with the concluding paragraph of the “Origin of Species” written in 1859, and allowed to stand during seventeen years of revision, though so much else was altered—­these passages, when their dates and surroundings are considered, suggest strongly that Mr. Darwin thought during all the forty years or so thus covered exactly as his grandfather and Lamarck had done, and indeed as all sensible people since Buffon wrote have done if they have accepted evolution at all.

Then why should he not have said so?  What object could he have in writing an elaborate work to support a theory which he knew all the time to be untenable?  The impropriety of such a course, unless the work was, like Buffon’s, transparently ironical, could only be matched by its fatuousness, or indeed by the folly of one who should assign action so motiveless to any one out of a lunatic asylum.

This sounds well, but unfortunately we cannot forget that when Mr. Darwin wrote the “Origin of Species” he claimed to be the originator of the theory of descent with modification generally; that he did this without one word of reference either to Buffon or Erasmus Darwin until the first six thousand copies of his book had been sold, and then with as meagre, inadequate notice as can be well conceived.  Lamarck was just named in the first editions of the “Origin of Species,” but only to be told that Mr. Darwin had not got anything to give him, and he must go away; the author of the “Vestiges of Creation” was also just mentioned, but only in a sentence full of such gross misrepresentation that Mr. Darwin did not venture to stand by it, and expunged it in later editions, as usual, without calling attention to what he had done.  It would have been in the highest degree imprudent, not to say impossible, for one so conscientious as Mr. Darwin to have taken the line he took in respect of descent with modification generally, if he were not provided with some ostensibly distinctive feature, in virtue of which, if people said anything, he might claim to have advanced something different, and widely different, from the theory of evolution propounded by his illustrious predecessors; a distinctive theory of some sort, therefore, had got to be looked for—­and if people look in this spirit they can generally find.

I imagine that Mr. Darwin, casting about for a substantial difference, and being unable to find one, committed the Gladstonian blunder of mistaking an unsubstantial for a substantial one.  It was doubtless because he suspected it that he never took us fully into his confidence, nor in all probability allowed even to himself how deeply he distrusted it.  Much, however, as he disliked the accumulation of accidental variations, he disliked not claiming the theory of descent with modification still more; and if he was to claim this, accidental his variations had got to be.  Accidental they accordingly were, but in as obscure and perfunctory a fashion as Mr. Darwin could make them consistently with their being to hand as accidental variations should later developments make this convenient.  Under these circumstances it was hardly to be expected that Mr. Darwin should help the reader to follow the workings of his mind—­nor, again, that a book the writer of which was hampered as I have supposed should prove clear and easy reading.

The attitude of Mr. Darwin’s mind, whatever it may have been in regard to the theory of descent with modification generally, goes so far to explain his attitude in respect to the theory of natural selection (which, it cannot be too often repeated, is only one of the conditions of existence advanced as the main means of modification by the earlier evolutionists), that it is worth while to settle the question once for all whether Mr. Darwin did or did not believe himself justified in claiming the theory of descent as an original discovery of his own.  This will be a task of some little length, and may perhaps try the reader’s patience, as it assuredly tried mine; if, however, he will read the two following chapters, he will probably be able to make up his mind upon much that will otherwise, if he thinks about it at all, continue to puzzle him.