The development of Darwin's theory : natural history, natural theology, and natural selection, 1838-1859 / Dov Ospovat.

  • Ospovat, Dov.
Date:
1995, ©1981
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: The development of Darwin's theory : natural history, natural theology, and natural selection, 1838-1859 / Dov Ospovat. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Darwin and the biology of the i8ßos tion explains why modern animals - same type as extinct, which is law [of 'propagation'] almost proved.)'^ Nor could Cuvier's conditions of existence explain the fact that each class of vertebrates, for instance, has representatives adapted for many dififerent situations. But again, heredity plus adaptation might do so: Perhaps consideration of range of capabilities past and present might tell something.'® For Darwin, as for others, rudimentary organs were among the strongest arguments against the teleologist, for only with great difficulty could they be construed as serving some useful purpose. Structures which seem to be unnecessary, and are therefore inexplicable by the teleologist, can be accounted for by inheritance from an ancestor to whom they were of some use: armadillos like every created [edentate]. - Passage for vertebrae in neck - same cause; such beautiful adaptation, yet other animals live so well. - This kind of propagation gives hiding-place for many unintelligi¬ ble structures - it might have been of use in progenitor, or it may be of use, - like mammae on men's breast. - When one sees a nipple on a man's breast, Darwin had said a few pages earlier, one must say not that it has some use, but that it is a vestige of a hermaphrodite ancestral form.'® Darwin rightly saw that the teleological approach to structure and distribution was a rival to his own view that species are propagated, and he seized on every fact or argument that cast doubt on the associated ideas of a fixed relationship between organisms and their environments and of the functional necessity of every detail of organic structure. Taken together those facts and arguments seemed to Darwin to require the rejection of the whole explanatory system of Cuvier and the natural theologians, includ¬ ing their bulwark against transmutationism: Look abroad, study gradation, study unity of type, study geographical distribution, study relation of fossil with recent. The fabric falls! In his dissatisfaction with the narrow interpretation of perfect adaptation, Darwin was in agreement with most of the best young biologists of his day. If this were the only similarity in their views, it could perhaps be dismissed as an unimportant coincidence. Darwin was bound to reject teleological explanation because of his belief in transmutation. Owen, Carpenter, Agassiz, and Schwann, on the other hand, rejected it on the ground that it gave an unsatisfactory account of some of the principal phenomena of 29