In other words, Dubois never said that Pithecanthropus was a gibbon (and therefore the lumbering, almost comical dead end of the legend); rather, he reconstructed Java Man with the proportions of a gibbon in order to inflate the body weight and transform his beloved creature into a direct human ancestor—its highest possible status—under his curious theory of evolution.
Eugène Dubois is no hero in my book, if only because I share the spirit of his unorthodoxies, but disagree so strongly with his version, and regard his supporting arguments as so weakly construed and so willfully blind to opposing evidence (the dogmatist within is always worse than the enemy without). Nonetheless, I step forward in his cause because he has been so badly served by careless reading and neglect of his primary work (theories of brain size) in favor of his moment of fame (the discovery of Pithecanthropus). As a bitter consequence, Dubois’s ingenious attempt to retain Pithecanthropus as a direct human ancestor has been widely misread in a precisely opposite manner as an ultimate surrender, almost comical in its transmogrification of a human forebear into a giant gibbon. With the patch of Pithecanthropus alone, the legend of the giant gibbon easily takes root; you need the tapestry of Dubois’s evolutionary theories about brain size, the integrating vision of his intellectual life, to grasp his true intent.
Good scholars struggle to understand the world in an integral way (pedants bite off tiny bits and worry them to death). These visions of reality—I have called them tapestries in this essay—demand our respect, for they are an intellectual’s only birthright. They are often entirely wrong and always flawed in serious ways, but they must be understood honorably and not subjected to mayhem by the excision of patches.
I think that Dubois was wrong in his basic approach, and surely incorrect in his ingenious argument for Pithecanthropus remade as a human ancestor with a gibbon’s build. He was a Platonic numerologist in a messy world. He longed for absolutes, for invariable laws based on clean and simple numbers. He never understood that nothing generates the shadows on Plato’s cave. The shadows are reality, and they are diffuse, with penumbras spreading out and intersecting in complex patterns. Arthur Keith, the great British anthropologist, made the necessary observation with adequate gentleness in an obituary notice for Dubois: “He was an idealist, his ideas being so firmly held that his mind tended to bend facts rather than alter his ideas to fit them.” Still, just as the old cliché tells us about love, it is surely better to have a dream and to be wrong, than never to dream at all.
9 | Darwin and Paley Meet the Invisible Hand
THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY government defined their new basis of measurement—the meter—as one ten-millionth of the quadrant of the earth’s circumference from pole to equator. While I do appreciate both the democratic intent and objectivity of such a choice, I must confess my continuing fondness for older units of explicitly human scale. Monarchs may not merit a role as standard-bearer in this sense, but at least we can empathize with a yard defined (in one common legend at least) as the distance from King Edgar’s nosetip to outstretched middle finger; or the foot as King John’s regal proclamation (after stamping his print on wet ground at a time of peace, rather than Magna Carta rebellion, with his nobles): “Let it be the measure from this day forward” or an inch as the length of the knuckle on King Edgar’s thumb.
But when inches required subdivision, our large frames failed to supply obvious reference points, and our forebears sought agricultural aids: Three (or sometimes four) barleycorns made an inch, and five poppy seeds a barleycorn.
I mention these arcana to explicate a quotation from William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802). When the good reverend cites the value of a barleycorn, he means “damned little.” Paley, out to prove the existence and benevolence of God from the good design of organisms, faced a puzzle in analyzing behavior. How, in God’s well-designed world, can organisms spend so much time and energy engaged in behavior for purposes they cannot understand? Birds must copulate to reproduce and must reproduce to perpetuate their kind, but birdbrains cannot grasp this chain of logic:
When a male and female sparrow come together, they do not meet to confer upon the expediency of perpetuating their species. As an abstract proposition, they care not the value of a barley-corn whether the species be perpetuated, or not. They follow their sensations; and all those consequences ensue, which the wisest counsels could have dictated, which the most solicitous care of futurity, which the most anxious concern for the sparrow world, could have produced. But how do these consequences arise?
The problem, Paley tells us, has a clear solution in such cases. Sex, after all, feels good; birds indulge for pleasures of the moment, while their benevolent creator implants the bonus of his own intent in perpetuating one of his created species:
Those actions of animals which we refer to instinct, are not gone about with any view to their consequences…but are pursued for the sake of gratification alone; what does all this prove, but that the prospection [that is, knowledge of ultimate benefit], which must be somewhere, is not in the animal, but in the Creator?
“Be it so,” Paley adds, but he is not out of the intellectual thicket yet. What about instinctive behaviors that impart no immediate gratification, but seem, on the contrary, to mire an animal in pain and distress? How can a bird tolerate days or months of incarceration at the nest for a fleeting moment of carnal pleasure before, for Paley asserts that the female is “often found wasted to skin and bone by sitting upon her eggs.” Paley evokes both our empathy and admiration for this sedentary sacrifice:
Neither ought it…to be forgotten, how much the instinct costs the animal which feels it; how much a bird, for example, gives up, by sitting upon her nest; how repugnant it is to her organization, her habits, and her pleasures…. An animal delighting in motion, made for motion,…is fixed to her nest, as close as if her limbs were tied down by pins and wires. For my part, I never see a bird in that situation, but I recognize an invisible hand, detaining the contented prisoner from her fields and groves for a purpose, as the event proves, the most worthy of the sacrifice, the most important, the most beneficial.
Paley has cleverly turned the problem to his advantage. Sex can be explained by immediate gratification, though its purpose in the scheme of things be deeper. But incarceration at the nest, by opposing any conceivable motivation of the bird itself, must point more directly to divine intent and imposition. The “invisible hand” that keeps the bird on her nest can only be God himself.
The Reverend William Paley (1743–1805) wrote the most famous and influential entry in a long English tradition with roots at least as far back as John Ray’s Wisdom of God Manifested in Works of the Creation (1691) and a few twigs persisting even today. Darwin revered Paley’s book as a young man, and reminisced to his friend John Lubbock in 1859, just a week before the Origin of Species rolled off the presses: “I do not think I hardly ever admired a book more…. I could almost formerly have said it by heart.” Later in this essay, we shall see that Darwin paid Paley an ultimate debt of gratitude by inverting his former mentor’s system to construct his own particular and distinctive version of evolution.
This long tradition bore the name that Paley appropriated for the title of his book—Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature. Natural Theology stakes the particular claim that God’s nature, as well as his being (“existence and attributes” of Paley’s title), can be inferred from the character of objects in the natural world. (Most religious thought today either denies or downplays such a link and does not attempt to validate the idea of divinity from the nature of material objects.)
Natural Theology, first published in 1802, presents five hundred pages of diverse arguments for God’s existence, personality, natural attributes, unity, and goodness (in this explicit order of Paley’s chapters), all centered upon one primary theme, endlessly hammered: God shows his creating hand in the good design of organisms for their appointed styl
es of life (wings are optimal for flying, nest behavior for raising offspring). Paley sets forth his theme, in the opening paragraphs of the book, with one of the most famous metaphors in English writing. As the scene opens, the good reverend is walking across a field:
In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer, that, for any thing I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever.
Hulton Deutsch Collection Limited
The stone, so rough and formless, can teach us nothing about its origins. “But,” Paley continues, “suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be enquired how the watch happened to be in that place.” Now, the answer must be different, for the watch—by its twin properties of complexity and obvious contrivance for a purpose—implies a watchmaker. Complexity and construction for use cannot arise randomly, or even from physical laws of nature (the laws may build something complex, like the chemical structure of a crystal, but not something evidently designed for a purpose, for nature’s laws are abstract and impersonal). The watch must have been made on purpose, in order to keep time:
The inference, we think, is inevitable; that the watch must have had a maker; that there must have existed, at some time and in some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.
One additional step completes the argument: Organisms are even more complex, and even more evidently designed for their modes of life, than watches. If the watch implies a watchmaker, then the better design of organisms requires a benevolent, creating God.
There cannot be design without a designer; contrivance without a contriver…. The marks of design are too strong to be got over. Design must have had a designer. That designer must have been a person. That person is GOD.
Paley’s argument is scarcely immune from parody, especially since he wrote in such a colorful style. His need to attribute purpose and benevolence to all aspects of our life in this vale of tears does recall his near contemporary, Voltaire’s immortal Dr. Pangloss. For example, Paley’s earnest resolution to the problem of pain parallels the punch line of an old and feeble joke: “Why did the moron hit himself on the head with a hammer? Because it felt so good when he stopped.” (In fairness, Paley also presents the acceptable argument that pain informs the body of danger). Substituting the ills of his age for the hammer of our joke, Paley writes:
A man resting from a fit of the stone or gout is, for the time, in possession of feelings which undisturbed health cannot impart…. I am far from being sure, that a man is not a gainer by suffering a moderate interruption of bodily ease for a couple of hours out of the four-and-twenty.
Nonetheless, I believe that Paley’s argument, though quite unacceptable today, deserves our respect as a coherent and subtly defended philosophy from an interesting past—a “fossil worldview” that stretches our mind as we seek to comprehend our own preferences by appreciating the history of alternatives. Self-sustaining arguments are cheap; anyone with half a brain and a reasonable turn of phrase should be able to set forth his own prejudices. The test of a well-constructed defense lies in the identification and disproof of alternatives. If contrary interpretations are fully listed, fairly characterized, and adequately dismissed, then a system can win respect. I admire Paley primarily for his treatment of alternatives to his favored argument.
Paley’s central argument includes an assertion—organisms are well designed for definite purpose—and an inference—good and purposeful design implies a designer. We might attack the assertion itself, but the prevalence of good design is an empirical matter not to be settled by a book on philosophy. The assertion, in any case, enjoys wide assent (both in Paley’s time and our own). Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly—and they seem to do so very well indeed. Let us then focus on the validity of the inference. Paley can imagine only two alternatives to his proposition that good and purposeful design implies a designer. Much of his book centers on the dismissal of these competing explanations.
1. Good design exists, but does not imply creation for its current purpose. Paley saw God in the correlation of form with function, specifically, in the divine construction of anatomy for its appointed role: the leg to walk, the hand to write, the mind to glorify God. But suppose that form arises first and function follows. Suppose that form originates for other reasons (direct production by physical laws, for example) and then finds a use based on fortuitous fit. Paley grants that such an alternative is conceivable:
This turn is sometimes attempted to be given, viz. that the parts were not intended for the use, but that the use arose out of the parts. This distinction is intelligible. A cabinet maker rubs his mahogany with fish-skin [I didn’t know that the skin of dogfish sharks once served as sandpaper]; yet it would be too much to assert that the skin of the dogfish was made rough and granulated on purpose for the polishing of wood, and the use of cabinet makers.
This argument may work, Paley allows, for simple structures like the skin of a dogfish, but surely not for highly complex contrivances, made of hundreds of parts, all pointing to the same end, and each dependent upon all the others. Nothing so intricate could be made for one purpose and then fortuitously suited for something quite different and entirely unanticipated. Paley writes of the eye:
Is it possible to believe that the eye was formed without any regard to vision; that it was the animal itself which found out, that, though formed with no such intention, it would serve to see with?
2. Good design exists, and implies production for its current purpose; but adaptations are built naturally, by slow evolution towards desired ends, not by immediate, divine fiat. Evolutionary alternatives were well understood in Paley’s time. Darwin provided volumes of evidence and discovered a new and plausible mechanism; he scarcely invented the concept.
Paley could only conceive of evolution as a purposeful sequence of positive steps, building adaptation bit by bit. Thus, he attempted to refute a “Lamarckian” theory of natural change by use and disuse, with inheritance of acquired characters. (Writing in 1802, I doubt that Paley knew Lamarck’s work directly, since his French colleague had just begun to publish evolutionary views. But use and disuse represented a common conviction among evolutionists of the time, not an invention made by Lamarck).
Paley provided both empirical and theoretical refutations. He began factually, with an old classic—a good example to be sure, but restricted by modesty to presentation in Latin, lest the unrefined derive some salacious pleasure. Centuries of disuse do not cause organs to disappear, or even to diminish:
The mammae of the male have not vanished by inusitation; nec curtorum, per multa saecula, Judaeorum propagini deest praeputium [nor has the foreskin of Jews become any shorter in offspring through many centuries of circumcision].
(I am reminded of a story told by my father-in-law about life in Saint Louis just before World War I. Underground copies of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis were always in circulation through boys’ networks, but all editions then in print retained the author’s original device of printing the case studies—and some are doozies, even by today’s more permissive standards—in Latin. This fact, he assured me, provided the only impetus for attentive study of a subject then universally taught but otherwise roundly despised.)
Paley also provided some powerful theoretical arguments against evolution by use. If the elephant’s short neck implies a great advantage for a long nose, all well and good. But what can a poor proto-elephant do with one-tenth of a trunk:
If it be suggested, that this proboscis may have been produced in the long course of generations, by the constant endeavor of the elephant to thrust out his nose, (which is the general hypothesis by which it has lately been attempted to account for the forms of animated nature), I would ask, how was the animal to subsist in the meantime, during the process, until this elongation of snout were completed? What wa
s to become of the individual, whilst the species was perfecting?
I accept Paley’s arguments and might even be tempted to entertain his conclusions if he had truly accomplished his proper goal of refuting all logically possible alternatives. I believe that he did consider and dismiss all the potential refutations that he could conceive. But now we come to the crux of this essay. True originality is almost always an addition to the realm of the previously conceivable, not a mere permutation of possibilities already in hand. Progress in knowledge is not a tower to heaven built of bricks from the bottom up, but a product of impasse and breakthrough, yielding a bizarre and circuitous structure that ultimately rises nonetheless.
Paley missed a third alternative. We can scarcely blame him. The alternative is weird and crazy, laughable really. No sane person would build anything by such a cruel and indirect route. This third alternative can only work if you have lots of time to spare, and if you are not wedded to the idea that nature must be both efficient and benevolent. The third alternative, like the second, identifies natural evolution as the source of good design, thereby sinking Paley’s central conviction that adaptation must imply creation by divine fiat. But instead of viewing evolution as purposeful and positive movement towards the desired goal, this third alternative builds adaptation negatively—by eliminating all creatures that do not vary fortuitously in a favored direction, and preserving but a tiny fraction to pass their lucky legacy into future generations.
As I said, this third alternative is grossly inefficient and defies the logic of a clockwork universe, built by our standards and reasoning. No wonder it never entered Paley’s head. The only thing going for this third view—the only reason for even raising such an unpleasant topic here—is the curious fact that nature seems to work this way after all. Nobody ever called this method elegant, but the job gets done. We call this third view “natural selection,” or Darwinism. Darwin himself commented most forcefully upon the inefficient and basically unpleasant character of his process, writing to his friend Joseph Hooker in 1856: “What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel works of nature!”