Books: Luck or Cunning?

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It may perhaps make the workings of Mr. Darwin's mind clearer to the
reader if I give the various readings of this passage as taken from
the three most important editions of the "Origin of Species."

In 1859 it stood, "Further, we must suppose that there is a power
always intently watching each slight accidental alteration," &c.

In 1861 it stood, "Further, we must suppose that there is a power
(natural selection) always intently watching each slight accidental
alteration," &c.

And in 1869, "Further, we must suppose that there is a power
represented by natural selection or the survival of the fittest
always intently watching each slight alteration," &c. {94a}

The hesitating feeble gait of one who fears a pitfall at every step,
so easily recognisable in the "numerous, successive, slight
alterations" in the foregoing passage, may be traced in many another
page of the "Origin of Species" by those who will be at the trouble
of comparing the several editions. It is only when this is done,
and the working of Mr. Darwin's mind can be seen as though it were
the twitchings of a dog's nose, that any idea can be formed of the
difficulty in which he found himself involved by his initial blunder
of thinking he had got a distinctive feature which entitled him to
claim the theory of evolution as an original idea of his own. He
found his natural selection hang round his neck like a millstone.
There is hardly a page in the "Origin of Species" in which traces of
the struggle going on in Mr. Darwin's mind are not discernible, with
a result alike exasperating and pitiable. I can only repeat what I
said in "Evolution Old and New," namely, that I find the task of
extracting a well-defined meaning out of Mr. Darwin's words
comparable only to that of trying to act on the advice of a lawyer
who has obscured the main issue as much as he can, and whose chief
aim has been to leave as many loopholes as possible for himself to
escape by, if things should go wrong hereafter. Or, again, to that
of one who has to construe an Act of Parliament which was originally
drawn with a view to throwing as much dust as possible in the eyes
of those who would oppose the measure, and which, having been found
utterly unworkable in practice, has had clauses repealed up and down
it till it is now in an inextricable tangle of confusion and
contradiction.

The more Mr. Darwin's work is studied, and more especially the more
his different editions are compared, the more impossible is it to
avoid a suspicion of arriere pensee as pervading it whenever the
"distinctive feature" is on the tapis. It is right to say, however,
that no such suspicion attaches to Mr. A. R. Wallace, Mr. Darwin's
fellow discoverer of natural selection. It is impossible to doubt
that Mr. Wallace believed he had made a real and important
improvement upon the Lamarckian system, and, as a natural
consequence, unlike Mr. Darwin, he began by telling us what Lamarck
had said. He did not, I admit, say quite all that I should have
been glad to have seen him say, nor use exactly the words I should
myself have chosen, but he said enough to make it impossible to
doubt his good faith, and his desire that we should understand that
with him, as with Mr. Darwin, variations are mainly accidental, not
functional. Thus, in his memorable paper communicated to the
Linnean Society in 1858 he said, in a passage which I have quoted in
"Unconscious Memory":

"The hypothesis of Lamarck--that progressive changes in species have
been produced by the attempts of the animals to increase the
development of their own organs, and thus modify their structures
and habits--has been repeatedly and easily refuted by all writers on
the subject of varieties and species; . . . but the view here
developed renders such an hypothesis quite unnecessary. . . . The
powerful retractile talons of the falcon and cat tribes have not
been produced or increased by the volition of those animals; . . .
neither did the giraffe acquire its long neck by desiring to reach
the foliage of the more lofty shrubs, and constantly stretching its
neck for this purpose, but because any varieties which occurred
among its antitypes with a longer neck than usual AT ONCE SECURED A
FRESH RANGE OF PASTURE OVER THE SAME GROUND AS THEIR SHORTER-NECKED
COMPANIONS, AND ON THE FIRST SCARCITY OF FOOD WERE THUS ENABLED TO
OUTLIVE THEM" (italics in original). {96a}

"Which occurred" is obviously "which happened to occur, by some
chance or accident entirely unconnected with use and disuse;" and
though the word "accidental" is never used, there can be no doubt
about Mr. Wallace's desire to make the reader catch the fact that
with him accident, and not, as with Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck,
sustained effort, is the main purveyor of the variations whose
accumulation amounts ultimately to specific difference. It is a
pity, however, that instead of contenting himself like a theologian
with saying that his opponent had been refuted over and over again,
he did not refer to any particular and tolerably successful attempt
to refute the theory that modifications in organic structure are
mainly functional. I am fairly well acquainted with the literature
of evolution, and have never met with any such attempt. But let
this pass; as with Mr. Darwin, so with Mr. Wallace, and so indeed
with all who accept Mr. Charles Darwin's natural selection as the
main means of modification, the central idea is luck, while the
central idea of the Erasmus-Darwinian system is cunning.

I have given the opinions of these contending parties in their
extreme development; but they both admit abatements which bring them
somewhat nearer to one another. Design, as even its most strenuous
upholders will admit, is a difficult word to deal with; it is, like
all our ideas, substantial enough until we try to grasp it--and
then, like all our ideas, it mockingly eludes us; it is like life or
death--a rope of many strands; there is design within design, and
design within undesign; there is undesign within design (as when a
man shuffles cards designing that there shall be no design in their
arrangement), and undesign within undesign; when we speak of cunning
or design in connection with organism we do not mean cunning, all
cunning, and nothing but cunning, so that there shall be no place
for luck; we do not mean that conscious attention and forethought
shall have been bestowed upon the minutest details of action, and
nothing been left to work itself out departmentally according to
precedent, or as it otherwise best may according to the chapter of
accidents.

So, again, when Mr. Darwin and his followers deny design and effort
to have been the main purveyors of the variations whose accumulation
results in specific difference, they do not entirely exclude the
action of use and disuse--and this at once opens the door for
cunning; nevertheless, according to Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, the
human eye and the long neck of the giraffe are alike due to the
accumulation of variations that are mainly functional, and hence
practical; according to Charles Darwin they are alike due to the
accumulation of variations that are accidental, fortuitous,
spontaneous, that is to say, mainly cannot be reduced to any known
general principle. According to Charles Darwin "the preservation of
favoured," or lucky, "races" is by far the most important means of
modification; according to Erasmus Darwin effort non sibi res sed se
rebus subjungere is unquestionably the most potent means; roughly,
therefore, there is no better or fairer way of putting the matter,
than to say that Charles Darwin is the apostle of luck, and his
grandfather, and Lamarck, of cunning.

It should be observed also that the distinction between the organism
and its surroundings--on which both systems are founded--is one that
cannot be so universally drawn as we find it convenient to allege.
There is a debatable ground of considerable extent on which RES and
ME, ego and non ego, luck and cunning, necessity and freewill, meet
and pass into one another as night and day, or life and death. No
one can draw a sharp line between ego and non ego, nor indeed any
sharp line between any classes of phenomena. Every part of the ego
is non ego qua organ or tool in use, and much of the non ego runs up
into the ego and is inseparably united with it; still there is
enough that it is obviously most convenient to call ego, and enough
that it is no less obviously most convenient to call non ego, as
there is enough obvious day and obvious night, or obvious luck and
obvious cunning, to make us think it advisable to keep separate
accounts for each.

I will say more on this head in a following chapter; in this present
one my business should be confined to pointing out as clearly and
succinctly as I can the issue between the two great main contending
opinions concerning organic development that obtain among those who
accept the theory of descent at all; nor do I believe that this can
be done more effectually and accurately than by saying, as above,
that Mr. Charles Darwin (whose name, by the way, was "Charles
Robert," and not, as would appear from the title-pages of his books,
"Charles" only), Mr. A. R. Wallace, and their supporters are the
apostles of luck, while Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, followed, more
or less timidly, by the Geoffroys and by Mr. Herbert Spencer, and
very timidly indeed by the Duke of Argyll, preach cunning as the
most important means of organic modification.

NOTE.--It appears from "Samuel Butler: A Memoir" (II, 29) that
Butler wrote to his father (Dec. 1885) about a passage in Horace
(near the beginning of the First Epistle of the First Book) -

Nunc in Aristippi furtim praecepta relabor,
Et mihi res, non me rebus subjungere conor.

On the preceding page he is adapting the second of these two verses
to his own purposes.--H. F. J.

CHAPTER VII--(Intercalated) Mr. Spencer's "The Factors of Organic
Evolution"

Since the foregoing and several of the succeeding chapters were
written, Mr. Herbert Spencer has made his position at once more
clear and more widely understood by his articles "The Factors of
Organic Evolution" which appeared in the Nineteenth Century for
April and May, 1886. The present appears the fittest place in which
to intercalate remarks concerning them.

Mr. Spencer asks whether those are right who regard Mr. Charles
Darwin's theory of natural selection as by itself sufficient to
account for organic evolution.

"On critically examining the evidence" (modern writers never examine
evidence, they always "critically," or "carefully," or "patiently,"
examine it), he writes, we shall find reason to think that it by no
means explains all that has to be explained. Omitting for the
present any consideration of a factor which may be considered
primordial, it may be contended that one of the factors alleged by
Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck must be recognised as a co-operator.
Unless that increase of a part resulting from extra activity, and
that decrease of it resulting from inactivity, are transmissible to
descendants, we are without a key to many phenomena of organic
evolution. UTTERLY INADEQUATE TO EXPLAIN THE MAJOR PART OF THE
FACTS AS IS THE HYPOTHESIS OF THE INHERITANCE OF FUNCTIONALLY
PRODUCED MODIFICATIONS, yet there is a minor part of the facts very
extensive though less, which must be ascribed to this cause."
(Italics mine.)

Mr. Spencer does not here say expressly that Erasmus Darwin and
Lamarck considered inheritance of functionally produced
modifications to be the sole explanation of the facts of organic
life; modern writers on evolution for the most part avoid saying
anything expressly; this nevertheless is the conclusion which the
reader naturally draws--and was doubtless intended to draw--from Mr.
Spencer's words. He gathers that these writers put forward an
"utterly inadequate" theory, which cannot for a moment be
entertained in the form in which they left it, but which,
nevertheless, contains contributions to the formation of a just
opinion which of late years have been too much neglected.

This inference would be, as Mr. Spencer ought to know, a mistaken
one. Erasmus Darwin, who was the first to depend mainly on
functionally produced modifications, attributes, if not as much
importance to variations induced either by what we must call chance,
or by causes having no connection with use and disuse, as Mr.
Spencer does, still so nearly as much that there is little to choose
between them. Mr. Spencer's words show that he attributes, if not
half, still not far off half the modification that has actually been
produced, to use and disuse. Erasmus Darwin does not say whether he
considers use and disuse to have brought about more than half or
less than half; he only says that animal and vegetable modification
is "in part produced" by the exertions of the animals and vegetables
themselves; the impression I have derived is, that just as Mr.
Spencer considers rather less than half to be due to use and disuse,
so Erasmus Darwin considers decidedly more than half--so much more,
in fact, than half as to make function unquestionably the factor
most proper to be insisted on if only one can be given. Further
than this he did not go. I will quote enough of Dr. Erasmus
Darwin's own words to put his position beyond doubt. He writes:-

"Thirdly, when we enumerate the great changes produced in the
species of animals before their nativity, as, for example, when the
offspring reproduces the effects produced upon the parent by
accident or culture, or the changes produced by the mixture of
species, as in mules; or the changes produced probably by exuberance
of nourishment supplied to the foetus, as in monstrous births with
additional limbs; many of these enormities are propagated and
continued as a variety at least, if not as a new species of animal.
I have seen a breed of cats with an additional claw on every foot;
of poultry also with an additional claw and with wings to their
feet; and of others without rumps. Mr. Buffon" (who, by the way,
surely, was no more "Mr. Buffon" than Lord Salisbury is "Mr.
Salisbury") "mentions a breed of dogs without tails which are common
at Rome and Naples--which he supposes to have been produced by a
custom long established of cutting their tails close off." {102a}

Here not one of the causes of variation adduced is connected with
use and disuse, or effort, volition, and purpose; the manner,
moreover, in which they are brought forward is not that of one who
shows signs of recalcitrancy about admitting other causes of
modification as well as use and disuse; indeed, a little lower down
he almost appears to assign the subordinate place to functionally
produced modifications, for he says--"Fifthly, from their first
rudiments or primordium to the termination of their lives, all
animals undergo perpetual transformations; WHICH ARE IN PART
PRODUCED by their own exertions in consequence of their desires and
aversions, of their pleasures and their pains, or of irritations or
of associations; and many of these acquired forms or propensities
are transmitted to their posterity."

I have quoted enough to show that Dr. Erasmus Darwin would have
protested against the supposition that functionally produced
modifications were an adequate explanation of all the phenomena of
organic modification. He declares accident and the chances and
changes of this mortal life to be potent and frequent causes of
variations, which, being not infrequently inherited, result in the
formation of varieties and even species, but considers these causes
if taken alone as no less insufficient to account for observable
facts than the theory of functionally produced modifications would
be if not supplemented by inheritance of so-called fortuitous, or
spontaneous variations. The difference between Dr. Erasmus Darwin
and Mr. Spencer does not consist in the denial by the first, that a
variety which happens, no matter how accidentally, to have varied in
a way that enables it to comply more fully and readily with the
conditions of its existence, is likely to live longer and leave more
offspring than one less favoured; nor in the denial by the second of
the inheritance and accumulation of functionally produced
modifications; but in the amount of stress which they respectively
lay on the relative importance of the two great factors of organic
evolution, the existence of which they are alike ready to admit.

With Erasmus Darwin there is indeed luck, and luck has had a great
deal to do with organic modification, but no amount of luck would
have done unless cunning had known how to take advantage of it;
whereas if cunning be given, a very little luck at a time will
accumulate in the course of ages and become a mighty heap. Cunning,
therefore, is the factor on which, having regard to the usage of
language and the necessity for simplifying facts, he thinks it most
proper to insist. Surely this is as near as may be the opinion
which common consent ascribes to Mr. Spencer himself. It is
certainly the one which, in supporting Erasmus Darwin's system as
against his grandson's, I have always intended to support. With
Charles Darwin, on the other hand, there is indeed cunning, effort,
and consequent use and disuse; nor does he deny that these have
produced some, and sometimes even an important, effect in modifying
species, but he assigns by far the most important role in the whole
scheme to natural selection, which, as I have already shown, must,
with him, be regarded as a synonym for luck pure and simple. This,
for reasons well shown by Mr. Spencer in the articles under
consideration, is so untenable that it seems only possible to
account for its having been advanced at all by supposing Mr.
Darwin's judgment to have been perverted by some one or more of the
many causes that might tend to warp them. What the chief of those
causes may have been I shall presently point out.

Buffon erred rather on the side of ignoring functionally produced
modifications than of insisting on them. The main agency with him
is the direct action of the environment upon the organism. This, no
doubt, is a flaw in Buffon's immortal work, but it is one which
Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck easily corrected; nor can we doubt that
Buffon would have readily accepted their amendment if it had been
suggested to him. Buffon did infinitely more in the way of
discovering and establishing the theory of descent with modification
than any one has ever done either before or since. He was too much
occupied with proving the fact of evolution at all, to dwell as
fully as might have been wished upon the details of the process
whereby the amoeba had become man, but we have already seen that he
regarded inherited mutilation as the cause of establishing a new
breed of dogs, and this is at any rate not laying much stress on
functionally produced modifications. Again, when writing of the
dog, he speaks of variations arising "BY SOME CHANCE common enough
with nature," {104a} and clearly does not contemplate function as
the sole cause of modification. Practically, though I grant I
should be less able to quote passages in support of my opinion than
I quite like, I do not doubt that his position was much the same as
that of his successors, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck.

Lamarck is more vulnerable than either Erasmus Darwin or Buffon on
the score of unwillingness to assign its full share to mere chance,
but I do not for a moment believe his comparative reticence to have
been caused by failure to see that the chapter of accidents is a
fateful one. He saw that the cunning or functional side had been
too much lost sight of, and therefore insisted on it, but he did not
mean to say that there is no such thing as luck. "Let us suppose,"
he says, "that a grass growing in a low-lying meadow, gets carried
BY SOME ACCIDENT to the brow of a neighbouring hill, where the soil
is still damp enough for the plant to be able to exist." {105a} Or
again--"With sufficient time, favourable conditions of life,
successive changes in the condition of the globe, and the power of
new surroundings and habits to modify the organs of living bodies,
all animal and vegetable forms have been imperceptibly rendered such
as we now see them." {105b} Who can doubt that accident is here
regarded as a potent factor of evolution, as well as the design that
is involved in the supposition that modification is, in the main,
functionally induced? Again he writes, "As regards the
circumstances that give rise to variation, the principal are
climatic changes, different temperatures of any of a creature's
environments, differences of abode, of habit, of the most frequent
actions, and lastly of the means of obtaining food, self-defence,
reproduction," &c. {105c} I will not dwell on the small
inconsistencies which may be found in the passages quoted above; the
reader will doubtless see them, and will also doubtless see that in
spite of them there can be no doubt that Lamarck, while believing
modification to be effected mainly by the survival in the struggle
for existence of modifications which had been induced functionally,
would not have hesitated to admit the survival of favourable
variations due to mere accident as also a potent factor in inducing
the results we see around us.

For the rest, Mr. Spencer's articles have relieved me from the
necessity of going into the evidence which proves that such
structures as a giraffe's neck, for example, cannot possibly have
been produced by the accumulation of variations which had their
origin mainly in accident. There is no occasion to add anything to
what Mr. Spencer has said on this score, and I am satisfied that
those who do not find his argument convince them would not be
convinced by anything I might say; I shall, therefore, omit what I
had written on this subject, and confine myself to giving the
substance of Mr. Spencer's most telling argument against Mr.
Darwin's theory that accidental variations, if favourable, would
accumulate and result in seemingly adaptive structures. Mr. Spencer
well shows that luck or chance is insufficient as a motive-power, or
helm, of evolution; but luck is only absence of design; if, then,
absence of design is found to fail, it follows that there must have
been design somewhere, nor can the design be more conveniently
placed than in association with function.

Mr. Spencer contends that where life is so simple as to consist
practically in the discharge of only one function, or where
circumstances are such that some one function is supremely important
(a state of things, by the way, more easily found in hypothesis than
in nature--at least as continuing without modification for many
successive seasons), then accidental variations, if favourable,
would indeed accumulate and result in modification, without the aid
of the transmission of functionally produced modification. This is
true; it is also true, however, that only a very small number of
species in comparison with those we see around us could thus arise,
and that we should never have got plants and animals as embodiments
of the two great fundamental principles on which it is alone
possible that life can be conducted, {107a} and species of plants
and animals as embodiments of the details involved in carrying out
these two main principles.

If the earliest organism could have only varied favourably in one
direction, the one possible favourable accidental variation would
have accumulated so long as the organism continued to exist at all,
inasmuch as this would be preserved whenever it happened to occur,
while every other would be lost in the struggle of competitive
forms; but even in the lowest forms of life there is more than one
condition in respect of which the organism must be supposed
sensitive, and there are as many directions in which variations may
be favourable as there are conditions of the environment that affect
the organism. We cannot conceive of a living form as having a power
of adaptation limited to one direction only; the elasticity which
admits of a not being "extreme to mark that which is done amiss" in
one direction will commonly admit of it in as many directions as
there are possible favourable modes of variation; the number of
these, as has been just said, depends upon the number of the
conditions of the environment that affect the organism, and these
last, though in the long run and over considerable intervals of time
tolerably constant, are over shorter intervals liable to frequent
and great changes; so that there is nothing in Mr. Charles Darwin's
system of modification through the natural survival of the lucky, to
prevent gain in one direction one year from being lost irretrievably
in the next, through the greater success of some in no way
correlated variation, the fortunate possessors of which alone
survive. This, in its turn, is as likely as not to disappear
shortly through the arising of some difficulty in some entirely new
direction, and so on; nor, if function be regarded as of small
effect in determining organism, is there anything to ensure either
that, even if ground be lost for a season or two in any one
direction, it shall be recovered presently on resumption by the
organism of the habits that called it into existence, or that it
shall appear synchronously in a sufficient number of individuals to
ensure its not being soon lost through gamogenesis.

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