248 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



Pompilids, the black wasp Priocnemis flavicomis, is an adept 

 in the art of navigation, since it adopts the principle of the 

 French hydroglissia (an air-driven boat which skims the water 

 under the propulsion of an aeroplane propeller). This insect 

 tows a huge black spider several times its own size and too 

 heavy to be carried, propelling its prey with buzzing wings 

 along the open waterway, and leaving behind a miniature 

 wake like that of a steamer. It thus avoids the obstacles of 

 the dense vegetation, and saves time and energy in transport- 

 ing the huge carcass of its paralyzed quarry to the haven of 

 its distant burrow. Spiders like the Epeira, for example, are 

 endowed with the mathematical ability of constructing their 

 webs on the patterns of the logarithmic spiral of Jacques Ber- 

 nouilli (1654-1705), a curve which it took man centuries to 

 discover. The dog infested with parasitic tapeworms (Taenia) 

 evinces a seeming knowledge of pharmaceutics, seeing that it 

 will avidly devour Common Wormwood {Artemisiu ahsyn- 

 thium) , an herb which it never touches otherwise. 



In all these cases, however, as we have previously remarked, 

 the illusion of intelligence is due to the combination of tele- 

 ology or objective purposiveness with sentient consciousness. 

 But teleology is nothing more than a material expres- 

 sion of intelligence, not to be confounded with sub- 

 jective intelligence, which is its causal principle. When 

 the cells of the iris of the eye of a larval sala- 

 mander regenerate the lens in its typical perfection, after 

 the latter has been experimentally destroyed, we behold a 

 process that is objectively, but not subjectively, intelligent. 

 In like manner the instinctive acts of an animal are teleological 

 or objectively purposive, but do not proceed from an intelli- 

 gence inherent in the animal, any more than the intelligent 

 soliloquy delivered by a phonograph proceeds from a con- 

 scious intelligence inherent in the disc. In the animal, sentient 

 consciousness is associated with this teleology or objective 

 purposiveness, but such consciousness is only aware of what 

 can be sensed, and is, therefore, unconscious of purpose, that 



