PROGRESS SHOWN IN EVOLUTION 



evolving along the lemur-monkey-ape line, were able to 

 develop brain power, which finally culminated in man, and 

 which has made man now the dominant, most successful 

 organism and has enabled him actually to beat the bird at 

 its own game, producing machines more swift and tireless 

 in the air than the birds themselves, and music compared to 

 which even the lark's and the nightingale's songs are but 

 naive. 



No, the only reason why we find that the direction of 

 biological progress coincides so closely with much of our 

 own ideas of progress and value is that man happens to be 

 in the main stream of biological progress, not in an eddy or 

 backwater. 



The fact that there exists (among other processes of 

 evolution) one which can rightly be styled progress, seems 

 to me of fundamental importance to our thought. It does 

 not in any way prove the existence of a supernatural purpose 

 in evolution. It is merely one among several kinds of evolu- 

 tionary results, no one of which is any less explicable by 

 natural causes than any other. Paley and his school main- 

 tained with great vigor that the existence of adaptive struc- 

 tures closely fitted to the function they were to perform — 

 the webbed foot of a duck, the eye of man, the stream-line 

 form of a fish — ^were proof of a supernatural designer. Dar- 

 win at one stroke swept this argument away by means of 

 his theory of natural selection. This was early recognized 

 by all who accepted Darwinism, but it has not been so 

 readily recognized that precisely the same arguments hold 

 as regards biological progress: granted the existence of 

 Variation and Natural Selection, then biological progress as 

 well as adaptation (which is the product of specialization) 

 must come about. ^ 



^ See essay on Progress in J. H. Huxley's Essays of a Biologist. 



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