via DARWINISM AND DESIGN 133 



adaptive, the immensely greater number not. These 

 were sifted by the process of Natural Selection, which 

 eliminated the non-adapted and ill-adapted, so that only 

 the fit survived, and after a time organisms would be, in 

 a general way, adapted to their conditions of life. The 

 process by which these adaptations arose, therefore, was 

 a purely mechanical one, and did not imply any in 

 telligence. The sifting of variations by natural selection 

 would no more imply a purposive ordering than the 

 successive depositing of lighter and lighter detritus as a 

 river flows out into the sea. 



The anti-teleologically minded, to whom the support 

 which biological facts had seemed to give to the belief in 

 design had long been hateful, were naturally delighted 

 with this easy and obvious way of disposing of the 

 appearance of intelligent adaptation. They loudly pro 

 claimed the disappearance of the Argument from Design, 

 and even their critics only ventured to object that 

 Darwinism had substituted one kind of teleology for 

 another, and made the good (or survival) of the organism 

 determine the conduct adopted by the race. This was a 

 poor consolation, and, in my opinion, an illusory one. 

 For it is not for the sake of the organism s good that the 

 conduct is adopted, but it so happens that conduct can 

 only become prevalent when it has survival -value, 

 and that the prevalent conduct and that adapted to the 

 conditions of life must coincide. In reality the process 

 is not teleological, but purely mechanical. This appears 

 quite clearly if it is supposed to act upon beings conceived 

 to be devoid of all intelligence, and it turns out that it 

 acts equally well. If animals were mere automata, their 

 variations would be sifted by natural selection in just the 

 same way, and it is quite possible and legitimate to apply 

 Darwinian methods of argument to astronomical physics 

 and the chemistry of the elements. 



But if the Darwinian assumptions are equally applicable 

 to automata, they are, ultimately and in principle, just as 

 fatal to the view that animal intelligence plays any part 

 at all in the history of life as they are to the belief in its 



