35 2 Problems of Organic Adaptation 



1. Supernatural Design 



It was the fitness of living things which furnished the 

 stock argument for the doctrine of supernatural design in 

 nature. Since these fitnesses are evidently purposive, and 

 since it is no longer credible that intelligent purpose is to 

 be found in the simplest plants and animals, it was argued 

 that an intelligent Designer must have supernaturally cre- 

 ated each and every one of these adaptations for the specific 

 function which it now performs. This doctrine reached its 

 climax in the Bridgewater Treatises, in which natural his- 

 tory became largely a study of the designs and purposes of 

 the Creator as revealed in his creatures, and biology was 

 made to serve as the handmaid of theology. 



But although adaptations are very general they are not 

 universal, and although they are frequently very efficient 

 they are not divinely perfect; indeed, all gradations of fit- 

 ness are found in nature from a high degree of perfection 

 to positive unfitness, and if all of these are the products 

 of supernatural design some of them show more than human 

 bungling. Furthermore, one "design" is frequently pitted 

 against another; the parasite is exquisitely, one might sus- 

 pect infernally, "designed" to prey upon its host, and the 

 beast of prey upon its victim, but on the other hand the 

 host is fitted to resist the parasite and the victim to escape 

 its enemy. If adaptations are supernatural designs, they 

 must be the designs of many intelligences working at odds 

 rather than of one, and their prevalence in the living world 

 would indicate that there are relatively few phenomena that 

 are natural. Finally, the "frivolities of teleology" were 

 carried to such an extent that they rendered the doctrine of 

 the supernatural origin of every adaptation not only incred- 

 ible but even ridiculous. And then came Darwinism, which 



