The Power 



of This 



View of 



Life 



• ^ " We should never have sought 

 ^ either solace or moral instruction 

 »— I in Nature" 



o 



Pjj by Stephen Jay Gould 



In the last sentence of The Origin of 

 Species, Charles Darwin attributed mul- 

 tiple powers to life itself, but chose to des- 

 ignate the evolutionary perspective ("this 

 view of hfe") as imbued with grandeur: 



There is grandeur in this view of life, with 

 its several powers, having been originally 

 breathed into a few forms or into one; and 

 that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on 

 according to the fixed law of gravity, from 

 so simple a beginning endless forms most 

 beautiful and most wonderful have been, 

 and are being, evolved. 



Darwin thus located evolutionary 

 grandeur in a contrast between the repeti- 

 tive motion of our planet's circuit about 

 the sun and the fascinating narrative of 

 life's history — a tale with a mysterious be- 

 girming, an enthralling unfolding, and an 

 unpredictable end. The grandeur, in short, 

 lies in the contrast between a well-oiled 

 machine and an edifying story. 



"This view of life" also emits power, for 

 evolution represents the fundamental fact 

 and central organizing concept of biologi- 

 cal science, and Bacon proclaimed long 

 ago that knowledge is power. Darwin 

 clearly saw that his revolution included 

 two distinct and separable components — 

 establishing the fact of evolution (ge- 

 nealogical connections among all organ- 

 isms, with life's history as a tale of 

 physical "descent with modification," to 

 cite Darwin's words) and proposing a the- 

 ory (natural selection) for the cause of 

 change. Darwin wrote in the The Descent 

 of Man: 



I had two distinct objects in view; firstly to 

 show that species had not been separately 

 created, and secondly, that natural selection 

 had been the chief agent of change. . .hence 

 if I have erred in giving to natural selection 



[too] great power. . .1 have at least, as I hope, 

 done good service in aiding to overthrow 

 the dogma of separate creations. 



(Darwin's distinction was not only logi- 

 cally correct but also politically sound. 

 The intellechjal world had been ready for 

 evolution's factuality, and had eagerly em- 

 braced Darwin's evidence, but his radical 

 theory of natural selection found few tak- 

 ers during his lifetime and did not become 

 a majority view until the 1930s. Darwin is 

 buried in Westminster Abbey, literally at 

 the feet of Isaac Newton, but he lies in hal- 

 lowed ground for establishing the fact of 

 evolution, not for proposing a theory 

 about causes.) 



Evolution surely stands first among the 

 "outrages upon our naive self love" that 

 Freud identified as the cachet of all truly 

 great scientific revolutions. I don't mean to 

 downplay the mental adjustment required 

 by the two other revolutions that Freud 

 specified as paramount: changing our 

 abode from the immobile center of a hm- 

 ited universe to a small peripheral hunk of 

 rock subordinate to one star among bil- 

 lions, and altering our view of mind from a 

 logical and moral instrument to a largely 

 nonrational device buffeted or controlled 

 by an "unconscious." Still, no demotion of 

 hope can quite match the cancellation of 

 our "particular privilege of having been 

 specially created" (in God's image, no 

 less) and our consequent "relegation to de- 

 scent from the animal world." 



Evolution therefore entered Western 

 consciousness as the most threatening of 

 all new ideas to our most fiindamental so- 

 cial assumption and psychological hope 

 for human uniqueness and centrahty. Evo- 

 lution in any guise had to pose a challenge 

 and initiate a crisis. But many versions 

 could have buffered the shock and sani- 

 tized the transition. The two components 

 that Darwin identified — fact and theory — 

 might have been formulated in a 

 "friendly" fashion that challenged a mini- 

 mal number of cherished assumptions. An 

 instigator other than Darwin might, for ex- 

 ample, have portrayed the pathway (the 

 "fact") of evolution as inherently progres- 

 sive and predictably leading to Homo 

 sapiens as a pinnacle — the necessary re- 

 sult of a mechanism (the "theory") that 

 conceptualized advancing neurological 

 complexity as an ineluctable, internally 

 driven property of living matter. In fact, 

 most non-Darwinian theories of the nine- 

 teenth century did portray evolution in this 

 more conventional and less threatening 

 mode. (Our name for the process is a ves- 

 tige of this search for comfort. Evolution 



comes to us, largely via Herbert Spencer, 

 from an English vernacular usage mean- 

 ing "progress." Darwin did not like the 

 word and preferred "descent with modifi- 

 cation." But most evolutionists did equate 

 biological change with necessary 

 progress, and Spencer's favored term 

 stuck.) 



Charles Darwin was a complex and 

 contradictory man — an intellectual radi- 

 cal, a political Uberal, and a social conser- 

 vative. His personal wealth and his loving, 

 protective home life allowed him to range 

 freely (and dangerously) in the realm of 

 ideas. Evolution, as argued above, would 

 have been challenging enough to consti- 

 tute Freud's greatest revolution in any 

 guise. But Darwin's version cut right 

 through the keystone of social convention 

 and provided an ideologically radical ac- 

 count in the domains of both theory and 

 fact. Auspicious beginnings often cascade 

 to full achievements (and rolling stones 

 gather no moss). Darwin started us well, 

 but the transformation continues, and the 

 surprises do not diminish. Perhaps we can 

 only agree with the Enghsh biologist and 

 writer J. B. S. Haldane that the universe is 

 not only pecuhar but "queerer than we can 

 suppose." 



The Radical Theory: Natural selection, 

 as a theory about diiferential reproductive 

 success and its consequences, could 

 scarcely be less available for any hope that 

 evolution might be either cosmically ra- 

 tional or just parochially directed toward 

 the appearance of Homo sapiens. Natural 

 selection is, first of all, a theory about 

 adaptation to changing local environ- 

 ments, not a statement about "improve- 

 ment" or "progress" in any global sense. 

 Since environments alter in a meandering 

 and unpredictable way through time, nat- 

 ural selection should not lead to any path- 

 way of stately unfolding. (Darwin, as an 

 eminent Victorian in a culture maximally 

 committed to progress, did manage to 

 smuggle predictable advance back into 

 evolution via an ecological argument 

 about competition in biologically crowded 

 environments, but he remained committed 

 to his radical proposal that the "bare 

 bones" mechanics of natural selection per- 

 mits no statement about favored directions 

 for long-term change.) 



Moreover, natural selection, expressed 

 in inappropriate human terms, is a remark- 

 ably inefficient, even cruel process. Selec- 

 rion carves adaptarion by eliminating 

 masses of the less fit — imposing 

 hecatombs of death as preconditions for 

 hmited increments of change. Natural se- 



6 Natural History 6/94 



