THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 



88 



All of this helps. But one might as well admit also that 

 the work done since Darwin constitutes a tacit admission 

 on the part of the investigators that they would feel a bit 

 more comfortable about the whole business if it could be 

 made less hard to swallow, that quite possibly there is 

 some factor operating which has not been taken proper 

 account of. And when we come to the case of Pronuba and 

 its elaborate working arrangement with the yucca we have 

 an especially hard nut to crack. Accident, mutation, selec- 

 tion, statistical probability, etc., all seem to leave it a little 

 mysterious still. Even granted a very long time for the 

 thing to work itself out, we seem to be approaching the 

 Hmits of credibility. It has been argued, to take the most 

 extravagant case, that if a hundred apes were to bang 

 away at a hundred typewriters for a long enough time, 

 then, sooner or later, one of them would have to compose 

 accidentally "Paradise Lost," complete and exact to the 

 last comma. But do we beheve that he ever would? 



Many would admit that most of the difficulties could be 

 made to vanish if only we might assume the intrusion of 

 some factor not wholly accidental and mechanical. If tjiere 

 were only some intelligence, however feeble; some inten- 

 tion, however dim; some power of choice, however weak, 

 which the evolving organism could have used, to take ad- 

 vantage of the opportunities which chance provided. If 

 only, in other words, the whole process of evolving life 

 were not assumed to be so lifeless. 



Nevertheless, most of the scientists who would even ad- 

 mit the convenience of such an assumption are aghast at 

 the suggestion that it might be made. They throw up their 

 hands in horror crying, "Teleology," "VitaHsm," "Lamarc- 



