THIS
VIEW OF LIFE
Darwin
and Paley
Meet the Invisible Hand The
price of perfect design is messy, relentless slaughter by Stephen
Jay Gould The French revolutionary government defined its new basis of
measurement--the meter--as one ten-millionth of the quadrant of the earth's
circumference from pole to equator. While I do appreciate both the democratic
intent and objectivity of such a choice, I confess a continuing fondness for older
units of explicitly human scale. Monarchs may not deserve to be standard-bearers
in this sense, but at least we can empathize with a yard defined, in one common
legend at least, as the distance from King Edgar's nosetip to outstretched middle
finger. Or the foot as King John's regal proclamation (after stamping his print
on wet ground at a time of peace, rather than Magna Carta rebellion, with his
nobles): "Let it be the measure from this day forward." Or turning to
King Edgar again, an inch as the length of the knuckle on his thumb.
But when inches required subdivision, our large frames failed to supply obvious
reference points, and our forebears sought agricultural aids. Three (or sometimes
four) barleycorns made an inch, and five poppy seeds a barleycorn.
I mention these arcana to
explicate a quotation from William Paley's Natural Theology (1802). When
the good reverend cites the value of a barleycorn, he means "damned little."
Paley, out to prove the existence and benevolence of God from the good design
of organisms, faces a puzzle in analyzing behavior. How, in God's well-designed
world, can organisms spend so much time and energy engaged in behavior for purposes
they cannot understand? Birds must copulate to reproduce and must reproduce to
perpetuate their kind, but bird brains cannot grasp this chain of logic:
When a male and female sparrow come together, they do not meet to confer upon
the expediency of perpetuating their species. As an abstract proposition, they
care not the value of a barleycorn whether the species be perpetuated, or not.
They follow their sensations; and all those consequences ensue, which the wisest
counsels could have dictated, which the most solicitous care of futurity, which
the most anxious concern for the sparrow world, could have produced. But how do
these consequences arise? The problem, Paley tells us, has a
clear solution in such cases. Sex, after all, feels good; birds indulge for pleasures
of the moment, while their benevolent creator implants the bonus of His own intent
in perpetuating one of His created species: Those actions of
animals which we refer to instinct, are not gone about with any view to their
consequences... but are pursued for the sake of gratification alone; what does
all this prove, but that the prospection [that is, knowledge of ultimate benefit],
which must be somewhere, is not in the animal, but in the Creator?
"Be it so," Paley adds, but he is not out of the intellectual thicket
yet. What about instinctive behaviors that impart no immediate gratification but
seem, on the contrary, to mire an animal in pain and distress? How can a bird
tolerate days or months of incarceration at the nest for a fleeting moment of
carnal pleasure before--for Paley asserts that the female is "often found
wasted to skin and bone by sitting upon her eggs." Paley evokes both our
empathy and admiration for this sedentary sacrifice: Neither
ought it... to be forgotten, how much the instinct costs the animal which feels
it; how much a bird, for example, gives up, by sitting upon her nest; how repugnant
it is to her organization, her habits, and her pleasures.... An animal delighting
in motion, made for motion... is fixed to her nest, as close as if her limbs were
tied down by pins and wires. For my part, I never see a bird in that situation,
but I recognize an invisible hand, detaining the contented prisoner from her fields
and groves for a purpose, as the event proves, the most worthy of the sacrifice,
the most important, the most beneficial. Paley has cleverly turned
the problem to his advantage. Sex can be explained by immediate gratification,
although its purpose in the scheme of things be deeper. But incarceration at the
nest, by opposing any conceivable motivation of the bird itself, must point more
directly to divine-intent and imposition. The "invisible hand" that
keeps the bird on her nest can only be God himself.
The Reverend
William Paley (1743-1805) wrote the most famous and influential entry in a long
English tradition with roots at least as far back as John Ray's Wisdom of God
Manifested in Works of the Creation (1691), and a few twigs persisting even
today. Darwin revered Paley's book as a young man and reminisced to his friend
John Lubbock in 1859, just a week before the Origin of Species rolled off
the presses, "I do not think I hardly ever ad-8
NATURAL HISTORY 11/90
|