PROGRESS SHOWN IN EVOLUTION
evolving along the lemur-monkey-ape line, were able to develop brain power, which finally culminated in man, and which has made man now the dominant, most successful organism and has enabled him actually to beat the bird at its own game, producing machines more swift and tireless in the air than the birds themselves, and music compared to which even the lark's and the nightingale's songs are but naïve.
No, the only reason why we find that the direction of biological progress coincides so closely with much of our own ideas of progress and value is that man happens to be in the main stream of biological progress, not in an eddy or backwater.
The fact that there exists (among other processes of evolution) one which can rightly be styled progress, seems to me of fundamental importance to our thought. It does not in any way prove the existence of a supernatural purpose in evolution. It is merely one among several kinds of evolutionary results, no one of which is any less explicable by natural causes than any other. Paley and his school maintained with great vigor that the existence of adaptive structures closely fitted to the function they were to perform―the webbed foot of a duck, the eye of man, the stream-line form of a fish—were proof of a supernatural designer. Darwin at one stroke swept this argument away by means of his theory of natural selection. This was early recognized by all who accepted Darwinism, but it has not been so readily recognized that precisely the same arguments hold as regards biological progress: granted the existence of Variation and Natural Selection, then biological progress as well as adaptation (which is the product of specialization) must come about.[1]
- ↑ See essay on Progress in J. H. Huxley’s Essays of a Biologist.
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