God and Natural Selection: The Darwinian Idea of Design

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University of Nebraska Lincoln, Nebraska

In his Autobiography Darwin said that at the time he wrote the Origin o f Species he was convinced that the universe was created by an intelligent God. '°l 'he extseme difficulty or rather impossibil i ty o f conceiving this immense and wonderful universe . . . as the result of blind chance or necessity," he said, "compel led" him to " look to a First Cause haviaag an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that o f man," and he deserved therefore " to be called a Theist ." "Since that t ime" his belief had grown weaker until he could only describe himself as "'an Agnostic." 1 This account definitely assigns Darwin's agnosticism to the period after 1859. But reminiscences, whether of scientists or others, are notoriously unreliable, and, appropriately, efforts have been made to determine independent ly o f the Autobiography what Darwin's Views were during the years in which he was at work on his theory o f natural selection. The quant i ty o f published material that bears on the question is already vast and is still growing. 2 In addit ion, there is a mass o f manuscript notes in Cambridge University Library that numerous scholars have been sifting through in order to trace the development o f Darwin's thought. Once immersed in these sources, they have found things less clear than in the Autobiography - o r at least their investiga- tions have produced litt le agreement. Some have found Darwin's own account to be accurate, while others have implied that his memory was faulty. John Greene has long held that Darwin was an "evolutionary

1. Nora Barlow, ed., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), pp. 92-94. Following Darwin's usage, I will throughout employ the word theist to describe his pre-1859 views, meaning by it: belief in a "First Cause" that has established the laws of nature. In the same way, I will describe Darwin's view of nature in this period as "theistic."

2. The most important recent and forthcoming additions are Howard Gruber and Paul Barrett, Darwin on Man (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974), which includes Barrett's transcriptions of Darwin's M and N notebooks and his "Old and Useless Notes"; Robert Stauffer, ed., Charles Darwin's Natural Selection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); and the complete correspondence of Darwin, now in preparation under the editorship of Frederick Burkhardt, David Kohn, Wdliam Montgomery, and Sydney Smith.

Journal o f the History of Biology, vol. 13, no. 2 (Fall 1980), pp. 169 - 194. 0022-5010/80/0132-0169. $02.60. Copyright © 1980 by D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht, Holland, and Boston, U.S.A

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deist" when he wrote the Origin; and Maurice Mandelbaum, in one of the fullest discussions of Darwin's religious views, supports the Autobiography. 3 But several authors who have most recently written on the subject have reached a very different conclusion. On the basis particularly of the M and N notebooks, in which Darwin speculated on the origin o f the idea o f God, they have indicated that Darwin was an agnostic or atheist by late 1838 or that he was, at least, wrong to say he was still a theist in 1859. 4 The evidence I will discuss below, including some that has not been noticed before, seems to me to support most strongly the view that Darwin's account is accurate.

From Darwin's day to this, there has been a persistent interest in his religious views, and this perhaps would be a sufficient justification for raising the issue once again, s My main concern, however, is with the character and development of the theory of natural selection, some aspects o f which can best be understood on the assumption that Darwin like most of his contemporaries, believed that God established the laws of nature. A case in point is Darwin's long-continued belief in design - a peculiarly Darwinian sort of design, it is true - which is revealed in some of his notes from the 1840s and 1850s, as well as in letters from the early 1860s. Another is his concept of adaptation. When he wrote the Origin Darwin explained that natural selection makes organisms adapted just well enough to be able to struggle successfully with their competitors. But when he first formulated his theory in 1838, and for much of the 21 years during which the theory was developed and extended, before it was first published, Darwin insisted that natural selection produces organisms perfec t ly adapted for the organic and inorganic conditions in which they live. The assumption of perfect

3. John Greene, "Reflections on the Progress of Darwin Studies," Z Hist. Biol., 8 (1975), 246; also John Greene, The Death of Adam (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1959), esp. pp, 10-13, 284; Maurice Mandelbaum, "Darwin's Religious Views," J. Hist. ldeas, 19 (1958), 363-378; and Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), pp. 85-87. Since this paper was written, a book by James R. Moore has appeared in which Darwin's theology is treated with insight and sympathy: The Post- Darwinian Controversies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 307-326.

4. Gruber and Barrett, Darwin on Man, pp. 208-213, 314; Edward Manier, The Young Darwin and His Culture Circle (Dordrecht, Holland, and Boston: D. Reidel, 1978), pp. 68, 204n13; Silvan Schweber, "The Origin of the Origin Revisited," J. Hist. Biol., 10 (1977), 233-234, 297, 304-308.

5. See, e.g., Francis Darwin, ed., Life and Letters o f Charles Darwin, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1888), I, 274-286; hereafter cited as LLD.

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adaptation, which Darwin shared with most of the biologists of his generation, was derived from the belief that nature is a created, harmo- nious, and purposeful whole. 6 It is therefore considerably easier to understand how Darwin could unite in one theory both the struggle for existence and perfect adaptation if we take seriously his statement that natural selection is one o f the "laws ordained by God to govern the Universe" instead o f dismissing it as merely inserted for the sake of conformity. 7

I argue in the first section o f this paper that the text o f the Origin o f Species, together with earlier notes in which Darwin refers to the creation o f life, offers stronger support than is usually allowed for the view that Darwin in 1859 believed the laws of nature were instituted by God. In the second section I present a reading of Darwin's notes o f 1838 on the origin o f man's idea o f God that I believe is more faithful to the text and context o f the notes than other recent readings and at the same time is in harmony with Darwin's autobiographical account o f his religious views. In the third I try to show what Darwin meant when he said in 1860 that he believed in "designed laws; ' ' a and I indicate briefly some o f the ways in which this Darwinian conception of design may have helped shape the development o f the theory of natural selection.

CREATION AND SECONDARY CAUSES

The Origin o f Species suggests at least three lines o f argument in support o f the view that Darwin was a "theist" when he wrote it. Facing the title page Darwin quoted from William Whewell's Bridgewater Treatise, "But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this - we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws. ' '9 He thus declared his

6. On some possible sources of the current belief among evolutionists in something like perfect adaptation, see Richard Lewontin, "Adaptation", The Encyclopedia Einaudi (Turin, 1977); see also J. Maynard Smith, "Optimization Theory in Evolution," Ann. Rev. Ecol. Syst., 9 (1978), 31-56. (I owe these references to Malcolm Kottler.).

7. Stauffer, ed., Natural Selection, p. 224. John Greene ("Reflections," pp. 246-247) has called attention to this passage as particularly good evidence that Darwin believed in God when he wrote the Origin.

8. LLD, II, 105. 9. Quoting William WheweU, Astronomy and General Physics (London: H. G.

Bohn, 1862; first published, 1833), p. 307.

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adherence to the doctrine of secondary causes, the most general func- tion of which in contemporary natural theology was to proclaim both the scientist's disbelief in divine intervention in the course of nature and his belief in God. 1° Whewell, like most natural theologians before 1850, was unwilling to extend the doctrine to the history of life. n In proclaiming that his book would do just that, Darwin was promising that he would explain the succession of species without recourse to miracles, while at the same time he assured his readers that he did not see this as tantamount to atheism, for the laws he proposed to discuss were laws established by God.

Darwin's theodicy as given at the end of the Origin also points, though less imperatively, to belief in a benevolent God whose laws are productive of good: "Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows." 12 The paragraph in which this statement is embedded, with its evocation of the beauty and sublimity of nature, makes it plain that Darwin sincerely believed that the effects of natural selection were on the whole good, that the evils at tendant on the struggle for existence served a higher purpose. The parallels between this and the reasoning of Paley or Malthus are obvious. 13 Without collateral evidence, however, it could

10. In the second and subsequent editions of the Origin Darwin used three quotations, each of which in different ways affirmed the doctrine of secondary causes. Mandelbaum, who has especially insisted on Darwin's use of secondary causes as evidence of his theism, has discussed all three in History, Man, and Reason, pp. 85-86. A tentative title page sketched in 1859 indicates the quotation from Whewell was originally to stand alone, beneath the title of the book (which was to be "On the Mutability of Species"); Darwin MSS, 205.1, Cambridge University Library (hereinafter CUL). There are numerous other passages in Darwin's published and unpublished writings in which he invoked the doctrine of creation by secondary means. The best known is in the Origin: '~fo my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes"; Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859), p. 488.

11. On Whewell's views, see John H. Brooke, "Natural Theology and the Plurality of Worlds: Observations on the Brewster-Whewell Debate," Ann. Sci., 34 (1977), 221-286.

12. Darwin, Origin, p. 490. 13. Cf. William Paley, Natural Theology, ed. Henry Brougham and Charles

Bell, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Bros., 1839), II, 155-156;Thomas R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1806), II, 498-499. As the passage just quoted suggests, Darwin believed that pro- gress, not merely some vague "good," was a necessary general result of evolution

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be argued that Darwin had endowed nature with the attributes o f Paley's God, and in this case his characterization o f himself as a theist would indeed be suspect. But pertinent collateral evidence does exist, as I will indicate shortly.

A further statement in the last paragraph of the Origin supplies a third reason for crediting Darwin's autobiographical account. The first form or forms of life, he indicated, were created by God. In the first edition the relevant passage reads, "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having seen originally breathed into a few forms or into one." 14 In the second edition this was amended to say "breathed by the Creator." as The use of "breathed" instead of the more neutral term "created," together with the explicit reference to the "Creator," makes the literal meaning of the sentence quite clear. It refers to the direct intervention of God in the history o f the world at the moment when life first appeared. The only question, then, is whether this was really Darwin's opinion, whether he was, in Mandel- baum's phrase, attempting to "adopt the protective coloration o f or thodoxy," 16 or whether he was merely expressing metaphorically all naturalists' ignorance about the origin of life.

Those who have questioned Darwin's portrayal o f himself as a "theist" have not always discussed these three lines o f argument) 7 But by implication they have said that those statements in the Origin which indicate Darwin believed in God are not to be taken at face value. Darwin himself seems to have provided a justification for this attitude when he wrote to Hooker in 1863 that his reference to divine inter- vention was not sincere: "I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion, and used the Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant 'appeared' by some wholly unknown process." is This disclaimer

by natural selection, though progress would not occur in every line of descent (see Greene, "Reflections," p. 256n). Mandelbaum has argued that this belief was a necessary consequence of Darwin's early theological convictions (History, Man, and Reason, p. 86). I agree that progress was probably in part a theological idea for Darwin, but for one in his social, economic, and cultural setting, there were obviously a good many nontheological incentives for seeing nature as progressive.

14. Darwin, Origin, p. 490; also p. 484. 15. Morse Peckham, ed., "The Origin o f Species" by Charles Darwin: A

Variorum Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959), p. 759. 16. Mandelbaum, History, Man and Reason, p. 86. 17. I have in mind especially Gruber, Manier, and Schweber (see note 4), all

of whom are especially concerned with the young Darwin, rather than the Darwin of the Origin.

18. LLD, II, 202-203.

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of course says nothing one way or the other about belief in God, for even if Darwin did not in 1859 have in mind a miraculous origin of life, he may well have supposed that life appeared as the result of divinely established laws. Several other considerations also indicate that we should be very cautions in taking this remark to Hooker as evidence that Darwin was an agnostic in 1859.

It is worth examining first of all the context in which the remark was made. The subject of the letter in which it appears is a review in the Athenaeum by Richard Owen, Darwin's leading scientific opponent in England. Owen used his review of a book by William B. Carpenter as an opportunity to reiterate a criticism of Darwin that he had originally made three years before, in his review of the Origin. In both reviews he censured Darwin for invoking a miracle to explain the origin of life instead of affirming that it, like all other natural phenomena, was effected by general laws. 19 It must have been particularly galling to Darwin that, of all people, Owen, who was generally (though wrongly) perceived as the champion of orthodoxy, should attack him not for extending the doctrine of secondary causes to the history of life, but for failing to extend it far enough or to adhere to it consistently. In such circumstances, it is little wonder that he wished he had avoided the word breathed. But whether his use of it was truckling, metaphor, or an honest expression of belief is a separate issue from his conclusion that it was ill-advised - an issue on which, fortunately, other evidence and arguments may be brought to bear.

There is, for instance, the series of notes and drafts running from the Origin back to the transmutation notebooks of 1837-1839, in which the origin of the first living forms is discussed. A note from about 1856 or 1857, when Darwin was writing Natural Selection, says, "In Ch [apter] on Classification show how far my theory goes. Beyond classes we can say only the germinal vesicle - the cellular structure, chemical composition, . . . growth, nutrition & generation, would indicate - by analogy that all living beings descended not from 4 or 5 animal types & as many or fewer vegetable types, but from one single created prototype protoplasm. ' 'z° Twelve to fifteen years earlier Darwin concluded his "Sketch of 1842" and "Essay of 1844" with

19. [Richard Owen], review of Introduction to the Study o f the Foraminifera, by William B. Carpenter, Athenaeum, no. 1848 (March 28, 1863), 418; [Richard Owen], "Darwin on the Origin of Species," Edinburgh Review, 111 (1860), 510-515.

20. Darwin MSS, 205.5, CUE See also Stauffer, ed., "Natural Selection," p. 255.

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references to the creation of life expressed in the same terms as in the Origin. 21 In all three o f these cases it can be argued that Darwin was drafting sentences ultimately intended for the public and so was employing the same truckling strategy he used in 1859. I f so, we must conclude that as early as 1842 he had decided it would be wise to mis- lead his readers on the subject o f his religious beliefs. This is possible: The more one examines Darwin's notes, the more instances one f'mds of Darwin's instructing himself not to state how far he was inclined to push some of his ideas - such as common descent, materialist explanations of mind, and so forth. 22 But it ought to be remembered that there is some difference in most people's eyes between prudent reticence and deliberate misrepresentation. Moreover, there is another, similar discussion of creation that from its location and tone appears to have been meant for Darwin's use alone and that should thus be free from any suspicion of hypocrisy. Inside the back of his copy of Owen's On the Nature o f Limbs (1849) Darwin wrote, "I look at Owen's Archetypes as more than ideal, as a real representation as far as the most consummate skill & loftiest generalization can represent the parent form of the Vertebrata. - " He added subsequently, "I follow him that there is a created archetype, the parent o f its class. ''23 This seems to show fairly clearly that as late as 1849 Darwin thought it most probable that God created the prototype o f each great class.

One can, however, construct an argument that may cast some doubt on this conclusion. If we trace the development o f Darwin's ideas on secondary causes, we find that he was not inclined to limit arbitrarily the sphere o f their operation. On more than one occasion in his early notebooks Darwin, referring to the example o f astronomy and to the law of gravity, argued that the doctrine o f secondary causes should be extended to the biological scignces, including the study of organic succession. At first, well before he read Malthus and hit on the idea o f natural selection, he pictured an original creation of life, after which all organisms have been produced by biological laws. 24 But by the period

21. Francis Darwin, ed., Foundations of the Origin of Species (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), pp. 52, 254.

22. See, e.g., Gruber and Barrett, Darwin on Man, p. 276 (M notebook, p. 57; subsequent references to the M and N notebooks, for which I am using Barrett's transcription, will be cited by notebook letter and page number: e.g., M, p. 57).

23. Darwin's Library, CUL. 24. Gavin de Beer, ed., "Darwin's Notebooks on Transmutation of Species,"

Bull. Brit. Mus. (Nat. Hist.), Hist. Set., 2 (1960), 41-183; 3 (1967), 131-176 (excised pages). De Beer's "First," "Second," "Third," and "Fourth" notebooks

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of July-November 1838 (he read Malthus at the end of September), Darwin was speaking o f the whole universe as one "GREAT SYSTEM" of laws. 2s He described a hierarchy of causes extending from "astro- nomical causes" down through the causes o f organic change and the cor- relation o f parts; and he said that God 's laws are capable of producing / 'every effect of every kind which surrounds us." 26 This seems to mean that everything, including the origin o f life, is brought about by laws, not divine intervention. Yet in his description of the hierarchy of "causes" Darwin did not include a cause o f the origin of life, instead proceeding from causes o f climatic change to causes of "changes of form in the organic world." Does this mean that he still required a separate creative act to establish the existence o f living beings? Con- sistent with such a possibility is the fact Manier has underscored, that Darwin's writings are antireductionist in tone. The idea of life "with all its powers" being breathed into a few forms or one is a reflection o f this at t i tude, for it implies that there are laws or "powers" peculiar to the organic world. 27 It is true that, as published, the "Sketch of 1842" contains a reference to "the law [singular] impressed on matter by the Creator," which would rule out any separate establishment of the laws o f the organic world. But I suspect that this is either an error in transcription or a slip of the pen by Darwin, for subsequently he always wrote instead "laws [plural] impressed by the Creator. ' '2a

I have not found any statement by Darwin that would make it possible to decide unequivocally whether he held, before 1859, that the general laws (or law) o f mat ter either included or had produced the laws o f the organic world. As far as it goes, the evidence seems to me to favor slightly the conclusion that he did not, and i f this is correct, his understanding ~f life may be said to require a further act o f creation in

correspond to Darwin's B, C, D, and E notebooks. Thoughout I will cite them by Darwin's letter and page number, followed by a lower-case e in the case of excised pages: here, B, pp. 101-102.

25. Darwin MSS, vol. 71, lois. 53-58, CUL (a fairly accurate transcription of these notes is published in Gruber and Barrett, Darwin on Man, pp. 416-420); see also D, p. 74e.

26. D, pp. 36-37;M,p. 136. 27. See Manier, Young Darwin, pp. 68, 131; see also Gruber and Barrett,

Darwin on Man, "Old and Useless Notes," p. 392n, where Darwin refers to "two great systems of laws in the world, the organic & inorganic."

28. F. Darwin, ed., Foundations, pp. 51, 253; Darwin, Origin, p. 488. Since this point occurred to me I have not had an opporttmity to examine at first hand the 1842 manuscript.

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addit ion to the ' creation of matter . But it may well be that Darwin considered the existence o f mat ter with its laws sufficient to account for organic as well as inorganic phenomena. 29 I f so, his discussions o f crea- t ion must be viewed in a different light, as not implying a special inter- posi t ion of divine power. This is how Darwin himself said subsequently that he wished to be understood. In December 1859, he explained to Huxley that at the end o f the Origin he was not talking about a miracle. He said that his reference to a "created form" meant "only that we know nothing as ye t [of] how life originates." 30 Now this usage of the term "creat ion," which, as I have noted, Darwin did not actually employ in the Origin, was commonplace among mid-nineteenth-century naturalists. Baden Powell wrote in 1855, "The term 'creat ion ' indeed, especially as respects new species, seems now, by common consent, to be adopted among geologists as a mere term o f convenience, to signify simply the fact o f origination o f a part icular form of animal or vegetable life, wi thout implying anything as to the precise mode of such origina- t ion." al In the present context Owen's similar definition is even more to the point , for he discussed the term with reference to the origin of life, and he tied usage o f it squarely to the doctrine o f secondary causes:

I t may be well to bear in mind that by the word "creat ion," the zoologist means "a process he knows not what ." Science has not ye t ascertained the secondary causes that operated when "the earth brought forth grass and herb yielding seed after its k ind," and when " the waters brought forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life." And supposing both the fact and the whole process of the so- called "spontaneous generat ion" of a fruit-bearing tree, or o f a fish, were scientifically demonstrated, we should still retain as strongly the idea . . . that the process was ordained by and had originated from an all-wise and powerful First Cause o f all things. 32

29. There are some Darwin notes that indicate he may have thought matter itself had "powers" - and, perhaps, that the laws of life and matter are coeval. Gruber and Barrett, Darwin on Man, "Old and Useless Notes," pp. 394, 396-398; see also Manier, Young Darwin, pp. 220-225.

30. LLD, II, 45. 31. Baden Powell, Essays on the Spirit o f the Inductive Philosophy, the Unity

o f Worlds, and the Philosophy o f Creation (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1855), p. 399.

32. Richard Owen, "Address," Report o f the British Association for the Advancement o f Science, 1858, p. xc. The meaning of "creation" and Darwin's iesponse to Owen's definition are discussed in W. F. Cannon, 'q'he Bases of Darwin's Achievement: A Revaluation," Vict. Stud., 5 (1961), 131.

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From Powell's and Owen's definitions two things appear. First, if Darwin was attempting to "adopt the protective coloration of ortho- doxy," he could have done so and still remained with the bounds of acceptable scientific discourse simply by using the word creation, in Owen's sense. That he close instead to say "breathed by the Creator" gives rise to the suspicion that this is what he meant. Second, it was legitimate in Darwin's day for a scientist who believed God worked only through secondary causes still to use language that suggested the role of an omniscient Creator in bringing about all things. We may perhaps justifiably ignore, then - as Darwin did in his explanation to Huxley - the exact terms Darwin adopted. This leaves the road open to interpret all of his discussions of the origin of life in accordance with the view that he thought that ever since the first creation of matter with its laws, the world has operated by secondary causes. The tone of one of Darwin's letters to Lyell in October 1859 perhaps lends some slight support to this interpretation. "We must under present knowledge," he wrote, "assume the creation of one or of a few forms in the same manner as philosophers assume the existence of a power of attraction without any explanation. ''33 This seems to imply that Darwin believed life with all its powers was not created directly by God, but was rather, like gravity, produced by the laws of matter.

From such ambiguous evidence it is unlikely that we will ever know for sure what Darwin had in mind in 1842, 1844, and 1859 by "breathed" into matter, or whether he meant the same thing in 1859 as in 1844. But when we fred him writing in the late 1850s that by nature he means "laws ordained by God"; and when we fred him recalling some years later that he was in 1859 "a Theist"; we must acknowledge that there is no justification for equating his presumed "truckling" with agnosticism. Whichever interpretation we adopt for Darwin's statements on creation, we are led to the conclusion that in 1859 he believed life was produced by God, either directly or indirectly, either by "the Creator" or by "laws ordained by God." In none of the material discussed so far is there the slightest suggestion of either agnosticism or atheism.

"MATERIALISM" AND PLAN

Those who have recently argued that Darwin's autobiographical account of his religious views is misleading have done so primarily

33. LLD, II, 6.

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because they have examined other sources in which, they think, Darwin was in fact questioning the existence of God. Their arguments have been based largely on lines of speculation recorded in Darwin's M and N notebooks, which he began in July 1838. 34 The first of these Darwin described as "full of Metaphysics on Morals and Speculations on Expression," the second simply as "Metaphysics & Expression. ' 'as In both he was concerned, among other things, to extend the domain of secondary causes to the production of mental phenomena. The origin of ideas, as well as of species, was to be ascribed to the action of definite laws. Before he thought of natural selection, Darwin's efforts to account for adaptation led him, in the spring of 1838, to adopt Lamarck's theory that environmentally induced changes in habits would result, over the course of many generations, in changes in structure. He proposed explaining the evolution of behavior by the supposition that habitual actions become hereditary, or instinctive. Instincts thus are the products of changes in habits, and he reasoned that if instincts are inherited, then they, and other mental phenomena, must depend on heritable structure, that is, on "organization of brain." Mind is a function of the nervous system as gravitation is a function of matter, he said. a6 Mandelbaum cites John Stuart Mill to the effect that the conventional definition of materialism current in Darwin's day "equated the materialist doctrine with the doctrine that all mental impressions resulted from the activities of the bodily organs." s7 Not surprisingly, we t'md that Darwin's specu- lations led him to consider himself a materialist, a8 But clearly it is not

34. It ought to be observed that even if Darwin was in 1838 questioning the existence of God (and the evidence does not seem to me to support this inter- pretation), this would not be grounds for concluding he then became an agnostic. Many have doubted and then decided their faith was well-founded. Darwin's conclusion seems to have been that it is impossible to believe the universe is the result of chance.

35. The M notebook was FdIed and the N begun on October 2, 1838. The last dated entry in N is April 3, 1839 (N, p. 75).

36. Gruber and Barrett, Darwin on Man, "Old and Useless Notes," pp. 393, 396; Manier, Young Darwin, p. 223 (a transcription of Darwin's comments on John Abercrombie, Inquiries concerning the Intellectual Powers and the Investiga- tion o f Truth; from Darwin's Library, CUL). On Darwin's Lamarckism and its relation to his speculations on behavior, see Sandra Herbert, "The Place of Man in the Development of Darwin's Theory of Transmutation, Part II," J. Hist. BioL, 10 (1977), 204-205; and Robert J. Richards, "Influence of Sensationalist Tradition on Early Theories of the Evolution of Behavior," J. Hist. Ideas, 40 (1979), 85-105.

37. Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason, p. 21. 38. C, p. 166; see also C, pp. 171-173.

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legitimate automatically to equate this sort of "materialism" with atheism or agnosticism.

Although Darwin at first supposed that the " s o d . . . is superadded," by mid-1838 he had concluded that, like all other creatures, man in his entirety is a product of evolution. To argue this required Darwin to construct evolutionary explanations for all those aspects o f behavior, all o f those abilities, attitudes, and ideas, that were most often interpreted as deriving from the specifically human nature with which God had endowed mankind, a9 In the M and N notebooks he speculated, for instance, on the origins of expressions associated with various emotions, on the origin of the "moral sense," and on the origin o f the idea of a deity. His views on the last o'f these have served as the principal evidence for his early adoption of an agnostic or atheistic stance. 4° In treating the origin o f the idea of God, Darwin took as given the human species at some sufficiently advanced stage of evolution and then considered what ideas or perceptions might have combined to produce the idea of a Creator. In his several brief discussions of the question no very definite answer is given, but two notions are mentioned more often than any others. One is the idea o f causation, the other man's perception o f the works of nature. Both figure in the following query: "?May not the idea of God arise from our confused idea of 'ought, ' joined with necessary notion of 'causation,' in reference to this 'ought, ' as well as the works o f the whole world. ''41 Neither o f these suggestions is very original. That the study of God's works leads inevitably to the idea of God was a cornerstone of natural religion. And, despite Hume, Darwin in 1838 could read in a book by the geologist John Macculloch, Proofs

and Illustrations o f the Attributes o f God (1837), "The proof of the existence of a Supreme Creator d e p e n d s . . , on our belief in a cause, or what has been termed causation. ' '42 Maccunoch's discussion was especially well suited to strike a responsive chord in Darwin. Macculloch

39. B. p. 232. W. Faye Cannon has offered one possible reason for Darwin's undertaking this task; see '~l'he WheweU-Darwin Controversy," J. Geol. Soc., 132 (1976), 381.

40. Gruber and Barrett, Darwin on Man, pp. 208, 212, 314; Manier, Young Darwin, p. 204n13; Schweber, "Revisited," pp. 308-309. See also, Stephen J. Gould, Ever since Darwin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 25; and Ernst Mayr, "Darwin and Natural Selection," Amer. Sci. 65 (1977), 323.

41. M, p. 151 (Sept. 23-Oct. 2, 1838); see also M, pp. 135-136; N, p. 4;N, pp. 11-13.

42. John Macculloch, Proofs and Illustrations of the Attributes of God, 3 vols. (London: James Duncan, 1837), I, 95.

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argued that the existence of God is not an intuitive truth "which we seem always to have known." But it may with some justice be likened to an instinct, because it is a necessary conclusion that people reach when they consider the cause of their own existence. We feel that we did not produce ourselves, he explained, and so we look for "some prior and different cause." And "whatever visible cause there may be for an effect, that cause is, itself, an effect of some prior cause. We trace, or conjecture these, as far as we can; but there is still a preceding one; and the ultimate one must be the primary power, a Deity; The Deity." Although Hume may have insisted that "we ought not to believe and reason in this manner," we cannot avoid doing so, MaccuUoch said; and he asserted that it is therefore perfectly legitimate to include such belief "among those original principles which belong to the human mind, as portions of its very nature; an instinct. "43 For Darwin it was an easy step from this to an evolutionary explanation. The instinctive belief in God would arise as soon as there was developed a mind capable of conceiving of causation and considering the implications of this idea. In response to Macculloch's discussion, Darwin commented that he "has an expression the very same as mine about our origin of a not ion of a Deity." 44

It is easy enough to understand why Darwin's project of explaining how mankind came to have an idea of God might lead one to think that he was trying to dismiss that idea as a mere artifact of the human condition. Gruber, Manier, and Schweber all appear to have interpreted the project as evidence of a growing agnosticism or atheism. 4s But this, I think, is to fail to see the problem as Darwin saw it at the time of these speculations. The most striking passages in which Darwin discussed the origin of the idea of God were written before he read Malthus, and all were written before his first clear statement of the principle of natural selection. 46 All, that is, are from the period before the idea of

43. Ibid., I, 94-95. 44. N, p. 35. 45. To be fair to Manier I must point out that he says Darwin was not an

atheist. He also says he was not a theist. He seems to suggest he was a pantheist (Young Darwin, p. 186). In the M and N notebooks and the '~)ld and Useless Notes" I have seen two explicit references to atheism. At one point Darwin said that Comte's ideas on free will "'would make a man a predestinarian of a new kind, because he would tend to be an atheist" (M, p. 74). Later he wrote, follow- ing William Kirby, "this materialism does not tend to Atheism" (Gruber and Barrett, Darwin on Man, "Old and Useless Notes," p. 394n).

46. E, p. 58, which is sometimes taken to be a condensed statement of the

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accident, of chance variations, became an important part of Darwin's conception of nature. Darwin, when they were written, still held to the most commonplace not ion of the system of laws established by God: he believed that God's laws are purposeful and serve detTmite, predetermined ends. Everything is the result of deterministic laws, yet everything has its lVmal cause. In nature we see, in Darwin's expression, "laws invoking laws & giving rise at last even to the perception of a fmal cause." 47 As WheweU said that rainfall and the laws that produce it exhibit purpose, so Darwin said that the laws of sexual generation and transmutation serve the purpose of producing social animals, particularly man. 48 For Darwin, as for the majority of his contem- poraries, the laws of nature were part of a plan of creation. The Creator, he supposed, achieves his ends through laws. The ends are known beforehand, and the laws are established to realize the plan.

For one with such a view of nature - and the evidence of the note- books shows most clearly that this was Darwin's view in the period of July-November 1838 49 - the problem in giving an evolutionary explanation for the existence of the idea of God was not to show how the idea of God arose even though God does not or may not exist; rather, it was to show how God, acting not directly, but through deterministic laws, has produced in man the idea of God. When Darwin said, "Love of deity effect of organization," he was not questioning the

theory of natural selection, makes no mention of the crucial element of chance variations. The first passage that dearly does so is E, pp. 111-112 (March 1839), but other references to chance make it probable that Darwin had fully recognized its importance by early December 1838 (E, pp. 68-69). Schweber has asserted that chance variation was recognized by Darwin by July 1838 (Schweber, "Re- visited," pp. 235, 264), but I have seen no evidence for this in the notebooks. The best statement of the view that Darwin's pre-Malthus theories did not involve chance is David Kohn, "Theories to Work by: Rejected Theories, Reproduction, and Darwin's Path to Natural Selection," in press.

47. M, p. 154 (Sept. 23-Oct. 2, 1838). This was written a few daysafter the passage quoted in the preceding paragraph (note 41). Darwin's view at this time was the traditional view of Boyle, but without, probably, Boyle's notion of God's "general concourse." See Robert Boyle, The Works, ed. Thomas Birch, new ed., 6 vols. (London, 1772), V, 413-414.

48. Whewell, Astronomy and General Physics, pp. 310-311; E. pp. 48-49: "Man is one great object, for which the world was brought into present state" (Nov. 1-7, 1838).

49. In addition to the passages cited just above, see D, pp. 36-37, 74e, 135e; M, pp. 135-136 (quoted below); Darwin MSS, vol. 71, lois. 53-58, CUL (Gruber and Barrett, Darwin on Man, pp. 418,419).

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existence of God. s° He was arguing that love of God was the necessary, predetermined outcome of the laws that produced the organization of the human brain. The following discussion from the M notebook leaves little room for doubt on this score:

Savages . . . consider the thunder & lightning the direct will of the God (& hence arises the theological age of science in every nation according to M. le Comte). Those savages who thus argue, make the same mistake, more apparent however to us, as does that philosopher who says the innate knowledge of creator has been implanted in us (individually or in race?) by a separate act of God, & not as a neces- sary integrant part of his most magnificent laws, which we profane in thinking not capable to produce every effect of every kind which surrounds us. sl

The idea of God is for Darwin one of the effects which God's laws produce. "Innate knowledge of creator" has not been implanted in man by a separate act of God. It is, rather a "necessary integrant part" of God's "most magnificent laws." Like man himself, it is, for Darwin, a part of the plan of creation.

When we discover in passages like this how all-embracing was Dar- win's conception of plan in the period July-November 1838, we can appreciate his characterization of nature as a "system of great harmony." We can see too that he was perfectly serious when he wrote in early September that the mechanism by which seeds are adapted for trans- portation over long distances "seems to imply knowledge of whole world." s: And we can only conclude, I think, that Darwin's "materi- alistic" speculations on the origin of the idea of God offer no support to the argument that Darwin was an agnostic or atheist when he indulged in them. They are an attempt by Darwin not to explain away the idea man has of God, but to explain how God, working only by law, has produced the idea of God in man.

DESIGNED LAWS AND CHANCE

Darwin's conception of plan is consistent with his autobiographical

50. C, p. 166. Cannon justly remarks, with reference to this passage, that Darwin thought his materialism "made God grander than other ways of thinking did" ("WheweU-Darwin Controversy," p. 379.

51. M, pp. 135-136 (September 8-13, 1838). Moore interprets this and related passages as I do, Post-Darwinian Controversies, pp. 319-320.

52. D, p. 74e (September 9-11, 1838).

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account of his religious views, and it deprives those who have wanted to see him as an agnostic or atheist at an early period of the only evidence that offered much support for their interpretation. But it also raises a question. The period of July.November 1838 includes the months in which Darwin first formulated the theory of natural selection. His new theory, which depends on the differential probability of survival of chance variations, could not readily coexist in Darwin's thought with the idea that nature is preplanned in every detail. How did Darwin's ideas on the overall design of nature change in order to accommodate the theory of natural selection? I have argued that when Darwin wrote the Origin two decades later he still believed in a God who established the laws of nature. But what exactly was Darwin's conception of nature's laws from 1838 to 18597 These are the years in which the theory of natural selection was fully elaborated and prepared for publication, and so it is of some importance to know whether Darwin's belief in God was of any consequence for his view of how these laws, including natural selection, operate and what they might be expected to produce.

Until he read Malthus, Darwin's theory of transmutation stated that all organic change is "adaptation" and that adaptation is an automatic organic response to environmental change. Adaptation is not produced by competition, struggle, or the greater likelihood of survival of the accidentally more fit. When conditions change, Darwin thought, or- ganisms adopt new habits, and, after many generations, their structure is altered, s3 Such a theory harmonized well with the idea of plan that Darwin held at the same time. He supposed that changes in the inorganic world are effected by deterministic laws; and that the laws established for the organic world are such that these inorganic changes will lead to the development of just those forms of life that the creator desired to produce - including man, with his brain organized in such a way as to give rise necessarily to the idea of a God who has established the whole system. In working out the theory of natural selection, however, Darwin concluded that adaptation is not automatic. When conditions change, organisms produce variations that are not necessarily adaptive. In the struggle for existence those "'accidental" variations that are best suited for the existing conditions will have the best chance of survival, s4

53. Kohn, "Theories to Work by." D, p. 175, together with the discussion of which it is a part, is among the best instances of Darwin's pre~Malthus belief that variations are themselves accommodations to changing conditions; i.e., they are adaptive.

54. E, pp. 111-112.

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Darwin appears to have recognized very quickly that such a view can only with difficulty be reconciled with the idea of a plan of creation, for by December he had ceased speaking of the "GREAT SYSTEM," and he had come to see man as a "chance" production, rather than as "'one great object" of the laws of generation, ss

With the introduction of the idea of chance, Darwin's conception of nature was altered. But the alteration did not inevitably involve the exclusion of all notion of design or purpose. I f organic change results from the natural selection of chance variations, one cannot predict that the process will produce any particular organs Or organic forms, such as eyes or elephants, and so one cannot say that eyes or elephants are designed. But one can predict tha~ various general, rather than specific, results will follow from natural selection, as, for instance, that natural selection will never produce a structure harmful to the organism that possesses it, or that natural selection will never produce an organ in one animal solely for the good of another, or that natural selection will always produce adaptation. Since they are predictable, all of these general results may, if one is so inclined, be said to be ends for which the law of natural selection was designed. The available evidence in- dicates that Darwin was so inclined. In the fall of 1838 he gave up the idea of a plan in favor of "general laws" that only by chance have produced precisely those organic forms that have lived or are now living; but he believed that these laws nevertheless serve general purposes.

Darwin's belief in design appears, for instance, in his comments on the debate then in progress among naturalists as to whether the idea of design was compatible with the doctrine of unity of type in the great classes of animals. In its strictest form, as displayed in some of the Bridgewater Treatises, the argument from design treated every organic structure as contrived expressly for its particular function. Form therefore was to be explained wholly in functional terms, s6 But in the second quarter of the nineteenth century more and more comparative anatomists found it difficult to account for what they knew of animal structure in terms of function alone. There seemed to be too many cases in which either the same functions were performed in different

55. E, pp. 68-69 (Dec. 4-16, 1838); E, pp. 48-49 (Nov. 1-7, 1838). 56. Chaxles Bell, The Hand: Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as Evincing

Design (London: William Picketing, 1834), pp. 42, 153-161, 280. This attitude was sanctioned by Cuvier, who also insisted on functional explanation. On Cuvier, see William Coleman, Georges Cuvier, Zoologist (Cambridge, Mass.: Ha~card University Press, 1964), pp. 38-43; E. S. Russell, Form and Function (London: John Murray, 1916), pp. 31-44, 76.

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animals by means of different organs or the same structural elements in different animals performed different functions. It became common for naturalists to explain these facts by the doctrine of unity of type. There can be discerned in nature, they said, certain basic structural plans, or archetypes, which are modified in different ways in different animals. All vertebrates are fundamentally alike, even if they are suited for very different conditions of existence; and all vertebrates are fundamentally different from all mollusks, even when they live under very similar conditions. On this theory, organic form is explained not solely by adaptation to function, but by adaptation plus typical structure, s7

Some naturalists and natural theologians viewed the doctrine of unity of type as a blow at the argument from design. To them, mor- phologists seemed to deny that the hand, for instance, is expressly and perfectly constructed for its various human functions, saying instead that it is merely one modification of a structure that is common to most birds, mammals, and reptiles. Richard Owen stated their objection in order to refute it:

Those physiologists who admit no other principle to have governed the construction of living beings than the exclusive and absolute adaptation of every part to its function, are apt to object to such remarks as have been offered regarding the composition of the skeleton of the whale's fm and of the chick's head, that "nothing is made in vain;" and they deem that adage a sufficient refutation of the idea that so many apparently superfluous bones and joints should exist in their particular order and collocation in subordination to another principle; conceiving, quite gratuitously in my opinion, the idea of conformity of type to be opposed to the idea of design, ss

Owen saw design and unity of type as complementary, rather than opposed, doctrines. He believed that the Creator established both plans of structure and laws by which these plans are modified to produce adaptation to the variety of conditions under which animals l ive . s9

To Darwin it appeared that Owen's formulation agreed very closely

57. The contrast between these two modes of explanation is treated at greater length in Dov Ospovat, "Perfect Adaptation and Teleological Explanation," Stud. Hist. Biol., 2 (1978), 33-56.

58. Richard Owen, On the Nature o f Limbs (London: John van Voorst, 1849), p. 84.

59. Richard Owen, On the Archetype and Homologies o f the Vertebrate Skeleton (London, 1848), pp. 171-172.

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with his own view. Hereditary structure derived from the common prototype is the fundamental plan in each group of animals, and natural selection is the principal law that adapts this structure to various circumstances. 6° When in 1850 Darwin read Owen's On the Nature o f Limbs (1849), his reaction was to second Owen's conclusion that there is no conflict between the law of unity of type and the idea of design. "I agree," he said, that it is false to say "conformity of type is opposed to idea of design .''61 What Darwin meant by this is elucidated by comparison with an interesting note, dating from about 1847, in which he is plotting the least objectionable way of stating publicly his views on God's place in nature. Again, his belief in design is clearly indicated:

All allusion to superintending providence unnecessary - The Creator able to make first able also to go on directing & matter of moonshine the argument whether he does or no. All notice of interposition being unnecessary is alarming to one class of readers & uncaUed for - rather expressly mention the design displayed in retaining useless organs for further modifications as proof o f supervisal. 62

There is obviously a sort of "truckling" going on here. Darwin is re- minding himself of what items of his belief he should and should not discuss. His theory makes unnecessary the idea of a superintending providence, but since the argument over whether the Creator created and retired or created and continues to superintend is irrelevant, it may be ignored. His theory makes interposition of divine power unnecessary, but to say so would offend some readers, and this should be avoided. On the other hand, some aspects of the evolutionary process display design, and this fact should be mentioned prominently so as to obtain the favor of these same readers. Previously published manuscripts are almost equally revelatory of Darwin's strategy. 63 What is especially significant about this note is the new light it sheds on Darwin's theory, for we can see in it something of what Darwin's idea of design was in

60. Darwin MSS, 205.5, CUL. 61. Darwin's Library, Owen, On the Nature of Limbs, inside back cover, CUL. 62. Darwin MSS, vol. 100, following letter no. 64, J. D. Hooker to Charles

Darwin, Sept. 28, 1846, CUL (my italics). In the margin of one page of the "Essay of 1844" Darwin wrote, "Best way of accounting for presence of organs evidently useless to the animal axe retained for future modifications, perhaps infinite"; Darwin MSS, vol. 113, fol. 190 (F. Darwin, ed., Foundations,~p, 218).

63. E.g., M, p. 57; F. Darwin, ed., Foundations, pp. 6-7.

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this period, i t was no(' that of traditional British natural theology, in which particular organs are said to be expressly designed to serve particular functions and particular organisms expressly designed to inhabit particular localities. The note suggests rather that organs and organisms are produced by laws that were themselves so designed as to produce good results, e4 and it appears to say further that the naturalist can recognize these results as the products o f an intelligent Creator. In the present instance, transmutation and the laws of heredity produce vestigial organs, remnants of formerly functional parts. While such rudiments were a source of difficulty for most natural theologians, who, from their rigidly functional viewpoint, were hard pressed to t'md what use they were designed to serve, Darwin's note says that we can see their purpose in the needs o f future generations. The reason for that provision of the laws of heredity by which vestiges remain is to preserve organs (unless they are injurious to their possessor), even in a useless state, so that they may later be modified in order to adapt succeeding generations to new conditions. The production o f rudimentary organs, that is, was designed to give organisms a flexibility, a capacity for adaptation.

This allows us to enlarge somewhat on an often quoted passage from Darwin's Descent o f Man, first published in 1871. In it Darwin said, speaking of the earlier editions o f the Origin:

I perhaps attributed too much to the action o f natural se lec t ion . . . I did not formerly consider sufficiently the existence of structures, which, as far as we can at present judge, are neither beneficial nor injurious . . . I was not . . . able to annul the influence o f my former belief, then almost universal, that each species had been purposely created; and this led to my tacit assumption that every detail o f structure, excepting rudiments, was of some special, though unre- cognised, service. Any one with this assumption in his mind would naturally extend too far the action of natural selection. 6s

64. I would argue that when Darwin wrote in 1838 (M, p. 70), "M. le Comte argues against all contrivance - it is what my views tend to," he was not rejecting all design; he was merely saying that adaptation is produced by law, not specially contrived in each case.

65. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd ed. (New York: D. Appleton, 1899), p. 61; quoted in Mandelbaum, "Darwin's Religious Views," p. 378, and in Robert Young, "'Darwin's Metaphor: Does Nature Select?" Monist, 55 (1971), p. 468.

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The evidence of the note just discussed indicates that Darwin formerly thought even rudiments had their purpose - a general, rather than a special one. More important, it indicates that Darwin did not so much assume that each species has been purposely created - an assumption that is truly at odds with the theory of natural selection - as that the whole process of evolution is purposeful and its every consequence in some sense useful. At the time the Origin was written, this was his current, not his "former" belief. Only after he came to doubt it did the usefulness of every part seem to him to be merely an assumption having no necessary connection with his theory or his conception of nature.

Darwin's idea of design is expressed most clearly in a letter to Asa Gray, written in 1860, in which he described his post-Malthus view of nature as follows: "I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance." 66 When in the 1860s he was forced to discuss his ideas on design with Gray, Charles Lyell, and others, Darwin found them not very satisfactory. 67 He questioned whether it made sense to say that laws whose working involves a large element of chance were designed by an omniscient creator who could foresee all their consequences. 6s Ultimately, he came to doubt purpose and design altogether and called himself an agnostic. But he wrote in his Autobiography, and the evidence just presented tends to confirm, that this is a conclusion he reached only after the publication of the Origin. Until then he believed that the laws of nature were designed by God.

Until he began to lose his faith in designed laws, Darwin continued to assume that nearly every part is produced by natural selection and is useful. He made another, similar assumption that was not so constantly connected with his belief in designed laws, but that was nevertheless closely associated with it during much of the period from 1838 to 1859. This is the assumption that adaptation is perfect; that is, that organisms are as well fitted as possible for the conditions under which they live. This assumption, in one form or another, was held by virtually every naturalist and natural theologian of the mid-nineteenth

66. LLD, II, 105. 67. Ibid., II, 96-97, 145-146, 247; Francis Darwin and A. C. Seward, ed.,

More Letters o f Charles Darwin, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1903), I, 190- 194.

68. Charles Darwin, The Variation o f Animals and Plants under Domestication, 2 vols. (New York: Orange Judd, 1868), II, 514-516.

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century. 69 It is a natural, perhaps a necessary, corollary of the belief that nature is a harmonious system preplanned in every detail by a wise and benevolent God. During the time that he believed in such a plan, Darwin as a matter of course believed also in perfect adaptation. 7° He supposed that when conditions change, organisms automatically change. The result of the process, he said, is "complete adaptation" to the new conditions. 71 In moving from the idea of a plan to that of designed general laws, Darwin retained the assumption that adaptation is perfect. "My theory," he wrote, a month or two after reading Malthus, "makes

all organic beings perfectly adapted to all situations where in accordance to certain laws they can live" (except i n the case of islands, since new arrivals on them will not at first be adapted to the conditions they fred). 72 We know that Darwin's belief in perfect adaptation was not a

necessary adjunct to his belief in designed laws because he abandoned it, in favor of the idea of relative adaptation, a few years before 1859 - that is, before he began to express doubts about designed laws. In the period 1854-1857, he formulated his "principle of divergence," according to which offspring of a species may at any time produce species better adapted than the parent form simply by diversifying to

69. Darwin and others used "perfection" in many senses, only one of which is relevant here. As an instance of a usage that is not relevant, Darwin often spoke of the "perfection" of the eye, meaning merely that the eye is admirably suited for its function. By "perfect adaptation," however, I mean the doctrine that orgnisms are constructed in the best possible manner for the situation in which they live. In Darwin's day there were two principal variants of this doctrine. One was that organisms have, in effect, the best conceivable form for their conditions. Each is designed expressly for a particular place in nature, and every organ is constructed solely in reference to its function. This is the doctrine of Paley and Charles Bell; it is incompatible with the doctrine of evolution. The second was that organisms have the best possible form within the limits imposed by their basic typical or hereditary structure. This was the view of the leading biologists of Darwin's generation, including Owen, William B. Carpenter, Louis Agassiz, and Darwin himself until the 1850s. See Ospovat, "Perfect Adaptation," pp. 33-39.

70. Camille Limoges has shown that in 1837 Darwin rejected the first variant of the doctrine of perfect adaptation (see preceding note), but Limoges does not discuss the second. La sdldetion naturelle (Paris: Presses Universltaires de France, 1970), pp. 76-77.

71. B, p. 210e. David Kohn in his careful study has shown that before Malthus adaptation was for Darwin an absolute matter: organisms are well-adapted or they are not; "Theories to Work by."

72. Darwin MSS, vol. 71, fol. 53-58, CUL (Grnber and Barrett, DarwOt on Man, p. 417).

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occupy new niches. ~ Adaptation in such a theory can only be a relative matter, because there is no limit to the improvement of adaptation that diversification may effect. In Natural Selection, which was written in 1856.1858, the idea of relative adaptation appears for the first time in Darwin's writings. Darwin's belief in laws ordained by God is also stated in Natural Selection, and there is no indication that Darwin found it incompatible with his new concept of adaptation. 74 But though there is no necessary connection between them, perfect adaptation is a natural assumption for one who believes in designed laws. The element of chance in Darwin's theory meant that no particular organic form could be said to be a necessary result of the evolutionary process. On the other hand, Darwin's belief in design sustained his conviction that the process was set in motion to produce certain general outcomes: the existence of the higher animals; organs every one of which is in some way - formerly, presently, or potentially - useful to its possessor; and organisms that are all perfectly adapted to conditions.

Darwin's assumption that adaptation is perfect reveals much about his conception of nature and its laws during the period between his reading of Malthus and the publication of the Origin. The laws of nature, he supposed, tend to produce the greatest good for the organic world as a whole, and this is because a benevolent Creator so designed them. The assumption also provides a good measure of the importance of Darwin's religious views for understanding the development of his theory. Perfect adaptation was not a neutral or theoretically unimpor- tant assumption. It may be said to have governed the operation of natural selection in Darwin's "Sketch of 1842" and "Essay of 1844." 7s In both Darwin stated on numerous occasions that normally organisms are perfectly adapted; that they cease being perfectly adapted only when conditions change; and that natural selection produces perfectly

73. Darwin, Origin, pp. 111-126; Stauffer, ed., Natural Selection, pp. 227- 250. The development of the principle of divergence is recorded in notes, many of them dated, in Darwin MSS, 205.5, CUL. I have been studying these in order to work out the relationship between the principle of divergence and relative adaptation, and Janet Browne has already made good use of them in her article "Darwin's Botanical Arithmetic and the 'Principle of Divergence,' 1854-1858," £ Hist. Biol., 13 (1980).

74. Stauffer, ed., Natural Selection, pp. 224,380, 386. Like many of Darwin's mature ideas, relative adaptation is hinted at in one or two early notes (Darwin MSS, 205.9, CUL), but Darwin's theory long continued to operate on the assump- tion of perfect adaptation.

75. This point is discussed more fully in Dov Ospovat, "Darwin after Malthus," £ Hist. Biol., 12 (1979), 211-230.

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adapted forms. 76 He supposed that when external conditions in some part of the world change, so that species there are no longer perfectly adapted, this change causes them to vary. In the competition among the variant offspring, those that are best adapted will have the best chance of survival. If conditions continue to change, or if the forms selected are not yet perfectly adapted to the new conditions, variable offspring will continue to be produced, and the process of selection will continue. But variation, and hence selection, will stop when they have produced perfectly adapted forms. They will not resume their operation until conditions have changed again. This idea, that there is a limit to im- provement and that organic change stops whenever the limit is reached, makes this a very different conception of natural selection from the one we fred in the Or/g/n. The basic assumption underlying it is not explicitly stated in either the "Essay of 1844" or the "Sketch of 1842," but it occurs in several places in Darwin's notes from the period 1838- 1846. It is this: perfectly adapted forms do not vary. 77 In other words, change proceeds to a point - perfect adaptation - at which organisms are in harmony with the environment; at that moment, the necessity for further change is eliminated; and so variation ceases, thus bringing the mechanism for change to a halt. As long as Darwin believed this, the assumption of perfect adaptation played a regulative role in his theory. Through it, his theism shaped in subtle ways his understanding of the mechanism, as well as the products, of evolutionary change.

CONCLUSION

If we arrange in chronological order the various statements Darwin made about God, creation, design, plan, law, and so forth, that I have discussed, there emerges a picture of a consistent development in Darwin's religious views from the orthodoxy of his youth to the agnosticism of his later years. Numerous sources attest that at the beginning of the Beagle voyage Darwin was more or less orthodox in religion and science alike. 7s After he became a transmutationist early in 1837, he concluded that the doctrine of secondary causes must be extended even to the history of life and that after the first forms of life

76. F. Darwin, ed., Foundations, pp. 91, 94-96, 185,196. 77. E, pp. 71,122e; Darwin MSS, vol. 16ii, fol. 303 (July 1846), CUL. On the

need for external change to produce variation, see F. Darwin, ed., Foundations, pp. xxviii-xxix, 78, 83-84. On the theological implications of this view of varia- tion, see Ospovat, "Darwin after Malthus."

78. Barlow, ed., Autobiography, p. 85.

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were created, there was no further need for divine intervention, except where man was concerned. Man's body, he thought, was produced by the process of transmutation, but he believed for a time that man's soul was "superadded." By mid-183 8 he had become convinced that nothing, after the creation of life, was due to miracles. God works only through laws, which are capable of producing "every effect of evey kind which surrounds us." The existence of man, the idea of God in man's mind, and the harmony of the whole system were in his eyes prearranged goals of deterministic laws imposed by God. Such a conception excludes the miracles on which Christianity depends; but it is not possible to say whether Darwin's loss of Christian faith, which occurred at about this same time, preceded and made possible his "materialism" or was rather caused or hastened by it. 79 In the weeks after his reading of Malthus, Darwin's belief in a plan of creation gave way to the belief that God created matter and life and designed their laws, leaving the details, however, to the workings of chance. This remained his view until the 1860s.

There is no exact parallel between this development of Darwin's religious views and the development of his ideas on evolution, but there is a general correspondence. When he believed in a plan of creation, Darwin's theory of transmutation did not depend on struggle or the selection of chance variations. Adaptation was, for him, an automatic response to environmental chance. From late 1838 to 1859 he believed in designed laws and chance, and this belief, too, has its parallel in his theory. The element of chance in natural selection meant that there could be no detailed plan, in which even man's idea of God would be a necessary outcome of nature's laws (man himself is not a necessary outcome of the working of natural selection), s° But Darwin still believed nature was programmed to achieve certain general ends. We might say that he believed in a general, though not a special, teleology. Natural selection was for him a law to maximize utility, creating useful organs, retaining vestiges for future use. For many years it was a law designed to produce organisms perfectly adapted to their environments. Only

79. Ibid., pp. 85-87. See Herbert's perceptive comment in "Man, Part II," p. 202n85.

80. As long as he wanted to, Darwin could have continued to use his early explanation of the origin of the idea of God, in the following way: an intellectual being, whether man or some other, that happened to be produced by natural selection would, in thinking about causation, inevitably conceive of a first cause. In the Descent of Man, pp. 95-98, however, he employed a very different argument.

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later did Darwin come to doubt even this sort of design in nature. 8t One way of describing the development of Darwin's evolutionary thought is to say that it shows a gradual abandoning of his "theistic" assumptions, so that by the late 1860s his theory was informed to a slighter extent by notions of purpose and design than it was in 1838 or 1844 or 1859.

81. As late as 1870 Darwin wrote Hooker, "I cannot look at the universe as the result of blind chance;" F. Darwin and A. C. Seward, ed., More Letters, I, 321.

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