Luck, or Cunning, as the Main Means of Organic Modification

by Samuel Butler

There is hardly an opinion on the subject of descent with modification which does not find support in some one passage or another of the “Origin of Species.” If it were desired to show that there is no substantial difference between the doctrine of Erasmus Darwin and that of his grandson, it would be easy to make out a good case for this, in spite of Mr. Darwin’s calling his grandfather’s views “erroneous,” in the historical sketch prefixed to the later editions of the “Origin of Species.” Passing over the passage already quoted on p. 62 of this book, in which Mr. Darwin declares “habit omnipotent and its effects hereditary”—a sentence, by the way, than which none can be either more unfalteringly Lamarckian or less tainted with the vices of Mr. Darwin’s later style—passing this over as having been written some twenty years before the “Origin of Species”—the last paragraph of the “Origin of Species” itself is purely Lamarckian and Erasmus-Darwinian. It declares the laws in accordance with which organic forms assumed their present shape to be—“Growth with reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life and from use and disuse, &c.” [158a] Wherein does this differ from the confession of faith made by Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck? Where are the accidental fortuitous, spontaneous variations now? And if they are not found important enough to demand mention in this peroration and stretto, as it were, of the whole matter, in which special prominence should be given to the special feature of the work, where ought they to be made important?

Mr. Darwin immediately goes on: “A ratio of existence so high as to lead to a struggle for life, and as a consequence to natural selection, entailing divergence of character and the extinction of less improved forms;” so that natural selection turns up after all. Yes—in the letters that compose it, but not in the spirit; not in the special sense up to this time attached to it in the “Origin of Species.” The expression as used here is one with which Erasmus Darwin would have found little fault, for it means not as elsewhere in Mr. Darwin’s book and on his title-page the preservation of “favoured” or lucky varieties, but the preservation of varieties that have come to be varieties through the causes assigned in the preceding two or three lines of Mr. Darwin’s sentence; and these are mainly functional or Erasmus-Darwinian; for the indirect action of the conditions of life is mainly functional, and the direct action is admitted on all hands to be but small.

It now appears more plainly, as insisted upon on an earlier page, that there is not one natural selection and one survival of the fittest, but two, inasmuch as there are two classes of variations from which nature (supposing no exception taken to her personification) can select. The bottles have the same labels, and they are of the same colour, but the one holds brandy, and the other toast and water. Nature can, by a figure of speech, be said to select from variations that are mainly functional or from variations that are mainly accidental; in the first case she will eventually get an accumulation of variation, and widely different types will come into existence; in the second, the variations will not occur with sufficient steadiness for accumulation to be possible. In the body of Mr. Darwin’s book the variations are supposed to be mainly due to accident, and function, though not denied all efficacy, is declared to be the greatly subordinate factor; natural selection, therefore, has been hitherto throughout tantamount to luck; in the peroration the position is reversed in toto; the selection is now made from variations into which luck has entered so little that it may be neglected, the greatly preponderating factor being function; here, then, natural selection is tantamount to cunning. We are such slaves of words that, seeing the words “natural selection” employed—and forgetting that the results ensuing on natural selection will depend entirely on what it is that is selected from, so that the gist of the matter lies in this and not in the words “natural selection”—it escaped us that a change of front had been made, and a conclusion entirely alien to the tenor of the whole book smuggled into the last paragraph as the one which it had been written to support; the book preached luck, the peroration cunning.

And there can be no doubt Mr. Darwin intended that the change of front should escape us; for it cannot be believed that he did not perfectly well know what he had done. Mr. Darwin edited and re-edited with such minuteness of revision that it may be said no detail escaped him provided it was small enough; it is incredible that he should have allowed this paragraph to remain from first to last unchanged (except for the introduction of the words “by the Creator,” which are wanting in the first edition) if they did not convey the conception he most wished his readers to retain. Even if in his first edition he had failed to see that he was abandoning in his last paragraph all that it had been his ostensible object most especially to support in the body of his book, he must have become aware of it long before he revised the “Origin of Species” for the last time; still he never altered it, and never put us on our guard.

It was not Mr. Darwin’s manner to put his reader on his guard; we might as well expect Mr. Gladstone to put us on our guard about the Irish land bills. Caveat lector seems to have been his motto. Mr. Spencer, in the articles already referred to, is at pains to show that Mr. Darwin’s opinions in later life underwent a change in the direction of laying greater stress on functionally produced modifications, and points out that in the sixth edition of the “Origin of Species” Mr. Darwin says, “I think there can be no doubt that use in our domestic animals has strengthened and enlarged certain parts, and disuse diminished them;” whereas in his first edition he said, “I think there can be little doubt” of this. Mr. Spencer also quotes a passage from “The Descent of Man,” in which Mr. Darwin said that even in the first edition of the “Origin of Species” he had attributed great effect to function, as though in the later ones he had attributed still more; but if there was any considerable change of position, it should not have been left to be toilsomely collected by collation of editions, and comparison of passages far removed from one another in other books. If his mind had undergone the modification supposed by Mr. Spencer, Mr. Darwin should have said so in a prominent passage of some later edition of the “Origin of Species.” He should have said—“In my earlier editions I underrated, as now seems probable, the effects of use and disuse as purveyors of the slight successive modifications whose accumulation in the ordinary course of things results in specific difference, and I laid too much stress on the accumulation of merely accidental variations;” having said this, he should have summarised the reasons that had made him change his mind, and given a list of the most important cases in which he has seen fit to alter what he had originally written. If Mr. Darwin had dealt thus with us we should have readily condoned all the mistakes he would have been at all likely to have made, for we should have known him as one who was trying to help us, tidy us up, keep us straight, and enable us to use our judgments to the best advantage. The public will forgive many errors alike of taste and judgment, where it feels that a writer persistently desires this.

I can only remember a couple of sentences in the later editions of the “Origin of Species” in which Mr. Darwin directly admits a change of opinion as regards the main causes of organic modification. How shuffling the first of these is I have already shown in “Life and Habit,” p. 260, and in “Evolution, Old and New,” p. 359; I need not, therefore, say more here, especially as there has been no rejoinder to what I then said. Curiously enough the sentence does not bear out Mr. Spencer’s contention that Mr. Darwin in his later years leaned more decidedly towards functionally produced modifications, for it runs: [161a]—“In the earlier editions of this work I underrated, as now seems probable, the frequency and importance of modifications due,” not, as Mr. Spencer would have us believe, to use and disuse, but “to spontaneous variability,” by which can only be intended, “to variations in no way connected with use and disuse,” as not being assignable to any known cause of general application, and referable as far as we are concerned to accident only; so that he gives the natural survival of the luckiest, which is indeed his distinctive feature, if it deserve to be called a feature at all, greater prominence than ever. Nevertheless there is no change in his concluding paragraph, which still remains an embodiment of the views of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck.

The other passage is on p. 421 of the edition of 1876. It stands:—“I have now recapitulated the facts and considerations which have thoroughly” (why “thoroughly”?) “convinced me that species have been modified during a long course of descent. This has been effected chiefly through the natural selection of numerous, successive, slight, favourable variations; aided in an important manner by the inherited effects of the use and disuse of parts; and in an unimportant manner, that is, in relation to adaptive structures, whether past or present, by the direct action of external conditions, and by variations which seem to us in our ignorance to arise spontaneously. It appears that I formerly underrated the frequency and value of these latter forms of variation as leading to permanent modifications of structure independently of natural selection.”

Here, again, it is not use and disuse which Mr. Darwin declares himself to have undervalued, but spontaneous variations. The sentence just given is one of the most confusing I ever read even in the works of Mr Darwin. It is the essence of his theory that the “numerous successive, slight, favourable variations,” above referred to, should be fortuitous, accidental, spontaneous; it is evident, moreover, that they are intended in this passage to be accidental or spontaneous, although neither of these words is employed, inasmuch as use and disuse and the action of the conditions of existence, whether direct or indirect, are mentioned specially as separate causes which purvey only the minor part of the variations from among which nature selects. The words “that is, in relation to adaptive forms” should be omitted, as surplusage that draws the reader’s attention from the point at issue; the sentence really amounts to this—that modification has been effected chiefly through selection in the ordinary course of nature from among spontaneous variations, aided in an unimportant manner by variations which quâ us are spontaneous. Nevertheless, though these spontaneous variations are still so trifling in effect that they only aid spontaneous variations in an unimportant manner, in his earlier editions Mr. Darwin thought them still less important than he does now.

This comes of tinkering. We do not know whether we are on our heads or our heels. We catch ourselves repeating “important,” “unimportant,” “unimportant,” “important,” like the King when addressing the jury in “Alice in Wonderland;” and yet this is the book of which Mr. Grant Allen [163a] says that it is “one of the greatest, and most learned, the most lucid, the most logical, the most crushing, the most conclusive, that the world has ever seen. Step by step, and principle by principle, it proved every point in its progress triumphantly before it went on to the next. So vast an array of facts so thoroughly in hand had never before been mustered and marshalled in favour of any biological theory.” The book and the eulogy are well mated.

I see that in the paragraph following on the one just quoted, Mr. Allen says, that “to the world at large Darwinism and evolution became at once synonymous terms.” Certainly it was no fault of Mr. Darwin’s if they did not, but I will add more on this head presently; for the moment, returning to Mr. Darwin, it is hardly credible, but it is nevertheless true, that Mr Darwin begins the paragraph next following on the one on which I have just reflected so severely, with the words, “It can hardly be supposed that a false theory would explain in so satisfactory a manner as does the theory of natural selection, the several large classes of facts above specified.” If Mr. Darwin found the large classes of facts “satisfactorily” explained by the survival of the luckiest irrespectively of the cunning which enabled them to turn their luck to account, he must have been easily satisfied. Perhaps he was in the same frame of mind as when he said [164a] that “even an imperfect answer would be satisfactory,” but surely this is being thankful for small mercies.