“The hypothesis of Lamarck—that progressive changes in species have been produced by the attempts of the animals to increase the development of their own organs, and thus modify their structures and habits—has been repeatedly and easily refuted by all writers on the subject of varieties and species; . . . but the view here developed renders such an hypothesis quite unnecessary. . . . The powerful retractile talons of the falcon and cat tribes have not been produced or increased by the volition of those animals; . . . neither did the giraffe acquire its long neck by desiring to reach the foliage of the more lofty shrubs, and constantly stretching its neck for this purpose, but because any varieties which occurred among its antitypes with a longer neck than usual _at once secured a fresh range of pasture over the same ground as their shorter-necked companions_, _and on the first scarcity of food were thus enabled to outlive them_” (italics in original). { 96a}
“Which occurred” is obviously “which happened to occur, by some chance or accident entirely unconnected with use and disuse;” and though the word “accidental” is never used, there can be no doubt about Mr. Wallace’s desire to make the reader catch the fact that with him accident, and not, as with Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, sustained effort, is the main purveyor of the variations whose accumulation amounts ultimately to specific difference. It is a pity, however, that instead of contenting himself like a theologian with saying that his opponent had been refuted over and over again, he did not refer to any particular and tolerably successful attempt to refute the theory that modifications in organic structure are mainly functional. I am fairly well acquainted with the literature of evolution, and have never met with any such attempt. But let this pass; as with Mr. Darwin, so with Mr. Wallace, and so indeed with all who accept Mr. Charles Darwin’s natural selection as the main means of modification, the central idea is luck, while the central idea of the Erasmus-Darwinian system is cunning.
I have given the opinions of these contending parties in their extreme development; but they both admit abatements which bring them somewhat nearer to one another. Design, as even its most strenuous upholders will admit, is a difficult word to deal with; it is, like all our ideas, substantial enough until we try to grasp it—and then, like all our ideas, it mockingly eludes us; it is like life or death—a rope of many strands; there is design within design, and design within undesign; there is undesign within design (as when a man shuffles cards designing that there shall be no design in their arrangement), and undesign within undesign; when we speak of cunning or design in connection with organism we do not mean cunning, all cunning, and nothing but cunning, so that there shall be no place for luck; we do not mean that conscious attention and forethought shall have been bestowed upon the minutest details of action, and nothing been left to work itself out departmentally according to precedent, or as it otherwise best may according to the chapter of accidents.