Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution and the Meaning of Life

34 TELL ME WHY
Hume, who deftly exposed the insoluble problems with this vision, and had
glimpses of the Darwinian alternative, could not see how to take it seriously.
CHAPTER 2: Darwin, setting out to answer a relatively modest question about
die origin of species, described a process he called natural selection, a
mindless, purposeless, mechanical process. This turns out to be the seed of
an answer to a much grander question: how does Design come into
existence?
CHAPTER TWO
An Idea Is Born
1. WHAT IS SO SPECIAL ABOUT SPECIES?
Charles Darwin did not set out to concoct an antidote to John Locke's
conceptual paralysis, or to pin down the grand cosmological alternative that
had barely eluded Hume. Once his great idea occurred to him, he saw that it
would indeed have these truly revolutionary consequences, but at the outset
he was not trying to explain the meaning of life, or even its origin. His aim
was slightly more modest: he wanted to explain the origin of species.
In his day, naturalists had amassed mountains of tantalizing facts about
living things and had succeeded in systematizing these facts along several
dimensions. Two great sources of wonder emerged from this work (Mayr
1982). First, there were all the discoveries about the adaptations of organisms
that had enthralled Hume's Cleanthes: "All these various machines, and
even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy
which ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them"
(Pt. II). Second, there was the prolific diversity of living things—literally
millions of different kinds of plants and animals. Why were there so many?
This diversity of design of organisms was as striking, in some regards, as
their excellence of design, and even more striking were the patterns discernible
within that diversity. Thousands of gradations and variations between
organisms could be observed, but there were also huge gaps between
them. There were birds and mammals that swam like fish, but none with
gills; there were dogs of many sizes and shapes, but no dogcats or dogcows
or feathered dogs. The patterns called out for classification, and by Darwin's
time the work of the great taxonomists (who began by adopting and correcting
Aristotle's ancient classifications) had created a detailed hierarchy of
two kingdoms (plants and animals), divided into phyla, which divided into
classes, which divided into orders, which divided into families, which
divided into genera (the plural of "genus"), which divided into species.