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maintaining its operation. The suggestion that, had there been
different conditions, other forms of life consonant with them
might have appeared is actually pointless: for “the existence of
any forms of life that we may conceive, the necessary environment,
whatever its nature, must be complex and dependent
upon a multiplicity of conditions, such as are not reasonably attributable
to blind forces or to pure mechanism.” (Footnote 69:
Ibid., p. 87.) In other words, any environment of life would depend
on a complex of conditions that is absolutely improbable
from the stand point of chance alone. It follows therefore that
any complex of conditions from which any form of life arises,
requires explanation in terms of guidance by intelligent will.
The same point can be cast in a different light with a similar
result, if we ask whether natural selection does explain specific
adaptations at all, and particularly the progress of the cosmic
process as a whole in the biological realm. In the first place, in
the case of any given adaptation, the mutations required to
achieve the complex structure are, in almost innumerable instances,
a burden and a handicap, rather than a means to more
adequate adjustment to environment. If pure natural selection
were operative, mutations of this type would die out because
not so fit to survive as their hardier, but less complex, relatives:
and yet on the theory of natural selection, it is just such mutations
which account for the progressive realization of more
[[322]] complex forms. But according to the theory itself, these
variants ought to die out as not fit to survive.
Burtt, though noncommittal on the point, gives this illustration:
he speaks of the complex of conditions involved in the development
of a bird’s wings, through which it is fitted to fly,
and then remarks:
[indent] Can this remarkably complex adaptation be accounted
for mechanically, by the principle of gradual natural
selection . . . ? No . . . because the first rudiments of a wing