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GOD the perfection of complex organs and instincts, to appeal to ‘means superior to, though analogous with, human reason’, he explicitly left room, in several places of the second edition of On the Origin of Species, for the activity of a creator In defending his theory from geological objections he pleads that the imperfections of the geological record ‘do not overthrow the theory of descent from a few created forms with subsequent modification’ (OS 376) ‘I should infer from analogy’, he tells us, ‘that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed by the Creator’ (OS 391) Indeed, Darwin claims it as a merit of his system that it is in accord with what we know of the divine mode of action: To 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, like those determining the birth and death of the individual When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled (OS 395) It was special creation, not creation, that Darwin objected to When neo-Darwinians claim that Darwin’s insights enable us to explain the entire cosmos, philosophical difficulties arise at three main points: the origin of language, the origin of life, and the origin of the universe In the case of the human species there is a particular difficulty in explaining by natural selection the origin of language, given that language is a system of conventions Explanation by natural selection of the origin of a feature in a population presupposes the occurrence of that feature in particular individuals of the population Natural selection might favour a certain length of leg, and the long-legged individuals in the population might outbreed the others But for this kind of explanation of features to be possible, it must be possible to conceive the occurrence of the feature in single individuals There is no problem in describing a single individual as having legs n metres long But there is a problem with the idea that there might be just a single human language-user It is not easy to explain how the human race may have begun to use language by claiming that the language-using individuals among the population were advantaged and so outbred the non-language-using 302
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