p.46 [Darwin's] grandfather Erasmus Darwin, had been one of evolution's leading exponents.
Evolution had been widely debated in theological as well as in scientific circles, but until [Charles] Darwin no one had demonstrated
that evolution shed any more light upon the mysteries of life's origins than the reigning theory of that era.
p.47 What any careful observer finds in nature is a vast array of animals all wonderfully adapted
to their environments... All this early scientific work proceeded under the banner of special creation... The problem
was that special creation had become a quick substitute for understanding.
p.56 Darwin depicts nature as a "power, acting during long ages and rigidly scrutinising the whole constitution,
structure, and habits of each creature,--favoring the good and rejecting the bad." ... when one summarizes all the things
which Darwin has natural selection doing toward the creation and improvement of life on this planet, one has an exact duplicate
of what Paley and theologians generally attribute to God.
p.57 In the pursuit of knowledge, analogies are the best we humans can come up with, for we only
have a human way of speaking and a human way of understanding inhuman, superhuman, or sub-human things, and there
is precious little that is human in this wide universe... As we look out upon the world and as we attempt to understand what
is happening in a dimension beyond the immediate reach of our five senses, we have got to depict what is happening
in human terms. Our analogies, our metaphors, and our anthropomorphic images are all that stand between ourselves
and the external world.
p.60 Gould quotes Francois Jacob to the effect that nature is "an excellent tinkerer, not a divine
artificer." ...The designs we see in nature resemble those of an amateur inventor, not an omnipotent
Creator; parts originally fitted for one function are adopted to another; new species are "jury-rigged from a limited
set of available components."
p.61 Gould still describes natural selection as the creator, sustainer, and superintendent of life;
as in Darwin, so in Gould, natural selection intervenes in nature to design and continually to redesign the diverse
forms of life. Ironically, Gould proves Paley right: wherever we find design, there must be a designer; wherever
one sees contrivance, one must conceive a contriver. For Gould and for many secular scientists natural selection functions
as a stand in for God.
