Quote of the Week
(December 1, 2025)

Here is the well-known description by Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s pre-eminent apologist during the latter part of the nineteenth century:

“Examine the recently laid egg of some common animal, such as a salamander or newt. It is a minute spheroid in which the best microscope will reveal nothing but a structureless sac, enclosing a glairy fluid, holding granules in suspension. But strange possibilities lie dormant in that semi-fluid globule. Let a moderate supply of warmth reach its watery cradle, and the plastic matter undergoes changes so rapid, yet so steady and purpose-like in their succession, that one can only compare them to those operated by a skilled modeller upon a formless lump of clay. As with an invisible trowel, the mass is divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller portions, until it is reduced to an aggregation of granules not too large to build withal the finest fabrics of the nascent organism. And, then, it is as if a delicate finger traced out the line to be occupied by the spinal column, and moulded the contour of the body; pinching up the head at one end, the tail at the other, and fashioning flank and limb into due salamandrine proportions, in so artistic a way, that, after watching the process hour by hour, one is almost involuntarily possessed by the notion, that some more subtle aid to vision than an achromatic, would show the hidden artist, with his plan before him, striving with skillful manipulation to perfect his work” (Huxley 1860).

Do we really need some still more subtle instrument that will reveal a hidden artist working from outside — which, of course, Huxley didn’t believe in — or do we need rather to credit the capacity of our own, educated eyes to see, as Huxley did, the inherent artistry that informs the processes right there in front of us? The embryo plainly and objectively manifests a power of unified expression, of metamorphosing organic form — something a child can recognize. Why should we not accept this power exactly as and where we observe it — as a living power — just as we accept the very different power of gravity in exactly the terms of its manifestations, despite our not understanding it?

(from Chapter 11, “Why We Cannot Explain the Form of Organisms”, in Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)

— See all quotes to date