Quote of the Week
(October 6, 2025)

Questions of form have seemed oddly resistant to the biologist’s quest for explanation. Darwin himself seemed to sense the difficulty in that famous instance where he recoiled from contemplating the subtle perfections in the form of the eye: “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree”.

Of course, as Darwin quickly added, his theory convinced him that he was merely suffering from a lack of imagination. All that was really needed were the creative powers of natural selection acting through eons upon an endless supply of small, helpful changes. But his underlying malaise was not so easily vanquished: “It is curious,” he wrote to the American botanist Asa Gray in the year following publication of the Origin, “that I remember well [the] time when the thought of the eye made me cold all over, but I have got over this stage of the complaint, and now small trifling particulars of structure often make me very uncomfortable. The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!”

We can assume that Darwin got over that stage of the complaint as well.

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

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