How has Darwin’s theory of natural selection transformed our view of humanity’s place in the universe?
For as long as our ancestors have been making tools, it has no doubt seemed obvious that an excellent artifact can be created only by something even more excellent: a clever artificer. You never see a shoe creating a cobbler; you never see a house making a carpenter. Darwin overthrew that received wisdom. One of Darwin’s earliest critics, Robert Beverley MacKenzie, could not contain his outrage: ” In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system, that, in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it.. This proposition will be found…to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin’s meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill.” This is indeed a “strange inversion of reasoning,” but once the topsy-turvy perspective
