Free Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel C. Dennett Page A

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    1831 book, Naval Timber and Arboriculture. In the wake of Darwin's ascent If, during the long course of ages and under varying conditions of life, to fame, Matthew published a letter (in Gardeners' Chronicle?) proclaiming organic beings vary at all in the several parts of their organization, and I his priority, which Darwin graciously conceded, excusing his ignorance by think this cannot be disputed; if there be, owing to the high geometric noting the obscurity of Matthew's choice of venue. Responding to Darwin's powers of increase of each species, at some age, season, or year, a severe published apology, Matthew wrote:
    struggle for life, and this certainly cannot be disputed; then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other To me the conception of this law of Nature came intuitively as a self-and to their conditions of existence, causing an infinite diversity in struc-evident fact, almost without an effort of concentrated thought. Mr. Darwin ture, constitution, and habits, to be advantageous to them, I think it here seems to have more merit in the discovery than I have had—to me it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variation ever had occurred did not appear a discovery. He seems to have worked it out by inductive useful to each being's own welfare, in the same way as so many variations reason, slowly and with due caution to have made his way synthetically have occurred useful to man. But if variations useful to any organic from fact to fact onwards; while with me it was by a general glance at the being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterized will have the scheme of Nature that I estimated this select production of species as an a best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong priori recognizable fact—an axiom, requiring only to be pointed out to be principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offspring similarly admitted by unprejudiced minds of sufficient grasp. [Quoted in Gould characterized. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of 1985, pp. 345-46.]
    brevity, Natural Selection. [Origin, p. 127 (facs. ed. of 1st ed.).]
    Unprejudiced minds may well resist a new idea out of sound conservatism, The basic deductive argument is short and sweet, but Darwin himself however. Deductive arguments are notoriously treacherous; what seems to described Origin of Species as "one long argument." That is because it stand to reason" can be betrayed by an overlooked detail. Darwin appreciated that only a relentlessly detailed survey of the evidence for the historical processes he was postulating would—or should—persuade scientists to abandon their traditional convictions and take on his revolutionary vision, 6. The ideal of a deductive ( or "nomologico-deductive" ) science, modeled on Newtonian even if it was in fact "deducible from first principles."
    or Galilean physics, was quite standard until fairly recently in the philosophy of science, so it is not surprising that much effort has been devoted to devising and criticizing various axiomatizations of Darwin's theory—since it was presumed that in such a formalization lay scientific vindication. The idea, introduced in this section, that Darwin should be seen, rather, as postulating that evolution is an algorithmic process, permits us to do justice to the undeniable a priori flavor of Darwin's thinking without forcing it into the Procrustean (and obsolete) bed of the nomologico-deductive model. See Sober 1984a and Kitcher Gardeners' Chronicle, April 7, I860. See Hardin 1964 for more details.
    1985a.

    50 AN IDEA IS BORN
    Natural Selection as an Algorithmic Process 51

    From the outset, there were those who viewed Darwin's novel mixture of ing, using any symbol system you like. The power of the procedure is detailed naturalism and abstract reasoning about processes as a dubious and due to its logical structure, not the causal powers of the materials