"Natural Selection never made it come to pass, as a habit of nature, that an unsupported stone should move downwards rather than upwards. It applies to no part of inorganic nature, and is very limited even in the phenomena of organic life"
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Wright is doing something sly: he’s deflating Darwinian swagger by reminding readers that “natural selection” is not a master key for the universe, but a specialized tool for a narrow class of problems. The image of an “unsupported stone” moving downward is a deliberately blunt bit of physics. Gravity doesn’t need a historical story; it doesn’t “learn” its regularities through trial, error, and survival. By picking the most obvious lawlike phenomenon imaginable, Wright corners anyone tempted to treat selection as a general explanation of why anything is reliably the way it is.
The intent is methodological policing. In the post-Darwin intellectual climate, selection started to migrate: from explaining adaptations to explaining mind, morality, social order, even cosmic order. Wright’s sentence draws a bright line between laws (inorganic regularities) and histories (organic contingencies). Selection, for him, is a filter that shapes living forms given preexisting constraints; it cannot conjure the constraints themselves. That’s the subtext: if you use Darwin to explain gravity, you’re not being bold, you’re being category-confused.
He also quietly narrows Darwinism even within biology: “very limited even in the phenomena of organic life.” Not everything in organisms is an adaptation; some traits are byproducts, developmental constraints, drift, or sheer happenstance. Wright is arguing for intellectual modesty at the exact moment when evolutionary thinking was becoming a cultural ideology. His rhetorical power comes from a simple inversion: the world’s most dependable downward motion becomes the proof that selection is not a synonym for explanation.
The intent is methodological policing. In the post-Darwin intellectual climate, selection started to migrate: from explaining adaptations to explaining mind, morality, social order, even cosmic order. Wright’s sentence draws a bright line between laws (inorganic regularities) and histories (organic contingencies). Selection, for him, is a filter that shapes living forms given preexisting constraints; it cannot conjure the constraints themselves. That’s the subtext: if you use Darwin to explain gravity, you’re not being bold, you’re being category-confused.
He also quietly narrows Darwinism even within biology: “very limited even in the phenomena of organic life.” Not everything in organisms is an adaptation; some traits are byproducts, developmental constraints, drift, or sheer happenstance. Wright is arguing for intellectual modesty at the exact moment when evolutionary thinking was becoming a cultural ideology. His rhetorical power comes from a simple inversion: the world’s most dependable downward motion becomes the proof that selection is not a synonym for explanation.
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| Topic | Science |
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