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Show 267 food supply when they considered the process of natural selection. Writing from his staunch Catastrophist viewpoint in 1877, Clarence King claimed that Darwin's theory was rooted in Uniformitarianism, and "biology as a whole, denies catastrophism in order to save evolution." King suspected that the law of selection would not be determined by the food supply in a rapidly changing environment, where "the companion law of adaptivity, or the accommodation to circumstances, is one which depends half upon the organism and half upon the environment; half upon the vital interior, and half upon the pressure which environment brings to bear upon it." This was the basis for "plasticity," as he called it, which determined the ability of an organism to adapt to a changed environment. Moments of great catastrophe, thus translated into the language of life, become moments of creation, when out of plastic organisms something newer and nobler is called into being. Despite King's insistence on catastrophe, this argument harmonizes with the one Muir had written in the Studies. Destruction is in fact creation, and the fittest in Nature's biosystems are those who can adapt. Similar to John Dewey's idea of flexibility. King's Plasticity suggested that the genius of creation lay in adapting the creature to the environment. This did not mean that animals evolved by intelligent need and impulse, as Lamarck had argued. Neither King nor Muir would argue that Position in the 1870's even if they sympathized with it. |
