human competence is null and void in the case of creation itself . . .
Nature is full of adaptations; but these are valueless to us as traces of
design, unless we know something of the rival adaptations among which an
intelligent being might have chosen. To assert that in Nature no such rival
adaptations existed, and that in every case the useful function in question
could be established by no other instrument but one, is simply to reason in
a circle, since it is solely from what we find existing that our notions of
possibility and impossibility are drawn. . . . We cannot imagine ourselves
in the position of the Creator before his work began, nor examine the
materials among which he had to choose, nor count the laws which limited
his operations. Here all is dark, and the inference we draw from the
seeming perfections of the existing instruments or means is a measure of
nothing but our ignorance."


But the question is not about the perfection of these adaptations, or
whether others might have been instituted in their place. It is simply
whether observed adaptations of intricate sorts, admirably subserving uses,
do or do not legitimately suggest to one designing mind that they are the
product of some other. If so, no amount of ignorance, or even
inconceivability, of the conditions and mode of production could affect the
validity of the inference, nor could it be affected by any misunderstanding
on our part as to what the particular use or function was; a statement
which would have been deemed superfluous, except for the following:


"There is not an organ in our bodies but what has passed, and is still
passing, through a series of different and often contradictory
interpretations. Our lungs, for instance, were anciently conceived to be a
kind of cooling apparatus, a refrigerator; at the close of the last century