Because the locks change faster than the keys : Darwin's loss is Dawson's gain

Charles Darwin had to seriously bent and twist the scientific evidence that lay before him to satisfy his twin personal concerns before he could publish his famous theory.

He wanted to both claim that Evolution indeed happened (boo-woo! said his fellow well-to-do Victorians) but that fortunately it happened extremely slowly (hooray!)

So in this 'survival of the fittest keys that perfectly match their locks', if the keys changed ever so slowly, so must the locks that they were to be matched to.

But did the keys actually need to change at all?

Could it not be argued, on the evidence, that there was only about a hundred thousand or so locks (biological niches) and it was they that changed - and fairly rapidly ?

And that meanwhile , among the millions of pre-existing unchanging  keys , there would always be at least one that would fit every new lock ?

(Hmmm. What a weird idea - except that is sort of how we currently think the human immune system works.)

Darwin was always far more anxious to claim that living beings changed very slowly than to seriously propose that biological niches changed equally slowly.

His argument that it took centuries to see a even a minor change in a living being was not something a layperson could commonsensibly refute in their mere seventy years on earth.

But most had seen biological niches (for forest birds, for example) vanish in a blink of a major storm.

If locks do indeed change faster than keys do (and I am not arguing that this is so , or even mostly so) it should have suggested something to Darwin's scientific children.

That now the world's long obvious biological variety, diversity, redundancy and those 500,000 species of beetles that 'God seems so inordinately fond of' made some sense.

So, for example, Martin Henry Dawson's inordinate interest in capsule-less R bacteria that seemed so useless to study in the eyes of his fellow scientists can now be justified.

Yes , they were indeed non-virulent, non-virile, uselessly S-capsule less, just so much 'life unworthy of life'  when viewed from the biological niche of the human bloodstream.

But these R-types might be just the key to unlock the mystery of how some bacteria manage to survive for long periods clinging to the cells of the human nasal passages - where a bulky capsule would only get in the way.

But instead, in the Era of Modernity, the intellectual energy was all directed towards thinking that every species had an ideal norm with all other variety within that species merely being handicapped or deviants or degenerates 'not wanted on the voyage'.

Eugenics hastened to the lethal gas and the surgical knife to obtain a majority of beings with that 'norm' rather than to seriously answer the challenge of why did  Evolution (or God) permit 500,000 species of beetles to endure ...