Charles Darwin died this week in 1882. If he never enjoyed the full breadth of his theory’s triumph, he at least was spared its devolution. He conceived it as a systematic, incremental march to morphological complexity, driven by physical life experience through the mechanism of Lamarckian adaptation.

But two events in the 20th century vitiated his grand designer-less design. The development of magnification revealed the teaming complexity of microbiology, rendering the visual appearance of morphological similarity irrelevant. To a Darwinian originalist, the photoreceptor cell might, by the complexifying adaptations of experience, evolve into a pinhole-camera eye; to the a 20th-century microbiologist, this is as absurd as the creator-less evolution of a Harley into a Prius.

But Charles might find equal distress in neo-Darwinism, which displaced the logical (but untrue) adaptations of Lamarck with the random failures of Medelian genetics. Where the former had explained the modification of species as congruous with the changes wrought by physical forces on insensate matter, the Mendelian system enshrined the opposite: the systematic resistance of species to change outside a limited range of characteristics. Larmarck’s hyposthesis assisted Darwin’s vision; that of Mendel and Huxley retarded it.

In Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks found it easier to swallow Lenin’s New Economic Policy than neo-Darwinian orthodoxy.

— Richard Nadler is president of the Americas Majority Foundation, a public-policy think tank in Overland Park, Kan.