On the perfection of bee architecture from Sydney Smirke and Charles Darwin, The Beavers and the Bees:
[In On the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin] argued that the refinement of the bee’s works resulted from natural selection — that is, through the accumulation of numerous successive, slight modifications of simpler instincts. One could witness this progress by comparing the nests of several types of bees: some, like the aptly named humble bee, made cruder, less mathematically rigorous cells, while others subject to greater selection pressures, like the hive bee, created combs that were superlative in economizing wax. The result was a flawless structure: “Beyond this state of perfection in architecture, natural selection could not lead.” It was, we might note, a curiously definitive statement from someone who is generally assumed to have divested nature of teleology.
