Darwin also denied an inevitable upward march
Progress is a metaphor from merely walking along a road--very likely the wrong road.
The objection to treating change as guaranteed improvement should not be mistaken for a refutation of Darwin's mechanism. In a letter to Charles Lyell dated 11 October [1859], Darwin says natural selection ‘implies no necessary tendency to progression.’ He explains that a simple organism might remain unchanged if greater complexity brought it no advantage, while descendants adapted to other conditions could become more complex. He also allows the possibility of degradation. The inspected witness is the Darwin Correspondence Project's transcription of letter 2503, sourced to the American Philosophical Society manuscript.
The distinction sharpens Chesterton's target. A biological account of how organisms change is different from the claim that historical change carries its own moral approval. Darwin's argument already separates adaptation from an obligatory ascent; Chesterton asks the further question of what human beings ought deliberately to pursue. This is a comparison of arguments, with no evidence here that Chesterton knew the letter.
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