Darwin vs Wallace: can natural selection make a mind?

We agree entirely on the mechanism, Alfred - variation, struggle, and selection shape every finch and orchid, and you saw it as clearly as I did, half a world away in the Malay Archipelago.

Just so, Charles - I watched the same blind winnowing carve species from species, and I hold with you that no design guides the bird's beak or the beetle's wing.

But here we split: you say the savage's brain is too fine for his rude wants, that mathematics and morality outrun survival - I say the mind, like the eye, was built up gradually by the very selection we share.

Then answer this, Charles - selection gives a creature only what it needs to live, yet the untutored mind already holds powers it never uses for survival; such surplus points, I think, beyond mere struggle to some higher purpose working through us.