Download DARWINIAN STRUGGLES: BUT IS THERE PROGRESS?

Hist. Sci., xlvii (2009)
DARWINIAN STRUGGLES: BUT IS THERE PROGRESS?
Michael Ruse
Florida State University
At the heart of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is the struggle for existence.1
Organisms are in ongoing conflict as they strive for food, space, and reproductive
opportunities. It is from this struggle that we are led to natural selection, the success
of some and the failure of others, and (given time) full-blooded evolutionary change.
Whether or not this change means very much — whether in particular it leads to
some form of progress, whatever that might mean — was debated before Darwin,
by Darwin, and still in many quarters is debated today.2 As also is the question of
whether it is appropriate to apply Darwin’s biological theory to the affairs of humans,
in particular to the growth of knowledge.3 What we can say, however, is that those
who work on Darwin and on the place in history of his ideas and influence — those
who work in what is generally known as “Darwin Studies” — have long been fighting
vigorously for the success of their ideas. It is these struggles that are the focus of this
essay. Whether there has been any progress is, as the saying goes, an exercise best
left to the reader. I will start the discussion by going back a full fifty years, to 1959,
the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 100th anniversary of the publication
of the Origin of species. I think one can say without much controversy that this was
the point at which Darwin Studies — especially understood as something demanding
serious, professional-level scholarship and not just as an antiquarian, hagiographyproducing hobby of retired scientists — really got going.
EARLY DAYS
In part, obviously, Darwin Studies got kick-started because of the birthday celebrations, including an absolutely massive gathering in Chicago.4 People’s attention was
focused on Darwin and they were led to work on him and his science and his influence. This was related to the fact that, finally, evolutionary theory itself as a science
was now functioning as a full-blown paradigm. As is well known, because Darwin
did not have an adequate theory of heredity, it was not until the 1930s that his great
contribution of natural selection could be underpinned by a working genetics and
the way was opened — by such people as Theodosius Dobzhansky in America and
Edmund Brisco Ford in Britain — for serous empirical and theoretical investigation
into the causes of organic change.5 By 1959 this science was really working and
naturally therefore there was interest in its own origins, particularly in the contribution of Darwin.6 In part, the professionalization of Darwin inquiries occurred because
of the general professionalization of the history of science. Now, the topic was to be
pursued with the rigour and tools of any area of historical inquiry. Darwin and his
work got caught up in this.7
0073-2753/09/4704-0407/$10.00 © 2009 Science History Publications Ltd
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Of course, none of this could really have occurred had there not been fuel for the
fire, and in this respect Darwin Studies was exceptionally fortunate. It turned out
that there was a huge mass of pertinent material, over and above the very extensive,
published works. There were notebooks kept at crucial times of discovery, there were
manuscripts of early drafts of key works, there were letters literally by the dozen,
by the hundred even. And this was just Darwin. If one started to extend out to linked
figures such as Alfred Russel Wallace and Thomas Henry Huxley, the source material
seemed to explode upwards exponentially. The opportunity was there for serious and
sustained examination and evaluation of the work of Charles Darwin, both narrowly
looking at what he did and more broadly looking at the extended context. It helped a
great deal that the material by and large was collected and stored in places where the
scholar could go and study freely — notably the University Library in Cambridge.
It was not held in private hands with restricted admission. Much praise should go to
Darwin’s granddaughter Nora Barlow who arranged for the purchase and transfer
of crucial material to the Cambridge archives.
Naturally, the products of the new Darwin Studies tended to divide. On the one
hand, there was the publication of hitherto-unknown or unavailable source material.
Nora Barlow herself contributed in this domain, publishing an unexpurgated edition
of her grandfather’s autobiography.8 Now, we got much more information on his
religious development, for instance — information removed from the official Life
and letters because Darwin’s female relatives were worried about his reputation.9
We also got candid assessments of Darwin’s contemporaries — Herbert Spencer was
judged much as we would judge him today; that is, negatively. Even more important
was an edition, prepared by the leading embryologist Gavin de Beer, of those crucial
notebooks kept during the years when Darwin first became an evolutionist and then
worked to his mechanism of natural selection.10 These were dynamite, as scholars
realized at once. De Beer also published an edition of the two early essays by Darwin
(generally known as the Sketch of 1842 and the Essay of 1844). These had been published by Darwin’s son Francis some fifty years earlier, but it was good to have them
once again readily available.11 A little less exciting but something that still proves
its great worth was a variorum edition of the Origin of species, enabling scholars to
trace the changes made by Darwin from the first edition of 1859 to the final edition
of 1872 (with more revisions in 1876).12 Also very useful was a facsimile of the first
edition of the Origin, published in the anniversary year with an introduction by the
leading evolutionist Ernst Mayr.13 It was around this time that scholars were starting
to realize that it is the first edition rather than the final edition which is the one to be
consulted first, looking at Darwin’s ideas before he started modifying and qualifying,
often in the face of criticisms that today we no longer think that well taken.
On the other hand, one now started to get works of interpretation and synthesis.
There was a spritely biography by De Beer.14 A heavier piece of scholarship was
Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution by the American historian Gertrude Himmelfarb.15 In respects this was a curious book, because she did not seem much to like her
subject. Probably this was a reflection of the fact that at the time Himmelfarb, now
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one of the neo-cons of the American scene, was leftwing and Darwin was seen by
her as a lackey of running-dog capitalism (which I shall suggest below he probably
was). However, the facts were there and the interpretations were really solid, even if
one disagreed with them. Another professionally trained scholar, John Greene, gave
us a careful history of evolutionary thinking, valuable for going back earlier than the
nineteenth century and trying to put the whole picture in perspective.16 And mention
should also be made of an incredibly sophisticated study by a Scandinavian scholar
(in English studies), Darwin and the general reader, by Alvar Ellegård.17 This was
a brilliant analysis of the reception of Darwin’s ideas in the years immediately after
the publication of the Origin. Drawing mainly on journal reviews and discussions,
there was a detailed and careful examination of the various ways in which Darwin’s
contemporaries received his ideas.
Once underway, Darwin Studies gathered speed and never slowed down. Young
and old flocked to the manuscript room in Cambridge and the results flowed forth.
Noteworthy were the studies by Walter (later Fay) Cannon, who had an almost
intuitive grasp of the subtleties of mid-nineteenth century thinking;18 the careful
analyses of the notebooks by the American scholar Sandra Herbert and the FrenchCanadian scholar Camille Limoges;19 the informative work on Darwin’s thinking on
heredity by Peter Vorzimmer;20 the powerful discussion of Darwin’s methodology
by the biologist Michael Ghiselin;21 and in a similar vein, preceded by some appalling and never-to-be-disclosed juvenilia, my own first serious attempt at history of
science, work much helped and influenced by Sydney Smith of St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, a man of keen intellect masked by his playing of the archetypical
old buffer.22 Worth highlighting — for my money simply among the very best of
all Darwin Studies — were the Marxist analyses of Robert Young, collected a few
years later in the volume Darwin’s metaphor: Does nature select?23 Paradoxically,
although he was a Cambridge University faculty member, Young never used the
unpublished work, claiming with some (but not complete) justification that until we
had studied the published works there was little point in looking at the unpublished
material. Around the central work were the ancillary studies. These included William
Coleman on Georges Cuvier;24 Richard Burkhardt on Jean Baptiste de Lamarck;25
Leonard G. Wilson on Charles Lyell, including an edition of notebooks on evolution
(very valuable because much of the Lyell material was still in the hands of the family
and not available to other scholars);26 and Martin Rudwick, formerly a specialist on
brachiopods, on the history of palaeontology, as well as a massive study of Darwin’s
big mistake about the parallel roads of Glen Roy.27
Twenty years after the 1959 Darwin celebrations I published my The Darwinian
Revolution: Science red in tooth and claw.28 I had started to get interested in the history of evolutionary theory about ten years earlier and this was the book that I wish I
had had back then! It was a survey of the period, drawing on the work that had been
done, trying to show how the story unfurled. Some liked the book, some did not. But I
think it is fair to say that this is the first point at which such a synthesis was possible,
and somewhat immodestly I might point out that the book is still in print and that it
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sells a steady number of copies each year. One could probably quibble with claims
on every page, but generally speaking the picture holds up — a picture that sees the
Darwinian Revolution as partly something caused by the ideas and society of the
time and partly causing the ideas and society of the time. The book was originally
conceived as a riposte against Thomas Kuhn’s celebrated theory of theory (or paradigm) change, in his Structure of scientific revolutions.29 Just before sending off the
manuscript to the publisher, I dropped the last forty pages of philosophical analysis.
I am not sure if I am pleased or sad that no one has ever said the book would be
improved by a final forty pages of philosophical analysis.
LATER DAYS
What has happened in the thirty years subsequent? The published source material
continues to grow and grow. Robert Stauffer published an edition of the large book
on which Darwin had been working when he was interrupted by the letter and essay
from Alfred Russel Wallace.30 A group of scholars went back to the notebooks and
published a really superb edition, with full annotation.31 It is a model of careful
scholarship. Other things have also been brought into the daylight, but dwarfing
everything has been the ongoing massive edition of the letters, both those to Darwin
and those from him.32 So far, the project has taken twenty-five years and we still have
fifteen years of Darwin’s life to go. My sense is that we are only starting to scratch
at the contents of these volumes and that a hundred years from now people will still
be mining them and coming up with new information.
At the interpretative level, sometimes we have had people come along and simply
correct past mistakes and assumptions. Noteworthy here was Frank Sulloway’s
showing that we were all mistaken in thinking that it was the finches that were so
influential on Darwin’s thinking about the origins of the denizens of the Galapagos.33
It was the mocking birds, rather. Sometimes, unfortunately, we have had people come
along and insert new mistakes and assumptions into the record. Prominent here is
the claim, taken by many today to be nigh gospel (to use a metaphor), that Darwin’s
loss of Christian faith was chiefly caused by the death of his daughter Annie in 1851.
Apparently the brain child of the historian James Moore,34 careful study of the relevant
documents — most particularly the Autobiography as well as the notebooks, various
letters, the published works and recollections of others — shows that this really is one
of those urban myths, rather like that circulating in England early in the years of the
Great War, that Russian soldiers were assisting in the fight, because they had been
seen on unmarked trains with snow still on their boots! The biologist Mark Pallen
demolishes the claim step by careful step. Darwin’s faith started to go in the 1830s,
even on the Beagle voyage, it was pushed along (as was the case for many other
Victorian intellectuals) by theological doubts about such topics as eternal punishment
for non-believers, and finally ended in old age with a kind of agnosticism, perhaps
with flashes of some kind of deistic belief (which had been the prominent position for
most of his adult life). Annie’s death was irrelevant. (For details, see Pallen’s blog,
The rough guide to evolution, especially the entry for 8 July 2009.35)
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Sometimes — to continue the survey of new work — we have had people come
along and show that there are whole areas of Darwin’s life and work about which
we were ignorant. Sandra Herbert’s detailed study of Darwin’s geology throws
light not just on its immediate subject but also demonstrates just how professional
a scientist Darwin was from a very early stage.36 By the time he went on the Beagle
voyage at the age of 22 in 1831, it is clear that Charles Darwin was already a man
with the knowledge to study the natural world with clarity and purpose. Sometimes
we have had works of synthesis bringing together information otherwise scattered.
Janet Browne’s magnificent two-volume biography of Darwin fits here.37 Also worth
mentioning are some collections, including the Cambridge companion to Darwin
edited by Jonathan Hodge and Greg Ruddick and the somewhat more specialized
Cambridge companion to the “Origin of Species”, edited by me and Robert J. Richards.38 Both volumes try to look at some of the broader social and cultural aspects
of the Darwin story as well as the pure science.
Sometimes we have had work that fills out the overall evolutionary story, helping us to put Darwin in context. Choosing just some personal favourites, I am very
impressed by the classicist David Sedley’s account of the Ancient Greek discussions
of origins and of why evolution was an idea that took root only many years later.39
He shows the significance of teleology in the story and that oft-made claims about
the barrier put up by Plato’s theory of forms has little substance.40 Coming rapidly
down towards the present, Robert J. Richards’s coverage of the Romantic Movement
in Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century shows the importance and high
level of inquiry by a group often derided for their ideas and enthusiasms.41 I shall be
talking of Richards more critically in a moment, but the worth of this study should
not be denied or ignored. The same can be said of his huge work on the evolution of
mind and behaviour in the Darwinian scheme of things.42 Just before Darwin there is
James Secord’s study of the reception of Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the natural
history of creation.43 It is incredibly detailed and at one level a model of scholarship.
Somewhat irritating however is the fact that the author does not really tell us about
the book itself and focuses just on what people said about the book: Hamlet without
the prince. Peter Bowler, of whom again more later, pours forth books. He has studied
the history of evolutionary thought in much detail and uncovered huge amounts of
material hitherto unknown.44 A true student of Robert Young, he shows that the printed
word is too often ignored, leading to a truncated view of what really occurred.
If we think of Darwin Studies as covering not just the period of Darwin’s life but
also of the years often much later when his ideas were played out — and I think we
should think of Darwin Studies in this way — then for a long time a major black hole
was the century or so after Darwin died. In major respects, this was the reason why
I brought my Darwinian Revolution to an abrupt end in 1882, the year of Darwin’s
death. However, more and more, this period is now being uncovered and discussed.
Major credit must go to William Provine.45 Starting with an overview of the development of population genetics in the early years of the last century, he then moved on
to a full-scale biography of the seminal theorist, American Sewall Wright. However,
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the biography was much more than just this, covering a huge amount that happened
in American evolutionary biology in the years especially before the middle of the
century, most particularly Wright’s fruitful but sometimes tense relationship with
Dobzhansky. Provine has also been an editor with the Ernst Mayr of the proceedings
of a conference that Mayr ran, gathering the recollections of influential evolutionists in the twentieth century.46 Supplementing Provine’s studies have been those of
others, including his student Betty Smocovitis, and the student of the social aspects
of evolution-as-a-discipline building, Joseph Cain.47 More recently I have collaborated with a young scholar to produce an edited volume on the history of modern
palaeobiology.48
If one were to ask what has been the major movement or ideology in the history
of science in the past thirty or forty years, the answer has to be the importance of
social constructivism. Around 1970 (the time when I was entering the field) the feeling was that it would be Anglo-Saxon (that is, analytic) philosophy and history that
would combine to throw light on science. Generally speaking, this was not to be. Very
quickly the historians got seduced by the sociologists, including those in France who
come out of philosophy departments. Very quickly, the historians began to doubt the
possibility (or desirability) of writing articles or books that showed science wrestling the objective truth from nature, progressing always to a complete disinterested
understanding of the real world. Rather, the move was to showing that science is in
respects as much a construction, a function if you like, as is literature or religion or
whatever. The idea of pure objectivity is a myth put out by scientists in order to gain
and keep power within the society in which they find themselves. Expectedly, it was
not long before this move made its way to Darwin Studies (broadly conceived) with
significant results, some perhaps of more worth than others. Adrian Desmond has been
at the front of the movement, and it must be granted that in his hands the philosophy
has paid major dividends. Perhaps his most significant book is one that looks at the
evolution wars in Britain in the 1830s — wars, to be candid, about which most of us
were totally ignorant — and about how the battles were played out against different
political philosophies as much as because of any hard facts.49 Desmond makes us
aware of the importance of a man, the anatomist Robert Grant, hitherto known only
because he spoke of evolution to the young Darwin in Edinburgh in the 1820s, and
of how he moulded and steered the discussion because of his desired ends. Praise
must also be given to the biography, albeit somewhat breathless, that Desmond wrote
of Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley.50 If there had been any earlier doubt,
Desmond entirely destroys the idea that Huxley was simply trying to put Darwin’s
intentions and program into action. The two men had very different aims, the one
a rich, somewhat isolated scientist pursuing his theories and investigations, and the
other a working teacher and university administrator, who had little interest in many
of the details that excited Darwin but who had major plans for the reformation of
Victorian Britain.
Less successful are the two biographies of Darwin co-authored with James Moore.
Let me say at once, since I do not want to leave a one-sided distorted view, that I
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consider Moore to be one of the real gems of Darwin Studies. His work, reflecting
his ebullient personality, enriches the field immeasurably. If you disagree, you are
forced to rethink long-hidden assumptions, and invariably come away enriched. His
early book, The post-Darwinian controversies: A study of the Protestant struggle to
come to terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900, is rightfully
considered a major contribution to scholarship.51 At a personal level, in 1981 I was
a witness for the American Civil Liberties Union in Arkansas, appearing in a trial
that (eventually successfully) opposed the teaching of Creationism in state-supported
schools. Appearing a couple of years earlier, Moore’s book showed definitively
that there is far from a simple relationship between Christian belief and acceptance
of evolution, and that in fact more conservative believers in respects find ideas of
development more congenial than do liberal thinkers. I made much use of this in
my testimony.52
However, even truly creative thinkers — perhaps because they are truly creative
thinkers — can go over the top. Most people would feel satisfied with one radically
new interpretation of the man and his work. Desmond and Moore have given us two!
First in Darwin: The tormented evolutionist, they give us a Robert Young-type account
of the life, where Darwin has come up with heretical materialist ideas that he knows
threaten the very existence of the comfortable upper-middle class life that he enjoys,
and wracked with guilt he cowers at home in the countryside while (in the 1840s at
least) Britain burns, thanks to revolutionary ideas like those of the Chartists.53 No
wonder the poor man felt so sick all of the time. Then second, in the more recent
Darwin’s sacred cause: How a hatred of slavery shaped Darwin’s views on human
evolution, they give us a kind of Christianized Darwin who is, like the rest of his
family, obsessed with the evils of slavery and who therefore puts forth his theories,
not on hard evidence, but because an evolutionary tree of life guarantees that we
are all one under the skin, as it were.54 “Am I not a man and a brother?”, as declared
the cameo prepared by Darwin’s Wedgwood relatives (he and his wife Emma were
grandchildren of the founder of the pottery, Josiah Wedgwood).
Desmond and Moore are incapable of writing a dull word. Reading Darwin the
tormented evolutionist is a bit like eating hot, boiled, salted peanuts. Once you start,
you cannot put the book down until it is all gone. Unfortunately, being lively and provocative are not sufficient to guarantee truth. As far as the first book is concerned, apart
from the fact that no one knows for certain that Darwin’s ailments were psychological
rather than physiological, the evidence that he was cowering while Britain burned
is at least as problematic as the Annie hypothesis. It is obviously true that Britain in
the first half of the nineteenth century was often wracked by social unrest.55 But do
not exaggerate. It was the British who won Trafalgar and Waterloo, not Napoleon.
It was British who, in the 1830s and ’40s, were leading the world in railway construction. It was Britain that avoided the revolutions of 1848s, a year when the rest
of Europe flamed up. The powers that be were very skilled at giving a little to avoid
the loss of much — the Reform Act of 1832 and then in the middle of the 1840s, led
by the conservatives no less, the repeal of the Corn Laws, something fuelled not by
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bloody revolt, but by solid middle-class citizens who saw the high price of wheat as
a hindrance to smooth economic growth. It is true that Ireland was troubled, but even
in that dreadful decade it was not rebelling. It was starving to death.
Moreover, even among the working classes there was much basic pride in the
state of the nation. Thanks to cheap train fares, it was these people who flooded the
Crystal Palace in 1851 to wonder at and celebrate that glorification of the nation, the
Great Exhibition. It is true that Darwin was pushing the envelope of religion, but he
was hardly a lonely figure without support. There was lots of sympathy for materialist ideas in the Darwin set, beginning with Charles’s father Robert and his brother
Erasmus. Nor should you think that outside the set there was nothing but a wall of
Victorian religious fervour. The religious census of 1851 showed that only half the
nation worshipped on Sundays — and these figures kept dropping.56 In any case,
as hinted above, to speak of Darwin at any point of his life as a materialist without
qualification is highly misleading. Right through the writing of the Origin Darwin
saw a world where God was working His purpose out.57 He was no proto-Richard
Dawkins. He was a very conventional upper-middle class Englishman, whose life
revolved around family and work, a genuine friend of the local vicar, and one whose
personal fortune just grew and grew — thanks in no small measure to his own wise
investments.
As far as their second book is concerned, Desmond and Moore do sterling service
in showing how committed to the anti-slavery movement people in Darwin’s extended
family truly were. But it simply isn’t true to say that this was the causal factor behind
Darwin’s becoming an evolutionist or his applying his thinking to our own species.
Apart from anything else, Darwin thought that slavery was a natural biological phenomenon. In an 1858 letter to Joseph Hooker, he wrote: “I had such a piece of luck
at Moor Park: I found the rare Slave-making Ant, & saw the little black niggers in
their Master’s nests.” And then, a couple of months later: “I have had some fun here
in watching a slave-making ant, for I could not help rather doubting the wonderful
stories, but I have now seen a defeated marauding party, & I have seen a migration
from one nest to another of the slave-makers, carrying their slaves (who are house
& not field niggers) in their mouths!”58 These are hardly the words of someone who
is trying to produce work that is predicated on the belief that all slavery is abnormal. It is true that Darwin here was writing about ants and not humans, but that is
the very point. Most of Darwin’s biological writings were not about humans — the
hymenoptera (ants, bees, and wasps) get a much bigger role in the Origin than does
Homo sapiens. Slave-making in ants gets a whole section to itself, and it is referred
to as “so wonderful an instinct” produced by natural selection.59 Of course, Darwin
is not endorsing human slavery, but this is not the work of a man who is using his
science to refute such slavery.
When Darwin came to treat of humans in depth, in the Descent of man, the big
change from non-human writings was the very much greater discussion of sexual
selection.60 This switch of emphasis had nothing to do with slavery, being rather a
response to Alfred Russel Wallace’s endorsement of spiritualism. Agreeing with
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Wallace that such human characteristics as hairlessness and great intelligence were
not produced by natural selection, but disagreeing that the only solution was the
invocation of supernatural forces, Darwin turned to sexual selection as the explanation. The mentions of human slavery (and there are several) all rather suggest that
slave-making is the natural inclination of primitive man (“savages” in Darwin’s
language), that this extends almost universally to the treatment of women (and so
speaking of primitive “man” means just that), and that it is only through civilization
that this vile tendency is checked and conquered — the implication obviously being
that it is British civilization that leads the world in this respect. Finally, in any case,
there were lots of people who were monogenesists (believing in a shared origin) and
who endorsed slavery. One simply trotted out the story of Noah and his sons about
how one was cursed (actually it was the son’s son who was cursed) for looking at
the old man, drunken and naked.61 One hardly has to be a constructivist or a cynic to
hypothesize that this second book was written to order for the Darwin bicentenary.
For all of my criticisms of these books and others, I am the first to insist that these
are exciting times for Darwin scholars. A little frustrating too. I have long given
up trying to collect, let alone read, every book with Darwin in the title. Despairing
therefore of giving a simple survey, and frankly not sure that it would be of great
value, let me therefore turn rather, somewhat egocentrically, to three controversies
in which I am engaged. This will give you a flavour of the ferment and discussion
and excitement of the field. I should say that I do not regard these controversies as a
weakness of the area. Whether or not science is a construction — as it happens, where
it really matters I don’t think it is — history certainly is a matter of interpretation
and opinion.62 Some history is better than other history, but all history comes from a
perspective and argues a point — otherwise it is just chronology and antiquarianism.
I see the controversies indeed as a sign of maturity, that we have now reached a point
where different interpretations are possible and different scholars reach opposing
conclusions. Darwin Studies are well beyond digging out the facts — although new
facts are undoubtedly there to be dug — and on to understanding and interpretation.
This is as it should be.
WAS THERE A DARWINIAN REVOLUTION?
The first controversy is over the very existence of a Darwinian Revolution, surely
the raison d’être for Darwin Studies. The British scholar Jonathan Hodge leads
the charge.63 He claims that the very notion of a scientific revolution is an artifact,
something made popular by Kuhn’s attractive little book.64 It is something that victors like to make up to colour their achievements in the brightest hues, but that truly
it has little reflection in reality. Things happen and then more things happen, but not
revolutions. In any case, the term is too sloppy to apply indifferently to such different things as the Scientific (Copernicus to Newton) Revolution and the Darwinian
Revolution, let alone to the American and French Revolutions. It also carries the rank
odour of progress, implying that what comes after is better than what came before.
And worst of all, it focuses attention on a few points in science and downplays and
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ignores the rest. Punning on the short name for the new science of evolutionary
development, “evo devo”, Hodge declares himself a charter member of the anti-“evo
revo” movement!
This is not a silly argument, but (recognizing now that I am more presenting my
own position descriptively as the alternative to Hodge, rather than arguing prescriptively that my position is the one you must accept) it is surely not as powerful as
Hodge suggests.65 It is obviously the case that we can characterize revolutions — they
are dramatic changes of one kind or another. Even though they are not all identical,
this is true. The American Revolution was against an external power, whereas the
French Revolution was entirely between parts of the same state — although one
might say in the American case that the external power was not truly external until
after the Revolution! — but they are linked by the very significant changes that they
shared — the overthrow of the older authority and a new regime. One can broaden
out to non-political revolutions, not all of which are bloody. Anyone over forty can
certainly attest that we have had a technological/informational revolution in the past
thirty years. Laptop computers, mobile phones, Google, Facebook, Wikipedia — the
world really has changed. I don’t see any reason why one shouldn’t extend this term
to the history of science. There really was a change when the Earth was moved from
the centre of the universe and when Aristotelian physics was overthrown. There
really was a change from a static world picture, infused with miracles of one kind
or another, to one of slow developmental change thanks to natural causes. Ask the
Creationists if you doubt that one!
Not all change is that big and significant. I would say, in the U.S., giving black
people the vote was significant. Lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 was not that
earth-changing. Likewise in science. A new technique may be very useful, but not
that revolutionary. The coming of evolution was, by any measure. I suspect that part
of the worry that historians of science have is that speaking of revolutions implicitly
implies progress and this pushes you to the sin of Whiggism, seeing the world as a
steady process of improvement to the present. (It would be odd were it not a worry,
since it seems to be a worry that historians of science have about everything else.)
However, one can point out that being a revolution as such is not something progressive — I doubt the Russian Revolution was much of an improvement in the long run.
My high-school history teacher (in England in the 1950s) had grave doubts about
the American Revolution. Although one must say that other than for extreme constructivists, it is hard to see why one would claim that there is no progress (however
defined) in science.66 It seems just silly to deny that Mendelian genes are superior
to Darwin’s gemmules or that DNA is a step beyond Mendel. In the case of the
Darwinian Revolution, evolution through natural selection is simply true in a way
that a Genesis-inspired six days of Creation is not.67 (I am fully aware that not all
pre-Darwinian students of organisms were Biblical literalists — more sophisticated
positions may have been more sophisticated. They were still wrong.)
Of course, Hodge is right if his worry is that focusing on revolutions leads to a
distorted view of science, where much interesting science is going to be ignored. There
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is no doubt that people (starting with myself) do turn to Darwin because this seems
to be the big one. But even the biggest fanatics can only spend so much time on one
topic. (I exclude here the Alfred Russel Wallace groupies whose obsession seems
to have no limit or end.) In the case of Darwin, even back around 1959 people had
been looking at other figures — the Englishmen Robert Chambers (pre-Origin) and
St George Mivart (post-Origin) for example,68 the Americans Asa Gray (pro-Darwin)
and Louis Agassiz (anti-Darwin) likewise.69 Now, as I have already mentioned, we
go right back to the Greeks and forward into the middle of the twentieth century and
beyond. Darwin was important for many, many reasons, a lot of them right out of
science as such. But he is not the only topic of conversation.
A more interesting question is about the kind of revolution represented by the
Darwinian Revolution, the missing discussion from my book! (I don’t regret dropping it. The book is much better doing what it does and no more.) There are two
main theories of theory change. On the one hand, we have the gradual picture, where
change is rational (fuelled by evidence and reason) and where the gains of the past
are incorporated into the new theory. This process is often known as theory reduction, not to be confused with other forms of reduction. On the other hand, we have
a picture of sharp break or breaks, where one moves almost literally from one world
to another. Although evidence and reason may enter in, there is also a large dose
of irrational (at least, arational) commitment, rather like the conversion experience
many have in religion. This is often known as a revolutionary picture, understanding that now revolution refers to the type of change rather than the magnitude or
significance. (In other words, in another sense, the sense we were using above, a
theory reductionist can still speak of revolutions.) Generally speaking, one thinks of
the reductionist picture as championed by the logical empiricists like Ernest Nagel
and Carl Hempel (Karl Popper also, probably) and the revolutionary picture above
all by Thomas Kuhn.70
Somewhat paradoxically, it seems to me that the Darwinian Revolution incorporates both kinds of change. Take the matter of homology, the isomorphisms between
organisms, something noted by Aristotle and a topic to be note again later. They were
a major element in much pre-Darwinian evolutionary thinking, for example that of
the Naturphilosophen in Germany and Etienne Geoffroy Saint Hilaire in France.71
Darwin recognized them but felt that they could be incorporated into his theory, being
explained by natural selection.
It is generally acknowledged that all organic beings have been formed on two
great laws — Unity of Type, and the Conditions of Existence. By unity of type is
meant that fundamental agreement in structure, which we see in organic beings
of the same class, and which is quite independent of their habits of life. On my
theory, unity of type is explained by unity of descent. The expression of conditions
of existence, so often insisted on by the illustrious Cuvier, is fully embraced by
the principle of natural selection. For natural selection acts by either now adapting the varying parts of each being to its organic and inorganic conditions of
life; or by having adapted them during long-past periods of time: the adaptations
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being aided in some cases by use and disuse, being slightly affected by the direct
action of the external conditions of life, and being in all cases subjected to the
several laws of growth. Hence, in fact, the law of the Conditions of Existence
is the higher law; as it includes, through the inheritance of former adaptations,
that of Unity of Type.72
This seems to be a clear cut case of theory reduction.
On the other hand, the differences between the anatomist Richard Owen and
Thomas Henry Huxley seem to be more than just this.73 In fact, they both recognized
homology and probably they both thought it more basic than did Darwin. Yet Owen
wanted to interpret it within an idealistic picture, with Christian undertones (overtones
a bit, too), whereas Huxley wanted a purely materialistic world picture. For Owen,
the vertebrate phylum is based on a Platonic archetype, and all real organisms are a
physical realization of this. For Huxley, it was individual empirical facts all of the
way, and when Owen took his thinking one step further, seeing isomorphisms between
parts of the same animal and hence promoting the so-called “vertebrate theory of
the skull”, where the skull is made of modified pieces of backbone, Huxley wrote
scornfully that this is “an attempt to introduce the phraseology and mode of thought
of an obsolete and scholastic realism into biology”.74 Here the differences between
the two men seem to be more than just reason and evidence, although they did lead to
differences about evidence, for instance in the notorious Huxley–Owen dispute over
the ape hippocampus (with Huxley arguing that it does exist and Owen denying it and
thus claiming the unique anatomical status of humans). Any resolution, certainly any
move from one position to the other, is beyond simple reason and evidence and requires
a leap of faith in some sense. This is more one of revolution than reduction.
ROMANTIC OR MECHANIST?
Move on now to a debate between myself and Robert J. Richards. I have written
already of Richards’s superb work on the German Romantic movement, especially
those Naturphilosophen mentioned just above. This is part of a bigger project tracing
the fate of that kind of biology, one that has led him recently to write and publish
a major biography of the post-Origin, German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel.75 Put
briefly, this kind of biology promotes a world picture that is holistic, seeing connections between parts and seeing the whole as more than these parts taken individually
— that sees things like homology reflecting the inner connectedness of things, and
that is deeply progressive, seeing all in a teleology rise upwards to perfection, more
concretely to humankind. Not all Romantics are religious, although some are, but
they all see a kind of world spirit infusing the empirical domain, unifying and lifting
upwards. The sentiments expressed in Wordsworth’s poem Tintern Abbey (1798)
are typical.
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
DARWINIAN STRUGGLES
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Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
I don’t think anyone wants to deny that Richards is right in this general characterization of Romantic biology — I don’t — or that he has done major work in showing how
historically important and influential this world picture truly was. The key question
is whether Charles Darwin fits into this picture. Richards, arguing positively to the
question,76 stakes his case first on the external evidence, most particularly the great
influence (acknowledged by Darwin in his Autobiography) of the German explorer and
naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, a man who clearly identified with the Romantic
Movement. Richards finds this influence not only in Darwin’s own life — notably the
Beagle voyage and the response to nature, especially in South America — but also
in the kinds of problems Darwin tackled and in the language that he uses in virtually
all of his writings. The famous closing passage of the Origin is typical.
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of
many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about,
and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each
other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.
These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect
and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a
Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence
to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of
less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the
most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production
of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life,
with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into
one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law
of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most
wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.77
Richards stakes his case second in the kind of thinking that characterizes Darwin’s
science, especially the anthropomorphic nature of natural selection — something
governed by a kind of world spirit, literal (early writings) or metaphorical (later
writings) — that shapes organisms and drives them upwards in a progressive process to ever-greater heights, ending in humankind. A major mark of this Romantic
progressionism is Darwin’s enthusiasm for what became known (in the hands of Ernst
Haeckel) as the “biogenetic law”, the development of the individual is a cameo for the
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development of the group. (“Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”78) One has a kind
of momentum in embryological development that leads inevitably (teleologically) to
the adult, finished organism. Likewise through history, one has a momentum of the
evolutionary process leading inevitably (teleologically) to the climax of development,
Homo sapiens. Darwin’s thinking moreover is deeply holistic, uniting organisms
rather than dividing them. In today’s terminology, Richards sees Darwin as a “group
selectionist”, where the chief process of change is one working on integrating societies rather than dividing them into individual units.
Prima facie convincing though this vision make be, ultimately it is unconvincing.
I see Darwin as a child of the Industrial Revolution, literally the grandchild of one of
the greatest capitalists (Josiah Wedgwood), with the associated metaphor of machines
running through his work, infused with British natural theology, materialistic, nonteleological. I am at one with that perceptive reader of the Origin, Karl Marx. As
soon as he had read the Origin, he wrote in a letter to his friend and co-writer Friedrich Engels: “It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his
English society with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets,
‘inventions,’ and the Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’.”79 (I remind the reader of
the caution made above. I am presenting my counter interpretation, but asking that
the alternatives be judged disinterestedly.)
Von Humboldt was certainly an influence on Darwin but so were many others, who
likewise responded to nature if not in a Romantic fashion. British natural theology
delighted in the living world — the 1830s saw the publication of the Bridgewater
treatises, covering not just areas like astronomy but also anatomy and geology and
palaeontology and much more.80 Darwin’s mentors, especially Cambridge professors like the botanist John Henslow and the geologist Adam Sedgwick, loved the
organic world and responded accordingly. I would say that this is the real way to
view natural selection, as a mechanism creating God’s artifacts such as the hand and
the eye — literally at first and then more metaphorically later.81 (As noted, there is
evidence that right through the writing of the Origin, Darwin believed in a designer
God, this belief going only in the final years.)
The flowery language, which I think often reflected Darwin’s attempt to write for
his sponsors and their set (his father and his uncle and his extended family) is right
out of the British natural theological tradition. I quote now the earliest version of
what was to become the final passage in the Origin. This was from a short piece,
known now as the Sketch, written in 1842. I highlight words that occur in a passage
written four years earlier in 1838 by the Scottish physicist and natural theologian
David Brewster. Darwin read this passage when it was published. I challenge the
reader to deny that there was a direct influence here.
First Darwin:
There is a simple grandeur in the view of life with its powers of growth, assimilation and reproduction, being originally breathed into matter under one or a few
forms, and that whilst this our planet has gone circling on according to fixed
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laws, and land and water, in a cycle of change, have gone on replacing each
other, and from so simple an origin, through the process of gradual selection of
infinitesimal changes, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have
been evolved.82
Then Brewster:
In considering our own globe as having its origin in a gaseous zone, thrown off
by the rapidity of the solar rotation, and as consolidated by cooling from the
chaos of its elements, we confirm rather than oppose the Mosaic cosmogony,
whether allegorically or literally interpreted....
In the grandeur and universality of these views, we forget the insignificant
beings which occupy and disturb the planetary domains. Life in all its forms,
in all its restlessness, and in all its pageantry, disappears in the magnitude and
remoteness of the perspective. The excited mind sees only the gorgeous fabric
of the universe, recognises only its Divine architect, and ponders but on its cycle
and desolation.83
It is true that Darwin was a progressionist. I and others (notably the late Dov
Ospovat) have long agreed on this.84 However Darwin’s progressionism is not the
progressionism of the Romantics. He realized that natural selection was somewhat of
a relativistic process and that what succeeds in one situation is not necessarily what
succeeds in another situation. He was set against the teleological progressionism of
the Romantics, warning himself not to think in terms of “higher” and “lower”. (He
wrote this on the flyleaf of his copy of Vestiges.) Rather, thinking of progress in terms
of some sort of move to complexity, especially to the heterogeneity brought on by the
division of labour, apart from an almost contingent drive to complexity given by the
very process of change — an idea of which Stephen Jay Gould was to make much
in his writings85 — Darwin saw organisms often engaged in what today’s biologists
call “arms races”. Lines compete against each other and adaptations get ever better
— the prey gets faster and in response the predator gets faster. Ultimately, as Richard Dawkins has argued, we get a kind of progress as more and more sophisticated
adaptations get produced, ending ultimately in big brains.86
If we take as the standard of high organisation, the amount of differentiation
and specialisation of the several organs in each being when adult (and this will
include the advancement of the brain for intellectual purposes), natural selection
clearly leads towards this standard: for all physiologists admit that the specialisation of organs, inasmuch as in this state they perform their functions better, is
an advantage to each being; and hence the accumulation of variations tending
towards specialisation is within the scope of natural selection.87
It is true that in Darwin’s writings we do find something like the biogenetic law,
but I would argue that Darwin’s conception is less Romantic and more a modification
of Karl Ernst von Baer’s rather different take on embryology. It is not that organisms go in a driven fashion through various stages, as their groups did in the past,
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but that we get common ancestors and branching, with more and more being added
on — a different more and more in different branches. In the early forms, the adults
are much more like the young. Hence, what we see in individual development at
the early stage today is the young form of the ancestor; but since the young form
of the ancestor is like the adult form of the ancestor, we thereby see today the adult
form of the ancestor in the early stages. (This is a key claim of the biogenetic law:
supposedly what we see in development today are the adult forms of the ancestors.
For Darwin, as for von Baer, even though this may be true, it is a side effect of the
ancestral forms not changing much in their individual development.)
Finally, there is the question of the level of selection. I claim that Darwin always
thought that selection favours the individual rather than the group.88 The struggle is
introduced in this way:
A struggle for existence inevitably follows from the high rate at which all organic
beings tend to increase. Every being, which during its natural lifetime produces
several eggs or seeds, must suffer destruction during some period of its life, and
during some season or occasional year, otherwise, on the principle of geometrical
increase, its numbers would quickly become so inordinately great that no country
could support the product. Hence, as more individuals are produced than can
possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one
individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct
species, or with the physical conditions of life. It is the doctrine of Malthus applied
with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms; for in this
case there can be no artificial increase of food, and no prudential restraint from
marriage. Although some species may be now increasing, more or less rapidly,
in numbers, all cannot do so, for the world would not hold them.89
The emphasis is clearly on individual against all else, other individuals or the
world at large. Moreover, the secondary mechanism of sexual selection, always
between members of the same species, reinforces this perspective. It is true that
Darwin did wrestle with group situations, especially the social insects. How could
a female worker have achieved a sterile situation? Today we explain something like
this in terms of kin selection — the worker is promoting the transmission of copies
of her own genes by raising fertile relatives. Darwin obviously, knowing nothing of
the true principles of heredity, could not work things out at this level. However, he
did have a proto version, drawing on the analogy of the practice of breeders in raising non-reproductive animals and going back to the parent stock when they proved
especially valuable. Darwin was as close to individual selection as his incomplete
thinking about heredity would let him be.
It should be added that the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, was always an enthusiastic group selectionist and that in the 1860s he and Darwin
argued about these things. Darwin did not slide into an unreflective view of the level
of selection. It is true that when he came to consider human morality, in the course
of writing the Descent of man, Darwin felt challenged by the way that sometimes
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people do prima facie sacrifice their all for the good of the group.90 But even here,
we find him invoking another mechanism much favoured today, reciprocal altruism
— you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Moreover, he saw morality developing
in human tribes (as he called them), and there is good evidence to think that he took
tribes to be closely interrelated groups. Pro-kin selection was operative here too.
IMPORTANT SCIENCE OR AN ABSOLUTE DISASTER?
Finally, let me mention briefly another dispute about Darwin, or rather more broadly
about the Darwinian Revolution. Although his work has not been confined to this,
no one has done more than Peter Bowler to open up windows into the ways in which
evolutionary ideas developed and changed in the decades after the Origin was published. Following his teacher Robert Young in relying mainly on the printed word,
Bowler has looked at evolution in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the
early decades of the twentieth century across fields and across countries. Heredity, palaeontology, biogeography, human evolution — England, France, Germany,
America. All is grist for his mill. One thing that Bowler has shown in very great detail
is how careful we should be about making claims for the influence of Darwin and
the ideas of the Origin. Indeed, Bowler has gone so far as to label one book, “The
non-Darwinian revolution”.91 There were many different mechanisms proposed for
evolutionary change — Lamarckism (the inheritance of acquired characteristics),
saltationism (evolution by jumps), orthogenesis (evolution as a kind of teleological
momentum), and more. Moreover, huge amounts of effort were given less to worrying
about mechanisms — always Darwin’s great concern — and more to working out
the actual history of life here on earth. In part, this was fuelled by the ever-increasing
fossil discoveries, especially those in the American (and Canadian) West. In part, it
was fuelled by work in anatomy and embryology, especially work that was based on
some variant of Haeckel’s biogenetic law. Yet, although this all seems to be against
the grain in some sense, Bowler argues that this work was tremendously significant.
Modern evolutionary biology would not exist, certainly would not take the form that
it does, without all of this work. In what may be fairly called his masterwork, Life’s
splendid drama, Bowler asks about the significance of Darwin’s own work.
Did it constitute a revolution, or merely a transformation of existing disciplines?
My argument is that the attempts to reconstruct life’s ancestry fall into the latter
category — but that in minimizing the ‘revolutionary’ impact of Darwinism, we
should not lose sight of the cumulative transformation of biologists’ attitudes
brought about by decades of effort. In the end, I hope to show that the emergence
of twentieth-century Darwinism was encouraged by profound modifications that
had taken place in evolutionists’ views on the history of life in the period from
the 1870s to the 1930s.92
In other words, the post-Origin work may not have been very Darwinian in any obvious sense, but viewed from today with respect to the advancement of evolutionary
thinking it was very important.
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My picture of the history of evolutionary thinking disagrees with this assessment
absolutely and completely. I think Bowler is just plain wrong, perhaps influenced in
part by the fact that, having spent so much time on the era, he is loathe to concede
that he has been spending time on second-rate theories by second-rate thinkers. In
Monad to man: The concept of progress in evolutionary biology, I present a history
of evolutionary thought (from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the end of
the twentieth century) in three parts. Up to the publication of the Origin, I see evolutionary thinking as a pseudo-science, existing solely as an epiphenomenon of hopes
of cultural progress.93 Then from the Origin to the early 1930s, and the coming of
Mendelian population genetics, I see evolution as having the status of a popular science, something still infused by progress but certainly accepted as fact (evolution that
is, not necessarily the mechanisms or paths). Then after the 1930s, I see evolutionary
thinking as moving towards maturity and being what I call a professional science.
(That this three-stage history seems suspiciously Comtean has not escaped the eagle
eye of one not-entirely-friendly critic, Michael Ghiselin. I have to agree, although I
never thought in these terms when working out and writing my history.)
In my story, Charles Darwin’s contribution is two-fold. First, and immediately
through the Origin, he persuaded people that the fact of evolution is true. Before him,
this was not the case. After him, it was — for virtually everyone within a decade,
with the obvious exception of the American creationists who had their own reasons
for opposition (not the least being that, at the time, literalism was taken to justify
slavery). Second, in the 1930s, his mechanism of natural selection was taken up and
became recognized as the chief causal factor in evolutionary change, a position that
is today the fundamental principle of evolutionary studies. (This is a pretty standard
account and not very original with me. My originality, if such there be, is to embed
these facts in the overall history.)
Starting backwards, it was because of natural selection, based now on a firm
grounding of an adequate theory of heredity (first Mendelian and then molecular)
that evolutionary thinking was able to achieve professional status. What then of the
second phase of evolutionary thinking, from the Origin to the 1930s, what I call
popular science. I recognize that there were some professional scientists, the people
Bowler writes about, but essentially I see evolutionary thinking as a subject for the
popular domain, especially the museums and their displays, and that the science as
such (meaning the causal speculations and the path tracing and so forth) as being
totally second rate, if that. At a time when physics was working towards quantum
theory and relativity theory, evolutionary biology was speculating all over the place,
with phony methodology and over-active imaginations. It was possible to do good
evolutionary science — a very few (like Henry Walter Bates just after the Origin
and Raphael Weldon at the end of the century) showed that one could do good selection studies94 — and increasingly good young biologists turned from evolution to
do work which did prove profitable (Thomas Hunt Morgan, the pioneer who in the
1910s with his students worked out the classical theory of the gene, being a prime
example).95 And no one should discount the wonderful discoveries. I still spend happy
DARWINIAN STRUGGLES
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hours in museums marvelling at stegosaurus and triceratops and Tyrannosaurus rex.
But judged overall, until the coming of genetics and people getting on with causal
studies, evolutionary biology was very second-rate science.
Moreover, I am just not convinced that the work that was done had any great input
at all. Obviously one does not want to say that there was nothing at all of value. But
even in the areas of supposed strength, major questions went unsolved. No one really
knew if the birds were descended from the dinosaurs or not. No one really knew if
humans got upright and then grew big brains, or if it went the other way. And the
early history of life was unknown. As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in Wonderful
life, even where there were major discoveries, in this case the soft-bodied organisms
of the Burgess Shale uncovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, it took
many decades before the correct interpretations could be given.96 One is glad that
Bowler has done his work. Going back to the earlier discussion about revolutions,
the history of science really must look at the low points as well as the heights. But
let no one overestimate what was not there.
SCIENCE AND RELIGION
I bring my survey to an end. I have been focusing more on Darwin Studies (broadly
conceived) within the field. I have not looked at issues and discussions coming
from without. I think here particularly of the science and religion interaction and
controversy, more specifically of the evolution and Creation (including the modern
manifestation of so-called Intelligent Design Theory) clash. The pickings here are
rich indeed, starting with Ronald Numbers’s definitive work on the Creationist
movement, moving on to the major Pulitzer-prize-winning account of the Scopes
Trial by his student Edward Larson, the very important discussion of the reception
of evolution by American Christians by Jon Roberts (and already-mentioned parallel
work in Britain by James Moore and of a somewhat later period by the indefatigable
Peter Bowler), several important treatments of the issues by David Livingstone, and
what I consider an absolutely brilliant analysis of the IDT movement by Barbara
Forrest and Paul Gross.97
I have myself contributed to the literature. My publications include a pair of more
historically oriented books, one looking at teleology and natural theology with respect
to evolutionary thinking and another trying to see creation and evolution as twin
millenarian movements, the former pre-millennial and the latter post-millennial.98
There are also two more philosophical works, one on the direct relationship between
Darwinism and Christianity and the other more broadly discussing the limits of science, through a historical survey of the importance of scientific metaphor.99 Then
in addition there are two collections, on evolution and creation, both with special
reference to Intelligent Design Theory.100 My co-editor for the former was Robert
Pennock, the arch-critic of IDT. My co-editor for the latter was William Dembski,
the arch-proponent of IDT! Apart from the intellectual and moral dexterity demanded
for juggling these opposing forces, attributes that not everyone felt that I possessed,
another thing that makes contributing to the field a little bit like skating on thin ice
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that is crackling is that there are the expected criticisms, not only from the religious
anti-evolutionists, but also from evolutionary fanatics (especially Richard Dawkins101)
who think that any attempt to acknowledge the integrity of any religious belief is a
pathetic pandering to the opposition.
One thing that all of this does show, if any argument were needed, is that Darwin
Studies are not just esoteric, ivory tower enterprises, of interest only to the initiated
and with little lasting worth. Darwinism has never been a neutral commodity, scientifically or culturally. It is not that today. For this reason, those of us working in the
field have great responsibilities, to do the best we can and to pass on our findings
to others.
REFERENCES
1. Charles Darwin, On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of
favoured races in the struggle for existence (London, 1859), Chapter III.
2. Michael Ruse, Monad to man: The concept of progress in evolutionary biology (Cambridge, MA,
1996).
3. Michael Ruse, Philosophy after Darwin: Classic and contemporary readings (Princeton, NJ, 2009)
includes many of the seminal discussions arguing this issue.
4. Sol Tax (ed.), Evolution after Darwin: The evolution of life (Chicago, 1960); idem, Evolution after
Darwin: The evolution of man (Chicago, 1960); Sol Tax and Charles Callender (eds), Evolution
after Darwin: Issues in evolution (Chicago, 1960).
5. Theodosius Dobzhansky, Genetics and the origin of species (New York, 1937); Edmund B. Ford,
Ecological genetics (London, 1964). The second of these books is a summation of nearly forty
years work.
6. Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, “The 1959 Darwin centennial celebration in America”, Osiris, xiv (1999),
274–323, is a superb overview of the Chicago gathering and of the underlying intentions.
7. As implied above, this professionalization demanded the shooing away of aged scientists.
Unfortunately, looking for other places to occupy their days, many moved over to my own home
discipline of philosophy. As in: “Poor old Jones is no longer up to cutting-edge research. He’s
entered the philosopause.”
8. Charles Darwin, The autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882. With the original omissions
restored. Edited and with appendix and notes by his grand-daughter Nora Barlow (London,
1958).
9. Francis Darwin (ed.), The life and letters of Charles Darwin, including an autobiographical chapter
(3 vols, London, 1887).
10. Gavin de Beer (ed.), “Darwin’s notebooks on transmutation of species”, Bulletin of the British
Museum (Natural History): Historical series, ii/2 (1960), 25–73; idem, “Darwin’s notebooks on
transmutation of species. Part II”, Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History): Historical
series, ii/3 (1960), 77–117; idem, “Darwin’s notebooks on transmutation of species. Part III”,
Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History): Historical series, ii/4 (1960), 121–50; idem,
“Darwin’s notebooks on transmutation of species. Part IV”, Bulletin of the British Museum
(Natural History): Historical series, ii/5 (1960), 154–83; Gavin de Beer and M. J. Rowlands
(eds), “Darwin’s notebooks on transmutation of species: Addenda and corrigenda”, Bulletin of the
British Museum (Natural History): Historical series, ii/6 (1961), 187–200; Gavin de Beer, M. J.
Rowlands and B. M. Skramovsky (eds), “Darwin’s notebooks on transmutation of species. Part
VI”, Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History): Historical series, iii/5 (1967), 131–76.
DARWINIAN STRUGGLES
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11. Charles Darwin, The foundations of the origin of species: Two essays written in 1842 and 1844, ed.
by Francis Darwin (Cambridge, 1909); Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, Evolution
by natural selection, ed. with a foreword by Gavin de Beer (Cambridge, 1958).
12. Charles Darwin, The origin of species by Charles Darwin: A variorum text, ed. by Morse Peckham
(Philadelphia, PA, 1959).
13. Charles Darwin, Facsimile edition of ‘On the Origin of Species’, ed. with an introduction by Ernst
Mayr (Cambridge, MA, 1959).
14. Gavin de Beer, Charles Darwin: Evolution by natural selection (London, 1961).
15. Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian revolution (New York, 1959).
16. John Greene, The death of Adam: Evolution and its impact on Western thought (Ames, IO, 1959).
17. Alvar Ellegård, Darwin and the general reader (Goteborg, 1958).
18. Susan Faye Cannon, Science in culture: The early Victorian period (New York, 1978).
19. Sandra Herbert, “Darwin, Malthus, and selection”, Journal of the history of biology, iv (1971),
209–17; Camille Limoges, La sélection naturelle (Paris, 1970).
20. Peter Vorzimmer, Charles Darwin: The years of controversy (Philadelphia, PA, 1970).
21. Michael Ghiselin, The triumph of the Darwinian method (Berkeley, 1969).
22. Michael Ruse, “Darwin’s debt to philosophy: An examination of the influence of the philosophical
ideas of John F. W. Herschel and William Whewell on the development of Charles Darwin’s
theory of evolution”, Studies in history and philosophy of science, vi (1975), 159–81.
23. Robert Young, Darwin’s metaphor: Nature’s place in Victorian culture (Cambridge, 1985).
24. William Coleman, Georges Cuvier zoologist: A study in the history of evolution theory (Cambridge,
1964).
25. Richard Burkhardt, The spirit of system: Lamarck and evolutionary biology (Cambridge, MA,
1977).
26. Leonard G. Wilson (ed.), Sir Charles Lyell’s scientific journals on the species question (New Haven,
1970); idem, Charles Lyell, the years to 1841: The revolution in geology (New Haven, 1972).
27. Martin Rudwick, “The strategy of Lyell’s Principles of Geology”, Isis, lxi (1969), 5–33; idem, The
meaning of fossils (New York, 1972); idem, “Darwin and Glen Roy: A ‘great failure’ in scientific
method?”, Studies in the history and philosophy of science, v (1974), 97–185.
28. Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Revolution: Science red in tooth and claw (Chicago, 1979; 2nd edn
with new afterword, 1999). A nice story about the subtitle: David Hull, my long-time friend and
fellow historian and philosopher of evolutionary biology, was one of the referees for the Press
and, as I discovered, it was he who suggested the subtitle to jazz things up a little. A year or two
later, we were both in conversation with Ernst Mayr, who turned to me and said: “I really liked
your book, Mike, but what a silly subtitle.” At which point, David — the whited sepulchre that
he is — nodded and murmured: “Yes Mike, you did yourself no favors there.” For the record:
I love the subtitle.
29. Thomas Kuhn, Structure of scientific revolutions (Chicago, 1962).
30. Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection; being the second part of his big species book
written from 1856 to 1858, ed. by Robert C. Stauffer (Cambridge, 1975).
31. Paul H. Barrett, Peter J. Gautrey, Sandra Herbert, David Kohn and Sydney Smith (eds), Charles
Darwin’s notebooks, 1836–1844 (Ithaca, NY, 1987).
32. Charles Darwin, The correspondence of Charles Darwin (Cambridge, 1985– ).
33. Frank Sulloway, “Darwin and his finches: The evolution of a legend”, Journal of the history of
biology, xv (1982), 1–53.
34. See for instance, James Moore, “Of love and death: Why Darwin ‘gave up Christianity’”, in
James Moore (ed.), History, humanity and evolution: Essays for John C. Greene (Cambridge,
428 ·
MICHAEL RUSE
1989),195–229.
35. http://roughguidetoevolution.blogspot.com/
36. Sandra Herbert, Charles Darwin, geologist (Ithaca, NY, 2005).
37. Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging. Volume I of a biography (New York, 1995); idem, Charles
Darwin: The power of place. Volume II of a biography (New York, 2002).
38. M. Jonathan S. Hodge and Gregory Radick (eds), The Cambridge companion to Darwin, 2nd edn
(Cambridge, 2009); Michael Ruse and Robert J. Richards (eds), The Cambridge companion to
the “Origin of Species” (Cambridge, 2009).
39. David Sedley, Creationism and its critics in Antiquity (Berkeley, 2008).
40. See for instance Ernst Mayr, The growth of biological thought: Diversity, evolution and inheritance
(Cambridge, MA, 1982). It has always been a mystery to me that Mayr, a genuinely cultured man
with a good German classical education, should have been so hostile to Plato.
41. Robert J. Richards, The romantic conception of life: Science and philosophy in the age of Goethe
(Chicago, 2003).
42. Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the emergence of evolutionary theories of mind and behavior
(Chicago, 1987).
43. James A. Secord, Victorian sensation (Chicago, 2000).
44. A partial list of Peter J. Bowler’s writings includes: Fossils and progress (New York, 1976); The eclipse
of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinism evolution theories in the decades around 1900 (Baltimore, 1983);
Evolution: The history of an idea (Berkeley, 1984); Theories of human evolution (Baltimore,
1986); The non-Darwinian revolution: Reinterpreting a historical myth (Baltimore, 1988); The
Mendelian revolution: The emergence of hereditarian concepts in modern science and society
(London, 1989); Charles Darwin: The man and his influence (Oxford, 1990; reissue Cambridge,
1996); The invention of progress: The Victorians and the past (Oxford, 1990); Life’s splendid
drama (Chicago, 1996); Reconciling science and religion: The debate in early-twentieth-century
Britain (Chicago, 2001); and Monkey trials and gorilla sermons: Evolution and Christianity from
Darwin to intelligent design (Cambridge, MA, 2009).
45. William Provine, The origins of theoretical population genetics (Chicago, 1971); idem, Sewall
Wright and evolutionary biology (Chicago, 1986).
46. Ernst Mayr and William Provine (eds), The evolutionary synthesis: Perspectives on the unification
of biology (Cambridge, MA, 1980).
47. Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, Unifying biology: The evolutionary synthesis and evolutionary
biology (Princeton, NJ, 1996); Joseph A. Cain, “Common problems and cooperative solutions:
Organizational activity in evolutionary studies 1936–1947”, Isis, lxxxiv (1993), 1–25; Joseph A.
Cain and Michael Ruse (eds), Descended from Darwin: Insights into the history of evolutionary
studies, 1900–1970 (Philadelphia, 2009).
48. David Sepkoski and Michael Ruse (eds), The paleobiological revolution: Essays on the growth of
modern paleontology (Chicago, 2009).
49. Adrian Desmond, The politics of evolution: Morphology, medicine and reform in radical London
(Chicago, 1989); see also Adrian Desmond, Archetypes and ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian
Britain, 1850–1875 (London, 1982).
50. Adrian Desmond, Huxley, the devil’s disciple (London, 1994); idem, Huxley, evolution’s high priest
(London, 1997).
51. James R. Moore, The post-Darwinian controversies: A study of the Protestant struggle to come to
terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900 (Cambridge, 1979).
52. Michael Ruse (ed.), But is it science? The philosophical question in the creation/evolution controversy
(Buffalo, NY, 1988).
53. Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The life of a tormented evolutionist (New York,
DARWINIAN STRUGGLES
· 429
1992).
54. Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s sacred cause: How a hatred of slavery shaped Darwin’s
views on human evolution (New York, 2009).
55. Boyd Hilton, A mad, bad and dangerous people? England 1783–1846 (Oxford, 2006).
56. K. Theodore Hoppen, The mid-Victorian generation, 1846–1886 (Oxford, 1998).
57. Michael Ruse, Darwin and design: Does evolution have a purpose? (Cambridge, MA, 2003);
idem, The evolution–creation struggle (Cambridge, MA, 2005); idem, Charles Darwin (Oxford,
2008).
58. Letters 2269 (6 May 1858) and 2306 (13 July 1858). These can be viewed online, thanks to the
Darwin Correspondence Project, at http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwin/search/advanced?
query=nigger&documenttype=all&submit=Go#
59. Darwin, op. cit. (ref. 1). The discussion of slave-making instincts is found in Chapter VII, “Instinct”,
219–24. The phrase “so wonderful an instinct” occurs on p. 219.
60. Charles Darwin, The descent of man and selection in relation to sex (London, 1871). The Wallace
story is told in many places, including by me in Charles Darwin (ref. 57).
61. David N. Livingstone, Adam’s ancestors: Race, religion, and the politics of human origins
(Baltimore, 2008).
62. Michael Ruse, Mystery of mysteries: Is evolution a social construction? (Cambridge, MA, 1999).
63. Jonathan Hodge, “Against ‘Revolution’ and ‘Evolution’”, Journal of the history of biology, xxxviii
(2005), 101–24.
64. Kuhn, op. cit. (ref. 29).
65. Michael Ruse, “The Darwinian Revolution as seen in 1979 and as seen twenty-five years later in
2004”, Journal of the history of biology, xxxviii (2005), 3–17; idem, op. cit. (ref. 57, 2008).
66. Ruse, op. cit. (ref. 3).
67. Michael Ruse, Darwinism defended: A guide to the evolution controversies (Reading, MA, 1982).
68. Milton Millhauser, Just before Darwin: Robert Chambers and ‘Vestiges’ (Middletown, CN, 1959),
and Jacob W. Gruber, A conscience in conflict: The life of St. George Jackson Mivart (Philadelphia,
1960), respectively.
69. A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray 1810–1888 (Cambridge, MA, 1959), and Edward Lurie, Louis Agassiz:
A life in science (Chicago, 1960).
70. Ernst Nagel, The structure of science: Problems in the logic of scientific explanation (New York,
1961); Carl G. Hempel, Philosophy of natural science (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1966); Karl R.
Popper, The logic of scientific discovery (London, 1959); Kuhn, op. cit. (ref. 29).
71. See Richards, op. cit. (ref. 41), and Toby Appel, The Cuvier–Geoffroy debate: French biology in the
decades before Darwin (New York, 1987), for Germany and France respectively.
72. Darwin, op. cit. (ref. 1), 206.
73. Richard Owen, On the nature of limbs (London, 1849); Thomas Henry Huxley, “On the theory of the
vertebrate skull. Croonian Lecture delivered before the Royal Society, June 17, 1858”, Proceedings
of the Royal Society, ix (1857–59), 381–457, reprinted in The scientific memoirs of Thomas Henry
Huxley, ed. by Michael Foster and E. Ray Lankester (London, 1903), i, 538–606.
74. Huxley, ibid., 585.
75. Robert J. Richards, The tragic sense of life: Ernst Haeckel and the struggle over evolutionary
thought (Chicago, 2008).
76. Richards, op. cit. (ref. 41); Robert J. Richards, “Michael Ruse’s design for living”, Journal of the
history of biology, xxxvii (2004), 25–38.
77. Darwin, op. cit. (ref. 1), 489–90.
78. Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (Berlin, 1866).
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MICHAEL RUSE
79. Letter from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 18 June 1862.
80. Charles C. Gillespie, Genesis and geology (Cambridge, MA, 1950).
81. Michael Ruse, “Darwin and mechanism: Metaphor in science”, Studies in history and philosophy
of biology and biomedical sciences, xxxvi (2005), 285–302.
82. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, Evolution by natural selection, foreword by Gavin de
Beer (Cambridge, 1958), 87.
83. David Brewster, “Review of Comte’s ‘Cours de Philosophie Positive’”, Edinburgh review, lxvii
(1838), 271–308, p. 301.
84. Ruse, op. cit. (ref. 28); Dov Ospovat, The development of Darwin’s theory: Natural history, natural
theology, and natural selection, 1838–1859 (Cambridge, 1981).
85. Stephen J. Gould, Full house: The spread of excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York, 1996).
86. Richard Dawkins, The blind watchmaker (New York, 1986).
87. Charles Darwin, The origin of species by Charles Darwin: A variorum text, ed. by Morse Peckham
(Philadelphia, PA, 1959), 222. This is from the third edition (1861) of the Origin.
88. Michael Ruse, “Charles Darwin and group selection”, Annals of science, xxxvii (1980), 615–30.
89. Darwin, op. cit. (ref. 1), 63–64.
90. Darwin, op. cit. (ref. 60).
91. Bowler, op. cit. (ref. 44, 1988).
92. Bowler, op. cit. (ref. 44, 1988), 4.
93. Ruse, op. cit. (ref. 2).
94. Henry Walter Bates, “Contributions to an insect fauna of the Amazon valley”, Transactions of the
Linnaean Society of London, xxiii (1862), 495–515; W. Raphael F. Weldon, “Presidential address
to the zoological section of the British Association”, Transactions of the British Association
(Bristol, 1898), 887–902.
95. Thomas Hunt Morgan, Alfred Sturtevant, Hermann J. Muller and Calvin Bridges, The mechanisms
of Mendelian heredity ( New York, 1915); Garland Allen, Thomas Hunt Morgan: The man and
his science (Princeton, NJ, 1978).
96. Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful life: The Burgess Shale and the nature of history (New York,
1989).
97. Ronald L. Numbers, The creationists: The evolution of scientific creationism (New York, 1992); 2nd
edn, The creationists: From scientific creationism to intelligent design (Cambridge, MA, 2006);
Edward J. Larson, Summer for the gods: The Scopes trial and America’s continuing debate over
science and religion (New York, 1997); Jon H. Roberts, Darwinism and the divine in America:
Protestant intellectuals and organic evolution, 1859–1900 (Madison, WI, 1988); Moore, op.
cit. (ref. 51); Bowler, op. cit. (ref. 44, 2001); Bowler, op. cit. (ref. 44, 2009); David Livingstone,
Darwin’s forgotten defenders: The encounter between evangelical theology and evolutionary
thought (Grand Rapids, 1987); Livingstone, op. cit. (ref. 61); Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross,
Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The wedge of intelligent design (Oxford, 2004).
98. Ruse, op. cit. (ref. 57, 2003); idem, op. cit. (ref. 57, 2005).
99. Michael Ruse, Can a Darwinian be a Christian? The relationship between science and religion
(Cambridge, 2001); idem, Science and spirituality: Making room for faith in the age of science
(Cambridge, in press).
100. Robert Pennock and Michael Ruse (eds), But is it science? The philosophical question in the
creation/evolution controversy, 2nd edn (Buffalo, NY, 2008); William A. Dembski and Michael
Ruse (eds), Debating design: Darwin to DNA (Cambridge, 2004).
101. Richard Dawkins, The God delusion (New York, 2007).
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