Oubai Elkerdi
Oubai Elkerdi is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology.
More About this Author
Oubai Elkerdi is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology.
More About this Author
Oubai Elkerdi is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology.
More About this AuthorI have not made them witness the creation of the heavens and the earth, nor their own creation.
QUR’AN 18:51
History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.
THOMAS KUHN
Charles Darwin, 1869
Think “Charles Darwin” or feed the name into a search engine and there turns up a mild-mannered, heavy-bearded, elderly gentleman in a three-piece suit. The man we see, typically cast in sepia or gray tones, broadcasts sagacity. We might as well be staring at the Victorian incarnation of a Greek philosopher. No paraphernalia, no backdrop—no context—situates him. Few have ever met a younger Darwin or would recognize him if they did. An elementary school or literary encounter might portray him “as a naïve, innocent, school-boyish, outdoor, nature-loving traveller and collector, whose theories emerged from lucky meetings of his genius with exceptional observational opportunities.”1 This is the familiar Darwin: a lone naturalist, stripped of all historical contingency, circumstances, social networks, and influences.
Of course, much of this popular perception is entirely true. Darwin was endowed with great observational skills, a remarkable ability to synthesize vast amounts of evidence from diverse disciplines, and an unimpeachable dedication to his calling. He was an obsessive collector and scribe, carefully annotating samples and documenting discoveries and information gathered from biologists, botanists, geologists, pigeon fanciers, horse breeders, zookeepers, and others.
That said, much is missing from this picture.
Evolution by natural selection is a Victorian scientific theory that has come to occupy a standard place in biology. The reading public might know the theory in its repackaged form as “the modern synthesis”—roughly, Darwinian selection plus Mendelian genetics. Turn back the clock, however, and the scientific landscape looks quite different. In the nineteenth century, there were numerous evolutionary theories. Philosophies of nature competed within a modernizing world, amid divergent political interests; the English and European scientific scene was lively and dramatic. There were no neatly circumscribed intellectual territories that separated scientific activities from philosophical introspection. Titles like “scientist” were just entering public discourse; efforts to carve out a scientific profession were just beginning. The one naturalist whose name would survive this formative period and eclipse all others, at least in our shared historical consciousness, is Charles Darwin (d. 1882).
A twenty-first-century reader of Darwin’s magnum opus, On the Origin of Species (1859), might be surprised if not disappointed at its lack of scientific tone and its style of analysis. By today’s norms, Origin reads somewhere between intimate correspondence and a formal travel account. Its language aimed to persuade through description and by tying together evidence from a host of disciplines—geology, botany, population studies, and other fields. In fact, Darwin intended the book as “one long argument” and “an abstract” for a proper scientific manuscript that never came to life.2 Darwin would revise his “argument” in six editions published over thirteen years, with the phrase “survival of the fittest” only appearing in the fifth edition and the word “evolution” only in the last. The former coinage was not even Darwin’s; it was introduced by Herbert Spencer (d. 1903). Indeed, many hands went into the production of Origin and its central theory: the principle of natural selection. This concept was, and still is, at the heart of controversies over biological evolution. Biologist and vocal atheist Richard Dawkins has described natural selection as a “masterpiece” and glorified its “explanatory power.”3 Yet Darwin never gave a straightforward definition of natural selection and could not even convince his inner circle (of evolutionists!) of its so-called explanatory power.
Evolution remains a recurring topic of discussion—online, in the workplace, and over dinner—between theists and atheists representing various strains of creationism and evolutionism. As in the nineteenth century, there are no neat categories: a conservative Muslim might indiscriminately subscribe to the theory of evolution over here, while an atheist over there might scoff at natural selection. But for all the furor, enthusiasts and opponents of evolution alike (including biologists on either side) tend to be ill informed about its history and deeper philosophical enigmas. This lack of awareness is usually coupled with confusion about how science works and what it can and cannot tell us about reality.
Studying the history and philosophy of science can help dispel ignorance about evolution and science more broadly. The case of Darwin is an occasion to test our beliefs about “science,” to humanize its pioneers, and to show that many of the questions they grappled with still haunt us today despite decades or even centuries of empirical research. Examining present controversies often shows that they repeat old debates, considering unresolved puzzles may bring to the fore early differences of opinion and untrodden paths, and studying naturalists and their theories in context can reveal hidden assumptions and philosophical biases. Therefore, probing evolution’s philosophical arguments in light of its history is a useful complement to both theological and scientific inquiry.4 Historical and philosophical knowledge helps us to be informed, granular, and selective about our commitments—in other words, it equips us to ask critical questions and to interrogate mere conjecture and scientist encroachments on metaphysical matters beyond the scope of science. And there is no better place to start than with the “Devil’s chaplain,” as Darwin once jokingly labeled himself.5
As talented as Darwin was, he did not arrive at his concepts through pure and simple scientific insight. Darwin made sense of nature and inferred its inner workings through the prisms of his circumstances and of contemporary thought. It is tempting to think of naturalists as dispassionate, objective individuals to whom the absolute truth is revealed thanks to sheer intellectual prowess.6 In reality, Darwin intertwined his interpretation of nature with questions like whether or not one could legitimately speak of progress, and to what extent did God intervene in creation, with his answers often tainted by subjective premises he inherited from his world. Darwin sojourned in dynamic places in a revolutionary period, among engaged thinkers and activists, surrounded by ideas embodied in the concrete materiality of the fast-mechanizing and expanding British Empire. His work, too, was situated in the thick of this cultural matrix. Victorian society; Britain’s industrial preeminence, global aspirations, and self-perception in a colonial era; racialized visions of humanity; class struggle; gender differences; the political debates and currents of the day; and personal experiences all shaped Darwin, his beliefs, and the very content of his theories. One of his leading biographers, Janet Browne, says it like this: “Darwinism was made by Darwin and Victorian society.”7
An uncomplicated image of Darwin might cast him as the objective scientist who arrived at his breakthroughs via plain observation and experimentation. In this simplistic portrait, evolution has no prehistory and no context. This conceals the facts that evolution itself has evolved and that its origins and ingredients matter decisively in how we talk about the theory today. A careful examination of Darwin’s writing alongside the books he read, the people he met and learned from, the sociopolitical issues of his time, and his correspondences makes it clear that Darwinian evolution can be neither described as “just science” nor understood independently from its historical setting. Studying Darwin up close is both an opportunity to gain a critical awareness of metaphysical and theological assumptions that are present in his formulation of evolution—and which have nothing to do with empirical science proper—and an invitation to adopt a more sophisticated view of science in general.
Darwin may be the poster child of evolution, but he did not invent the idea. The Victorian era was full of efforts to construct worldviews on an evolutionary foundation.8 By the time Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, a handful of evolutionist doctrines were already in wide circulation, and many of the themes he addressed were new neither to him nor to his readers. Historians are therefore reluctant to speak of a “Darwinian revolution”—at least not without serious caveats.9 French Enlightenment authors like the philosopher Denis Diderot (d. 1784) and the naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (d. 1788), advocated developmental ideas in the eighteenth century.10 Darwin’s own grandfather Erasmus (d. 1802) entertained the possibilities of common ancestry and divergence among animals in the late 1780s and 1790s. By the first decade of the 1800s, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (d. 1829)—who coined the term biology—had proposed a theory of evolution by the inheritance of acquired characteristics—transformisme, he called it. The naturalist speculated that animals could transform their bodies gradually and heritably by force of will or habit. This theory was defended and extended by another prominent French zoologist, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (d. 1844), whose morphological views slowly aligned with Lamarckian transformism following a four-year expedition in Egypt, where he served as a savant in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army.
Lamarckism and Geoffroyism crossed the English Channel and were disseminated in the penny press. The notion that an animal could change itself into a higher being through its own efforts and pass on the gains to its progeny appealed to the working class and radical physicians. In 1826, zoologist Robert Grant (d. 1874), who studied with Saint-Hilaire and taught Darwin in Edinburgh, became the first in Britain to talk of animals having evolved, in the sense of transmuting from one species into another (until that time, evolution had referred to embryological development). Eventually came the best-selling Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), a Victorian sensation by Scottish thinker Robert Chambers that brought transmutation off the streets and out of medical theaters and into the English home.11 Finally, Alfred Russel Wallace (d. 1913) independently identified a principle close to Darwin’s (at least from the latter’s perspective), leading to a joint publication in 1858 and making Wallace the (largely forgotten) codiscoverer of evolution by natural selection. In short, even before Darwin published Origin, “there was plenty of evolutionism around for those who had eyes to see it,” as Browne puts it.12
Darwin was well aware of his precursors. The third edition of Origin included a historical sketch that summarized the contributions of Lamarck, Saint-Hilaire, Grant, and even the “excellent service” that Vestiges had done “in calling in this country attention to the subject, in removing prejudice, and in thus preparing the ground for the reception of analogous views.”13 Indeed, in addition to offering Darwin a way of anticipating criticisms of his own manuscript, Vestiges had helped to tone down the unsettling sociopolitical visions of radical evolutionism.14
Pro- and anti-evolutionists were not simply debating how nature worked in the abstract: philosophical positions on either side reflected social, political, and religious ideals that were hotly disputed on the ground. In Paris, evolutionary thinking was put in direct opposition to the church, the privileges of nobility, and professional control in science. Lamarck and Saint-Hilaire attracted republican sympathizers, noisy artisan atheists, socialists, and democrats among the medical community.
Against the two zoologists stood the formidable anatomist Georges Cuvier (d. 1832)—give him a few bones and he would reconstruct a creature, clothe it with skin, work out its habits, decipher its life. In contrast to Saint-Hilaire’s methodical romanticism, Cuvier’s analytic approach to science aligned with an austere conservatism concerned with sober facts and low-level laws. He rejected the speculative deism of the older Enlightenment and the notion postulated by Saint-Hilaire that some overarching law or plan might explain the animal chain. Cuvier thought this was tantamount to imposing restraints on God, who acted contingently. The two men clashed in a politically charged climate. Cuvier exemplified the old establishment; Saint-Hilaire symbolized revolution.
Why mention the French connection? When transformism traveled to England from France, it brought its political overtones with it. Lamarckian ideas were disseminated in cheap print along with attacks on the clergy and demands for democracy, while the upper class feared the implications of transformism for British society and culture. The French Revolution loomed large, and it was blamed on the corrosive teachings of the Lumières (Diderot and company) and naturalists like Lamarck.15
In expounding his version of evolution, Darwin thus had to be careful not to rattle some cages. When the time came to publish his version of evolution, he eschewed the subversive insinuations and applications of earlier versions. Luckily, revolution was not in his linguistic repertoire—he deplored the very thought. Darwin came from a Unitarian, Whig family belonging to the ruling class, with its implicit support of British colonialism. He inclined toward a law-abiding account of nature in which change was coordinated as part of a balanced scheme. This view of nature was inspired by natural theology—the rational and empirical study of nature (rather than revelation) to infer knowledge about God’s existence and attributes.
Natural theology was popular in the upper reaches of British society and at Cambridge, where Darwin studied to become an Anglican priest. It fused nature and religion, promoting a stable moral and social order by its emphasis on natural law.16 Chief in this tradition was the Christian apologist William Paley (d. 1805). At Cambridge, Darwin read Paley’s design argument: a pocket watch found on the sidewalk brings to mind a watchmaker, ergo a world replete with design must point to a designer. According to Paley’s argument, things in nature were like mechanical devices: formed and organized a certain way, imbued with functional intent, harmoniously adapted to the rest of the natural system. This worldview, wherein everything was arranged to serve specified ends, resonated with the ideology of Britain’s governing classes, who favored an orderly, stable society over Napoleonic revolutionism. Darwin, too, found Paley’s logic and conception of organisms as contrivances irresistible.
Darwin took a voyage from 1831 to 1836 on the HMS Beagle, depicted here at Tierra del Fuego; Conrad Martens, 1830s
Although Darwin would ultimately emancipate himself from Paley’s philosophy, Darwinian adaptation was very much rooted in the soil of British scientific, religious, social, commercial, and political life—and the argument-from-design tradition in particular.17 Darwin’s nature, like Paley’s divinely orchestrated world, was akin to a workshop that produced machines. In Origin, he described “the whole machinery of life” and nature as the stage where “the manufactory of species” takes place. A living organ was a “beautiful contrivance.” Bat wings were like a gliding “apparatus.” The Articulata possessed an optical “instrument.” These technological metaphors reflected the reality of British industrialism while also mimicking the approach of natural theology. A reader may discern in Darwin’s “laws impressed on matter by the Creator” a little bit of Paley.18 However, this phrase is even more reminiscent of a famous contemporary we do not normally associate with the evolution saga.
Charles Babbage (d. 1871) is nowadays known as the philosopher-engineer who played a key role in the history of computing thanks to his invention of mechanical calculators (most of which remained unfinished). He was notorious for hosting high-society parties at his house on Dorset Street in London. The events brought together zoologists, bishops, artists, industrialists, and many other individuals from the cultural elite. These lively soirees sometimes included the display of cutting-edge inventions. Babbage, an advocate of natural theology, entwined metaphysical musings with his philosophy of technology. At one party in March 1837, he demonstrated one of his calculating engines as a means to explain how God was like “the inventor of a complex, powerful calculating engine” who built into His creation the temporal changes He willed:
God impress[ed] His creation with laws, laws that have built into them future alterations in their patterns. God’s omnipotence entails that He can foretell what causes will be needed to bring about the effects He desires; God does not need to intervene each and every time some new cause is required.19
Everything in the cosmos was previously ordained in the same way that an engineer programs a machine to behave in a prescribed manner at specific times without requiring (further) human intervention. God, however, was not “fettered by the same infirmities” that limited human beings, and He therefore never needed to meddle in the affairs of His creation. Two months later, in his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837), Babbage would publish this argument, writing about nature as the most sophisticated contrivance, its mechanical structure, and the “comprehensive law[s] impressed on matter at the dawn of existence.” As Babbage rehearsed his argument that earlier evening, the audience watched with rapt attention. In the crowd stood a young Charles Darwin, listening.20 Here was an example of how to distance nature from its Author—or so he must have thought.
During the 1830s, Darwin was exposed to several other thinkers who left pivotal marks on his philosophy of nature. Reading Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, published in the early 1830s, supplied Darwin with the critical assumption that nature operated uniformly. The image of nature as a stage for struggle and animal extinction resulting from overpopulation and competition over finite resources came from reading the works of English economist Thomas Malthus (d. 1834) and dovetailed with the ethos of industrialized England and its spirit of free rivalry. Auguste Comte (d. 1857), the father of modern positivism, left a conceptual impact on Darwin so palpable that he kept writing about it for a month and invoked the French philosopher for years to come (Comte’s main translator and champion in England was Harriet Martineau, a close friend of Darwin’s).21
A popular account of Darwin’s life might restrict his scientific achievements to his discoveries on the HMS Beagle voyage. Such a narrative not only ignores these philosophical influences that Darwin himself acknowledged, but it also romanticizes what was in reality a colonial expedition. We must not forget the political aims and ramifications of voyages like those of the Beagle. Whether to establish strong footholds in unexplored areas of South America or maintain an economic advantage in the commercial exchange of plants, specimens, and other natural things, the end goal of such “scientific” explorations was always national expansion. The young naturalist moved within an empire infatuated with its own moral and cultural superiority, convinced that it was fully entitled to explore and exploit the rest of the world.22 He witnessed violence and civilizational differences that left impressions on his philosophy of nature and humans’ place within it. In his eyes, there was a striking gap between, say, the “primitive wildness” of the indigenous “Fuegan” and the British gentleman,23 and yet human progress toward the latter was neither linear nor guaranteed; nature was a precarious and dangerous place of competition, possible retrogression, and death. Darwin imbibed, analyzed, and even modified existing knowledge and ideas within this world—of colonial domination and apparent cruelty in nature—and, after returning from his voyage, concluded that “organized beings represent a tree irregularly branched.”24 His observations mixed and evolved together with cultural assumptions, the outcome of which was a theory of evolution by natural selection that was as much a theological belief as it was a scientific argument.
Natural selection was a difficult principle to explain, let alone justify. Darwin never provided a clear-cut definition that satisfied the intelligentsia. Even his most loyal followers had trouble swallowing the concept. As Browne remarks, “Natural selection was not self-evident in nature, nor was it the kind of theory in which one could say, ‘Look here and see.’ Darwin had no crucial experiment that conclusively demonstrated evolution in action. He had no equations to establish his case.”25 Evolution was convincing; natural selection was not.
Origin introduced readers to the principle of natural selection by drawing an analogy with artificial selection, which humans had practiced on plants and domesticated animals for centuries. Natural selection was a more extensive and pervasive version of this humbler activity: Darwin described it as “daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest,” and as constantly acting “on each part of each being, solely through and for its advantage.”26
The problem is that Darwin meant to remove the telos from nature: there was to be no direction or end toward which the natural selection process would take a species. No divine or other agency ran the show. The struggle for life caused by environmental constraints pressured species to adapt and evolve. If Origin made it sound like nature was looking after species by allowing them to preserve those traits they most needed to survive, then this was only because language was a limitation. Hence, natural selection, arguably an oxymoron by design, kept the mind at an arm’s length from any teleological thinking while ensuring that nature’s contents still developed. In other words, Darwin sought an account of nature that essentially kept features of Paleyan design but eliminated any invocation of the Designer.27 This paradoxical compromise did not persuade every evolutionist.
Look no further than the codiscoverer of natural selection. Alfred Wallace, or “the other beetle-hunter,” who read many of the same books as Darwin (including Vestiges and Malthus’s treatise on population growth), found similar biological problems during his overseas travels, and shared much the same progressive Victorian milieu. Yet the two men diverged in significant ways, most importantly in their formulations of evolution. Near the end of his life, Wallace restored teleology into evolution in a manner consistent with his theism and spiritualism. He declared that abundant evidence “indicated a prevision and definite preparation of the earth for Man.” Wallace maintained that humans were an exception in the evolutionary process and that forces other than natural selection were at play in the history of humankind. “I do not consider that all nature can be explained on the principles of which I am so ardent an advocate,” he announced in an essay titled “The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man.” If Darwin went from natural theology to natural selection, Wallace’s journey was in the opposite direction.28
Darwin, however, had a “bulldog,” and his name was Thomas Henry Huxley (d. 1895). Huxley earned the moniker for having done more than most to campaign for Darwinian evolution. Suffice it to say that he was the first to utter the rallying cry “Darwinism,” preach it to the nonaristocratic masses, and institute a group—the X Club—to defend evolutionary naturalism and liberate the natural order from supernatural interventions (as Darwin wished to do). If Darwin had a chief marketing officer, it was Huxley. Even he was undecided about natural selection. He avoided mentioning the concept in public lectures and articles because he did not think it stood on robust ground.29
Another proponent of Darwinian evolution was the Harvard botanist Asa Gray (d. 1888). Gray felt that blind selection acting on chance variations failed to explain how so many organisms were splendidly designed for their roles in life. Gray, a devout Christian, suggested that God created useful variations, which natural selection then preserved in a population. Darwin could not accept this. The whole point of natural selection was to keep divine will out of the temporal realm. In a well-known letter to Gray, he confessed:
With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.—I am bewildered.—I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.—Let each man hope & believe what he can.30
This revealing excerpt allows us to highlight a fundamental fact in the history and philosophy of science. Naturalists like Darwin were not necessarily the disinterested oracles of nature we often imagine them to be. They held on to preconceived notions and expectations that, despite falling outside the purview of systematic inquiry, still infiltrated their theories. It would be remiss of us to read such a lucid revelation of Darwin’s philosophical opinions and not see how his theory might have been shaped by underlying assumptions and unresolved turbulences. It is hard not to read between Darwin’s lines to Gray hints of his Beagle experience and a personal tragedy that affected him deeply—the passing of his beloved daughter Annie at age ten, in 1851. Her loss weighed heavily on him and probably added to his disenchantment with Paley and Christian faith.
A scientific mythology would have us think of pioneering naturalists as no more than gifted persons who operated with machinelike detachment, objectivity, and rigor; who were engrossed in empirical inquiry and perfectly insulated from “nonscientific” matters; who were untouched and unbothered by personal events or the social and political concerns of their days. And if they did get involved, then surely their theories remained intact. On this view, naturalists adhered strictly to factual analysis and steered away from speculation, and if their theories spread, it was because of their inherent truth. And yet as the story of Darwin makes clear, his context, his theological beliefs, and his theory were of a piece, and if Darwinism gained more followers, it was largely thanks to muscle power and an audience that had been primed to accept many of his arguments. At the same time, there was resistance and dissent from within Darwinian ranks—a point hardly ever mentioned in schoolbooks and popular histories.
To Darwin, the principle of natural selection was not just a scientific concept; it was also a theological compromise. In his letters to Gray and others, he could have concealed his theological dilemmas. By choosing not to separate naturalist and metaphysical concerns, Darwin made clear that his science and philosophy were cut from the same cloth. He went through an archetypal Victorian crisis of faith and, by the end of his life, adopted the word agnostic to characterize his beliefs.31
Incidentally, the term agnosticism was coined by none other than Darwin’s disciple—Huxley.