Darwin Discovers

Darwin's Error an Introduction

Introduction
 
This book looks at Charles Darwin’s The Origin Of Species and The Descent Of Man from what is perhaps a slightly unusual angle. My theme is that Darwin made one of the greatest discoveries in all of science, but at the same time presented it in a highly mythologized and misleading way. As far as I know, nobody has considered The Origin both as science and myth. Contrary to what is normally thought, the great majority of Victorian scientists did not accept natural selection, and in his later life even Darwin himself had considerable reservations about it. The discoveries of the true age of the earth and Mendel’s laws of inheritance, which together in the twentieth century resoundingly rebutted the doubts about Darwin’s theory, were still unknown in the nineteenth. Yet the public adopted natural selection with great enthusiasm. Despite the hullabaloo of 1859 the Church rapidly accommodated itself to Darwinism, and the theologians never used the doubts of the scientists to undermine natural selection, as they could so easily have done. How are we to explain this?
 
My answer is that societies validate themselves to themselves by creation myths. This has traditionally been one of the major functions of religion. Because the Victorians were exploiting nature in a way that had never been done before they had a special need to seek such validation, but the authority of religion was rapidly weakening as a result of German Biblical criticism and the new science of geology. They therefore turned to the authority of science. An account of origins that was scientifically unimpeachable, yet at the same time highly vulnerable to being mythologized, suited them extremely well. They wanted to be told not only that better adapted forms survive differentially in changing environments, but that there is an agency external to the organisms themselves that drives progress forward by ruthless extermination, just as Paley’s had done by benign design. They wanted to believe that the conditions of their own society, leading to the triumph of the strong and the extermination of the weak, are inescapable laws of nature. In fact this external agency was, as Darwin presented it, just as mythological as Paley’s had been, but was immensely persuasive because it appeared to be part of the science.
 
My first chapter discusses the need that societies seem to have to deceive themselves, the function that religion has so often fulfilled as a court of mythic permission in the provision of such deceptions, and why, in these logics of delusion, creation myths are of especial importance. For centuries Europe had proclaimed its belief in Christianity, while at the same time subverting the teaching of the founder of its beliefs to justify the very things that he had condemned. In the nineteenth century this prolific source of moral duplicity was weakening alarmingly. Chapter two discusses the difference between facts and meanings in science. The first can be validated, the second cannot. This is the crucial distinction that I bring to my understanding of The Origin. Chapter three explains why the Whigs, to whom Darwin’s family belonged, were in acute need of a scientific theory that would validate their social and economic policies. Chapter four examines the major intellectual influences on Darwin, especially Locke’s teaching that behind the deceptive world of sensation there is a true world of law discoverable by science, and Herschell’s and Whewell’s scientific methodology: (1) the assembly of facts (2) the inductive detection of regularities, or empirical laws, in the facts, and (3) the discovery, through deduction, of the truly explanatory laws, the verae causae,i that explain the empirical laws. The great example of this methodology was Newtonian physics. It was fatally misleading when it was applied to biology. Chapter five is devoted to Darwin’s tendentious use of metaphor, and his presentation of natural selection as if it were a biological version of a Newtonian law of nature, which was in fact a misconception, in language that, extraordinarily, suggests not so much a law as a god. In chapter six I discuss the mythical qualities of The Origin and why the Victorian public took it so much to their hearts. In chapter seven I argue that The Descent Of Man functioned as a mythical justification of imperialism just as The Origin had been used to justify industrial capitalism.
 
In the subsequent, and final, three chapters I try to approach my subject from a slightly different angle. In chapter eight, A Slow Dying Amongst Barnacles, I argue that Darwin never presented in The Origin the nature that he had actually encountered during his voyage in The Beagle. The outstanding feature of the journal that he kept on the voyage is his intoxication at nature’s glory and wonder, recorded by one of the greatest prose poets in the language, but none of this made it into The Origin. During the two decades in between his marvellous adventure and the publication of The Origin this most wonderful man died emotionally. It is surely one of the greatest tragedies in the history of science. The key thing that we need to remember about The Origin is that it was written by a man with a crushed heart. Darwin needed to impress a scientific establishment that had little use for glory and wonder. Both they and he had an extremely narrow attitude to science that had been shaped philosophically by Locke and Hume. If Darwin had been as influenced by Kant as he was by Locke and Hume, we would, perhaps, have had the much greater Humboldtian work that The Origin might have been. Darwin’s wonderful discovery that all life emanates from a single source would better have led him to stress the brotherhood of all life, not extermination and competition. His philosophical blindness to form warped his vision. He stressed nature’s cruelty but, he of all people, forgot its beauty. If he had been influenced by the Kantian account of teleology he would surely not have committed so diminishing an oversight. He also failed to appreciate, too, the ever intensifying inwardness that has been the driving force of evolution. Again, Kant would have saved him. Instead he substituted for it a highly mythical external agency that was in fact, ironically enough, a secularization of Paley’s cosmic designer.
 
The Origin is as confused as it is because Darwin’s heart was at war with his head. His heart had been enchanted by Humboldt but his mind had been shaped by Locke. The Origin is as it is because in this conflict the heart was totally overwhelmed by the head. If one of the pillars of Darwin’s insight was the variations occurring within organisms, the other was that organisms are shaped by their environment. Both of these were influences originally emanating from Goethe that reached Darwin through Humboldt – though perhaps an infusion into the bloodstream of his experience rather than a direct illumination of his mind - a Kantian debt that The Origin in no way acknowledges. Darwin took up the environmental side of this equation and used it to develop his great theory, albeit in a highly mythologized way. But the other side of the equation, the inner variations, he neither investigated, though he frequently lamented his inability to do so, nor developed. The question that Goethe had constantly asked and the one that Humboldt when he was a young man insistently pressed upon him – why are natural things so beautiful? – he did not address at all. The empiricist tradition in science has always regarded such a question as outside its remit. But natural things are not only observable and measurable and spatially extended and mobile. They are beautiful. Why? English science’s lack of interest in this question was Darwin’s profound misfortune. The great Humboldtian companion to Darwin’s Origin, the flowering of his heart that, perhaps in other circumstances, this great master of English prose, this most sensitive of men and most poetic of souls, would have given us, remains to be written.