MYTH 13
THAT DARWINIAN NATURAL SELECTION HAS BEEN “THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN”
Nicolaas Rupke
Charles Darwin … expressed the beauty of evolution in the famous final paragraph of the book that started it all—On the Origin of Species (1859): “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Jerry A. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True (2009)
We are surrounded by endless forms, most beautiful and wonderful, and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by natural selection—the only game in town, the greatest show on earth.
—Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2009)
The year 2009 marked the 150th anniversary of the first edition of Charles Darwin’s (1809–1882) On the Origin of Species (1859). Among the highlights of the celebrations were two best-selling exposés of evolutionary theory today, one by the University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne (b. 1949) and the other by Richard Dawkins (b. 1941), who was Oxford University’s Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. Each author wrote a blurb praising the other man’s book, unified as they are in claiming that Darwin’s notion of evolution by natural selection is the only viable explanation for “endless forms most beautiful”—that is, the outstanding variety of living forms. Both men present much of their evidence for evolution as an argument for the efficacy of natural selection. Darwinian theory, Dawkins concludes, is “the only game in town.” The sole serious challenge to Darwin has come from the creationist belief in intelligent design, not from science—or so they contend.
This claim is questionable and substantially incorrect—it is a myth—because a scientific alternative has been in existence from well before the publication of The Origin of Species, an alternative that does not invalidate natural selection altogether as a driving force of evolutionary change, but reduces it to a contributory factor in the origin of organic form and diversity on earth. My purpose in this essay is less to argue a scientific or a philosophical and theological point of view than to treat the matter historically.
There is nothing new about putting Darwin’s views forward as the one and only scientific theory of the origin of species by presenting it as the alternative to the biblical belief in special creation. Contrasting Moses and Darwin—so to speak—was in fact initiated by Darwin himself when he added to the fourth edition of The Origin of Species “an historical sketch” of evolutionary thought. “Until recently,” he wrote, “the great majority of naturalists believed that species were immutable productions, and had been separately created.… Some few naturalists, on the other hand, have believed that species undergo modification, and that the existing forms of life are the descendants by true generation of pre-existing forms.”1 These few naturalists, however, were said to be mere forerunners of Darwin, imperfectly grappling with evidence; and according to one admirer, Darwin provided “the magnificent synthesis of evidence, all known before, and of theory, adumbrated in every postulate by his forerunners—a synthesis so compelling in honesty and comprehensiveness that it forced men such as Thomas Henry Huxley [1825–1895] to say: How stupid not to have realized that before!”2
To repeat: the equating of evolution with Darwinian theory, as initiated by Darwin himself and perpetuated today by Coyne and Dawkins, is a myth, presented in the form of a historical narrative of evolutionary biology that in part defined itself in opposition to creationism while ignoring notions of structuralist (or formalist) evolutionary theory—that is, the attribution of the origin of life and of the many forms it has taken primarily to the operation of physico-chemical and mechanical forces, and less to natural selection, the impact of which, however, is not denied (more to follow).3 The mythical part of the Darwinian account is based on several narrative ploys, such as forgetting, ignoring, and misrepresenting. One of the most blatant and enduring misrepresentations has been Darwin’s allegation that his structuralist critic Richard Owen (1804–1892), founder of London’s Natural History Museum, was a creationist.4 A century and a half later, Dawkins continues to repeat this misrepresentation, in spite of the fact that historical scholarship has long restored Owen to his identity as an evolutionist, albeit not a Darwinian.5 Other scientific critics of Darwin’s theory, too, have been put under a cloud of suspicion for their alleged creationist or crypto-creationist solicitude.6
Let me briefly summarize some of the characteristic points and great names of the pre—and post–Origin of Species structuralist tradition. From the start—the late eighteenth century—the structuralist approach to the origin of species was a more comprehensive one than Darwinian theory ever was or is, if only because the question of the origin of organic diversity was treated as intrinsically related to the question of the origin of life—abiogenesis. This was believed to be a natural process—spontaneous generation—engendered by a constellation of material conditions and molecular forces. It connected the evolutionary history of life with the evolution of the earth, the solar system, our galaxy, and the elements. The literary epitome of this grand synthesis was Alexander von Humboldt’s (1769–1859) Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe (5 volumes, 1845–1862), whereas a more amateur and outspoken rendition was Robert Chambers’s (1802–1871) Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844).7 They saw the history of the cosmos as an integrated process of material complexification that followed natural laws, and they understood the origin of life and species—organic evolution—as a process driven by molecular forces, “molecular evolution” in today’s terminology. Owen referred to the formative forces as “inner tendencies.” A century after Owen, Nobel Laureate Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961), who made groundbreaking contributions to quantum mechanics, argued along similar structuralist lines in his What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (1943), while today Simon Conway Morris speaks of “deep structure” and Keith Bennett writes “that macroevolution may, over the long-term, be driven largely by internally generated genetic change, not adaptation to a changing environment.”8
During the early years of biology, around 1800, when the term “biology” was coined and the subject took institutional shape, many believed that each species, including Homo sapiens, had originated from a spontaneously generated germ, and that species were autochthonous (that is, they had originated naturally in the locations where they were found). Distinct global provinces of geographical distribution together with the phenomenon of sudden complexity in the paleontological record seemed to make sense that way.9 Yet through the first half of the nineteenth century, a consensus developed that most species had come into being through a process of descent, although not gradually via an accumulation of small modifications but often instantaneously as the result of large changes, the latter exemplified by congenital conditions such as situs inversus, as in the case of dextrocardia (when the apex of the heart is oriented toward the right side of the chest, not the left side), or by dramatic metamorphic changes, like the ones known from metagenetic cycles (when sexually and asexually reproducing generations alternate).
Crystallography was brought to bear on organic form, its regularities, and its symmetries, highlighting striking similarities between crystals and skeletons (more to follow). Throughout a century of research along these lines, from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, several prominent scholars featured life’s mathematical describability, such as Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869), Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), and D’Arcy Thompson (1860–1948), the last in his compendious On Growth and Form (1917).10 Inner architectural logic of form was considered a more fundamental feature than the externalities of unpredictable form changes in response to environmental conditions. The molecular nature of the driving process explained the fact that not only crystals but also organic forms can be captured by arithmetic and geometry—Fibonacci sequence, golden ratio, crystal symmetry—as in the case of phyllotaxis, the likely biocrystalline nature of diatomaceous and radiolarian skeletons, and many instances of symmetry, especially in plants; later examples came from viruses, the helical structure of DNA, and the fractal nature of fern leaves, as well as the self-similarity in Ediacaran rangeomorphs. Life’s forms express a structural logic and are, to a certain extent, predictable. The innumerable instances of convergent evolution are suggestive of patterns, of preferential pathways of evolutionary change that allow for notions of direction—perhaps orientation toward an end, a goal, as most recently suggested by Conway Morris in his Life’s Solution (2003).11
The question has to be asked: How can this myth of Darwinism’s singularity as a theory of evolution have taken hold? How can Darwin, in his Dawkinsian incarnation, have turned into the schoolyard bully of evolutionary biology? Here is not the place to go into the detailed scientific arguments over how much of organic diversity can be explained in structuralist terms and to what extent natural selection has acted as a morphing influence. Rather, I’d like to look at the issue of structuralism versus Darwinism in terms of the geography of knowledge and underline the importance of location. More fundamentally, in order to understand the victory of Darwinism over the older, more comprehensive structuralist approach—a victory that took place in the wake of World War II—we need briefly to step back from the scientific issues and look at the geography of evolutionary knowledge, at the locations where Darwinism flourished, at the sites where the structuralist approach took shape. David Livingstone has shown in his recent Gifford Lectures how differently Darwin was read, at times appropriated, in various places.12 I’d like to extend this contention by arguing that nature itself was read differently in various locations and adjusted to the sensibilities of place and time. It is essential to realize that the two approaches to organic evolution were, by and large, products of distinct national cultures. As John C. Greene remarked some time ago:
It is a curious fact that all, or nearly, all, of the men who propounded some idea of natural selection in the first half of the nineteenth century were British. Given the international character of science, it seems strange that nature should divulge one of her profoundest secrets only to inhabitants of Great Britain. Yet she did. The fact seems explicable only by assuming that British political economy, based on the idea of the survival of the fittest in the marketplace, and the British competitive ethos generally predisposed Britons to think in terms of competitive struggle in theorizing about plants and animals as well as man.13
Darwin scholarship of the past half century has informed us about the debt Darwin owed to British political economy, especially Thomas Malthus’s (1766–1834) An Essay on the Principle of Population (six editions between 1798 and 1826); moreover, it has highlighted the considerable extent to which Darwin’s thought was conditioned by the functionalism of the design argument and William Paley’s (1743–1805) Natural Theology (1802). Darwin’s theory of evolution was a product of British—more particularly, English—culture.14 His theory of evolution by natural selection, with its emphasis on adaptation, was an anastomosis of Malthusian and Paleyan thought, and although Darwin inverted Paley’s argument of design, one can argue that his theory remained an integral part of homegrown functionalist preoccupations. Dawkins is a present-day continuation of the same concern, engaging with modern-day proponents of intelligent design whose geographical and sociopolitical heartland continues to be the English-speaking world (in spite of the existence of differences between them).
By contrast, structuralism was primarily Continental, more specifically German. Most structuralists were Germans; Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) in Göttingen, and his students Lorenz Oken (1779–1851) and Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus (1776–1837) are just a few of the early influential names. Perhaps most prominent are Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), active in Jena and Weimar—the cultural heartland of the emerging nation-state of Germany—as well as the Dresden polymath and Goethe biographer Carus, author of the structuralist classic Von den Ur-Theilen des Knochen- und Schalengerüste (On the Fundamental Components of Endo- and Exo-Skeletons) (1828) which advanced the architectural approach to organic form in the context of German Romanticism and Idealist philosophy. Throughout the nineteenth century, Jena remained a hotbed of the morphological method, some major representatives of which were Karl Gegenbaur (1826–1903) and Ernst Haeckel.15
Haeckel died in 1919, just after the end of the Great War, in which Germany suffered humiliating defeat. Still, during Haeckel’s lifetime, the German approach to organic evolution endured in the form of Evolutionsmorphologie and an interest in the mechanics of growth and form, Entwicklungsmechanik. However, German defeat in World War II seriously damaged structuralist evolutionary theory. During the Third Reich, academics and political ideologues appropriated German Romanticism and Idealism, in particular Goethe and Humboldt. A Nazi biography of Humboldt accentuated the latter’s debt to Goethe’s Idealism, and both men were presented as precursors of National Socialism.16 Several structural evolutionists, such as the Austrian cofounder of paleobiology Othenio Abel (1875–1946), were outspoken anti-Semites and active participants in Nazi politics; the botanist Wilhelm Troll (1897–1978), known for his inflorescence studies, combined Idealist morphology in the tradition of Goethe with political proximity to Adolf Hitler (1889–1945). Through the period of the Third Reich, Darwinism became thought of as “un-German.”
In the wake of World War II, putting forward a structuralist theory of organic evolution that was besmirched by having the fingerprints of Nazi collaborators and sympathizers all over it proved inopportune, to put it mildly. All the same, a number of senior scientists—among them Tübingen University mineralogist and Goethe scholar Wolf von Engelhardt (1910–2008)—made a cautious attempt to perpetuate and rehabilitate the structuralist tradition, but their success was limited, as the journal in which they published their views did not survive for long. Another Tübingen figure, the formidable champion of “a saltational, internally driven evolutionism in the Continental formalist tradition,” Otto Schindewolf (1896–1971)—a man who, unlike Abel, had not blotted his political copy book during the Third Reich—was also unable to keep the younger generation of paleontologists and historians of biology, including Wolf-Ernst Reif (1945–2009), from turning to “the longstanding English preference for functionalist theories based on continuous adaptation to a changing external environment.”17
Being a Darwinian in post–World War II Germany, and in neighboring countries that had collaborated, became something of a Persilschein—a certificate that helped cleanse a person of Nazi dirt and smudges, or simply a means of distancing oneself from the recent political past and joining cultural traditions of the victorious Allies. British Darwinians, in turn, were now able to denigrate structuralist thought on the basis of its German connotation. Today, Dawkins belittles the notion of “fundamental body plans,” known by the German word Baupläne.18
In conclusion, perhaps one further point should be made. The success of the myth of the Darwinian evolution being “the only game in town” may in part be due to the fact that the theory of evolution by means of natural selection has enormously benefited from its many historical accounts, from Darwin’s own early story to Ernst Mayr’s The Growth of Biological Thought (1982),19 and the hundreds of other articles and books that the “Darwin industry” since 1959—the centenary of The Origin of Species—has put into circulation. The formalist tradition in evolutionary biology has never received its historical exposition—that is, it has never been the subject of a comprehensive narrative. There is a need to recalibrate the historiography of evolutionary biology by writing a comprehensive account of the structuralist tradition.20