Evolution
THE GREEKS did not have a philosophy of history, something that turned them to thinking about purpose over long periods of time. That was Christianity’s major contribution to the discussion. Augustine was as influential on the Protestants as he was on the Catholics—arguments could be made for saying that in many respects, Luther and Calvin were closer to him than was Aquinas. However, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, things were starting to come apart at the seams. Although both Catholics and Protestants were deeply committed to Christianity, the fact is that they did differ on important things, structurally (like the authority of the pope) and theologically (like the status of the Virgin Mary). With such fundamental differences, the way was open for those who wondered whether any of it was true. It did not help that the Augustinian view of God, akin to the Form of the Good, was in direct conflict to the biblical view of God endorsed by the Reformers. For them, God was a person—the stern judge of Genesis, the loving father of the parable of the prodigal son. This did not sound much like an ethereal being, outside time and space.
In parallel, voyages of discovery were going farther and farther afield, especially around Africa to the East. There Europeans found old civilizations, with their own religions, none of which had any role for Jesus of Nazareth. Who was right and who was wrong? The British rather compounded things for they hated and barred Christian missionaries, thinking (with good reason) that they only foment strife and are bad for trade. The trouble is that, if on commercial grounds you start making arguments about the integrity of Hinduism and Buddhism, before long you are liable to believe what you are saying. Science likewise has uncomfortable ways of pressuring Christianity. If we are now but one speck of dust in an infinite universe, no longer at the center, what price the special status of humans? Biblical time was also under pressure. With geological knowledge being increasingly important for mining and canal building and the like, the complex strata of the earth’s crust hinted strongly at eons before the present, as did the fossils being unearthed. Then, too, the Christian religion itself was starting to crumble under new, sophisticated scrutiny. Spinoza was one of the first to start looking at the Bible as a humanly written book rather than given from on high by the Almighty. And truly, when you think about it, the legacy of Augustine is pretty dreadful. God is going to condemn most of his creatures to everlasting hellfire, and while he can justify this on the grounds that they themselves sinned and so are guilty, the reason for their troubles is that God didn’t give them the wherewithal to stand firm against temptation.
Progress
This was not a reason to give up on history. But, as God was being expelled from the sciences, perhaps the time was now coming when God could be expelled from history also, or at least pushed to the sidelines. Could we move from a “Providential” view of history—where God controlled everything and nothing we humans did had any merit in its own right—to a more secular view of history where we humans, through our labors, could indeed have influence over our fate, over our future? Many in the eighteenth century, the Age of the Enlightenment, thought this indeed a possibility.1 Thought and hope were actualized in the form of a formidable challenger: progress! No less end-directed, this was a philosophy of history that took the responsibility and control away from God and put it firmly in our hands. The values are our values. The purposes are ours and ours alone. A function both of the loosening grip of the God hypothesis and a growing sense that thanks to technology and political reform and more, it was now possible—and desirable—for us ourselves to make a better tomorrow. In the words of its most distinguished historian: “The idea of human Progress, then, is a theory which involves a synthesis of the past and a prophecy of the future. It is based on an interpretation of history, which regards men as slowly advancing—pedetemtim progredietes—in a definite and desirable direction, and infers that this progress will continue indefinitely.”2
To be honest, the two philosophies (Providence and progress) were frequently not all that different, and at times it is difficult to distinguish their ends. If anyone can tell in the following passage where Kant stood, they are doing better than I: “Now if things in the world, as dependent beings as far as their existence is concerned, need a supreme cause acting in accordance with ends, then the human being is the final end of creation, for without him the chain of ends subordinated to one another would not be completely grounded; and only in the human being, although in him only as a subject of morality, is unconditional legislation with regard to ends to be found, which therefore makes him alone capable of being a final end, to which the whole of nature is teleologically subordinated.”3 Everyone was a millennialist, worrying about end times, and not too careful to distinguish spiritual heaven up above from secular heaven down here.4 That said, there really was a change of attitude—for the progressionist, science, education, and political economy were crucially important in the New World scheme, and it was for us to use these and to push for better times.
Toward the end of the century, the essayist and novelist William Godwin (1756–1836)—husband of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein—was a great enthusiast. He had a nigh-fanatical belief in human perfectibility and consequent progressive improvement of society. He believed all of our weaknesses and moral failings could be overcome. This apparently was a function of our receptivity to truth. “Every truth that is capable of being communicated is capable of being brought home to the conviction of the mind. Every principle which can be brought home to the conviction of the mind will infallibly produce a correspondent effect upon the conduct.”5 And from the individual, because all humans are fundamentally the same, this will spin out to society. “We are partakers of a common nature, and the same causes that contribute to the benefit of one will contribute to the benefit of another.”6
Expectedly, one sees variations across countries and across cultures. Great Britain was now a united country and getting well into the Industrial Revolution. Naturally, thoughts of progress reflected this. Adam Smith was important here, with his ideas of the importance of a division of labor and of the Invisible Hand making a virtue of individual selfishness. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”7 In France, until the revolution, intellectuals and other would-be reformers labored under the restraints of the Church and the monarchy, the ancien régime. One tended therefore to see more theoretical and idealistic arguments, as well as vitriolic attacks on the clergy and others in power. Hume may have hammered at the argument from design, but Voltaire was brutal about natural theology in his satirical Candide (1759), and in The Nun (1796), Denis Diderot was positively cruel about religion and its organizations.
What one also sees is the linking of the cultural and the political with other areas of inquiry, for instance, about humankind. Naturally enough, thoughts of progress tended to get caught up with the comparative anthropology that was becoming increasingly detailed and comprehensive as Europeans extended their travels more and more broadly. It was not just a matter of improving our own society from where we are now but also of showing how far we—that is to say, we white people jammed in between the Atlantic and Asia—had already come. Diderot, a novelist and one of the founders of the Encyclopédie (a very Enlightenment attempt to register and catalog all knowledge), was forward but typical. “The Tahitian is at a primary stage in the development of the world, the European is at its old age. The interval separating us is greater than that between the new-born child and the decrepit old man.”8 Note the analogy with human individual growth. Naturally, this soon led to thoughts of what we would call organic “evolution.” (Back then, “evolution” as a word tended to apply to individual growth.)
Evolution was not an idea entirely unknown. Empedocles, like the atomists, had protoevolutionary views—the kind of views, as we have seen, later endorsed by Lucretius. The elements come together randomly and sometimes form parts of animals and plants—a head here and a leg there—“Here sprang up many faces without necks, arms wandered without shoulders, unattached, and eyes strayed alone, in need of foreheads.”9 In turn these sometimes combine: “Many creatures were born with faces and breasts on both sides, man-faced ox-progeny, while others again sprang forth as ox-headed offspring of man, creatures compounded partly of male, partly of the nature of female, and fitted with shadowy parts.” Every now and again, as Lucretius acknowledged, we get functioning organisms.10 As we have seen, the philosophers—Aristotle picked out Empedocles—knew that this was silly talk. Randomness and chance do not make for functioning complexity. Evolution in any sense as we might understand it is simply physically impossible. This would apply to the physical world, but also very particularly to the world of animals and plants. Final causes demand something extra.
This kind of critical thinking persisted right down through our time period. In the Third Critique, Kant (somewhat tensely) argued that blind law doesn’t lead to purpose, to phenomena demanding final-cause understanding. The “archaeologist of nature” can speculate all he likes, but ultimately he has to find in nature “an organization purposively aimed at all these creatures, for otherwise the possibility of the purposive form of the products of the animal and vegetable kingdoms cannot be conceived at all. In that case, however, he has merely put off the explanation, and cannot presume to have made the generation of those two kingdoms independent from the condition of final causes.”11 Kant’s great follower, the French comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier, made much the same point. He stressed that in considering an organism, we have to look at how the various parts fit and work together. We have to dig into the organization of the organism and ask about purposes. Justifying this, as it were, was something Cuvier called the “conditions of existence.” This demands that we look at the parts of organisms from a final-cause perspective.
As nothing can exist without the re-union of those conditions which render its existence possible, the component parts of each being must be so arranged as to render possible the whole being, not only with regard to itself but to its surrounding relations. The analysis of these conditions frequently conducts us to general laws, as certain as those that are derived from calculation or experiment.12
We must keep value questions in front of us all the time. What is the purpose of a particular part? And from this it follows that any organism midway between two functioning organisms, which there would have to be if evolution be true, would be literally neither fish nor fowl and hence nonviable.
Yet increasingly, evolution was an idea whose time had come. As Kant admitted candidly, there were some very suggestive phenomena. Paradoxically, it was the philosophers who suggested that perhaps all organisms are related. Aristotle particularly took note of the isomorphisms—what we today call homologies—between members of different species. Could this mean something? In his rather convoluted way, Kant thought it might.
The agreement of so many genera of animals in a certain common schema, which seems to lie at the basis not only of their skeletal structure but also of the arrangement of their other parts, and by which a remarkable simplicity of basic design has been able to produce such a great variety of species by the shortening of one part and the elongation of another, by the involution of this part and the evolution of another, allows the mind at least a weak ray of hope that something may be accomplished here with the principle of the mechanism of nature, without which there can be no natural science at all.13
Truly, however, it was progress that was the chief motive force and helped people to ride roughshod over problems with final cause. As with human societies, and likewise drawing analogy with the growth of the individual, Diderot wrote: “Just as in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, an individual begins, so to speak, grows, subsists, decays and passes away, could it not be the same with the whole species?” Going on to say that an organism might continue to exist “but in a form, and with faculties, quite different from those observed in it at this moment of time.”14 Cut from the same cloth, across the Channel, the Scottish-educated English physician and poet Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) held forth.
Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.
Thus the tall Oak, the giant of the wood,
Which bears Britannia’s thunders on the flood;
The Whale, unmeasured monster of the main,
The lordly Lion, monarch of the plain,
The Eagle soaring in the realms of air,
Whose eye undazzled drinks the solar glare,
Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd,
Of language, reason, and reflection proud,
With brow erect who scorns this earthy sod,
And styles himself the image of his God;
Arose from rudiments of form and sense,
An embryon point, or microscopic ens!15
Biological progress, from the blob to the human, is a given, and Erasmus Darwin explicitly tied his biology into his philosophy. The idea of organic progressive evolution “is analogous to the improving excellence observable in every part of the creation; such as the progressive increase of the wisdom and happiness of its inhabitants.”16
As the fortunes of cultural progress rose and fell, so rose and fell the fortunes of evolution. The French Revolution and the consequent Napoleonic wars made people very wary of happy stories about a better future. It is clear that for Cuvier, as for many English conservatives, his enthusiasm for final cause had an added political dimension. A consummate civil servant, he had lived through the horrors of the French Revolution, and he wanted nothing to do with dangerous ideologies, especially those stemming from science. Evolution was not just theoretically wrong—based on the identity between today’s organisms and those mummified by the Egyptians, he would have added that it was empirically wrong too—it was politically dangerous as well. But as the nineteenth century calmed down and took speed, the Industrial Revolution caught fire again, especially with the building of the railways, and social progress came back into fashion. Evolution was not far behind. In his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), the successful Scottish publisher of magazines for the general public, Robert Chambers, showed the way, arguing that nature reaches ever higher, and that it is progress that provides the needed proof, if need there be.
A progression resembling development may be traced in human nature, both in the individual and in large groups of men.… Now all of this is in conformity with what we have seen of the progress of organic creation. It seems but the minute hand of a watch, of which the hour hand is the transition from species to species. Knowing what we do of that latter transition, the possibility of a decided and general retrogression of the highest species towards a meaner type is scarce admissible, but a forward movement seems anything but unlikely.17
What of times to come? “Is our race but the initial of the grand crowning type? Are there yet to be species superior to us in organization, purer in feeling, more powerful in device and act, and who shall take a rule over us!”18 Chambers was confident: “There may then be occasion for a nobler type of humanity, which shall complete the zoological circle on this planet, and realize some of the dreams of the purest spirits of the present race.”19
At midcentury all of this was picked up and made a smashing success by the most famous and defining poet of the Victorian era, Alfred Tennyson, in his lament for a long-dead friend. Perhaps, suggested Tennyson inventively in In Memoriam (1850), that friend was too advanced to live. Perhaps this planet was not yet ready for “a nobler type of humanity.”
A soul shall strike from out the vast
And strike his being into bounds,
And moved thro’ life of lower phase,
Result in man, be born and think,
And act and love, a closer link
Betwixt us and the crowning race …
Whereof the man, that with me trod
This planet, was a noble type
Appearing ere the times were ripe,
That friend of mine who lives in God.
Purpose and Evolution
What price purpose in all of this? Overall, in these early years of its existence, evolutionary theorizing didn’t really rise above the status of a pseudoscience.20 People could see only too clearly that it existed on the back of what many (with reason) considered the very iffy ideology of cultural progress. One mark was the way in which nonprofessionals like Robert Chambers felt free to plunge right in with their ideas, as though they had spent their lives working in the laboratory or out in the field. And this really showed when it came to purpose. The leading professional biologist to get tangled up with ideas of evolution was the French naturalist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, who published his speculations in his Philosophie Zoologique in 1809. That he was an enthusiast for cultural progress is shown if only by the fact that, although a minor aristocrat, it was during the revolution that his career really took off. He became a world-leading invertebrate taxonomist, a scientist of deserved respect, and as such was brought right up against the issue of the end-directed nature of the features of organisms. Famously, he spoke to this issue through the mechanism that now bears his name, the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Why does the giraffe have a long neck? Because its ancestors stretched up to eat the leaves from tall trees, and over the generations the necks became ever longer through this strenuous use. Conversely, cave dwellers are often blind simply because they never use their organs of sight.
As it happens, Lamarck was not the first to use this mechanism, and it was never his chief mechanism of evolutionary change (of which more later), but it does show that he was sensitive to issues of purpose at the individual level and spoke to them,21 unlike others. To be fair, Erasmus Darwin did offer a bit of a hotchpotch of suggestions, included in which was what came to be known as “Lamarckism.” This is more than one can really say for Chambers, for whom purpose at the individual level was never really a meaningful issue. That was not where his mind was at. Not that this meant he was indifferent to purpose. Always, historical purpose or end direction. Indeed, with his obsession about social or cultural progress, the very raison d’être of his thinking about organic evolution was progress from the primitive—in fact, Chambers was much into the spontaneous generation of life from nonlife—to the complex, or what was known back then as from the monad to the man. As was everyone else, from Diderot through Erasmus Darwin (whose poetry is explicitly on this topic) to Tennyson (whose poetry is no less explicitly on this topic). You want value? Evolution gave it to you.
What was the cause of historical direction? Like many intellectuals at the end of the eighteenth century—including many of the signers of the American Declaration of Independence—Erasmus Darwin was a deist, believing in God as Unmoved Mover. Unlike Aristotle’s God, this was more an Unmoved Mover as efficient cause than as final cause, so if we were speaking generically, this would put him in the Plato camp. Probably the same can be said of Chambers, and certainly the same can be said of Tennyson, although he was quite explicitly an Anglican theist, so his chief influence was (and always was to be) Christianity. Interestingly, at a more specific level, as an educated Englishman, Tennyson knew his Plato, and in In Memoriam makes much use of the allegory of the cave—about seeing only indistinctly—taken from The Republic. Tennyson was comfortable philosophically as well as theologically with the idea of a Creator God who stands behind his world, and whose purpose was the nature and well-being of his favored creatures, humans.
The Perils of Purpose
From the perspective of our story, with the midcentury publication of In Memoriam, we have arrived at a fascinating point of tension. Purpose was no less important for the evolutionists than it was for their critics, and yet—thanks in no small part to the evolutionists, if only for the aspects of reality to which they were drawing attention—purpose was all over the place and, like Humpty Dumpty, it didn’t seem that all of the king’s men and all of the king’s horses could put it together again. First, thoughtful people—especially those firmly within the scientific community, like Cuvier, or (initially) those commenting on the work of the scientific community, like Tennyson’s teacher, the English historian and philosopher of science William Whewell (a scientist in his own right, especially with his work on the tides)—were adamant that the clue to understanding organisms was precisely that stressed by Kant.22 Organisms had to be understood in terms of final cause. The parts of organisms did not exist in their own right. They existed in order to complete the whole, to serve the ends of the whole, which was survival and reproduction: “each part is conceived as if it exists only through all the others, thus as if existing for the sake of the others and on account of the whole, i.e., as an instrument (organ).”23
Second, there was recognition of the widespread existence of the already-mentioned isomorphisms, what by 1850 we can without anachronism call “homologies,” between very different species of organism.24 A much-favored example was the ordering of the bones in the forelimb of humans (used for grasping), of the wings of birds (for flying), of horses (for running), and of dolphins (used for swimming). This seems to serve no direct purpose. Does this mean that the world was not so very teleological after all? The trouble was that it was growing increasingly difficult to ignore homology. On the one hand, for all that Cuvier stressed the conditions of existence, it was homology that was the working tool of the comparative anatomist. No one thought that Cuvier could really in isolation deduce the nature of an organism from a bone. It was always done comparatively against other better-known organisms. Whether or not one was an evolutionist, one was interested in relationships even if only ideal. The English anatomist Richard Owen, drawing on Continental thinking, made much of the “vertebrate archetype,” a kind of Platonic form—he identified it as such—that was a template for all vertebrates, including humans.25
On the other hand, there were theological virtues to recognizing homology. In the 1830s, thanks to a bequest by the Earl of Bridgewater, a series of works (eight in all) on natural theology were commissioned, written, and published.26 Whewell drew the task of writing on cosmology, and this set him to thinking about purpose through the universe.27 As a good Christian and Newtonian, the Aristotelian solution of heavenly bodies as living beings was obviously unacceptable, but what purpose did so great a creation actually serve? Could these heavenly bodies be themselves the homes of living beings? This hypothesis of a “plurality of worlds” had a venerable history of several centuries. But Whewell thought it raised immeasurable difficulties for the Christian. If the denizens of other worlds are not human or humanlike, then what is the point of them? If they are humanlike, does this mean that some at least are fallen and that the Savior has to go and care for them? Could Jesus be crucified over and over again throughout time and space?
How could Whewell wriggle out of this one? Two moves came at once to mind. In both cases: Aegrescit medendo. The cure is worse than the disease. First, one argues for what is sometimes known as the “argument (for God’s existence) from law,” that you really don’t need useful ends—what are sometimes called “utilitarian” ends—to show design. Any kind of law-bound pattern will do. “[I]n the plan of creation, we have a profusion of examples, where similar visible structures do not answer a similar purpose; where, so far as we can see, the structure answers no purpose in many cases; but exists, as we may say, for the sake of similarity: the similarity being a general Law, the result, it would seem, of a creative energy, which is wider in its operation than the particular purpose.”28 Second, one might stress how very badly the world is designed anyway! So what if the planets and stars are useless? Much of our world is useless. Hundreds of organisms are born that wither and die without success. “Of the vegetable seeds which are produced, what an infinitely small proportion ever grow into plants! Of animal ova, how exceedingly few become animals, in proportion to those that do not; and that are wasted, if this be waste!”29 Just as well, because there would be nowhere for them to live anyway. Huge areas of our planet are arid and dry and worthless. “Vast desert tracts exist in Africa and in Asia, where the barren land nourishes neither animal nor vegetable life.”30 Suddenly, all of those Kantian demands about purpose seem a lot less pressing and interesting. The ends are much broader and ecumenical than anyone might have thought, and in any case, lots of times there don’t seem to be many ends in the first place.
These are the tangles of natural theology. On top of all of this there is the problem of purpose in what one might call a more positive sense. As Kant agreed, all of that talk about homology was very conducive to thinking favorably about evolution. Right at the end of his life, when he read (in translation) an evolutionary work (Zoonomia) by Erasmus Darwin, he might have become an evolutionist.31 Even in the Third Critique he wrote of it as “a daring adventure of reason” and that “there may be few, even among the sharpest researchers into nature, who have not occasionally entertained it.”32 This said, though the evolutionary hypothesis is not “absurd,” how do you speak to the purposeful nature of organisms? Blind law, let us agree, will not do the trick. That just leads to mess and disorder. Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—even if we agree with Whewell that there is widespread mess and disorder (hardly something compatible with law-bound patterns), not everything is mess and disorder. The seeing eye is more than this. Or the thinking brain. The one attempt to speak to the effectiveness of organisms is the Lamarckian process of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. As Charles Darwin saw, this could hardly be the whole story. When he first became an evolutionist, he was more or less exclusively a Lamarckian, but he soon saw that it was not enough. “Wax of Ear, bitter perhaps to prevent insects lodging there, now these exquisite adaptations can hardly be accounted for by my method of breeding there must be some core[r]elation, but the whole mechanism is so beautiful.”33 You can ignore final cause. That was more or less the tactic taken by Chambers, that one suspects as much from ignorance as anything thought through carefully. But like cancer, it has a nasty way of catching up with you. And if you go the route of Tennyson and give the whole job over to God, you are really no longer doing science. Whewell following Kant was explicit about this. He felt that the problem of final cause meant that there could be no solution to the problem of organic origins. With mixed feelings—a plus for theology, a minus for science—he saw at once what this meant. “Science says nothing, but she points upwards.”34
Teleology, final cause, purpose, seems to have collapsed in on itself. We need it but it is wreathed in paradox. Where to go next? Fortunately, the route was being opened by a newcomer to the field, the just-mentioned Charles Robert Darwin (1809–82). Let us turn to him and his work.