Steven Dutch, Professor Emeritus, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
| Year | Biology | Geology |
|---|---|---|
| 1700 | ||
| Selective Breeding | ||
| 1750 | Linnaeus-Classification | |
| Hutton-Founding of Geology | ||
| 1800 | Lamarck-Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics | |
| Voyage of the Beagle | Lyell-Uniformitarianism Geologic Time Scale | |
| 1850 | Mendel-Heredity Darwin & Wallace-Evolution |
In the mid-1700's, the Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus developed the scientificnomenclature system still used in biology. He placed humans in the order of the Primatesalong with apes and monkeys, but seems to have encountered little criticism. Linnaeus'system was purely descriptive, making no claims about origins. Also, its hierarchicalnature meshed well with the hierarchical social and political systems of the time.
The French scientist Jean Lamarck postulated in the late 1790's that organismsunderwent changes in their lifetimes that were passed along to their offspring. Lamarck'scelebrated example is the giraffe, which supposedly had to stretch to reach the leaves oftrees and passed the tendency for a long neck on to its offspring. However, as anyoneknows who has ever seen videos of Africa, the giraffe overshot the target because itgrazes the trees from the top down. Actually, numerous experiments have failed to show anytransmission of inherited characteristics. If Lamarck's mechanism existed, Eskimos oughtby now to be able to live in the Arctic without clothing. In reality, Eskimos can freezeto death just like anyone else. Also, virtually nobody lives permanently above 5000 meterselevation; the human body just can't adapt to that little oxygen.
Nevertheless, Lamarck deserves credit for one important insight: organisms evolve tofit their environment. Lamarck seems to have encountered little criticism for making thissuggestion.
At about the same time, James Hutton and other founders of geology were first workingout the methods for interpreting the record in the rocks, and concluded that the Earth hadto be far older than indicated by the Biblical account. In the 1830's Charles Lyellpublished his concept of uniformitarianism, the present is key to the past. Othergeologists laid out the presently-used geological period names in their proper sequence,though they had no means of estimating the length of geologic time. There was somegrumbling from Biblical literalists, but nothing approaching the fury that greetedevolution.
During the 1830's, Charles Darwin made his celebrated voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle. Andthereby hangs an interesting tale. Why was Darwin on the Beagle? The standardanswer is that Darwin was the ship's naturalist. But British naval doctrine of the daycalled for the ship's physician to be responsible for gathering scientific observations.
British naval discipline was very rigid; seamen did not socialize with officers, juniorofficers did not socialize with senior officers, and nobody socialized with the captain.On a long voyage the captain could go insane from isolation. One option sometimes was tobring his family along so they could all go crazy together. (Just imagine being cooped upwith several children in a room ten feet square on a rolling ship for several months at atime.) The captain of the Beagle, Fitzroy, had reason to be concerned since depression ranin his family and some of his relatives had committed suicide. (Fitzroy himself wouldabout 30 years later.) So another solution was found: take along a civilian, of theappropriate social class but not bound by naval regulations. Darwin was hired aboard as anextra naturalist, or "supernumerary", but his real job was social peer andgentleman companion to the captain.
The plan didn't work very well. The regular naturalist was a capable man but was noDarwin, and he had himself sent home for medical reasons from Brazil. Fitzroy was aBiblical literalist and social conservative; Darwin much more liberal, and poor Fitzroyfound himself almost as isolated as if he'd gone by himself. Nevertheless, the voyage gaveDarwin ample time to make observations You can map the voyage of the Beagle by simplyscanning a world atlas for place names containing "Darwin", "Beagle"and "Fitzroy", commemorating places where the Beagle stopped.
It's easy to cast Fitzroy as a villain here; he really isn't. He was a Biblicalliteralist not so much for doctrinal reasons than because he believed it was the bestsystem for maintaining social order and good naval discipline. Later in his life hebattled courageously for a system of weather forecasting to help reduce shipwrecks aroundthe British Isles. He was capable of fighting for scientific innovation and was concernedabout saving human life. He appears to have been a thoroughly decent if somewhat rigidman. But for the rest of his life he and Darwin had a love-hate relationship and Fitzroywas deeply chagrined at his own unwitting role in the discovery of evolution.
By about 1800, Western philosophers had a perplexing problem on their hands: here wasthis robust, thriving, expanding economy, changing rapidly to meet the needs of society, andnobody was in charge of it! Nobody quite knew why it worked.
Adam Smith published his famous work explaining how the economic forces of supply anddemand interacted via prices and incentives to make a free market economy work. Smith useda somewhat theological metaphor of an "invisible hand" to describe the process.Nevertheless, there's an obvious parallel between supply and demand driving the changes ina free market, and environment and predation driving biological evolution. A greatdeal of the imagery and terminology in early writings on evolution came from economics.The phrase "survival of the fittest" was not coined by Darwin but borrowed fromHerbert Spencer.
Some people took the "invisible hand" metaphor literally. As late as the1970's there were Soviet planners who were convinced that there must be a secret controlcenter that ran the U.S. economy.
One highly influential writer was Thomas Malthus, who in 1798 noted that populationgrowth always tends to outstrip agricultural production, leading to famine. Darwin wasstrongly influenced by the idea that environmental factors limit survival. Population has,of course, far outstripped anything Malthus considered possible because of completelyunforeseen technological developments. This has led many people to a much more dangerousconclusion, namely, that we can ignore the question of ultimate limits.
The Argument from Design is ancient but was brought to its 19th century form largely byWilliam Paley. The Argument from Design holds that the complexity and order in theUniverse argues for an intelligent designer (God), just as, in Paley's words, "awatch implies a watchmaker."
The fit between organisms and their environment had been noted long before Darwin, andin fact was actually cited as evidence in support of the Argument from Design; the fitbetween, say, a hummingbird's bill and the shape of the flowers it feeds on, or thecoexistence of organisms that require one another for survival, was viewed as clearevidence of an overall plan in nature.
In the traditional Judaeo-Christian view, the imperfections of the world were explainedby the Fall. The universe had originally been created perfect and harmonious, but thedisobedience of Adam and Eve allowed evil to enter the world. Although pre-Darwinnaturalists were perfectly aware that most offspring did not survive, they could reconcilethis observation with their religious beliefs by asserting that in the world as originallyintended, reproduction would have been limited and predators would have survived by othermeans. (Nobody seems to have realized that eating a plant kills life just as surely aseating an animal.)
As soon as medieval theologians began postulating that there were laws in nature aswell as in human morality, a disturbing question arose: if the Universe operates accordingto natural laws, then what is God's role? As the centuries rolled on, one phenomenon afteranother moved from the supernatural to the natural realm. The result for some believerswas a "God of the gaps." Those who believed that supernatural phenomena were aregular part of nature found themselves pushed into steadily shrinking enclaves ofphenomena that science had not yet explained. Benjamin Franklin's demonstration in 1752that lightning was electricity and could be controlled or at least mitigated was aparticularly shocking (ouch!) discovery. Here was a phenomenon that had been consideredsupernatural since time immemorial, and Franklin dethroned it. Preachers condemnedlightning rods, but as Isaac Asimov put it, people quickly noticed that the local churchkept getting hit by lightning, while the local bordello, if it had lightning rods, didn't.
The real problem with the God of the Gaps is that we live in a universe of patterns.Once religious believers had created a pattern of steady retreat, nonbelievers wereperfectly justified in assuming the pattern would continue until the gaps shrank to zero,and that the retreat would continue until final surrender.
In any battle, philosophical or military, once it becomes obvious a piece of groundcan't be held, the smart thing to do is give it up and build defenses along lines that canbe held. In the case of theology, once Ben Franklin naturalized lightning (and actuallylong before then), theologians should have dealt with this issue: what if everythingin nature is eventually explainable in terms of natural laws? Or, what if God's actionsare so subtle that no test will ever distinguish them from natural phenomena? Even todayfew theologians tackle these issues with any intellectual rigor.
One of the last holdouts of supernaturalism in science was the nature of life. Manythinkers held that there was something special about life that required a vital forceor elan vital that was different from the laws governing inorganic matter. It wasonce held that chemists would never synthesize organic chemicals, but beginning in themid-19th century that defense collapsed. The idea that life is driven by some sort ofspecial force is termed vitalism
Lightning is just electricity. Life is chemistry and physics. So what? What does thishave to do with God? The important thing to realize here is that hard-coresupernaturalists weren't simply trying for a simple explanation of complex phenomena. Theywere desperately hoping for some phenomenon that would forever be inexplicable inconventional scientific terms, where nonbelievers would be compelled either toacknowledge the existence of the supernatural, or be put in a position of blatantintellectual dishonesty.
A lot of theologians hold that the dream just described is inherently impossible; thatif free will has any meaning, people have to be free to accept or reject the existence ofGod regardless of how perfect our knowledge of the natural world is. But many mid-19thcentury theologians rejected free will. They considered it incompatible with theomniscience of God; if God already knows whether you are saved or not, you can't really befree. They wouldn't have seen any problem with discovering some inescapably supernaturalphenomenon in nature. Also, many of them considered the Bible to be documentation on a parwith any other historical or scientific document; in their view, if you could read theBible and still not believe in God, you could witness a miracle in the lab and still notbelieve.
The fundamental observations on which evolution by natural selection is based arethese:
All these points were obvious and widely known. Darwin and Wallace stated thatindividuals varied, and that those individuals that happened to vary in a way that madethem better fitted to survive had a better chance of mating and producing offspring. Intime, their characteristics would become prevalent.
At the time, nobody knew what might be responsible for individual variation andtransmission of traits. But at about the same time Darwin and Wallace were publishingtheir ideas, the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel was publishing his ideas on inheritance.Although Mendel's work was published openly and he corresponded widely, his results had noimmediate impact. There was simply no known way to apply them to any other major problemsin science. Over the next few decades, they were largely forgotten until they wererediscovered by the German biologists Correns, Tschermak and DeVries about 1900. They weredoing a routine literature search prior to publishing their own results and discoveredthat Mendel had anticipated many of their own findings. To their enormous credit, theypublicized Mendel's work. Mendel is considered a classic example of prematurity inscience: a finding that appears before there are any known ways of exploiting it.
As we can see from the above discussion, the pieces of the evolution puzzle had beenfalling into place for a century with little or no opposition. And the basic elements ofnatural selection are obvious and common-sense observations that had all been notedbefore. So why the fury over evolution? There are a number of reasons:
It's one thing to speak of "Nature red in tooth and claw", or to note thatmost organisms are fated only to be lunch for somebody else. It's another to assert thatnature was intrinsically organized that way. If the world was originally createdharmonious but was corrupted somehow, cruelty and predation are explainable. On the otherhand, if death, predation and parasitism are built into the biological world, indeed arethe main mechanisms by which evolution proceeds, the philosophical and theologicalimplications are troubling.
There's an interesting paradox here. Many theologians who believed in predestinationhad no trouble with believing that a loving God could create people that he knewwere destined to be condemned. These same theologians often had a tremendous problembelieving that a loving God would allow a caterpillar to hatch knowing that it was fatedto be eaten by a bird.
It's also interesting that many atheist debaters bring up predation and parasitism asarguments against the concept of a loving God. It seems to be a general pattern thatextremists on both sides of a debate take one another's arguments at face value withoutsubjecting them to analysis. It doesn't seem to have occurred to either side that perhaps predationin nature has nothing to do with right and wrong or good and evil.
One reason that Lamarck ran into so little opposition was that his concept of evolutionmeshed so perfectly with the Argument from Design. God could instill organisms with aninstinct to behave a certain way, and the better they fulfilled the will of God, the moreperfect their biological adaptation became. With Lamarck, you almost had tobelieve in the Argument from Design.
In Darwin's model, Man is not necessarily the pinnacle of evolution, and there is noguarantee that the world would have evolved humans. Once again humans are dethroned fromthe center of the Universe.
Underlying these objections is a serious threat to the Argument from Design itself. Ifhighly-ordered systems can arise from the impersonal interaction of natural forces, thenorder may not demonstrate intelligent design. Most of the modern assaults on the Argumentfrom Design have built around that very theme. If there is design, it must lie at somedeeper level than the systems themselves.
The two issues above both had religious cores, but in addition, evolution threatenednot just religious ideas in general, but specific Christian doctrines in particular. Forone thing, life was one phenomenon that seemed certain to require some component ofsupernatural action, and that belief took a serious blow. If humans evolved from moreprimitive organisms and if death and predation have always been part of the natural order,then there was no literal Garden of Eden, no literal Adam and Eve, and no Fall in thetraditional sense. But if Christ came to redeem fallen mankind after the sin of Adam andEve, and none of those were literal events, then what exactly was Christ's role?
Also, it's one thing to say that "the Sun stood still" for Joshua, reallymeant the Sun only appeared to stand still, or that a "day" in Genesis 1really refers to an indefinitely long period of geologic time. It's another entirely tosay that there was no literal Adam and Eve or Garden of Eden. Furthermore, the genealogiesthat begin with Adam and Eve must be at least partly mythological. Accepting evolutionmeans that one must interpret a fairly large piece of Genesis as allegorical if notmythological. That in turn, means a pretty radical revision in how one interprets the restof the Bible; why should the rest of it be different?
Already, scholars were doing just that. Archeological discoveries in the Middle East,newly discovered historical documents, and advances in techniques for interpreting ancienttexts had already convinced many historians and scholars that sections of the Bible hadbeen copied from other sources, pieced together by multiple authors, or post-dated(written after their purported date). Conservatives were already feeling highly threatenedby these developments. Liberals had no difficulty accommodating Darwin, but toconservatives Darwin was the last straw.
This was the Victorian era, and you simply cannot discuss evolution withoutreproduction. Victorians had some difficulty accepting that there were plants that gotpollinated by tricking insects into trying to mate with them, for example.
Victorians have been accused of being prudish about sex. Frankly I don't see it. Theirart shows a lot of unclad human forms; their fashions are figure-flattering (evenexaggerating - this was the era of bustles and corsets) and discreetly revealing. Culturesthat are really sexually hung-up keep women hidden and conceal them in shapeless clothing(the Middle East being the archetypical example). The Victorian era managed to generateenough sexual art and literature to keep an anti-pornography crusader named AnthonyComstock permanently employed.
So what were the Victorians? They were staggeringly, stupefyingly sentimental.Everything about them; their prose, their art, their fashion, is dripping with honey andcovered with sugar. It must have been a rough time for diabetics. It would be hard forsuch a sentimental society to take the utilitarian view of sex or predation that evolutionrequires. One of the toughest sentimental hurdles to escape in biology is anthropomorphism,projecting human traits onto other species. A housefly can sense its environment, but it'sextremely doubtful that it has any more self-awareness than a computer-driven roboticmachine. So is the death of a fly any more a moral issue than the junking of an obsoletecomputer? Much of the problem people had with the alleged cruelty of evolution was simplygetting over anthropomorphism.
The sentimentality of the Victorians also explains their seeming indifference to socialills. They weren't indifferent - their concern made Charles Dickens pretty prosperous -but they had an unshakable optimism that things would inevitably get better, that thesocial ills were transient. And to be fair to them, things were getting better,very dramatically so. Someone born in 1800 would live to see a world with enormousimprovements in standards of living, life expectancy, and public health. If the Victorianswere all that indifferent to social ills, how did these improvements happen?
Read about the aftermath of Darwin
Stent, Gunther, 1972; Prematurity and Uniqueness in Scientific Discovery, ScientificAmerican, v. 227, no. 6 (December), p. 84.
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Created 10 April 1998, Last Update 1 September 1998