Significantly, and surprising to many, the idea of evolution of species was not Darwin’s own, nor was the idea of natural selection. Darwin didn’t even come up with the idea that we might use the fossil record to trace evolutionary development. To put Darwin into proper perspective, he ought to be credited with four things: (a) the specific tracing of adaptation in a finch from the Galapagos Islands; (b) the frameshifting insight of evolutionary mechanisms including chance mutations alongside the various pressures of natural and sexual selection; (c) the notion that evolution isn’t a linear ladder, but a bushy complex of offshoots; and (d) the proposition that homo sapiens and the primates branched off from a common ancestor.
Unfortunately his implicit claims for a purely mechanical accidentalist take on evolution have brought about a false and frankly destructive cultural frameshift. His grand theory is misframed as having a metaphysical significance rather than a very limited material significance. What the grand theory of evolution by chance mutation and various external selection pressures most certainly cannot account for is the origin of anything (which Darwin readily admits)1; what it can account for is the survival of certain types, the extinction of others and the emergence of various morphologies. In its proper frame evolution via natural selection is a laudable observation and one worth celebrating like any correctly framed scientific insight. But what’s been made of Darwinism is a fanatical cult; an idol-worshipping, nihilistic and culturally destructive institution officiated by a group of cudgel and rapier bearing professors.2
In addition to misframing the significance of Darwin’s insights, he adopted an us-versus-them position—a Team Darwin versus those with other ideas, who suggested that accidental variation and external selection pressures could not account for all of evolution. According to St. George Jackson Mivart (1827-1900), for example, there had to be some measure of “internal force or tendency” at play.3 The immensely popular evolutionary theorist Richard Owen (1804-1892) too pushed back against Darwin’s purely outer, undirected evolutionary mechanism, hypothesising instead an internal genetic cause with a structural logic.4 Even Thomas Huxley, who came to be known as “Darwin’s bulldog,” and who, more than anybody, is responsible for the us-and-them perspective, did not think much of natural selection because, to his mind, Darwin hadn’t shown how this mechanism could produce a new species.5 Indeed, Darwin’s close associate in evolutionary theorisation, Alfred Russel Wallace, ultimately broke with Darwin and turned to spiritualism—earning him the eternal scorn of Darwinists.
Perhaps an even greater flaw in Darwin’s rhetoric is an all-or-nothing fallacy that seems implicit in all the glib nastiness one gets wind of today toward other ideas that threaten the integrity of the mechanical accidentalist narrative.
Speaking specifically of the cuckoo’s instinct to kick its foster siblings out of the nest, for instance, Darwin speculates as follows:
The first step towards the acquisition of the proper instinct might have been more unintentional restlessness on the part of the young bird, when somewhat advanced in age and strength; the habit having been afterwards improved, and transmitted to an earlier age, I can see no more difficulty in this, than in the unhatched eggs of other birds acquiring the instinct to break through their own shells. . .For if each part is liable to individual variations at all ages, and the variations tend to be inherited at a corresponding or earlier age,—propositions which cannot be disputed,—then the instincts and structure of the young could be slowly modified as surely as those of the adult; and both cases must stand or fall together with the whole theory of natural selection. [emphasis added]6
In other words it cannot be that the cuckoo ever understood what it was doing when it ejected others from the nest. What we’re witnessing is an unconscious and blind reflex that was encouraged by natural selection because it worked. Such is Darwin’s proposition. But why must the entire validity of his natural selection idea live or die by this premise? Surely even if the cuckoo knew at some level what it was doing, natural selection would still operate, no? These two mechanisms needn’t be mutually exclusive.
Throughout The Origin of Species one witnesses Darwin in a struggle, at one moment admitting to the limitations of his insight, at the next covertly slipping baloney into our roast beef. Ultimately he felt that the whole of evolution must operate by blind mechanism exerted by external circumstances upon a malleable biological putty, and he was willing to contort Ockham’s Razor and set aside common sense to satisfy an unstated assumption that life is just a kind of Rube Goldberg machine that came together from inert knockings about and sans Rube Goldberg. This presupposition is the only explanation for why he would make such an absurd statement about “the whole theory of natural selection” falling apart in the face of an “internal force or tendency.” The fact that Darwin does not state this assumption or subject it to careful consideration is a major flaw in his work. What would have been lost had he admitted that Mivart and Owen (along with many others) may have had a point? Surely that issue could have remained productively inconclusive in his writings.
One of the things that might possibly account for Darwin’s immovability on this subject has to do with his commitment to the abolition of slavery. According to science historians and Darwin specialists James Moore and Adrian Desmond, Darwin’s dedication to the abolitionist movement was a profound mainspring of his efforts. In their 2004 introduction to The Descent of Man, they explain as follows:
By the 1850s these humanitarians were retreating before younger ‘polygenists’, who saw humans divided into distinct species, each with an independent origin. ‘Hard’ facts alone, the new men argued - skull measurements and archeological comparisons - should enable the species to be ranked ‘impartially’, irrespective of Christian rationalization.
. . .
Darwin was to beat the the pro-slavery polygenists at their own scientific game. For him, the races had diverged from a common stock like other animal varieties, and he had begun to explore the apparently aesthetic features - hair texture, skin colour and so on - that to polygenists marked off the races.
. . .
. . .A case for racial evolution, mounted with abolitionist fervour, might find an audience in radical Dissenting and free-thinking humanitarian circles, where belief in racial unity urgently needed scientific support.7
So perhaps to Darwin’s mind an admission to the workings of an inner force might have armed racists and slavery apologists with the notion that certain races were inferior due to an inherent weakness in their evolutionary powers and therefore deserved to be dominated and enslaved. If all the developments of human progress were purely a matter of chance mutations and responses to exterior pressures, however, then the superiority of the European to the various “primitives” and “savages” would be a mere accident of circumstances, and no claim could be left to argue for inherent superiority and inferiority.
But to complicate this hypothesis, Darwin was still an elitist, racist and eugenicist who opposed universal suffrage. He believed that “all ought to refrain from marriage who cannot avoid abject poverty for their children. . .as Mr Galton has remarked, if the prudent avoid marriage, whilst the reckless marry, the inferior members tend to supplant the better members of society.”8 As Darwin scholars James Moore and Adrian Desmond point out:
Darwin never intended that his evolutionary scheme, whatever its secularizing tendencies, should sanction working-class collective self-help. Unions and cooperatives, which ‘opposed . . . competition’, were, he declared in 1872, ‘a great evil for the future progress of mankind’.9
So sure, Darwin felt slavery was immoral, but he still perceived certain races as primitive, savage and inferior.10 Following the 1867 Reform Act which “created a million new working-class voters,” Moore and Desmond explain:
Darwin’s former student friend W. R. Greg warned in Fraser’s Magazine that democracy negated God’s ‘salutary’ law of natural selection. Government by the unfit would bring ruin. Yet the reckless were increasing and clamouring for power, even the ‘careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman, fed on potatoes, living in a pig-stye, doting on a superstition’, multiplying ‘like rabbits’ and so on. Greg was a mellowed radical like Darwin, who now slipped part of the Irish diatribe into the Descent, quoting Greg verbatim in the proto-eugenical section (Part I, Chapter 5), which dealt with the obstacles to breeding a better class of person.11
As one learns time and again in attempting to understand the history of ideas, of science, and the pursuit of Truth, context is everything. How unfortunate that we have retained the fervour of Darwin’s abolitionist motives but have forgotten why, and lost the thread entirely when it comes to Darwin’s elitism. New Atheist culture has retained the Team Darwin versus his detractors fallacy along with the all-or-nothing fallacy towards accidental mechanism without any urgent need for these attitudes today. These unsavoury aspects of Darwinism have become the patina of an irrational cult that worships Saint Darwin and is committed to following in his footsteps by asking, What would Darwin argue? Darwinists thereby engage in an unexamined tradition and unquestioningly abide by pre-established habits of thought.
There’s an egotistical side to Darwin that deserves pointing out here as well because that quality—not uncommon among scientists (or anyone else for that matter)—may have had more to do with his insistence that there could be no internal agency involved in evolution than any concerns he may have had with the abolition of slavery. The idea of an undirected, external cause of mutation is really what distinguished his theory from Richard Owen’s, and Owen was the star, the most popular evolutionary theorist of his day. Since Owen’s emphasis was on directed, internal mechanism, Darwin’s external mechanism (to the exclusion of all other influences) promised him the laurels. This may explain better than the foregoing reasons I’ve just reviewed why Darwin refused to compromise on what would seem to be an obvious point.
By Darwin’s account, Owen became an enemy owing to jealousy at the success of The Origin of Species. And Owen did indeed publish a harsh critique of the book in the Edinburgh Review in April 1860. According to science historian and Owen biographer Nicolaas Rupke, however, this review appeared “nearly a year and a half after Huxley, Darwin and others had attempted to sabotage Owen’s plans for what was to become his most monumental accomplishment”12—the founding of the Natural History Museum of London. Rupke explains, crediting Desmond:
Huxley belonged to a fast-rising middle class of the new-style biologists who nurtured a strong anticlerical bias and who became the crusaders in the cause of Darwinian evolution. They maneuvered to capture control of the key scientific posts in the metropolis, for example, in the Royal Society and the University of London. The greatest obstacle to the attainment of this goal was Owen, regarded by many of his contemporaries as the greatest living naturalist. . . 13
So Darwin’s motivations for ousting Owen and mischaracterising his critique of Origin as mere pettiness were political and had more to do with reputation boosting and authority than with science and the pursuit of truth.
The New Atheist cult of Darwinism is uninformed and unhelpful. It alienates religious and scientific minds alike because it assumes that the inner life, where an inner tendency abides, is a fabrication. Any well read and free-thinking human being operating with a full deck finds the rhetoric of this discourse insulting to his intelligence because it runs counter to human experience. My point here is that we are being hindered by a grand theory without being familiar with its raison d’etre. Perhaps this state of scientific stasis could be more readily alleviated were we to understand the injunction against idol worship in a secular sense and were science therefore more sceptical of grand theorising to begin with.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies(Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.
Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. Sixth Edition, 1872. New York: New American Library of World Literature, 1958. p. 228.
I’m referring to last month’s article in which I discussed Galileo and his fear of his colleagues rather than of the Church.
Origin op. cit. p. 224.
See Rupke, Nicolas. Richard Owen: Biology without Darwin. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. p. xi. Perhaps worth noting that Owen’s take has enjoyed a comeback since the genetic revolution, although the inwardness implied by the gene has been subverted by the notion of mechanism, especially Dawkins’s popular selfish mechanism.
Barton, Ruth. The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2018. p. 172.
Origin op. cit. p. 237.
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. James Moore and Adrian Desmond eds. Penguin Random House UK, 2004. p. xxviii.
Ibid. p. 688.
Ibid. p. liv.
See ibid. pp. xliv-xlv.
Ibid. p. xlvi.
Owen op. cit. p. 43.
Ibid. p. 39.
You'd get on very well with my 2012 philosophy book The Mythology of Evolution, which deals with topics like these on quite a broad tapestry. It also became my most pirated ebook for some reason! 😁
Thank you for coining "mechanical accidentalism". That's a lucid turn of phrase that illustrates the existential catastrophe we're living through, especially in the way it implies the virtual annihilation of independent thought and, perhaps more vitally, critical self-reflection. The assbackwardness of Darwin the racist fighting for the abolition of slavery echoes the absurdity of today's official crusade against bigotry by an army of woke bigots, or by the legions who believe that staying safe and healthy includes injecting their bodies with poison. The other day I watched in amazement as a friend burst into tears because she's worried about my mental health, seeing as I hold these ongoing "beliefs" in, for example, the grave risks posed by the covid shots. But once she'd finished sobbing, she did add that when I do finally admit that I suffer from a mental illness and when I do finally admit that my brain is polluted with so much conspiratorial nonsense, she and my other true believing friends will forgive me for all the terror I've caused them via my crazy ideas. I wonder if such derangement, such cultish thinking is what results when people believe they're essentially robots with no minds of their own enduring meaningless lives mass-produced in a cosmic factory.