Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World without Darwin by Peter J. Bowler (review)

Darwin Deleted is Peter J. Bowler’s twelfth monograph on the history of evolutionary theory and its ramifications in intellectual and social history. For his latest look at the subject, he has chosen to approach it through a problem in counterfactual history. What would evolutionary theory have looked like, Bowler asks, and how would it have developed, if Charles Darwin had never discovered natural selection? In an uncharacteristic moment of narrative fancy, Bowler imagines Darwin washed overboard off the H. M. S. Beagle, never to make land again. This premise gives him an opportunity to analyze what was distinctive about Darwin’s contribution to science. More precisely, it enables him to show what was so distinctive about Darwin himself that enabled him to make his discovery, and that led other scientists and the reading public to take notice. By deleting Darwin’s contribution from the record, Bowler can explore how the many other evolutionists writing in the late nineteenth century might have got along without him.

According to Bowler, Darwin was uniquely well placed to discover natural selection. Crucially, he was the only mid-Victorian biologist to combine a detailed knowledge of biogeography with the close study of animal breeding that underpinned his analogy between the differential survival of individuals in the wild and their deliberate selection under domestication. Alfred Russel Wallace’s co-discovery of the principle Darwin called natural selection lacked this crucial focus on variations between individuals rather than groups. Besides, even if we were to take Wallace as having discovered the same process as Darwin, his lack of social and scientific status and connections would have prevented his theory from gaining wide traction. Only Darwin, Bowler concludes, could have made the discovery he did when he did.

Bowler does not come principally to praise Darwin, however, but to bury him. He does so through two arguments which sit uneasily together. The first, familiar to readers of his previous books, is that no one took much notice of natural selection anyway, while the trend toward evolutionism in Victorian science was already underway and would have carried on regardless. It is possible to show how evolutionary thinking would have developed without Darwin because, as Bowler sees it, most late nineteenth-century evolutionists were not Darwinians: they attributed evolution to other, more directed causes than natural selection. Although Darwin’s work was one stimulus for their own theorizing and research, Herbert Spencer, Ernst Haeckel, Richard Owen, and many others would, he posits, have developed their own lines of thought even without Darwin’s influence. Eventually, dissatisfaction with unproven Lamarckian theories about the inheritance of acquired characteristics would have led someone, perhaps Karl Pearson, to have discovered natural selection as Darwin understood it in the early twentieth century. From there, the modern synthesis of what we call Darwinism and Mendelian genetics would have proceeded much as it actually did. Social Darwinism, too, would have developed along not dissimilar lines, albeit under other names.

But while Bowler wants to suggest that Darwin did not make that much of an impression on the development of evolutionary science, he also wants to argue that that development would have been healthier if he had not “jumped the gun” and scooped the theory of natural selection forty years ahead of its time (197). Depending on which case he is making, the historical significance of natural selection fluctuates. When Bowler is arguing for its insignificance, even the description of the rise of non-Darwinian evolutionary theories at the expense of Darwinism as an “eclipse” is “misleading … given that the theory of natural selection had never enjoyed much success among life scientists” (169). But when he is arguing that natural selection “might have been better left for a later generation of scientists,” he has to concede that Darwin’s theory was at the least “an integral part of the scientific naturalism that T. H. Huxley and his followers used to challenge traditional religious beliefs” (203–04).

Bowler...