Styles of Knowing: A New History of Science from Ancient Times to the Present

10. The Evolutionary Style

221 Charles darwin PUblished On the Origin of Species in 1859—a very late date, in at least two respects. He had arrived back in England in 1836 from a five-year voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle. Upon his return, he immediately began to flesh out the ideas in his notebooks, and he wrote up his theory of evolution the following year. But it took Darwin more than twenty years to go through his notes and write his book. In fact, he might have taken much longer if an acquaintance, Alfred Russell Wallace, had not decided to publish a book of his own on the same topic. Darwin then had no choice but to hurriedly publish his own work. But the field of biology as a whole was also very late to develop a mature theory of evolution, considering that the nineteenth century is often seen as the age of history, of historical thinking. Around 1800, a historical style emerged in a number of sciences: in astronomy, in geology, and, above all, in narratives of the political and cultural history of humanity. This makes it tempting to look for nineteenth-century forerunners of Darwin. Were there any? In an ideological sense, the eighteenth-century world had been prepared for the theory of evolution by ideas about “transformism.” But these ideas were embedded in scientific frameworks that no longer seemed rel-´ 10 The Evolutionary Style At the time when Nature with a lusty spirit Was conceiving monstrous children each day —Baudelaire 222 ¨ The Evolutionary Style evant to later generations. The nineteenth century called for facts of a new kind, and for a long time such facts were not available, or not in sufficient numbers. One of the great ironies of nineteenth-century science is that the man whose intellectual style makes him Darwin’s most plausible precursor , the anatomist Georges Cuvier, explicitly rejected the theory of evolution . The standard historical account of evolutionary theory explains the late publication date of the Origin mainly by reference to Darwin’s concerns that he might offend religious sensitivities. To be sure, there was hostility to Darwin’s views, but not primarily among theologians. And Darwin himself had no desire whatsoever to challenge Christianity. Furthermore, we should not forget that many of the concepts used in evolutionary theory predated the Origin. Darwin had many sources on which he could draw. For instance, the idea that Earth had a history was accepted long before Darwin’s day. In the seventeenth century, Robert Hooke in England and Niels Stensen (Steno), a Danish scientist working in Italy, had discovered fossil shells and sharks’ teeth at high elevations in the mountains. Hooke and Steno noticed that the shells resembled known living species, but with certain differences, and this observation raised all sorts of questions. Similarly , in the seventeenth century, the philosopher Leibniz had pondered the origin of human languages. Leibniz, like most people at the time, had been reluctant to believe that Adam had spoken Hebrew in Eden. His hypothesis —namely, that Hebrew was at most somewhat closer to the common ancestor of all languages—was in fact a kind of evolutionary theory, though not for the plant and animal kingdoms.1 In searching for Darwin’s predecessors, we must proceed very cautiously . None of Darwin’s forerunners formulated their ideas in the same terms as the later theory of evolution, and most or all of them were influenced by the theories and preoccupations of their own day. The scientific standards of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (leaving aside Leibniz ) did not allow for evolutionary explanations in a modern sense. Both ancient and biblical sources, as well as new geological and paleontological findings, were interpreted in accordance with the dominant, mechanistic mode of thought. Some eighteenth-century theories implied that one species could somehow transform into another, but the way they described this process did not meet the standards of early nineteenth-century biologists. The history of Earth continued to fascinate both scholars and the general public. But researchers could not reconcile their new findings about the structure and functioning of organisms with the concept of evolution from one species to another. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was the only person to attempt this feat, and his theory (published in 1807) was too redolent of The Evolutionary Style ´ 223 eighteenth-century ideas, and its factual basis too weak, especially for English tastes. The geologist Charles Lyell...