Retrieving Darwin's Revolutionary Idea by Samuel Grove;

Author:Samuel Grove;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781793632500
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing

Part III

DARWIN’S CENTURY

From Crisis to Reaction

Chapter 7

A Crisis of Representation

Representations of Evolution 1859–1929

We now understand his creative mystery: it is a Trimurti of three principles, Accident, Absolute Ignorance, and Extermination.

—Robert Mackenzie1

A religion, almost a religion and no quarrel and a single scientific statement and no darkness and no question.

—Gertrude Stein2

Darwin’s eschewal of scientific protocol convinced a generation of evolutionary theorists to cast his theory aside in favor of alternatives that could promise to provide a properly scientific account of the course and cause of evolution. If Darwin’s theory was to win scientific acceptance, it would have to do the same. The Modern Evolutionary Synthesis did this by effectively replacing historical causes with mechanical ones. What was a triumph of Darwinian science would travesty Darwin’s counter-scientific idea.

Introduction: The Eclipse of Darwinism

Distinguishing between Darwin’s two theories is useful because it separates an evolutionary process itself (TfE) from its historical causes (TfNS). More importantly, it serves to separate science from counter-science, allowing us to segregate our discussion of their contrasting historical receptions. However, it bears repeating that Darwin never committed to a distinction between his two theories; a fact confirmed by his characterization of The Origin as “one long argument,” his affectionate allusion to “my theory” and, above all, his terminology. Selection, adaptation, and struggle refer to both heritable characteristics that survive across generations (TfE), and the historical fate of organisms in just one (TfNS). If a distinction is to be made in The Origin, it is between Darwin’s inductive argument that evolution had happened, and his deductive argument that evolution would happen, on the premise that certain conditions were fulfilled. The trouble was that Darwin had neither a mechanism of heredity nor of variation to underpin his TfE and upon which his TfNS was based. This forced him to infer hereditary characteristics from individual organisms; an inference that encouraged a conflation between the two theories, but more significantly at the time, placed both theories in jeopardy. To demonstrate why let’s take a very simple example. Imagine we have a population of red organisms that live in a blue environment. Over the course of successive generations, the organisms turn blue. We might infer that the quality of being blue originated in a selective process for camouflage. However, what if the quality of being blue was a direct effect of the environment, or the result of a single genetic leap, or the product of an internal developmental process independent from the environment? These three alternative possibilities constitute different kinds of evolution, requiring, in turn, different causal theories. While Darwin’s conviction was that in general “the nature of variation depends but little on the conditions to which [the organism] has been exposed,” without a mechanism of heredity and variation, he was unable to distinguish direct environmental or developmental modifications from the selection of random variations in hereditary constitution.3 With alternative “means of modification” available, Darwin’s two theories were aggregated under the label “natural selection” and the term “evolution” was employed to designate a generic process by which species change over time.

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