Darwin: ahead of his times in more ways than one
In a meticulously-researched essay for Prospect this month, based on his and James Moore’s groundbreaking book Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Adrian Desmond argues that Darwin’s development of his theory of evolution was crucially catalysed by his personal and family commitment to the abolitionist cause. Based on new analyses of his letters, papers and private notes, Desmond paints a picture of Darwin that is far more complex than the traditional vision of an impartial scientist fighting against his society’s traditional beliefs (and his own innate conservatism). Behind the rational self-presentation was, Desmond argues, a shocked and deeply-felt aversion to those brutal realities Darwin had himself witnessed on his far-from-picturesque travels with the Beagle.
Perhaps most tellingly of all, Desmond’s account also teases out one of the saddest ironies of Darwin’s thought: that this brilliant advocate of the common humanity of all races was also, in his later years, resigned to the ethnic cleansings of colonial expansion as a matter of Malthusian inevitability. Still, if “Darwinism” was never as truly distinct from “social Darwinism” as advocates of the purity of his original theory might claim, it is nevertheless high time that, 200 years after his birth, we celebrate Darwin’s life and work as a moral as well as as a scientific triumph; and his youthful ambition for its humanitarian drive and compassion as much as for its clarity of insight.
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Mr. Darwin’s book was “proudly” reasoned, I learn from the authors of Sacred Cause. He had good reason to be proud of his reasoning. His theory was carefully constructed, supported by evidence and an objective (relatively so) view of the natural world that allowed him to see through the moral bias of the day… moral bias. That’s right: if Darwin had reasoned “morally” he would have formed a silly idea based on his own prejudices and forced all the evidence to fit his theory, just as, for example, the plantation apologists did, or the charlatan anthropologists of the day, with their skull theories, or any of the host of others. Moral beliefs do not inhibit good scientific theorizing, but they don’t “drive” the theories either. At best, they are one of many influences that contribute to forming a mind capable of generating a thought. The authors take a strong view of moral causes in Darwin’s case. What could be less likely than that views of abolition “drove” Darwin to see the world in terms of natural selection? Isn’t this placing the lowest agent in Darwin’s thinking at the top of the list? One reads these attempts to find moral drivers in the backseats of great thinkers with a sense of wonder. Why? Is this some kind of attempt to humble reason (from failing to distinguish it from calculation, perhaps?)? Or, maybe, the idea of morals generating great thoughts provides a kind of consolation. Who knows? All I know is that it is poor reasoning. Here is the line from “Sacred Cause” that speaks volumes: ‘But many naval naturalists had seen as much as Darwin had and not cried “Evolution!”‘ What strangely vehement diction. That’s right… there’s no such thing as a superior ability to synthesize knowledge. It must have been the morals.
That Darwin delayed publication demonstrates not that he was driven by moral convictions. Moral convictions could just as well (and more likely) have given him courage to push for early publication. Of course, one could argue that it was because he didn’t want to damage the cause that he delayed, and that would be perfectly in line with the opportunistic use of reason that characterizes this sort of historical speculation. What forced Darwin to publish? Rivalry over the credit for a great idea.
Darwin’s moral advantage was that he was free of the moral biases of his time – freedom, in short, from the vast majority of what constitutes morality — that would have inhibited his intellect from perceiving the significance of the evidence and scientific works of his time.
Here’s another choice bit: “The answer is clear. Primed by his anti-slavery heritage and horrifying experience of Brazilian slavery, Darwin returned to England in 1836 and immediately conceived an image of common descent.” Yes… and perhaps an angel visited him while he was jarring beetles. Is it even possible to imagine presumption coupled with intellectual senility expressing itself in such naked and embarrassing terms? Someone has let their apples hang undisturbed on the tree of knowledge. Please, take a bite… I won’t tell.
Common descent was a consequence of the theory. It follows directly from observations that immediately present themselves once the idea of selection becomes clear. Only members of the same species can procreate! Is that not clear enough?
It was 1961., and Dr. Carl Jung, (1875-1961) was very
tired. After all, he had spent over 60 years
attempting to explain the nature of “mind”
and reality. In 1932., he had met the
physicist Professor W. Pauli, and they spent
some 25 years discussing the problems.
They did come to a major conclusion about
reality, and the “mind.” It’s called,
“acausality,” – that which acts as a balance
to cause and effect events.
The website above explains an experience,
that was verified by senior researchers
at Princeton University. It’s about acausal
events.
There is greater details on the web, search
google under: Kochab, 1080 (woyano).
“numomathematics”
What is perhaps not fully explored is how much influence Charles Darwin exerted on early social reformers of India.
That he did along with Thomas Paine, there is no doubt about it.
One of the most radical firebrand reformers- Mahatma Jyotirao Phule (1827-1890) who took on Brahmin-dominated Indian establishment- mentions Darwin’s work in his book -”Shetkarayacha Aasud (Cultivator’s Whipcord), July 1883″
Jon’s perspicacious comments above are right on right on the nail. Desmond (and Moore) can only conceive of scientific theories as deriving directly from the social and political milieu of the time. In their biography of Darwin they write: “We can trace the political roots of his key ideas.” Of course they can – by tendentious selection, interpretation and insinuation. It’s called confirmation bias.
In this article Desmond writes:
“The standard tale of a disinterested gentleman-naturalist’s journey of discovery will no longer wash. Rather, to understand both the man in his times and the true radicalism of his theory, we must look to the political and moral considerations that shaped his thought.”
What he means is that it won’t wash with him, because he starts with the *presupposition* that socio-political affairs directly shape scientific ideas. So when he writes that we must [sic] look to political and moral considerations of course he ‘finds’ them.
The weakness of Desmond and Moore’s thesis is illustrated by this comment of Moore:
“We are making the case that it was necessary for Darwin to believe in ‘brotherhood science’ in order to see common descent. We can’t figure out where else he got it from.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSLD55838020090123
For an answer to that, see Jon’s comments above.
See also John van Wyhe, “Mind the Gap”, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 2007, 61, pp. 177-205, in which article Wyhe shows how fashionable notions about Darwin’s work arise and are perpetuated:
http://darwin-online.org.uk/pdf/2007_MindtheGap_A544.pdf
An addendum to my previous comment:
Desmond writes “painstaking archival investigations into Darwin’s letters, papers and notes” supports his (and James Moore’s) contention that, as the blurb introducing the article puts it, “Darwin was driven to the idea of common descent by a great moral cause”.
Taking the period of the early development of Darwin’s ideas on transmutation, I have searched the four “Transmutation of species” notebooks of 1837-1838 at Darwin Online and found that Darwin mentions slavery a total of three times. I was unable to find a single mention of slavery in his letters from the time he left the Beagle to his writing the first full sketch for “Origin” in 1844.
I am really interested in the Gerber vs. Darwin theory of evolution, a rather dramatic new theory disturbing yet liberating if science continues on the current course of validating it. read it on http://skeptic.me . The controversial part is the vested interest in maintaining Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, exactly the same type of crew thought promoted the “Flat Earth” fiction to use fear to discourage others from discovering the spice routes type of scheme.
The article is interesting, but the conclusions unconvincing. Darwin’s theory does not lead to the conclusion that the various ethnic humans are NOT separate species; in fact, absent a knowledge of the groups’ histories, one might conclude that natural selection in the different environments had in fact produced definably different species of human. Even today, the designation of human groups isn’t totally agreed upon – are we in different subspecies? It all depends on how you define your terms.
Given that Darwin returned to a nation that had given slavery up, it seems unlikely that this would be a strong factor in what he would or wouldn’t publish. There are several much more likely influences (Christian reaction, his own wife’s feelings, there are many better hypotheses than slavery issues) that kept him from doing it until Wallace’s paper came along.
When I first read the opening sentence of this article it struck me that it was a description of the treatment of Darwin’s own countrymen. It seems, however, that he needed to travel thousands of miles away from Down House where he lived at a very comfortable and safe remove from the vile circumstances in which the majority of his countrymen lived, in order for his humanity to be troubled by the cruel and inhumane practices of slavery elsewhere. Had Darwin’s quest taken him a mere 20 miles from Down House to London, he would have been able to view the subhuman conditions of enslavement inflicted on millions of his own countrymen. The conditions everywhere in London (and the rest of Britain), which so horrified Henry Mayhew, Charles Dickens, William Blake, Capt Coram and many others seemed to have passed Darwin by.
I am puzzled by the enthusiasm of Prospect’s top management for Andrew Desmond’s essay. ‘Meticulously researched’ it may have been, but the defects of reasoning, if found in an undergraduate essay, would surely have had it returned for rewriting.
The great ugly ditch in Desmond’s article is between the moral passion that is supposed to have driven Darwin’s research and his 1859 book’s gross unsuitability as a blast against slavery. He was evidently aware that his naturalistic theory of human origins would convulse the Christian establishment. But the Christians most likely to be annoyed had voted down the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833. To open a second front without announcing his main anti-slavery message would have been strategically and morally incompetent. How many people realised, in the post-publication furore that Darwin’s real target was human racial discrimination?
As others have noted, Darwin’s announced thesis had little original value in establishing the oneness of humanity. The Origin of Species did not rule out multi-linear evolution of the human species, with the possibility of ‘races’ (Darwin used that word on his title page) proceeding from different geographical origins to different levels of advancement, with different natural entitlements to survive. More recent knowledge of Horizontal Gene Transfer has further blurred Darwin’s picture of the tree of life, with humanity advancing from a single succession of microbial, marine and reptilian ancestors.
As for Desmond’s assertion that, pre-Darwin, ‘interbreeding was believed to result in “hybrids,” who sooner or later became infertile‘, the slave owners themselves provided and observed plentiful evidence to refute that. Adam and Eve provided a better basis for common human origin, if that‘s what Darwin wanted to proclaim. A case for a common origin in earlier life-forms does not carry moral messages about how humans should all treat each other, any more than eagles and pigeons would become compatible in the wild by knowing that they were all birds. If anyone says that Adam and Eve hadn’t prevented their children from killing each other, the mutual human slaughter and prodigious species destruction in the century after Darwin doesn’t look much like success either.
I’ve no doubt that Darwin applied himself to his findings with exemplary scientific objectivity. I suggest that if any social impulse made him read evidence as he did, it could have been Burkean conservatism. In reaction to the French Revolution, Victorian gentleman-romantics preferred what grew and changed by long experience over what was made by sudden fiat. But even if we allow Desmond’s belief that Darwin was a passionate abolitionist during his cruise on the Beagle, we need not suppose that his decline into colonial genocide was from some moral pinnacle evident within his writings on natural selection. I suggest that he was driven by, not in spite of, his belief in natural selection, to his late-Victorian approval of replacing ’less favoured races’ in fruitful lands. Such historic outrages were crude but understandable and explicit applications of Darwinism. Scientific racism did not ignore Darwin.
Happily, Darwin did exhibit faith in the capacity of the Fuegans to rise above the level at which he had observed them in the 1830s. This was most notable in 1870, when he wrote that he was ‘charmed’ by the success of Christian mission work in Tierra del Fuego having, he said, ‘prophesied its utter failure‘. From then to his fife’s end he donated annually to the conservative evangelical Anglican South American Missionary Society. He and they, and I, held that evolution by the survival of the fittest through natural selection is probably true – and immoral.