Science

To comment, scroll to the bottom of the page.

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection -- From time to time in high school, some pertinacious friend would occasionally ask if I believed in Adam and Eve or Darwin. My response would be that the Adam and Eve story, having a moral element, was more useful to me than Darwin who had inquired into things that were not likely to be a part of my life. I have now read The Origin of Species for a second time and I have not really changed my mind on this question. I do not believe that this makes me lacking in curiosity about my environment or even a Know-Nothing about science. Rather, I see Darwin much the way that I visit a controversial wing of an art museum, always persuaded that the best of anything is usually pretty good. In any event, what may have been revolutionary in 1859 sounds uncontroversial today.

Did Darwin risk ridicule by men of substance by observing that:

"I look at varieties which are in any degree more distinct and permanent, as steps towards more strongly-marked and permanent varieties; and at the latter, as leading to sub-species, and then to species"?

He was writing, after all, in an age in which husbandry and animal breeding was of consuming interest to even the most religious men. And I certainly take some pleasure in statements like the following in these days of fanatic environmentalism:

"so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!"

This book was not written for a general reader, although that is not to say that it seems very scientific. For example, I expected a far more rigorous -- and hence far more boring -- recitation of the data on which Darwin based his conclusions. But this would be impossible. His subject, after all, is the evolution of every living thing on Earth, not to mention every extinct life form. And so instead the book uses what I would call anecdotal data from the observations of Darwin and countless other scientists to persuade the reader that natural selection is the only logical answer to questions of variety, extinction, heredity, etc.

As a work of persuasion, it obviously could not have been more successful. In part, this was surely owing to Darwin's generally cool presentation, which would be expected in a scientific treatise. But for a reader like me, even knowing I was not going to get a narrative story, I would have welcomed -- indeed, expected -- more excitement, or passion, or wit. Most revolutionary books have plenty of each. I must add that the second time I read the book it was a later edition (circa 1862). In it, Darwin included a number of defenses to criticisms evoked by the first. These do not always stand out since the original work openly anticipated criticism, but in any event all such ruminations on possible problems are well considered and presented fairly.

For example, what about the problem of "missing links"? The answer, if I understand the author, is concerned with "sedimentation," the process by which a dead being is covered with the right material shortly after death so that it is not destroyed. It seems that the world can go several eons without the right material ready to cover its dead inhabitants on cue, with the result that more than a few "links" are permanently missing.

Finally, it occurs to me that even absent the damage Darwin is said to have done to traditional religion, it is at least the case that this early effort in "scientific historicism," like the writings of Marx, et al., contributed to the decline in natural rights philosophy and possibly to the racial "survival of the fittest" views of the Third Reich.