Anchor Books, 1962, 510 pgs.
Summary: Gertrude Himmelfarb (1922 - ) is an historian of the Victorian period. She is especially concerned with promoting the virtues of the Victorian era in the political and public square and correcting Freudian, Relativistic, and wrongheaded historical research. She and her husband Irving Kristol worked to help develop neo-conservatism in political and academic thought in America. Dr. Himmelfarb is a socially conservative Jew.
Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution is a biography of both Darwin and the Darwinian revolution. The material is laid out with great personal sympathy for Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and should be of much value for those interested in the personality, habits, and family of Darwin.
At the same time Himmelfarb is obliviously not amused by Darwin’s philosophical commitments, his persuasive methods, or the common historical narrative that an onrush of new facts caused the current acquiescence to Darwinism.
According to Himmelfarb, there are deep rational problems with Darwin’s theory. Darwin openly “‘defended the procedure’ of inventing a theory and seeing how many classes of fact the theory could explain” (157). The correspondence to reality was secondary to explanatory power. The most accurate theory in Darwin’s conception was the one that could explain the most facts under his assumed conditions.
Darwin enframed his theory with two unprovable but compatible assumptions: continuity over catastrophism and “Natura non facit saltum” (Nature does not make leaps). Continuity is the unprovable belief that the physical processes we observe now have always existed and therefore all changes over time must be explained from currently observable phenomena. Its corollary—nature does not make leaps—requires that there is no unobserved power within or without nature that cause anything but incremental change.
These assumptions committed Darwin to progressive evolution rather than devolution. (Some ancient materialists were devolutionists.) He need to begin with the simple and build up to the complex. Having accepted progressive presuppositions, Darwin then needed a mechanism to explain the origin of species. He landed on natural selection or survival of the fittest augmented with sex selection and environmental adaptation.
Survival of the fittest is at best a tautology: those that survive are fit and the fit are those that survive. Without the hidden assumption of advancement, it is meaningless. Yet Himmelfarb also notes: “the fittest being presumed in some sense to survive, this itself is not sufficient to insure natural selection and evolution. The struggle for existence as readily have a retarding as an advancing effect upon the species, the fittest at the end of the struggle being less fit than those at the beginning, thus giving no opportunity for the emergence of more fit forms that will constitute new varieties or species. The most familiar example is a war which leaves both victor and vanquished enfeebled” (316).
The theory is further weakened by the constant attempt to explain “survival of the fittest” as if the greatest agent of biological change was the individual. Yet at the same time there are obvious examples of animals that function at higher levels than the individual—for instance ants and bees produce sterile workers. This requires Darwin to regularly shift between species survival and individual survival. But the two positions are not mutually compatible.
The same obfuscating can be seen in his understanding of adaptation:
The undisciplined nature of Darwin’s concept of adaption may be seen in his reply to those critics who objected that the same process that might be thought to account for the long neck of the giraffe might also have been expected to produce long necks in other species, the ability to browse upon the high branches of trees being of as much apparent advantage to one quadruped as to another. In a later edition of the Origin Darwin attempted to meet this objection, first by explaining that an adequate answer to this as to so many other questions was impossible because of our ignorance of all the conditions determining the number, range, size, and structure of species; and then by suggesting possible reasons why the giraffe alone developed a long neck, such as that only in that one species were all the necessary correlated variations present in precisely the right degree and at the right time. He frankly admitted that these reasons were ‘general,’ ‘vague,’ and conjectural.’ In fact they were as hypothetical as the hypothesis they were intended to support (318-319).
Himmelfarb writes of his methods and argument:
Darwin’s “essential method was neither observing nor the more prosaic mode of scientific reasoning, but a peculiarly imaginative, inventive mode of argument. It was this that Whewhell objected to in the Origin: ‘For it is assumed that the mere possibility of imagining a series of steps of transition from one condition of organs to another, is to be accepted as a reason for believing that such transition has taken place. And next, that such a possibility being thus imagined, we may assumed an unlimited number of generations for the transition to take place in, and that this indefinite time may extinguish all doubt that the transitions really have taken place.
What Darwin was doing, in effect, was creating a ‘logic of possibility.’ Unlike conventional logic, where the compound of possibilities results not in a greater possibility, or probability, but in a lesser one, the logic of the Origin was one in which possibilities were assumed to add up to probability” (333-334).
“As possibilities were promoted into probabilities, and probabilities into certainties, so ignorance itself was raised to a position only once removed from certain knowledge. When imagination exhausted itself and Darwin could devise no hypothesis to explain away a difficulty, he resorted to the blanket assurance that we were too ignorant of the ways of nature why one event occurred rather than another, and hence ignorant of the explanation that would reconcile the facts to his theory” (335).
“The difficulty with natural selection, however, is that if it explains too much, it also explains toounob little, and that the more questionable of its hypotheses lie at the heart of the thesis. Posing as a massive deduction from the evidence, it ends up as an ingenious argument from ignorance” (336).
“It was probably less the weight of the facts than the weight of the argument that was impressive. The reasoning was so subtle and complex as to flatter and disarm all but the most wary of intelligence. Only upon close inspection do the faults of the theory emerge. And this close inspection, by the nature of the case, was rarely vouchsafed. The points were so intricately argued that to follow them at all required considerable patience and concentration—an expenditure of effort which was itself conducive to acquiescence. . .More important, however, than any assets which Darwin’s theory might be thought to possess was the bankruptcy of his opponents. The only serious rival, as a general theory, was creation. . .And the theory of creation was no more satisfactory than the theory of evolution. Able to defy natural laws whenever it chose, creation was obviously not bound by the usual canons of scientific proof. Any particular hypothesis might be disproved, such as Archbishop’s Usher’s calculation that was created at 8 P.M. on Saturday, October 22, 4004 B. C.; but the general theory of creation was at least as difficult either to prove or disprove—which comes to the same thing—as Darwin’s theory” (350-351).
Because Darwinism cannot proved or disproved, Dr. Himmelfarb explains the role that particularly evolution and natural selection play in the modern scientific community:
“And a few years ago the professor of zoology at Cambridge posed the dilemma in its sharpest form: No amount of argument, or clever epigrams, can disguise the inherent improbability of orthodox [Darwinian] theory; but most biologist feel it is better to think in terms of improbable events than not to think at all. . . .
It is no vulgar ‘act of faith’ that is at issue here, no ignoble acquiescence in orthodoxy or submission to an establishment. What is at issue is the faith in science itself, or in what passes as the necessary logic of science. The theory of natural selection is in many respects the ideal scientific theory; it is eminently naturalistic, mechanical, objective, impersonal and economical. A maximum number of phenomena are accounted for in the simplest and most congenial way. “The desire from some such hypothesis,” as the authors of a work on zoology put it, is as powerful a fact in its perpetuation as it has been in its original acceptance. And when there is no alternative, or rather when the alternative is making do without any theory at all, the pull to Darwinism becomes very nearly irresistible. Science abhors gaps in its logical structures as it abhors leaps in nature—and for the same reason. Without the continuum of scientific theory, without the uniformity of nature, scientific knowledge, indeed science itself, feels jeopardized. Scientist cannot long—and a century is long time as the history of modern science goes—live with the unknown, particularly when the unknown resides at the heart of their subject, when it threatens to pass from transient condition of the unknown into the permanent unknowable. Tyndall was once indiscreet enough to write: ‘The logical feebleness of science is not sufficiently borne in mind. It keeps down the weed of superstition not by logic, but by slowly rendering the mental soil unfit for its cultivation.’ The more it is that the mind must be so entirely habituated to the ideas of uniformity and continuity that even in the failure of fact and logic, the faith in science would remain intact (445-446).
Further, she notes that conversion of Darwin and his cohorts from supposed Christian orthodoxy to revolutionary evolutionist was more about recognition than crisis. The philosophical, skeptical, and naturalistic groundwork had been laid several generations earlier throughout Europe.
. . . “Buffon [1707-1788, French naturatilist] planted, Erasmus Darwin [1731-1802, Charles’ grandfather and noted evolutionist] and Lamarck [1744-1829, evolutionist] watered, but it was Mr. Darwin who said “That fruit is ripe,’ and shook it into his lap.” For what they were experiencing was not the shock of discovery but rather the shock of recognition. They were so quickly converted because there was little to be converted to. And those who chose not to be converted were also as quick in their response (448).
Benefits/Detriments: Himmelfarb is eloquent writter and careful researcher, and I share her general assessment of Darwinian theory and the causes of its prominence. The basic take home of the book is that Charles Darwin was a Victorian gentleman, and there is no historical, factual, or rational necessity for Darwinism.
Besides the helpful history and rational critique of the theory, she provides the following statement:
As often happens, victory, rather than abating hostility, had only served to intensify it. [Darwin’s] cousin, Julia Wedgwood, remarked upon the curious fact that his antagonism to religion increased, “while all the apparent reasons for it were vanishing quantities.” In the same proportion, she observed, as the churches approached him in docile and even eager acceptance of his teachings, so he receded from them. “He was far more sympathetic with religion when his books were considered wicked, by the religious world, than when (as was the case for some years before he died), the dignitaries of the Church were eager to pay him the highest honor (386). [quoted from F. Juila Wedgwood to Francis Darwin, Oct. 3, 1884: Cambridge Mss.]
Recommended for high school seniors, undergraduates, and historically minded pastors.