The pobble has no toes...

It is, as JBS Haldane noted, a fact the whole world knows, which he called "Aunt Jobiska's Theorem" after Edward Lear's poem:

The Pobble who has no toes

Was placed in a friendly Bark,

And they rowed him back, and carried him up,

To his Aunt Jobiska's Park.

And she made him a feast at his earnest wish

Of eggs and buttercups fried with fish;--

And she said,-- 'It's a fact the whole world knows,

'That Pobbles are happier without their toes.'

What fact? Well, it doesn't matter. Any fact, that everyone knows, will do. Try this:

On the morning of November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species made its first appearance and the world changed forever. An age of faith was plunged into profound religious doubt, and believers of every kind rose to pronounce anathema on Darwin’s godless tract, sparking a fresh battle in the long-running war between science and religion. But while the reactionaries raged, the scientific community soon came to accept natural selection, and the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work in 1900 (which marked the founding of modern genetics) set the seal on Darwin’s triumph by providing the missing piece to his puzzle – a scientific understanding of just how inheritance works.

As reviewer Jim Endersby, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, notes, everything except the date is false about that story. But it is a fact that everyone knows. These are myths, and they have grown up for reasons that have to do more with the ways different people try to capture and enslave history for their own reasons than with the enjoyment of history in its own right.

The most successful English book in 1859 was Sir Samuel Smiles' Self Help, the first of its genre, from the same publishers as Darwin's book. If you ask me, that changed the world far more than Darwin's tome ever did, in large part because fashions in culture are more rapid than shifts in scientific ideas. It took over 300 years for heliocentrism to change the way we saw the universe; it will take a similar duration for Darwin's demon to pervert the course of history.

On the myths above - religious believers tended to accept it as part of the geological revolution that had been going on for decades by 1859. Strong religious opposition to evolution did not begin until the early 20th century. Natural selection was already accepted, but not as a mechanism of evolution, before Darwin, and acceptance of that took over 60 years, and is still argued over. Darwin was not godless, but agnostic in his writings about the existence of God. Like his many clerical friends, he did not see evolution as being antireligion.

Mendelians opposed Darwinian evolution for the better part of 30 years, and as late as the 1950s there were serious scholars who though evolution was abrupt because genes were distinct (arguably, Jeffrey Schwartz still thinks this). And of course genetics did not stop with Mendel, and things have gotten... complex... since.

Why do these scientific myths get going? Scientists abuse history in the service of their own polemics, although there are honourable exceptions, like the late A. J. Cain, who did marvellous work on species, or the unlate Michael Ghiselin, who is doing work on the 19th Century morphologists and idealists. But often a history gets accepted by a science because it is how it ought to have gone. By focussing on the successes, ignoring the failures, and smoothing over the complexity, this or that view is firmly supported so that all right-thinking undergraduates come to the right conclusions...

I suspect this is necessary in science. After all, in science you need to teach students to be scientists, not historians, and moral lessons from history are a great propaedeutic technique, as the Christians knew back in the early days from Augustine onwards. Historians of science, though, take great relish in demolishing these myths, where they can.

Some myths appear in Endersby's article, though. He thinks David Lack's estimable work on Darwin's finches, seemingly speciating by selection for different adaptive niches, was something Darwin should have seen the possibilities of. But while Darwin did not directly observe selection going on in the finches now named after him (how could he? - Lack spent years studying these finches, while Darwin spent a few days), he did propose that the mechanism of speciation was divergent selection, and that is highly contested by modern biologists. Some think divergent selection would never be enough to overcome the averaging effects of crossbreeding.

Endersby also thinks Darwin did not get "more Lamarckian" as time went by in successive editions. This is, in my view, dependent on what one counts as "Lamarckian". The sole basis for think Darwin was indebted to Lamarck in any way apart from transmutation of species, is that Darwin increasingly appealed to Use and Disuse modifying the heritability of traits that were use or not. According to the mythological history of Ernst Mayr, this was "Lamarckian" not because it was opposed to selection, but because it was not Weismannian - and required "soft" inheritance. By Weismann lived and worked after Darwin's publication, and the Weismann's Barrier he is famous for was published after Darwin's death.

Moreover, Lamarck's view had nothing to do with strength of heritability, but of the changes in the body being inherited directly (a view he shared with pretty well everyone at the time). So is Darwin "Lamarckian" or not? Only if you accept Mayr's mid-20thC formulation of the issues based on work done after Darwin. Otherwise, he is simply accepting a view that he got from various continental naturalists, which has little or nothing to do with Lamarck.

So Darwin is Lamarckian in Mayr's sense, but not in a historical one. Endersby fails to distinguish between this myth and the history as well. That said, I'm picking nits. Recognition of the ways scientists use history is coming, slowly, and it's good to see it in a major public intellectual magazine.