Readers may be somewhat surprised that Evolving Thoughts hasn't made much of the Darwin bicentennial and the Origin sesquicentennial so far. Well, I haven't needed to, given the number of other folk making hay from this. In particular I recommend Carl Zimmer's piece, over at his new digs with Discover magazine. Carl points out John van Whye's paper that showed that Darwin didn't "sit on the theory for 20 years" but rather followed a preplanned sequence for backing up his ideas. However, when Charles planned this research, he greatly underestimated the time it would take him (the Cirripedia volumes, where he dissected and described all known and extinct barnacles, took him much longer than he anticipated), and so it blew out from 8 to 20 years.
But there's another point I want to make about this anniversary, and it is this: Darwin, as important as he was, is not the crucial man in the history of biology. And to make this claim out, I have to discuss some theories of history, and how they affect the history of science.
I must start by disclaiming anything that might be taken by creationists for comfort. Darwin is significant. He is, in fact, about as significant a figure in biology as there is. Few other biologists have close to the sort of influence he did on the subsequent path of biology - maybe Pasteur, Mendel, and Crick and Watson come close. But is Darwin the font of wisdom? No, not really. He's a man who did a very good job, who started some crucial lines of research, and who was right more often than someone in his time and place had a right to be, but his ideas have been radically superceded by modern biology, and his main role these days is to be used as a banner for biologists of several schools to flock underneath to disparage others.
Historians have several approaches - none of which are ever used alone - to explaining historical processes, and science, whatever else it is, is a historical process. One is the so-called Great Man theory, in which some singular figure is the founder of all that is right and true, or influential. Coming from the old style of history in which kings and warriors and people of "breeding" were the players of history, when applied to science, it took discoverers who were being honoured for their work and made them into the motive forces of science. As Carlyle said, "The history of the world is but the biography of great men". On this account biology is the outcome of work by giants like Linnaeus, Owen, Darwin, Huxley and Pasteur; all the rest is filling out the details and making commentary.
Another is the Zeitgeist view: history occurs because some developments are just "in the air". Gertrude Himmelfarb, then a socialist, used this argument to deprecate Darwin's ideas in her Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, by claiming that as Wallace was on the verge of the idea, along with Owen and the author of the Vestiges, evolutionary biology would have occurred anyway without Darwin and we shouldn't make him crucial to the progress of biology. A similar account is the Marxian one that economic factors drive ideas, and so with or without Darwin, the English would have promoted their capitalist system of division of labor and competition into biology.
Both of these extremes are, to me, wrong. Darwin's individual contributions changed the way that biological problems were approached from then until now. In particular, his notion of common descent, or the branching tree of evolution, seems to me more important than most historians have given him credit for. What had been a logical arrangement of taxa became a historical outcome, and it radically changed how evolution was received and understood from the previous linear accounts of his grandfather Erasmus, Lamarck, Geoffroy, and Chambers (who wrote the Vestiges). In fact it was that idea that was immediately taken up by naturalists, not natural selection, which languished as a motor of evolution for another 60 years.
But biology like any science proceeds at a time from a series of shared problems, and a problem has only so many solutions that satisfy the standards of a discipline at a time. It is likely that naturalists would have stumbled on the same solutions as we now have, only in a longer (or shorter) time, without Darwin. Also, as founding figures tend to act as attractor points, had it been Owen whose ideas introduced evolution, we may have taken longer to understand the role heredity and selection play in evolutionary adaptation, because people would be appealing to the authority of the founder, as Romanes did with Darwin when he coined the term "neo-Darwinians" to sneer at Wallace and Weismann for their strong selectionism.
In fact, evolution as we now have it is the result of all those "minor" figures contributing to both the logic and the empirical work; it doesn't resemble much of Darwin's views in many respects. Some changes since Darwin:
- The branching tree is now a net, much of the time, because of lateral genetic transfer and hybridism
- Selection is rarely if ever thought to cause speciation in sexual organisms; at best it makes isolated populations adapt to novel surroundings, causing some degree of reproductive isolation as a side effect
- Inheritance is regarded as particulate: Darwin thought it blended
- Darwin thought that usage of traits strengthened the likelihood those traits would be inherited, and non-usage would weaken it. We do not (although we now have methylation patterns and other epigenetic factors modifying the expression of genes)
- Darwin thought that "land bridges" explained widely dispersed but closely related taxa; we now have tectonic plate movement to do that
There's more, but you can see that Darwin's own ideas are way out of date. And they carry no authority for the modern biologist. So why is he treated so?
The answer is that one of the ways scientists use history, as Polly Winsor has shown, is to mark out scientific territories. If - say - Mayr claims Darwin as his predecessor (even though Mayr disputes most of Darwin's ideas on species and speciation), then if you claim Darwin as a predecessor, you must be in Mayr's camp. It's like kids drawing a line in the sand and daring their antagonists to step over, and when they do declaring "Now you're on my side!"
So while Darwin was important, it's worth noting that biology is the vector sum of all the influential biologists whose work is cited or started some program of research. And no authority remains an authority for very long. Many of the things Darwin is credited for are actually the work of others - evolution itself (Maupertuis), selection (Wells and Mathew), biogeography (Wallace and the Victorian explorers), sexual selection (Erasmus Darwin) and so on. What Darwin did was create the first synthesis, and it was very fruitful. It just wasn't all there was.
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"It is likely that naturalists would have stumbled on the same solutions as we now have, only in a longer (or shorter) time, without Darwin."
True. And it is even more true of Darwin and biology than of Newton and physics.
I'm not out to bash Darwin. But frankly the adulation sometimes gets a little unseemly. (Could there at least be more representation of the young Darwin rather than the Moses-like big-bearded old white guy? Or better yet, Wallace?)
In no way could someone whose notions of inheritance included blending and gemmules be considered the founder of MODERN evolutionary biology.
You don't talk to many insect evolutionary biologists, do you? :-)
I was going to suggest that you should add Fisher to the list of influential biologists, but I guess that's just me marking out my territory.
Colugo - you will be delighted to know that Darwin uses a picture of his young self on his blog.
To be fair, over the years Darwin dithered about particulate vs. blending inheritance. In his hypothesis of pangenesis, outlined in Part 2 of Chapter XXVII of The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868) he posits "gemmules" as units of inheritance, and they're particulate:
(Bolding added)
Oops. Reference for the quotation is page 374.
That's not to make Darwin's view particulate - as the particles here are not particles of inheritance but of some physical or biological material, which can aggregate stronger or weaker hereditary traits. In other words, these granules are the basis of the blending.
However, in his Notebooks, Darwin did toy with particulate inheritance, as I recall.
I think Mendel is a textbook example of the time is (not) right theory. Here is a great man whose work was unappreciated for some 40 years.
You asked for 'em... ;)
"Many of the things Darwin is credited for are actually the work of others - evolution itself (Maupertuis), selection (Wells and Mathew), biogeography (Wallace and the Victorian explorers), sexual selection (Erasmus Darwin) and so on. What Darwin did was create the first synthesis, and it was very fruitful."
It's true that Darwin didn't come up with all these things from scratch. I would have worded things a little differently, though, because even though Darwin couldn't claim priority for natural selection he did come up with it independently (as far as I am aware Darwin only knew of Matthew's work after he had published and Matthew was frustrated that Darwin didn't know of his work). I think this is significant being that natural selection was described at least twice but was generally ignored, overlooked, or generally not treated as significant. The question then becomes who should "get the credit" for natural selection; Wells and Matthew for coming up with it earlier or Darwin & Wallace for their independent work that popularized natural selection as a potential evolutionary mechanism? (I say "potential" because even if Darwin's work convinced people that evolution was real not everyone accepted natural selection as the mechanism.)
Other than that I just had a few minor additions as to why we often give Darwin so much credit (whether these observations justify giving him the credit is another matter). In the case of Darwin and Wallace, Darwin seems to have been favored by the other naturalists he knew because they knew he had been working on the problem for so long. Wallace deferred priority to Darwin, too, and so even the "co-discoverer" of the idea bolstered Darwin's reputation.
I also think that the fact that On the Origin of Species was an abstract is important (as some historians have pointed out). If Darwin finished his technical work, Natural Selection, his ideas may not have been as widely disseminated or accessible; the fact that the public could pick up his book and read it helped.
As for Darwin's modern-day popularity, I think it somewhat stems from the vast amount of material he left behind in the form of books, notebooks, and correspondence. His life provides a compelling narrative of how a young man planning to settle down in a quiet country parish instead sparked a scientific revolution, the masses of correspondence and notebooks allowing us to get into Darwin's head and learn what he was thinking as he developed his ideas. Sometimes the ease with which we can come up with narratives about Darwin isn't a good thing, leading to more confusion than enlightenment, but the vast source of materials we have from him allows us to know Darwin in a much more personal way.
That's all I've got; barely any quibbles at all in there, really.
As Carlyle said, "The history of the world is but the biography of great men".
... and, if one thinks about it long enough, one realizes that it's probably much more the other way around.
I think that you're way off the mark here. The first three of your arguments that Darwin is touted too highly are as follows:
"In fact, evolution as we now have it is the result of all those "minor" figures contributing to both the logic and the empirical work; it doesn't resemble much of Darwin's views in many respects. Some changes since Darwin:
1. The branching tree is now a net, much of the time, because of lateral genetic transfer and hybridism
2. Selection is rarely if ever thought to cause speciation in sexual organisms; at best it makes isolated populations adapt to novel surroundings, causing some degree of reproductive isolation as a side effect
3. Inheritance is regarded as particulate: Darwin thought it blended"
Well, the "net" is not much of a net for complex organisms, because "lateral gene transfer and hybridism" haven't made much of a dent in their genomes. Is the genome of primates, cats, teleosts, or angiosperms irrevocably messed up by gene exchange, so that we can't construct valid evolutionary trees? I don't think so. Trees are still made and used routinely, and are quite informative. Hybridism and lateral gene transfer are usually minor factors in most species.
I don't understand #2 unless you are referring to Darwin's idea that species evolve to fill up the polity of nature. In some respects this view survives, especially in ideas of sympatric speciation and ecological speciation. But at any rate, this is again a quibble. The main idea--that new species arise from old ones, and that leads to common ancestry--is what is important.
Finally, so what if Darwin got the mechanism of inheritance wrong? It DIDN'T MUCH MATTER for his theory. Whether variation arises due to mutation or via "changed conditions," it is still, as Darwin thought, the stuff of evolution.
The fact is that EVERY scientific discovery would eventually have been made by someone. Without Newton, we'd still have calculus, without Einstein, relativity. Darwin's greatness did not lie in the fact that evolution was a unique, one-off contribution that couldn't have been made by another. It lay in the fact that in The Origin and in his other works, Darwin put so much evidence together, in such a convincing way, that his theory was almost impossible to reject. His genius lay in waiting decades while accumulating evidence until that evidence crushed any intellectual opposition, in making clever analogies and arguments, such as the parallel with artificial selection, in his rhetorical skills, and in his use of evidence that other people might not have thought of, such as island biogeography. Above all, Darwin proposed all major tenets of evolutionary theory AT ONCE, rather than piecemeal. There is no guarantee that had he not done this, somebody else would have proposed such a complete theory. A.R. Wallace certainly didn't, and probably wouldn't have. At any rate, remember that The Origin contains all of the following six propositions, every one of which still holds in modern evolutionary theory
1. Organisms evolved (and began with one or a few early forms.
2. Organisms split, so that one lineage could become two or more (speciation)
3. That speciation led to common ancestry between any pair of species, so you could trace the tree back to nodes, and find evidence for those common ancestors
4. Natural selection was the main engine of evolutionary change, and the only process that could produce adaptation
5. Not all features, though, are adaptive--there are other processes of evolutionary change.
6. Evolution is gradual rather than instantaneous.
Who else could have proposed--and documented with evidence--ALL of these hypotheses in one neat package? In this respect I think Darwin was sui generis.
I think that you're way off the mark here. The first three of your arguments that Darwin is touted too highly are as follows:
"In fact, evolution as we now have it is the result of all those "minor" figures contributing to both the logic and the empirical work; it doesn't resemble much of Darwin's views in many respects. Some changes since Darwin:
1. The branching tree is now a net, much of the time, because of lateral genetic transfer and hybridism
2. Selection is rarely if ever thought to cause speciation in sexual organisms; at best it makes isolated populations adapt to novel surroundings, causing some degree of reproductive isolation as a side effect
3. Inheritance is regarded as particulate: Darwin thought it blended"
Well, the "net" is not much of a net for complex organisms, because "lateral gene transfer and hybridism" haven't made much of a dent in their genomes. Is the genome of primates, cats, teleosts, or angiosperms irrevocably messed up by gene exchange, so that we can't construct valid evolutionary trees? I don't think so. Trees are still made and used routinely, and are quite informative. Hybridism and lateral gene transfer are usually minor factors in most species.
I don't understand #2 unless you are referring to Darwin's idea that species evolve to fill up the polity of nature. In some respects this view survives, especially in ideas of sympatric speciation and ecological speciation. But at any rate, this is again a quibble. The main idea--that new species arise from old ones, and that leads to common ancestry--is what is important.
Finally, so what if Darwin got the mechanism of inheritance wrong? It DIDN'T MUCH MATTER for his theory. Whether variation arises due to mutation or via "changed conditions," it is still, as Darwin thought, the stuff of evolution.
The fact is that EVERY scientific discovery would eventually have been made by someone. Without Newton, we'd still have calculus, without Einstein, relativity. Darwin's greatness did not lie in the fact that evolution was a unique, one-off contribution that couldn't have been made by another. It lay in the fact that in The Origin and in his other works, Darwin put so much evidence together, in such a convincing way, that his theory was almost impossible to reject. His genius lay in waiting decades while accumulating evidence until that evidence crushed any intellectual opposition, in making clever analogies and arguments, such as the parallel with artificial selection, in his rhetorical skills, and in his use of evidence that other people might not have thought of, such as island biogeography. Above all, Darwin proposed all major tenets of evolutionary theory AT ONCE, rather than piecemeal. There is no guarantee that had he not done this, somebody else would have proposed such a complete theory. A.R. Wallace certainly didn't, and probably wouldn't have. At any rate, remember that The Origin contains all of the following six propositions, every one of which still holds in modern evolutionary theory
1. Organisms evolved (and began with one or a few early forms.
2. Organisms split, so that one lineage could become two or more (speciation)
3. That speciation led to common ancestry between any pair of species, so you could trace the tree back to nodes, and find evidence for those common ancestors
4. Natural selection was the main engine of evolutionary change, and the only process that could produce adaptation
5. Not all features, though, are adaptive--there are other processes of evolutionary change.
6. Evolution is gradual rather than instantaneous.
Who else could have proposed--and documented with evidence--ALL of these hypotheses in one neat package? In this respect I think Darwin was sui generis.
I agree with Bob- depends on who you ask. And IIRC, much of what Darwin did say about speciation in the OoS fits the view of speciation as a byproduct of local adaptation?
@1:
"Adulation" exaggerates it. He is a mascot, not a deity.
Jaco sez, referring the the "Above all, Darwin proposed all major tenets of evolutionary theory AT ONCE, rather than piecemeal. There is no guarantee that had he not done this, somebody else would have proposed such a complete theory. A.R. Wallace certainly didn't, and probably wouldn't have."
I wouldn't be so quick to write off Wallace. Have you read his essay that sparked the readings before the Linnean Society? It is surprisingly close to what Darwin independently produced, identifying natural selection and the branching nature of evolution. Wallace split with Darwin over whether artificial selection was a good analogy for natural selection, but in general Wallace's essay is surprising in it's similarities to Darwin's excerpts. We can't know for sure what would have happened if Darwin never published for one reason or another but I would not be so quick to write off Wallace. If anything it seems that Wallace came in support of Darwin rather than trying to compete against him and his support base.
I am not going to add any comments on what Darwin or Wallace did or did not do, there are others far more qualified than I to do that, but I will comment on your thoughts on the historiography of science, they are spot on as always.
I actually think you write best when you write on the historiography of science, but then I would, because that is what I am most hoping to read when I come here. The evolution of science is a complex web of differing factors that twists and turns its way through historical time sometimes progressing, sometimes regressing and sometimes just going round in circles or even standing still. It is made up of the contributions of many, many people some of them great and famous many of them small and forgotten: scientist, technicians, publishers, teachers etc. etc. and all of their wives, helpmates, children and probably even the family dog. Singling out the "great" for extravagant praise and honorifics certainly distorts the public picture of science and turns the history of science into the mythology of science.
Next year is actually the Unesco Year of Astronomy and everyone is dusting off their Galileo lectures, books, slideshows etc for the occasion. For the non-astronomers Galileo made his first telescopic astronomical observations in 1609. I shall be holding a lecture on all the other astronomers who turned their telescopes to the heavens in the first eighteen months after it was invented (the telescope that is in 1608), some of them even before Mr G, most of whom the general public has never heard of. I think anniversaries are a good way of bringing science closer to the non-scientist something that appears to become more and more necessary but can we please get away from hero worship and hagiography!
I thought your post was rather good. Like you I have no truck with creationists or their crypto-creationist brothers, the IDiots, but I have always been a little troubled by the way Darwin is pesented.
John, I pretty much agree with Jaco there. Most people have no idea how far-reaching Darwin's ideas were, either because they still don't understand them, or because the ideas now seem, in hindsight, so obvious as to be almost trivial.
You can certainly criticise someone for not discovering things, like Darwin did not discover how heredity worked, but it does not follow that what they did discover wasn't earth-shattering. What always amazes me about Darwin was how far he was able to push his extreme materialism (by which I mean a theory based purely on known physical and biological forces), while everyone around him (Lamarck, Chambers, Huxley, Spencer, Wallace, Romanes, Haeckel) failed, because they all wanted to put some teleology, or religion, or essentialism, or purpose, or whatever (!) back into evolution.
Even though they themselves are great feats of scientific achievement, every major discovery in biology since Darwin -- Mendelian genetics, DNA, newer speciation theories, chromosomal evolution, and so on -- is still virtually insignificant beside the general explanatory power and understanding that Darwin reached with his theory of evolution.
It appears that people either think I am criticising Darwin for not doing something, or that I think Darwin was unimportant. I tried very hard not to make either error. One cannot criticise someone for not doing something unless there is good reason to think they should have, and in fact it was in large part Darwin's speculations about inheritance that got people going (and Mendel himself was greatly influenced by he Origin), although Lewes had a great summary of heredity in 1856 that I previously put up on this blog.
But we do like our heroes. Yes, Darwin has been enormously influential, and nowhere more outside biology than in philosophy. My whole professional focus is on this, but as a matter of history, he is a large fish in a very large pond; his size should not detract from the rest of the pond's inhabitants.
The whole idea of Darwin's elevation as a consequence of territorial pissings seems to me as simplistic and off-the-mark as the Great Man and Zeitgeist ideas you criticize. Everyone knows that staking out scientists is how philosophers advance. Projection?
More likely to my mind is the simple fact that evolution is a magnificent idea, and that is the focus of all the celebration. It's just not human nature to see ideas as emerging out of a community of scholars, so we need a figurehead to represent an abstraction. In this case, there happens to be one fellow who most clearly expressed that idea, so he's it -- Darwin, strapped to the prow of the ship of science, scaring the bejayzus out of the creationists and inspiring the motley crew behind him.
"Darwin, strapped to the prow of the ship of science, scaring the bejayzus out of the creationists"
That's an interesting metaphor, and it suggests that creationists have something to do with the status of Darwin as a totem. Sure, Darwin is great like Newton is great, but Newton is not a totem of physics, much less science. That's because there is no anti-modern physics movement of consequence.
Sure, there's the natural human tendency to rally around a figurehead. But would such a symbol be necessary if evolutionary science were not under attack? If there were no creationist threat perhaps more due could be given to the rest of the lineage of evolutionary scientists both before and after The Origin.
(In addition, The British and perhaps larger English-speaking world's elevation of Darwin can perhaps be partly attributed to nationalism or collective identification. The French have their statues of Lamarck.)
By trying to destroy Darwin, the creationists have instead amplified his stature to new heights. 'Creation science' and 'Intelligent Design' were evolving responses spurred by Darwinism and in turn creationists have contributed to the creation of Darwin the symbol. A strange symbiosis.
I have nothing to add.
Another aspect of the Darwin vs creationists debate is the fact that Darwin was such a "nice" guy: family man, honorable opponent, non-polemicist, careful to cite others, etc. Despite all of their efforts to the contrary, it has been very difficult for creationists to thoroughly demonize Darwin. He was just not the kind of libertine atheist that creationists like to characterize believers in evolution to be.
Allen is right. Darwin was a moral man, a charitable man, one who supported the poor in his parish (anonymously - we know from his accounts that he did so only after his death), and one who opposed slavery as debasing the dignity of all races. Despite constant harping on the Victorian wording of the Descent, Darwin was actually very egalitarian in his views. He believed in family, honour, and all the values of the best modern "family values" conservative. And yet he was a revolutionary.
But I would like to contradict that mere developmental biologist's assertion that scientists never use rhetoric, and point out the so-called Darwin Wars between the two camps that claimed Darwin for themselves: Mayr, Williams, Maynard Smith, Dawkins and that crew on the one hand (and mostly on the right hand side of the Atlantic), and Lewontin, Gould, Eldredge, Raup, and that crew on the other. Sure scientists never play that game, Paul. Sure.
Darwin is worth admiration alone because he was such a damned good naturalist. The fact he also was able to synthesize a staggeringly large amount of data from numerous disciplines into a coherent argument puts him into a relatively small, elite group in my eyes.
Re: On the Darwin Year
Reading what John wrote I first want to say that agree with almost everything in his analysis of Darwin's work and its context in the history of science. I just choose to raise two different perspectives for the discussion.
The first point is based on the perspective of political philosophy which I learned long ago.
I actually learned it so long ago that I can't remember who said it but I've heard it in the context of nationality. The claim took some time getting used to but now it is so common sense that I can't understand how I tried to rationalize things without it. It is this: A nation is a group of people that agree to believe the same lie.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that there is no truth to the assumed history of the scientific community or that there is no truth to the stories that bond any national or other group together.
What I'm saying is that we all need myth. Scientists are no different than other people in this regard. What makes us a community is the agreement to leave the historical accuracy at some point and accept the same story, same heroes, same theories, same grounds for discussion and same questions to be answered.
In a sense the scientific community is no more rational then a group of people that meet each other and decide that they arrived from the moon. I'm not saying it as a criticism I do believe that we need to choose grounds for common dialogue and if for most Darwin is more of a symbol than others then by all means we should celebrate the Darwin year.
The second point is focused more on the philosophy of science.
What makes a scientific revolution? What is that kind of revelation that influence the way scientists think for generation after the specific person is long gone and his outstanding revelations of that time are even a little outdated.
The answer that is probably common to the Great Man Approach and to the Zeitgeist approach and it is the new possibility that a person and his work opens for the development of the entire scientific field.
If you happen to be the one that doesn't just discover new facts but discover new way of explanation and thinking that enable others to explain better their own research then you're probably going to be remembered in the history of science forever.
Darwin acted at a time when a new perspective was badly needed. If what he gave naturalists is the idea of branching and this idea came at a time when they were in serious need for this new way of thinking than it is no surprise he is still so widely respected. It is never just the scientific discovery it is always that ability to move all research forward due to that scientific discovery and Darwin open a new path for everyone.
If I take the question of what takes one scientist, Darwin in this case, and make a symbol of out him, from another angel then I need to argue that geniuses is often the ability to do that one thing that makes all the other elements that were developing on their own merge.
After all even John argues Darwin did a great work even if he "just" put everything together in the right place. Having all the pieces of the puzzle staring you in the face without able to create a whole picture out of them is usually not the characteristic of a major scientific breakthrough.
Putting everything together in a way that takes knowledge from various lines of work and allow them to "talk" to each other so that the whole scientific community was able to communicate and evolve is a sign of greatness or maybe just great timing. If we think about it the branching of the biologist community changed to a great deal after Darwin and this is an indication that he was the right place at the right time offering the right tools and the right perspective.
If he did just that Darwin deserves our eternal gratitude.
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i really admired darwins work about his theory on survival of the fittest.