Fifteen Eighty Four

In late 2024 Cambridge University Press published two surveys of the history of evolutionism, Michael Ruse’s Charles Darwin: No Revel, Great Revolutionary and my own Darwin for the People. Michael passed away more or less as his book was hitting the shops, so this is his last contribution – unless he has another in press to appear posthumously, which wouldn’t surprise me. He had been good enough to provide a very positive endorsement which appears on the back of my own book, but true to form his own account complains that I consistently try to play down the impact of Darwin’s theory on late nineteenth-century culture. This will be the last clash in what has been a long-standing debate between us, although we were always able to go out for a drink together when we met up at conferences (much to the amazement of some who had read our often quite barbed remarks about each other).

Michael and I first met around 1970 when I was a graduate student at the University of Toronto and he was a newly-appointed lecturer at the University of Guelph (just down the road by North American standards). He was a philosopher who had developed an interest in Darwinism and wanted to explore its influence, while I was a historian of science who would soon go on to make my mark by exploring the alternatives to Darwin’s theory of natural selection that were proposed by late-Victorian biologists. At first, I think Michael was worried that my interest in non-Darwinian theories was driven by a desire to undermine the transformative impact of Darwin’s ideas. Eventually I thought I had persuaded him that the reverse was true: I agreed that Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection was a revolutionary concept – so revolutionary that his contemporaries found it hard to accept and looked for less threatening explanations of how evolution progressed toward humankind. Even those who called themselves ‘Darwinians’ tended to include a role for the other explanations of how evolution works. But we continued to disagree over the extent to which the selection theory impacted on the late Victorian mind. Ruse (and many others) assume that contemporaries who were traumatized by reading Darwin were responding to the whole new worldview, while I suspect that they saw only the harsher elements of the theory without fully appreciating the whole package.

There are two related issues here. One centers on the transformation of what ‘Darwinism’ means over time: how much of our modern understanding of the theory’s implications was recognized by Darwin’s followers in his own time? In this area Ruse and I came to an understanding because we agreed that the first generation of Darwinists were more willing to link the theory to the idea of progress than we are today. The second issue, which remains unresolved, relates to the impact of Darwin’s vision on those who responded more to its negative side. There were intellectuals and writers who were traumatized by the image of nature as a scene of endless struggle. But that was only part of the theory and they presumably didn’t appreciate the positive aspects of the selection mechanism recognized by the enthusiasts. The controversies over the Origin of Species highlighted a disturbing vision that was already being articulated, so that Darwin became a symbol identifying only one element of his theory – and one that was not his most innovative contribution.

The first of these issues arises because historians have a problem when dealing with a term such as ‘Darwinism’ which has changed its meaning over time – it’s all too easy to read our modern understanding back into discussions of an earlier period. Ruse is quite right to point out that today we see how profoundly Darwin’s thinking transformed our culture’s world-view. If natural selection is the only (or even just the main) mechanism of evolution, it becomes impossible to see the human species as the predestined goal of a process with a built-in moral or spiritual purpose. Conservative moralists and religious thinkers in Darwin’s time and today find this a very disturbing prospect, and Ruse’s latest book explores these reactions in some detail. Some looked for alternatives to natural selection that would offer a less threatening view of evolutionism. These included the Lamarckian idea that new characters acquired by the adult organism can be transmitted directly to the offspring. Ruse tends to see these alternatives as dead-ends, although they were significant even among biologists at the time. I see them as an indication of just how hard it was for people at the time to come to terms with the revolutionary nature of Darwin’s worldview.

Ruse himself has shown in earlier studies how the first generation of ‘Darwinians’ – which included some liberal theologians – saw a more positive message in his theory. They often associated his scientific work with the cosmic philosophy of progressive evolution propounded by Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ but assumed that the fittest were superior in the sense of being more complex as well as better adapted. Spencer also included a substantial role for the Lamarckian mechanism, which was widely taken as having a greater tendency toward progress than natural selection. T. H. Huxley, later known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, was no Lamarckian but did think that evolution often worked via sudden jumps rather than gradual adaptation. I don’t think Ruse would have disagreed too much with my own view of the early version of Darwinism as a broad church that included other mechanisms besides natural selection and was welcomed mainly by those who wanted to see evolution as a guarantee of social progress. His latest survey also shows that even as the selection theory was boosted in the early twentieth century by the emergence of population genetics, the tension between the optimistic and pessimistic interpretations of the theory continued unabated.

If Ruse and I could reconcile our positions by adopting a more complex interpretation of the earliest form of Darwinism, we still seemed to be at loggerheads over the question of the theory’s wider cultural impact. He was determined to show that Darwin had an immediate and revolutionary impact on a wide range of thinkers and writers. He cites poets including Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson to show how the vision of nature as a scene of constant struggle and suffering impacted the Victorian psyche and insists that it was Darwin who forced them to confront the nightmare. That may be the case, but this image of nature had emerged before Darwin published – Thomas Malthus had used the phrase ‘struggle for existence’ in his work on population, and we can also think of Tennyson’s image of ‘nature, red in tooth and claw’. Darwin’s appeal to the element of struggle certainly drew attention to it and allowed him to become the figurehead for this pessimistic vision. But the struggle for existence was only one element of his theory and those who saw only its negative implications may not have been able to appreciate the more positive interpretation of the whole theory adopted by those who called themselves Darwinians. I agree that the Origin of Species had a broad impact on Victorian culture, but I would argue that in some respects it was a rather shallow impact whose most disturbing aspects drew on only certain elements of the theory.

It’s a pity that Michael’s departure robs us of the opportunity to continue our long-standing debate over the complexity of Darwin’s impact. Whatever our disagreements over the nature of Darwinism as a historical entity, if you want to understand just how profound its impact has become in the modern world, his book explores its ramifications for a wide range of philosophical, religious and social issues in a way that few other authors could match.