PHIL 1366: Philosophy and History of Philosophy
Darwin
Evolution Before Darwin
The idea of evolution was not new with Charles Darwin. By the time Darwin published The
Origin of Species the dispute between the fixity and the mutability of species was well known
and had long been in dispute. Charles’ Grandfather Erasmus Darwin had poetically espouses
the mutability of species in his work The Botanic Garden. Perhaps the earliest statement of
evolution comes from Benoit de Maillet, ambassador to Egypt. De Maillet wrote a work which
claimed that the earth was originally covered entirely in water but that as the sea gradually
receded, the fins of fish became feet. The world appeared in 1748 and produces a mixture of
ridicule and outrage. This was the time of great speculation about both the formation of the
earth. Compte Buffon in the 1750’s produced his Natural History and Epochs of Creation, in
which he argued that the planets, including the earth, were created when a comet hit the sun.
Buffon claimed that the earth was much older than previously thought having gone through
seven distinct periods or epochs. Life, including human life, appeared only in the final epoch
and some 30,000 years had elapsed. The Scottish naturalist James Hutton espoused slow
gradual change at the close of the 18th century. Perhaps the most explicit challenge to the fixity
of species came from Karl Linnaeus. Linnaeus claimed that God had originally created only a
small number of species but that through hybridization and adaptions to environmental
conditions, a multiplicity of primordial genera had been produced. Buffon held a similar view
except that he thought that the wide variety of species had “degenerated” from the originally
created species. He also held that if the environmental variation were removed the variety of
species would return to their original, natural forms. All these authors did not doubt that God
was responsible for creation. They were merely postulating the natural laws by which God
created. In this way, the doctrine of deism is being expanded from the physical sciences to the
explanation of life. The deism being developed during this period lead to a revival of the deign
argument for God’s existence as developed in natural theology. It is critical to understand this
movement if we are to understand first how Darwin’s doctrine of natural selection differs from
previously postulated mechanisms of transmutation (evolution) and second and consequently
why there was such opposition to Darwin’s mechanism. For as we shall see, it is primarily the
specific doctrine of natural selection and not the general doctrine of evolution which took so
long to be accepted and is seen to be so threating to traditional religious worldviews.
Georges Cuvier and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
The doctrine of evolution or transformation was clearly articulated by the beginning of the 19 th
century. It was, in fact, the explicit object of dispute between two of the best known French
natural philosophers at the time of the French Revolution and its aftermath: Georges Cuvier
and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Cuvier benefited from the French Revolution and its aftermath.
First, the anti-aristocratic movement which resulted from the revolution allowed him to rise to
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prominent positions in the French scientific society. He was not an aristocratic and therefore
did not suffer the fate (death at the scaffold) of many former scientists, but he was well trained
in the sciences. Initially after the revolution and especially during the terror, science was
looked down as elitist and exploitive of the “third republic”. The major scientific institution
including the French Society of Sciences and the King’s garden were closed. However, as
Napoleon rose to power and France found it’s self at war with the rest of Europe, France found
the need for scientific and engineering knowledge. Men like Cuvier were recalled and the
scientific societies were reestablished, if in a more egalitarian and democratic spirit. The
second way in which Napoleon helped Cuvier was that fossils from all over Europe came
flooding into Paris as Napoleon sent back the spoils of war. At the turn of the 19 th century
Cuvier gave many public lectures where he convincingly argued that some of the fossils were of
prehistoric animals which had become extinct. In one particularly famous lecture in 1796,
Cuvier showed that the bones of a Mastodon could not possible be those of either an African or
Indian elephant but was rather a different animal that had gone extinct. Cuvier postulated that
God had created all the species that had ever lived but that as a result of sudden catastrophes
(such as floods or sudden elevation of land) some species went extinct. Cuvier postulated his
doctrine of catastrophism explicitly to oppose the transformationist doctrines of De Maillet,
Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and especially his contemporary Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Before
looking at Lamarck, however its worth pointing out a major contribution to evolution in general
and natural selection in particular which was made by Cuvier. Cuvier introduced the ideas of
the “interrelated conditions of existence” and the “subordination of characters.” In the
development of the first version of the science of comparative anatomy, Cuvier emphasized
how the structures of organisms are intimately connected with the conditions of the
environment.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck argued that Cuvier’s pre-historic animals had not become extinct but
rather were examples of older species which had transformed into the species we see today.
This view was already fully articulated in the 1809 book Zoological Philosophy. Lamarckian
evolution proceeds by three principles. The first is what he called “the power of life”. The
power of life is a set of laws and processes that only apply to living organisms. They both
explain the growth of individual organisms but also the change in species over time. This
change is always from simple to more complex in both the embryo and also in the species.
Lamarck’s second principle is the “law of use and disuse.” This principle holds that as
environmental factors change, organisms in the environment acquire different habits. When
these different habits involve the use or disuse of organs or physical characteristics, those
organs and characteristics permanently change. Lamarck’s most famous example is the giraffe
and the development of its elongated neck. As a result of the habit of constantly stretching it’s
neck to reach the leaves of tall trees, its neck lengthens slightly over its lifetime. The third
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Lamarckian principle is “the law the inheritance of acquired characteristics,” which maintains
that characteristics acquired through use and disuse are passed on to its offspring.
In summary, there were four important pre-Darwinian issues in the early science of biology:
1. The debate between the (mechanical) pre-formationists and the (vitalist) epigenesists regarding
the development of the embryos into adult animals. This debate leads to the theory of
recapitulation that postulates a close parallel between the development of individual organisms
and the development of species as a whole.
2. The debate about the emerging fossil record of not currently existing prehistoric animals.
Cuvier maintained that these were the fossils of prehistoric species that had gone extinct due to
catastrophic climatic and geological events. Lamarck maintained that the fossils were
prehistoric forms of currently existing species that had transformed (or evolved).
3. The Scottish debate between the Vulcanists and the Neptunists. Out if this debate grew Charles
Lyle’s Uniformitarianism view that the earth was exceedingly old and uniform, although isolated
and gradual climatic and geological change does occur. Uniformitarianism is the extension of
deism, and therefore natural theology, to the natural and organic world.
4. William Buckland introduced the topic of geology and natural history into world history as a
result of the discovery of the fossilized bones of hyenas, elephants, and rhinos in a cave in
northern England. Buckland concluded that the history of human beings must be naturalized to
include the effects of geology and other natural forces in addition to the effects of civilization.
Charles Darwin
When Charles Darwin went to university in 1825 in Edinburgh Scotland, he would have been aware of
the debate surrounding the transmutation or evolution of species. Recall that his grandfather, Erasmus
Darwin, was a committed and famous exponent of evolution. At that time, the debate between special
creation and deistic transmutation was well known. The debate was between those who believed that
species were created at the beginning of the world or that they were slowly created by natural law in
the course of natural history. Darwin went to Edinburgh to study medicine but was more interested in
natural history. He would have also been exposed to the Vulcanist-Neptunist debate raging in Scotland.
He is known to have studied under Jameson, a well-known Neptunist.
Darwin soon abandoned the study of medicine. He went south to Cambridge to become a pastor where
he studied under world historian William Buckland and the botanist John Henslow. Henslow was doing
research to determine the limits of variability within a species. Henslow was a committed deist who
believed in the fixity of species. Henslow recommended the 22 year-old Darwin for the position of
naturalist on a five-year circumnavigation of the globe aboard the HMS Beagle. This voyage was the
most formative experience of Darwin’s scientific life. There is much controversy in particular about his
time on the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador. What was striking about these islands is that
though they are only 50 or so miles apart and have very similar geography and climate, they display an
astonishing variety of biological diversity. Each island seemed to Darwin to display it own variety (or
perhaps species—he wasn’t sure) of tortoises, thrushes, finches, and plants. The significance of these
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facts did not strike Darwin until after he returned from the voyage in 1836 when he consulted with John
Gould, who told him that the birds he brought back from the Galapagos were separate species. Darwin
then realized that the characteristics that Gould told him determined the birds to be separate species
were the kinds of differences he noticed between the fossil record of extinct species and currently
existing species. In the summer of 1837 Darwin began his first notebook on the doctrine of the
transmutation of species.
Darwin was careful to distinguish between the fact and the mechanism of transmutation. Of the former,
he was convinced in 1837 but it wasn’t until reading Thomas Malthus’s work on population in 1838 that
he began to formulate his mechanism of natural selection. By 1842 he began convinced of both the fact
of transmutation as well as the importance of the mechanism of natural selection.
In 1844, Richard Chambers published the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. The Vestiges is a
highly speculative and dogmatic deistic account of the evolution of the cosmos, the earth and life.
Further the work ties evolution not only to God’s plan but also to the radical and progressive political
and social movements in Victorian Britain. Darwin severely criticized the work; he said the geology “was
bad” and the zoology was “far worse”. Many Historians of science think that the publication of the
Vestiges caused Darwin to delay publication of his theory of transformation by natural selection. He was
determined to amass empirical evidence to clearly distinguish himself from the sort of deistic and highly
speculative theories of transmutation that had preceded him. He studied the work of animal breeders
and also because an expert on barnacles. Darwin noticed that most barnacles were hermaphrodites but
that some contained a precursor male. Darwin was convinced that he was seeing the current evolution
of sexuality in barnacles. In 1856 Darwin was convinced by Charles Lyle to publish his work on natural
selection but while he was writing his manuscript he received a letter from Alfred Russell Wallace asking
him about an idea which was remarkable similar to evolution by natural selection. After presenting both
Wallace’s letter as well as a short précis of Darwin’s work to the Linnean Society, Darwin rushed his
book, On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection into print in 1858.
The Origin has become a paradigm of scientific exposition because of its logic of presentation and its
power of persuasion. It centers on an analogy between the variation that breeders of plants and
animals can produce and the variation which nature can produce given natural selection and enormous
amounts of time. At the same time, there is a substantial dis-analogy between the intestinal
modification produced by breeders and the random and unpredictable variations produced by nature.
The book is filled with specific examples involving a wide range of plants and animals. The book is very
much based on documented evidence. Another thing that makes the book so persuasive is that Darwin
carefully explicates problems with his theory and suggests ways to respond to these problems. The
book differs substantially from previous works on evolution in that it provides natural selection as a
credible mechanism driving evolution. The irony of Darwin’s book is that it advances the fact of
evolution over his specific proposed mechanism of natural selection. The substantial scientific, religious,
and social problems associated with natural selection cause a resurgence of neo-Lamarckian
evolutionary theory. It isn’t until the twentieth century with the rise of the science of genetics that
evolution is seen to be driven largely by natural selection.
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Darwinism
Theory of evolution or Darwinism is a theory of biological evolution developed by the naturalist Charles
Darwin and other scientist who helped him support his theory, stating that all species of organisms arise
and develop trough natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual ability to
compete, survive and reproduce. Scientist William Buckland was a paleontologist and geologist who made
detailed documentation of the dinosaur fossils and former teacher to Charles Darwin. There Charles Darwin
met John Gould who showed him the Galapagos Islands. Darwin saw how the difference between species
and wrote about natural selection. On the other hand, Malthus made Darwin rethink many issues while
coming up with his theory of natural selection. Malthus' work made Darwin realize the importance of
overpopulation and how it was necessary to have variability in different populations. Charles Lyle convinced
Darwin to publish his work and it was of great evidence on the "randomness and unpredictable variations
produced by nature”. With this theory scientist in the 20th century made use of Darwinism natural selection.
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