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The Making of John Tyndall's Darwinian Revolution

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The Making of John Tyndall's Darwinian Revolution Annals of Science ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tasc20 The making of John Tyndall's Darwinian Revolution Ian Hesketh To cite this article: Ian Hesketh (2020) The making of John Tyndall's Darwinian Revolution, Annals of Science, 77:4, 524-548, DOI: 10.1080/00033790.2020.1808243 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00033790.2020.1808243 © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 26 Aug 2020. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 100 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=tasc20 ANNALS OF SCIENCE 2020, VOL. 77, NO. 4, 524–548 https://doi.org/10.1080/00033790.2020.1808243 The making of John Tyndall’s Darwinian Revolution Ian Hesketh Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY One of the most influential imagined histories of science of Received 21 April 2020 the nineteenth century was John Tyndall’s Belfast Address Accepted 5 August 2020 of 1874. In that address, Tyndall presented a sweeping KEYWORDS history of science that focused on the attempt to Tyndall; Darwin; evolution; understand the material nature of life. While the address biography; historiography has garnered attention for its discussion of the conflict at the centre of this history, namely between science and theology, less has been said about how Tyndall’s history culminated with a discussion of the evolutionary researches of Charles Darwin. Tyndall presented Darwin as a revolutionary scientific practitioner, whose virtues of patience, self-denial, and observation led him to his epochal theory of evolution and thus justified the extension of science into realms previously under the purview of theology. Tyndall was criticized at the time for his ‘vulgar admiration’ of a man of science who was still very much alive, and who could not possibly live up to such ‘fulsome adulation’. What such critics failed to realize, however, is that Tyndall had historicized the living Darwin within the context of his own philosophy of history that he cultivated years before, a philosophy that integrated the moral lives of heroic individuals within a progressive history of science itself. In life you must use men as you use their biographies. -John Tyndall, Lecture on James Watt, Queenwood College, 1847 When the physicist John Tyndall died in 1893, his popularity was attributed not necessarily to his own significant scientific advancements, but rather to the fact that he was ‘a leading exponent to the people of the Darwinian theory’.1 In the last twenty-five years of his life, Tyndall’s public addresses tended to stress the importance of Darwinian evolution in bringing together disparate fields of research while pushing the boundaries of science into realms previously beyond its purview. Most notable in this regard was Tyndall’s Presidential Address at the British Association meeting in Belfast in 1874, which offered a sweeping history of science that focused on the conflict between science and CONTACT Ian Hesketh [email protected] 1P. Chalmers Mitchell, “Professor Tyndall,” The New Review 10:56 (January 1894): 77–85, on 80. © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. ANNALS OF SCIENCE 525 theology and culminated in a discussion of evolution and the researches of Charles Darwin. Tyndall stressed in Belfast and in other addresses, that Darwin was the embodiment of a living historical figure, a great man who had, through his devotion to a particular set of epistemic virtues, brought about a revolution in science. Tyndall was criticized at the time for his ‘vulgar admiration’ of a man of science who was still very much alive, and who could not possibly live up to such ‘fulsome adulation’.2 But what such critics failed to realize is that Tyndall had historicized the living Darwin within the context of a philosophy of history that he had cultivated many years before, a philosophy that integrated the moral lives of heroic individuals within a progressive history of science itself. For a leading exponent of Darwin and Darwinism, however, Tyndall was rather late in bringing his voice and intellectual resources to bear on the evol- ution debates. Despite the fact that Tyndall was part of what Ruth Barton has called the X-network, a group of naturalists who would go on to form the X Club and found in Darwin’s Origin of Species a key work that needed to be defended in public for the benefit of their naturalist agenda, he did not initially take part in this campaign.3 Indeed, as Roland Jackson has pointed out, when the Origin of Species was published in 1859, Tyndall’s ‘immediate reactions … are hidden from us’ as there are no references to the book in his journal or extant correspondence.4 Tyndall would, moreover, say nothing publicly in defence of evolution or the Origin until 1870. It is perhaps for this reason that little has been written about Tyndall’s engagements with evolution, particularly in the context of his heroic characterizations of Darwin.5 Indeed, important questions in relation to this remain unanswered. What, for instance, accounts for Tyndall’s lengthy delay? And what does this delay tell us about Tyndall’s eventual defence of Darwin and Darwinian evolution? This article provides an answer to these questions by arguing that Tyndall only came to Darwin’s defense after he realized that Darwin and Darwinian evolution could be fitted within his own idealized vision of science, one that was informed by his early intellectual and scientific development. Tyndall regarded science as a form of knowledge that progressed due to the morally driven actions of great men. His devotion to self-improvement, along with his reading of Thomas Carlyle and of scientific biographies, shaped this idea, which then informed his scientific practices and his admiration for particularly deserving contemporaries. This worship of contemporaries was first explicitly expressed, not by his relationship with Darwin, however, but rather by his 2[John Tulloch], “Modern Scientific Materialism,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 116:709 (November 1874): 519– 539, on 528 “vulgar admiration”; and “Professor Tyndall’s Address,” The Saturday Review, 22 August 1874, 236– 238, on 237 “fulsome adulation.” 3Ruth Barton, The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 184– 185. 4Roland Jackson, The Ascent of John Tyndall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 150. 5Tyndall’s engagement with evolution has been typically written about in the context of the spontaneous gener- ation debates. See, for instance, James Strick, “Darwinism and the Origin of Life: The Role of H. C. Bastian in the British Spontaneous Generation Debates, 1868–1873,” Journal of the History of Biology 32 (1999): 51–92. 526 I. HESKETH relationship with, and writings about, the celebrated British experimentalist, Michael Faraday. Bernard Lightman has suggested that it was his relationship with Faraday that accounts for Tyndall’s failure to engage in controversial subject matter while Faraday was alive (he died in 1867), and this may be, at the very least, partly the case.6 However, in light of Tyndall’s early interest in cosmic evolutionism, as expressed in his reading of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, along with the nature of his own scientific researches that led him to draw con- nections between the ultramicroscopic world of atoms and particles and the largescale world of atmospheric forces and cosmic energy, Darwin’s Origin might have struck Tyndall as remarkably narrow. More particularly, Tyndall was, at the time of the Origin’s early reception engaged in his own controversy surrounding the publication of his book on glaciers. More significantly, Tyn- dall’s work did not come into direct conversation with Darwin’s until Darwin’s Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication appeared in 1868 and not only provided much of the detailed factual basis for many of the claims in the Origin in regard to artificial selection but also sought to make sense of inheritance at the molecular scale. This was a scale for thinking about evolution that Tyndall found particularly relevant to his own burgeoning work on air-borne particles, or what he called ‘floating matter’. Moreover, as we will see when we consider Tyndall’s belated discussions of evolution, he was clearly interested in evolution as providing an approach that could connect the molecular and the cosmic, the inorganic and the organic.7 He was, in this regard, much more invested in Darwin’s theory of pangenesis than in the theory of natural selection, and tended to stress evolution’s broader meaning rather than the particulars of Darwin’s theory. It was, there- fore, the historical figure of Darwin that became prominent in Tyndall’s belated intervention, as Darwin came to represent in Tyndall’s history of science an idealized scientific practitioner uniquely capable of transcending the contemporary boundaries of knowledge. 1. Development through hero worship For Tyndall, the history of science was best understood biographically, as the product of great men. This was an insight he developed quite early on, well before he embraced science as his vocation. While much recent work on Tyndall has shed light on his early background and the development of his scien- tific identity, what has yet to be explored in this regard is how history, construed 6Bernard Lightman, “Fashioning the Victorian Man of Science: Tyndall’s Shifting Strategies,” Journal of Dialectics of Nature 38 (2015): 25–38.
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