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''It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over'': Rethinking the Darwinian Revolution

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''It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over'': Rethinking the Darwinian Revolution Journal of the History of Biology (2005) 38: 33–49 Ó Springer 2005 DOI 10.1007/s10739-004-6508-z ‘‘It Ain’t Over ‘til it’s Over’’: Rethinking the Darwinian Revolution VASSILIKI BETTY SMOCOVITIS Department of Philosophy and History of Science University of Athens, Athens Greece and Departments of Zoology and History University of Florida Gainesville, FL 32611 USA E-mail: [email protected]fl.edu Abstract. This paper attempts a critical examination of scholarly understanding of the historical event referred to as ‘‘the Darwinian Revolution.’’ In particular, it concentrates on some of the major scholarly works that have appeared since the publication in 1979 of Michael Ruse’s The Darwinian Revolution: Nature Red in Tooth and Claw. The paper closes by arguing that fruitful critical perspectives on what counts as this event can be gained by locating it in a range of historiographic and disciplinary contexts that include the emergence of the discipline of evolutionary biology (following the ‘‘evolutionary synthesis’’), the 1959 Darwin centenary, and the maturation of the discipline of the history of science. Broader perspectives on something called the ‘‘Darwinian Revolu- tion’’ are called for that include recognizing that it does not map a one-to-one corre- spondence with the history of evolution, broadly construed. Keywords: Darwin centennial, Darwinian Revolution, discipline, evolutionary biology evolutionary synthesis, historiography The Darwinian Revolution was probably the most significant revolution that has ever occurred in the sciences, because its effects and influences were significant in many different areas of thought and belief. The con- sequence of this revolution was a systematic rethinking of the nature of the world, of man, and of human institutions.1 It would seem to an outsider that the ‘‘evolutionary synthesis’’ that has characterized recent evolutionary biology – a result of joint activity by geneticists and naturalists – may well constitute a second Darwinian revolution or a second stage of the Darwinian Revolution, or perhaps a transformed Darwinian Revolution. But it should not be thought that the revolution is over.2 1 Cohen, 1985, p. 299. 2 Ibid, p. 297. 34 VASSILIKI BETTY SMOCOVITIS Darwin as ‘‘Hollywood Epic’’: The ‘‘Darwinian Revolution’’ in the 1980s By the time I actually encountered it formally sometime in mid-1980s while still a graduate student, the ‘‘Darwinian Revolution’’ was not just an established event, it had become, I would argue, a defining event for historians of biology. A staggering number of books, articles, confer- ences and exhibits, and even documentary dramas and feature films had been devoted to it directly, or to some related aspect exploring the revolutionary Darwin and his world. Revolution in science as a whole was a big topic for discussion in the mid-1980s, especially following the appearance of I. Bernard Cohen’s popular Revolutions in Science in 1985.3 The ‘‘Darwinian Revolution’’ got a complete chapter in a book otherwise devoted to revolutions in the physical sciences. Considering the fact that the physical sciences had until then dominated much of the history and philosophy of science, and considering Cohen’s own predilections in that direction, the inclu- sion of this chapter and effusive language describing it, indicated that historians of science outside the smaller circles of the history of biology were recognizing the event as being of prime importance. Darwin, the token representative of the life sciences, finally seemed to join the pantheon of those famous ‘‘dead white males’’ in the history of the physical sciences like Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, of course. It also seemed to silence a range of queries that had begun early in the 1970s about whether or not the ‘‘Darwinian Revolution’’ constituted a ‘‘Kuhnian revolution’’ in science.4 A self-designated ‘‘outsider’’ (see the epigraph above), Cohen’s his- toric appraisal was not exactly news to any of the ‘‘insiders’’ in the history of biology. Almost from its start, the Journal of the History of Biology had featured Darwin or some aspect of the history of evolution. The founding of the journal had been facilitated by Ernst Mayr, keen to redress the imbalance generated by the new historiography of biology stressing genetics; as a result of his influence on the journal and his own forays into both the history and philosophy of biology beginning in the early 1960s, Darwin, evolution, and the history of natural history were featured prominently.5 By the mid-1980s, the number of secondary sources available to anyone interested in Darwin or the ‘‘Darwinian Revolution’’ bordered on overwhelming. The occasion of the 100th anniversary of Darwin’s death in 1982 served to generate a range of 3 See Cohen, 1985. 4 See Mayr, 1971, Greene, 1971, Ghiselin, 1971; and see Ruse 1970, 1971 for just a quick survey of some of this literature. 5 See Smocovitis, 1996 for discussion of this. RETHINKING THE DARWINIAN REVOLUTION 35 commemorative events, lectures and exhibits, which culminated with the appearance of an enormous book titled The Darwinian Heritage in 1985.6 It was therefore no real surprise that a notorious review of the volume in Quarterly Review of Biology charged that the plethora of good works available on Darwin resembled a virtual ‘‘Holly- wood Epic.’’7 The following year, a celebrated essay review appearing in the Journal of the History of Biology, gave name to the glut of workers devoting themselves to Darwin and his world as ‘‘the Darwin Indus- try.’’8 Finally, in 1988, a new epoch in the history of the ‘‘Darwinian Revolution’’ dawned when Darwin was relegated to an afterword in what was a revolutionary work assessing the origins of evolutionary thought in a 19th century radical political context. Adrian Desmond’s proletarian-driven The Politics of Evolution was intended to shock expectant readers by leaving the mighty figure of Darwin and his Darwinian evolution until only the afterword of a very long book.9 Instead of diminishing the stature of Darwin, however, this organiza- tional tactic only served to enhance the dramatic conclusion of an otherwise conventional social history; the book only reified Darwin’s towering stature in the history of 19th century evolutionary radicalism. Like other impressionable graduate students, I was swept away by the revolutionary fervor. I eagerly anticipated the new books and arti- cles, sought out the critical reviews and especially enjoyed following the public debates – and antics – of the Darwin Industry. In 1987 when the John S. Knight Writing Program at Cornell asked me to design my first course in their ‘‘writing-across-disciplines’’ series to help initiate stu- dents into the ‘‘disciplinary discourse’’ of my field, I didn’t even need to think twice about it; my new course would be on ‘‘The Darwinian Revolution.’’ It seemed timely, of general interest to young people, and the perfect book existed to guide the course, Michael Ruse’s Darwinian Revolution. Nature Red in Tooth and Claw.10 Appearing in 1979, Ruse’s book had quickly become a classic on the subject and was available in paperback edition. It was used widely in teaching courses just like mine. Although there were other books on the topic,11 Ruse’s Darwinian Revolution, came to be synonymous with the historical event designated as the ‘‘Darwinian Revolution.’’ This became so much the case, that in my mind, any mention of the phrase ‘‘Darwinian Revolution’’ 6 Kohn, 1985. 7 Ruse, 1986. 8 Lenoir, 1987. 9 Desmond, 1989. 10 Ruse, 1979; revised edition 1999. 11 See for example Oldroyd, 1980. 36 VASSILIKI BETTY SMOCOVITIS immediately conjures up the visual image of an orange-colored skeletal hand against a bright blue background (the cover of the book) and the dramatic phrasing of the subtitle appropriated from Alfred Lord Ten- nyson, ‘‘nature red in tooth and claw.’’ Michael Ruse’s The Darwinian Revolution: Nature Red in Tooth and Claw Michael Ruse’s book, which served as a popular textbook to many courses taught by historians of biology thus serves as a good starting point for historical understanding of something called the ‘‘Darwinian Revolution.’’ It is vitally important to those of us who trained as his- torians of biology after 1979. Ruse’s book concentrates on a now fairly familiar story. It locates the origins of Darwinian evolution in the context of Enlightenment views that included belief in progress, in theological movements like natural theology, in the shifting views and practices of traditional natural history, anatomy, and morphology, and in emerging related sciences like geology. The story gives preeminence to the Darwin figure and some details of his life are included, but the book captures more fully the ‘‘spirit of the times,’’ the Zeitgeist, or the intellectual milieu as embodied by a group of players whose interactions gave rise to Darwinian evolution and which in turn was shaped by something called Darwinism. The book placed the revolution in Britain; it was unabashedly Anglocentric, for the simple reason that Ruse argued that the British natural theology tradition, which Darwin had imbibed during his undergraduate Cambridge days had inspired his interest in adaptation. It argued for the importance of Lyell’s uniformitarianism in shaping Darwin’s natural history, and argued that Darwinian natural selection with its non-purposiveness and its challenge to the argument for God’s design, effectively killed Aristotelian teleology, though that did not necessarily stop belief in a higher purpose or in progress (two additional points Ruse carefully pointed out). The relationship between something called ‘‘science,’’ a practice Ruse was following the emergence of, and its interaction with prevailing religious views was one of the major themes of the book as a whole. Ruse’s book also did much to place Darwin in his philosophical milieu, for example by considering the influence and effects of William Whewell and J.
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