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Darwinism and the Argument from Design: Suggestions for a Reevaluation

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Darwinism and the Argument from Design: Suggestions for a Reevaluation Darwinism and the Argument from Design: Suggestions for a Reevaluation PETER J. BOWLER University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba Considering the amount which has been written on the clash between Darwinism and religion, one could be forgiven for assuming that the basic outlines of the debate are well understood. Works such as Charles C. Gillispie's Genesis and Geology 1 have highlighted the theological preoccu- pations of the pre-Darwinian British naturalists, and a host of books and articles have recounted how the theory of natural selection undermined the earlier commitment to the belief that nature was designed by God. As a result, every history of science undergraduate knows that William Paley's Natural Theology of 1802 established the claim that the adaptation of each species to its environment indicated that it was designed by a benev. olent Creator, an approach developed ad nauseam in the Bridgewater Trea- tises of the 1830's. Darwin read Paley while he was at Cambridge and was impressed with the universal significance of adaptation, but his theory of natural selection provided a completely mechanistic alternative to design as an explanation of the phenomenon. After the Origin of Species appear- ed, naturalists such as the American botanist Asa Gray rushed to the defense of design and tried, unsuccessfully in the end, to adapt the basic idea of evolution to their belief in a benevolent Creator. This pattern has been described over and over again in most accounts of the Darwinian debate, from John C. Greene's The Death of Adam through to more modern accounts, such as those of Robert Young and David L. Hull. 2 1. Charles C. GiUispie, Genesis and Geology: A Study in the Relations of Scientific Thought, Natural Theology, and Social Opinion in Great Britain, 1790-1850 (rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1959). See also Waiter F. Cannon, "The Problem of Miracles in the 1830s," Viet. Stud., 4 (1960), 5-32. 2. John C. Greene, The Death of Adam: Evolution and lts Impact on Western Thought (Ames, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1959), chap. 9. Robert M. Young, "Darwin's Metaphor: Does Nature Select? " The Monist, 55 (1971), 442-503. David L. Hull, Darwin and His Critics: The Reception of Darwin's Theory of Evolution by the Scientific Community (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 55-66. Asa Gray's original arguments are collected together in his Darwiniana: Essays and Reviews pertaining to Darwinism (New York, 1876: rpt. ed. A. Hunter Dupree, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963). Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring 1977). pp. 29-43. Copyright © 1977 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland. PETER J. BOWLER Only Loren Eiseley's Darwin's Century made any mention of an alterna- tive transcendental or idealist concept of design, based on the overall pattern of creation rather than the adaptation of individual species to their environment. 3 Eiseley does not explore this point in detail, yet his hint that the spirit of nineteenth-century transcendental biology (usually associated with the German Naturphilosophen and Geoffroy Saint Hilaire) could be adapted to the argument from design points the way toward a serious inadequacy in the traditional picture outlined above. Discussions centered solely on the argument from designed adaptation are quite accurate as far as they go, but they miss a whole area of nineteenth-century thought about the relationship between God and nature. The potential significance of this alternative is evident in Mary P. Winsor's recent study of inverte- brate taxonomy, and I have tried to use it in my own account of the origins of progressionism.4 Several of the papers read to the 1975 History of Science Society convention in Atlanta also showed an increased aware- ness of this point, s Now at last we are beginning to realize that Darwinism destroyed much more than Paley's concept of designed adaptation. After a considerable struggle, it also supplanted the whole idealist movement in biology - a movement which had come to play a significant role in British natural theology. If we are to understand the kind of world into which Darwinism emerged and the attitudes of those who resented its uncompro- mising naturalism, we must take into account the totality of the system by which God and nature were supposed to be connected via the argument from design. Several reasons can be given to explain why the inadequacy of the old approach has only slowly been recognized. The various steps seemed to fit together so neatly that it would be difficult at first to believe that the resulting picture was seriously inadequate. It must also be admitted that as far as the origins of Darwinism itself are concerned, the picture is quite complete: Darwin did read Paley and then go on to develop a natural explanation of adaptation without paying any attention to the idealist movement. Writers such as Robert Young, whose main concern is to link 3. Loren Eiseley, Darwin's Century: Evolution and the Men who Discovered It (New York: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 94-97. Gillispie makes a brief reference to Owen's idealist argument (Genesis and Geology, pp. 204-205) although the title of his chapter indicates that his main interest is the argument from designed adap- tation: "How Useful Is Thy Dwelling Place." 4. Mary P. Winser, Starfish, Jellyfish, and the Order of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). Peter J. Bowler. Fossils and Progress: Paleontology and the Idea of Progressive Evolution in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Science History Publications, 1976). 5. I am thinking, for instance, of the papers by Dov Ospovat and Muriel Blaisdell. 30 Darwinism and the Argument from Design Darwinism with the utilitarian social philosophy, will naturally tend to ignore the idealist movement in biology. At the same time, the vision of evolution exclusively as an idea challenging design which characterizes even the more recent of Jolm Greene's writings leads inevitably to a lack of interest in the complexities of the design argument and a neglect of the concept of a designed organic progression. 6 One is also led to suspect that the convenience of Asa Gray as an example of a theistic evolutionist - especially for American historians - has tended to obscure the complexity of the design issue. We know from Alvar Elleg~rd's survey of the Dar- winian debate in the periodical press that the idea of designed evolution was very popular in the decade after 1860. 7 But this is so murky and confusing a topic that most historians have been glad to deal with only a single example of the movement. It is not until after one begins to read beyond Gray into the other supporters of designed evolution that one becomes aware of the fact that his exclusive concern with designed adapta- tion is not typical of the general approach to the issue. It was no accident that Gray tried to adapt natural selection itself to the argument from design: most other natural theologians rejected selection altogether and thus were not necessarily limited to a consideration of adaptation as the only possible sign of the Creator's power. We shall see below that several other writers did indeed go beyond the question of adaptation to suggest that the overall pattern of creation revealed artifical regularities that were equally indicative of design. Darwinism may have originated as an explicit reaction against the belief in designed adaptation, but its basic philosophy was equally damaging to the idealist version of design and prompted an appropriate reaction from many naturalists. The purpose of this article is to outline the role of the idealist argument from design in both the pre- and post-Darwinian situations, but first we must clarify the difference between this and the approach of the Paley school. Paley's argument from design was essentially utilitarian: it stressed the usefulness of each character as it contributed to the adaptation of the species to its environment. Each example of adaptation in each species could be treated separately as an illustration of the Creator's benevolence. But as Thomas McPherson's analysis points out, the discovery of the pur- 6. John C. Greene, "The Kuhnian Paradigm and the Darwinian Revolution in Na- tural History," in Perspectives in the History of Science and Technology ed. Duane H. D. Roller (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), pp. 3-25 ; "Reflections on the Progress of Darwin Studies," J. Hist. Biol., 8 (1975), 243-273. 7. Alvar Elleg-~rd, Darwin and the General Reader." The Reception of Darwin's Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 1859-1872 (GiSteburg: Acta Universitatis Gothenburgensis, 195 8); see especially pp. 272 273. 31 PETER J. BOWLER pose behind each structure is not the only way of pursuing the search for evidence of design. 8 One can also see design in the order or unity of nature, for instance, in the supposedly harmonious relationships which some naturalists saw when they linked together the various species to form a taxonomic system. This approach depends on the unity and harmony of the whole of nature, not on the utility of its individual parts. A similar argument can be derived from the physical sciences, as in Kepler's convic- tion that the solar system was created according to a rational, mathemat- ical pattern. It is well known that the search for an underlying unity of type among living things inspired schools of transcendental biology in early nineteenth-century Germany and France. But less is known about the spread of this movement to the English-speaking world, and in particu- lar, little has been done to bring out the fact that idealism could be adapted to our native tradition of natural theology.
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