Darwin's Century, by Loren Eiseley

Re: DARWIN'S CENTURY -- EVOLUTION AND THE MEN WHO DISCOVERED

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Chapter VII: The Making of the Origin

Though I shall get more kicks than half-pennies, I will, life serving, attempt my work.
-- Darwin


I . "The Bridgewater Treatises"

When Darwin's uncle, Josiah Wedgwood, had sought to obtain the permission of Robert Darwin that Charles might go upon the voyage of the Beagle, he had urged that "the pursuit of Natural History, though certainly not professional is very suitable to a clergyman." [1] This remark is strongly indicative of the esteem in which natural theology was held in early nineteenth century England. Wedgwood was not a biologist. He was simply an affluent, intelligent manufacturer trying to do his nephew a favor. His recourse to this argument is evidence of its strength and wide dissemination in cultivated circles. The traditional observance of life in nature had been part of the legitimate province of the English clergyman since the days of John Ray and Gilbert White. It is significant, therefore, that the devout Fitzroy had chosen to take a "naturalist" on the Beagle rather than a geologist.

The argument for design, that is, the contention that all the multitudinous adjustments of organisms to their environment were evidence of the direct hand of God in earthly affairs, had been vigorously promoted through a long series of theological naturalists from John Ray and William Derham to William Paley. This viewpoint, while naive in its more primitive expression, nevertheless led directly to a great deal of very careful observation of both plants and animals. The microscope in particular enhanced the feeling of wonder toward the works of God and increased human faith in Divine Providence.

This popular attitude is very well expressed in the following passage from Paley's Natural Theology, a book which, though partially derivative, as many such works were after the time of Ray, was very influential in the early part of the century. Paley says: "Nor ought we to feel our situation insecure. In every nature and every portion of nature which we can descry, we find attention bestowed upon even the minutest parts. The hinges in the wings of an earwig and the joints of its antennae, are as highly wrought; as if the creator had had nothing else to finish. We see no signs of diminution of care by multiplicity of objects, or of distraction of thought by variety. We have no reason to fear, therefore, our being forgotten, or overlooked, or neglected." [2]

The italics are my own. They call attention to the way in which the study of natural history was at this time used to sustain Christian faith and comfort the bereaved. There was a general conception of God as a kind of master workman who had personally supervised the creation of even the tiniest organisms of the living world. In earlier centuries the church had largely based its system of theology upon the inspired word of the Scriptures. From about the latter half of the seventeenth century, however, the cultivation of science had led to a more intensive examination of the natural world. A feeling that religious insight could be obtained from the observation of God's works in the things about us led to a great proliferation of works upon natural theology. The telescope and the microscope widened man's comprehension and imagination. The tiniest infusoria, equally with the vast reaches of sidereal space, gave awe-inspiring glimpses of a world whose wonders were proclaimed as the most powerful evidence of God's design. The search for design in nature soon became a mania and everything was made to appear as though created specifically to serve man. There were Bronto (thunder) theologies, Insecto-theologies, Astra-theologies, Phyto-theologies, Ichthyo-theologies, Physico-theologies. Insects and stars alike were seen both figuratively and literally through human spectacles. Man stood at the center of all things and the entire universe had been created for his edification and instruction: hills had been placed for his pleasure, animals ran on four feet because it made them better beasts of burden, and flowers grew for his enjoyment.

This essentially egocentric point of view reached its final if sophisticated expression In the famous Bridgewater Treatises. Francis Henry Egerton, the eighth Earl of Bridgewater, died in 1829 leaving a bequest of eight thousand pounds for a work or works to be written "on the power, wisdom, and goodness of God as manifested in the Creation." Between 1833 and 1836 a series of eight such books were published, through the co-ordinated efforts of Chalmers, Buckland, Whewell, Kirby, and other scholars of the time. [3] They had set out to prove like others before them that the evidence of design In the world about us implies an Intelligent designer. The argument from contrivance had become a standard part of theology. The existence of God, the position of man, the truth of the Bible were all to be "proved" by an examination of the natural world about us. Since evolutionary change went unrecognized and each species of plant or animal was assumed to be a special creation, a particular conscious act on the part of God, natural theology had assumed the impossible burden of demonstrating "the final intention of the Creator in respect to each structure." [4]

The theologian was thus forced into the embarrassing position of having to explain why a benevolent Deity had devised unpleasant parasites with which to torture His subjects. In addition, the static nature of the design argument failed to explain satisfactorily the presence of rudimentary organs. The whole idea had to be propped up by a scaffolding of tendentious theory which rapidly became unwieldy. In the end Darwin was to appropriate the design hypothesis and turn it to quite another purpose. At the time of his voyage, however, it was still the reigning biological doctrine and received pious expression in church and lecture hall alike. Darwin had been a diligent student of Paley's Natural Theology, but what he did to Paley's carefully selected evidences of design will only emerge by degrees as we follow Darwin's thought in the formulation of the Origin.

II. Darwin and Malthus

When Darwin reached home in 1836 he was anxious to dispose of his specimens and set about the reports of the voyage. "I am to have the third volume," he wrote to Fox in 1837, "in which I intend giving a kind of journal of a naturalist.... The habits of animals will occupy a large portion, sketches of the geology, the appearance of the country, and personal details will make the hodgepodge complete. Afterwards I shall write an account of the geology in detail, and draw up some zoological papers." [5] London he characterized as "a vile smoky place." [6] It is obvious that he is already at this time contemplating the' retreat to the country which he later carried out, but he records with pleasure that some papers given before the Geological Society "were favorably received by the great guns, and this gives me much confidence." [7]

His short sojourn in London preceding his marriage had advantages. It brought him a close friendship with Sir Charles Lyell and the opportunity of meeting some of the finest scientific minds of the age. He had scarcely been home eight months before he opened, as he tells us, his first notebook upon the subject of species and began his conversations with commercial breeders. [8] In a letter to Lyell dated September 13, 1838, he wrote as follows: "I have been sadly tempted to be idle -- -that is, as far as pure geology is concerned -- by the delightful number of new views which have been coming in thickly and steadily -- on the classification and affinities and instincts of animals-bearing on the question of species. Note-book after note-book has been filled with facts which begin to group themselves clearly under sub-laws." [9]

This statement is particularly intriguing for two reasons: first, it shows that the interest in animals expressed in South America to his sister Susan was continuing and second, and more important, this letter, written about a month before Darwin read Thomas Malthus in October of 1838, [10] already speaks of "facts" grouping "clearly under sub-laws." What Darwin meant by this cryptic statement it is impossible to say, though one cannot help wondering if he was already groping his way toward the principle of natural selection before he read Malthus on population. Nevertheless, Darwin informs us in his autobiography, when speaking of Malthus, that "being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence, which everywhere goes on, from long continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species." [11]

This remark is straightforward enough, but it has always seemed dubious to the present writer that Darwin received his complete inspiration on the selective aspect of the struggle for existence from Malthus, or from his South American observations. The idea is clearly expressed in Paley and even more suggestively in Lyell, both authors whom Darwin had studied with great care. Lyell, for example, notes that "Every species which has spread itself from a small point over a wide area must ... have marked its progress by the diminution or the entire extirpation of some other, and must maintain its ground by a successful struggle against the encroachments of other plants and animals." [12] Again and again Lyell reiterates the observation that "in the universal struggle for existence, the right of the strongest eventually prevails; and the strength and durability of a race depends mainly on its prolificness...." [13]

Actually, as we have already seen, it would appear that Lyell foreran Darwin in the recognition of ecological change brought about by the struggle for existence and pressure of population, but that he did not grasp its creative aspect in terms of limitless organic alteration induced by such means. Darwin's son Francis has himself expressed surprise that his father should have regarded Malthus as providing the necessary clue to natural selection for, as he points out, the Notebook of 1837 contains a discussion which, while a trifle obscure in diction, really expresses the' whole principle. "We can easily see that a variety of the ostrich may not be well adapted, and thus perish out; or on the other hand ... being favorable, many might be produced. This requires the principle that the permanent variations produced by confined breeding and changing circumstances are continued and produced according to the adaptation of such circumstances, and therefore that death of species is a consequence ... of non-adaptation of circumstances." [14]

The statement would be clearer if it read "adaptation to circumstances" instead of "adaptation of circumstances," but anyone acquainted with Darwin's sometimes awkward and hasty wording of ideas in his notebooks will not be inclined to discount this passage. There is, in addition, one other very intriguing notation in the Notebook of 1837: "View of generation being condensation, test of highest organization ..." Francis Darwin inclined to the view that this somewhat cryptic statement means that "each generation is 'condensed' to a small number of the best organized individuals." If this is the case it constitutes additional evidence that Darwin had grasped what was to become the essential principle of his theory before reading Malthus. An added indication lies in the fact that in the same paragraph he refers to adaptation, and while putting in, in parentheses, the Lamarckian explanation, "wish of parents," he places two question marks after the statement. He is apparently beginning to write it off in his mind, but it is one more proof that Lamarck did play a part in his early thinking. [15]

It may well be that Darwin really received only an increased growth of confidence in his previously perceived idea through reading the Malthusian essay. The geometric growth of life as expressed by Malthus greatly impressed him and may have turned his thoughts more intensively upon the struggle for existence. There is evidence in Darwin's essay of 1842 of his impressed reaction to the mathematical approach of Malthus. He comments almost as a memorandum to himself: "Study Malthus and calculate rates of increase [for various species]." [16]

Moreover, Malthus was very popular at this time and therefore a powerful ally. We know that Darwin spoke of him admiringly as a "great philosopher." Perhaps in the vigorous expression of his views Malthus acted as one catalyst in the final precipitation of Darwin's thought. It is at least interesting that both Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace attribute their insight into the struggle for existence to Malthus, although we know both men had been profound students of Lyell's Principles of Geology. Perhaps it is the mathematical aspect of Malthus which partly explains this situation. It Is picturesque and brief and it captured the imagination as its later widespread use by the Darwinists reveals. [17]

III. The Law of Divergence

As Darwin pondered upon the forces at work in the natural world about him he came to see that over and beyond the pure struggle for life some factor or accessory law must have made for increasing organic diversity. Life, in other words, was a vast ramification of protoplasm into innumerable shapes and forms adapted not alone to differences in climate or medium as, say, air or water, but also it had succeeded in achieving differences of adaptation in a single location. Thus Darwin was later to remark to Asa Gray, "The same spot will support more life if occupied by very diverse forms.... And it follows ... that the varying offspring of each species will try (only a few will succeed) to seize on as many and as diverse places in the economy of nature as possible." [18] Since this Law of Divergence, as it came to be called, was regarded by Darwin as of the utmost significance in evolution, it is not without interest to observe that there are preliminary intuitions of it once more among Darwin's favorite authors.

Humboldt, in describing the tropical forest of South America, does not, of course, state an evolutionary principle, but he sketches exactly the kind of life-situation which was now preoccupying Darwin. "It might be said that the earth, overloaded with plants, does not allow them space enough to unfold themselves. The trunks of the trees are everywhere concealed under a thick carpet of verdure; and if we carefully transplanted the orchidiae, the pipers, and the pothoses ... we should cover a vast extent of ground. By this singular assemblage, the forests, as well as the flanks of the rocks and mountains, enlarge the domains of organic nature." [19]

Paley, however, whom Darwin practically knew by heart, comes very close to a full statement of the law itself except that he does not directly recognize the possibility of evolutionary change save for one cryptic phrase which implies the likelihood of secondary forces at work. This phrase I italicize in the passage that follows. "To this great variety in organized life, the Deity has given, or perhaps there arises out of it, a corresponding variety of animal appetites. For the final cause of this we have not far to seek. Did all animals covet the same element, retreat, or food, it is evident how much fewer could be supplied and accommodated, than what at present live conveniently together, and find a plentiful subsistence." [20]

There is no doubt that this statement contains the germ or the essence, which, given life and motion by Darwin, was destined to become the Law of Divergence. This, in more modern terms, we would call adaptive radiation. Even Paley remarks that "[Superfecundity] allows the proportion between the several species of animals to be differently modified, as different purposes require, or as different situations may afford for them room and food." [21] The passage quoted, equally with some of Lyell's remarks in the Principles, shows a true grasp of dynamic ecological change as the quantity of a given species alters in the struggle for existence.

What is not clearly realized by these earlier writers is the possibility of the slow alteration, not alone of the proportionate numbers of animals and plants in a given environment, but of their actual physical forms ~ well. "The thought of each age," remarked Sir William Thiselton-Dyer on the occasion of the Darwin-Wallace celebration in 1908, "is the foundation of that which follows. Darwin was an admirer of Paley, a member of his own College. He swept in the whole of Paley's teleology, simply dispensing with its supernatural explanation." [22] The manner in which this gigantic reversal of the orthodox field of thought was successfully attempted may now occupy our attention.

IV. The First Essay Attempts

Darwin tells us in his autobiography that directly after his return to England he had set about collecting ·facts which bore in any way on the variation of animals and plants under domestication and nature." [23] He had observed that selection was the key process in the creation of new domestic races of plants or animals, and by steeping himself in the lore of the practical breeder he hoped to discover the secret of change under the conditions of wild nature. He remarks that he spent hours in gin palaces talking to pigeon fanciers or combing the flies of gardeners' magazines. Even after the discovery of Malthus he was not content to relapse into an armchair consideration of the subject but persisted in breeding experiments of his own. particularly upon pigeons. "In your letter," he writes to his friend Joseph Hooker, the botanist, as late as 1849, "you wonder what 'Ornamental Poultry' has to do with Barnacles; but do not flatter yourself that I shall not yet live to finish the Barnacles, and then make a fool of myself on the subject of species, under which head Ornamental Poultry are very interesting...." [24]

Darwin nowhere states just what led him to feel that domesticated forms might have some relationship to the secret he sought, but we know that the selective breeding of cattle and sheep was widely practiced toward the end of the eighteenth century. Many of the modern breeds became established at this time. [25] Moreover, there was great interest among naturalists as to the causes of variation in living things. [26] The examination of the products of colonial America and the passion for classification which, guided and stimulated by Linnaeus, had made the latter a world figure, doubtless played a considerable role in the development of this interest on the part of the public. At any rate, it was in such an atmosphere that Darwin was immersed in his youth. We know, in addition, that he observed and speculated upon a peculiar breed of cattle he encountered on the pampas. From the self-conscious awareness of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century naturalists that man had successfully altered living things, Darwin, convinced already of the reality of evolution, must have passed rapidly to the suspicion that the effects of small, controlled variations might in reality be potentially endless. Finally, and perhaps most important of all for Darwin, the road had been pointed out by no less a man than Sir Charles Lyell himself, who had said in the Principles: "The best authenticated examples of the extent to which species can be made to vary may be looked for in the history of domesticated animals and cultivated plants." [27] By the time of his essay of 1844 Darwin is willing to write: "That a limit to variation does exist in nature is assumed by most authors, though I am unable to discover a single fact on which this belief is grounded." [28]

This is a bolder expression of Darwin's views than he was willing to express even two years earlier. Since we possess two compositions which may be regarded as trial runs before the Origin, and which were not published in Darwin's lifetime, their careful examination may be expected to yield us information as to the progress of his thought. We owe their preservation and publication in 1909 to Darwin's eldest son, Francis. There are two of these essays, one written in 1842, the other in 1844. The trial attempt of 1842 was not known to be in existence until it was discovered hidden in a cupboard when the old house at Down was vacated by the family in 1896. Though roughly and rapidly composed for his own purposes and not for publication, the first essay, seventeen years before the appearance of the Origin, contains the essential essence of Darwin's developed thought. As Huxley wrote long afterwards: "The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions were notorious enough; but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness." [29] In the first essay of 1842 all of these factors dwelt upon by Huxley are clearly assigned the roles they will later play in the Origin of Species.

The essay begins with a discussion of variation under domestication and this approach persists through the essay of 1844 and reappears as the opening chapter of the Origin itself. One might say that there is simply a steady enlargement in scope, sweep of ideas, and precision of statement from the first essay to the completion of the Origin. As one studies these early essays, however, one cannot help observing the transitional nature of much of Darwin's thought-transitional, that is, in the sense of passing from outright Lamarckian inheritance toward the as yet unformulated genetics of the future.

Although Darwin was in the habit of repudiating violently any intimation that he had pro.6ted from Lamarck, we have already seen that he was acquainted at an early age with English versions of the latter's work and in 1845 there is a reference in an unpublished letter to Lyell [30] regarding "my volumes of Lamarck." His rather cavalier rejection of his distinguished forerunner is tinged with an acerbity whose cause at this late date is difficult to discover, Darwin, although he added a meager and needlessly obscure historical introduction to later editions of the Origin, was essentially indifferent to his precursors, and doubtless resented Owen's sharply critical treatment of this fact in the latter's review of the first edition of the Origin. [31]

As we examine the early essays, however, it becomes apparent that Darwin's theory does not lack Lamarckian elements in spite of the removal of the idea of willed organic change. Darwin always maintained, and rightly, that he could not see how climate (Buffon) or the individual effort of the animal (Lamarck) could accomplish such peculiar organic adaptations as, for example, that of a woodpecker. Instead, Darwin introduced the principle of fortuitous variation but he retained the idea that environment, climate, domestication, or other similar exterior influences were a stimulating factor which might induce the variations which were then selected in the struggle for existence." Moreover, he held to the Lamarckian conception of the genetic transmissal of characteristics acquired by the animal during its own lifetime. This fact, though somewhat muted in the first edition of the Origin, re-emerged more powerfully in later editions as the Darwinian position became difficult to sustain under the assault of the mathematicians and the physicists, which will be discussed later on in Chapter IX. A few remarks will serve to indicate Darwin's thinking upon these topics.

As early as the Journal of Researches (1839) and drawn from material which, judging from clues in the Diary of the Voyage, dates to late in 1833, Darwin remarks that "Nature by making habit omnipotent and its effects hereditary, has fitted the Fuegian for the climate and productions of his country" (p. 237). This statement is so strongly Lamarckian that it suggests again the young Darwin's intellectual antecedents during the earlier portion of his voyage. On the very first page of the essay of 1842 he mentions that "habits of life develope certain parts.... Most of these slight variations tend to become hereditary." [33] He expresses, in addition, the view that "when the organism is bred for several generations under new or varying conditions, the variation is greater in amount and endless in kind." He is then careful to maintain that variation is not the product of direct effect from external conditions but only as these influence the reproductive powers and thus induce mutative changes.

In the essay of 1844 essentially the same views are given though in a more clearly expressed and qualified fashion. Also we observe here a theoretic trend which was to give an opening to Darwin's opposition and later to bring advice and counsel from his friendly rival Wallace. I refer to Darwin's failure, in spite of his Galapagos' experience, to estimate properly the amount of individual variation existing in wild nature. Two things were apparently responsible for his conservatism on this point: first, his own innately cautious reluctance to advocate what he could not thoroughly document or see; second, his preoccupation with domesticated plants or animals whose variation was easily observable and superficially so much more evident than that of creatures existing in a state of nature.

As a result, Darwin came to associate marked variation with the domestic state and to comment that "the amount of variation [was1exceedingly small ... in a state of nature, and probably quite wanting ... in the majority of cases...." [34] Domestication with its accompanying tendency to vary seemed, he thought, "to resolve itself into a change from the natural conditions of the species." If this, then, promoted a tendency to vary, "organisms in a state of nature must occasionally in the course of ages be ex posed to analogous influences." These "influences" he ascribed to climatic and other inexplicable causes of an external character which, along with geographical isolation, would promote evolutionary development.

It is evident from these observations that Darwin's search for the mechanism of change in wild nature had led him to seek for environmental rather than interior causes of change. His considerable belief that change in nature was to a degree the "occasional" product of accidental migration or climatic alteration led him directly to a need for enormous quantities of time for the development of the living world. In this reluctance to accept an internal mutative factor and in his preference for postulated changes occurring only in lengthy, sporadic intervals as the external world might dictate, Darwin was unconsciously placing a heavy load on the credibility of his doctrine of fortuitous improvement through natural selection. Though by the time the Origin was written Darwin placed considerable emphasis on variability in wild nature and never again was so pessimistic on this point as in the second chapter of the essay of 1844, a residue of this philosophy did not escape his critics. He still argued that under nature organisms varied in less degree and he contented himself with the rhetorical observation that since useful variations have been accumulated under domestication, others "useful in some way to each being in the ... complex battle of life should sometimes occur in the course of thousands of generations." This statement, whose pertinent portion I have italicized, reveals the timidity and caution with which Darwin approached the subject of variation under natural conditions. Obviously it opened the way for critics to point out that if advantageous variation was this rare, all of the many intricate organs, habits, and behavior manifested in the past and living worlds would have demanded fantastic lengths of time for their appearance and dissemination. Moreover, such a slow production of variations would be further retarded by the likelihood that they would not appear at a favorable moment in the life of the species.

Wallace, bolder by nature and perceiving the danger implicit in this hesitant line of reasoning, wrote to Darwin in July of 1866 urging him to abandon the sort of statements we have quoted above as tilting the scales too strongly against himself. Wallace pleads at some length: "Such expressions have given your opponents the advantage of assuming that favorable variations are rare accidents, or may even for long periods never occur at all and thus [the] argument would appear to many to have great force. I think it would be better to do away with all such qualifying expressions, and constantly maintain (what I certainly believe to be the fact) that variations of every kind are always occurring in every part of every species, and therefore that favorable variations are always ready when wanted. You have, I am sure, abundant materials to prove this, and it is, I believe, the grand fact that renders modification and adaptation to conditions almost always possible. I would put the burthen of proof on my opponents to show that anyone organ, structure or faculty, does not vary, even during one generation, among all the individuals of a species; and also to show any mode or way, in which any such organ, etc. does not vary." [35] In making this statement Wallace showed less addiction to the echoes of Lamarckian thought than his master. He was moving toward a more modem point of view. It is worth noting that Darwin took his advice. In later editions the sentence in Chapter V of the Origin which originally spoke of favorable mutations occurring "in the course of thousands of generations" has been unobtrusively altered to "successive generations."

Curiously enough, some years after Darwin's death, Hooker writing to Huxley expressed the view that "Darwin has nowhere that I can think of dealt with the causes of variation ... and I doubt his assenting to the view that they were in any scientific sense limited or directed by external conditions...." [36]

This statement has been rather widely and popularly accepted, yet Darwin himself wrote to Hooker in 1862 saying, "You speak of an inherent tendency to vary wholly independent of 'physical conditions'! This is a very simple way of putting the case ... but two great classes of facts make me think that all variability is due to change in the conditions of life: finally, that there is more variability and more monstrosities ... under unnatural domestic conditions than under nature; and, secondly, that changed conditions affect in an especial manner the reproductive organs." [37]

As the years went on Darwin wavered on certain points, altered sentences, blew hot and cold in letters to friends, including Hooker and Huxley, but there is no evidence he totally abandoned the beliefs we have outlined, He besieged Gray upon the variability manifested by newly naturalized plants and, in at least one instance, expressed surprise that such plants should not have proved variable. Nevertheless, he clung to his own point of view. As his surviving friends entered the autumn of their careers they seem to have been loath to remember before a later, critical generation this fading argument of the master. So much had been written, and the subject, even in Darwin's hands, had proved so elusive that it was left to die a natural death. But the widely held notion that Darwin totally abandoned it is false. It is true he hesitated, that much at least can be allowed. Far more than his younger colleague Wallace, however, or the brisk and aggressive Huxley, he never totally escaped the shadow of Lamarck, the man who had haunted him at Edinburgh and in Lyell's pages read on the Beagle long ago.

V. Darwin and Design

Although Lamarck had been dismissed as a "French atheist" in England and his work maligned in the conservative English reaction to the French Revolution and its Napoleonic consequences, there is no essential difference in the publicly expressed theological outlook of either Darwin or Lamarck. Both acknowledge a Creator, a Divine Author of all things, but both contend that the appearance of life on the planet, and its subsequent enormous radiation into divergent forms, is the product of secondary law as unswerving as that which the astronomer reads in the heavens. God, in other words, has not personally superintended the "emergence of every species of gnat, mole, and cricket. Instead, these have come about through the working out of the natural forces implanted in that highly complicated chemical compound known as protoplasm, and the response of this same protoplasm to the environmental world about it. "It is derogatory," says Darwin in the first essay of 1842, "that the Creator of countless systems of worlds should have created each of the myriads of creeping parasites and slimy worms which have swarmed each day of life ... on this one globe." [38] The creation and extinction of forms, he goes on to contend instead, "is the effect of secondary means." On homological resemblances alone, he argued later, "I disbelieve in ... innumerable acts of creation." [39] Species formation, he wrote to Lyell, "has hitherto been viewed as beyond law, in fact this branch of science is still with most people under its theological phase of development." [40] "For the life of me," Darwin maintained, "I cannot see any difficulty in natural selection producing the most exquisite structure, if such structure can be arrived at by gradation, and I know from experience how hard it is to name any structure towards which at least some gradations are not known." [41]

As one studies these remarks, and many like them, one can observe that the continuity in nature which had been maintained by Sir Charles Lyell against the catastrophists in geology has now been extended to the living world. The stability of natural law, first glimpsed in the heavens, had been by slow degrees extended to the work of waves and winds that shape the continents. Finally, through the long cycles of erosion and the uneasy stirring of the ocean beds, it was beginning dimly to be seen that life itself had passed like a shifting and ephemeral apparition across the face of nature. Nor could that elusive phantom be divorced from man himself, "the great subject," as even Darwin once remarked. If fin and wing and hoof led backward toward some ancient union in the vertebrate line, then the hand of man and ape could be scanned in the same light. Even had they wished, the scientists could not stop short at the human boundary. A world, a dream world which had sustained human hearts for many centuries, was about to pass away. It was the world of design.

"Now it appears," wrote one wistful philosopher, "that Darwin has at last enabled the extreme materialist to attempt and carry the design argument, the last and hitherto impregnable fortress behind which natural theology has entrenched herself." [42] President Barnard of Columbia University declared in 1873 that if organic evolution were true then the existence of God was impossible. "If," he declared bitterly, "the final outcome of all the boasted discoveries of modern science is to disclose to men that they are more evanescent than the shadow of the swallow's wing upon the lake ... give me then, I pray, no more science. I will live on in my simple ignorance, as my fathers did before me...." [43] Time and time again similar, if not more outraged, expressions echoed in intellectual quarters both in America and Europe. Man bad first gazed out upon the night skies and found himself and his planet dwarfed by the immensities of time and space; now, to his fear and chagrin, he was learning that his ancestry was that of an arboreal primate who in the long course of Tertiary time had descended to the ground and achieved some dexterity in the manipulation of stones. The wonder of the human achievement was lost for a moment in the sick revulsion of the wounded human ego. The fallen Adam had stared into the mirror of nature and perceived there only the mocking visage of an ape. Frederick Engels looking on amusedly at the disintegration of the philosophy of the Bridgewater Treatises commented: "Until Darwin, what was stressed by his present adherents was precisely the harmonious co-operative working of organic nature, how the plant kingdom supplies animals with nourishment and oxygen, and animals supply plants with manure, ammonia, and carbonic acid. Hardly was Darwin recognized before these same people saw everywhere nothing but struggle." [44] Papers poured from the press denouncing and refuting the Origin but the time for that was long past. Its mass of accumulated evidence had the weight of a boulder. Criticism flowed around and over it but the boulder in all its impenetrable strength remained.

Philosophically Darwin had achieved several things. Whether every aspect of his interpretation of the evolutionary process was to prove correct or not -- and about this he retained more fundamental doubts than his followers -- his work had destroyed the man-centered romantic evolutionism of the progressionists. It had, in fact, left man only one of innumerable creatures evolving through the play of secondary forces and it had divested him of his mythological and supernatural trappings. The whole tradition of the parson-naturalists had been overthrown. Mechanical cause had replaced Paley's watch and watchmaker. It was not possible to argue from special design to the Deity. If this were true it could also be observed that men no longer were forced to wonder privately by what road the parasitism and disease which had troubled Darwin had come to exist in the world. These, too, were part of the evolving life-web, but they did not represent preordained evil. Man could learn from the secondary laws which had brought them into being how they might be controlled.

The key change in the intellectual climate of the nineteenth century came with the recognition of adaptation, of the fact that creatures fit themselves to their environment. Lamarck and a few others had glimpsed this fact but most naturalists had gone on examining their universe blinded by a tradition of natural theology based on special creation. With Darwin we come to observe a very different world -- a world with which he is already toying in the first essay of 1842; he is concerned with abortive organs as Lamarck was before him -- rudiments, echoes from the past, traces of vanished limbs, soldered wing cases, buried teeth -- all that conglomeration of useless organs that lie hidden in living bodies like the refuse in a hundred-year-old attic. "No one can reflect on this without astonishment," muses Darwin; "can anything be clearer than that wings are to fly and teeth to bite and yet we find these organs ... in situations where they cannot possibly be of their normal use." [45]

The only reasonable explanation of this fact, which even Cuvier could not satisfactorily explain, lies in the evolutionary past of every species of organism-the ghostly world of time in which animals are forever slipping from one environment to another and changing their forms and features as they go. But the marks of the passage linger, and so we come down to the present bearing the traces of all the curious tables at which our forerunners have sat and played the game of life. Our world, in short, is a marred world, an imperfect world, a never totally adjusted world, for the simple reason that it is not static. The games are still in progress and all of us, in the words of Sir Arthur Keith, bear the wounds of evolution. Our backs hurt, we have muscles which no longer move, we have hair that is not functional. All of this bespeaks another world, another game played far behind us in the past. We are indeed the products of "descent with modification."

Yet as we dip more deeply into the pages of the Origin and as we browse in that great body of commentary which grew up around it one thing becomes apparent: Darwin did not destroy the argument from design. He destroyed only the watchmaker and the watch. "Under my hearty congratulations of Darwin for his striking contributions to teleology," wrote Asa Gray to de Candolle in 1863, "there is a vein of petite malice, from my knowing well that he rejects the idea of design, while all the while he is bringing out the neatest illustrations of it." [46] Alone among Darwin's immediate associates Gray inclined toward a more theistic position. We need not pursue his line of thinking here except to note that he sensed very early the fact that only a certain type of design argument had been eliminated by Darwin, namely, the finalistic one. Design by special creation implies the creation of an animal or plant for a special purpose and for all time; it is, in other words, final design. That was the design of the early naturalists whose last echoes resound in Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises. The word "final," however, throws a tremendous burden upon the theologian. "It places him," to reiterate the remarks of Lewis Hicks, "in the attitude of attempting to demonstrate, not merely a purpose but the purpose, the only, the ultimate, the exclusive, the final intention of the Creator in respect to each structure." [47] Obviously, in the light of the discovery that organisms change their bodies and the functions of their organs, Hicks's stricture becomes most pertinent. The design enthusiasts had assumed to define the intentions of the watchmaker only to discover that he had no final purpose which they could anticipate and that the watch, furthermore, was showing signs of turning into a compass through some self-directed reorganization of its inner structure.

The analogy is plain. The evolutionists discovered that nature "makes things make themselves" and thus succeeded in apparently removing the need of a Master Craftsman. The resulting excitement was so great that it was only later that the question began to be asked: Why does nature let things make themselves? Obviously this is a question science can only philosophize about but cannot answer. It can trace the organism down to the final cell; it may even be able someday, In its knowledge of biophysics and chemistry, to create simple life, but it will still not be able to answer the final why. For at that point science will have left the field of secondary causes in which it operates so successfully and, Instead, will be asking the primary and unanswerable questions.

Darwin had delivered a death blow to a simple, a naively simple, form of the design argument but, as Huxley himself came to realize, it is still possible to argue for directivity In the process of life even though that directivity may be without finality in a human sense. The rise of a broad and more sophisticated teleology may well have played a part in the development of the organismic philosophies of later years. Cuvier's grasp of the body as a functioning whole was far greater than Darwin's. Cuvier was struck with the wonderful stability of the functioning organism; Darwin with a theory of change. In pursuit of the mechanism of that change he tended to forget or ignore the interior organizing ability of the body, the curious adjustments of which it is capable and which he passed over lightly with the word "correlations" and references to "complex laws." Not even today is it possible to describe satisfactorily what power controls the innumerable activities, not alone of a living body, but of just one functioning cell which has to assemble and activate within itself all the chemical components necessary for its existence.

The concern with exterior struggle which followed the publication of the Origin of Species diverted biologists for decades from the most mysterious aspect of the living organism -- how its elaborate interior system is so subtly controlled and regulated. Cuvier differed from Darwin in his concern with the great organ systems underlying classes and phyla. As a comparative morphologist he was occupied with divergent, stable systems; Darwin, as we have seen, with adaptability and change. Both were men of great insight and if they could have been combined into one person, much later confusion might have been avoided. Human lives are limited in time, however, and a powerful mind, by its own interests, draws its particular followers down a diverging path for years. It was true of Cuvier who ignored Lamarck and it was true in a more subtle way of Darwin who ignored the organismic aspect of the thought of Cuvier.

VI. Darwin and Lamarck

To conclude our philosophic discussion of the making of the Origin a short comparison of the major tenets of the Darwinian as opposed to the Lamarckian view of nature will prove useful. It should be emphasized that we are here examining the writings of Darwin and Lamarck, not the embellishments or alterations made upon their systems by later writers. It must also be remembered In fairness to Lamarck that he was writing a half century earlier than Darwin, and with far less accumulated knowledge at his command.

Both (and in this respect Lamarck was far ahead of most of his generation) recognized that vast intervals of time were involved in the process of organic change. Each visualized the process as continuous, not saltatory. Each saw clearly that it was the exceedingly slow tempo of evolution as contrasted with the development of the individual which gave the illusion of total organic stability. Both saw life as branching and ramifying into a diversity of habitats and becoming by degrees ecologically adapted.

Here, however, a difference can be observed which reflects Lamarck's closer association with the thought of the eighteenth century. It is, he maintains, the necessity of ecological adjustment, of adaptation, which interferes with the perfectly graduated scale of nature which would otherwise come about naturally by means of an inner perfecting principle within the organism. It is the environment, in other words, which, in concert with the modifying power within the living creature, induces modifications of animal structure. There is thus an ideal structure toward which the organism would evolve, but which is constantly reworked by the creature's efforts to maintain and adjust itself to the world around it. This adjustment achieved by need, by the effort of the individual, will remain static and unchanging so long as the environment remains unchanged. In spite of Darwin's rejection of Lamarck's inner perfecting principle and modification by need to the demands of the habitat, one can observe that his break with Lamarck is not complete. The struggle for existence, the willingness of the organism to struggle, a fact which Darwin does not attempt to explain, equates at least partially, though perhaps not quite so teleologically, with Lamarck's life-power, or perfecting principle.

Furthermore, as we have previously had occasion to note, the Darwin of the essay of 1844, and similarly in a somewhat modulated tone thereafter, underestimates variation in wild nature. He comes close to assuming Lamarck's view of the perpetual stability of a once adapted form. Something in the external environment, they both believe, must impinge upon the organism to cause further change. Where Lamarck would have demanded renewed interior need for adjustment as a modifying force, Darwin institutes an environmental change which produces germ cell modifications by influence from without. These new characters are then selected as the creature struggles for life in its new or altered environment. It is a reworked Lamarckism but the similarities are intriguing. Of course, the belief in the reality of acquired characteristics was shared by both men. In Darwin's case, for reasons to be explored in a later chapter, this type of inheritance was to be carried to great lengths in his later work.

We have previously noted that the concept of the struggle for existence has sometimes been described erroneously as one of Darwin's contributions to general biological theory. By his own words be drew upon Malthus's treatment of human population problems and applied this concept throughout the organic world. Here again it should be remembered that knowledge of the struggle for existence in nature is to be found in Lamarck, Paley, and Lyell. By the early nineteenth century it was a commonplace.

But to Lamarck the "war of nature" was a pruning device, holding life in order and restraining the limitless fecundity of nature. It was not needed in order to achieve the transformation of species, since for him another mechanism was available. As a consequence, Lamarck ignored its possible winnowing effect in the preservation of variation. Darwin, by contrast, recognized its possible role in the accumulation of favorable mutations -- even if the latter emerged in a purely fortuitous fashion. We come here to an exceedingly interesting and neglected point: What led Darwin to believe in the chance emergence of new characters? This constitutes his major break with Lamarck and it is far more important than his recognition of the struggle for existence. The latter takes on renewed importance only after one believes that chance variations emerge and are inherited. After this is recognized, and only then, does the commonplace and widely recognized "struggle" become a genuine creative device.

Darwin at no point dates for us the time when this distinction emerged clearly In his mind, but one may suspect that the analysis of the Galapagos fauna with its variable products in isles not widely separated and climatically similar played its part. Here, "need," in the Lamarckian sense, should have produced similar results, but if one retained the idea that a new environment merely stimulated fortuitous variation which was than selected by struggle -- one would be moving toward a new interpretation of evolution by way of Lamarck. This apparently is what Darwin did. Similarly the domestic breeding in which Darwin also took such deep Interest offers examples of the development of odd, exotic, and quite useless or even detrimental characters preserved by artificial selection. These could hardly be regarded as teleologically implanted in the organism and Darwin uses this fact as an argument against the predetermination of animal form. Yet to promote the variation he has recourse again to the argument that domestication in some manner stimulates variability.

It is impossible, as one considers this subject in the context of Lamarck's thought, not to wonder why Darwin had to seek his inspiration in Malthus, or why in writing to Lyell long afterward he found it necessary to characterize Lamarck's as a "wretched book ... from which (I well remember my surprise) I gained nothing." The surprise, one comes to feel, should not be Darwin's. Rather it should be the surprise of the historian who finds that the two men shared similar views on the significance of domestic breeding, even to the extent of similar observations upon pigeons, greyhounds, and bulldogs, upon the interpretation of rudimentary parts, even upon use and disuse and their effects upon individual organs. They shared also like views upon man's relationship to the primates, except that Darwin was in a position to see more clearly man's paleontological relationship to extinct anthropoids. They felt varieties and species to be shifting, nebulous, and ill-defined. Though Lamarck hesitated over the question of total extinctions, he shared with Darwin a belief that morphological similarities indicated continuity of descent. It may be said justly that they differed in their opinions upon spontaneous generation, which Lamarck favored, and that Darwin eschewed necessary progression. Yet Darwin on the final page of the Origin so far forgot his antipathy to the idea as to write: "All corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection." In this he could no more quite escape his antecedents than Lamarck could escape the Scale of Nature.

Lamarck, however, in his final pages offers a sage observation. He says: "It is not enough to discover and prove a useful truth ... but that it is necessary also to be able to propagate it and get it recognized." For this effort Lamarck, as we have seen, was too old, too inept, too poor; too ahead of his time. Darwin is often pictured as similarly launching his frail bark upon the restless intellectual currents of his day. There is one difference. He had acquired Lamarck's bitterly learned wisdom by way of the worldly-wise geologist Lyell. His book was not launched alone.

Edmund Gosse in his autobiographical study, Father and Son, throws an unconscious light upon the way in which that great book, the Origin, entered the world. "It was the notion of Lyell, himself a great mover of men, that before the doctrine of natural selection was given to a world which would be sure to lift up at it a howl of execration, a certain bodyguard of sound and experienced naturalists, expert in the description of species, should be privately made aware of its tenor. Among those who were thus initiated or approached with a view toward possible illumination, was my Father. He was spoken to by Hooker, and later on by Darwin ... in the summer of 1857." [48] The great idea was being launched again, as Lamarck had foreseen. One wishes that Darwin and Huxley, both of whom had decried the shouldering and pushing for eminence among the scientists of their day, might have been just a little kinder to that old man whose bones are lost among the forgotten millions of the Paris poor. In the end perhaps it does not matter, but it is ironic that he who glimpsed so much truth should largely be remembered as the perpetrator of an error which was also shared by his intellectual descendant, Charles Darwin -- the belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

_______________

Notes:

1. LLD, Vol. 1, p. 198.

2. William Paley, Natural Theology, London edition of 1836, Vol. 2, p. 201.

3. E. C. Massner, Bishop Butler and the Age of Reason, Macmillan, New York, 1936, p. 203. See also D. W. Gundry, "The Bridgewater Treatises and Their Authors," History, 1946, Vol. 31, pp. 140-52, and George Ensor, Natural Theology: the Arguments Of Paley, Brougham, and the Bridgewater Treatises on this Examined, London, 1836.

4. L. E. Hicks, A Critique of Design Arguments, New York, 1883, p. 42.

5. LLD, Vol. 1, pp. 279-80.

6. Ibid., p. 282.

7. Ibid., p. 280.

8. A few excerpts were given by Francis Darwin in Vol. 2 of the LLD.

9. LLD, Vol. 1, p. 298.

10. Ibid., p. 83.

11. LLD, Vol. I, p. 83.

12. PG, Vol. 3, p. 67.

13. Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 391. For a more extended treatment of my views on Sir Charles Lyell see "Charles Lyell" Scientific American, 1959, Vol. 201, pp. 98-101.

14. FO, p. xvi. An entry in the Beagle diary (p. 212) speaks of the cause of Fuegian warfare as involving the means of subsistence. This statement (1834) shows very early Darwinian concentration upon the struggle for existence.

15. LLD, Vol. 2, p. 8. The recent publication in full of Darwin's Notebook by Sir Gavin de Beer makes Darwin's interest in Lamarck even more apparent.

16. FO, p. 8.

17. In addition it should perhaps not pass unnoted, as a speculative point, that to have referred to Lyell as a direct source of inspiration would have been, for both Darwin and Wallace, to quote a man publicly opposed to transmutation in support of that doctrine. Malthus, by contrast, was active In a totally different field, and had a popular following. Since he was the source of most of nineteenth-century England's thinking on the struggle for existence, nothing was more natural than to have recourse to him as the "authority," even if one had largely digested his ideas by way of Intermediate sources.

18. LLD, Vol. 2, pp. 124-25.

19. A. von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of Travels, 3 vols., Bohn, ed., London, 1852, Vol. 1, p. 216. (Italics mine. L.E.)

20. W. Paley, Natural Theology, London ed. of 1822, p. 229. Huxley, in fact, speaks of Paley in his recognition of secondary causes as "proleptically" accepting the hypothesis of evolution. LLD, Vol. 2, p. 202.

21. Ibid., p. 317.

22. The Darwin-Wallace Celebration Held on Thursday, July 1, 1908, by the Linnean Society of London, London, 1908, p. 37.

23. LLD, Vol. 1, pp. 82-83.

24. Ibid., p. 376.

25. C. F. A. Pantin, "Darwin's Theory and the Causes of its Acceptance," The School Science Review, June, 1951.

26. J. C. Ewart, "The Experimental Study of Variation," Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Glasgow, 1901, p. 666.

27. PG, Vol. 2, p. 354.

28. FO, p. 109. (Italics mine. L.E.)

29. LLD, Vol. 2, p. 197.

30. In the possession of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

31. Richard Owen, "Darwin on the Origin of Species," Edinburgh Review, 1860, Vol. 3, pp. 487-532.

32. In 1856 he stated explicitly to Hooker: "My conclusion is that external conditions do extremely little, except in causing mere variability." LLD, Vol. 2, p. 87. In this remark he parallels the belief of Maupertuis.

33. FO, p. 1.

34. Ibid., p. 83.

35. James Marchant, Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, New York, 1916, pp. 142-43.

36. Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Hooker, Vol. 2, p. 304.

37. MLD, Vol. 1, p. 198.

38. FO. p. 51.

39. MLD, Vol. 1, p. 173.

40. Ibid., p. 194.

41. LLD, Vol. 2, pp. 303-4.

42. William Graham, The Creed of Science, London, 1881, p. 319.

43. Sidney Ratner, "Evolution and the Rise of the Scientific Spirit In America," Philosophy of Science, 1936, Vol. 3. p. 115.

44. R. L. Meek, Marx and Engels on Malthus, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1953. p. 186.

45. FO, p. 45.

46. Jane Gray, Letters of Asa Gray, Boston, 1894, Vol. 2, p. 498.

47. L. E. Hicks. A Critique of Design Arguments, New York, 1883. p. 42.

48. Wm. Heinemann, Windmill Library ed., London, 1928, p. 106. Gosse's memory seems slightly at fault here. The date was most probably the summer of 1858.
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Re: DARWIN'S CENTURY -- EVOLUTION AND THE MEN WHO DISCOVERED

Postby admin » Thu Jul 16, 2015 10:38 pm

Chapter VIII: The Priest Who Held the Key to Evolution

Great revolutions in science are scarcely ever effected but after their authors have ceased to breathe.
-- William Swainson, 1834


I. Gregor Mendel

"On a clear, cold evening in February; so his biographer states, for the record is clearer upon the weather of this particular evening of 1865 than upon the momentous event that occurred in it, "Father Gregor Mendel read before the Brunn Society for the Study of Natural Science, his paper upon 'Experiments in Plant Hybridization.'" [1] Forty people were present in the room at the schoolhouse where the lecture was given. They were not ignorant people. Botanists, a chemist, an astronomer, a geologist were among those present. In the next month Mendel spoke again to the same audience recounting before them his new theory upon the nature of inheritance. The audience listened patiently. At the end of the blue-eyed priest's eager presentation of his researches, the still existing minutes of the society indicate there was no discussion.

Stolidly the audience bad listened. Just as stolidly it had risen and dispersed down the cold, moonlit streets of Brunn. No one had ventured a question, not a single heartbeat had quickened. In the little schoolroom one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century had just been enunciated by a professional teacher with an elaborate array of evidence. Not a solitary soul bad understood him.

Thirty-five years were to flow by and the grass on the discoverer's grave would be green before the world of science comprehended that tremendous moment. Aged survivors from the little audience would then be importuned for their memories. Few would have any.

In the four huge volumes in which, at the end of the century, the scientific historian John Merz records a hundred years of discovery, the name Gregor Mendel receives only footnote mention. Yet with Lamarck and Charles Darwin he shares today the biological honors of the nineteenth century. It is par excellence the century that discovered time and change. Perhaps as a consequence there is something a little symbolic about the lives of these three men. Lamarck died in forgotten poverty, but above his grave rang his daughter's defiant outcry, "The future will remember you, my father." Charles Darwin had been more fortunate in the world's adulation, yet a decade after the publication of the Origin he was to hesitate and fall back upon a theory which weakened his life's work and which would have proved unnecessary had he known what was said on that winter evening of 1865 in Brunn.

Darwinism, after the rediscovery of Mendel, was to undergo a sea change. It was to be half dismissed by Mendel's first followers and then emerge once more strengthened, enriched, and rejuvenated by the discoveries which flowed from the work of the obscure priest who read the Origin of Species and carried on queer experiments with peas which he affectionately referred to as his children. From peas, dwarfed, wrinkled, yellow, tall, short, he was to derive the laws which make modem genetics one of the most exact of the biological sciences. He had probed into the mysteries of the cell without a microscope. He had done it by infinite patience alone in the solitude of a monastery garden.

Although his observations were reported to the world, they lay unread. "My time will come," he said once to his friend Niessl, but it is doubtful if by then he really believed it. When he died in 1884, it was as a prelate of the church, worn out with the cares of office. His experiments had long since ceased. They had never aroused public attention and perhaps in the end, alone, confused, and ill-advised by the only botanist he knew, he had come to doubt their value. A few years after his election as prelate a visitor wishing to observe the experimental plants at the monastery reported simply, I found that I had come too late" In a similar way fame came at last to Gregor Mendel.

There is perhaps no stranger story in the annals of science than the rise to international eminence of this solitary man sixteen years after his death and thirty-five years after the talk in the little hall at Brunn. It is a story which is worth perusal by all scholars, not alone because of what Mendel achieved, but also because the complete failure of communication in this particular instance was, to a major degree, the failure of professional science. It has its lessons, even though the world has changed greatly since 1865. No man who loves knowledge would want an episode like this to happen twice.

Some scientists have tried to argue that the journal in which Mendel published was obscure, but his tragedy is more profound than this. He was advised by one of the great European botanists of his generation and he was betrayed, not consciously, we may say in charity, but betrayed through condescension. Mendel was an amateur and the professional scientist whom he looked up to and admired saw in him no more than an instrument for the furtherance of his own researches. It is true that the intellectual climate of the time increased his difficulties, but it is also true that Mendel, this man of buoyant good will, was denied throughout his life the solace of a single sincere professional friend who would lend an understanding ear to the account of his experiments.

From first to last Mendel was dogged by ill luck in everything that mattered save just one thing: the choice of the edible pea for his experiments. Even this plant, with its luckily simple genetic structure, was eventually abandoned -- once more by professional scientific advice. indeed, at this late point in time one might readily wonder how much he really glimpsed of the significance of his own discoveries -- one might, that is, if one did not know of the well-stocked monastery library with its annotated copy of Darwin. We know, too, that he tried experiments to test the Lamarckian principle. Alone in his garden he had wrestled with the two leading theories involving organic evolution, but where Darwin and Lamarck had been fascinated by change, Mendel was fascinated by stability. Instead of attempting, as did Darwin, to determine how the characteristics of the adult organism were transferred to, or compressed into, a minute germ cell, Mendel sought to determine how it came about that the germ cell contained and transmitted the characters of the living animal.

Mendel, in other words, had intuitively grasped what seemingly no one else of his generation understood; namely, that until we had some idea of the mechanisms which .controlled organic persistence we would be ill-equipped to understand what it was that produced evolutionary change. The persistence of biological form in time is the first fact in our experience. Organic change is a far more subtle phenomenon whose detection, as we have had occasion to observe, is dependent upon a sophisticated knowledge of successive plant and animal transformations occurring throughout great stretches of the past. It is for this reason that evolution remained so long undetected, whereas the assumption of special creation of each species struck very few as being in the least illogical.

It was Mendel's virtue that he concentrated with more precision than anyone before him upon the way in which already existing characters emerged or failed to emerge in the offspring of a particular union. In examining the details of his unfortunate career it will be possible to see with greater clarity why Darwin by 1871 in the Descent of Man was expressly retreating from his bold stand upon natural selection as the major factor in the production of evolutionary change, In that volume Darwin, quite in contrast with his assurance of 1859, wrote as follows: "I now admit ... that in the earlier editions of my 'Origin of Species' I perhaps attributed too much to the action of natural selection or the survival of the fittest." [2]

There was a reason for this wary retreat on the part of the master. Ironically enough, two years after Mendel had actually placed a possible answer to Darwin's problem on record, a very erudite Scotch engineer brought forward in the pages of the North British Review [3] a formidable challenge to the Darwinians. It was a challenge which only a Mendelian geneticist could have answered -- and Mendel, immured in his monastery, was unknown to both parties.

Darwin never attempted a direct response to Jenkin -- he always avoided public controversy -- but there is ample testimony in his letters to the effect which Jenkin's criticism had upon him. "Fleeming Jenkin has given me much trouble ..." he wrote to Hooker in January of 1869. [4] In February he confided to Wallace: "Jenkin argued in the 'North British Review' against single variations ever being perpetuated, and has convinced me...." Finally, in the sixth edition of the Origin of Species one may read his open confession: "Nevertheless, until reading an able and valuable article in the 'North British Review' (1867) I did not appreciate how rarely single variations, whether slight or strongly marked, could be perpetuated.... The justice of these remarks cannot, I think, be disputed." [5]

The reader must now consider what is implied in the above statements. Fleeming Jenkin had, in actuality, well-nigh destroyed the fortuitous character of variation as it was originally visualized by Darwin. Jenkin set forth the fact that a newly emergent character possessed by one or a few rare mutants would be rapidly swamped out of existence by backcrossing with the mass of individuals that did not possess the trait in question. Only if the same trait emerged simultaneously throughout the majority of the species could it be expected to survive.

An admission that numbers of animals or plants mutate simultaneously in the same direction, however, greatly reduces the significance of natural selection and suggests either some interior orthogenetic drive which is affecting the individual members of the species, or an external environmental force of Lamarckian character producing a direct effect on the germ plasm of an entire group of organisms. In either case fluctuating fortuitous individual variation has to be abandoned and with it goes much of the importance of natural selection." Jenkin's formidable mathematical attack, formidable, that is, in the light of the conception of blending inheritance prevalent at the time, seemed to Darwin largely unanswerable. The only recourse was to fall back toward the type of Lamarckianism around which he elaborated his theory of pangenesis. Darwin died with this difficulty unsolved and its consequences haunting his last years. The answer to Fleeming Jenkin had been standing on library shelves in the Proceedings of the Brunn Society for the Study of Natural Science since 1866. Jenkin, the hardheaded engineer, and the gracious, dreaming naturalist who had been forced to retreat before him would both be gone before anyone blew the dust from those forgotten pages.

Mendel is a curious wraith in history. His associates, his followers, are all in the next century. That is when his influence began. Yet if we are to understand him and the way in which he eventually rescued Darwinism itself from oblivion we must go the long way back to Brunn in Moravia and stand among the green peas in a quiet garden. Gregor Mendel had a strange fate: he was destined to live one life painfully in the flesh at Brunn and another, the intellectual life of which he dreamed, in the following century. His words, his calculations were to take a sudden belated flight out of the dark tomblike volumes and be written on hundreds of university blackboards, and go spinning through innumerable heads. Before their importance can be grasped, however, it is necessary to examine the state of genetics at the time Darwin wrote the Origin of Species and to gain some idea of the nature of the menace which confronted Darwin upon the publication of Jenkin's paper. [7]

II. Pre-Mendelian Genetics

The earlier history of human genetics is an amazing assemblage of superstitious error and fallacious observation. Monstrous births were assumed to be the result of man-animal connections. Right down into the eighteenth century such reports continued to be printed. As I remarked on an earlier page, the fixed precision of Christian speciation really represents in no small degree a late amalgamation of Linnaean scientific taxonomy with the increasing Christian emphasis upon special creation. [8] Monstrous hybrids between men, bears, and other animals which no educated person would accept today were taken quite seriously right into De Maillet's time -- an added reason, incidentally, for not dismissing as romantics, or as unscientific, scholars who were merely repeating the common beliefs of their day. [9] Undoubtedly some of the floating beliefs that plants could change their type-ideas which survive in the pages of the Vestiges -- were derived from accidental cases of genuine plant hybridity and mutation. Anecdote and tall tale were the common data of genetics until well into the. latter part of the eighteenth century. At that time the rise of professional breeding and the growing interest in the importation of valuable food and drug plants began to place emphasis upon controlled experimentation. The idea of selective livestock breeding arose in England during the early phases of the Industrial Revolution when the multiplying towns began to demand meat and dairy produce on a large scale. What emerged, and stimulated practical improvement in livestock, was the shift from purely local subsistence farming to the profitable business of supplying the food and wool needs of the new industrial towns. All of these purely economic factors greatly stimulated experimentation among commercial breeders. Darwin, who had come from the country, early showed a shrewd instinct for merging the theoretical with the practical when he began his intensive perusal of horticultural and livestock journals.

If we are to get clearly in mind the difference between the genetics of Darwin's day and the sort of problems which began to emerge toward the close of the century we must remember that all the great cytological work upon cell mechanisms was unavailable to both Darwin and Mendel. Their observations were confined to direct breeding experiments, or what they could learn from others. Mendel, as we have intimated, approached the problem in a quite different way from Darwin and proved to be the better experimentalist. Perhaps he was fortunate, so far as his experiments went, in not being a famous man already laboring under a point of view.

We have already learned the general nature of Darwin's beliefs. Here we are concerned only with the contrast he was later to make with Wallace on the one hand and, later on and posthumously, with the Mendelians on the other. Just as in the case of Darwin's evolutionary thinking, it is not always easy to isolate, out of the vast mass of his accumulated examples, the precise outlines of his genetic ideas. It is very commonly stated that Darwin believed in blending inheritance, while Mendel succeeded in demonstrating the reality of particulate inheritance. This appears to me a mild oversimplification of a more complicated situation. The confusion is emphasized when one comes to remark that Romanes, in discussing Darwin's views a few years prior to the rediscovery of Mendel, classifies Darwin's theory of heredity as a particulate one. [10]

Actually it would seem that the case might be better put as follows. Prior to the emergence of the critiques of A. W. Bennett and Fleeming Jenkin it would appear that Darwin had taken a great deal of the genetics of his day for granted. His primary interest, because of his evolutionary studies, lay in the field of variation. In the first edition of the Origin he simply states that the laws governing in- heritance are quite unknown, though he is vaguely aware of phenomena that today would go under such categories as sex-linked inheritance, or dominance and recessiveness. He confesses that variability is governed by unknown laws, but he realizes that this variability is without significance unless its benefits can be retained and accumulated through heredity. Drawing upon the forceful analogy of domestic breeding he professes to see no limit to the transmuting power of nature.

As one studies this first edition of the Origin one can see that in spite of the author's enthusiasm for natural selection he is rather careful to mention all factors which could conceivably playa part in organic change. As we have remarked, he remains, in this sense, a transitional figure. His genetics is essentially that of the shrewd out-of-doors observer. He is neither particulate in any precise sense, nor does he incline totally toward blending conceptions of inheritance. In reality he is occupied with just two things: variation and natural selection. He is thinking about evolution and his views have not yet been proved vulnerable by means of heredity. It was the attack launched by Jenkin and Bennett that forced Darwin into a more elaborate treatment of genetic mechanisms and led eventually to a retreat down one of the. pathways he had left open for himself. The retreat was not dictated through Jenkin's criticism alone. His troubles were augmented by events in the field of geophysics which we will chronicle in the next chapter.

When Jenkin penned his attack on natural selection it is quite obvious that he had found a loophole which Darwin, who was not mathematically gifted, had entirely overlooked. In brief, Jenkin simply took the position:

1. That it was not possible in domestic breeding to push a strain beyond a certain point of maximum efficiency for a given character. In his analysis of this problem Jenkin appears to have theoretically anticipated the later discoveries of Johannsen in the field of fluctuating variation. In this, however, he was ahead of his time and the debates which would later emerge around that subject. The attack which really shook Darwin was:

2. The argument that a favorable mutative sport would be "utterly outbalanced by numerical inferiority." Since the unblending character of Mendelian units was unknown, Jenkin's position was simply that a single favorable mutation would soon be swamped out and by degrees obliterated in any population group in which it occurred. Since the favored animal or plant would presumably be mating with its normal fellows, the rare variation would not long survive. As a potent example Jenkin advanced the hypothetical case of a single well- endowed white man being cast ashore on an island inhabited by Negroes. No matter how much power he might attain among them, the tribe would certainly not become white because of his presence. The only answer, ignoring for the moment Mendelian genetics, is to postulate a large group of animals mutating in a similar direction and contemporaneously. Jenkin points out this alternative, though, as he justly observes, it results in an evolution which is no longer the product of chance and selection but rather "a theory of successive creations." The fortuitous element involved in natural selection disappears and one is immediately confronted, not with accident, but an orthogenetic and controlled movement in a single direction. Darwin was sufficiently impressed by this argument that, although he did not abandon his book, he incorporated into it the Jenkin alternative suggestion and began at the same time a retreat toward habit and use -- inheritance which it is obvious he now saw as a refuge from the corner into which he had been forced by Jenkin. A. W. Bennett pressed the same advantage in another paper three years later in Nature [11] and Herbert Spencer, one of England's pre-Darwinian evolutionists, reiterated the Jenkin position as late as 1893. [12]

The final edition of the Origin contains, in the light of Jenkin's views, some quite surprising comment. "There must be some efficient cause for each slight individual difference," Darwin says, "as well as for more strongly marked variations which occasionally arise; and if the unknown cause were to act persistently, it is almost certain that all the individuals of the species would be similarly modified." [13] (Italics mine. L.E.) In those lines Darwin has assumed the Jenkin argument which permits the retention of evolution but at the price of fortuitous variation. One line further, however, and we encounter the contention that he has underrated "the frequency and importance of modifications due to spontaneous variability." Darwin with his gift for compromise has here accepted both a point of view which, if pursued, would be metaphysically fatal to his system and, at the same time, has stepped up the pace of variation to try to overcome the logic of Jenkin's argument. The number of these concealed contradictions makes the later editions of the Origin instructive but difficult reading. For clarity and reasonable consistency the first edition is by far the most satisfactory.

III. Pangenesis

In 1868 Darwin published the Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. In it, for the first time, he set forth a theory of inheritance to which he applied the term "pangenesis." This theory actually implies a type of particulate inheritance, although Darwin's concern over Jenkin's paper quite obviously reveals that this assumption of blending inheritance raised no question in his mind in 1867. Pangenesis, however, is a theory of particulate inheritance beginning at the other end, so to speak, of the problem Mendel pursued. It begins, that is, with the assemblage of another potential individual from the body cells of an existing organism. It is not an idea originating with Darwin by any means; it runs all the way back to the Greeks, [14] but Darwin's elaboration of it is an indirect escape from such problems as Bennett and Jenkin had formulated.

Darwin assumed that the cells of the body throw off minute material particles and that these particles, "gemmules," he calls them, are gathered from all parts of the body into the sexual cells of the organism. Darwin thus assumes that the sexual cells contain only what is represented in the living body -- or primarily so -- and the, particles they receive upon fertilization. Every character thus comes from the somatic, or body, tissues, and the germ cells contain only what is brought to them by the blood stream from all parts of the body. The germ is merely a device to create a new body out of the mingling of the particles of the parents' bodies.

Darwin's germ materials are thus developed anew with every living individual. This is in marked contradiction to later theories about the inviolability of the germ plasm. It permits any somatic modification during an individual's lifetime to be represented in his germ cells. It is, in other words, a Lamarckian device ensuring the inheritance of adaptive modifications in unending succession. That Darwin should have proposed this theory indicates, not alone how inadequate natural selection had come to seem to him, but how truly transitional, in retrospect, we can observe his thinking to be. He is half modem, half experimental, yet in times of difficulty he is capable of obscure retreats in the direction of eighteenth-century concepts. August Weismann (1834-1914), the man who reversed the trend of particulate studies, and who has been termed the first original evolutionist after Darwin, [15] has himself remarked that he would probably never have been led to deny the inheritance of acquired characters if it had not been for the impossible complications involved in "the giving off, circulation, and accumulation of gemmules." [16]

In spite of the fact that Weismann remained sufficiently hypnotized by the omnipresent Darwinian shadow to postulate a "struggle" among the determiners in the germ cell, he actually diverted the study of evolution into the pathway which has led oil to the great modem advances in the field of genetics. We have seen that Darwin's determiners were supposed to arise in the body cells and to carry, in some mysterious manner, the image of their particular body region compacted into a newly produced germ cell.

Weismann, on the other hand, reversed the attention which had been directed to the body as a source of variation, and concentrated his attention upon the germ itself as the source of emergent change. He postulated a germ plasm which was basically immortal and inviolable. By this he meant that the reproductive cells are isolated early and are passed along unchanged from individual to individual in the history of the race. By "unchanged" is meant unaffected by exterior environmental influences. All changes which emerge in the phylogeny of a given organism must therefore emerge from the alteration or elimination of particular hereditary determiners within the germ plasm itself, not from "messenger" determiners carried into the germ from sources in the adult body. It has been said by many modem writers that Weismann carried this inviolability principle too far, but it should be remarked in simple justice that since his works are no longer read in great detail, his own qualifications upon this point have been forgotten. He was willing to concede that the germ plasm was probably not totally isolable from influences penetrating it from the body, but that such influences -must be extremely slight. [17] It must be remembered that Weismann was combating Darwin's notion of a great stream of "messengers" entering the germ plasm from the body itself. There is no reason to think that Weismann, if he were alive today, would find it necessary to cavil over mutations produced in the germ plasm by radiation or by other similar powerful forces exerted upon the body.

In summary then, we may say that while it has long since been disproved that the determiners engage in a struggle for existence within the germ cell, the main features of Weismann's system have been retained as the actual basis of modern genetics. Germ cells come from other germ cel1s and are not derived from body cells. Germinal continuity Is complete, but not somatic continuity. This is the reverse of Darwin's position, and Weismann's victory over the conception of pangenesis marked the declining influence of Lamarckian theories of inheritance. As Weismann himself commented, "The transmission of acquired characters Is an impossibility, for if the germ plasm is not formed anew in each individual but is derived from that which preceded it, its structure and above all its molecular constitution cannot depend upon the individual in which it happens to occur...." [18] He also correctly recognized that sexual reproduction with its reshuffling of hereditary characters in every generation Is really a remarkable device for promoting variability -- new character combinations which may have selective value in the struggle for life. This observation was made possible by the slowly growing knowledge of cell mechanics to which the German workers of this period made such notable contributions. [19] So greatly does the sexual division promote new and individual combinations of characters that, without including any new mutations at all, it still contributes greatly to the potential evolutionary variability of any species.

Weismann's centering of emphasis upon a germ plasm out of which arose variation which was manifested in the living organism, and the failure of experiment to validate Darwin's pangenesis, led directly to the renewed experimentation which eventually culminated in the rediscovery of the lost work of Gregor Mendel. Before discussing the nature of that work, however, it is necessary to examine in a brief way just what Darwin, Wallace, and Weismann meant by variation. As we will see a little later, modern genetics, beginning with Mendel, has envisaged this problem differently from the way it was treated earlier in the century. The truth is that the Darwinists lumped under the term "variation" a great range of bodily differences about which they knew nothing whatever. They assumed that these characteristics were heritable -- natural selection has no meaning without such inheritance -- and that "variation and heredity," as Hogben says, "were coextensive processes." [20] Offspring were always a little different from their parents, the line of evolution was constantly in motion and constantly subjected to the selective attrition of the struggle for existence. As someone cleverly remarked, the species was always swallowing its tail. The normal curve of distribution for a given character was constantly being advanced on one side toward greater efficiency, and similarly suffering erosion from the side of the less effective. A stable species, in other words, was merely an illusion created by the constant, slow pruning effect of natural selection.

This idea, in spite of other differences, is common to Darwin, Wallace, and Weismann. There was no clear comprehension that not all somatic variation is heritable. Thus the Darwinists tended to conceive of evolution as a continuous process. Even an organism which appears to be standing still. like some living fossils, is actually in a kind of dynamic balance. Its apparent resting state is really produced by the fact that selection is holding the norm of the species at a given spot instead of thrusting it forward. The modem interpretation of evolution and variation does not totally equate with this point of view. When we use the term "variation," our meaning is somewhat different from that of the Darwinists.

IV. Artificial Selection and the Evolutionists

All through the earlier portion of the nineteenth century, and indeed the latter portion of the eighteenth century as well, evolutionists had had recourse to domesticated animals and plants as suggesting the mutability of biological form. Special creationists, even, had had to recognize a certain degree of plasticity in life whether wild or tame, but they had regarded this plasticity as being confined and demarcated. Species, sammelarten, as the Germans would say, were receptacles containing a range of varieties, but the species was the original created entity. The evolutionists, by contrast, had insisted that the species barrier was an illusion, that given time and opportunity the species, in Wallace's convenient phrase, would "depart indefinitely" from its original appearance. Buffon hinted at the possibility; Lamarck expressed it; Darwin used the whole process of artificial selection from which to develop, by analogy, his principle of natural selection. "The possibility of continued divergence," he remarked, "rests on the tendency in each part or organ to go on varying in the same manner in which it has al ready varied; and that this occurs is proved by the steady and gradual improvement of many animals and plants during lengthened periods." [21] While Darwin was not unaware of what today we would call macro-mutations, or saltations, he was inclined to believe that in a state of nature, particularly, smaller changes operating by degrees were the main instrument of change." Wallace, in a rather unguarded moment when he was attempting to counter the weight of the Jenkin-Bennett argument, speaks of the "powerful influence of heredity, which actually increases the tendency to produce the favorable variations with each succeeding generation...." [23] The metaphysical implications of this remark are about as "unDarwinian" as
some of Darwin's statements in this same period.

Neither Wallace nor Darwin had any experimental data which would enable them to distinguish between purely somatic, non-heritable variation and change of the genuine mutative variety. Darwin did have some notion of the complexities of inheritance, and it is not quite accurate to say that his notions of heredity were as simple as mixing water and ink. His knowledge, he well knew, was clouded and obscure:

"The germ ... becomes a ... marvelous object, for besides the visible changes to which it is subjected, we must believe that it is crowded with invisible characters, proper to both sexes, to both the right and left side of the body, and to a long line of male and female ancestors separated by hundreds or even thousands of generations from the present time; and these characters, like those written on paper with invisible ink, all lie ready to be evolved under certain known or unknown conditions." [24]

Arguments for a lessened antiquity for the globe began to mount as nineteenth-century physicists applied their calculations to the age of the earth. It is interesting to see that Darwin, who had once been quite casual as to time, shows an increasing interest in stories which suggest visible change in the present. He quotes, in the Descent of Man, the story of an American hunter who asserted that in a certain region male deer with single unbranched antlers were becoming more numerous than the normal variety. In reality the bucks were all yearlings ,with their first antlers, and the observer had been self-deceived. [25]

The story is less important than the glimpse it affords into Darwin's mind. Although he had written much about the minute, age-long increments involved in evolutionary change, it is clearly apparent that some of these apocryphal anecdotes possessed a strong appeal for Darwin. There was an understandable desire to show the process of evolution in operation, even as one tried to explain why it could not' actually be seen. It is not surprising that Darwin occasionally succumbed to this temptation and was, in spite of a judicious temperament, a little too easily tempted by "spiked buck" stories. They fitted in well with his notions of the way in which domestic animals were altered. We come now, however, to a peculiar fact. It would appear that careful domestic breeding, whatever it may do to improve the quality of race horses and cabbages, is not actually in itself the road to the endless biological deviation which is evolution. There is great irony in this situation; for more than almost any other single factor, domestic breeding had been used as an argument for the reality of evolution. Its significance, however, is somewhat deceptive and capable of misinterpretation.

V. Mendel's Contribution

In 1900 Correns, Tschermak, and De Vries, all working independently along the lines which Weismann and others had brought under examination, rediscovered the lost principles and lost paper of Mendel. The mere fact that three workers, after the long lapse of years, turned the little document up at the same time suggests that biological science was just reaching the point where Mendel's work could be appreciated. We have seen that Weismann had dealt with the germ plasm from "inside," that he did not accept pangenesis. Mendel, though cyt0logical methods were unknown to him, had, years earlier, used essentially the same approach. By carefully controlled experiment he sought to trace particular characters of the adult through successive generations, to find out whether such characters remained the same, mixed, or disappeared. As he himself commented in the introduction to his paper, "Among all the numerous experiments made [prior to his time] not one has been carried out to such an extent and in such a way as to make it possible to determine the number of different forms under which the offspring of hybrids appear, or to arrange these forms with certainty according to their separate generations, or definitely to ascertain their statistical relations." [26] Bateson observed that these primary conceptions of Mendel were absolutely new in his day. There is a surgical precision about Menders procedures which is in marked contrast to the bunglesome anecdotal literature which fills so much even of Darwin's treatment of the subject. By selecting from a variety of pea plants a series of easily observable and identifiable characters, Mendel began his. experiments with attention focused upon what happened to these characters in the course of their passage through several generations. The details of the experiments need not concern us here, but the results, from the standpoint of evolution, were spectacular.

Mendel had established for a series of plant characters the fact that they passed through the germ cell as units. Such units did not mix with other units, though it was found that certain characters might be suppressed in a heterozygous individual and re-emerge only in a homozygous one. All of these facts depended on gametic segregation. They had nothing to do with pangenesis, nothing to do with the kind of selection Darwin and Wallace had been largely concerned with. Jenkin's "swamping out" of a new mutant character could not take place so long as the individual had offspring. The units were particulate and unalterable except by actual mutation. A character could be carried and could be spread even if recessive. If it had survival value, its diffusion could be rapid.

Mendel challenged directly the Darwinian idea that cultivated plants had, in some manner, been made more "plastic" and variable. "Nothing," he says, "justifies the assumption that the tendency to the formation of varieties is so extraordinarily increased that the species speedily lose all stability." Instead of this assumption, Mendel draws upon his new discoveries to suggest that most cultivated plants are actually hybrids, mixing back and forth and showing the unit character ratios which such origins would suggest. The close proximity of domesticated forms promotes the opportunities for hybridism. Thus the fluctuating variability which Darwin sometimes attributed to the indirect factors of climate, soil, and other influences could not all be regarded as due to the emergence of new evolutionary characters. Much of the supposed new was old, but variable in its phenotypic expression. Mendel had shown that the vast array of living characteristics was controlled by mathematical laws of assortment, and biological units (genes) were transmitted independently. "The course of development," he remarked, "consists simply in this, that in each successive generation the two primal characters issue distinct and unaltered out of the hybridized form, there being nothing whatever to show that either of them has inherited or taken over anything from the other." [27] Heredity and variation in the old Darwinian sense could, therefore, not be synonymous. The unit factors had a constancy which the Darwinians had failed to guess. [28]

VI. Johannsen and Variation

We have seen that the Darwinian evolutionary mechanism was one involving the constant selection of small variations which were assumed to be numerous and inheritable. For a long time they were pretty much taken as given, and little or no attempt was made to determine what lay back of them, or whether all variation actually arose from the same cause. William Bateson, one of the first active Mendelian researchers, put the matter succinctly when he said: "The indiscriminate confounding of all divergences from type into one heterogeneous heap under the name 'variation' effectually concealed those features of order which the phenomena severally present. creating an enduring obstacle to the progress of evolutionary science." [29] It was Menders contribution to have revealed that not all variation was new in the sense of just emerging. Furthermore, the revelation that discrete unblending hereditary units existed which might be studied cytologically as well as through breeding experiments swung interest in new directions. Hugo De Vries, whom we shall discuss in the following chapter, seized public attention by his advocacy of rapid species alteration through sizable changes, speciation really, by sudden saltations or jumps. This doctrine in its extreme form was fated to be modified, but it cannot be denied that his emphasis upon the distinction between minor "fluctuating variations" and "discontinuous" variability, to which he applied the term "mutation; greatly stimulated research. Among the results of that research was the discovery of the Danish scientist W. L. Johannsen that the more or less constant somatic variations upon which Darwin and Wallace had placed their emphasis in species change cannot be selectively pushed beyond a certain point, that such variability does not contain the secret of "indefinite departure."

The Belgian anthropologist Lambert Quetelet (1796-1874) observed in 1871 that for almost any biological character, height for example, one could erect a frequency distribution curve, provided a statistically adequate sample was available. There would be a scattering of individuals on either side of the norm and the extreme variants would lie at either end of the frequency curve. There is, in other words, an oscillation in a given population group around a mean value for any biological characteristic that we may choose to examine. It was this type of fluctuating variation which the Darwinian school had assumed might be "selected," either artificially or naturally, by the simple expedient of eliminating organisms at the lower end of the curve and selecting the individuals at the upper end of the curve for breeding purposes until the norm was moved forward. The breeder, it is true, can do certain things in this regard, but his effects are limited in a way the Darwinians were not in a position to foresee.

By selecting pure lines of beans, Johannsen anticipated that by raising beans from large bean seeds and from small and intermediate types he would obtain a series of different norms of size from his several plants. In this he failed. Whatever the size of the bean used, the progeny continued to fluctuate about a norm. Selection had had no effect in modifying the character of the norm. These variations in bean size were purely somatic, that is, they had no connection with genetic factors, but instead apparently represented accidentally favorable or unfavorable growth conditions.

There is another factor which is concerned in the successful artificial breeding of both animals and plants. Johannsen did find that in spite of the somatic norm indicated by the frequency distribution of his pure lines of beans, there were also distinct means in separate lines of beans. This represented a true hereditary component. If we breed for large beans, say, or the fastest race horses, we are selecting out a stock which contains hereditary unit factors favorable to our intent. By constant selection we perfect a relatively pure line for the given effect we wish to produce. Through judicious mating we may even introduce new elements into the complex. Basically, however, our efforts are limited to what exists genetically in the stock. By careful manipulation we may draw certain characters to the surface or combine them with others. [30] We can, however, produce only what is potentially contained within a given line. Beyond this the breeder can do nothing but wait upon those incalculable events known as mutations, which appear spontaneously. For example, Johannsen at one point in his experiments observed that the range shifted in an unexplainable man ner in one of his true lines. It was a true mutative event -- a new factor had been introduced.

The result of Johannsen's studies of 1903 and later was to demonstrate conclusively (1) that organisms with the same genotype (i.e., genetic composition) could differ phenotypically, that is, in their physical appearance; (2) that the selection of phenotypic characters without a genetic base would not yield hereditary change; (3) that selection of hereditary characters could induce some degree of physical alteration but the effect would attenuate and halt unless there were added mutations which are sometimes forthcoming and sometimes not.

For a time there was an understandable feeling that Darwinism was moribund. This was due partly to the discovery that certain of the variations upon which Darwin had depended were non-heritable, partly to the feeling that new changes emerged suddenly and were not the result of a slow accretion of characters. By degrees, however, the latter notion gave way. It began to be realized that there were small mutations as well as large, which would produce an effect not greatly different from the kind of continuous evolution Darwin had visualized. Thus the word "mutation" began to take on its modern meaning. [31] The word "macro-mutation" fits better today the kind of evolutionary leaps which, under De Vries's influence, were heavily popularized in the first few years of the twentieth century. In this period there was, for a brief time, a line drawn between the significance of large and small variations, but it was a line which could not be maintained.

As the century progressed, biological thought swung around to the opinion that however wrong Darwin may have been in certain details, he had been justified in his view that small changes are less apt to be detrimental to the organism and are the more likely mode of evolutionary change. [32] Nevertheless, in contemplating the Darwinian rejuvenation, it is well to remember a forgotten observation of Jacques Loeb, one of the finest experimental biologists of the early decades of this century. He commented that one of the greatest peculiarities of the Darwinian period was the seeming scientific indifference to the actual visible demonstration of specific change. The draft of limitless time at the Darwinists' command led them to assume that the process was too slow to be observed at all. That this troubled Darwin, particularly after the time scale began to be shortened, we can see from stories such as the account of the spiked buck. The literature, however, remained largely polemical. It was therefore an enormous leap forward when Hugo De Vries proposed his "mutation" theory and demonstrated hereditary changes of form. The rediscovery of Mendel at this time with his evidence for the actual existence of specific hereditary determiners marked, as Loeb says, "the beginning of a real theory of heredity and evolution." Even though some of De Vries's thought was later to be repudiated, and though Loeb was writing in the period of uncritical enthusiasm for De Vries's discoveries, we may, I think, with little reservation, endorse this final remark: "If it is at all possible to produce new species artificially I think that the discoveries of Mendel and De Vries must be the starting point." [33]

In the next fifty years Mendel's principles were expanded to cover many organisms, both plant and animal. Mathematical tools elaborated by such men as Fisher, Sewall Wright, and others were introduced to handle the theoretical genetics of entire populations. It was discovered that certain types of mutations occur over and over again in particular stocks, and thus by inference it was possible to assume that a certain reservoir of variability was always at hand in particular species-a reservoir possibly contributing to organic change in times of shifting conditions. Certain kinds of genetic mutation were found more likely to occur than others. [34]

Cytology continued to press farther and farther into the mysterious mechanics of the nucleus and the cytoplasm. Finally, today, mutations are being artificially induced by various types of radiation and chemical agents. All this, however, is a book-long story in itself. There is still much that is unknown: the cellular location and nature of the great mechanisms that control the structure of phyla and classes escape us still; we know far more about fruit flies than men. It is strange, now, to walk through the laboratories and encounter the warning signs before radiation experiments, and to think of Mendel among the droning bees and flowers in the monastery at Brunn. "My time will come," he had said to his friend Niessl. "My time will come." Perhaps, as others had heard the sound of change and the flow of waters in the night, Mendel had learned from those tiny intricate units that shape a flower's heart something of the elemental patience that holds a living organism to its course while mountains wear away. "My time will come," he said. It was the indefinable echo of another century in the air.

_______________

Notes:

1. Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, New York, 1932.

2. C. Darwin, Descent of Man, 1871, Modern Library ed., p. 441.

3. FIeeming Jenkin, "The Origin of Species," North British Review, 1867, Vol. 46, pp. 149-71.

4. LLD, Vol. 2, p. 379.

5. Modern Library ed., p. 71.

6. J. C. Willis, The Course of Evolution, Cambridge University Press, 1940, pp. 5, 165-66. Also H. J. Muller. "The Views of Haeckel in the Light of Genetics," Philosophy of Science, 1934, Vol. 1, p. 318.

7. It can also be found in his Papers, Literary, scientific, Etc., ed. by Sidney Colvin and J. A. Ewing, London, 1887, Vol. 1.

8. E. B. Poulton in Essays on Evolution, Oxford, 1908, p. 56, suggests seventeenth-century Puritan influence.

9. Conway Zirkle in The Beginnings of Plant Hybridization, Philadelphia, 1935, gives an extended historical account of fantastic animal combinations.

10. G. J. Romanes, Darwin and after Darwin, Chicago, 1897, Vol. 2, p. 45. E. S. Russell in The Interpretation of Development and Heredity, Oxford, 1930, p. 63, similarly expresses himself and cites Johannsen to the same effect.

11. "The Theory of Selection from a Mathematical Point of View," Nature, 1870, Vol. 3, pp. 30-31.

12. "The Inadequacy of Natural Selection," Popular Science Monthly, 1893, Vol. 42, p. 807.

13. Modern Library ed., p. 155-56.

14. M. J. Sirks, General Genetics, The Hague. 1956, p. 49 ff.

15. Mendel, of course, being unknown.

16. Essays upon Heredity, Oxford, 1892, Vol. 2, pp. 80-81.

17. Op. cit. edition of 1889, p. 170.

18. Ibid., p. 266.

19. The advances in cell-staining techniques in Germany were responsible for major advances in cytology. Roux had observed the behavior of chromatin and examined mitosis. He believed that the secret of heredity was incorporated in a particulate manner within the nucleus. Following Roux's lead Weismann glimpsed the role of the chromosomes in carrying what today we would call genes. He also predicted In 1887 the reduction division which was later on to be established for meiosis.

20. L. Hogbon, Genetic Principles in Medicine and Social Science, New York, 1932, p. 167.

21. Charles Darwin, Variations of Animals and Plants under Domestication, New York: Orange Judd & Co., 1868, Vol. 2 p. 300.

22. Ibid., pp. 306-7.

23. A. R. Wallace, "Natural Selection -- Mr. Wallace's Reply to Mr. Bennett," Nature, 1870, Vol. 3, p. 49.

24. VAP, Vol. 2, p. 80.

25. J. T. Cunningham, "Organic Variations and Their Interpretation: Nature, 1898, Vol. 58, p. 594.

26. Mendel's paper is reproduced in W. Bateson's Mendel's Principles of Heredity, Cambridge University Press, 1913.

27. Cited by Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, New York, 1932, pp. 147-48.

28. Ibid., pp. 178-79.

29. "Heredity and Evolution," Popular Science Monthly, 1904, Vol. 65, p. 524.

30. Raymond Pearl, "The Selection Problem," American Naturalist, 1917, Vol. 51, pp. 65-91.

31. T. H. Morgan, "For Darwin," Popular Science Monthly, 1909, Vol. 74, p. 375.

32. H. J. Muller, "On the Relation Between Chromosome Changes and Gene Mutations" in Mutation, Report of Symposium held June 15-17, 1955, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, N.Y., pp. 134, 142.

33. "The Recent Development of Biology," Science, 1904, n.s. Vol. 20,
p. 781.

34. Thomas Hunt Morgan, "The Bearing of Mendelism on the Origin of Species," Scientific Monthly, 1923, Vol. 16, p. 247. See also W. E. Castle, "Mendel's Laws of Heredity," Science, 1903, n.s. Vol. 18, p. 404.
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Re: DARWIN'S CENTURY -- EVOLUTION AND THE MEN WHO DISCOVERED

Postby admin » Thu Jul 16, 2015 10:39 pm

Chapter IX: Darwin and the Physicists

We have almost unlimited time.
-- Darwin, 1858

If the mathematicians are right, the biologists cannot have what they demand.
-- Lord Salisbury, 1894


I. Kelvin and Residual Heat

We have seen, in our earlier discussion of Sir Charles Lyell and the uniformitarian hypothesis in geology, what a vast reversal in human conceptions of the age of the earth went on in the Christian world in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. We also observed in the course of that survey what visions of limitless time, "millions of ages," as Erasmus Darwin somewhere remarks, were a necessary preliminary premise before a satisfactory theory of evolution could be entertained. The slow organic change postulated by both Lamarck and Darwin demanded time far beyond anything conceived in the Mosaic account of Creation. The existence of time of such magnitude, beginning with the labors of Hutton, Playfair, and others, was pretty well demonstrated to the satisfaction of all objectively minded scholars by the mid-century. It formed, in fact, part of the necessary groundwork of the Origin of Species.

Strangely enough, however, within six years after the publication of that work an attack on the conception of unlimited geological time had been launched with such vigor that, by the end of the century, it was still one of two leading arguments entertained by many naturalists as casting doubt upon the principle of natural selection. It had shaken the confidence of Darwin himself, forced Huxley into a defense characterized more by sophistry than scientific objectivity, and placed geology in general in the position of an errant schoolboy before his masters. The attack had been launched by Lord Kelvin, contended by many historians of science to be the outstanding physicist of the nineteenth century. Today there is a tendency in some quarters to regard the physical sciences as superior in reliability to those in which precise mathematical adeptness has not been achieved. Without wishing to challenge this point of view, it may still be worth a chastening thought that, in this long controversy extending well over half a century, the physicists made extended use of mathematical techniques and still were hopelessly and, it must be added, arrogantly wrong. By contrast, the geologists who appeared to their physicist colleagues as bumbling amateurs expressing themselves only in vague hunches, and who could produce few arguments that the great Kelvin would deign to notice or to answer, happen to have been remarkably right. But in those days of the seventies things were going badly for Darwin and his followers. If fortuitous variations were the source of the great diversity of planetary life, then time was of the essence of the matter. A contraction in the time scale, therefore, must inevitably force biologists to a rejection of fortuitous variation in favor of some type of more rapid orthogenetic and therefore possibly teleologically directed change.

Whether Lord Kelvin and his Scotch associate, Peter Tait, saw this inevitable consequence of their thought one cannot but wonder, since they were devoutly religious men. At any rate, they pressed their advantage hard. In the words of Sir Archibald Geikie, "the physicists have been insatiable and inexorable. As remorseless as Lear's daughters, they have cut down their grant of years by successive slices, until some of them have brought the number to something less than ten millions." [1] Today when the antiquity of life on the planet is beginning to be conservatively estimated at close to three billion years it can readily be seen that calculations as low as ten to thirty million years for the elapsed time since life on earth would have been possible placed an enormous strain on the Darwinian theory. It became, in other words, increasingly difficult to see how an evolutionary theory operating primarily on the basis of fortuitous mutations occurring at lengthy intervals, and only then being selected by the winnowing process of natural selection, could possibly account for the diversity of existing organic life in the short interval of a few million years.

It can be observed from Darwin's letters that this new development in physics gravely troubled him. He refers to Lord Kelvin as an "odious spectre,'' [2] and in a letter to an unknown correspondent in the collections of the American Philosophical Society he writes: "Notwithstanding your excellent remarks on the work which can be effected within a million years, I am greatly troubled at the short duration of the world according to Sir W. Thomson [Lord Kelvin] for I require for my theoretical views a very long period before the Cambrian formation." [3]

Let us now investigate, from the historical standpoint, how this peculiar situation had come about in the short time since Darwin had published The Origin of Species. By the last decade of the nineteenth century Lord Salisbury, in his Presidential Address before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, was able to bring forward as the two strongest objections to the Darwinian hypothesis the Insufficiency of time for evolution by such a method and, second, the impossibility of demonstrating natural selection in detail. [4] Though not at first glance obvious, the two points are actually interlinked in some degree as we will later be able to observe.

Though the nature of our major subject will not permit a lengthy analysis of the developments leading to Lord Kelvin's position, we may note in passing that they were the inevitable outcome of the cosmic evolutionism of the late eighteenth century. Temperatures taken in deep mines indicated an increase of heat as one went downward, and these observations were occasionally dwelt upon in scientific papers during the early nineteenth century. What began to be regarded as the secular cooling of the earth, its dissipation of heat from its original molten condition into the freezing space around it, began to occupy attention. The geologist George Greenough, for example, in his Anniversary Address before the Geological Society of London in 1834, remarked that "it appears certain that the surface of our planet has become cooler and cooler, from the period when organic life commenced to the Tertiary epoch."

The growing recognition in geological studies of the second law of thermodynamics would thus inevitably bring into question the :Implied eternities of the early uniformitarians. When to this problem of the residual heat of the earth was added the question of the age of the sun's heat and its influence upon the life of the earth, it was inevitable that there should be a demand for geological reform. "British popular geology," insisted Lord Kelvin, "is in direct opposition to the principles of Natural Philosophy." "I take the sun much to heart," groaned Darwin to Lyell in 1868.

It is interesting to note that although time in quantity had been implied by many solar observations there had been, prior to Kelvin, comparatively few attempts to relate astronomical to geological problems. The uniformitarian geologists, in fact, had in their earlier phase "discerned neither a beginning nor an end: Darwin, in the first edition of the Origin, had ventured that "in all probability a far longer period than 300,000,000 years had elapsed since the latter part of the secondary period." [5]

Even today, with radioactive methods of checking time in the rocks, this figure would be regarded as excessive. The later editions of the Origin do not carry it. One may suspect that, just as today the study of man in the Pleistocene has greatly intensified our efforts to define, subdivide, and date this epoch, so the emergence of the evolutionary theory after 1859 as a leading aspect of biological thought enormously enhanced the human effort to date the past. The past had no longer the static or cyclic quality of the classical Greco-Roman conception, nor, by contrast, the six-thousand-year ephemeral duration accorded it by orthodox Christians. Change had entered the world; time was debatable and open to scientific examination.

Lord Kelvin had thrown down a direct challenge to the geologists and, by indirection, to the evolutionists themselves. At the close of the century the two antagonistic camps would still be in existence. A collected bibliography of the subject through the period 1862 to 1902 would be enormous. What concerns us here, however, is the effect which Kelvin and his colleagues in physics had upon both the geologists and biologists. It was impossible to ignore Kelvin. Given the physics of the time there was no way of escaping him. Many geologists capitulated and revised their calculations of the earth's antiquity downward. Biologists, trapped in a more difficult impasse, tried to find their way out through various ancillary hypotheses. Three papers written by Lord Kelvin and dating back to the early sixties may serve to indicate the major points which he was to emphasize, with elaboration of detail, until the close of the century. "On the Age of the Sun's Heat," written for Macmillan's Magazine, [6] expounds the view, also supported by Helmholtz and others, that the sun is an incandescent liquid mass which is dissipating its energy at a rapid pace. Lord Kelvin could see no way in which this loss of radiant energy could be compensated for by other mechanisms. Therefore, argued Kelvin, the sun's future life is limited, and, in its not too lengthy past, it must at one time have been sensibly hotter than at present.

"As for the future; said Kelvin in a similar paper which he delivered before the British Association in 1861, "we may say with ... certainty that inhabitants of the earth cannot continue to enjoy the light and heat essential to their life for many million years longer, unless [he added with unconscious prophecy] new sources now unknown to us, are prepared in the great storehouse of Creation." [7] Atomic energy was not, of course, discovered until the twentieth century, but it was already warming the earth that Kelvin gazed upon so gloomily. Ten per cent less light and heat would destroy us, we know now, and ten per cent more heat would boil us alive. Throughout the whole great range of geological time, modem science now tells us, our sun can have changed only insensibly at best from its original state. [8] Otherwise there would have been no continuity of life upon earth.

In 1865 Kelvin turned directly to the geologists with a paper whose very title was a forthright challenge: "The Doctrine of Uniformity in Geology Briefly Refuted," [9] which he read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh. It is an attempt to demonstrate mathematically, in terms of heat loss, that the earth's crust cannot have maintained its stability over such an enormous time range as that demanded by the theories of the uniformitarian geologists and the evolutionary biologists who relied upon them.

Later, in 1869, Thomas Huxley attempted a counter-blow which did not prove particularly convincing. Essentially, he attempted to evade the issue by the nonchalant pose that "Biology takes her time from Geology. The only reason we have for believing in the slow rate of the change in living forms is the fact that they persist through a series of deposits which geology informs us have taken a long while to make. If the geological clock is wrong all the naturalist will have to do is to modify his notions of the rapidity of change accordingly." [10] (Italics mine. L.E.)

On an earlier page I have spoken of this as sophistry. At best it was a mere delaying action. For if evolutionary biology relied for change upon infinitesimal variations acted upon by natural selection through long time periods, it was difficult to see how the process could be "speeded up" to accord with the new facts of geology unless Huxley had a new theory to propose in place of natural selection. Huxley proposed nothing new. "It is not obvious," he went on, "that we shall have to alter or reform our ways...." [11] With his old proud gladiatorial skill he referred to himself as a counsel who contrives to gain his cause "by force of mother-wit...." [12]

This was not, however, a struggle which debating skill alone could win. Though we know now that Lord Kelvin was wrong, he was, paradoxically, right in terms of nineteenth-century physics. Grimly he ignored the elusive footwork of Huxley. "A correction of this kind," he observed to the Geological Society of Glasgow, "cannot be said to be unimportant in reference to biological speculation. The limitation of geological periods imposed by physical science cannot, of course, disprove the hypothesis of transmutation of species; but it does seem sufficient to disprove the doctrine that transmutation has taken place through 'descent with modification by natural selection.'" [13] (Italics mine. L.E.) Squirm as he might, Huxley could not totally evade that point. It is no wonder that Darwin, beset simultaneously by both the Jenkin and Kelvin nightmares, began to fall back toward the familiar landmarks of his youth, toward the "inherited effects of habit," toward that shadowy biological borderland haunted by Lamarck and the ghost of his grandfather. In this instance the swashbuckling of Huxley did not impress him. Painfully and doubtfully he wrote to Wallace in 1871, "I have not as yet been able to digest the fundamental notion of the shortened age of the sun and earth." [14]

Kelvin pressed his advantage relentlessly. "We find at every turn something to show ... the utter futility of [Darwin's] philosophy," [15] he said in 1873. By 1893 he was willing to go along with the American Clarence King's estimate of the age of the earth as around twenty-four million years. "I am not led to differ much," [16] said Kelvin. Today these twenty-million-year estimates of the earth's antiquity would take us only into the upper reaches of the Age of Mammals. This will give us some idea of the contracted time span that had been forced upon a science used to reveling in time vistas of which Hutton had spoken long ago as having "no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end." The great rout was on at last. The science of geology had ceased to be what it was to the early uniformitarians, "the science of infinite time."

Most of the geologists, though occasionally hedging, grumbling, and not averse to claiming a few extra million years for themselves, fell in line reluctantly with the physicists. Sollas confessed that "so far as I can at present see, the lapse of time since the beginning of the Cambrian system is probably less than seventeen millions of years...." [17] By 1900 he was aware that "eminent biologists" besides himself were willing to settle for twenty-six million years as satisfying the needs of evolutionists. [18] Charles Walcott conceded geologic lime could be measured by tens of millions of years. [19] Falling in with Huxley's position he remarks evasively, "I have not referred to the rate of development of life, as that is virtually controlled by conditions of environment." Sir Archibald Geikie, although protesting "a flaw in a line of argument which tends to results so entirely at variance with the strong evidence for a higher antiquity," was willing, nevertheless, to settle for 100 million years. This figure, he modestly maintained, would content the geologists whose errors he admitted. [20]

II. The Biological Retreat

The biologists, confronted in this manner by the defection of the geologists, began to grope for feasible solutions. This groping is important to observe because it is part of the confused intellectual climate out of which emerged a momentary anti-Darwinian trend and which, at the same time, contributed to the stimulation of researches leading toward the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel. Darwin died before the new trend culminated. He admitted in the sixth edition of the Origin that the objection to natural selection raised by Lord Kelvin was a very formidable one.

A close examination of the last edition of the Origin reveals that in attempting on scattered pages to meet the objections being launched against his theory the much-labored-upon volume had become contradictory. In Chapter XI, surviving from earlier editions, we read: "There is some reason to believe that organisms high in the scale, change more quickly than those that are low." [21] Darwin dwells on the "slow and scarcely sensible mutations of specific forms." [22] Then, as we turn to another section, we suddenly discover a converse statement apparently inserted as a device to evade Lord Kelvin's mathematics. We perceive with mild astonishment that "the world at a very early period was subjected to more rapid and violent changes in its physical conditions than those now occurring; and such changes would have tended to induce changes at a corresponding rate in the organisms which then existed." [23] (Italics mine. L.E.) The last repairs to the Origin reveal, both in connection with Lord Kelvin and Jenkin, how very shaky Darwin's theoretical structure had become. His gracious ability to compromise had produced some striking inconsistencies. His book was already a classic, however, and these deviations for the most part passed unnoticed even by his enemies. The number of improvisations which had had to be marshaled to the assistance of natural selection remind one at times of the difficulties which Lamarck tried to meet by additional hypotheses.

Wallace had suggested that periods when the earth's orbit was less eccentric would give an impression of greater stability so far as the living world was concerned. Changes in the earth's orbit, on the other band, would, he contended, stimulate climatic change and thus speed the process of evolution. This, he thought, would account for a more rapid rate of organic change and enable us to fit the main events of evolution within a shorter time scale. [24]

Adam Sedgwick, a younger relative of Darwin's old geology professor, proposed a theory that selection tends to diminish the Variability of species. Therefore, he reasoned, "variation must have been much greater in the past than now.... This view, if it can be established, is of the utmost importance to our theoretical conception of evolution, because it enables us to bring our requirements as to time within the limits granted by the physicists." [25] "That variation," Sedgwick goes on to say, "was much greater near the dawn of life than it is now, and heredity a correspondingly less important phenomenon, is a deduction from the selection theory." [26]

Sedgwick here seems to have developed another version of the Darwinian argument that evolution proceeded rapidly at the dawn of life. Others, like Lloyd Morgan, found solace in repeating Huxley's argument that time is the business of the geologist and that the biologist can adjust accordingly. No Darwinist could be long happy with this argument, however, which, as Kelvin had warned, left the notion of fortuitous mutation and selection in a most dubious position.

Nor, for that matter, were the geologists entirely happy. They were willing to admit that a false analogy had, in the past, "been set up between the boundless infinity of space and the vast immensity of past time," [27] but the voluminous records of past life and the time ratios founded upon sedimentation did not fit easily into the strait jacket of the physicists. The geologists, shrewdly observed G. K. Gilbert, were "making as earnest an effort for reconciliation as had been made a generation earlier to adjust the elements of the Hebrew cosmogony to the facts of geology." [28] We might add that just as the earlier attempt had proved hopeless so, in the end, would this similar effort. Geological time, as foreseen by the eloquent Huxley, sprang irresistibly out of the facts. It was, as he had said, like the djin from the jar which the fisherman had opened. It was "vaporous, shifting, and undefinable, but unmistakably gigantic." In the end, for all their striving, the physicists would be unable to coax the monster back into the bottle. To this day it is continuing to expand.

III. De Vries and Saltatory Evolution

We have previously had occasion to examine the way in which the blending idea of inheritance held in Darwin's time led the author of the Origin into difficulties with the mathematically inclined engineer Fleeming Jenkin. We have, furthermore, noted Lord Salisbury's stricture at the end of the century that, along with the problem of time, which we have just surveyed, the second point which left the status of Darwinian evolution inconclusive was the inability to demonstrate natural selection in detail. All in all, then, we may observe that Jenkin, and Lord Kelvin, along with a host of followers had forced Darwin, before his death, into an awkward retreat which mars in some degree the final edition of the Origin. As C. D. Darlington has ironically expressed it: "He panicked and ran straight into the opposite camp....Lamarck became a posthumous Darwinian." [29] Within two years of Darwin's death a letter to Wallace insists: "It is Impossible to urge too often that the selection from a single varying individual or of a single varying organ will not suffice." [30] Even his old colleague Wallace was constrained to remark in a letter to Professor Meldola fifteen years after Darwin's death that his addiction to notions of the hereditary effects of climate, food, etc., upon the individual "led to much obscurity and fallacy in his arguments, here and there." [31]

It is unnecessary to pursue further the inconsistencies of an outstanding and basically courageous thinker. As we have seen in a previous chapter, Darwin was essentially a transitional figure standing between the eighteenth century and the modem world. He had never entirely escaped certain of the Lamarckian ideas of his youth, whether they came by way of Lyell, or independently from his grandfather, or, as is more likely, from both. As a consequence it Is not surprising that in a time of stress he grew doubtful that natural selection contained the full answer to the sallies of his critics. He fell back, therefore, toward ideas he had never totally repudiated but which, in the first edition of the Origin, had been allowed to remain in the background, masked, in a sense, while the major emphasis had been placed upon natural selection. The inheritance of habit, incidentally, is indirectly an excellent device for speeding up evolution in a world where time is short. Darwin made use of it in The Descent of Man.

It is not Darwin but the younger generation of evolutionists who must now concern us. By and large they had accepted the evolutionary point of view, but they were oppressed by the confused and incoherent situation which they had inherited from the dead, master. The relative value of natural selection against the Lamarckian approach was being reweighed. The nature of heredity was under debate and the rate of organic change was, as we have already observed, a matter of great concern. Weismann had overthrown Herbert Spencer's support of the Lamarckian position. In spite of Darwin's past hesitations, change appeared to be, not the result of climatic stimulation upon the germ cells, but the product of some imponderable chance, or so it seemed, emanating from those same germ cells. This development, more or less divorcing mutations from environmental influence, made even more impossible the attempt to assume rapid mutative change accommodating its emergence entirely to physical and climatic episodes upon the planet. The latter factors might in some degree select, but could not stimulate, the appearance of new variations.

It is now clear that evolutionary science in the last decade of the nineteenth century was drastically in need of a new approach. The old catastrophic cosmogony, by its short time scale, had made anything but the progressionist doctrine impossible. Darwin, to his great good fortune, had appeared when this hypothesis was in the process of being overthrown by Lyell. Thus Darwin, whose theories demanded a vaster grant of time than any previous worker had envisaged, wrote his book in the easygoing days of ultra-uniformitarianism, when time appeared as infinite as space. Once, for example, when Lyell in 1860 had raised some question about the slow change in insular faunas, Darwin had responded complacently, "We should ... always remember that no change will ever be effected till a variation in the habits, or structure, or of both, chance to occur in the right direction ... and this may be in any particular case indefinitely long." [32]

It can easily be seen that the harsh strictures of the physicists, if they had been voiced a few years earlier, might well have reduced Darwin to silence or, at the very least, have caused him to reject natural selection as an evolutionary mechanism. Fortunately, from the historical standpoint, this did not occur, physics instead, as represented by the devout Kelvin, probably having been stimulated to an examination of earth-time, by some degree of animus toward Darwin's new heresy. The results, viewed even partially in this light, are fascinating. It can be seen, for example, that the damage done by Kelvin's doctrine to Darwin's ideas of change as involving the selection of minute and almost imperceptible variations led to a renewed search on the part of the biologists. They badly needed some mechanism of rapid organic transformation. This became particularly true as the demonstrated inviolability of the germ plasm precluded further reliance on use-inheritance or similar Lamarckian mechanisms.

Thus, though the physicists originally appeared as the bette noire of this chapter, they became, wrong though they were, the indirect stimulation which played a considerable part in the emergence of the new genetics and the rediscovery of Mendel at the turn of the century. Discontinuous, saltatory evolution became the only apparent alternative to uniformitarian evolution, nor was it long in appearing. The doctrine of macro-mutations offered a way out of the Weismann-Darwin dilemma. Lest I seem to be reading connections into unrelated events long after their occurrence, the following quotation from Hugo De Vries, one of the three independent rediscoverers of Mendel's work in 1900, may prove of interest.

"I have now to point out one of the weightiest objections against the conception of the origin of species by means of slow and gradual changes. It is an objection which has been brought forward against Darwin from the very beginning, which has never relented, and which often has threatened to impair the whole theory of descent. It is the incompatibility of the results concerning the age of life on this earth, as propounded by physicists and astronomers, with the demand made by the theory of descent.

"The deductions made by Lord Kelvin and others from the central heat of the earth, from the rate of the production of the calcareous deposits, from the increase of the amount of salt in the seas, and from various other sources, indicate an age for the inhabitable surface of the earth of some millions of years only. The most probable estimates lie between twenty and forty millions of years. The evolutionists of the gradual line, however, had supposed many thousands of millions of years to be the smallest amount that would account for the whole range of evolution, from the very first beginning until the appearance of mankind. This large discrepancy has always been a source of doubt and a weapon in the hands of the opponents of the evolutionary idea.... The theory of evolution had to be remolded." [33]

When De Vries made this statement on a lecture tour of America he was being hailed as a second Darwin -- much to the elderly Wallace's amazement -- the latter having refused to express much confidence in the newfangled Mendelian genetics whose characters he regarded as in the nature of "abnormalities or monstrosities." The reaction of Wallace to the Mendelian discoveries was not purely the product of old age. There is in it a trace of subconscious fear -- the fear, perfectly understandable in the light of the times, that Darwin and he had, after all, not been right and that they might be losing their hold on posterity. This had become particularly apparent with the rise of the "new Darwin" who had momentarily captured the public imagination.

In 1886, about the time that Weismann was engaged upon his theory of the inviolability of the germ plasm, De Vries in Holland had begun to study an American plant, Oenotheraa lamarckiana, the evening primrose, which had escaped into the wild state in Europe. To his happy astonishment it seemed that he had discovered a plant actually giving birth directly to a new species -- and this in considerable profusion. Furthermore, the plant appeared to be giving off new types every year. If this phenomenon could be verified and established, a macro-mutative method of establishing new species might be demonstrable. The evolutionary rate of change could be speeded up to accord with the time scale of the physicists and Darwin's minute variations could safely be disregarded. Natural selection would then cease to be as important as it was in the first edition of the Origin.

The idea of dramatic and considerable alterations at one step did not, of course, originate with De Vries. Darwin had been cognizant of the possibility so far as domesticated plants, or animals like the Ancon sheep, were concerned, but because of the problem presented by the conception of blending inheritance, he did not see how such breeds could be maintained except through the attention of the breeder. Theophilus Parsons in America, a few months after the first publication of the Origin, had dwelt on the possibility of the "hopeful monster" as a step in the creation of new species. Parsons even went so far (a courageous act in 1860) as to intimate that the earliest human beings were "children of Simiae nearest in structure to men, and were made, by some influence of variation, to differ from their progenitors...." [34] This communication of Parsons's thus anticipates Kolliker's expression of similar views upon saltatory evolution in 1864. [35]

It was not until 1901, however, that De Vries, by now acquainted with Menders work, began to publish upon his discovery. He came to believe that states of mutability might alternate with periods of much greater stability in organisms which do not necessarily show such constant selection and change as had been propounded by Darwinians such as Wallace. His conclusions and the reemergence of Mendel into the limelight brought De Vries world-wide fame. There are psychological aspects to this phenomenon. Thomas Case commented in Science that the new theory should appeal particularly to theologians. "If.» he says, "we conceive that man originated abruptly by some unaccountable molecular change ... there can be no doubt of the time when man became immortal, whereas there would be necessarily much, much uncertainty as to tile time when this occurred among the successive infinitesimal increments of brain development necessitated by the Darwinian theory." [36]

For a short time it appeared that some of the more repugnant aspects of Darwinian thought -- its constant emphasis upon struggle, its mechanistic, utilitarian philosophy which, to many, seemed as dingy as a Victorian factory -- might vanish away in the light of the new Mendelian discoveries arid particularly under the influence of the type of mutative change dwelt upon by De Vries. His work contained a vision in which even human evolution might appear to press forward more gracefully and rapidly than in the tooth-and-claw philosophies which had haunted Darwinian thinking. Then suddenly the dream, the popular enthusiasm, ended.

De Vries, who had held for a period a position of such unrivaled popularity that he had been brought to America to give personal addresses upon his theories, is now sometimes difficult to find in the indices of introductory works on genetics. It is no fault of De Vries, who was an honest worker. Instead, it was the simple irony of fate. The man who had sought to see creation at work in a simple flower, who had held in his own hands "a species which has been taken in the very act of producing new forms," the man who had been able to say "the origin of species is no longer to be considered beyond our experience," had been working with a plant hybrid whose genetic mechanism, because of unequal chromosome numbers, had a tendency to break down. In the words of two modem geneticists, "The mutants of Oenothera are therefore nothing more than symptoms of its peculiar hybridity and as such are of little significance in evolution." [37] The acclaim has long vanished. Even by 1907 Vernon Kellogg had seen fit to comment: "The lack of new observational data ... of the origin of new species through mutations in nature, is significant. It is my belief that a reaction against the curiously swift and widespread partial to complete acceptance of the mutation theory ... will soon occur." By "mutation theory," of course, Kellogg was referring to what today we would call a large or macromutation.

It would be ill to forget, however, that De Vries, like many another, had borne the heat of the scientific day. He had pursued what seemed a reality and had found a phantom, but in the process had contributed like Mendel before him to the accumulating wisdom that might be used by other men after his name and his memory had vanished from the books. There can be no doubt that in dramatizing the large, the macro-mutation, rather than the small "fluctuating" variations of the Darwinists, De Vries so emphasized discontinuity in evolution as to promote a clarification of, the problem by renewed research. Furthermore, his swift-changing kaleidoscopic evolution shifted attention from natural selection in the world of the adult organism to the processes at work in the egg or sperm cell. Cytology was coming into its own and the disproportionate emphasis upon natural selection was fading. There are still those who remember that in the thinly tenanted no man's land described by Bateson as the field of genetics in the first five years of this century, Hugo De Vries by this emphasis alone did notable work. As Bateson has remarked, it is in the seed bed, the poultry yard, and amid growing nature that variation may be found and its properties tested. [38] De Vries was to be found in these places. He was one of the very few theoretical evolutionists, after the old pigeon fancier died at Down, who did not confine himself to his study.

IV. Time and Radioactivity

We have now seen something of the subtle if mistaken pressures exerted indirectly upon biology from the field of physics. They had contributed to Darwin's discomfort almost from the time the Origin was published, and had played their part in his groping retreat toward Lamarck. Still, a few geologists remained suspicious. F. R. Moulton was among them. He was dubious that the contraction theory of the sun's heat was sufficient to give the necessary duration to energies radiated by that body. "Finally he pointed out in 1899 that it was conceivable that some type of unknown atomic energy might contain the secret. S. His words were indeed prophetic and were to be totally fulfilled within the next decade. In 1903 Paul Curie and Laborde demonstrated that radium steadily maintains its temperature above its surroundings. Both geology and astronomy were not slow to assess the significance of the newly discovered atomic energies. Kelvin's conception of the sun as a sort of figurative coal pile rapidly dwindling toward extinction was swept away; his harsh calculations became meaningless. Even here on earth the uranium content of the rocks was such that the doctrine of the loss of residual heat ceased to have significance. The way lay open for an enormous extension of the antiquity of the earth -- an antiquity that would have delighted and astounded Darwin. The long tyranny of the physicists was over; the oncoming cold had been a phantom. Instead of a freezing and contracting earth whose fires were dying, men now saw a planet which, in terms of human years, was well-nigh forever young, prodigal of its heat in mountain upthrusts, green with some endless and undying spring whose source lay hidden at the atom's heart. Instrument of terror though the atom in our time has come to be, it may someday be remembered that the news of radioactivity came first among us as a message that the abysmal mechanics of nineteenth-century science had perished and had left us lifting our faces with renewed faith and understanding to the sun.

_______________

Notes:

1. "Twenty-five Years of Geological Progress in Britain," Nature, 1895. Vol. 51. p. 369.

2. James Marchant, Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, New York, 1916, p. 220.

3. Dated January 31, 1869. The correspondent was apparently J. Croll. See MLD, Vol. 2, pp. 163-64.

4. Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Oxford, 1894, pp. 3-15.

5. O, p. 245.

6. 1862, Vol. 5, pp. 388-93.

7. W. Thomson (Lord Kelvin), "Physical Considerations Regarding the Possible Age of the Sun's Heat," The London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, 1862. Series 4, Vol. 23, p. 160.

8. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, Stars in the Making, Harvard University Press, 1952, pp. 106-7.

9. Reprinted In Popular Lectures and Addresses by Sir William Thomson, London, 1894, Vol. 2. pp. 6-9.

10. Anniversary Address, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, 1869, Vol. 25, p. xlviii.

11. Ibid., p. xlviii.

12. Ibid., p. xxxviii.

13. Popular Lectures and Addresses, London, 1894, Vol. 2, pp. 89-90.

14. James Marchant, Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, New York, 1916, pp. 205-6.

15. S. P. Thompson, The Life of William Thomson, London, 1910, Vol. 2, p. 637.

16. Ibid., p. 943.

17. W. J. Sollas, "The Age of the Earth," Nature, 1895, Vol. 51, p. 543.

18. "Evolution Geology," Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Bradford. England, 1900, p. 722.

19. "Geologic Time, As Indicated by the Sedimentary Rocks of North America," The American Geologist, 1895, Vol. 12, p. 368.

20. ''Twenty-five Years of Geological Progress In Britain," Nature, 1895, Vol. 51, p. 369.

21. Modern Library ed., p. 256.

22. Ibid., p. 270.

23. Ibid., p. 253. This statement may also be contrasted with one which Darwin made to Hooker in 1856: "This power of selection stands in the most direct relation to time, and in the state of nature can only be excessively slow." At this date he categorically denied that time and altered conditions were "convertible terms." LLD, Vol. 2, p. 84.

24. A. R. Wallace, "On a Diagram of the Earth's Eccentricity and the Precession of the Equinoxes Illustrating their Relation to Geological Climate and the Rate of Organic Change," Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1870, p. 89.

25. Adam Sedgwick, "Variation and Some Phenomena Connected with Reproduction and Sex," Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Dover, 1899, pp. 773-74.

26. Ibid., p. 774.

27. C. L. Morgan, "Geological Time," Geological Magazine, 1878, n.s.. Vol. 5, p. 155.

28. G. K. Gilbert, "Rhythms and Geologic Time," Popular Science Monthly, 1900, Vol. 57, p. 346.

29. "Purpose and Particles in the Study of Heredity; Science, Medicine and History, edited by E. A. Underwood, Oxford University Press, 1953, Vol. 2, p. 474.

30. James Marchant, Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, New York, 1916, p. 249.

31. Ibid., p. 322.

32. LLD. Vol. 2, p. 337.

33. Hugo De Vries, "The Evidence of Evolution," Science, 1904, n.s. Vol. 20, p. 398.

34. "A Communication upon Evolution," Proceedings of the Am. Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1860. Vol. 4. p. 416. Darwin was aware of Parsons's views and commented in the same year to Asa Gray that he had reflected on the possibility of "favorable monstrosities" playing a part in evolution. "It would be a great aid," he admitted, "but I did not allude to the subject, for, after much labor, I could find nothing which satisfied me of the probability of such occurrences." LLD. Vol. 2. p. 333.

35. For a discussion of Von Kolliker and other early advocates of saltatory evolution see Philip Fothergill's Historical Aspects of Organic Evolution, Hollis and Carter, London. 1952. p. 172 ff.

36. "The Mutation Theory," Science, 1905, n.s. Vol. 22. p. 309.

37. C. D. Darlington and K. Mather, The Elements of Genetics, London, 1949, p. 263.

38. William Bateson, "Heredity and Evolution," Popular Science Monthly, 1904, Vol. 65, p. 525.

39. A. C. Gifford, "The Origin of the Solar System," Scientia, 1932, Vol. 52, p. 154.
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Re: DARWIN'S CENTURY -- EVOLUTION AND THE MEN WHO DISCOVERED

Postby admin » Thu Jul 16, 2015 10:41 pm

PART 1 OF 2

Chapter X: The Reception of the First Missing Links

Must we suppose that the picture of the original man has disappeared just as much as that of the originals of domestic animals?
-- Christian Ludwig, 1796


I. The Evolutionists Turn to Man

For many years philosophers had debated the nature of man's relationship to the natural world about him. In the year 1859 science discovered man was an animal-though a most unusual one. Science arrived at this conclusion by indirect deduction. The year 1859 is generally regarded as the climactic point in the long, involved, and somewhat sporadic efforts toward the development of a satisfactory explanation of organic change. In that year Charles Darwin published the Origin of Species in which he dared only one solitary and wary sentence upon the evolution of man. "Light," he cryptically intimated in the conclusion of his epoch-making book, "will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." It was not until later editions that he ventured to add the adjective "much" to his use of the word "light." Nothing better illustrates the oppressive theological atmosphere of the time than Darwin's response to an inquiry from Wallace prior to publication of the Origin as to whether he Intended to discuss man. Darwin rejoined as follows: "I think I shall avoid the whole subject. as so surrounded with prejudices, though I fully admit that it is the highest and most Interesting problem for the naturalist." [1] In a similar vein he confessed to Jenyns, "With respect to man, I am very far from wishing to obtrude my belief; but I thought it dishonest to quite conceal my opinion." [2]

In the clamor that arose after his book appeared, Darwin, In spite of this last remark, was not to avoid insinuations of deceit in failing to elaborate upon the place of man in his system. It was, perhaps, partly In indirect answer to such slurs that he undertook the publication of the Descent of Man in 1871 when his position and that of his theory had ceased to appear so novel and revolting to the public mind In the judgment of the present writer there can be no doubt, considering the temper of the times, that Darwin's caution was well justified, and probably had the salutary effect of broaching what was then an unpleasant topic by successive doses which were found assimilable rather than, as Lyell was accustomed to saying, "going the whole orang" all at once.

It is a matter of considerable historical interest that Darwin postulated his theory and extended it to man without having available as evidence a single subhuman fossil by which, on the basis of his theoretical views, he could have satisfactorily demonstrated the likelihood of man's relationship to the world of the subhuman primates. Yet, curiously enough, at least two early human fossils had been discovered and one, the Neanderthal skull, had been published upon. The historian of ideas should be attentive to the discussions of the closing half of the nineteenth century in order to observe, once the theory of evolution began its diffusion, the effect that the first paleontological discoveries had, not necessarily upon the lay mind, which could be expected to discount them, but upon the minds of scholars and savants who were at that time either weighing or had committed themselves to a belief in human as well as animal evolution.

That our generation has accepted this commitment we know; evolution forms the guiding motif in all our biological studies. But no episode In science affords a better glimpse into the workings of even the cultivated mind than an exploration of that combination of motives which revolves about the scientific investigation of the first human fossils. The subject was one touching deeply upon human emotions, and it tended to become proportionately distorted. The reigning political prejudices, racial and religious shibboleths, are all caught up in an intellectual ferment which invaded staid congresses and cropped out In sober scientific pronouncements.

My remarks on this subject are offered, not In a critical spirit, nor to uphold our scientific fathers to ridicule, but to show with what doubt and withdrawal and hesitation, along with an almost morbid fascination, man discovered he was an animal. It is my genuine belief that no greater act of the human intellect, no greater gesture of humility on the part of man has been or will be made In the long history of science. The marvel lies not In the fact that the bones from the caves and river gravels were recognized in trepidation and doubt as beings from the half-world of the past; the miracle, considering the nature of the human ego, occurs In the circumstance that we were able to recognize them at all, or to see in these remote half-fearsome creatures our long-forgotten fathers who had cherished our seed through the ages of ice and loneliness before a single lighted city flickered out of the darkness of the planet's nighttime face.

That recognition did not come in a day, even with a Darwin to light the path. When it did come those wavering apparitional faces were masked by the projected fantasies arising in the minds of scientists themselves. They were ill seen, ill understood. and, above all, their numbers were pitifully few. The account which follows deals with the only two fossil men known from the nineteenth century -- Homo neanderthalensis, ironically and indirectly named for a forgotten poet, and Pithecanthropus, who is really, in nineteenth-century terms, closest to a true missing link and who came closest to convincing the doubters. His earlier colleague from the valley of the Neander had no such success. The two forms together, however, cover almost a fifty-year span in the history of the search for human origins. In the words of Max Muller. "The skull as the shell of the brain has, by many students. been supposed to betray something of the spiritual essence of man...." [3] Upon those fossil skulls, then just beginning to be wrenched from caverns and river drifts. the eyes of the world were now to be centered in horrified fascination. Man has probably never waited before in such a prolonged suspense of mingled hope and fear; his very faith in his uniqueness within the animal world was being shaken at last.

There is, however, a certain irony in the first results. for the bones were to be read ambiguously. In addition, ideas from the pre- Darwinian world of the eighteenth century were destined to shape much of the thinking of the nineteenth. Roaming Britishers at the world's far-flung margins were to see half-men slouch through the forests. Long-armed. bandy-legged. these nightmare creatures were subjective mental projections straight from the bookshelves of philosophes and Darwinists. Even now the last of them haunt the snow fields of the Himalayas or startle Malayan planters. The key to this labyrinth of ideas lies in picking up the separate thought streams which flow out of the eighteenth century and which mingle with true Darwinism in the nineteenth. Before examining the first genuine human fossils, therefore, it may be well to ascertain with what preconceptions our Victorian predecessors entered upon their archaeological search and what it was, precisely, that they expected to see.

II. Ape and Hottentot

Superficially it would appear that the growing number of archaeological discoveries bearing upon human antiquity which were made during the time Darwin was engaged upon his book aroused an interest which, after the publication of the Origin, simply coalesced about the theory of evolution. This is true, but there is a deeper substratum of ideas unconsciously carried over from the reigning philosophical doctrines of the eighteenth century, namely, the concept of the missing link as it flourished in that older pre-Darwinian atmosphere of the Scala Naturae. "Next to the word 'Nature,'" remarks Professor Lovejoy, "the Great Chain of Being was the sacred phrase of the eighteenth century playing a part somewhat analogous to that of the blessed word 'evolution' in the late nineteenth."

Let us refresh our memory by a quotation from Addison: "The whole chasm in Nature, from a Plant to a Man, is filled up with diverse Kinds of Creatures, rising one over another by such a gentle and easy Ascent, that the little Transitions and Deviations from one Species to another, are almost insensible." [4] This chain of organized beings is not, as we have seen, an evolutionary chain, but one instantaneously conceived at the moment of Creation. Everything holds its appropriate place and does not, or at least is supposed not to, aspire beyond its station. It is important, however, to take note of the fact that this widespread bio-theological doctrine had conditioned men, first, to the idea that one form of life passed insensibly into the next on the scale beneath it so that, in the words f a contemporary writer, "Man is connected by his nature and, therefore, by the design of the Author of all Nature, with the whole tribe of animals, and so closely with some of them, that the distance between his intellectual faculties and theirs ... appears, in many instances, small, and would probably appear still less, if we bad the means of knowing their motives, as we have of observing their actions." [5]

Second, this humbling thought had another corollary: it roused a high pitch of interest in those animals, such as the great apes, which appeared to stand close to man. The law of continuity, furthermore, implied that there might be "many degrees of intelligence found within the human species." [6] Though the vast majority of the eighteenth-century thinkers did not assume an actual genetic blood link between man and his nearest primate relatives, they were extremely conscious of the close position of the great apes to man on the Scale of Being. Moreover, when earlier the confusion as to whether exotic, little-known apes were actually men began to disappear, it was replaced or at least intensified by a search for some creature who, though speaking, would exemplify the imperceptible transition on the Scale of Being from an ape into a man. At this time the far-Hung world of primitive cultures was being discovered, and Western man was being made increasingly aware of the vast gulf that seemed to yawn between his society and that of remote and, to his sophisticated eye, unquestionably benighted heathen peoples.

We find scattered through the accounts of voyagers of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries numerous accounts of the Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope. Their low state of culture and the phonetic peculiarities of their speech, "a farrago of bestial sounds resembling the chatter of apes," [7] led to great interest as to their position on the Scale of Nature. It is not surprising, therefore, to find "the brutal Hottentot" standing only an in finitesimal degree above the ape, nor did the American Indian escape similar attentions. [8] What is more interesting, however, is to find, long after the Scale of Being has lapsed out of existence as a serious philosophic concept, that this same ''brutal Hottentot" is continuing to occupy his time-honored position in the minds of nineteenth. century scholars. Darwin, writing to Sir Charles Lyell ill the year of the Origin, indicates with careful conservatism that "we have a very fine gradation in the intellectual powers of the Vertebrata, with one rather wide gap ... between say a Hottentot and an Orang ... even if civilized as much mentally as the dog has been from the wolf." [9]

We need not confine ourselves to Hottentots, however. The French anthropologist, Pouchet, by 1864 [10] has faced up grimly to the implications of the new doctrine of evolution. "Let us no longer put ourselves on the stage," he exhorts his reader. "Let us descend boldly the steps of the human ladder...."

"Examples are not wanting of races placed so low that they have quite naturally appeared to resemble the ape tribe. These people, much nearer than ourselves to a state of nature, deserve on that account every attention on the part of the anthropologist.... What will become of the unity of the human species, if we can prove that certain races are not a whit more intelligent than certain animals ...?"

Pouchet goes on to picture the Australian aborigine as existing "in a sort of moral brutality," surviving by means of "a kind of highly developed instinct for discovering the food which is always difficult for them to obtain...."

Earlier than this, however, and unsullied by contact with the Origin of Species, there is the eyewitness record of Henry Piddington published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1855 [11] and relating, actually, to events of 1824.

"We have," he affirms, "upon three points of continental India the indubitable fact ... that there are wild tribes existing which the native traditional names liken to the Orang-Utang, and my own knowledge certainly bears them out; for in the gloom of a forest, the individual I saw might as well pass for an Orang-Utang as a man."

"He was short," Mr. Piddington continues to reminisce, "flat nosed, had pouch-like wrinkles in semicircles around the comers of the mouth and cheeks; his arms were disproportionately long, and there was a portion of reddish hair to be seen on the rusty black skin. Altogether, if crouched in a dark comer or on a tree, he might have been mistaken for a large Orang-Utang."

The Geneva scholar, Carl Vogt, strives to be anatomically precise: "The pendulous abdomen of the lower races ... shows an approximation to the ape, as do also the want of calves, the flatness of the thighs, the pointed form of the buttocks, and the leanness of the upper arm...." [12] Giving particular attention to pubertal changes in the Negro, he comments with gloomy insight:

"It is a repetition of the phenomena occurring in the anthropoid apes. In them also the skull presents, until the second dentition, a remarkable resemblance to the human skull, the cerebral portion being arched and the jaws but little projecting. From that time the cerebral skull remains stationary, the internal capacity in no way Increases.... Young orangs and chimpanzees are good-natured, amiable, intelligent beings, very apt to learn and become civilized. After the transformation they are obstinate savage beasts, incapable of any improvement.

"And so it is with the Negro...." [13]

Not content, however, with an attempt to show that the foot of the Negro makes "... a decided approach to the form of a hand," and that he "rarely stands quite upright," Vogt finally introduces an extreme statement which is unconsciously revelatory as reflecting attitudes in Western society of male superiority. He concludes, in short: "We may be sure that wherever we perceive an approach to the animal type, the female is nearer to it than the male, hence we should discover a greater simious resemblance if we were to take the female as our standard." [14]

After this new subdivision of the Scale of Nature, a less misanthropic observation like that of Robert Dunn before the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1862 that "the American Indian is too dangerous to be trusted by the white man in social intercourse and too obtuse and intractable to be worth coercing into servitude" [15] is, for all its frank honesty about Caucasian intentions, a trifle anti-climactic. He does, however, succeed in a few succinct sentences in establishing his notion of a clear succession in the development of the white stock. The report of the conclusion of his address reads as follows:

"He observed that the leading characters of the various races of mankind have been maintained to be simply representatives of a particular type in the development of the highest or Caucasian; the Negro exhibiting permanently the imperfect .brow, projecting lower jaw, and slender bent limbs of the Caucasian child some considerable time before its birth, the aboriginal Americans representing the same child nearer birth, and the Mongolian the same newly born."

It is apparent from these statements, gleaned from a variety of sources, and which could be endlessly multiplied from the literature, that long before the clear recognition of fossil forms of man there existed in the minds of western Europeans a notion of racial gradation, and a conception of that gradation as leading downward toward the ape. Moreover, the less culturally advanced members of the human stock are increasingly seen as affording "a glimmer of the ape beneath the human envelope." These people are regarded as living fossils both culturally and physically; in fact, there is evident a lack of clear distinction between the two categories.

In the century of Enlightenment there had been philosophical admiration, at least in some quarters, for the "noble savage." The idea of progress as it had existed in eighteenth-century France had implied some notion of mankind's ability to absorb learning. Here, however, in .nineteenth-century England the earlier Scale of Nature now classifies living men in terms of their cultural achievement by Western standards. The hopeful aspects of the idea of progress as they were entertained by the thinkers of Revolutionary France are denied fruition. Instead, a linear biology, so far as human kind at least is concerned, reigns in imperial England. Natives are incapable of achieving high culture. Humorlessly, in a dozen forms the philosophers of the Victorian Era repeat the story, "The Mongol and the Negro are but human saurians who reached long ago ... their full development, and are now moral fossils." [16]

Darwin, gazing upon the natives of Fuegia, is appalled by the gap which yawns between savage and civilized man; yet it must be said in justice to his supreme observational powers that, at the age of twenty-four, watching the return of Captain Fitzroy's hostages to their own people, he comments:

"It was quite melancholy leaving our Fuegians amongst their barbarous countrymen.... In contradiction of what has often been stated, three years has been sufficient to change savages into, as far as habits go, complete and voluntary Europeans." [17]

His account of Jemmy Button and the last signal fire lit by the latter in farewell to his white friends as the Beagle stood out to sea contains the pathos of great literature. It is only in the later years as his constant concern with natural selection and the effort to explain the rise of man weigh heavily upon his mind that he forgets and speaks of Hottentots and Orangs. Charles Darwin came close to envisaging the problem of culture as he bade good-by to his Indian shipmates. It is perhaps too much to expect of one man in an intellectually confused period that he should have solved both sides of the human mystery, or have distinguished clearly between the biological and the cultural. On that day in his youth, however, in a great surge of human feeling, he stood very close to doing so. The fire from the dark headland stings the eyes a little even now, and Jemmy Button's wistful, forgotten face is an eternal reproach to those who persist in projecting upon the bodies of living men the shadow of an unknown vanished ape. Moreover, even the form of that ancestral ape is illusory. The long arms, the bandy legs, the pendulous belly, the semi-erect posture are conceived in imitation of the apes of today. Modern paleontology offers little encouragement to such notions and none at all to the idea that the existing races represent in the order of their emergence successive "missing links," mentally frozen, so to speak, at various stages of the human past.

III. The Microcephali

It would appear from some of the material we have just reviewed that man had mentally so closed the gap between himself and the anthropoids that he would scarcely be conscious that there was a paleontological break in the evolutionary chain of ascent. Actually, however, we have to bear in mind that we are examining a ferment of opinion in which writers are not always consistent with their own more extreme statements, nor do they all represent the same point of view. The more religious-minded and the more sober-headed continued to cling to the views expressed by Adam Sedgwick in his Presidential Address before the Geological Society of London in 1831, just about the time young Charles Darwin was departing upon his memorable voyage. Sedgwick's speech was devoted to an attack on the uniformitarian hypothesis of Sir Charles Lyell In it he called the appearance of man "a geological event of vast importance ... breaking in upon any supposition of geological continuity, and utterly unaccounted for by what we have any right to call the laws of nature." [18]

It is obvious, of course, that so long as man was regarded in this fashion as "outside" of nature, a unique being divorced from any but the most recent past, he stood as a challenge to all scientific attempts to explain, not alone his own origins, but those of even the "natural" world about him. Only by establishing satisfactorily the continuity of human development and the relationship of man to his nearest primate relatives would it be possible to escape from the foggy atmosphere of supernaturalism which still lingered over the English scene. That atmosphere would not entirely pass away even from the more mundane aspects of geology until the nature of this strange emergent, man, could be more fully established.

It is not without interest as showing with what reluctance the task was carried out that as late as 1863 Sir Charles Lyell, whose geological doctrines form the very groundwork of the Origin at Species and who was Darwin's lifelong friend and confidant, was still speculating as to whether, in the case of man, he may not "have cleared at one bound the space which separated the highest stage of the unprogressive intelligence of the inferior animals from the first and lowest form of improvable reason manifested by man." Darwin, reading this remark in the first edition of the Antiquity of Man (p. 505), commented wryly that the sentence "makes me groan." [19]

It is plain, as one examines the more guarded statements of the leading evolutionists, that in spite of the tendency to arrange the existing human races in a sequence of stages, or to perceive even lower intermediates flitting through the unexplored forests of Africa or the Far East, the gap between living man and the animal world is still a source of embarrassment. After expressing hope that living apes may eventually be found which approach man in cerebral content, Vogt, for example, confesses that "in the absence of the fact, it would be foolish to form any conclusions." [20] That the evolutionists' hope was by degrees shifting to the fossil record is shown by his following remark: "There may, however, have existed intermediate forms, which in the lapse of time have become extinct." [21] Vogt saw fit to italicize this statement, but he was not the man to be handicapped by any lack of the necessary fossils. Instead, he succeeded in commanding international attention with a very ingenious, if now outmoded, theory.

Undaunted by "the gulf which still exists between the Negro and the ape," Vogt turns to the abnormal. We have a right, he contends, when living forms fail us, to refer to the pathological. "I do not hesitate to uphold ... that microcephali and born idiots present as perfect a series from man to the ape as may be wished for...." [22] Since the evolutionary development of man from some lower primate inevitably seems to demand an increase in cranial capacity, what would appear more logical than that a modem microcephalic idiot "in its abnormity represents that intermediate form, which at a remote period may have been normal. This arrest . . . is the simian stage." Such an "arrested monstrosity of the present creation," argues Vogt, "fills up the gap which cannot be bridged over by normal types in the present creation, but may be so by some future discoveries." [23]

Vogt, in other words, has taken the notion of atavistic throwbacks and argued that his microcephali, of which he gives several examples, constitute just such returns to the ancestral human line. "The arms," he observes, "seem disproportionately long, the legs short and weak. The head is that of an ape." [24] Though he occasionally hedges upon the teeth and jaw, so far as the skull is concerned, every naturalist, if such a fossil specimen were found, would, he asserts, "at once declare it to be the cranium of an ape." [25] With careful deliberation he places the skulls of a Negro, an idiot, and a chimpanzee together in order to show that the idiot "holds in every respect au intermediate place between them." [26]

The various breeding experiments of the Darwinians, along with their eagerness to observe traces of the evolutionary pathway, had led to great interest in what they termed "atavisms" or "reversions" in which a carefully bred and standardized form showed a tendency occasionally to produce descendants who resembled more remote ancestors. Since genetic mechanisms were not clearly understood by the Darwinists, these mysterious episodes were regarded with considerable awe. [27] Darwin himself once remarked that he regarded "reversion -- this power of calling back to life long-lost characters -- as the most wonderful of all the attributes of inheritance." Red Eye, the ferocious throwback in Jack London's Before Adam, is an interesting example of the atavism's appearance in popular literature well within the twentieth century. Today most so-called atavisms are explainable on Mendelian principles as the results of various types of gene segregation and recombination, alteration in growth rates, or even outright mutation in the gene system.

Vogt's cases of arrested brain growth, therefore, are certainly not to be regarded as the emergence of missing stages in the long history of humanity, and they bear little actual resemblance to recently discovered fossils of the hominid line. Vogt's idea was seriously received in the sixties of the last century, however, and Darwin devotes attention to it in the Descent of Man (1871). Huxley, in addition, commented that even the Neanderthal skull might be just such an accidental reversion, though he feels that the capacious cranial capacity suggests "the pithecoid tendencies, indicated by this skull, did not extend deep into the organization..." [28]

Arguments were occasionally brought against the theory of human evolution on the ground that man did not show "reversion" as he should if he had really evolved from an ancestor unlike himself. In 1872 we find Darwin responding serenely to one such criticism: "I do not think the absence of reversions of structure in man is of much weight. Carl Vogt, indeed, argues that [the existence of] Micro- cephalous idiots is a case of reversion." [29]

We may observe at this point that so long as the theory of microcephalies as "missing links" was seriously entertained, the claims launched by some writers against the first human fossils as merely representing idiots showing premature synostosis of the cranial sutures actually proved nothing at all. A follower of Vogt's views could simply have responded thus: "Certainly, this is what we have been saying all along. Modem idiots resemble a specific human level of organization in the past. Now you have found genuine traces of that level in the past." Thus those who spoke of Neanderthal or Pithecanthropus in this way were, in actuality, merely begging the question, so far as the true nature of these specimens was concerned. In the light of the intellectual preconceptions of Vogt and his followers it was perfectly possible for a human calvarium to be both that of a true fossil hominid and to resemble in detail the skull-of a modem idiot. With this observation, and having seen a slow shift from a belief in living normal links passing slowly to a notion of living microcephalic abnormals as in some manner representing past normals no longer existent in the living world, we shall now turn to the final remaining alternative. The archaeologist has been busy throughout the Darwinian period. It may be that he can supply the missing evidence from the ground. Let us see how his evidence was received.

IV. The Descent Into the Past

Up to the time of Cuvier's death in 1832 no remains of any primates were known from fossiliferous deposits, The great master of French biology died in the unshaken belief that man's advent upon the earth did not much exceed the common estimates of around six thousand years, and that probably the lower monkeys were little if any older. Only a few years later, in 1836, his own countryman, Edouard Lartet, unearthed the first fossil anthropoid in Miocene deposits near Sausan in the south of France. The report of the Siwalik discoveries of Falconer and Cautley soon followed.

Cuvier's theory had been breached in so far as man's simian relatives were concerned. There was a consequent feeling of alarm in many quarters, for the unearthing of ancient primates made it quickly apparent that the discovery of human fossils was made more probable. The weight of Cuvier's authoritative dogmatism was no longer able to stem the tide. In the words of Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: "The question will soon be answered in the affirmative. There are already a sufficient number of facts which would be considered as conclusive, were the question confined to any other animal." [30]

Boucher de Perthes revealed the presence of ancient human artifacts along the Somme in the 1840s, and it is interesting to note that Darwin admitted years later that he had read de Perthes' book. Although this is well within the period when Darwin was developing his evolutionary interpretation of life, he confesses humbly, "I ... looked at [de Perthes'] book ... and am ashamed to think that I concluded the whole was rubbish. Yet he has done for man something like what Agassiz did for glaciers." [31] It was not until 1859, the year of the Origin, that de Perthes' efforts were finally vindicated.

Three years before the antiquity of de Perthes' artifacts had been conclusively accepted, a skull cap of strange aspect had been discovered in a small cave in Rhenish Prussia. This skull, though not the first Neanderthal skull to be observed, was the first to come under the attention of science. It constitutes, therefore, the first genuinely extinct variety of man ever to undergo scientific scrutiny. Moreover, the date of its discovery, 1856, and the descriptions and discussions which followed were juxtaposed so closely upon the evolutionary debate as practically to have ensured attention from the leading Darwinians and their opponents.

As might have been expected, attempts to diagnose the age and nature of the skull range all the way from a sober, but very cautious, analysis by Thomas Huxley to claims that the bones represented only a rickety Cossack from the Napoleonic Wars. The individual was geologically old: he was not old. He was pathological: he was normal. [32] Notable names were entered in the lists on both sides of these questions. By way of extenuation it may be said that the confusion among the savants was augmented through the incomplete nature of the calvarium, and the lack of clear stratigraphical information from the Neanderthal Cave. No scientific eye, it must be remembered, had, before this, looked upon the remains of an extinct form of man.

Setting aside some of the more outmoded, if not ludicrous, treatments of the subject, the careful student is still, in the light of historical perspective, forced to conclude that the antiquity of man was as yet little understood, and his salient characteristics less so. In addition to the still heavy prejudice directed against belief in the existence of early man an accidental factor further confused the issue: the Engis skull from a cave along the banks of the Meuse, near Liege in Belgium, was regarded by many as being of similar age. Professor Schmerling had found this skull under nearly five feet of osseous breccia in association with an extinct Pleistocene fauna. Discovered ill the 1830S it long predated the Neanderthal discovery. Its significance in: the present connection, however, lies in the words of Sir John Lubbock: "... there are, as yet, only two cases on record in which the bone caves have furnished us with skulls in such a condition as to allow of restoration. One of these was found by Dr. Schmerling in the cave of Engis ...; the other by Dr. Fuhlrott in the Neanderthal near Dusseldorf." [33]

There was as yet no clear stratigraphy separating the Middle from the Upper Paleolithic period. It was inevitable that these two skulls should be compared even though today we know that they are derived from widely separated time levels. Both lack totally the face and jaw, though the Engis skull is more nearly complete. In Neanderthal we possess one low-vaulted skull with a massive supraorbital torus, regarded by its describer, Schaaffhausen, as belonging to a period prior to the time of the Celts and Germans. The remains, he says, "were in all probability derived from one of the wild races of northwestern Europe, spoken of by Latin writers." [34] The Engis skull in contrast to the Neanderthal had no other interest than its fossiliferous associations. To quote Sir Arthur Keith: "There is not a single feature that marks this skull off from men of the Neolithic or of modern times." [35]

It has been pertinent to our discussion to make plain the fact that the facial character of Neanderthal man was then unknown. This unfortunate situation placed altogether too much emphasis upon the supraciliary ridges. Many writers, searching collections of skulls, thought the problem had been settled when they found a specimen of Homo sapiens with a massive supraorbital torus. Huxley, for example, after admitting the Neanderthal cranium to be "the most apelike ... I have ever seen," [36] contends that the creature was "in no sense intermediate between men and apes." [37] Taking note of the gradations to be found among recent skulls. he says there is no ground for separating [Neanderthal] specifically. still less generically from Homo sapiens." [38] This view still finds emphatic expression in an anthropological text referring to the Engis and Neanderthal skulls, as late as 1890: "A number of other anatomical elements, thought to be peculiar in these fossil skulls, such as the superciliary prominences. the small and receding forehead. the form of the ciliary arcs, the amplitude of the occiput, are found to be but the individual and accidental varieties of men living among us." [39]

J. W. Dawson, writing with an eye to the modem races, comments: "that the characters for which this skeleton is eminent. are found, though perhaps in less degree, in the rude tribes of America and Australia. It is also doubtful whether this skeleton really indicates a race at all. It may have belonged to one of those wild men, half-crazed, half-idiotic, cruel and strong, who are always more or less to be found living on the outskirts of barbarous tribes, and who now and then appear in civilized communities, to be consigned perhaps to the penitentiary or the gallows, when their murderous propensities manifest themselves." [40]

This curious quotation not only shows the continuing application of the idea of racial gradation, but Dawson's "wild man· hypothesis seems to echo this tradition as it exists in European folklore." Neanderthal man is here quite close to being made one with those fallen, feral creatures who wander in the green forests of medieval romance.

Carl Vogt, as might have been expected, diagnoses the forehead of the Neander skull as "that of an idiot or microcephalus," [42] though he accepts its antiquity and, as we have had occasion to note, this in no way prevents him from regarding it as "normal." [43] He takes, however, one further step which introduces to us the final vast confusion which can: be wrought by archaeological ineptitude. Vogt finds "a great similarity between the Engis and Neanderthal skulls." [44] Moreover, recognizing the female skull to be smaller than the male and to possess less prominent supraorbital ridges, he arrives at the conclusion that both skulls belong to the same race. The Neanderthal skull belonged to a muscular, stupid male but the Engis specimen "belonged to an intelligent woman." The race, he assumes, resembled the existing Australian aboriginals. The cultural associations mentioned briefly in his writings suggest a similar confusion of different time levels. In this he was not alone. For over thirty years after its discovery and description Homo neanderthalensis was destined to remain the butt of idle speculation as well as the suspected product of disease.

In the meantime, a growing body of archaeologists continued to prowl through the caves and grottoes of civilized Europe. More discoveries of tools and artifacts were made. Additional human remains were discovered but they all proved to be those of big-brained upper paleolithic people. So consistent were these discoveries that for a time the Victorian uneasiness about ape-men began to fade. Perhaps the Darwinians had been wrong about man after all. The drift of thought can be glimpsed in this account by Gill of Riviere's discoveries at Mentone:

"... the negative results afforded us indicate that fossil man was, in all respects, a typical man, perhaps even differing less from his successors in Europe than do some other existing races. It is at least very certain that he had no decided ape-like characteristics. Even morel He was man to excess. The proportions of the forelimb to the hind, and of the median and distal portions of each to the proximal, so far from proving a condition intermediate between man and the apes, or embryonic or juvenile humanity or even affinity to the Negro, indicate that he was more unlike the apes in such respects than are some existing races; nor is this evidence rebutted by the skull, the dentition or otherwise...." [45]

Continuing in this vein, Dr. Gill goes on to assert that, in the light of such evidence as is revealed at Mentone, "the anxious may ... contemplate with a happy serenity the explorations made, for every skeleton found, in its perfect manlike features, will not only disprove the existence of the dreaded intermediate link, but will add to the value of the negative evidence against such a link -- that is in Europe or America." [46]

Apparently Gill is enough of an evolutionist to intimate that perhaps Africa or Asia may sometime yield a remote link to man, but he hastens to add comfortingly that "it is not likely to be of very recent origin, most likely Miocene." Another writer, A. S. Packard, similarly inclined, emphasizes "... anatomists of high authority have, we cannot but think too hastily, referred their [finds] to the most degraded of savage races." [47]

It may be added in extenuation of Professor Packard's point of view that the activities of confirmed evolutionists, as the Darwinian enthusiasm began to mount, are sadly revelatory of a state of mind in its way as dogmatically fervid as that of those opposed to the evolutionary point of view. Where some saw the big-brained upper paleolithic people, or even the big-brained Neanderthals, as a denial of the possibility of evolutionary change, others just as enthusiastically regarded these types as representing living races lower on the scale of life than the modem Caucasian. Once more existing peoples were being arranged on the time scale of the fossil past. "If we uplift the deposits of the earth's surface," writes a German scholar in 1868, "there appears as the first inhabitant of Central Europe a man whose protruding jaws and nearly deficient forehead betray a savage animal character. The elongated skull with its strongly projecting eyebrows reminds one of the Negro, the Mongol, the Hottentot and the Australian." [48]

Others read into the fragmentary Neanderthal remains something even more formidable; The jaw of La Naulette found in 1866 in a cave in eastern Belgium is described in one book as extremely apelike with huge projecting canines." It does not seem to trouble the writers that the teeth of this specimen are missing, having been lost from the sockets after death. Instead, they go on to describe the entire Neanderthal tribe with their "gorilla-like eye teeth" as presenting an appearance "in the highest degree hideous and ferocious." [49] No known form of fossil man possesses gorilloid canines. These descriptions are the product of imagination whether they visualize Neanderthal man as a Hottentot or a gorilla. In either case they are simple projections into the past of living forms which the describer sincerely believes are links in the evolutionary scale leading to man. Once more there is an attempt to equate the past evolution of man with a graded existing scale of creatures running from the ape to man. Innumerable descriptions characterize natives as apelike in appearance and habits. [50] Similarly the effort to close the gap from the other, or anthropoidal, side leads to assumptions that the existing great apes may possess undeveloped or rudimentary linguistic ability. An anonymous article in Chambers' Journal speaks of the grunt of the orang as perhaps "some incipient form of speech capable of being cultivated and enlarged." [51] Ernst Haeckel, towards the turn of the century, characteristically proclaims that "the old doctrine that only man is endowed with speech" is outmoded. "It is high time," he says, "that this erroneous impression, resting on a lack of zoological information, should be abandoned." [52] Returning, however, to our more immediate point of discussion, it might have been thought that the discovery in 1886 of the Neanderthal men of Spy would have dissipated the mist of suspicion which had for so long lingered over the valley of the Neander. Certainly it led some to the belief that Neanderthal man could not be a diseased idiot or a distorted Lombrosian criminal. On the other hand, the recognition of the great cranial capacity of the type puzzled those who were still anticipating some sort of small-brained emergent.

As late as 1911, W. J. Sollas, the distinguished English geologist, wrote of this problem as follows:

"The Mousterian skulls are the oldest human skulls of which we have any knowledge; but just as in the case of the Magdalenian and Solutrean, they indicate that the primitive inhabitants of France were distinguished from the highest civilized races, not by a smaller, but by a larger cranial capacity; in other words as we proceed backwards in time the human brain increases rather than decreases in volume." [53]

Disregarding Pithecanthropus which even this great student believed diseased, he poses a final paradox: "Thus, as we proceed backwards in time Man departs farther from the ape in the size of his brain, but approaches nearer to the ape in the characters of his bodily framework." [54] It was a reasonably true statement so far as Neanderthal man was concerned, and it may have bolstered the hopes of those who had earlier followed the lead of Gill, Brinton, [55] and others. Nevertheless, it was a paradox and a paradox which could not be long sustained. Though Vogt's microcephals had not stood the test of time a few evolutionists, by pure extrapolation, saw clearly that at some point, however deep it might lie beneath us on the time scale, the transition from the animal brain had occurred.
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Re: DARWIN'S CENTURY -- EVOLUTION AND THE MEN WHO DISCOVERED

Postby admin » Thu Jul 16, 2015 10:41 pm

PART 2 OF 2

V. The Java Ape Man

With the discovery in 1891 of Pithecanthropus erectus by Eugene Dubois, the first human type of genuinely low cranial capacity was revealed. Some, with considerable reason, would regard it as the only real "missing link" produced in the nineteenth century. By this time much of the public outcry which had greeted Darwin's Descent of Man in 1871 had died down. The doctrine of evolution had been widely disseminated, discussed, and accepted in intellectual circles. The time would have seemed ripe for a clinching paleontological demonstration of the pathway of human descent. Unfortunately, however, the face of the Java hominid was missing and almost the same distrust which had been directed at the first Neanderthal discovery emerged once more, though perhaps in a less aggravated form. [56]

At the Third International Zoological Congress which met in Leyden in 1895 Dubois exhibited and discussed his find. The zoologists present maintained that the skull was human and the human anatomists maintained it to be that of an ape. Once more the cry of microcephalic idiot was raised. [57] We have the testimony of Marsh that in the beginning, with the exception of Manouvrier in Paris and himself, no one took Dubois' claims at their full valuation. "Among a score or more of notices," he writes, "I do not recall a single one that ... admitted the full importance of the discovery...." [58] "M. Dubois," Manouvrier ironically observes, "can congratulate himself on seeing placed in relief at Berlin the reasons according to which his Pithecanthropus could not be a man and, in England, much better reasons according to which the same Pithecanthropus could not be a monkey." [59]

The situation, however, is not one in which the absurdities are all confined to one side. Nothing better illustrates the power of preconceived ideas than to discover Dubois contending that no good can arise from a comparison between his precious skull cap and that of the Neanderthals of Dusseldorf and Spy because these latter specimens are pathological! [60] Apparently it never crossed Dubois' mind that this argument was just as applicable to his own transitional man-ape calvarium. As for the Pithecanthropus femur, so deep are the preconceptions of the age that it is perhaps not surprising to find Dubois hinting of "indications in that bone of an arboreal habit, such as are not found in the human femur." [61]Today we know that the transition from the trees to the ground long preceded the rise of such true paleanthropic men as Pithecanthropus. At that time, however, constant morphological comparisons of man with the existing apes had left this point less clear." It is with genuine pleasure and a little shock of surprise, therefore, that one encounters in a statement of the anatomist Cunningham a very clear modem grasp of the primate phylogeny and an unwillingness to confuse "missing links" with living collateral lines of descent. "Most certainly," he says, the Pithecanthropus fossils "are not derived from a transition form between any of the existing anthropoid apes and man; such a form does not and cannot exist, seeing that the divarication of the ape and man has taken place low down in the genealogical tree and each has followed ... its own path. The so-called Pithecanthropus is in the direct human line although it occupies a place on this considerably lower than any human form at present known." [63]

With this precise and much ignored observation, Cunningham passes from the scene. It is left for Manouvrier to define Dubois' final contribution as it may now be also interpreted from the midpoint of our century, "He established the fact," comments the Frenchman, "that the craniologic inferiority of fossil human races, according to the specimens we mow, increases with their antiquity.... We consider [Pithecanthropus] as one of the intermediate fossils theoretically foreseen." [64] Thus man, in his descent through time, had finally passed beyond the range of the big-brained men of the upper Pleistocene. The cerebral reduction was a reality, and the curious paradox of the anthropoidal big-brained Neanderthals could be carried no further. As we have noted, some did not at first accept this view, but by the 1950s it was a commonplace.

The whole of the nineteenth century and at least part of the eighteenth century had been devoted to the understanding not alone of man, but of his relationship to the only other living thing on the planet that looks like him -- the monkeys. They had been with him since the beginning, grimacing at him from behind the curtain of leaves. Their faces were sad or evil little caricatures of the human face; bone for bone, tooth for tooth, they were built on the human pattern or the human on theirs. In the end, on that great scale of perfection which runs from the crystal to the noblest beings on the farthest worlds, they stood next to man, but the chain had been fixed in the moment of Creation. Nothing became extinct, everything was locked in an eternal order. In that order an ape crouched beside man and the two mew each other to be very close. There was only the breadth of a hair between them. They had come to mow each other well. "Show me a generic character," cries Linnaeus, "by which to distinguish Man and Ape; I myself ... know of none." [65]

Even the races ascended in that vast chain and the Hottentot mew best the touch of the ape. In the nineteenth century the chain began to be forgotten, but fragments of it persisted in the minds of men and passed unconsciously into the new doctrine of evolution, where the wheel turned at last.

The nineteenth century drew from the eighteenth century an idea of necessary, constant progression which had arisen in the field of social studies. Every society in its own time and place would advance by necessary law even though historical chance and incident might promote or incommode that advance. In the nineteenth century aspects of this idea of progress were transferred to biology. Darwin, though he abjured the idea of necessary progression and mentions, as illustration, animals which had changed little, if at all, through long periods, shows signs of confused thinking on this point. He reveals in occasional passages that he is unconsciously transferring the concept of the eighteenth-century unilinear fixed scale of being to, as Teggart puts it, a "concept of a unilinear and continuous series in time, parallel with the classificatory series." [66] The classificatory series is, of course, the Scale of Being. Darwin speaks of the whole organic world as tending inevitably to "progress toward perfection" He pronounces that "among the vertebrata the degree of intellect and an approach in structure to man clearly come into play." [67]

At least once more Darwin seems to imply that other primates would tend to evolve toward man if given the opportunity. In 1860 we find him writing to Lyell: "The simile of man now keeping down any new man which might be developed strikes me as good and new. The white man is 'improving off the face of the earth' even races nearly his equals." [68] Implicit also in this remark is a growing need to explain the gap between man and his nearest relatives because natural selection can make each creature only a little more perfect than its competitors. Since the phylogenetic series is now historical the past must be searched and the man-creating, competitive intermediate links in the chain will be found there.

In the meantime, however, the concept "atavism; emerging out of the misinterpreted heredity studies carried out upon recent domesticated forms, promised a way of seeing the ancestor in the flesh without waiting for the laborious uncertainties of paleontological research. It is this which explains the popularity of Vogt's suggestion and the interest that the idea aroused in Darwin. By contrast, the big-brained Neanderthals, especially after the Spy discovery, must have seemed to the Darwinians at the very least anomalous, if not. threatening, to their theories. [69] Neither Cro-Magnons nor Neanderthals showed the rapid mental regress which had been assumed, in the underestimated time scale of that day, to characterize the skulls of genuine primitives, particularly in the light of the assumptions which had been made about various of the living races of man. It disturbed the old ideas of continuity and progression and is undoubtedly one of the reasons why these first fossil forms were eyed with hesitation. Sollas's statement of his paradox of increasing brain size makes this quite clear.

At first, since by the law of the old Scale nothing became extinct, men had tended unconsciously to see their past story totally revealed among the living races hidden away in the forests. They had seen the half man pass in the jungle; they had interpreted lowly cultures as a sign of lowly brains. Later, as the forests were cleared and the apes were seen in the sunlight, the gap loomed a little larger between man and his beasts.

It was then that his isolation struck him most clearly. He stared thoughtfully at the tiny-brained among his kind. He dug in the earth and found bones beneath it. He began to sense that the wondrous chain was moving, climbing, perishing. He found his own lost, bestial skull in the drift by the river, and the flints that his hands had tried to shape. At first he sought to run away from the sight of these things or to tell the tale differently. In the end it could no longer be done. The tale will tell itself and man will listen. He is quite alone now. In spite of claims that persisted into the beginning of this century, his brothers in the forest do not speak. Unutterably alone, man senses the great division between his mind and theirs. He has completed a fearful passage, but of its nature and causation even the modern biologist is still profoundly ignorant.

_______________

Notes:

1. LLD, Vol. 2, p. 109.

2. Ibid., p. 263.

3. F. Max Muller, Nature, 1891, Vol. 44. p. 430.

4. The Spectator, No. 519.

5. H. Bolingbroke, quoted by Lovejoy, op. cit., p. 196.

6. Lovejoy, cp. cit., p. 197.

7. R. W. Frantz, "Swift's Yahoos and the Voyagers," Modern Philology, 1931, Vol. 29, p. 55. See also Lovejoy, p. 234.

8. L. C. Rosenfield, From Beast Machine to Man Machine, New York, 1940. pp. 196, 204.

9. LLD, Vol. 2, p. 211.

10. The Plurality of the Human Race, London, 1864, p. 15.

11. "Memorandum on an Unknown Forest Race," 1855. Vol. 24. pp. 207-10. See also "Krao, the So-called Missing Link," by J. P. Harrison, Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1883, p. 575.

12. Vogt, Lectures on Man, London, 1864, p. 128.

13. Op. cit., p. 191.

14. Ibid., p. 180.

15. Robert Dunn, "Some Observations on the Psychological Differences Which Exist among the Typical Races of Man," Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1862, pp. 144-46. This idea is actually drawn from J. C. Prichard.

16. The Galaxy, 1867, Vol. 4. p. 1881. See also W. B. Carpenter, Nature and Man, New York, 1889, pp. 406-7.

17. D, p. 136.

18. J. W. Gregory, "Problems of Geology Contemporary with the British Association," Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1931, p. 53.

19. LLD, Vol. 3, p. 12. As indicating the vacillation of Lyell's thought on this subject, however, one might refer to a letter from Huxley to Lyell dated January 25, 1859, in which Huxley says in response to a letter now missing: "I do not exactly see the force of your argument that we are bound to find fossil forms intermediate between man and monkeys in the Rocks.... How do we know that man is not a persistent type?" (LLH, Vol. 1, p. 251.) Huxley at the time of this letter seems to have inclined, in the case of man, toward the possibility of some leap of the order of a macromutation taken very long ago. This hypothesis sounds rather similar to Lyell's publicly expressed view of 1863 and since it was written to Lyell, may have had some influence in leading his thought in this direction. Huxley's remark also shows the lingering influence of Huxley's only recently abandoned non-progressionism.

20. Op. cit., p. 194.

21. Op. cit., p. 194.

22. Ibid., pp. 194-95.

23. Ibid., pp. 462-63.

24. Ibid., p. 195.

25. Ibid., pp. 198-99.

26. Op. cit., p. 198.

27. M. F. Ashley Montagu, "The Concept of Atavism," Science, 1938, Vol. 87, pp. 462-63.

28 .T. H. Huxley, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature, London, 1863, p. 137.

29. LLD, Vol. 3, p. 163.

30. Quoted in the Anthropological Review, 1863, Vol. 1, p. 65.

31. LLD, Vol. 3. pp. 15-16.

32. Jacob Gruber, "The Neanderthal Controversy," Scientific Monthly, 1948, Vol. 67, pp. 436-39.

33. John Lubbock, "Cave Man," Natural History Review, 1864, Vol. 4, pp. 407-28.

34. H. Schaaffhausen, "On the Crania of the Most Ancient Races of Man," Natural History Review, 1861, Vol. 1, p. 155.

35. Antiquity of Man, 2d ed., London, 1925, Vol. 1, p. 70.

36. T. H. Huxley, "Further Remarks upon the Human Remains from the Neanderthal," Natural History Review, 1864, Vol. 4, p. 431.

37. Ibid., p. 442.

38. Ibid., p. 443.

39. Thomas Hughes, Principles of Anthropology and Biology, 2d ed., New York. 1890, p. 69.

40. J. W. Dawson,"On the Antiquity of Man," Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, 1864, n.s. Vol. 19. p. 53.

41. See R. Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages, Harvard University Press, 1952.

42. Op. cit., p. 304.

43. Carl Vogt, "The Primitive Period of the Human Species," Anthropological Review, 1867. Vol. 5, p. 213.

44. Carl Vogt, Lectures on Man, London, 1864, p. 304.

45. Theodore Gill, "The Fossil Man of Mentone," Popular Science Monthly, 1874, Vol. 5, p. 644.

46. Ibid.

47. "The Hairy Mammoth," American Naturalist, 1869, Vol. 2, pp. 28-29.

48. R. Sweichel cited by L. Buchner, Man in the Past, Present and Future, London. 1872, p. 261.

49. J. Y. and F. D. Bergen, The Development Theory, Boston, 1884, p. 196. Similarly, the anatomist William King, in Opposition to Huxley, regarded the Neanderthal specimen as "eminently simian" and its thoughts "those of the brute." See Keith, op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 188-89.

50. Buchner, op. cit., p. 314 ff.

51. "The Wild Man of the Woods," Chambers' Journal, 1856, Series 3, Vol. 6, p. 131. I am indebted to my colleague Dr. Gerald Henderson of Brooklyn College for calling this paper to my attention.

52. "On Our Present Knowledge of the Origin of Man," Annual Report, Smithsonian Institution, 1899, p. 466.

53. W. J. Sollas, "The Evolution of Man," Scientia, 1911, Vol. 9, p. 121.

54. Ibid., p. 124.

55. D. G. Brinton, ''The Earliest Men." Nature, 1893, Vol. 48, p. 460.

56. O. C. Marsh, "The Ape from the Tertiary of Java," Science, 1896, n.s. Vol. 3, p. 790. Thomas Wilson, "The Beginnings of the Science of Prehistoric Anthropology," Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1899, p. 327.

57. R. Lydekker, Nature, 1895, Vol. 51, p. 291.

58. O. C. Marsh, "On the Pithecanthropus erectus from the Tertiary of Java," American Journal of Science, 1896, Vol. 1, p. 476.

59. L. Manouvrier, "On the Pithecanthropus erectus," American Journal of Science, 1897, Vol. 4, p. 218.

60. D. J. Cunningham. "Dr. Dubois' So-called Missing Link," Nature, 1895, Vol. 51, p. 429.

61. E. Dubois, "Remarks on the Brain Cast of Pithecanthropus erectus." Summary of a talk before the International Congress of Zoologists, Nature, 1898, Vol. 58, p. 427.

62. Thomas Wilson, for example, writes in 1899 of paleolithic man as having crooked legs and projecting teeth. "It has been doubted whether ne regularly assumed the upright position." "The Beginning of the Science of Prehistoric Anthropology," Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1899, p. 330.

63. Op. cit., p. 429.

64. Op. cit., p. 225.

65. Cited by Gladys Bryson, Man and Society, Princeton University Press, 1945, p. 60.

66. F. J. Teggart, Theory of History, Yale University Press. 1935, p. 132.

67. Origin of Species, New York, Modern Library ed., p. 93. (Italics mine. L.E.)

68. LLD, Vol. 2, p. 344. Actually this idea was first advanced by Lamarck.

69. Darwin, for example, seizes with eagerness upon Broca's suggestion that large cranial size in early man represents a more selected mean than among modem civilized peoples where the weak survive. This clashes, of course, with his cranial statistics aimed to demonstrate the superiority of Caucasians over other existing races. (Descent of Man, Modern Library ed., pp. 436-37.)
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Re: DARWIN'S CENTURY -- EVOLUTION AND THE MEN WHO DISCOVERED

Postby admin » Thu Jul 16, 2015 10:43 pm

PART 1 OF 2

Chapter XI: Wallace and the Brain

The difference between the hand of a monkey and the hand of a man may seem small when they are both placed on the dissecting table, but in that difference whatever it may be, lies the whole difference between an organ limited to the climbing of trees or the plucking of fruit, and an organ which is so correlated with man's inventive genius that by its aid the Earth is weighed and the distance of the sun is measured.
-- Duke of Argyll


I. The Darwinian Bias

"As evolution came to be the reigning hypothesis among men of science," remarked a contemporary observer, "it was to be anticipated that its central problem, the origin of the human mind, would demand consideration." [1] We have seen in the last chapter that one of the strongest unconscious motivations of the Darwinians was to draw human and animal nature, as well as anatomy, as close to each other as possible in the hope of thereby minimizing the evolutionary gap which mentally, at least, yawned between man and his existing primate relatives. There is no need to read unscrupulous intentions into this situation. It was a natural response to the circumstances of an age of transition. Man, theologically, had for so long been accorded a special and supernatural place in creation that the" evolutionists, in striving to carry their point that he was intimately related to the rest of the world of life, sought to emphasize those characteristics which particularly revealed our humble origins.

Today the intellectual climate has so changed that it is possible to find oneself totally misunderstood by cultivated people who assume that any serious examination of Darwinian ideas involves the repudiation of evolution or the principle of natural selection. Before entering further on this subject, therefore, let us examine certain detailed tenets of Darwin's thinking upon man. In subjecting certain of these ideas to critical scrutiny in the light of modern knowledge it is not implied that we are, in any sense, challenging the validity of Darwin's major thesis that man is both related to the existing monkeys and apes and has descended from some early and primitive group within the primate order. In attempting to bolster his scientific position, however, in a time when little in the way of paleontological materials was available, Darwin made use of hypotheses which we would be forced largely to repudiate today.

1. In making use of the living taxonomic ladder he implies marked differences in the inherited mental faculties between the members of the different existing races. [2] This point of view unconsciously reflects the old Scale of Nature and the tacit assumption that the races of today in some manner represent a sequence in time, a series of living fossils, with western European man standing biologically at the head of the procession.

2. Darwin assumed that "when at a remote epoch the progenitors of man were in a transitional state ... natural selection would probably have been greatly aided by the inherited effects of the increased or diminished use of different parts of the body." [3] This Lamarckian effect of habit he extended to such cultural activities as hunting and fishing techniques. [4]

3. He ascribes to the La Naulette jaw, which we discussed in the previous chapter, the "enormous" canines which the workers of this period frequently assumed would be found upon primitive specimens of man. [5]

4. Darwin assumes that in man the "vocal organs have become adapted through the inherited effects of use for the utterance of articulate language." [6] Since language constitutes one of the most striking distinctions between man and the aninla1 world about him, it was almost inevitable that the evolutionary school would seek to reduce its importance as confined to humanity alone. Thus at the very end of the century Haeckel was still insisting that animals were capable of incipient speech, and an enormous amount of poorly rewarded effort has gone into the attempt to teach the existing apes to talk or to formulate and use a few words.

Darwin and his followers actually obscured the whole problem by not differentiating clearly between the signal cries of animals and the symbolism of true speech. [7] They tended to slur over a very difficult and complex question at the same time that they were successful in drawing attention to the fact that if man is a part of the rest of nature, language, too, must have evolved in some way. The obscurity and vagueness of the Darwinian approach to language lies in the fact that in spite of a certain use of signal cries of a largely instinctive nature, animals show no tendency to increase their vocabularies or to transform vague emotional cries into specific symbols capable of manipulating the past and future. There is a recognizable gap here which the Darwinists in the first flush of their enthusiasm tried altogether to minimize. It is not necessary to belabor the point except to observe that there were attempts at first to equate living peoples with various levels of linguistic development which, in time, proved unsatisfactory. [8]

In the arguments which arose upon the subject of man, his animal relationships, his uniqueness or lack of uniqueness as various writers saw the story, the position of Alfred Russel Wallace came to differ markedly from that of Charles Darwin and most of his followers. The episode is a curious and dramatic one in the history of science -- more particularly because certain of Wallace's observations were more perceptive than most of the writers of his own day -- even though in other particulars he relapsed into a somewhat mystical approach. Moreover, the whole episode has been dramatically re-emphasized in modem times by the revelation of the Piltdown forgery. In pursuing the meaning of this somewhat involved series of events it will do no harm to examine Wallace's first contacts with Darwin. As is well known he arrived independently at the principle of natural selection and shares with Darwin a pre-eminent position in nineteenth- century biology.

II. Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913)

If any additional proof were needed that the first half of the "wonderful century" was stirring with half-formulated evolutionary ideas, the life of Wallace would supply such evidence. Born into modest economic circumstances and in his own words "shy, awkward and unused to good society," [9] Wallace had, unlike Darwin, little in the way of educational advantages. Like so many Englishmen of the period, however, he acquired early a taste for nature. While working as a teacher at a private school in Leicester in 1844 he read Humboldt and Malthus, both of whom made a profound impression upon him. Earlier he had read Sir Charles Lyell's Principles, Chambers' Vestiges, and Darwin's Journal of Researches. Wallace was a convinced evolutionist with the same reading background as Darwin before he went to South America with his friend Henry Walter Bates as a beetle and butterfly collector in 1848. He spent four years wandering in the Amazon valley before going on a second collecting expedition to the Far East in 1854. It was here, on the island of Ternate in 1858, that Wallace, while suffering from an attack of fever, conceived the idea of natural selection.

Although he once generously compared his own part in the evolutionary story as one week to Darwin's twenty years, the truth was that Wallace had contemplated variation in wild nature for many years; moreover he was fully cognizant of, and sympathetic with, the evolutionary point of view. Somewhat like Darwin earlier, he had been mulling over his observations for some ten years before he was struck by this sudden Hash of insight. It must be recognized, however, that although Wallace conceived his theory independently he had actually been stimulated not alone through perusing Darwin's Journal of Researches but also through direct correspondence with Darwin. Darwin had written to Wallace that he agreed heartily with an earlier (1855) paper expressing evolutionary views and that "they had thought much alike. [10]

Correspondence indicates that Darwin had told Wallace he was working on "the species problem." He generously urged Wallace on in his own speculations, but politely declined to divulge his own theory prematurely. There is thus clear documentation which, while establishing Wallace's own claims to originality, indicates at the same time that this very astute and perceptive young naturalist was running hot on Darwin's trail. His curiosity must have been intense and there is every indication that even if the memory of Malthus provided a spark, Wallace, like Darwin, had long pondered "the great work of Lyell." [11]

When Wallace sent his theory to Darwin and there occurred that mutual nobility of behavior so justly celebrated in the annals of science -- a tolerance and recognition of their two claims which led to the reading of their preliminary papers jointly before the Linnaean Society in 1858 -- a new world had opened up for man. Even those who loathe the very names of Wallace and Darwin today seek out unquestioningly, when ill, doctors whose whole medical training is postulated upon evolutionary principles, whose medical experiments are based upon the fact that one form of life is related to another. As we examine the skulls of primitive men which reveal the tremendous physical changes man has undergone in the last million years, the thought must inevitably cross our minds that the unfixed but imminent future yawns before us; that our acts may ensure the disappearance of our species from the earth or, on the contrary, that we, like these small-brained, massive-jawed forerunners of ours, may be the bridge to a higher form of life than has yet appeared. "Mother Nature," as Charles Kingsley, a nineteenth-century minister once said, "lets things make themselves." There is a great deal in that remark for the human species to ponder.

Scarcely had the two leading exponents of natural selection launched upon their evolutionary careers before they came to differ, and to differ profoundly, upon the subject of human origins. Upon the development of the animal world alone Darwin and Wallace might have continued to agree. Man, however, is an elusive and, even to himself, mysterious subject it was not long before these two great scholars had fallen into disagreement -- though never into dislike of each other. The story is an interesting one-little told, almost forgotten in the dust of years -- but emerging with renewed significance upon the discovery of the Piltdown fraud in 1953.

III. Darwin and Human Evolution

As we have already had occasion to remark, Darwin, save for a passing sentence, reserved his opinions upon man when he wrote the Origin of Species. Later, in 1871, he published a selection of materials intended to demonstrate man's relationship to the higher animals "especially the anthropomorphous apes." [12] Although he expressed a general caution that "we must not fall into the error of supposing that the early progenitor of the whole Simian stock, including man, was identical with, or even closely resembled, any existing ape or monkey; [13] it was inevitable that the dearth of human fossils would focus attention on the existing great apes. These animals were regarded by Darwin as being in an "intermediate condition" between a quadruped and biped. [14] It was not clearly foreseen in Darwin's time that the existing great apes, in many of their characters, reveal divergent specializations which need not necessarily be attributed to the early human forerunners. While it is a subject which we do not have space to pursue here, it may be noted that Darwin's conception of huge canine teeth in man's immediate ancestry has not been borne out by modern paleontological discoveries and, in addition, it seems extremely unlikely that man ever passed through a modern chimpanzee- or gorilla-like postural stage in his achievement of the upright position. [15]

The question of the place of origin and the size of the human ancestor left Darwin divided between two possibilities: a large gorilloid type of primate whose homeland was very likely Africa, or some smaller, weaker anthropoid which might have inhabited a large island such as New Guinea or Borneo. In terms of his enthusiasm for "natural selection arising from the competition of tribe with tribe," Darwin, left to himself, might have been inclined toward the first hypothesis, as indeed his projection of huge canine teeth upon Neanderthal man and his suggestion of traces of a sagittal crest among male Australians strongly intimate.

There was, however, an obstacle to this approach. One of Darwin's opposition, the Duke of Argyll, in his volume Primeval Man published in 1869, had raised a very legitimate question. He had called attention to the fact that in comparison with many mammals man is physically weak, and, except for his brain, has no really specialized survival mechanisms. How then, contended the Duke, could the human ancestor according to the demands of natural selection "have been modified in the direction of greater weakness without inevitable destruction, until first by the gift of reason and of mental capacities of contrivance, there had been established an adequate preparation for the change?" [16]

Now although the Duke of Argyll's challenge was legitimate -- he had raised a question based upon man's generalized physical attributes -- it is clear he had drawn something of a false contrast between intellect and physique, as well as equated the physical frailties of living savages with what fossil evidence now tells us were our more rugged Pleistocene ancestors. There was, in other words, another way of answering the Duke's objection, but Darwin, partly because of his very emphasis upon struggle, could not perceive it. As a consequence, he took refuge in his second hypothesis -- that which conceived of the human forerunner as a less formidable primate. An ancestor like the gorilla, Darwin cautioned, "possessing great size, strength and ferocity" might never have become social. "Hence; he concludes, "it might have been an immense advantage to man to have sprung from some comparatively weak creature."

No sooner had Darwin given vent to this view, however, than it must have occurred to him that he was in danger of giving the Duke of Argyll another opportunity to attack him by means of the "weak creature" of rather un-Darwinian qualities which he had postulated. Darwin had once jokingly termed himself a "master wriggler" and these powers are not unobservable in the way he met the implied threat to his second hypothesis. It was quite conceivable, he contended, that the ancestors of man, "even if far more helpless and defenseless than any existing savages," had inhabited some safe island, or continent like Australia, until they had achieved sufficient intellect to be a match for the more formidable dangers of the major land masses. There is more than a hint of the Golden Age, of lost echoes from the Earthly Paradise, in this conception. Some of his German followers added a final touch by suggesting that it was in Australia that man had learned to speak by listening to the beautiful voices of singing birds. [17]

This idyllic vision is quite in contrast with Darwin's usual emphasis on the major continents where, "in the larger country, there will have existed more individuals and more diversified forms, and the competition will have been severer." [18] In a way, such maneuvers are rather characteristic of late Darwinian days before Weismann, Mendel, and the rise of experimental genetics. There was a great deal of theorizing on very little evidence and if one encountered a stiff argument it was easy to add an ancillary hypothesis or make out a special case. Since Darwin was making extensive use of both natural selection and inheritance of habit, there was really no way in which he could lose such an argument as that described above so long as it was not solvable by experiment. Slowly, however, a certain accumulation of paleontological and archaeological information was taking place. It was this fact, even as early as 1864, that had led Wallace to entertain a new conception of human evolution -- an idea overlooked by Darwin -- which was destined to influence profoundly all later thinking on the subject.

Before launching into a discussion of this conception it is important to make clear the fact that Wallace's original formulation of his ideas had nothing whatever to do with his religious beliefs. Wallace, in his later years, became interested in spiritualism. So greatly has our thinking shifted away from the religious interests of the nineteenth century that to consider, or express approval of, certain of Wallace's ideas is occasionally to find oneself labeled, along with Wallace, as a "mystic." This is particularly ironic because, anthropologically speaking, Wallace was somewhat in advance of his confreres, and made, undisputed contributions to our common scientific knowledge, although some of these have been absorbed almost without notice. Modest and solitary by nature, Wallace, unlike Darwin and Huxley, left no scientific descendants to speak for him. A later generation has come to think of him as an old man who had outlived his time, a crotchety evolutionist who, in 1913, had refused to be impressed by the fossil skull from Piltdown. [19]

IV. Degeneration or Development

When the Ice Age began to be investigated, profound changes in thinking about archaeological problems were brought about. We know, of course, that the abandonment of the idea of a universal deluge and of the conception of special creation forced great alterations in religious belief. Less well known, as observed in the chapter upon the missing links, is the fact that the evolutionists themselves were destined to have some of their own preconceptions shattered. So long as the emphasis upon the living scale of relationships had existed, there had been an unconscious tendency to rank the living races upon a succession of evolutionary levels, and to incorporate the existing anthropoids into the system.

Thus Haeckel at one time suggested that he had heard "remarkable clicking sounds" in the noises made by apes, and expressed the conviction that these sounds are still present in the language of the Bushmen. [20] Others maintained that the languages of savage nations were extremely simple, "often not rivalling even that of the children of the civilized," [21] in trying ... to show that man differs from animals only in degree, not in kind; wrote Henry Chapman, who reflects the typical ideas of his period, we hope to have made out a series of transitional forms, beginning with the lower monkeys and ascending from them, through the higher apes and the lower races of mankind to the higher. Thus the skulls of the Chimpanzee, Idiot, Negro and Kalmuck offer a series of ascending forms." [22]

It becomes obvious, in the light of such views, that however much Darwin may have talked of the great length of the time scale, such assumptions as those of Chapman, Haeckel, and numerous others would stand in more or less unspoken opposition to an extended history for man. If the sequence of ascent was almost totally visible in the living world, how could it, in reality, be very greatly extended in time? There was, in other words, an unspoken contradiction between the geological demands upon the past and the emphasis of the biologist, particularly in the case of man, upon the living scale of life. The eighteenth century, it is evident, still possessed great power over men's minds.

When, therefore, tools and implements began to be traced into Ice Age gravels, and when, moreover, it was seen that these tools were primitive, even though found in an area of present-day high civilization, there was a quickening of interest in evolutionary circles. It was al ready known that the Pleistocene fauna of Europe differed markedly from that of the present, and that several huge beasts 'Such as the hairy mammoth had completely vanished. Awareness of these faunal modifications led to the assumption that when man was found at such levels he would prove to be very primitive -- a real missing link -- of a kind mentally comparable to microcephals and Hottentots. If the big mammals had changed there seemed no reason to suppose that man had not likewise altered in appearance. In fact, so strong had this preconception become that there arose a tendency to see, even among remains that we would now classify as mesolithic, evidences of biological inferiority. Even when the form of the skulls belied such a judgment it was argued that these crania, though indistinguishable from those of modern man, must have contained less gray matter and more interstitial tissue. [23]

Such a climate of thought caused the rejection, at first, of clues to the life habits of our upper paleolithic ancestors. u Many did not believe paleolithic men to have been mentally capable of burying their dead, and regarded their mural art with incredulity. As it began to be realized that the Engis skull and other Cra-Magnon specimens revealed no signs of biological inferiority, the notion that simple technological developments could be equated with inferior brains received a severe blow. European man was now looking upon the remains of his own ancestors, both physically and culturally. In physique and skull capacity they were his equals, if not superiors. Even the poorly understood Neanderthal calvarium had housed a large brain.

At this point there arose in English intellectual circles a considerable debate between the evolutionists and what we may term the "degenerationists." The "degeneration" school of thought has a long and interesting history which can be pursued into pre-evolutionary times as a pessimistic phase of Christian philosophy related to the doctrine of the Fall of Man and the idea of the sin of the microcosm (man) infecting the macrocosm (the universe). [25] In its new phase at the mid-nineteenth century it represented the last stand of the special creationists against human evolution. In brief compass, this school of thought regarded existing savages, not as surviving fossils representing the past condition of man, but rather as degenerate peoples fallen away from a more ideal condition. Richard Whately (1787-1863), Archbishop of Dublin, was a leading mid-century exponent of this point of view." His influence in conservative circles was powerful, and he had, moreover, the effect of bestirring even his scientific opponents with the necessity of making a response.

Using the fact that modem natives often proved intractable and averse to the acceptance of cultural traits from Western society, the Bishop argued that savages were incapable of raising themselves to civilized levels by their own efforts. In the beginning, therefore, civilized man could not have achieved this status unaided, but must have received a divine revelation. Basically the Bishop was using the uninventiveness of man as a premise In a manner -- minus its theological trappings -- not too distinct from that of some of the more extreme diffusionists of the early twentieth century. A considerable debate arose and was continued over a score of years. Some, as Hugh Miller had earlier done, argued that "the farther we remove In any direction from the Adamic center [presumably Palestine], the more animalized and sunk do we find the various tribes or races." [27]

A writer in The Contemporary Review observed that "In the savage races of the present day we seem to find the human faculties, not in their fresh virgin state, tending to develop into something better, but arrested and benumbed by long acquiescence in groveling habits. Therefore I think that we are justified In regarding these races as the swamps and backwaters of the stream of noble humanity, and not as the representatives of the fountainhead from which it has been derived." [28] The fall of the ancient civilizations of the Near East and the more recently discovered remains of the Moundbuilders were all presented as clear-cut evidence that man was capable of relapsing from a civilized state. [29] The controversy echoed in the meetings of the British Association and prominent scholars aligned themselves on one side or another. so The entire dilemma was succinctly presented by C. J. D'Oyly when he remarked: "If the Caucasian appeared first, then a degenerating principle, which is observed in no other part of creation, has been allowed to operate, but if the Caucasian has appeared last, then the law of human life, like that of all other organized beings, has been progressive." [31] This remark, which contains three interesting items, is worth consideration. It is revelatory of the white, ethnocentric bias of western Europe in the nineteenth century, it reveals a general acceptance of the evolution of "all other organized beings," but it pauses over what was, given the intellectual climate of the time, an unanswerable question: were the traces of man in the earth a sign of feet going down or of footsteps ascending?

The degenerationists had neatly inverted the anthropological argument for evolution: man had not arisen from savagery; he had sunk to it, particularly in those regions most peripheral to Europe. To prove their point lay the Sphinx brooding over fallen Egypt. In the Guatemalan jungles the mathematical computations of the Mayan astronomer-priests lay lost and unread beneath the hungry. rootlets of the rain forest. Who could say that whole nations had not fallen from their once high estate? Steps going up or steps coming down-but how was the archaeologist and ethnologist to judge which, particularly when he was considering peoples without written history, wandering, perhaps, on the bleak shores of Patagonia.

In reality both schools of thought were obsessed with one-way processes operating in diametrically opposed directions. The evolutionists, in addition, were struggling to align materials of a widely scattered and unrelated nature. So long as the paleontological record of man was almost lacking, his cultural remains could be read just as easily in terms of peripheral peoples fallen on evil days, and culturally deteriorated, as they could be interpreted in terms of stages in human advancement. This problem was stated with great objectivity by Rudolf Schmid. "Archaeology," he remarked, seems to do no more than admit that its results can be incorporated into the theory of an origin of the human race through gradual development, if this theory can be shown to be correct in some other way, and that its results can just as well be brought into harmony with a contradictory theory." [32] No simple tool, of and by itself, would be sufficient to prove "that there was a condition of mankind lying near that of animals." [33]

Grant Allen had been forced to admit that the antiquity of man was growing more far reaching in its implications than had been at first imagined. Instead of being the "missing link," the cave man appeared to be "a mere average savage." The Darwinists seemed confronted either with no traces of man at all or with man essentially like that of the present day. [34] Having now reviewed the problem created by the discovery of the glacial antiquity of European man, let us examine its bearing on the thought of Alfred Russel Wallace.

V. Wallace and Human Antiquity

If one glances at the map of Wallace's eastern wanderings, one is immediately struck by the many lines which cross and crisscross among the innumerable Islands of the Malay Archipelago [35] They represent the journeys of Wallace over a period of eight years-eight years of passage, often by native prau, among the dangerous reefs and shoals of the eastern seas; eight years among the fevers, the leeches, the ten-inch scorpions; eight years among the solitudes of the great forests. Darwin and Huxley had seen natives in the days of their voyages, but neither had depended so completely or in such a fashion as Wallace upon their good will. It is interesting to observe that Wallace reveals scarcely a trace of the racial superiority so frequently manifested in nineteenth-century scientific circles. "The more I see of uncivilized people, the better I think of human nature; he wrote to a friend in 1855, "and the essential differences between civilized and savage men seem to disappear." [36]

When reviewing Walter Bagehot's Physics and Politics for Nature in later years, his old thoughts returned. "We find many broad statements as to the low state of morality and of intellect in all prehistoric men," he commented critically, "which facts hardly warrant." [37] So strongly did he differ from the major tendency to arrange natives on decreasing levels of intellect and to picture them as depraved in habits that Sir John Lubbock commented that Wallace's description of savage people differed greatly from that of earlier observers. [38] Somewhere on the seas or in the forests, accompanied by his faithful Malay, Ali, he had ceased to be impressed by the typical conception of the native as a physical and mental fossil. With these attitudes and, paradoxically, being at the same time a confirmed evolutionist, he had returned to England. There he had encountered the degeneration doctrine in the early sixties.

Wallace was a man who went his own way. Evolutionist though he was, he had been impressed by some lectures given by a Mr. Albert Mott, the president of the Liverpool Philosophical Society. Mr. Mott appears to have regarded modem man as being basically in no way morally superior to his ancestors. In addition he had advanced the view that savages were often the descendants of more civilized races. [39] Although we do not possess the entire record of Wallace's thinking during the period just prior to 1864, when he published his first great addition to the theory of evolution, we can, nevertheless, discern certain stages in the development of his thought as it progresses through several successive contributions. We can begin with his statement of 1864, which received the approbation of Darwin. [40]

In this paper, which marks the beginning of Wallace's divergence from Darwin, we may note three things: (1) he seeks to account for the apparent long-time stability in the appearance of the human species as compared with the faunal variations observable in the upper Pleistocene; (2) he attempts to explain the racial varieties of man on another basis than that of successive stages; (3) he points out, for the first time, that with the rise of the human brain the whole nature of the natural selection process has altered.

It should be emphasized once more that there is nothing whatever of a mystical or theological point of view in this paper. It clings carefully to the basic Darwinian formulation of insensible variations selected for survival through the struggle for existence. Darwin himself received the paper with manifestations of pleasure and interest. In a letter to Hooker in May of 1864 he wrote: "I have now read Wallace's paper on Man, and think it most striking and original and forcible. I wish he had written Lyell's chapters on Man.... I am not sure that I fully agree with his views about Man, but there is no doubt. in my opinion, on the remarkable genius shown by the paper. I agree, however, to the main new leading idea." [41] Actually Darwin's point of difference with Wallace at this time revolved around comparatively minor matters involving racial differentiation which Wallace, in a letter to Darwin, clarified more fully and satisfactorily than in his paper. [42]

Wallace set out to explain the apparent stability of the human stock by pointing out that it was necessary to account for the fact that the bodily differences between man and the great apes were small but that the gap between them in mental and cranial characters was vast. Unlike some of the other Darwinists, he was not greatly impressed by the living taxonomic scale, nor did he regard modem primitives as almost filling in the gap between man and ape. In effect, what Wallace proposed would run somewhat as follows: he saw the evolution of man as occurring really in two stages. The first would have been represented by the series of physical changes which culminated in his achievement of bipedal posture and the freeing of the hands as implements to carry out the dictates of the brain. This earlier phase of human evolution, whatever the forces that promoted it, was the product of the same type of natural selection that had produced a seal's flipper or the wing of a bird. It was, essentially, an evolution of parts, specializations promoting certain adaptive ecological adjustments of the individual. This type of evolutionary adjustment is omnipresent in the living world. It has led to the discovery of the principles of comparative anatomy and adaptive radiation. The investigation of the mechanisms involving the production of new organs and the alteration of living forms occupies the whole of the Origin of Species.

The second stage in human evolution, however -- the stage which represents Wallace's original contribution to the subject, and which elicited admiring plaudits from Darwin -- involves his recognition of the role of the human brain as a totally new factor in the history of life. Wallace was apparently the first evolutionist to recognize clearly and consciously and with a full grasp of its implications the fact that, with the emergence of that bodily specialization which constitutes the human brain, bodily specialization itself might be said to be outmoded. The evolution of parts, the evolution of the sort of unconscious adaptations which are to be observed in the life cycle of a complicated parasite or the surgical mouth parts of a vampire bat, had been forever surpassed. Nature, instead of delimiting through parts a creature confined to some narrow niche of existence, had at last produced an organism potentially capable of the endless inventing and discarding of parts through the medium of a specialized organ whose primary purpose was, paradoxically, the evasion of specialization.

The long dominance of partitive evolution, with its choking of life in blind alleys having no evolutionary outlet, was at last over. However imperfect this new brain might be, it had opened up new vistas which, if not limitless, were as yet beyond human experience. There had come into existence, Wallace emphasized, a being in whom mind was of vastly greater importance than bodily structure. For the first time there was offered to a complex living creature the possibility of escape from the endless paleontological story of a generalized animal becoming increasingly specialized until the destruction of its ecological niche foretells its own extinction. Man has the possibilities within him of remaining in the body he now inhabits while whole faunas rise and change or pass away. "We must look," said Wallace, "very far in the past to find man in that early condition in which his mind was not sufficiently developed to remove his body from the modifying influence of external conditions and the cumulative action of 'natural selection.'" [43]

Wallace, in other words, conceived of man's body, even though he made allowance for certain continuing minor selective effects, as having reached a kind of timeless aspect in the midst of universal change. "My argument is," he wrote to Darwin, "that this great cranial difference has been slowly developing while the rest of the skeleton has remained nearly stationary; and while the Miocene Dryopithecus has been modified into the existing gorilla, speechless and ape-brained man (but yet man.) has been developed into great-brained, speech forming man." [44]

The order of time necessary to bridge the difference between the cranium of an ape and a man he suggested might be enormous and as quite possibly extending into the middle Tertiary. "While the animals which surrounded him have been undergoing modification In an parts of their bodies to a generic or even family degree of difference he [man] has been changing almost wholly in the head." Ten million years or more might be Involved in this peculiar evolutionary development. It had been absurd from the first to expect to see the human phylogeny revealed among the historic races or among upper paleolithic Cro-Magnons. The major racial criteria, he was inclined to believe, dated to the infancy of the race before man was able successfully to protect his body from change." In any case he thought the advantage of his theory lay in its perception of a heretofore unrecognized aspect of evolution and, along with this, a point of view which "neither requires us to depreciate the intellectual chasm which separates man from the apes, nor refuses full recognition of the striking resemblances to them which exists in other parts of his structure." [46]

While Wallace, like Darwin at this time, still conceived of human advance largely in terms of intergroup struggle, it is evident that the long phylogeny he had introduced for man lightened the emphasis upon a short unilinear succession of the modem races. Wallace's ideas had greater Christian appeal and, like the degenerationists, he recognized the fact that the decline of elaborate civilizations was sometimes possible. His "compromise," as in a sense it was, between the evolutionists and the degenerationists, was somewhat face-saving for the less fanatical elements in both parties. The Darwinians liked the new lease on time which had been given them. Huxley was willing to consider a Miocene date for man, and Lyell was intrigued by the new hypothesis. Time was still a commodity with which geologists could afford to be bountiful. Moreover, in a world which had yet to yield evidence of genuinely primitive hominids, Wallace had found a way around the big-brained men of the upper Pleistocene. Man might prove to be a very persistent and ancient type in his last, his intellectual phase." [46]

Wallace, however, did not leave the subject alone. He persisted in returning to it in a succession of later papers, In doing so he ended by disturbing Darwin and drawing upon his own head accusations of mysticism. It is at this point that we must proceed with the greatest caution. The controversy is less than a century away and it is easy still to find oneself emotionally attracted to one side or the other. What one must do dispassionately is to realize that whatever one may think of certain of Wallace's philosophical interpretations of nature, the man recognized some genuinely unexplained phenomena.

It is an ironic aftermath of the Darwinian era that the two discoverers and popularizers of the theory of natural selection should both have found that doctrine inadequate when applied to man. Wallace made the more spectacular rejection and as a consequence, his own somewhat mystical religious convictions occupied more attention than the problems which he raised. Darwin, by contrast, escaped attention through a gift for being ambiguously inconspicuous. Yet it is plain that the Lamarckianism, which increasingly characterized his later years, is particularly evident in his treatment of man.
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Re: DARWIN'S CENTURY -- EVOLUTION AND THE MEN WHO DISCOVERED

Postby admin » Thu Jul 16, 2015 10:43 pm

PART 2 OF 2

VI. The Concept of Latency

We have already had occasion to observe that from the sixties onward there was a decline in geological prestige. Limitless earthly time was being subjected to the scrutiny of a physics which was intensely conscious of heat loss and the second law of thermodynamics. Kelvin, the odious specter who dogged Darwin's footsteps, threatened to compress the earth's history into something like twenty-five million years. There were physicists who argued for even less. Wallace's generous grant of ten million years, or even more, for the development of man would, according to this system, have taken half of the world's time and left the emergence of the rest of life to be dealt with in a compressed series of episodes remarkably similar to the old catastrophism. Keeping in mind this background of thought to which the Darwinists were being forced to give serious attention, let us now examine Wallace's later contributions to human evolution.

Wallace had always expressed himself as open to conviction on the subject of human antiquity, but in proposing his theory that man was very old he had recourse to no other possibility so long as he abided by strict Darwinian tenets. These included, first, organic change by almost imperceptible increments, for the Darwinians on the whole abjured saltatory macro-mutations. Second, for intensive selection, a considerable emphasis on large populations. Thus Darwin remarked to Lyell in 1860: "Where there are few individuals variation at most must be slower." [47] In this same vein Wallace observed in 1876, after he had begun to entertain other views, that, according to Darwin's hypothesis, so "distinct a creature as man must have risen at a very early period into the position of a dominant race, and spread in dense waves of population over all suitable portions of the great continent -- for this ... is essential to rapid developmental progress through the agency of natural selection." Third, and most important perhaps in its final effect upon the thinking of Wallace, was Darwin's heavy emphasis upon utility, upon limited perfection. "Natural selection," he had contended in the Origin, "tends only to make each organic being as perfect as, or slightly more perfect than, the other inhabitantsof the same country with which it had to struggle for existence. Natural selection will not produce absolute perfection." [48]

It was just this reservation when applied to the problem of the rise of the human brain which led Wallace to break with the views of his distinguished colleague. In 1869, much to the dismay of Darwin, he came to the conclusion that natural selection and its purely utilitarian approach to life would not account for many aspects and capacities of the human brain. [49] Furthermore, he began to express concern over the difficulty of accounting for the absence of numerous human remains in the older geological deposits, if humanity had been indeed as numerous as the Darwinian theory demanded. [50]

Wallace contended in the Quarterly Review article, which soon drew the attention of Darwin and Huxley, that the brain of the lowest savages, or even of the known prehistoric races, was little inferior to that of Europeans. "Natural selection," he argued, "could only have endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one but very little inferior to that of the average member of our learned societies." Today, when careful distinctions are made between natural genetic endowment and cultural inheritance, such a remark does not sound particularly iconoclastic. In the time of Wallace, however, it was a direct challenge to Western ethnocentrism and the whole conception of the native as a living fossil destined to be swept away in the struggle for existence because of his feeble and archaic intellect. In contrast to the apocryphal stories of natives who spoke like monkeys, or were almost mute, Wallace pointed out "that, among the lowest savages with the least copious vocabularies, the capacity of uttering a variety of distinct articulate sounds, and of applying to them an almost infinite amount of modulation and inflection, is not in any way inferior to that of the higher races. An instrument has been developed in advance of the needs of its possessor."

In this last sentence we come upon the clue to all of Wallace's later thinking upon man. He had become firmly convinced that man's latent intellectual powers, even in a savage state, were far in excess of what he might have achieved through natural selection alone. "We have to ask; he said later, "what relation the successive stages of improvement of the mathematical faculty had to the life or death of its possessors, to the struggle of tribe with tribe, or nation with nation; or to the ultimate survival of one race and the extinction of another." Musical gifts, high ethical behavior, he had come to doubt as being ever the product of utility in the war of nature. They lay ready for exploitation as much among savages as among the civilized. They were latent powers. "It is a somewhat curious fact," Wallace remarked a little wryly, "that while all modem writers admit the great antiquity of man, most of them maintain the very recent development of his intellect, and will hardly contemplate the possibility of men, equal in mental capacity to ourselves, having existed in prehistoric times." [51] Wallace, in other words, had come to the conclusion that whatever the age of man might eventually prove to be, man's intellectual development had reached, biologically, a high level very long ago. Surveying such aspects of man's mental characters having no apparent relation to his material progress, his curious hairlessness, the structure of his larynx, his adept hand, Wallace was inclined to the belief that "some higher intelligence may have directed the process by which the human race was developed." [52]

"If you had not told me; wrote Darwin after the appearance of the Quarterly Review article, "I should have thought your remarks had been added by someone else. As you expected, 1 differ grievously from you, and am very sorry for it. I can see no necessity for calling in an additional and proximate cause in regard to man." [53] The two men remained friends, but the episode must have left both of them -- each in his own way a solitary thinker -- a little lonelier. "I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child," sighed Darwin tolerantly, though he could never endure "miraculous additions at anyone stage of ascent." [54] Others viewed Wallace's case more sympathetically. "If we do not admit that latent capacities in the savage brain were implanted for use at some time in the distant future," wrote one reviewer, "we can only say that they are the result of a force which we do not know, and of a law which we have not grasped." [55]

But the current of the times was running against mysticism and toward a positivist scientific approach. The Pithecanthropus skull cap and the discoveries at Piltdown gave a new impetus to the pursuit of the fossil history of man. The point raised by Rudolf Schmid -- that the quarrel between degenerationists and evolutionists had to be settled in some other way than by archaeology -- was at last answered by way of paleontology. The degeneration argument was difficult to sustain in the face of so pithecoid a fossil as Pithecanthropus or the ape-jawed creature (later found to be a hoax) from Piltdown.

Wallace's contributions to anthropology, on the other hand, the recognition that man had transferred to his tools and mechanical devices the specialized evolution which so totally involves the world of plants and animals, were absorbed into the general body of scientific knowledge. [56] Absorbed also, though in some degree reluctantly, has been the recognition that the higher intellectual and moral nature of man has been roughly stationary throughout the whole range of historic time and must be distinguished from material progress. The Hottentot has ceased to be a step from the monkey people; the Negro's skull is no longer placed on the lecturer's table between that of the gorilla and the Caucasian.

Looking back from this vantage point in time we can recognize that some of the physical features of man which troubled Wallace in terms of the selective forces known in his day can now in some degree be accounted for in terms of pedomorphism -- the retention of embryonic or infantile characters into adult life. That such forces have probably played a key part in human evolution is now generally recognized. [57] Wallace observed what he was not in a position to understand. If it led him, finally, away from his fellows toward a somewhat cloud-borne thought, it led him also toward the next century, toward a drama of which he would witness the beginning act before he died in 1913.

VII. Brains and Time

All through the nineteenth century the brain as the most mysterious of human organs had been under examination. It was then, as it is now, "the greatest enigma of modern science." Cuvier as early as 1804 called attention to the possibility of investigating the brains of extinct animals through natural endocasts. [58] Writing in his Notebook of 1837, Darwin foresaw that his theory would "give zest to recent and fossil comparative anatomy; it would lead to the study of instincts, heredity and mind-heredity." [59] In 1851 J. Stanley Grimes (1807-1903), a forgotten American evolutionist, produced a book which, falling under criticism, he rapidly suppressed; it was entitled Phreno-Geology: The Progressive Creation of Man, Indicated by Natural History and Confirmed by Discoveries which Connect the Organization and Functions of the Brain with the Successive Geological Periods (Boston). [60] As the title indicates, Grimes attempted to correlate the various portions of the brain as they were then understood phrenologically with the different geological periods which rendered their emergence necessary.

It is evident that Grimes was acquainted with the work of Von Baer and other European naturalists. His evolutionary philosophy, though crudely entangled with phrenological ideas, contains glimpses of adaptive radiation and of mutations (he terms them "idiosyncracies") such "as to be able to sustain the shock of new circumstances and survive." [61] The book constitutes renewed evidence of the wide dispersal of evolutionary ideas after the success of the Vestiges and shows how infinitesimally close some of these writers came to the leading idea of the Origin. Grimes, as in so many other cases, did not have the technical background to deal with the ideas he had encountered or the ability to realize which of his own were important. His gropings upon brain evolution, however, are in a sense a prelude to the post-Darwinian recognition that the brain, like other bodily organs, has a history extending into the animal past. In this sense he is a pioneer forerunner of men like the neurologist J. Hughlings Jackson, who, later on in the century, observed that as evolution progresses the higher centers of the brain grow more complex and increasingly independent of the lower centers out of which they evolved. [62]

Two things, however, these students of the evolving brain were unable to say. They could give no answer to the question of how long it had taken that organ to achieve its present status, nor could they be sure whether Wallace was right in his assumption that the human head had undergone its major alterations after a long period of upright terrestrial activity during which a completely non-prehensile foot had been developed. "We may suppose," Wallace had commented, "that when he had reached the erect form and possessed all the external appearance of man, his brain still remained undeveloped." [63] The one phase was merely a specialized adaptation in the old evolutionary sense; the second, involving the brain, had introduced a new power into the universe.

As the attack of physics upon geological time intensified, even Darwin had written to his friend Hugh Falconer: "I should rather like to see it rendered highly probable that the process of formation of a new species was short compared to its duration...." Although he carefully dissociated himself in the same letter from any belief "that new species are suddenly formed like monsters," and emphasized again that species formation was a long process, it is evident that he was willing to consider the possible emergence of a new form in much less time than its after-survival as a species would suggest. [64] Similarly Wallace in 1876, although in the old terms of natural selection he had advocated a very lengthy history for man, was willing to venture that "if ... continued researches in all parts of Europe and Asia fail to bring to light any proofs of his presence, [65] it will be at least a presumption that he came into existence at a much later date, and by a much more rapid process of development."

Wallace, at this point, could suggest as a "fair argument" only the possibility that man's evolution had been guided by "higher agencies." [66] Since this hypothesis removed the issue to the domain of metaphysics, it was not taken seriously in science, and the genuine question which he had raised about human antiquity faded from scientific attention. Although discoveries of fossil human material had been slight, the Pithecanthropus skull cap and thigh bone had suggested a development in which bipedalism, as Wallace had prophesied, preceded the full growth of the brain. Furthermore, the renewed grant of geological time. which emerged after the recognition of radioactivity, made the issue of human antiquity less pressing than it had begun to appear in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

Then in 1912 came the public announcement of the discovery of the Piltdown skull which precipitated the caustic remark from Wallace that "it does not prove much, if anything." [*] It was, perhaps, Wallace's last comment upon the fossil past of man. He died in November of the following year. It may reasonably be asked why he had dismissed in this cavalier manner the skull with which so many others were impressed -- he, the last survivor of those who had fought and won the battle for evolution long ago, he who had lived to see the shadows which had haunted Darwin well-nigh dispelled. Did he have some inkling that the skull was an imposture? [67] It seems unlikely. Rather it may be suspected that in some degree he was actuated by the thought that the skull did not fit his own conception of human evolution.

The Piltdown skull had presented the contemporary workers with a most peculiar situation. Both Pithecanthropus and Piltdown, at the time of discovery, had been assigned very early datings around the Plio-Pleistocene border. Yet the disparity in appearance between the two specimens was such as to suggest quite different evolutionary forces at work. The Java cranium, as we have noted, seemed to substantiate Wallace's view of a brain slowly increasing in size long after the attainment of the upright posture. Piltdown, by contrast, with its anthropoid jaw combined with a sapiens cranium suggested that the brain had advanced more rapidly than other parts of the body. Suggestions were also made that the creature had not even fully acquired an upright position. [68] So great was the resulting confusion introduced into human paleontology that all kinds of supporting hypotheses and ramifying family trees had to be elaborated to take care of this anomalous situation. Watson, after pointing out in 1928 that the specimens were of approximately the same age, commented that on the analogy of what we knew of evolution in other mammals it should be possible to discover "the characteristic structure of early Pleistocene man." The results of such a comparison, Watson had to confess, were "very disappointing." He found human variability "unusually great," and was only able to reduce the differences by attributing a small and primitive brain to the Piltdown fragments. [69]

Within the last two decades a new and striking series of developments have served to rearouse the long dormant interest in the antiquity of the human line. We here refer to Wallace's second phase of human evolution: that involving the emergence of the true culture- producing brain. In the first place there is a growing body of evidence -- not at this writing conclusive, but far more weighty than at the time Wallace first raised the question in 1876 -- suggesting that in geological terms the evolution of the human brain has been extremely rapid. Dr. Tilly Edinger, distinguished paleoneurologist of Harvard University, has commented that enlargement of the cerebral hemispheres by fifty per cent seems to have taken place, geologically speaking, almost instantaneously, without having been accompanied by any marked increase in body size. [70] There are also suggestions, in terms of new dating .methods, that the million-year age of the Pleistocene period may be shortened by new studies, [71] which would have the indirect consequence of further reducing the age of the fossil men now known to us. Pithecanthropus, once assigned a late Pliocene age, has long since been correlated with the middle Pleistocene, and a great many, in fact most, of the paleanthropic men remaining to us fall within the latter half of Pleistocene time. Below this level, and stretching backward into the mistier reaches of the lower Pleistocene, the researches of Raymond Dart, Robert Broom, J. T. Robinson, and others have revealed a curious series of anthropoids so close to the human border line that it remains a moot question whether they were already "tool users" in a very primitive way, or whether they are actually bipedal apes whose brains had not achieved even a low "human" level.

Numerous finds and accumulating information may settle these disputed points before long. Whether all of this rather variable assemblage now referred to as the Australopithecine man-apes is on the direct human line of ascent or not, it suggests the postulated earlier omnivorous ground phase of Wallace's twofold scheme of hominid evolution. The variability of the forms themselves unmistakably reminds one also of another aspect of Wallace's thought. In the tropics, he had theorized, perhaps in Africa, "we may trace back the gradually decreasing brain of former races, till we come to a time when the body also begins materially to differ. There we should reach the starting point of the human family. Before that period [man] had not enough mind to preserve his body from change, and would, therefore, have been subject to the same comparatively rapid modifications of form as other mammals." [72] Curiously enough, of all the ancestral primate relatives of man, these East African grassland apes, if apes they were, have come closest to filling those century-old speculations.

One asks inevitably, and asks again, what forces were at work, if indeed the human brain, as now seems likely, "exploded" so precipitously upon the world. Certainly competitive tribal struggle in the old Darwinian sense would seem to have little to do with man's pedomorphic nakedness and the other curious qualities that drew Wallace's attention long ago. This does not mean that we have to abandon natural selection as a principle, but it is obvious that we must seek selective factors of a sort that Darwin never envisaged, and which may be bound up with speech and social factors difficult to investigate paleontologically. As Watson has remarked, the most fascinating problems of human evolution may actually lie beyond the grasp of the paleontologist who must, of necessity, deal with the shapes of bone. It may be, as he says, that "those structures whose qualities can alone explain the meaning of man's evolution lie beyond his sight." [73] Even a great modern geneticist has confessed humbly: "The causes which have brought about the development of the human species can be only dimly discerned...." [74] H.S. Harrison once put the matter: "Man did very well before he was a man at all, and no one has given any reason why he ceased to be an ape." We are "trying to understand ... the way in which natural man became unnatural." [75]

Can it be, one wonders, as one surveys this century-long discussion, that both Darwin and Wallace had within their grasp the general outline of a theory which, without the necessary addition of any metaphysical elements, might have answered some of the questions which so constantly baffled them? With man, as Fiske remarked, one is started upon a new chapter in the history of the universe. It is as though nature had chosen to bypass all her previous experiments in the making of limbs, paddles, teeth, and fins save for one thing: to place a manipulative forelimb under the conscious control of the brain, to totally encephalize the hand. The brain and hand alone will now order the environment that once ordered them. Trees will be cut, fires will be started, flint will fly.

But, asked Wallace, how did it come? Darwin "has taken care to impress upon us that natural selection has no power to produce absolute perfection, no power to advance any being much beyond his fellow beings, but only just so much beyond them as to enable it to survive them in the struggle for existence." [76] The power of natural selection is thus limited, but man, even savage man, sings and dreams, contains within himself vast latent powers that, properly educated, measure worlds and atoms. These powers are not the product of internecine struggle. From whence did they come? A brain a little better than that of a gorilla would have sufficed for man.

Hidden in a few obscure sentences in the Descent Of Man is Darwin's answer, and it is a tremendous one, so far as his point of view and Wallace's are concerned. Yet in reality it is a sleepwalker's answer, the response of a man so deeply immersed in the thinking of his period that his response is like that of an oracle who, in a trance, speaks a prophetic truth but does not envision its consequences. "In many cases," wrote Darwin, "the continued development of a part, for instance of the beak of a bird, or of the teeth of a mammal, would not aid the species in gaining its food, or for any other object; but with man we can see no definite limit to the continued development of the brain and mental faculties, as far as advantage is concerned." [77]

In those words Darwin momentarily broke with his principle of relative or limited perfection because he had realized that the achievement of the reasoning brain swings open a possible door to perfection whose story is not told by the limited advantage of a butterfly's wing -- though the life of man may yet prove as airy and as insubstantial as that delicate insect. For an instant, for just a solitary, musing instant as he wrote, the mind that had conceived in youth the whole vast evil and the good of life perhaps heard far-off an opening door. But Darwin was old, and the moment passed. He composed no essay, he made no answer. Across the pages of the selfsame book march struggle and habit, the war of tribe with tribe.

He did not realize, nor did Wallace, without appeal to special intervention, realize that with the shift from the evolution of parts to the evolution of the brain the principle of relative perfection did not rule. Once the higher qualities begin to emerge, man in his loneliness may well have felt drawn to them as even a dog prefers the kinder, understanding hand. Selection, then, to a certain extent, may have come under the guidance of man's nobler nature, just as he unconsciously selected for temperament the kind of animals he wanted. In the words of F. R. Tennant, "The human mind once having attained in the course of evolution to ideation, social intercourse and language, is in a position to develop spontaneously, no longer controlled by mechanical selection (which is but rejection) but by its own interest and intrinsic potencies. From intelligence and emotional sensibility that are biologically useful it may proceed to disinterested science, to pure mathematics having no relation to the needs of life, to art, morality, and religion, no one of which products, rather than another, requires the Deus ex machina to cause its emergence." [78]

These remarks are not given to suggest that every aspect of the rise of the human brain, or the matter of how it came by the curious accelerated spurt which it shows at birth, is fully understood. Rather it is to reiterate that in the expanded cortex of man a new world has opened out. The precise instincts of the lower mammals have been replaced by a highly malleable and adaptive behavior controlled by the culture of the group.

This cultural phase of man, which has seemed to set him off so totally from other animals, has been recently re-examined by A. I. Hallowell, who comes to the conclusion that a false dichotomy has been erected by our tendency to regard existing man as the possessor of "culture," and the animal world, including our primate relatives, as totally lacking in such human traits. "The possession of culture," he writes, "has tended to become an all-or-none proposition."

By contrast he postulates what he terms a proto-cultural stage which might well have been reached early, "even before the development of speech." There may have been some slight degree of tool using, some learned behavior, but not the whole range of activities, including speech, which we now tend to regard as so uniquely human. Because Darwin and his associates pushed living apes too close to living men, a reaction set in which led anthropologists, even while rendering lip service to morphological evolution, to imply that culture is a whole with a "relatively constant categorical content." Culture and "man," whatever this latter word might mean in the cloudy borderlands of prehistory, had presumably appeared together. [79] Obviously such a clear-cut artificial distinction interposed a barrier between man and his remote forerunners which would have baffled Darwin and his associates.

Ironically enough, a good bit of the responsibility for this artificial barrier must be attributed to the Darwinian circle. They had been too hasty in their assumption that animals possessed rudimentary speech and that living natives echoed the higher primates in their vocabularies. They had confused culture with biological endowment as thoroughly, perhaps, as later anthropologists have tended to assume that what we call "culture" is a single emergent without rudimentary preliminaries which may even precede language. They had, with such notable and infrequent exceptions as Wallace, contributed, though often unintentionally, to racial prejudice.

Perhaps there is something appropriate, in the end, about the fact that Wallace was a searcher after birds of paradise and that he was a butterfly hunter among the islands of the Coral Sea. He loved beauty, and among the many rarities he came to cherish was the potential moral beauty of man. He found it among simple people and it never passed away from his heart.

_______________

Notes:

1. Anonymous, "The Origin of Intellect," Edinburgh Review, 1889, Vol. 170, p. 359.

2. Descent of Man, 2d revised ed., New York, 1874, pp. 30, 178. VAP, Vol. 2, p. 63. Also LLD, Vol. 2, p. 211.

3. Descent of Man, 2d ed., New York, 1874. p. 40.

4. Ibid., p. 37. See also LLD, Vol. 3, p. 90.

5. Ibid., pp. 46, 60.

6. Ibid., p. 56.

7. See, for example, Ibid., pp. 98-99.

8. Henry C. Chapman in his Evolution of Life (Philadelphia 1873) said that "the roots in the languages of the lowest races of mankind resemble the sounds made by monkeys" (pp. 172-73). Innumerable similar remarks exist in the literature of the period. "Even to this day," comments one writer as late as 1914, "there are said to be some low tribes In South America whose spoken language is so imperfect that they cannot converse in the dark." Science Progress, 1914, Vol. 8, p. 524.

9. My Life, New York, 1905, Vol. 1, p. 433.

10. LLD, Vol. 2, p. 95.

11. My Life, Vol. 1, pp. 354-55.

12. Descent of Man, 2d ed., New York, 1874, p. 9.

13. Ibid., p. 176.

14. Ibid., p. 59.

15. For more extended discussion of this subject the reader should consult R. I. Pocock, "The New Heresy of Man's Descent," Conquest, 1920, Vol. 1, pp. 151-57, and W. L. Straus, Jr., "The Riddle of Man's Ancestry," The Quarterly Review of Biology, 1949, Vol. 24, pp. 200-23.

16. New York edition of 1884, p. 22.

17. W. J. Sollas, "The Evolution of Man," Scientia, 1911, Vol. 9, p. 136.

18. O, 6th ed. Modem Library, New York, p. 152.

19. James Marchant, Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, New York, 1916, p. 347.

20. See Walter Smith, "Why Is the Human Ear Immobile?" popular Science Monthly, 1904, Vol. 65. p. 225.

21. H. C. Chapman, op. cit., p. 172.

22. Op. cit., p. 169.

23. Rudolph Virchow, Freedom of Science in the Modern State,London, 1878, pp. 58-61. Virchow himself, however, did not accept this.

24. Glyn Daniel, A Hundred Years of Archaeology, Duckworth, London, 1950, p. 97.

25. Ronald W. Hepburn, "George Hakewill: The Virility of Nature," Journal of the History of Ideas, 1955. Vol. 16. pp. 135-50. The whole earlier history of the subject has been excellently treated In Ernest Tuveson's Millennium and Utopia, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1949, and in Victor Harris's All Coherence Gone, University of Chicago Press, 1949. E. S. Carpenter has devoted attention to its nineteenth-century aspect in his paper "The Role of Archaeology in the 19th Century Controversy Between Developmentalism and Degeneration," Pennsylvania Archaeologist, 1950, Vol. 20, pp. 5-18.

26. Richard Whately, "On the Origin of Civilization," Miscellaneous Lecturer and Reviews, London, 1861, pp. 26-59. The paper dates originally to 1854.

27. Testimony of the Rocks, Edinburgh, 1869, pp. 229-30.

28. A. Grant, "Philosophy and Mr. Darwin," The Contemporary Review, 1871, Vol. 17, p. 281.

29. H. B. Tristram, "Recent Geographical and Historical Progress in Zoology," The Contemporary Review, 1866, Vol., p. 124.

30. For a contemporary analysis of some of the leading arguments and books see J. Hannah, "Primeval Man," The Contemporary Review, 1869, Vol. 2, pp. 161-77.

31. "Man In Creation," The Contemporary Review, 1868, Vol. 8, p. 555.

32. The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion and Morality, Chicago, 1883, p. 91.

33. Ibid., p. 90.

34. "Who Was Primitive Man?" Fortnightly Review, 1882, Vol. 38, pp. 308-9.

35. My Life, New York, 1905, Vol. 1, p. 368.

36. Ibid., p. 342.

37. "Modern Applications of the Doctrine of Natural Selection," Nature, 1873, Vol. 7, p. 277.

38. "The Malayan Archipelago," Macmillan's Magazine, 1869, Vol. 19. p. 533.

39. James Marchant, Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, New York, 1916, p. 335. I have been able to and a record of one paper of Mott's delivered before the Liverpool Philosophical Society on October 6, 1873. It Is entitled "On the Origin of Savage Life." St. George Mivart quotes extensively from it in his Lessons from Nature, New York, 1876, p. 148 ff.

40. A. R. Wallace, "The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the "Theory of Natural Selection,'" Anthropological Review, 1864, Vol. 2, pp. clviii-clxxxvii.

41. MLD, Vol. 2. pp. 31-32.

42. Ibid., pp. 35-36.

43. Op. cit., p. clxvii.

44. My Life, Vol. 1. p. 419.

45. See Stanley Garn, "Race and Evolution." American Anthropologist, 1957. Vol. 59. pp. 218-23 for a discussion of modern genetic views on race. Today, so far as racial characteristics go, man is seen as possibly more malleable than Wallace envisaged.

46. Anthropological Review, 1864, Vol. 2, p. clxix.

47. MLD, Vol. 1, p. 143. Modern students of genetic drift, quantum evolution, and similar subjects will realize that small populations need not Inhibit evolutionary change. but this fact was not grasped in the Darwinian period, which lacked our present knowledge of genetics.

48 O, pp. 172-73.

49."Geological Climates and the Origin of Species," Quarterly Review, 1869, Vol. 126, pp. 359-94. Other papers followed. Most of them can be found In the uniform edition of Wallace's works issued by the Macmillan Co. of London.

50. Darwinism, London, 1896, p. 458.

51. "Difficulties of Development as Applied to Man," Popular Science Monthly, 1876, Vol. 10, p. 65.

52. Natural Selection and Tropical Nature, London, 1895, p. 204. This particular paper, "Limits of Natural Selection in Man," was written in 1870.

53. Marchant, op. cit., p. 199.

54. LLD, Vol. 2, p. 211.

55. Anonymous, "Darwin on the Descent of Man," Edinburgh Review, 1871, Vol. 134, p. 204.

56. The idea was hailed by most of the leading thinkers of the period, including Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Chauncey Wright, James McCosh, Edward S. Morse, E. Ray Lankester and many others. In the words of John Fiske "it seemed to open up an entirely new world of speculation." (A Century of Science, Boston 1899 p. 104.)

57. See Gavin de Beer, Embyros and Ancestors, 2d rev. ed., Oxford University Press, 1951; also M. F. Ashley Montagu, "Time, Morphology, and Neoteny in the Evolution of Man," American Anthropologist, 1955, Vol. 57, pp. 13-27·

58. Tilly Edinger, "Objets et Resultats de la Paleoneurologie," Annales de Paleontologie, 1956, Vol. 42, p. 97.

59. LLD, Vol. 2, p. 8.

60. Later, In 1881, the work was republished under the title Problems of Creation (Chicago).

61. Op. cit., [in text above] p. 135.

62. Evolution and Dissolution of the Nervous System, London, 1888, p. 38.

63. The Wonderful Century, New York, 1898, p. 134.

64. MLD, Vol. 1, p. 244.

65. That is, in truly ancient deposits.

66. "Difficulties of Development as Applied to Man," Popular Science Monthly, 1876, Vol. 10, p. 65.

* Marchant, op. cit., p. 347.

67. For an account of the exposure of the hoax in 1953 the reader is referred to J. S. Weiner, The Piltdown Forgery, Oxford University Press, 1955.

68. W. P. Pycraft, "The Jaw of Piltdown Man," Science Progress, 1917, Vol. 65, p. 391.

69. D. M. S. Watson, Paleontology and the Evolution of Man, Oxford University Press, 1928, pp. 14-19. It should he said in justice to Dr. Watson that many other scholars found similar difficulties and made similar adjustments in dealing with the Piltdown material. His very complaints reveal an intuitive sense that something about the situation was abnormal. I merely use his work to illustrate a general trend of thought.

70. Op. cit., p. 5.

71. Cesare Emiliani, "Note on Absolute Chronology of Human Evolution," Science, 1956, Vol. 123, pp. 924-26.

72. Op. cit., 1864, p. clxviii.

73. Watson, op. cit., p. 27.

74. Theodosius Dobzhansky, The Biological Basis of Human Freedom, Columbia University Press, 1956, p. 9.

75. H. S. Harrison "Evolution In Material Culture," Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1930, p. 140.

76. A. R. Wallace, Natural Selection and Tropical Nature, London, 1895, p. 187.

77. Op. cit., p. 169. (Italics mine. L.E.)

79. A. I. Hallowell, "The Structural and Functional Dimensions of a Human Existence," The Quarterly Review of Biology, 1956, Vol. 31, pp. 88-101.
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Re: DARWIN'S CENTURY -- EVOLUTION AND THE MEN WHO DISCOVERED

Postby admin » Thu Jul 16, 2015 10:44 pm

Chapter XII: Conclusion

Life can only be understood backward but it must be lived forward.
-- Kierkegaard


I. Time: Cyclic and Historic

In the course of three centuries ideas, like the disintegrating face of Hutton's planet, evolve, erode, and change. Sometimes they are gone in a night without anyone's quite knowing what became of them, or why they had possessed momentarily a kind of demonic power. Again they may last for ages protruding, gaunt, bare, and uncompromising, from the soft sward of later beliefs. Sometimes, in the clouds that pass over the formless landscape of time, they will seem to shift and catch new lights, become transmuted into something other than what they were, grow dull, or glisten with a kind of sunset color reflected from the human mind itself. Of such a nature is that vast monument to human thinking which is now called evolution.

Something of its origins we have learned, a few of the many names that contributed to its substance have taken on a familiar appearance. The idea, the structure itself, however, looms ever vaster and more impenetrable. It is linked with the mysteries within the atom as it is also linked with that intangible, immaterial world of consciousness which no one has quite succeeded in identifying with the soft dust that flies up from a summer road. Evolution is an idea that has seemed to many to condemn man to the life of a beast and there are those who have ordered their days accordingly. Others have seen, in the long climb upward from the ooze, a law of progress, a reversal of the dour prophecies of an earlier Christianity which had viewed the human condition as one destined inevitably to worsen. The man of blood has had recourse to its arguments equally with the man of peace. In such circumstances we will do well to take a long second look at the history of this concept and at its moral implications.

It will be recalled that Adam Sedgwick spoke of the advent of man as "breaking in upon any supposition of zoological continuity -- and utterly unaccounted for by what we have any right to call the Laws of Nature." [1] This is a typical progressionist remark from the early part of the nineteenth century. Compare it with the blithe and perhaps irresponsible gaiety of Huxley, going off to address a group of working men with the remark, "By next Friday they will all be convinced that they are monkeys." Or consider, coming down to our modern day, John Baillie's more measured observation: "The mark of modem unbelieving man is that he has felt astonishingly much at home in his earthly surroundings." [2] Between the first of these observations and the last a world has come and gone. It remains to ask, however, whether between the defiant supernaturalism of Sedgwick and the complacency of modern scientifically oriented man there may not lie other territories, other mysteries as great as those that intrigued Darwin long ago. To search out those last regions one must survey Darwin's century with care.

II. The Pre-Darwinian Era

The first half of the nineteenth century may be roughly characterized as morphological in biology- -- he morphology being primarily derived from French sources -- though paralleled to a degree in England by the somewhat inarticulate but magnificent anatomist John Hunter (1728-93). Great emphasis came to be placed upon the anatomical unities and connections between divergent forms. The work begun by John Ray and Linnaeus was extended to the most obscure portions of the globe, and the accumulated knowledge upon the world's faunas and floras had become tremendous. Though unity of biological type between great groups of animals had become evident, it was viewed by most thinkers as an immaterial, divinely ordained connection. While Germany and France had taken the lead in comparative biology, England had momentarily surpassed the Continental scholars in the field of stratigraphical geology. It may be that this latter episode was partly a result of the rise of industrialism in a circumscribed island area. At any rate, there met and merged in early nineteenth-century England a unique religious conservatism stemming from the reaction to the French Revolution, a recognized succession of faunas in geological time, and a similarly recognizable morphological resemblance, but not identity, between the faunas.

Out of this mixture the natural theologians, such as Sedgwick and others of like views, erected the concept of progressionism which, though based upon natural science, is essentially a metaphysical system. "It can be shown," wrote Agassiz, who subscribed fully to this viewpoint, "that in the great plan of creation ... the very commencement, exhibits a certain tendency towards the end, betrays the issue toward which it is striving; and in the series of vertebrate animals, the constantly increasing similarity to man of the creatures that were successively called into existence, makes the final purpose obvious to ward which these successions are rising." [3] Progressionism is really a system of evolution without either bodily or geological continuity; it could be called, in fact, a theory of spiritual macro- utations. The rise of this romantic "evolutionism," so vigorously opposed by the Scientifically minded uniformitarians with predilections for observable, unchanging forces, led to the curious spectacle of scientific geology actually opposing the idea of organic change. On the other hand, progressionism was regarded approvingly by Richard Owen, Louis Agassiz, and others who came to detest the Darwinian viewpoint The uniformitarian, so long as he had no natural explanation for the changes in life patterns, was dangerously exposed, philosophically, if he admitted mysterious forces at work in life which he refused to recognize when he rejected catastrophist geology.

Living nature, in progressionist hands, was the very opposite of that calm, undeviating world machine envisaged by Hutton as the quintessence of Newtonian world order. To admit change and emergence into the world in the miraculous fashion of progressionism [4] destroyed the reign of scientific law. Paleontology, from the time in 1801 when Cuvier announced to the world his discovery of twenty- three species of animals no longer in existence, offered just that threat to the scientific geologist. Without a natural explanation for change the dragons in the rocks were in reality intellectual dragons. They threatened to impose upon the rational Huttonian world order the unpredictable interposition of occult powers. Cuvier could indeed have been regarded in some quarters as justly deserving his satanic charnel house title and his impish halo of Pterodactyls.

Another aspect of thought developing slowly throughout the first part of the century has to do with the nature of time, We have seen that the growing knowledge of geology, even in the case of the catastrophists, had slowly strengthened the willingness of the public to accept a greater antiquity for the earth. In the case of Lyell and his followers time still has a sense of the illimitable about it. It is cyclical and in some degree repetitive. One can see the attraction of this old view in Lyell's waverings and advocacy of non-progressionism. Time of this character may be monotonous but it is safe, sane, and familiar. Throughout eternity the same waters hurry to the sea, the same basic animal forms expand or contract their habitat. All things pass and come again. The Newtonian world view, the eternal and balanced machine of the heavens, is repeated upon earth. Even life, crowded and struggling, remains in a dynamic, oscillating balance as much as perturbed planetary orbits correct themselves without supernatural interference. "Carnivorous animals," once remarked John Hunter, "are only to be considered the correctors of quantity. There is an equilibrium kept up among the animals by themselves." The struggle for existence he regarded as a "natural government." [5]

It should be noted that almost every eighteenth-century attempt to examine the struggle for existence ends upon this note of "equilibrium," "pruning," "policing," "natural government." Even Malthus's thesis is primarily a warning that man, too, cannot escape the limitation of numbers; perpetual progress is not possible, The observation of the creative aspect of this struggle waited upon the recognition of several interrelated clues. These clues are all really contained in one single basic proposition: historic as opposed to cyclic time. In the end it was not to be so much a demand for more time, as between catastrophists and uniformitarians, that introduced the true importance of the struggle for existence, but rather the unique character of the time which was beginning to emerge from astronomical and paleontological studies. It was time of enormous dimensions, true; in this men echoed the Greco-Roman past. For the first time, however, the historic ever-changing, irreversible, on-flowing continuum of events was being linked to galaxies and suns and worlds.

Laplace had been content, toward the end of the eighteenth century, to propose his nebular hypothesis as to how the planets might have been formed. That this in its turn suggested long lapses of astronomical time there can be no doubt [6] Still, Laplace did not ask of the heavens the questions the nineteenth century was to ask; he did not debate the secular cooling of the earth or the rate at which the sun was consuming its own substance. In a way, by propounding a theory of the earth's origin, he was considering an historical event, but it was a remote and starry speculation.

In Darwin's century, however, the unique and unreturning nature of the past began early to evince itself. The nature of energy began to be better grasped, with a consequent recognition of the importance of the second law of thermodynamics and the "heat death" which threatened potentially to chill the entire planetary system. In the rocks lay the evidences of a strange and unreturning fauna, rescued from oblivion by the arts of Cuvier. The gardens and paddocks of kings and nobles were revealing what curious, never-before-seen varieties, historic shapes in other words, could be tempted from the darkness of non-being by the selective hand of the breeder. Without anyone's being able to say just why, the struggle for existence which people had been examining for a century or more was suddenly seen by a few people almost simultaneously to be a creative mechanism. Basically -- and this reached great intensity after Darwin -- man was adjusting himself, not just to time in unlimited quantities, but rather to complete historicity, to the emergence of the endlessly new. His philosophy was to include, henceforth, cosmic as well as organic novelty. It is not enough to say that man had come into possession of time, or even of eternity. These he had possessed before in other cultures, but never with this particular conception of on-goingness. To see and to re-create the past, to observe how it has come to mold the present, one must possess the knowledge that all things are new under the sun and that they are flowing in the direction of time's arrow never to return upon their course-that time is noncyclic, unreturning, and creative.

Instead of the "natural government" of the eighteenth century, the old principle of plenitude, of God's infinite creativeness, now led directly to a war of nature in which, through time, living creatures are jostled in or out of ex- istence, expand or contract at one another's expense. The infinite creativeness remained as given, but the carefully balanced equilibrium was the illusion of an unhistorical outlook. The dreadful calculation of Malthus -- that life tended to increase in geometric ratio against resources which at best could only be expanded on an arithmetic basis -- cast a frightening shadow over public optimism. In spite of Lyell's transitional treatment of the struggle for existence (that he saw ecological contraction and expansion, we know), it may well be that the full import of the new conception demanded time for its complete import to sink home. As I have previously emphasized, it was possible-in fact is in large measure demonstrable -- that Darwin and Wallace derived their applications of the Malthusian principle from Lyell, yet had recourse to Malthus as their inspiration. The paper in which Wallace first communicated his discovery bears, interestingly enough, the title "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type." In Lyell's Principles of Geology occurs the following, directed toward the French evolutionists: "... let a sufficient number of centuries elapse, to allow of important revolutions in climate, physical geography, and other circumstances, and the characters say they, of the descendants of common parents may deviate indefinitely from their original type." [7]

Wallace's title approximates so closely the italicized portion of Lyell's sentence that we may reasonably suspect it was Lyell he was primarily consulting as he worked upon his paper. Yet by his own testimony it was Malthus that brought the matter to his mind. One is thus inclined to observe that something about the Malthusian mathematical approach exercised an appeal to the first discoverers of natural selection comparable to the effect it had when the same idea was given to the public. [8] Irrespective of whether their major inspiration came from Malthus or from Lyell, they seem to have been impelled toward the former as the most powerful source of authority. With his acceptance of the phrase "to depart indefinitely; Wallace may be said, in 1858, to have epitomized the new time and the new world that Darwin and he were to leave as their heritage to the next century. Time was no longer the medium through which oscillated a self-adjusting and eternal world machine under a "natural government." It was instead a vast chaotic Amazon pouring through unimaginable wildernesses its burden of "houses and bones and gardens, cooks and clocks."

Just to make the change more emphatic, in that same year of 1859 the spectroscope was perfected. Even as the great scientific voyages had opened up the seas and continents, the long inviolable Empyrean heavens were now to be subjected to analysis. Until that instrument had been invented, astronomers might calculate from point to point the immeasurable distances of space, but the shining objects of their attention could be regarded only by dubious inference as being composed of the same matter as the earth. Ever since Newton's discovery of 1675 that the light of the sun is actually composed of a combination of colored rays which can be bent out of their course and separated by a lens, the solar spectrum, in principle, had been known. About 1815 Fraunhofer at Munich had succeeded in greatly improving the observational apparatus for examining the dark lines in the spectrum. The significance of Fraunhofer's lines was not cleared up until 1859 when Gustav Kirchhoff (1824-87) succeeded in establishing their relationship to heated metals here upon earth. Now, for the first time, it was possible to learn the composition of the outer universe, to dip a ladle into the roaring furnace of the sun and stars. Astrophysics had become a reality.

"All these marvellous and unexpected phenomena which have flashed, as it were, into the human cognizance within the last seven or eight years," writes a contemporary observer, "go far to establish the truth of Laplace's hypothesis, that the whole visible material universe is an evolution of things, arising from the condensation of vast tracts of gaseous or vaporous matter scattered through the regions of space." [9] By 1863 it had been pretty well established through this new "sidereal chemistry" that the matter of the entire visible universe was largely identical with the chemical elements known from our own solar system. In the fury of plutonic fires and wandering gases man began to seek the possibility of piercing "that hitherto impenetrable veil which seems to separate what we term inorganic from what we term organic and vital." [10] That the public was vastly interested can be shown by the number of popular articles devoted to the spectroscope and to cosmic evolution. For a time the new cosmology rivaled the Darwinian controversy in interest, and there can be no doubt that it promoted and stimulated the willingness to accept Darwin. Stars and men and worlds emerged out of the interstellar vapor, flared briefly, and passed again into darkness. If the eternal stars transformed themselves, why should one quibble over the powers contained in a meadow mouse, or an ape who forgot to go back to his tree? Time was a different thing now. It was not even the old stable eternity of the stoics. It was, instead, irreversible and unreturning. As the life records in the rocks revealed, it was a loneliness, an on-going. Through the ruins of vanished eras one could trace the silver thread of genetic continuity winding on toward the always looming and unknown future.

III. The Struggle of the Parts

With the fall of progressionism the sure and predetermined character of the human adventure appeared to melt away. The progressionist had seen the earlier stages of earth life prophetically -- a great prologue whose sole purpose was to introduce man upon the scene, after which there would be no further alterations of life. [11] With the rise of natural selection and the philosophy of actual physical descent with modification, man becomes, along with all the other forms of life, "the child of chance." "The gist of Darwin's theory," wrote Ernst Haeckel, "is this simple idea: that the Struggle for Existence in Nature evolves new Species without design just as the Will of Man produces new Varieties in Cultivation with design." [12] All notion of preconceived Platonic ideal forms has vanished from this system. The fixed taxonomy of life is an illusion born of our limited experience. In reality every living thing is writhing from one shape into another in the way that we might witness the growth of a tropical forest in a speeded-up motion picture. Our long-assumed stability is only the illusion produced by the tempo at which we live.

So complete was the triumph of the new philosophy that the struggle for existence, the "war of nature," was projected into the growth of the organism itself. Darwin's shadow dominates, in this respect, the rest of the century. Moreover, it provides an apt illustration of the way in which a successful theory may be carried to excess. The co-operative aspects of bodily organization, the vast intricacy of hormonic interplay, of cellular chemistry, remained to a considerable degree uninvestigated. Instead, "struggle" was the leading motif of the day. "It is a probable hypothesis," said Huxley in 1869, "that what the world is to organisms in general each organism is to the molecules of which it is composed. Multitudes of these, having diverse tendencies, are competing with one another for opportunity to exist and multiply; and the organism, as a whole, is as much the product of the molecules which are victorious as the Fauna, or Flora of a country is the product of the victorious organic beings in it." [13]

Darwin commented, with what one cannot help suspecting was a private grin, "about natural selection amongst the molecules." He expressed admiration for Huxley's boldness -- always easy to do -- and then proceeded to add cautiously, "I cannot quite follow you." [14] The rage persisted, however. Wilhelm Roux, the distinguished German embryologist, developed a theory of internal struggle for nourishment between the parts of an organism. [15] Weismann went even further and extended natural selection to the smallest particles of the germ plasm. One could say in a somewhat figurative fashion that in a fertilized cell the very ancestors were struggling as to which might emerge once more into the light! "Each animal and plant," pondered Darwin, "may be compared to a bed of mould full of seeds, most of which soon germinate, some lie for a period dormant, whilst others perish." [16]

It is not necessary to pursue this subject at length. It fascinated good men, produced some able research in embryology, and faded with the rise of a better understanding of the complexities of cell mechanics. It does, nevertheless, express something about the period. So grim was the struggle for existence conceived to be that a single improved bristle, an inch longer horn was thought of as individually decisive in survival. Part of this mistaken emphasis lay in the attention paid to somatic variations which are now known to be fluctuating and nonheritable.

There can be no doubt that this utilitarian emphasis was in some degree misplaced. It diverted attention from other more imponderable mysteries, minimized the role of co-operation in animal life and, in its more absurd manifestations, left reason to wonder why, if the organism was nothing but a collection of struggling particles, it had ever managed to collect itself into a body in the first place. As we have observed in an earlier chapter, neither Darwin nor his immediate followers seem to have had any particular feeling for the internal stability and harmony of the organism. Their success with the concept of struggle in the exterior environment had led them to see everything through this set of spectacles. A whole generation of neo-Darwinians persisted in this point of view. [17]

IV. Evolution and Human Culture

Coincident with the development of the evolutionary philosophy has been the rise of anthropology as a science. Although of late years there has been a tendency for social anthropology to pursue its tasks without reference to the field of biology, this specialization is not entirely desirable without at least some knowledge of the relationship of these two subjects in the past. We are in a position to see, after our lengthy survey of the history of biological evolution, that almost every mistake and folly which was perpetrated in the creation of a satisfactory theory of organic evolution was duplicated or had its analogue in the social field. On the other hand, steps which were taken to extricate biological theory from just such difficulties have, in certain instances, been utilized with equal success in anthropology.

In reality biological and anthropological thinking have influenced each other and have been part of the same intellectual climate for a long period of time. It has been man's curiosity about himself, extended to the origins of the world around him, that has led to the discovery of the evolutionary process. Although the Christian world had tended to take the Bible literally on Creation as a single act by divine Bat, it had, at the same time, never completely divorced itself from the ancient idea that simpler organisms are constantly arising by spontaneous generation. At the same time it had inherited from the Greek world of Aristotle a kind of taxonomic ladder, a sort of frozen evolution in the shape of the Scale of Being. [18] Since, before the rise of modem science, all three of these somewhat incompatible doctrines had persisted uncritically in the Western mind, the seeds of speculation lay ready to hand. One can note, for example, that Lamarck's evolution consists really in the utilization of spontaneous generation along with the unfreezing of the Scale of Being. When he came to man he made use of a widely held eighteenth-century social theory; namely, that man in a state of nature was in no way distinct from the existing apes; that we could see in the orang outang of the voyagers a member of our own species without language or other social proclivities, in short, a living "cultural" as well as physical fossil. Man's history, the French philosophes argued, is characterized by the ability to unfold the higher mental attributes in a state of society, to attain wisdom by degrees. He is capable of perfectibilite, of progress. [19] That there was a submerged element of biological thinking in some of the writing upon purely social progress can be judged from Condorcet's observation that "Organic perfectibility or deterioration amongst the various strains in the vegetable and animal kingdom can be regarded as one of the general laws of nature. This law also applies to the human race." [20]

It has sometimes been ventured that it was the growth and popularization of the idea of social progress that led to the development of the idea of evolution. Without wishing to ignore this influence it can still be observed that both points of view seem to have arisen together, and that from the first, particularly in France, there is a considerable interplay of ideas between those whose major thinking lay in one field or the other. In any case only the extension of the earth's antiquity and increased knowledge of the paleontological past, with its horde of vanished animals, could remove a certain casualness from the earliest expression of evolutionary ideas. The conception only becomes important when the full depth and marvelous organic diversity of life become known. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the unilinear scale of nature, as we have earlier observed, placed man at the head of the animal kingdom. Beneath him there descended a series of grades or steps to the lowest infusoria. This chain was regarded as a single unbroken stair. The existence of this idea led to conceptions of various racial groups as occupying positions on this ladder intermediate between Western Caucasian man and the great apes. The social thinkers, like Condorcet, tended to think of barbarians as educable; in fact, there were those who, right down into the nineteenth century, thought it might be possible to teach the orang to speak. As slavery and imperialism extended, however, the notion of existing races as lying fixed, biologically, upon levels inferior to Western man persisted, and was in some cases extended as a convenient rationalization. Cultural levels were often confused with biological potentiality. So powerful was the influence of the idea of the living scale of life that surviving human "links" were still being sought for in the nineteenth century.

In 1816 Cuvier broke with the conception of a single unilinear scale of life. He introduced in its place four great animal groups whose anatomical structure he regarded as impossible to correlate into a single ascending system of taxonomy, whether in terms of abstract unity of plan or in evolutionary terms. Karl von Baer (1792-1876) approached the problem through comparative embryology and demonstrated a little later that the egg of each of these separate groups undergoes a separate type of development showing no relationship to the developmental stages of the others. Neither Baer nor Cuvier was an evolutionist, but they were contributing heavily to the final triumph of the evolutionist cause. They were breaking away from a unilineal conception of organic relationship and enabling later workers to see the evolution of the Mollusca, for example, as being a separate branch of the tree of life related only in the most distant fashion, if at all, to the Vertebrates. They were not in the scale leading to man. The garden snail wandering in its little trail of slime over a leaf was not an ancestral vertebrate. Instead, it was following its own branching road of developments.

It is at just this point that we can observe an interesting analogy between the morphological revolution in biology and the later reaction toward unilinear schemes of cultural development which took place in the twentieth century. Just as the early Darwinians had to see man's relationship to living apes as closer than it was, so the nineteenth-century social evolutionists had shown a tendency to take the varied nonliterate cultures of modem primitives and arrange them in a sort of phylogenetic sequence leading to advanced Western culture. There was little attempt to examine the actual functioning of these communities. They were seen primarily much as the great apes appeared to the biologists: living ancestral social forms, surviving into the present.

Just as it had proved necessary for biologists to break away from the idea that existing apes are precisely similar to our Tertiary forerunners; just as it had been necessary to cease projecting upon unfamiliar racial types the features of existing gorillas and chimpanzees, so, similarly, it was necessary to break out of a particular habit of social thinking. Like the impact of Cuvier's reassessment of biological patterns in 1816, the questions raised by Westermarck in 1891 over the "origin" of given social institutions in terms of unilineal "advance" caused a mild flurry in English social anthropology. It began to be clear, and to be emphasized in twentieth-century anthropology, that "every culture in the world has had its own unique history and we can not therefore say that any culture observable in the present day world is an earlier form of any other." [21] Cultures contemporaneous in time have, like men, monkeys and apes, their own unique historical pathways. To recognize this fact is not to deny that men have a genuine morphological kinship to apes, nor that small isolated societies may not throw some general light upon human psychology under such conditions. This is a far cry, however, from the more rigid and ethnocentric extrapolations indulged in by both biologists and anthropologists in the Victorian past.

There is still another interesting analogy between theoretical developments in the biological world and events in anthropology. It will be recalled that I have touched upon the subject of Darwin's primary interest: the modification of living forms under the selective influence of the environment I have been at some pains to point out that Darwin, by the very nature of his interests, was a student of the individual characteristics of animals and plants. He is concerned essentially with differences and their inheritance, with all that is unfixed, shifting, and subject to change. Magnificent as his grasp of this aspect of biology is, it is counterbalanced by a curious lack of interest in the nature of the organism itself. Perhaps this partly explains his indifference to his forerunners and their abstract ideas. Occasionally, when he is confronted by the problem of explaining a variation which demands simultaneous alterations in other parts in order to be successful, he faintly echoes Cuvier by referring to a "mysterious law of correlation."

It is obvious, however, that Darwin is uncomfortable among these inner mysteries of the body and does not, of his own volition, enjoy pursuing them. We have already noted the tendency of some of his followers to attempt to project the war of nature directly into the body, to make the method which had explained so much on the "outside" account for the organization within. Pursued to its reductio ad absurdum every living creature would simply be reduced to a sack of struggling molecules in some manner creating order out of individual chaos. One may suspect that having committed himself to a principle of fortuity In the emergence and evolution of life, he was made uncomfortable by temperament when issues implying bodily organization and co-ordinated behavior beyond the range of his theory were brought to his attention.

He was far too Intelligent to ignore them completely, but, as in the "mysterious law of correlation," he had a way of relegating such subjects to a brief phrase, or paragraph, and hastily returning to his favorite subject. It is thus very difficult to discover what he really thought on the subject of biological organization. It is quite conceivable that he thought very little about it, that he took the body "as given," and proceeded from there. Darwin had an excellent sense for the sort of investigations which offered the possibility of solution with the means at his command. There is no use blaming him for a shrewd empirical good sense in evading what were then problems insoluble or likely to prove metaphysical and abstract. Nevertheless, it is difficult to find in Darwin any really deep recognition of the life of the organism as a functioning whole which must be co-ordinated interiorly before it can function exteriorly. He was, as we have said, a separatist, a student of parts and their changes. He looked upon the organism as a cloud form altering under the winds of chance and it was the permutations and transmutations of its substance that interested him. The inner nature of the cloud, its stability as a cloud, even as it was drawn out, flattened, or compressed by the forces of time and circumstance, moved him but little.

It is intriguing to find Huxley, on the other hand, fascinated by the stability of the great classes just before he surrendered to the Darwinian hypothesis.

"Not only are all animals existing in the present creation organized according to one of these five plans; but paleontology tends to show that in the myriad of past ages of which the earth's crust contains the records, no other plan of animal life made its appearance on our planet. A marvellous fact and one which seems to present no small obstacle in the way of the notion of the possibility of fortuitous development of animal life." [22]

Even later, in 1862, he expressed wonder "not that the changes of life ... have been so great, but that they have been so small." [28] One has the feeling with some of this early writing of Huxley's that his interests were rather different from Darwin's, and that his later conversion to the latter's theory was more of a change of sides than any marked change in the store of facts he had available. He was interested, it is apparent, in the stability of form, in what kept the great basic plans of organization so steadfast throughout whole eras and epochs. Later his long warfare on behalf of Darwin drew him aside from this quite justifiable field of speculation.

In the domain of anthropology we may observe once more that after a period of pursuing the geographical diffusion of cultural traits and complexes over wide areas, after a time of conceiving cultures as things of "shreds and patches" made up of miscellaneous assemblages of traits derived from many sources, it began to become apparent that whatever the original derivation of these traits, they had been taken into a functioning society and reshaped by inner organizing forces. Just as Darwin had been partitive so these earlier studies in the social field had, to a considerable degree, concerned themselves with the picked bones of institutions and beliefs. The inner consistency, living society, had escaped attention. It was the day of the purely descriptive ethnographer just as, in post-Darwinian biology, several decades were consumed in the descriptive embroidery of evolution. It is not my intention to decry the value of these studies; it is merely to remark that in the end they were found, both in biology and social anthropology, to be inadequate to the problems presented.

It was then, in the words of Ruth Benedict, that cultures began to loom like individual personalities "cast large upon the screen, given gigantic features and a long time span." To list or discuss the various views and contributions to this subject of such pioneers as Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Mead, Hallowell, Kluckhohn, and numerous others would go beyond the limitations of this book. What I wish to indicate here is simply that the holistic, organismic approach which finally emerged in biology when the intricacy of inner co- ordination and adjustment began to be realized has, once more, its analogue in the social field.

Like organisms, societies ingest or reject materials which come to them. Often, like organisms, what is ingested is reworked in such a manner that when it reappears as a part of the social body it has been molded to fit a purpose other than what was envisaged in another time and place where the trait arose. Sometimes the psychological set or bent of a given society will long outlast its political independence or even its material technology. There is an inner cohesiveness which is a product of the social mind, just as in the body the persistence of a physical trait or an instinct is part of the co-ordinated behavior of an organism. With the rise of the human brain, however, and the emergence of societies in which social tradition constitutes a new form of heredity, another world is opening up for man -- a world he has possessed for only a few seconds in terms of the geological clock. It is important that his new powers and limitations should be properly assessed because only so can hope be entertained for his future. It must be remembered that in geological terms we are living perhaps at the very dawn of complex human society and this is most unfortunate because man, in coming to understand his genetic history, continues to look toward the past. This is the burden which science, and particularly evolutionary biology, has placed upon man's shoulders even as it has tried to free him from the shackles of superstition. Man is, in short, in danger of acquiring a feeling of inferiority about his past. It provides him with rationalizations for things undone and dreams defeated.

How did this situation come about? "'That man is an animal is the great and special discovery of natural science in our generation; reported a contemporary of Darwin. [24] In that remark is epitomized the whole Darwinian concentration upon the past. It is natural, it is normal, it is the reaction to be expected of a world discovering the historic continuity of life for the first time. It is, however, a literal fixation upon the past. It accounts for our too great feeling of "at homeness" in a world where man, ever eager to transcend himself, should have other aspirations by reason of 'his very nature.

He has been convinced of his rise from a late Tertiary anthropoid stock. Through neurological and psychological research he is conscious that the human brain is an imperfect instrument built up through long geological periods. Some of its levels of operation are more primitive and archaic than others. Our heads, modern man has learned, may contain weird and irrational shadows out of the subhuman past-shadows that under stress can sometimes elongate and fall darkly across the threshold of our rational lives. Man has lost the faith of the eighteenth century in the enlightening power of pure reason, for he has come to know that he is not a consistently reasoning animal. We have frightened ourselves with our own black nature and instead of thinking "We are men now, not beasts, and must live like men; we have eyed each other with wary suspicion and whispered in our hearts, "We will trust no one. Man is evil. Man is an animal. He has come from the dark wood and the caves."

As Huxley said, it is easy to convince men that they are monkeys. We all know this in our hearts. The real effort lies in convincing us that we are men. Yet somewhere in the past a group of apes -- gross, brutal, violent-tempered, with a paucity of words -- started to act like men, and now they are men, but not far enough, not nearly far enough. There may be an animal limit within us but Darwin established no such limit. It is complacent to settle for material progress in machines while we stifle the spiritual aspirations for the "kingdom within" that all the world's great moral teachers have sought to instill into their followers.

It was natural enough, in the eagerness to communicate a great scientific truth, that Darwin's followers, more dogmatically than Darwin, told and retold the tale of the past or tried to press across the barrier that still lay between cosmic and organic evolution. Haeckel, in a statement of 1877, contended that "the cell consists of matter called protoplasm, composed chiefly of carbon, with an admixture of hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur. These component parts, properly united, produce the soul and body of the animated world, and suitably nursed become man. With this single argument the mystery of the universe is explained, the Deity annulled and a new era of infinite knowledge ushered in." [25] This, it can readily be observed, is a very large order indeed.

No reasonable scientist today would assume, even if he succeeded in creating simple life in a test tube, that the mystery of the universe was explained thereby. Haeckel's remark was dictated by anti-theological bias and a desire to settle man into the kind of "natural" world in which he now finds himself. As a recent student of evolution, the naturalist W. H. Dowdeswell, has remarked, "Studies centered exclusively on the past tend inevitably to obscure the present and future, thus fostering the idea that evolution has come to a comparative standstill at the present time or is proceeding too slowly to be detected." [28] From the moral and ethical standpoint, unless balanced by some consideration of the emergent aspects of the human psyche, these studies can lead in unenlightened hands to a certain complacent acquiescence in everything but the desire for more and more material progress in goods, com forts, and sensual enjoyment.

Evolution, if it has taught us anything, has taught us that life is infinitely creative. Whether one accepts Henri Bergson's view of the process or not, one of the profoundest remarks he ever made was the statement that "the role of life is to insert some indetermination into matter." An advanced brain capable of multiple choices is represented on this planet only by man. He is a "reservoir of indetermination" containing infinite possibilities of good and evil. He is nature's greatest attempt to escape the blind subservience of the lower world to instinct and those evolutionary forces which, in all other forms of life, channel its various manifestations into constricted nooks and crannies of the environment. Wallace saw, and saw correctly, that with the rise of man the evolution of parts was to a marked degree outmoded, that mind was now the arbiter of human destiny.

The Darwinians, however, were essentially biologists. They were accustomed to dealing with the lower animals, with instincts, with inherited habit, with the study of organisms responding to change rather than the observation of creatures controlling their own environment. They tended to confuse cultural behavior with the inherited behavior with which they were far more familiar. They could speak seriously of other races seeming "less human than our dogs and horses," but about the social attitudes which led to these revelatory statements they were remarkably unperceptive. The Mendelian developments of the early twentieth century intensified a severe trend toward a delimitation of human psychology in terms of instinct. [27] Much of what we would call acquired behavior patterns were labeled as inherited instincts by William James, Thorndike, and others. The triumphs of biology were influencing other fields in a manner resembling the triumphs of atomic physics today. Selfishness, acquisitiveness, opposition to women's rights were all at one time or another justified on the basis of instinct, of "human nature." To seek for the amelioration or removal of social ills such as war was to "oppose instinct." And to oppose instinct was, of course, to interfere with the evolutionary process and the inscrutable selective wisdom contained in the struggle for existence.

In this attitude, in this unwillingness to interfere with "primeval nature," it is possible to perceive the greatest persistent blind spot in the thinking of the nineteenth century. Darwin himself is not guiltless in this respect, though there is no reason to blame him for the grosser philosophical sins of his followers. In making out his case for natural selection, and the fortuitous character of evolution as opposed to the metaphysical beliefs of the progressionists, Darwin incorporated into the Origin of Species a powerful expression of the utilitarian philosophy of his time. His emphasis lay to a very considerable degree upon selfish motivation, although he admitted that social animals would perpetuate adaptations which benefited the community. On the whole, however, he devoted little attention to the co-operative tendencies in life which later drew the attention of Prince Kropotkin. [28] It was, in actuality, part of that same curious indifference he showed to the co-operation manifested within the body itself. Yet this body we inhabit is composed of millions of selflessly toiling and co-operating cells. Cells have joined to individual cells in the long ages of evolutionary advance, have even sacrificed themselves to build that vaster individuality of which they can have no knowledge. The cell itself is, in turn, a laboratory where chemical processes are being carried on in an amazingly co-ordinated fashion. One generation, as Bergson somewhere remarks, bends lovingly over the cradle of the next. All of these thing;, imply other aspects of life than those to which the Darwinians devoted the greater part of their attention. Professor W. C. Allee expressed the more modern viewpoint succinctly when he said, not long ago.

"The subsocial and social life of animals shows two major tendencies: one toward aggressiveness, which is best developed in man and his fellow vertebrates; the other toward unconscious, and in higher animals, toward conscious cooperation. With various associates I have long experimented upon both tendencies. Of these, the drive toward cooperation ... is the more elusive and the more important." [29]

V. The Role of Indeterminism

The blind spot we have dwelt upon in Darwinian thinking is not confined to a confused weighing of the relative aspects of co-operation and struggle in the long history of life. There is another phase of evolutionary thought which it is of the utmost importance to clarify. We have spoken of the brain of man as a sort of organ of indetermination. We have seen through Wallace its ability to escape from mechanical specialization, its creation of a freedom unknown to any other creature on the planet. Ironically enough, that freedom, that power of choice on the part of man, represents in a curious way the belated triumph of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck. [30]

Here at last volition has taken its place in the world of nature. It was not perhaps quite the place these evolutionists had foreseen, but in the end its part in the cultural drama of man could not be gainsaid by their scientific successors. The mind of man, by indetermination, by the power of choice and cultural communication, by the great powers of thought, is on the verge of escape from the blind control of that deterministic world with which the Darwinists had unconsciously shackled man. The inborn characteristics laid upon him by the biological extremists have crumbled away. Man is many things -- he is protean, elusive, capable of great good and appalling evil. He is what he is -- a reservoir of indeterminism. He represents the genuine triumph of volition, life's near evasion of the forces that have molded it. In the West of our day only one anachronistic force threatens man with the ruin of that hope. It is his confusion of the word "progress" with the mechanical extensions which represent his triumph over the primeval wilderness of biological selection. This confusion represents, in away, a reversion. It is a failure to see that the triumph of the machine without an accompanying inner triumph represents an atavistic return to the competition and extermination represented in the old biological evolution of "parts." In the case of man the struggle is, of course, veiled and projected into his machines, but the enormous wealth now poured by modem governments into the development of implements of war reveals a kind of leviathan echo from the Age of Dinosaurs. Nor is this attitude confined to the exigencies of defense. It persists in the notion that something called gracious living is solely associated with high-powered automobiles and the social amenities available in the very best clubs. It is the twentieth-century version of the Victorian idea that men of simple cultures are "moral fossils."

A few years ago, in a desert and out-of-the-way region of Mexico, the writer and a companion wandered lost and exhausted into the camp of a Mexican peon. This man, whose wife and newborn child were sheltered in a little hovel of sticks into which one could only creep on hands and knees, supplied our needs graciously. To our amazement he gently refused any payment, and walked with us to the edge of his barren lands in order to set us on the right path. There was a dignified simplicity about this man and his wife, in their little nest of sticks, that was a total antithesis to gracious living in the great land to the north. It demanded no mechanical extensions, no stewards with shining trays. We had drunk from a common vessel. We had bowed and spoken as graciously as on the steps of a great house. I had looked into his eyes and seen there that transcendence of self is not to be sought in the outer world or in mechanical extensions. These are merely another version of specialized evolution. They can be used for human benefit if one recognizes them for what they are, but they must never be confused with that other interior kingdom in which man is forever free to be better than what he knows himself to be. It is there that the progress of which he dreams is at last to be found. It is the thing that his great moral teachers have been telling him since man was man. This is his true world; the other, the mechanical world which tickles his fancy, may be useful to good men but it is not in itself good. It takes its color from the minds behind it and this man has not learned. When he does so he will have achieved his final escape from the world which Darwin saw and pictured.

One last thing, however, should be said of Charles Darwin, the man who saw the wrinkled hide of a disintegrating planet, glyptodonts and men, all equally flowing down the direction of time's arrow: he was a master artist and he entered sympathetically into life. As a young man somewhere in the high-starred Andean night, or perhaps drinking alone at an island spring where wild birds who had never learned to fear man came down upon his shoulder, Charles Darwin saw a vision. It was one of the most tremendous insights a living being ever had. It combined the awful roar of Hutton's Scottish brook with a glimpse of Smith's frail ladder dangling into the abyss of vanished eras. None of his forerunners has left us such a message; none saw, in a similar manner, the whole vista of life with quite such sweeping vision. None, it may be added, spoke with the pity which infuses these lines: "If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow brethren in pain, disease, suffering and famine -- our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements -- they may partake of our origin in one common ancestor -- we may be all melted together." [31]

Darwin was twenty-eight when he jotted down this paragraph in his notebook. If he had never conceived of natural selection, if he had never written the Origin, it would still stand as a statement of almost clairvoyant perception. There are very few youths today who will pause, coming from a biology class, to finger a yellow flower or poke in friendly fashion at a sunning turtle on the edge of the campus pond, and who are capable of saying to themselves, "We are all one -- all melted together." It is for this, as much as for the difficult, concise reasoning of the Origin, that Darwin's shadow will run a long way forward into the future. It is his heritage from the parson- naturalists of England.

_______________

Notes:

1. Adam Sedgwick, A Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge, 5th ed., London, 1850, p. xlv. Also Proceedings of the Geological Society of London, 1831, Vol. 1, p. 305.

2. Invitation to Pilgrimage, Oxford University Press, 1942 , p. 94.

3. Louis Agassiz, "A Period in the History of Our Planet," Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, 1843, Vol. 35, p. 5.

4. Care should be taken by the reader who consults the primary documents of this period to distinguish between true "progressionism" and the phrase "progressive-development theory," which is occasionally applied to genuine evolution, particularly the Lamarckian variety.

5. Essays and Observations, London, 1861, Vol. 1, pp. 46-47.

6. F. R. Moulton, "Influence of Astronomy on Science," Scientific Monthly, 1938, Vol. 67, p. 306.

7. Third ed., London, 1834, Vol. 2, p. 325. (Italics mine. L.E.)

8. It is perhaps worth noting, since the biological observations of Malthus are little commented upon, that he recognized, like so many others, the effects of selective breeding in altering the appearance of plants and animals, but regarded such alterations of form as occurring within admittedly ill-defined limits.

9. C. Pritchard, "Spectrum Analysis," The Contemporary Review, 1869, Vol. 11, p. 487. (Italics mine. L.E.)

10. Ibid., p. 490.

11. A few progressionists, such as Lord Brougham, were willing to entertain the possibility of a future development beyond man, but such Ideas are not characteristic of this group of thinkers as a whole. The strong theological emphasis of this school of thought inevitably tended to overshadow such suggestions.

12. The Evolution of Man, New York, 1896, Vol. 1, p. 950.

13. LLD, Vol. 3, p. 119.

14. Ibid.

15. Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus, Leipzig, 1881.

16. VAP, Vol. 2, p. 483.

17. See E. S. Russell, "Schopenhauer's Contribution to Biological Theory," in Science, Medicine and History, edited by E. A. Underwood. Oxford University Press, 1953, Vol. 2, pp. 205-6.

18. E. T. Brewster, Creation: A History of Non-Evolutionary Theories, Indianapolis, 1927, p. 81.

19. A. O. Lovejoy, "Monboddo and Rousseau," Modern Philology, 1932-33. Vol. 30, pp. 277-78.

20. Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, 1795, Noonday Press ed., New York, 1955. p. 199.

21. C. W. M. Hart. "Social Evolution and Modern Anthropology; Essays in Political Economy, edited by H. A. Innis, University of Toronto Press, n.d. p. 114.

22. "On Natural History as Knowledge, Discipline and Power" (1856), Scientific Memoirs of Thomas Huxley, 1898, Vol. 1, p. 306. (Italics mine. L.E.)

23. Anniversary Address, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, 1862, Vol. 18, p. 1.

24. William Graham, The Creed of Science, London, 1881, p. 161.

25. Cited by W. S. Lilley in the Fortnightly Review, 1886, Vol. 39, p. 35.

26. The Mechanism of Evolution, Heinemann, London, 1955, p. 1.

27. Merle Curti, "Human Nature in American Thought: Retreat from Reason in the Age of Science," Political Science Quarterly, 1953, Vol. 68, pp. 495-96.

28. Mutual Aid, 1902 (various editions).

29. "Biology" in What is Science? ed. by James R. Newman, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955, p. 243.

30. David Bidney, Theoretical Anthropology, Columbia University Press, p. 82.

31. LLD, Vol. 2, p. 6. Notebook of 1837.
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Re: DARWIN'S CENTURY -- EVOLUTION AND THE MEN WHO DISCOVERED

Postby admin » Thu Jul 16, 2015 10:45 pm

Glossary

Uniformitarianism, that scientific school of thought generally associated with the names of James Hutton and Sir Charles Lyell which assumed that geological phenomena were the product of natural forces operating over enormous periods of time and with considerable, though not necessarily total, uniformity. With modifications it has become the geological point of view of the twentieth century. In the early nineteenth century it stood In considerable opposition to

Catastrophism, a geological approach which Interpreted the stratigraphic features of the planet as representing a succession of sudden, violent, and cataclysmic disturbances in the geologic past Interspersed between long periods of calm. These disturbances were often regarded as world wide and totally, or almost totally, lethal in their effect upon the life of the globe. The theory implies the work of forces unknown in the present era and there thus lingers about the doctrine a certain aroma of the supernatural even though not always directly expressed or avowed by its more scientific proponents. The fact that life was supposedly created anew after each such episode enhances this aspect of the theory. Essentially catastrophism represents a compromise between the Mosaic account of creation and the increasing geological knowledge of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The biological analogue of catastrophism is

Progressionism, the assumption that life has risen from simple to more complex forms throughout the successive eras of the geological past. The doctrine does not imply actual phylogenetic descent from one form to another, but rather a succession of more and more advanced creations until finally man appears as the crowning achievement. The unity of biological form is thus not the product of "descent with modification" but rather a succession of creations linked only by an abstract unity existing In the mind of God. Opposed to this point of view was the short-lived

Non-progressionism of Lyell which was the biological equivalent of extreme uniformitarianism. Non-progressionism opposed the theory of successive and advancing creations by seeking to demonstrate that the higher and more complex forms of life such as the birds and mammals were actually to be found in ancient deposits. The theory was expressed somewhat ambiguously and with qualifications. It did not long survive but essentially it represents a pre-Darwinian attempt to avoid the supernaturalism so abhorrent to the uniformitarian geologists with their preference for natural rather than unknown mysterious forces. In the end

Developmentalism, later to be called evolution, arose out of the merging of progressionism with the natural philosophy of uniformitarianism. This could only take place when Charles Darwin supplied, through the principle of natural selection, a natural (i.e., uniformitarian) explanation for the past changes which had taken place in the flora and fauna of the world.
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Re: DARWIN'S CENTURY -- EVOLUTION AND THE MEN WHO DISCOVERED

Postby admin » Thu Jul 16, 2015 10:45 pm

Suggested Reading

An exhaustive list of the sources consulted in preparation for the writing of this book would occupy too much space to be presented here. The reader is referred to the individual footnotes extended throughout the book. What follows consists primarily of a list of what might be called "basic" material bearing upon the major progress of evolutionary thought. As can be gathered from the text it does not include the variety of papers, published and unpublished, which the author has consulted in the composition of this volume.

Agassiz, Elizabeth Cary
(1886) Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence, 2 vols., Houghton Mifflin, Boston.

Agassiz, Louis
(1894, 1896) Geological Sketches, 2 vols., Houghton Mifflin, Boston.

Barlow, Nora
(1935) "Charles Darwin and the Galapagos Islands," Nature, Vol. 136, p. 391.

Barlow, Nora (editor)
(1933) Charles Darwin's Diary of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle: Cambridge University Press.
(1946) Charles Darwin and the Voyage of the "Beagle," Philosophical Library, New York.

Bateson, William
(1913) Mendel's Principles of Heredity, Cambridge University Press.

Blyth, Edward
(1835) "An Attempt to Classify the Variations of Animals, etc.," Magazine of Natural History, Vol. 8, pp. 40-53.
(1837) "On the Psychological Distinctions Between Man and All Other Animals," Magazine of Natural History, Vol. 1, n.s., Parts I, II, III.

Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de
(1797-1807) Buffon's Natural History (Barr's translation), London.
(1812) Natural History, General and Particular, 20 vols., translated by William Smellie.

Cannon, H. Graham
(1955-56) "What Lamarck Really Said," Proceedings of the Linnaean Society of London, 168th Session, Parts I, II.

Chambers, Robert
(1844) Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, London.
(1846) Explanations: A Sequel to the Vestiges, London. Clark, John Willis and Hughes, Thomas M.
(1890) Life and Letters of the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, 2 vols., Cambridge University Press.

Cole, F. J.
(1930) Early Theories of Sexual Generation, Oxford University Press.

Condorcet, Antoine-Nicolas de
(1955) Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795), Noonday Press, New York.

Cuvier, Georges, Baron
(1802) Lessons in Comparative Anatomy, 2 vols., London.
(1815) Essay on the Theory of the Earth, second ed., Edinburgh.

Darlington, C. D.
(1959) Darwin's Place in History, Blackwell's, Oxford.

Darwin, Charles
(1952) Journal of Researches, facsimile reprint of first edition
(1839), Hafner Publishing Co., New York.
(1951) Origin of Species, reprint of first edition (1859), Philosophical Library, New York.
(1868) Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, 2 vols., London and New York.
(1874) The Descent of Man, second edition, New York.
(1881) "Inheritance," Nature, Vol. 24, p. 257. The Origin of Species (sixth edition 1872) and the Descent of Man, Modern Library, New York, n.d.

Darwin, Erasmus
(1791) The Botanic Garden, London.
(1794-96) Zoonomia, 2 vols., London.
(1803) The Temple of Nature, London.

Darwin, Francis
(1888) Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 3 vols., John Murray, London.

Darwin, Francis and Seward, A. C. (editors)
(1903) More Letters of Charles Darwin, John Murray, London.

Darwin, Francis (editor)
(1909) The Foundations of the Origin of Species, Cambridge University Press.

De Beer, Sir Gavin (editor)
(1960) Darwin's Notebooks on Transmutation of Species, Bulletin of the British Museum of Natural History, Historical Series, Part I, Vol. 2, No. 2; Part II, Vol. 2, No. 3; Part III, Vol. 2, No. 4. London.

Derham, W. (editor)
(1718) Philosophical Letters Between the Late Mr. Ray and ... His Correspondents, London.

Dupree, A. Hunter
(1959) Asa Gray 1810-1888, Harvard University Press.

Ellegard, Alvar
(1958) Darwin and the General Reader, Goteborg, Sweden.

Falconer, Hugh
(1856) "On Professor Huxley's Attempted Refutation of Cuvier's Laws of Correlation in the Reconstruction of Extinct Vertebrate Forms," Annals and Magazine of Natural History, second series, Vol. 17, pp. 476-93.
(1868) Paleontological Memoirs, 2 vols., London.

Geikie, Archibald
(1901) The Founders of Geology, Baltimore.

Gillispie, Charles C.
(1951) Genesis and Geology, Harvard University Press.

Glass, Bentley, O. Temkin, and W. L. Straus, Jr.
(1959) Forerunners of Darwin 1745-1859, Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore.

Gray, Asa
(1876) Darwiniana: Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism, Appleton, New York.

Gray, Jane Loring
(1894) Letters of Asa Gray, 2 vols., Houghton Mifflin, Boston.

Grimes, J. Stanley
(1851) Phreno-Geology, Boston.

Gruber, Jacob
(1960) A Conscience in Conflict: The Life of St. George Jackson Mivart, Columbia University Press, New York.

Gunther, Robert W. T. (editor)
(1928) Further Correspondence of John Ray, The Ray Society, London.

Hagberg, Knut
(1952) Carl Linnaeus, Jonathan Cape, London.

Hunter, John
(1861) Essays and Observations on Natural History, 2 vols., London.

Hutton, James
(1788) "Theory of the Earth; or An Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land Upon the Globe," Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Vol. 1, pp. 209-304.
(1795) Theory of the Earth with Proofs and Illustrations, 2 vols., Edinburgh.

Huxley, Leonard
(1913) Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, 3 vols., London.
(1918) Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, 2 vols., Murray, London.

Huxley, T. H.
(1898) The Scientific Memoirs of Thomas Henry Huxley, 4 vols., edited by Michael Foster and E. Ray Lankester, and a supplement, Macmillan, London.

Iltis, Hugo
(1932) Life of Mendel, W. W. Norton, New York.

Jenkin, Fleeming
(1887) Papers, Literary, Scientific, Etc., 2 vols., edited by Sidney Colvin and J. A. Ewing, London.

Jenyns, Leonard
(1862) Memoir of the Reverend John Stevens Henslow, John van Voorst, London.

Joly, John
(1925) The Surface History of the Earth, Oxford University Press.

Lord Kelvin (William Thomson)
(1894) Popular Lectures and Addresses, 3 vols., London.

Kramer, Herbert H.
(1948) The Intellectual Background and Immediate Reception of Darwin's Origin of Species, Doctoral Dissertation (unpublished), Harvard University.

Lack, David
(1957) Evolutionary Theory and Christian Belief, Methuen, London.

Lamarck, J. B.
(1914) Zoological Philosophy (1809), Macmillan, London.

Litchfield, Henrietta
(1904) A Century of Family Letters, 2 vols., Cambridge University Press.

Lovejoy, A. O.
(1942) The Great Chain of Being, Harvard University Press.

Lyell, Sir Charles
(1834) Principles of Geology, 4 vols., third edition, London.
(1842) Lectures on Geology Delivered at the Broadway Tabernacle in the City of New York, New York.
(1850) Anniversary Address of the President, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, Vol. 6, pp. xxvIi-lxvI.
(1851) "The Theory of the Successive Geological Development of Plants, from the Earliest Periods to Our Own Time, as Deduced from Geological Evidence; Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, Vol. 51, pp. 213-26.
(1851) "On Fossil Rain-marks of the Recent Triassic and Carboniferous Periods," Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, Vol. 7, pp. 238-47.
(1851) "The Theory of Successive Development in the Scale of Being both Animal and Vegetable, from the earliest Periods to Our Own Time, as Deducted from .Paleontological Evidence," Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, Vol. 51, pp. 1-31.
(1851) Anniversary Address of the President, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, Vol. 7, pp. xxxii-lxxi.
(1863) The Antiquity of Man, John Murray, London.

Lyell, Katherine M.
(1881) Life, Letters .and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, 2 vols., London.
(1890) Memoir of Leonard Horner, 2 vols., London.

Malthus, Thomas Robert
(1798) An Essay on the Principles of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet and Other Writers, London, facsimile of the first edition, Macmillan, 1926.

Marchant, James
(1916) Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Harper, New York.

Matthew, Patrick
(1831) On Naval Timber and Arboriculture, Edinburgh.

Millhauser, Milton
(1959) Just Before Darwin: Robert Chambers and the Vestiges, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Conn.

Montagu, M. F. Ashley
(1943) "Edward Tyson, M.D., F.R.S., 1650-1780, and the Rise of Human and Comparative Anatomy in England; Memoirs American Philosophical Society, Vol. 20.

Nicholson, H. Alleyne
(1886) Natural History, its Rise and Progress in Britain as Developed in the Life and Labours of Leading Naturalists, London.

Owen, Rev. Richard
(1894) The Life of Richard Owen, 2 vols., New York.

Packard, A. S.
(1901) Lamarck: The Founder of Evolution, Longmans, Green & Co., London and New York.

Paley, William
(1822) Natural Theology, London.

Panlin, C. F. A.
(1950-51) "Darwin's Theory and the Causes of its Acceptance," School Science Review, 3-part paper, October,
1950, March and June, 1951.

Playfair, John
(1802) Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth, Edinburgh.

Potter, George Reuben
(1922 ) The Idea of Evolution In the English Poets from 1744 to 1832, Doctoral Dissertation (unpublished), Harvard University.

Pulteny, Richard
(1805) A General View of the Writings of Linnaeus. London.

Raven, Charles E.
(1942 ) John Ray, Naturalist: His Life and Works, Cambridge University Press.
(1953) Organic Design: A Study of Scientific Thought from Ray to Paley, Oxford University Press.

Roppen, George
(1956) Evolution and Poetic Belief, Oslo.

Russell, E. S.
(1916) Form and Function: A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology, John Murray, London.

Sears, Paul B.
(1950) Charles Darwin: The Naturalist As a Cultural Force, Scribner's, New York.

Sedgwick, Adam
(1850) Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge, fifth edition, London.

Smith, Sir James Edward
(1821) A Selection of the Correspondence of Linnaeus and Other Naturalists, London.

Smith, William
(1817) Stratigraphical System of Organized Fossils, etc., London.

Trow-Smith, Robert
(1959) A History of British Livestock Husbandry 1700-
1900, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.

Wallace, Alfred Russel
(1905) My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions, 2 vols., New York.

Weismann, August
(1892 ) Essays upon Heredity, 2 vols., Oxford.

Wells, William Charles
(1818) Two Essays: One upon Single Vision with Two Eyes; The Other on Dew, etc., London.
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