(xi) Preface to the Third Edition

Verantwoording van de grondige omwerking van de eerste edities.

(xv) Preface to the First Edition

"The book is a survey of the history of evolutionism, presented not as an academic monograph but as an introduction accessible to someone with no background in either biology or history. It is not, however, a popularization in the sense of turning history into bedtime reading. It is aimed at those with a serious interest in the theory of evolution and its implications who have not tackled the subject in any detail before."(xv)

"So this is not a book on the Darwinian revolution alone. It is a history of “evolution,” using that term in its widest possible sense to denote any theory postulating a natural process for the development of life on earth. Much important work was done in geology and natural history before the Origin of Species appeared, and one cannot properly understand the impact of Darwin’s theory without some grounding in the earlier developments."(xvi)

"The penalty for trying to provide comprehensive coverage of so wide a field is that the amount of space available for each topic is limited. This is why I have abandoned the normal academic practice of giving extensive quotations, footnotes, and so forth, to flesh out the narrative. I also have pared down to a minimum information on the lives and backgrounds of the scientists involved. The main purpose of this book is to introduce the ideas themselves, in all their complexity, in as straightforward a manner as possible."(xvi)

(1) 1 - The Idea of Evolution - Its Scope and Implications

"For historians of science, the “Darwinian revolution” has always ranked alongside the “Copernican revolution” as an episode in which a new scientific theory symbolized a wholesale change in cultural values. In both cases, fundamental aspects of the traditional Christian worldview were replaced by new interpretations of nature." [mijn nadruk] (1)

"The existence of a series of intermediate positions between biblical creationism and materialistic evolutionism forces us to recognize the complexity of the relationship between science and religion. All too often this relationship has been depicted as a state of open warfare. But the scholars who first wrote on the war between science and religion, such as J. W. Draper (1875) and Andrew White (in 1896), were part of a secularist movement that rejoiced in sweeping away what was regarded as outdated superstition. Modern creationists also have much to gain from depicting all evolutionism as an outgrowth of militant atheism. To construct a more balanced picture, historians have had to adopt a more flexible view of the interaction between science and religion (for recent surveys, see Brooke 1991; and Lindberg and Numbers 1986). Moore (1979) has criticized Draper’s and White’s analyses of the Darwinian debates, pointing out that some religious thinkers were able to exploit the idea of evolution as part of their campaign to liberalize Christian theology. Many scientists too were deeply concerned over the religious implications of what they were doing. Both scientists and religious thinkers had to accommodate themselves to the new ideas being advanced to explain the history of life on earth." [mijn nadruk] (3-4)

Meer over de vergroting van de kosmologische tijdschaal. De christelijke (Usher: 4004 vC op basis van de bijbel) werd zeer breed losgelaten, vooral toen er geavanceerde dateertechnieken werden uitgevonden. Pas met het latere creationisme wordt Usher weer van stal gehaald.

"In the old worldview, the pattern of each species is designed by its creator. The whole point of the theory of miraculous creations is to insist that only supernatural design can explain the complex and orderly structure of each animal’s body. The laws of nature can perpetuate existing designs but cannot create new ones. The “argument from design” popular among the exponents of natural theology holds that the perfection of each design, and the adaptation of each species to a particular way of life, confirms the wisdom and benevolence of God." [mijn nadruk] (5-6)

[Wat zonde van alle energie dat Bowler zoveel aandacht geeft aan het christendom. Mensen die uitgaan van dat er een god bestaat die een persoon is met wijsheid en welwillendheid - iemand die zijn eigen schepping blijkbaar niet belangrijk vindt gezien alle catastrofes die de wereld altijd weer teisteren. Wat een zinloos geloof. Waarom zouden we luisteren naar mensen die in goden geloven? Waarom zouden we wat die mensen beweren zelfs maar een beetje serieus nemen? Waarom doet Bowler dat?]

"In the Darwinian theory of natural selection, evolution exploits individual variations that are purposeless (although not absolutely random, as is popularly supposed) by simply eliminating those that confer no benefit to the organism. Evolution becomes a process of trial and error based on massive wastage and the death of vast numbers of unfit creatures. On such a model, it is difficult to see how the structure of any particular species, or the overall distribution of species, can be the product of divine forethought. There can be no goal toward which evolution is striving, only a multitude of different species each responding to local environmental challenges in an ad hoc way." [mijn nadruk] (6)

"Many efforts were made to show that the radical materialism of Darwin’s theory was not the only explanation of evolutionary change. Evolution must somehow represent the unfolding of the divine plan. Some nonreligious thinkers, frightened by the haphazard and open-ended nature of evolution according to the Darwinian system, also argue that there must be orderly patterns built into the history of life on earth."(6)

"The Bible tells us that the human race was formed in the image of the Creator and given dominion over the rest of nature. Christianity (unlike some other religions) insists that only humans have a spiritual component to their existence; the other animals are “the brutes that perish.” Evolutionism states that the human race must have evolved from the lower animals and cannot have this unique status. In this view, we are part of nature, and our higher faculties cannot stem from a spiritual factor with which we alone are endowed. Even our moral or ethical feelings (our conscience) must be seen as an extension of animal social instincts produced by the laws of natural evolution. This prospect created perhaps the greatest barrier to the acceptance of Darwin’s theory, and it still horrifies many people today. It was overcome in Darwin’s time by invoking the idea of progress: if nature was intended to progress toward evolving these higher mental faculties, then we retain our position as the goal of creation. But critics still maintain that it is precisely in the reduction of humanity to the status of beasts that we see the true materialism of the evolutionary worldview. Social scientists also prefer to believe that some aspects of human behavior cannot be explained in purely biological terms. They warn that biologists are constantly tempted to see behavioral differences between humans as innate and hence unchangeable products of the evolutionary past. In fact, the differences may be the products of education and culture." [mijn nadruk] (7)

"Modern genetics denies the validity of the Lamarckian effect: acquired characters and other modifications of individual development cannot be imprinted on the genes and thus cannot participate in evolution."(11)

"Our last important distinction relates to the way the evolutionary process is depicted visually. Stephen Jay Gould (1989) warned of the dangers implicit in different forms of diagrammatic representations of evolution. Each kind of representation has hidden assumptions built into it, and the reader must be aware of the values being projected." [mijn nadruk] (12)

[Bezwaren tegen metaforen lopen vaak gelijk op met bezwaren tegen allerlei grafische modellen / schema's. Bij die laatste worden er inderdaad gemakkelijk waarden ingestopt die de mens als de top van de evolutie, de kroon op de schepping zien.]

"This leads us to the question of the scientific method itself and historians’ efforts to understand how new theories are introduced.
Historians have become involved in a more general process by which the nature of science has been questioned. Traditionally, scientists have presented themselves as disinterested providers of factual information. The scientific method was supposed to guarantee total freedom from the influence of subjective factors such as religion, philosophy, and moral values. It has now become apparent even to most scientists that this was an inadequate model of how science actually functions. Historians dealing with the development of evolution theory are in an excellent position to see why the traditional image of objectivity has broken down. Here is a theory which, even in its most basic form, begins to challenge a worldview that was deeply rooted in Western culture. Any theory advanced to explain the facts of nature had implications for these deeply rooted beliefs, and history suggests that the scientists’ behavior often reflected the positions they took up on the broader issues." [mijn nadruk] (13)

"In principle, all scientific knowledge must be treated as provisional, because we can never be sure that currently accepted laws and theories will not turn out to be false when exposed to future tests.
If scientific knowledge is only provisional, why should it be given higher status than other forms of knowledge? Scientists argue that their laws and theories are more objective because they have been formulated and tested in such a way as to rapidly expose any weaknesses. A scientific hypothesis is constructed to maximize its testability — or, since any test may potentially refute it, its degree of “falsifiability” (Popper 1959, 1974). By formulating their statements in a way that leaves them open to rigorous testing, scientists ensure that their kind of knowledge can be distinguished from nonscience and from pseudosciences, such as astrology, which offer vague generalizations that can never be falsified by any empirical test. Karl Popper argues that scientists have consistently been guided in their choice of hypotheses by the criterion of which is the more falsifiable." [mijn nadruk] (14)

[Het demarkatiecriterium. De toetsbaarheid van beweringen is essentieel.]

"Science thus has to be understood in the context of the “sociology of knowledge” (Barnes, Bloor, and Henry 1996; Mulkay 1979). Sociologists accept that other areas of knowledge are shaped by social and cultural factors ... (...) Evolution theory provides a fertile field of study for historians to debate the relative significance of objective and subjective factors in determining the success or failure of theories." [mijn nadruk] (16)

[Vind ik ook.]

"The history of evolution theory offers clear illustrations of the need to take such factors into account. We are no longer quite so sure that unsuccessful theories were defended only by scientists whose judgment was warped by their religious beliefs and moral values. We sometimes can see that, in their heyday, theories later judged to be false served a valuable role in generating knowledge incorporated into a current paradigm. Scientists such as Lyell and Darwin, who are supposed to have hit on the right approach, were themselves influenced by their wider beliefs." [mijn nadruk] (17)

[Bowler beweegt toch wel erg in de richting waarin alles grijs is en elke opvatting waardevol, zelfs de religieuze.]

"Whatever our feelings about the ultimate success of Darwinism as an explanation of evolutionary change, as historians we cannot afford to ignore the possibility that the formulation and popularization of the theory were to some extent reflections of changing values in Western society. Some would argue that the same ideological factors underlie modern debates on related issues." [mijn nadruk] (17)

[Ik vind dat echt een open deur. Natuurlijk is dat zo.]

"Samuel Butler’s attack on Darwin (1879) exaggerated the achievements of the forerunners of evolutionism in order to denigrate the official “hero” by showing that he was not as original as his followers believed."(20)

De geschiedenis van de wetenschap heeft een andere insteek gekregen.

"The legends that built up around major figures have had to be reexamined. The temptation to present one theory as right, and its rival as wrong, has had to be reassessed. The past cannot be evaluated by modern standards — even if scientists could agree what those standards are. We cannot present one theory as the product of objective study and disparage its rival as having been upheld by non-scientific prejudice. The catastrophists did some good science despite their religious beliefs, while Lyell himself was by no means free from the desire to link his scientific position to a wider philosophy. No theory escaped the influence of the cultural values debated at the time." [mijn nadruk] (21)

"If Darwin’s immediate followers sidelined the theory of natural selection, we must learn why they were attracted to the more general idea of evolution. If we do not make an effort to understand why they preferred alternative mechanisms, we are left with an impoverished view of how the more general idea gained so important a foothold in science."(25)

"This book strikes a balance between the two approaches to history. By including chapters covering the Darwin industry’s reassessments of the familiar story of his discovery and its subsequent development, I have respected the desire of the modern Darwinians to seek the origins of their unique perspective on nature. But I have also made a serious effort to include those areas of evolutionary science and thought which are traditionally dismissed as side branches, especially where it can be shown that those areas helped define worldviews widely accepted by earlier generations. Darwin’s theory had a major influence on modern science and thought, but we must take account of historical revisions suggesting that this influence was far more subtle than the traditional picture allows." [mijn nadruk] (26)

(27) 2 - The Pre-evolutionary Worldview

"Our story begins with the attempt to demonstrate that the new science inspired by Galileo and Newton could be made to harmonize with the contemporary understanding of the Bible. The attempt was doomed to failure, and we can identify some of the sources of the tension that would fragment the synthesis and pave the way for the Darwinian revolution."(27)

"The rock strata showed that the earth itself had changed, but the fossils suggested that the population of animals and plants was no longer the same as that produced by God at the creation. To those with deep religious convictions, this conclusion was unacceptable. The English naturalist John Ray doubted that a caring God would have created species only to let them die out in a natural catastrophe."(37)

[Als voorbeeld van hoe dat ging. ]

"Ray’s concern over extinction reflects an attitude that became very common among the exponents of the new science. The work of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton was reducing the world to a gigantic machine, a system of matter in motion. Their followers perceived an underlying threat to traditional religious values: if the world consisted only of material particles (atoms, as the ancient philosophers had called them), on what grounds could one believe there was a God who both created and cared for the system? Was it possible that the objects we observe in the world (including ourselves) are merely random and transient products of the everlasting whirl of atoms? It was vital to defend the new natural philosophy against the charge that it would lead to atheism." [mijn nadruk] (38)

[Wat dus een hoop tijd en energie kostte. Vandaar dat ik dat een zinloze tijdverspilling noem.]

"Along with the chemist Robert Boyle, Ray became the chief exponent of natural theology, the claim that the study of nature led to better knowledge of God (Westfall 1958; on Ray, see Gillespie 1977; Raven 1942)."(39)

"Boyle wanted God to be seen as the Creator of the actual structures we observe. His tactic was to argue that, although nature is a machine, it is obviously a complex and purposeful structure that could only have been produced by an intelligent designer, that is, God. The scientist who studied these complexities and showed how they were subordinate to a higher purpose was, in effect, illustrating the power of God."(39)

"A later exponent of this tradition, William Paley, used the analogy of a watch and a watchmaker to explain the logic of what became known as the argument from design. Anyone finding a watch would know that such a complex piece of machinery had been designed and constructed by an intelligent agent, the watchmaker. It was inconceivable that so complex a structure could have originated through the random motion of atoms. Given that nature contained many structures far more complex than watches, all apparently designed for a purpose, it was necessary to postulate a Designer of superhuman intelligence for the whole universe." [mijn nadruk] (39)

[Dat idee van 'intelligent design' was er dus al vroeg. - 17e eeuw.]

"Ray admitted he was puzzled by God’s decision to create animals whose only purpose was to cause suffering to others."(40)

[Nee. echt?]

"The new taxonomy rested on the assumptions that nature is a stable, orderly system and that species retained their characters unchanged from the creation. Such assumptions were not, however, part of the worldview favored in medieval and Renaissance times. On the contrary, nature often had been seen as an unstable and almost capricious system."(45)

(47) 3 - Evolution in the Enlightenment

"Small wonder that such a period [De Verlichting - GdG] saw major challenges to the worldview of natural theology. The materialist philosophers of the Enlightenment sought explanations of how life originated on the earth that did not depend on supernatural intervention. Life must have originated by a natural process (spontaneous generation), and since there was no divine guarantee of stability, species might be subject to change through time. The Enlightenment saw the emergence of the first worldviews containing an element of what we would call evolution." [mijn nadruk] (48)

"The attempt to treat Enlightenment naturalists as forerunners of Darwin (Glass, Temkin, and Strauss 1959) must be treated with caution. The historian must avoid the temptation to impose modern values onto the past by, for instance, focusing only on extracts from eighteenth-century writings which make sense in modern terms. The past must be read within its own context and allowances made for the fact that this context may differ from our own interpretation." [mijn nadruk] (49)

"Despite the tendency to disparage the mental powers of other races, most European thinkers remained faithful to the traditional view that human nature was uniform around the globe. The human mind had powers not found in the animals, and the most popular philosophy of the Enlightenment sought to explain those powers." [mijn nadruk] (53)

"Seventeenth-century theories of the earth had retained a biblical timescale which drastically restricted naturalists’ ability to imagine a long sequence of geological changes. Now the history of the earth began to open up in a way that laid the foundations of modern geology (Haber 1959; Toulmin and Goodfield 1965; Rossi 1984)."(57)

"The chain of being was an attempt to put this intuitive sense of hierarchy onto a systematic basis. It postulated a single, linear hierarchy of species stretching down from humanity to the simplest living form."(63)

"The chain of being assumed that similarities between species naturally would define a linear pattern. In practice this view was already losing support as exploration revealed an ever wider range of species that had to be fitted in. There were too many different degrees of relationship involved."(66)

"Most of Linnaeus’s followers continued to believe that the number of species was fixed at the creation."(69)

"Descartes’s original program had sought to explain the origins of all natural structures by material processes. The Enlightenment materialists hoped to extend this program to living structures."(71)

"For the eighteenth-century materialists, this was precisely why the idea was attractive. If life was the product of natural forces, it need not exhibit the designing hand of the Creator."(72)

"Here Maupertuis contributed to the strangest outcome of Enlightenment materialism: in attempting to explain life as the product of material processes, philosophers were forced to attribute the properties of life to matter itself." [mijn nadruk] (75)

"The definition of the species as a population preserved by reproduction threw great emphasis on Buffon’s theory of generation. Like Maupertuis, he argued that life could be explained only if its production could be accounted for in material (i.e., Newtonian) terms."(76)

"He supposed that at certain periods in the earth’s history, spontaneous generation produced even the higher forms of life directly from free organic particles."(80)

"Buffon seems to have believed that only certain combinations of organic particles are stable, just as in chemistry the elements can combine to give only a certain range of stable compounds. For all his materialism, he remained locked into a worldview in which natural developments were constrained by predetermined patterns and thus endlessly reproduced the same basic forms." [mijn nadruk] (80)

"Among the Enlightenment materialists were thinkers more radical than Buffon who wanted to eliminate all trace of the argument from design by showing that the world we observe is the product of purely random activity within material nature. For these thinkers, everything we see arises from the ceaseless activity of nature proceeding without any direction or plan. In such a worldview, there could be no room for the concept of the fixity of species; the living forms we see are produced by trial and error, and there is nothing to guarantee that their structure will be perpetuated accurately by reproduction. The Enlightenment materialists came close to the philosophy of modern Darwinism in their refusal to accept that there are fixed forms in nature and in their assumption that species are produced by an undirected material process.(...) They were speculative thinkers, not scientists — although they were in contact with the best scientific minds of the day — and they presented no coherent theory of evolution." [mijn nadruk] (81)

De bijbehorende personen: Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Denis Diderot, Baron d’Holbach.

"Diderot was friendly with d’Holbach but distrusted his militant dismissal of all religion as a fraud designed to uphold social repression. The System of Nature provided a new utilitarian social philosophy designed to increase human happiness, but d’Holbach insisted that this must rest on a materialistic conception of life that eliminated the traditional religious view of human nature and divine creation."(83)

"At the very end of the eighteenth century lived two figures whose ideas seem to come closer to the modern concept of how life on earth developed: Erasmus Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Both accepted the notion of spontaneous generation but realized that only the simplest forms of life might be formed in this way. They thus were forced to postulate a process by which living structures became progressively more complex."(84)

(96) 4 - Nature and Society, 1800–1859

"Darwin created a unique blend of factors derived from natural history and social philosophy, establishing a theory whose full implications would not be explored until the twentieth century. To understand the complex relationship between Darwinism and the rest of nineteenth-century science, we must first understand the visions of nature proposed by his fellow scientists."(96)

"There was no war between science and religion because many scientists were themselves both deeply religious and anxious to ensure that their scientific work could be reconciled with their faith (Gillispie 1951)." [mijn nadruk] (96)

"This revival of conservative thinking did not go unchallenged — indeed we can now see that it was sustained by the fear that materialism was still influencing the more radical thinkers. Outright materialism was marginalized as dangerously subversive, but newer theories, including Auguste Comte’s positivistic philosophy, offered a less radical alternative to the religious outlook.(...) Materialism was an integral aspect of a revolutionary ideology that wanted to sweep all traces of the old social hierarchy aside. Natural theology and idealism were invoked by conservatives who wanted to preserve their position in that hierarchy: the world was designed by a God who intended us all to accept our place in the preordained social scale." [mijn nadruk] (97)

"Looking back at the early part of the century, the philosopher John Stuart Mill (reprint 1950) saw Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Taylor Coleridge as the figureheads of the two dominant streams of thought."(99)

"Auguste Comte, whose philosophy of positivism saw an inevitable progress in humankind’s efforts to control the world (Pickering 1994)."(100)

"Jeremy Bentham’s radical individualism pioneered the most active strand of British thought, because it expressed the aspirations of the rising middle class. These people shared the conservatives’ horror of revolution, yet they demanded reforms that would throw off the shackles of feudalism and allow entrepreneurs the freedom they needed to do business. Progress was an article of faith because they saw their own economic activities as the driving force of social changes that ultimately would benefit the whole of humankind."(102)

"There were others in this liberal or individualist tradition, however, who saw no need for state interference with human behavior. The ideology of industrial capitalism reduced all social interactions to the level of the marketplace. Economic (and by implication social) progress would occur naturally, without state interference, once all restrictions on individual freedom were lifted. This laissez-faire, or free enterprise, approach to economics was founded by Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations of 1776 (reprint 1910), in which Smith argued that prosperity depended solely on individual initiative. State control of the economy, however well-intentioned, would only interfere with the natural tendency for everyone to interact in a way that would maximize profit for all. This economic philosophy assumed the existence of an “invisible hand” guiding individuals so that actions taken for purely personal profit turned out, in the end, to be best for the economy as a whole."(103)

"Some exponents of free enterprise saw no room for progress even in the social realm. One such conservative thinker was to exert a profound influence on Darwin: this was another clergyman, the political economist Thomas Robert Malthus (James 1979; Petersen 1979). Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population of 1797 (reprint 1959, second edition reprint 1990) was written to challenge the optimism of those who proclaimed that social reform would bring increased happiness for all."(104)

"The fact that Darwin’s formulation of natural selection was inspired in part by Malthus’s principle has led many historians to argue that the theory reflects the competitive ideology of early-nineteenth-century capitalism. (...) There is no doubt that the principles of utilitarianism and individualism formed the common context within which both social and biological theories were debated (Young 1969, 1985)."(105)

"Spencer was an apostle of free enterprise and saw as the driving force of progress the innovative activities of individuals trying to cope with a competitive environment. His philosophy would become an integral part of the framework of thought within which Darwinism became popular in the 1860s (see chap. 6)."(106)

[Dat was dus een kort overzicht van heel veel mensen en ideeën. Hoe zinvol is dat?]

Opkomst van door de Staat gesteunde wetenschap. De rol van de 'Societies' daarin.

"The pillars of the scientific community were the societies — where research could be debated and published — and the research facilities such as museums, surveys, and university departments."(106)

"Only Anglicans could attend Oxford or Cambridge, but the University of London was founded by Nonconformists in the 1820s."(107)

"Similar developments took place in the United States but equally slowly because here, too, state and federal governments were reluctant to spend public money on science. Much scientific work was still done by wealthy individuals, and paying positions were in short supply. American universities were starting to expand, although scholars emigrating from Europe still played a prominent role, as when Louis Agassiz was brought to Harvard to create the Museum of Comparative Zoology (Winsor 1991). Only later in the century did the United States begin to take a lead in the founding of re- search universities." [mijn nadruk] (108)

"Better knowledge of the internal structures of different species allowed Cuvier to see that many superficially different species shared deep similarities. (...) Yet Cuvier had no intention of explaining the diversity of structures within each class by a process of descent from a common ancestor. He ridiculed Lamarck’s theory of transmutation and defended the fixity of species (Burkhardt 1970)."(110)

"By the 1840s, an outline of the history of the earth as we understand it today had already emerged."(118)

"Hutton’s steady state worldview was refuted by the obvious progress of life from primitive invertebrates through fish, reptiles, and mammals. No human fossils had yet been found, so the progress seemed to culminate with the appearance of humankind in the modern period (Bowler 1976a, 1989a)."(118)

"The idealistic philosophy encouraged a developmental worldview, even though most of its supporters rejected transmutation. It was natural for idealists to see the progressive development of life toward the human form as a central theme of the divine plan."(121)

"God was a rational, almost an artistic, designer concerned more with the underlying symmetry of nature than with the details of adaptation."(123)

"Von Baer had no time for evolutionism, but his embryology offered a model of development that would play a major role in the emergence of Darwinism. His concept of branching development offered a new way of understanding the patterns revealed by the fossil record."(124)

"Owen’s early opposition to transmutation had a specific target. Older histories (e.g., Gillispie 1951) presented the opinions of the scientific elite as though they were the only theories available at the time. There were disputes about how best to illustrate the Creator’s wisdom, but no serious challenge to the view that the universe was a divine artifact. Yet throughout this period, those in high positions within the scientific community were looking over their shoulders at a threat they dared not name. We have already noted the extent to which the conservative establishment was under threat from radicals promoting revolutionary political — and scientific — ideas. Working-class revolutionaries and middle-class activists were looking for a degree of influence that would match their contributions to the newly industrialized economy. These debates frequently employed scientific ideas, and many of the ideas described above were developed quite explicitly to resist the threat of materialistic theories proposed by the radicals. Evolutionism became part of the radical campaign to discredit the old worldview which propped up aristocratic privilege." [mijn nadruk] (126)

"In Britain, both Lamarckism and the new philosophical anatomy were taken up by radical thinkers trying to undermine Paley’s argument from design. Even among working-class agitators, transformist ideas were rife (Desmond 1987). But the fiercest battles were fought within the medical profession (Desmond 1989). The old leadership, allying itself with the conservative naturalists at Oxford and Cambridge, kept control in the hands of the upper classes. Middle- and even working-class students, however, were demanding changes that would allow them to study medicine. They found Lamarckian transmutation and the new philosophical anatomy to be the ideal tools by which to undermine the credibility of the establishment’s theories and hence, by implication, its authority over the profession." [mijn nadruk] (127)

"It was no accident that Edinburgh was the center for much of this radical intellectual activity. The academic community there was not directly under the control of the churches, and middle-class political activity was rife. Many of the new ideas and theories promoted in Scotland were resisted ac- tively when transferred south of the border, as Grant’s marginalization shows. Yet the theories promoted by conservative English naturalists such as Buckland and Owen can be properly understood only if they are seen as reactions against the constant threat of political and intellectual innovation by the middle and even lower classes." [mijn nadruk] (129)

"Lyell came from a wealthy Scottish family and stood firmly in the liberal camp. He wanted a society free of aristocratic privilege in which the middle classes could make their way forward, and his attack on scriptural geology was motivated by this ideology." [mijn nadruk] (130)

"Just as the immense structure of Etna had been built up slowly and gradually, so might other geological formations be explained as the results of the accumulated effect of limited causes acting over vast periods of time. Convinced of the validity of this view, Lyell returned to England and began writing his classic Principles of Geology (1830–33)."(131)

"Lyell’s uncomfortable position on this issue, along with Darwin’s reluctance to publish his own theory, must be understood in the context of the reputation acquired by transmutationism during the era of radical scientists such as R. E. Grant. Endorsement by radical scientists allowed the theory to be branded as dangerous materialism, subversive of the moral as well as the intellectual order. (...) The trick was to show that recognition of progress up to and including the appearance of the human species did not undermine the religious beliefs still held by most respectable Victorians." [mijn nadruk] (134-135)

"Chambers sanitized the radical science tradition by using the notion of laws of creation to argue that evolution toward humanity was merely the unfolding of a divine plan. He challenged the authority of the professional scientists by going over their heads in a direct appeal to the reading public. The result was a debate which rocked the foundations of Victorian opinion and paved the way for the reception of Darwin’s theory (Lovejoy 1959c; Millhauser 1959; Secord 1989; Yeo 1984; for a collection of primary sources, see Lynch 2000). A recent study by James Secord (2000) presents the debate not as a mere prelude to the Darwinian episode but as the defining factor in shaping the Victorian public’s attitude toward evolution." [mijn nadruk] (135)

[Alles om de religie te ontzien ... ]

"Had Vestiges merely postulated such a predesigned law of creation, it might have been tolerated even by conservative thinkers. But one implication which Chambers refused to conceal damned his book in the eyes of the scientific and religious establishment."(137-138)

[Het erge is natuurlijk dat de wetenschappelijke establishment hetzelfde is als de religieuze establishment ... ]

(141) 5 - The Development of Darwin’s Theory

"It is no surprise that Darwin is the focus of intense public interest and the subject of much historical research. Yet to those who feel — for religious, philosophical, or moral reasons — that the theory has had harmful rather than beneficial effects on our culture, Darwin himself is more a villain than a hero. The originator of so controversial a theory must necessarily be a subject of debate rather than consensus among historians."(141)

"The greatest division within the various interpretations of Darwin’s life and work is between those which portray his theory as a major step toward a more rational view of the world and those which depict it as a force that has undermined our religious and moral values. But neither of these two camps is homogeneous; the opponents in particular fall into two mutually hostile factions."(142)

[De intellectuelen konden het weer niet eens worden: zo veel hooifden zo veel zinnen. Waaraan je ziet hoe groot de invloed is van hun waarden en normen.]

"Any attempt to build up a balanced picture of Darwin’s work must confront the following issues (see Oldroyd 1984 for a useful overview).
1. The role of ideology. Most controversial is the claim that the selection theory reflects the ideology of free-enterprise capitalism — in effect that Darwin projected the ideology of his own social group onto nature itself. The possibility that the use of the metaphor “struggle for existence” represents such a social influence was noted already by Marx and Engels in the nineteenth century and is current in modern studies such as those of Young (1985). But this is not a simple issue.(...) The liberals’ rejection of the idealist model of the state in favor of individualism thus provides a more general ideological foundation for Darwinism. Population thinking also reflects a transition in nineteenth-century scientific thought noted by John Theodore Merz (1896–1903): the emergence of the statistical mode of explanation designed to cover changes so complex that the behavior of their individual components cannot be predicted. It is possible to see the rise of Darwinism as the creation of a statistical mode of explanation as opposed to the old Newtonian view of causation based on law (Depew and Weber 1995)." [mijn nadruk] (145)

"2. The idea of progress. A related issue concerns Darwin’s commitment to the idea of progress. It is normally assumed that liberal ideology saw indi- vidual effort (stimulated by competition) as the driving force of progress.(...) Most historians now accept that Darwin cannot be seen as a nonprogressionist in the modern sense. But few would go as far as Richards, who sees Darwin as an exponent of an almost idealist vision of progress based on the model of embryological development."(146)

"3. The argument from design. Disagreement also focuses on Darwin’s religious views and the rapidity with which he threw off the belief that nature is designed by a benevolent God (Brooke 1985). (...) All agree that by the time Darwin wrote the Origin, he had more or less abandoned any religious faith, although he was never an outright atheist. The story that he underwent a deathbed conversion, popular among creationists, has no foundation (Moore 1994)." [mijn nadruk] (146)

"4. The scientific method. A more specialized debate centers on Darwin’s scientific method. Darwin sometimes projected an image of himself as a patient observer, and his opponents have always accused him of being incapable of deep thought. But he also said the Origin was “one long argument,” and most historians now accept that he was anything but a simple fact- gatherer (Mayr 1991). According to Ghiselin (1969), he was a follower of the hypothetico-deductive method, using his research to test the theory."(146-147)

"5. Scientific problems. Additional debates center on the scientific factors which shaped Darwin’s thinking. Attention has always focused on three main areas: the biogeographical insights of the Beagle voyage and the evidence of speciation in the Galàpagos finches, his acceptance of Lyell’s uniformitarian geology, and the analogy provided by the selective method employed by animal breeders. Modern research has modified our understanding of these influences, challenging some facets of the story Darwin told in his autobiography."(147)

"Darwin began to appreciate that the simple model of divine creation encountered difficulties when it was used to explain the facts of dis- tribution. Eventually he would realize that those facts could be better explained by combining a theory of adaptive evolution with a study of how species are able to migrate around the world."(150-151)

"It is a common assumption that nineteenth-century Europeans were fascinated by the image of struggle and competition (Gale 1972). But there are different levels at which struggle can occur. The often-quoted lines from In Memoriam, written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, between 1833 and 1850, encapsulate a growing sense that nature was a scene of death and suffering. Nature gives no comfort to the gullible human (...) Here, natural theology’s efforts to maintain belief in a benevolent God are undermined by the assertion that suffering is integral to nature. This perspective reflects a change in the cultural climate which would encourage naturalists to challenge the idea of a harmonious balance of nature." [mijn nadruk] (152)

"Darwin’s notebooks confirm that the discovery of the selection theory stands as a major example of creative thinking (H. Gruber 1974). He drew on an enormous range of influences, scientific and nonscientific, constituting a unique conceptual framework that steered him toward a radical break with the past." [mijn nadruk] (157)

"For a time he wondered if species might be “born” with a built-in lifespan, after which they become extinct. He soon realized, however, that some other, more active mechanism of change was needed, and by July 1837 he was convinced that transmutation must come about by the accumulation of individual variations over many generations." [mijn nadruk] (159)

"The breadth of Darwin’s reading reveals many ways in which the ideology of the time could have influenced his thinking (Manier 1978; Schweber 1977). He read David Brewster’s review of Comte’s positivist philosophy, which argued for the need to base all theories on mathematical foundations — exactly what was provided by the arithmetical logic of the population principle. His reading of Malthus was not an accident: it was part of a major program of investigation undertaken to throw light on the human implications of evolutionism. He read the work of Adam Smith, whose analysis of laissez-faire economics showed how individual reactions could work together to give an apparently purposeful overall effect." [mijn nadruk] (162)

[Etcetera.]

"By the end of 1839, Darwin had conceived the outline of his theory. In 1842 he wrote out a short sketch of his ideas, followed two years later by a substantial essay (both reprinted in Darwin and Wallace 1958). The essay was meant to be published in the case of his premature death, but Darwin had no intention of putting his ideas before the public yet. He was well aware of their controversial nature"(164)

"Darwin’s vision of evolution as a branching process required him to see each branch as evolving in its own direction, so that the end product of one branch could never be treated as the ancestral or immature stage of the end product of another."(169)

"Seeking to explain this process of divergence and specialization, Darwin realized in 1854 that natural selection was a constant force that would tend to improve the level of adaptation even in a stable environment (see fig. 21). Any variant that was more specialized for the species’ way of life would give its owner an advantage, and thus a character like the giraffe’s neck would continue to be enhanced long after the initial switch to the new lifestyle. This pressure to specialize generated the divergent trends observed in the fossil record. (..) Darwin now realized that, by the same logic, a piece of territory could support more living things if they diversified to exploit the resources in as many different ways as possible. This would explain why natural selection constantly tended to improve the efficiency of adaptation by increasing the level of specialization.(...) By focusing on the pressure to specialize, Darwin was led to marginalize his early emphasis on the role of geographical isolation in speciation, as in the Galàpagos (Sulloway 1979a)."(172)

"The stimulus which prompted Darwin to publish in haste was the arrival in 1858 of Alfred Russel Wallace’s paper on natural selection (on Wallace’s life, see Beddall 1968; Fichman 1981; George 1964; Marchant 1916; McKinney 1972; Raby 2001; Williams-Ellis 1966)."(173)

(177) 6 - The Reception of Darwin’s Theory

"When the Origin of Species was published on November 24, 1859, the 1,250 copies of the first edition were snapped up by booksellers on the first day. There was some support from scientists, but much of the initial response was negative. One clergyman declared Darwin to be the most dangerous man in England. We should not be surprised by the reaction of conservative forces. If evolutionism implied that humans were merely improved apes, and nature only a senseless round of struggle and death, where was the divine source of moral values? And if those traditional values were threatened, so was the established order of society, of which the Church was still a central pillar. Those who favored the theory tended to come from less privileged social backgrounds and were anxious to replace the old hierarchy with a new order favoring the middle classes. This group included the new generation of professional scientists who—unlike Darwin—depended on an income obtained by offering their services to the state or to industry. From the start, the theory was a religious, philosophical, and ideological battleground, and the scientific debates can be understood only in this context. Yet there were technical arguments both for and against the theory, and the debate over these arguments in the scientific community would determine the theory’s fate. If it were discredited by the scientists, it could hardly be used to revolutionary effect in society at large." [mijn nadruk] (177)

"Victorians did not accept evolution because they were convinced that Darwin had found the correct explanation of how it worked. They accepted it despite having major reservations about natural selection—and this means that they would not have been persuaded by the arguments now used to support the modern Darwinian theory. The transition to an evolutionary worldview must have involved something more than the sheer weight of evidence in its favor."(178)

"By the mid-1870s, the Darwinians were the dominant force in the British scientific community, although many gave natural selection a less prominent position than did Darwin himself. In most other countries as well, with the exception of France, evolutionism triumphed."(180)

"One area which turned out to be crucial was the fossil record, and here Darwin had to be cautious. He knew that new forms of life often seemed to appear suddenly in the record—the evidence that creationists took (as they still do) as confirmation of miraculous origin. Darwin borrowed Lyell’s argument on the imperfection of the geological record, noting that the chances of most species leaving fossil remains were very slight (because fossils were laid down only in certain circumstances). This meant that there must be many “gaps” in the record, which would appear as sudden transitions from one population to another. In fact, two apparently contiguous populations might have been separated by millions of years in which no fossils were laid down. Because he stressed the imperfection of the record, Darwin could not argue that it could be used to reconstruct the evolutionary ancestries of modern species. But the theory predicted that new discoveries would occasionally fill in gaps, and in fact the discoveries of the next few decades encouraged paleontologists to hope that they could reconstruct the whole history of life."(182)

"He certainly did not want to set up a ladder of evolution in which lower animals were regarded merely as immature versions of higher forms. The most one could expect was that the ancestry of a group might be identified—not the whole sequence of its evolution."(183)

"Some of the earliest support for Darwin came from field naturalists who appreciated his arguments based on biogeography and the complex interactions between species and their environments. The botanists Joseph Dalton Hooker and Asa Gray had already come to accept the theory as a result of their earlier contacts with Darwin, and both now came out in open support."(183-184)

"Darwin’s most flamboyant convert was not, however, a field naturalist but a young morphologist originally specializing in the structure of invertebrates, Thomas Henry Huxley (Barr 1997; Desmond 1994, 1997; Di Gregorio 1984; L. Huxley 1900; Irvine 1955; Lyons 1999). Darwin could not stand the excitement of public debate, but Huxley was willing to take on any opponent in defense of free thought. He was a gifted lecturer and writer (Jensen 1991). Unlike Darwin, he had risen to the middle class by his own efforts as a professional scientist, and his challenge to religion was based on the desire to present science as a source of authority to supplant the Church." [mijn nadruk] (184)

"The Darwinists’ success points to a change of attitude within the scientific community. There were massive debates over the cause of evolution, but few now accepted that it was legitimate to invoke miracles as the source of new species. For Huxley and his fellow opponents of religion, this meant that the argument from design was dead. But others saw evolutionism as compatible with theism, because it was God who instituted the laws which govern the process," [mijn nadruk] (185-186)

"In the short term, Owen’s and Mivart’s influence was limited, in part by the clumsiness of their tactics (Bowler 1985; Desmond 1982), but their teleological evolutionism was the forerunner of the openly anti-Darwinian schools of evolutionism which emerged later in the century."(186)

"Some German scientists, of whom Ernst Haeckel was the most active, were political radicals who saw Darwin’s rejection of design as a weapon in their fight against conservatism (Gasman 1971; Montgomery 1974; Weindling 1989a). It has been said that while Darwinism was born in England, it found its true home in Germany (Nordenskiöld 1946; Radl 1930). But this was not Darwin’s Darwinism— Haeckel (translation 1876) openly proclaimed his intention of synthesizing the ideas of Darwin, Lamarck, and Goethe, and his work still reflected the spirit of Naturphilosophie." [mijn nadruk] (187)

"The first stage in the Darwinian revolution cannot be explained as a simple process in which the objective evidence for evolution convinced all scientists that the theory was correct. Evidence for and against evolution or natural selection was evaluated differently by scientists from different backgrounds, and some were more effective than others at promoting their position." [mijn nadruk] (188)

[Wat uiteraard normaal is in het wetenschappelijke proces.]

"Fossil discoveries sometimes revealed the missing links in hypothetical evolutionary genealogies. Although Darwin himself was reluctant to engage in such speculations, his more enthusiastic followers could not wait to begin a complete reconstruction of the development of life on earth, even where no fossils were available."(190)

"To the opponents of evolution, the apparent gaps in the record were genuine evidence for the miraculous origin of new forms. They insisted that all the intermediate stages predicted by evolutionists ought to be visible among the known fossils. The fossil record thus became a vital area of debate despite Darwin’s efforts to sideline the issue. Some crucial fossil links were discovered just in time to influence the debate. Many gaps were left unfilled, but the opponents of evolution were put on the defensive because they could never predict what new discoveries might turn up."(190)

"Haeckel created the wave of enthusiasm for the theory that the embryological development of the individual organism (ontogeny) recapitulates the evolutionary ancestry of its species (phylogeny)."(191)

"By the 1870s most biologists were convinced that evolution did occur, but distrusted Darwin’s claim that natural selection was the chief cause."(196)

"The disagreements between Darwin and Wallace always took place in a friendly atmosphere, but there were other scientists determined to reject natural selection altogether. Their opposition to the selection theory was often motivated by religious or moral objections to the idea that competition weeded out the poorly adapted products of random variation. But this does not mean their objections can be dismissed as expressions of mere prejudice, and in some cases the critics identified genuine weaknesses in the way Darwin had formulated his ideas."(197)

"Opponents who demanded absolute proof and then dismissed the theory as speculation because their standards of proof could not be met were adopting an oversimplified view of the scientific method."(197)

"An equally persistent line of objection centered on the internal working of the selection mechanism. Darwin’s theory of heredity shared the conven- tional view of the time that the characters of the two parents would be blended in the offspring—if their hair color, for instance, was different, the offspring would have hair of an intermediate shade."(199)

"It may seem odd that an engineer like Jenkin should attack Darwin’s theory, but Jenkin was in touch with the leading physicist of the day, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), who was disturbed by the implications of Darwinism. Kelvin did not oppose evolution, but he rejected any materialistic application of the idea and shared the view that something more purposeful than natural selection must be involved."(201)

"Surprising as it may seem in today’s world of revived biblical literalism, there was little opposition to Darwin’s book on the grounds that it challenged the Genesis account of creation. The geological controversies in the early decades of the century had convinced most educated people that the text of Genesis must be understood in a nonliteral way that would be consistent with the development of the earth over a vast period of time. The challenge of Darwinism was that it turned nature into an amoral chaos showing no evidence of design by a creator. The argument from design was central to the pre-Darwinian worldview, at least in the English-speaking world, and its defense was a leading theme in the debates of the 1860s." [mijn nadruk] (202)

"Most of those who worked for compromise tried to evade the more materialistic implications of Darwinism so that evolution could be seen as a purposeful process (Elder 1996)."(203)

"These arguments illustrate the difficulty that many scientists—to say nothing of religious thinkers—had in accepting Darwin’s completely naturalistic theory. Theistic evolutionism was a halfway house which tried to admit evolution and the rule of natural law while retaining the hope that the laws were directed by a supernatural intelligence which provided visible proofs of its activity." [mijn nadruk] (205)

"Was there any hope of seeing natural selection as the expression of divine purpose? The most notable effort to incorporate Darwinism into the teleological viewpoint came from Asa Gray, a deeply religious man who felt it necessary to show that his acceptance of Darwinism did not threaten his faith (Dupree 1959; and more generally, Persons 1956). Gray’s collected essays (1876) offered scientific support for Darwin’s theory but also sought to defend it against the charge that natural selection implied atheism because it negated the argument from design. Natural selection explained adaptation by law rather than by miracle, and the theist always has assumed that the laws of nature are expressions of God’s will. No one accused Newton of atheism because he showed that the planets are maintained in their orbits by natural law, so why should anyone accuse Darwin for showing that species are maintained in a state of adaptation by an equivalent process?" [mijn nadruk] (205)

"The scientific community eventually realized that the kind of open invocation of God’s designing hand reflected in the writings of Gray and Argyll was unacceptable. Lamarckism and other non-Darwinian theories began to gain ground in the later decades of the century precisely because they provided mechanisms of evolution which seemed more compatible with the belief that they had been instituted by a divine lawgiver." [mijn nadruk] (207)

"Darwin knew that the application of his theory to human origins would be its most controversial aspect. The reaction to Chambers’s Vestiges had confirmed the strength of conservative opinion on this issue and ensured that everyone was aware of the materialist implications of evolutionism. To avoid further inflaming the controversy, Darwin decided not to deal with the emergence of humans in the Origin. (...) The question of human evolution almost immediately became central to the debate, even though Darwin himself did not publish his views until he brought out The Descent of Man (1871)." [mijn nadruk] (207)

"The problem arose from evolution’s challenge to the traditional view of the status of humanity’s mental and moral qualities. These always had been assigned to the spiritual world as characteristics of the soul, not the body. Christians had assumed that animals had no spiritual faculties, so there was a complete gulf between the animal and human kingdoms. Evolution would bridge this gulf and imply that all human characters are parts of nature, subject to natural law. To preserve the uniqueness of humankind, evolution would have to be rejected outright or qualified by the assumption that something very special, and presumably of supernatural origin, had happened on the one branch of evolution leading toward humans. Alternatively, the human situation would have to be reassessed so that the meaning for our lives came from our position at the head of the panorama of evolutionary progress. For this to be plausible, evolution had to be presented as an essentially purposeful process. Darwin and the evolutionists also had to explain how nature had generated the higher faculties of the human mind (R. Richards 1987)." [mijn nadruk] (207-208)

"Brain size and intelligence would have had to expand very slowly beyond the ape level, and at some point in this process the purely human attributes of material technology, language, and culture would have begun to emerge. The archaeological discoveries confirmed not only the vast span of human history but also the primitive level of ancient technology."(211)

"Evolutionism thus contributed to a growing sense of racial superiority among whites, in which other races were perceived as relics of earlier stages in human evolution. In effect, modern “primitives” became a model for the missing link—indeed, it was almost as though the link were not missing at all, because it was preserved by these living fossils even though the actual fossils were not available." [mijn nadruk] (211)

"Darwin realized that he had to minimize the alleged gulf between human and animal mental faculties. He tried to show that the differences were only in degree, not in kind: there were no totally unique human characters because all were possessed to at least some slight extent by the higher animals.(...)
Darwin went too far in his desire to “humanize” animal behavior. He accepted unverified travelers’ tales which exaggerated animals’ intelligence and foresight and their capacity for cooperation and unselfishness."(212)

"A more serious problem for the theological critics was the origin of the moral faculties. Darwin argued that moral values were merely the intellectual expression of social instincts implanted in us by evolution because our ancestors lived in social groups."(213-214)

"None of this convinced the skeptics, who claimed that human moral faculties were completely different from anything possessed by even the higher animals. Some of those who accepted the basic idea of evolution for the human body nevertheless thought that something quite exceptional must have happened to create the human mind. The critics maximized the gulf between animal and human mental powers and insisted that we had unique faculties that could not be seen as extensions of animal mental powers." [mijn nadruk] (214-215)

"Even some of Darwin’s closest supporters could not go the whole way with him on this issue. In his Antiquity of Man (1863), Lyell accepted a progressionist view of the fossil record and conceded some plausibility to Darwin’s theory, but he speculated that the human species could have been formed by a sudden leap that introduced a new level of awareness into the world. He had long been disturbed by the possibility that evolutionism would destroy the status of humankind, and was now able to accept the basic idea of evolution only with this exception (Bartholomew 1973). Darwin wrote that this part of Lyell’s book made him “groan”—he could see no point in making the origin of humanity a separate issue." [mijn nadruk] (215)

"Working-class radicals had long been atheists and materialists and had used Lamarckian evolutionism to discredit the traditional worldview. But they called for outright revolution, which was anathema to the successful middle classes who wanted to enjoy the fruits of their newfound prosperity and thus favored steady reform. This latter group made Darwinism its own, thereby associating the theory with an ideology which preserved a role for the elite. What had changed was that the elite was now expected to demonstrate its superior ability in order to confirm its position as the guardian of progress." [mijn nadruk] (217)

"Huxley was active in promoting what his opponents claimed was a materialistic view of the mind. Animals were merely automata, complex robots, and even humans were subject to the same mechanistic laws of physiology. The conscious mind was an epiphenomenon, a by-product of the brain’s activity with no power to alter the mechanistic operations of nature." [mijn nadruk] (219)

[Toen dus al een opvatting die uitgedragen werd. Interessant, die T.H. Huxley. Hierna wordt Herbert Spencer besproken.]

"Spencer had published an article in favor of Lamarckism as early as 1852 and his Principles of Psychology of 1855 invoked Lamarckism to explain how the faculties of the mind were constructed and modified. He accepted the theory of natural selection when Darwin published it, and he coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” (Paul 1988). Throughout the rest of his career, Spencer invoked both selection and Lamarckism."(221)

"Spencer’s popular reputation derived from his association of his philosophy with the ideology of free-enterprise capitalism. His Social Statics of 1851 had attacked the idea that the state could play any useful role in promoting the well-being of individuals—everything should be left to the individuals themselves, who must sort out their social interactions in terms of their own self-interest. It is this aspect of his thought, coupled with his introduction of the phrase “survival of the fittest,” that led a later generation to dub Spencer a social Darwinist, although the Lamarckian element in his thought renders this attribution problematic (see chap. 8). Spencer still thought of himself as a moral philosopher, even though his critics accused him of rejecting the whole tradition of morality which had underpinned Christian society. In one sense the critics were right: for Spencer, whatever is successful is good. The world determines what our morality should be, not a conscience reflecting eternal moral values. Yet neither Darwin nor Spencer saw their ideas as promoting ruthlessness or immorality. Darwin protested when a newspaper described his theory as justifying the actions of Napoleon or tradesmen who cheat. Spencer accepted that people cooperate and thus subdue their own short-term interests for the benefit of living in an orderly society. He also accepted that sympathy was an important human emotion, and that individual (though not state-funded) charity was a legitimate response to the genuine misfortune of others. More seriously, his social philosophy was intended to promote the virtues of thrift, self-reliance, and initiative. These are very much the virtues of the old Protestant work ethic, and as James Moore (1985b) argues, some liberal Christians were able to see themselves as Spencerians because of this." [mijn nadruk] (221-222)

[Een genuanceerde positie dus? Een liberaal met een geweten? ]

"A key feature of Spencer’s thinking was his assumption that the same laws of evolution govern both the biological process by which humans have been created and the emergence and development of society. For him, the evolution of the mind and the evolution of society went hand in hand."(222)

[En dat is een kolossale denkfout met enorme gevolgen. ]

(224) 7 - The Eclipse of Darwinism - Scientific Evolutionism, 1875–1925

"Biologists reluctant to concede that evolution is a haphazard, trial-and-error process preferred to believe that development is predisposed to advance in purposeful or orderly directions. The anti-Darwinian movement thus exploited themes pioneered in the theistic evolutionism of earlier naturalists such as Mivart. Some non-Darwinian theories were derived from the recapitulation theory, in which the course of evolution was modeled on the embryological development of the individual organism."(225)

[Volgen allerlei zijwegen en opvattingen die ik zelf niet zo interessant vind, maar die inderdaad in een historisch overzicht als dit thuishoren. Bowler laat overtuigend zien dat de historische ontwikkeling van de evolutietheorie een ontzettend complexe zaak was. Veel over het neo-lamarckisme. Over Lysenko:]

"More generally, historians of science have begun to recognize that genetics itself was not a totally value-free science, so the hostility of Marxist thinkers may not have been altogether misplaced (Sapp 1987). It has also been noted that, whatever Lysenko’s later excesses, his early work was in line with the kind of neo- Lamarckian work still going on in countries where genetics had not led to a hard-line determinist viewpoint (Roll-Hansen 1985). The episode certainly illustrates the dangers of allowing demagogues to impose their theories on the scientific community. But it should not lead us to suppose that modern Western science is value-neutral in ideological terms."(247)

[Dat lijkt me een evenwichtig oordeel. ]

"Weismann’s concept of the germ plasm made Lamarckism impossible. Since the body merely transmitted its germ plasm to the next generation, and did not actually produce it, there was no way that changes in the body due to use or disuse could be reflected in the process of heredity. Weismann dismissed the popular belief to the contrary as mere superstition. For him, variation within a population was due solely to the recombination of determinants as they were shuffled by sexual reproduction. Natural selection was the only possible mechanism of evolution, because it could favor those determinants responsible for producing useful structures and suppress those that were harmful. New variations could be produced only if the determinants’ structure was distorted by an accident of duplication at the cellular level."(255)

"In conclusion, however, it is important to note that the geneticists’ growing consensus in favor of nuclear preformationism and natural selection was confined to Britain and America. In continental Europe, genetics did not develop such a hard-line stance against Lamarckism and other non-Darwinian mechanisms."(272)

"The emergence of the modern Darwinian synthesis was very much a product of the way science was institutionalized in the English-speaking world, and we should be careful not to assume that it was typical of how genetics or evolution theory developed across the whole scientific community." [mijn nadruk] (273)

(274) 8 - Evolution, Society, and Culture, 1875–1925

"By 1875 the majority of educated people in Europe and America had accepted evolution. Even religious thinkers were now trying to come to terms with the prospect of a natural origin for humanity. Opponents of religion openly rejoiced at the prospect of replacing ancient superstition with a philosophy based on a scientific understanding of human nature. Across the spectrum of theological, philosophical, and political thought, the idea of evolution exerted a powerful effect on the imagination. This was an age where everything would be transformed by the idea that humanity was the product of a natural process that had operated long before we actually appeared on the earth. Themes of evolution, progress, and struggle permeated even the literature of the period, although most writers had only the vaguest understanding of the Darwinian theory (Beer 1983; Bender 1996; Carroll 1995; Henkin 1963; G. Levine 1988; Morton 1984)." [mijn nadruk] (274)

"Our perception of this period is distorted by popular images of a rampant social Darwinism in which, it is alleged, all moral standards were abandoned. People were taught that only material success mattered. But if the most materialistic form of evolutionism was not accepted by the scientists, why should we assume that the whole age was mesmerized by the implications attributed to that theory by its opponents? In fact, the story of evolutionism’s cultural impact is a good deal more complicated than implied by the simple model of a transition from natural theology to ruthless social Darwinism." [mijn nadruk] (274)

"Our vision of the whole Darwinian revolution has been skewed by the fact that the evolutionary movement became known as Darwinism even though the theory of natural selection was not widely accepted. What we call Darwinism today—a reliance on natural selection as the sole mecha- nism of change—corresponds to the neo-Darwinism of late-nineteenth-century biology, which was highly controversial at the time. It is all too easy for a historian unfamiliar with the range of evolution theories then available to be misled into thinking that the Darwinism of the late nineteenth century is the Darwinism of today." [mijn nadruk] (275)

"Another source of misunderstanding is the ease with which anyone unfamiliar with the detailed theory of natural selection may confuse it with some of the alternatives. Darwin has been so closely associated with the idea of the struggle for existence that any theory evoking struggle is automatically assumed to be Darwinian."(275)

"The dominant theme of late-nineteenth-century thought was progress, and evolutionism became popular because it was perceived as a scientific expression of this broader principle. But the concept of progress itself could exist in different, and to some extent contradictory, forms. (...) industrialists and entrepreneurs demanded political power consistent with their newly earned wealth. The latter were likely to endorse a philosophy of progress which made their demands seem no more than acceptance of the next step in an inevitable advance. Other groups were less sure of the benefits of progress and less willing to endorse a philosophy in which economic success was the only measure of development." [mijn nadruk] (275-276)

"As the industrial revolution gave way to the age of imperialism, new expressions of the idea of progress manifested themselves as white people sought means of justifying their domination of the “less advanced” branches of the human stock. And the possibility that progress was not uniform but included occasional episodes of degeneration also began to loom larger in the minds"(276)

[Eigenlijk is de Industriële Revolutie al een vorm van imperialisme naar de eigen werkende bevolking. ]

"The simplest model of progress is based on a “ladder”: the advance is defined in terms of a linear hierarchy.(...) Such a model presupposes that development moves in a certain direction, and there is little incentive to inquire about the mechanism generating the advance. The linear model is almost teleological in its willingness to depict the advance as preordained."(276)

"By the early twentieth century, the progressionist consensus which had dominated late-nineteenth-century thought was becoming fragmented. However complex the process of biological evolution, psychologists and anthropologists now began to doubt that the human mind and its achievements could be explained as consequences of a universal evolutionary process which had begun with the origin of life itself. A more relativistic view of the different human races and cultures emerged, one no longer based on the assumption that the Western pattern was superior. Some now doubted the idea of progress altogether, especially when the Great War revealed the depths to which supposedly civilized peoples could descend." [mijn nadruk] (277)

"This chapter surveys the impact of evolutionism in three broad areas. First comes the subject of human origins: what does biology tell us about our ancestry, and how can the idea of evolution be used to help us understand the development of the mind, of society, and of culture? Here the study of hominid fossils interacted with prehistoric archaeology and anthropology. While anthropologists looked for remnants of the earliest forms of human society, evolutionary psychologists tried to define the hierarchy by which new mental functions were added in the rise from animal to human. These issues lead naturally into the second broad area: the impact of evolutionism on social thought. If social Darwinism is a problematic concept, we must explore the rival ways in which models of social evolution were used to defend new ideologies. Race became an important biological concept, with evolutionism being called in to justify existing prejudices about the hierarchy of human types. By the early twentieth century, the claim that human nature is rigidly fixed by heredity was becoming an important part of social policy as the eugenics movement called for limits on the breeding of the “unfit.” Finally, we look at the influence of evolutionism on philosophy and religion. The debates of the 1860s on the theological implications of evolution died down in the later part of the century because so many modes of thought took it for granted that the world was the product of a progressive and purposeful development. But the gulf separating the traditional and the modern viewpoints was to some extent papered over rather than confronted, and the emergence of a fundamentalist opposition to evolution in the 1920s symbolized the underlying tensions." [mijn nadruk] (277)

Verschillende voorlopers - zoals Neanderthalers - van de mens worden besproken. Er waren verhitte discussies over die kwestie van de 'missing link' omdat de overgang van aap naar mens gevoelig lag.

"The popularity of the Asian theory of human origins helps to explain the initially negative reaction to what was subsequently accepted as a far more significant find. Raymond Dart discovered a juvenile hominid skull at Taungs, South Africa, in 1924, which he named Australopithecus africanus. Dart saw evidence from the skull that this creature had walked fully upright, yet the brain was scarcely larger than an ape’s. His claim that it was the true ancestor of humankind was rejected because all eyes were focused on Asia, and no one expected the line of human ancestry to have achieved bipedalism so early. In fact, Dart had confirmed Darwin’s hypothesis that the key breakthrough defining the human family was the acquisition of an upright posture, with the enlargement of the brain coming later. But at the time, no one was prepared to admit the possibility that an adaptive transformation could have played so vital a role, because everyone was obsessed with the belief that the drive to gain greater intelligence was the motivating force. Dart’s views were treated with skepticism until further discoveries of australopithecines by Robert Broom in the late 1930s confirmed that this early hominid type was indeed bipedal. The australopithecines’ significance as the founders of the human family was not admitted until the 1950s, when the modern Darwinian synthesis highlighted the crucial role of adaptation and exposed the hidden teleology of the assumption that an increase in brain size was the central driving force of evolution." [mijn nadruk] (284)

[Zo zie je maar weer dat wetenschap en waardenvrijheid niet altijd zo simpel liggen. ]

"Anthropologists looking at “savage” cultures in Africa and Australia saw their level of technology as parallel with that of Stone Age cultures, and thus used these peoples as models for the early stages of human evolution. Since the explorers of the Victorian era routinely pictured the peoples they encountered as mentally and morally less advanced than themselves, an image of humanity evolving from a level of savagery equivalent to that of the most despised living peoples was established. The resulting developmental model of mental and cultural evolution postulated a linear hierarchy of stages leading up to the level of modern Europeans." [mijn nadruk] (285)

[Hoe dom en arrogant.]

"The decision to treat savage peoples as though they were mentally and morally inferior to Europeans was also inspired by the evolutionism of Herbert Spencer (Duncan 1911; J. Greene 1959b; Kennedy 1978; Peel 1971)."(287)

"Sociology thus concurred with anthropology in recognizing an evolutionary hierarchy of social and cultural levels. Both used biology to explain why races which advanced to higher levels of social organization did so by increasing their mental powers. Liberal thinkers who insisted that all humans had the same level of mentality, whatever their culture, were now on the defensive against the prevailing image of a racial hierarchy created by the combination of biological and cultural evolutionism. The linear progressionism of this social evolutionism was related more to a developmental, Lamarckian view of biology than to Darwinism." [mijn nadruk] (287)

"Evolution might have shaped the human mind, but in so doing it had created something capable of transcending all the dictates of its biological origin (Cravens 1978; Greenwood 1984; Harris 1968; Hatch 1973; Ingold 1987). In Europe, scholars such as Max Weber and Émile Durkheim began to treat each society or culture as a functioning whole which cannot be evaluated by the standards of any other. The assumption that the rational structure of the mind drives cultural change in a fixed direction was rejected, and along with it went the need to rank all societies into a linear hierarchy with Europeans at the top."(288)

[Dat laatste idee heeft dus een heel andere insteek dan de opvatting die ervoor beschreven werd.]

"When Boas’s student Margaret Mead returned from Samoa to proclaim that the “adolescent trauma” which plagued Western teenagers was unknown in the sexually relaxed atmosphere of the South Seas, her message that biology placed no restrictions on behavior was popularized throughout the English-speaking world ..." [mijn nadruk] (288-289)

"Evolutionary psychology rested on an attempt to draw up a phylogeny of the mind, a reconstruction of the steps by which the ladder of mental ability had been ascended through the animal kingdom up to the modern human level." [mijn nadruk] (290)

"This developmental approach to psychology began to break down in the last years of the nineteenth century."(290)

[Het gaat hier dus om een geheel andere evolutionaire psychologie dan die van de laatste decennia. Daarna krijgen we behaviorisme bijvoorbeeld.]

"The classic and much-maligned concept of social Darwinism is the assumption that struggle is the motor of progress, spurring on development and weeding out those who do not keep up. But social Darwinism could be expressed in many forms: beginning as a link between freeenterprise capitalism and the Darwinian theory of individual competition, the ideology of progress through struggle was increasingly transferred to the level of national or even racial competition. Nor was Darwin’s theory the only way of forging a link between biology and social thought." [mijn nadruk] (297)

"The area where evolutionism impinged most obviously on social thought was the implication that there might be a struggle for existence among individuals, nations, or races. This points us toward the controversial topic of social Darwinism, the use of the Darwinian notion of struggle to justify social policies in which there was little sympathy toward those who could not support themselves." [mijn nadruk] (298)

"Darwin’s liberalism was a long way short of the ruthless individualism worshiped by some successful industrialists (G. Jones 1980). He certainly wanted to restrict the powers of the landed aristocracy, who, he believed, had no hereditary right to rule. But he accepted that there was a natural aristocracy of talent which should have the freedom to rise to the top in every generation."(300)

"The more ruthless form of individualism is usually associated with the name of Herbert Spencer, although as R. J. Richards (1987) and other have argued, Spencer—like Darwin—would have been horrified at the thought that his philosophy was being used to undermine moral values. His Synthetic Philosophy became the most broadly articulated version of the progressionist philosophy into which Darwinism was received. Spencer accepted natural selection as an important mechanism of biological evolution, and he coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.” He was also an exponent of an extreme laissez-faire individualism, seeing the struggle between individuals jockeying for position as the driving force of social progress (Kennedy 1978; Peel 1971; Taylor 1992). His ideas were welcomed with enthusiasm by the robber barons who masterminded the development of American industry in the late nineteenth century. It is easy, then, to see why Hofstadter should take Spencer as the archetypical social Darwinist, responsible for transmitting this harsh philosophy of progress through struggle across the Atlantic. Spencer’s opposition to socialism was based on the assumption that state support for the poor would encourage them to be idle. In his later life he came to place increasing emphasis on the fear that a statefunded welfare system would permit an ever greater number of “unfit” people to survive and breed, thereby undermining social progress (see his 1884 book The Man versus the State, reprinted in 1969). But Spencer was a biological Lamarckian, and an equally important aspect of his support for free enterprise was his belief that competition would stimulate individuals to improve themselves.The aim was not so much to eliminate the unfit as to make everyone fitter, and in this sense Spencer’s ideology endorsed the Victorian sense of the need for personal development articulated in Samuel Smiles’s classic book, Self-Help (1859; see also Jarvis 1997). Since the acquired improvements were supposed to be transmitted to future generations, this was more social Lamarckism than social Darwinism. But because struggle was seen as the spur to progress, the Lamarckian element has gone largely unnoticed by later writers. The emphasis on the virtues of thrift, industry, and initiative was an attempt to revise the old Protestant work ethic, and for this reason Spencer’s apparently agnostic philosophy was welcomed by some liberal religious thinkers (Moore 1985a)." [mijn nadruk] (301)

"Leading American industrialists also claimed that Spencer’s philosophy justified their own enthusiasm for unrestricted competition. Andrew Carnegie became his avowed disciple, while John D. Rockefeller and the railway magnate James J. Hill used the phrase “survival of the fittest” to endorse the capitalist system. In their view, the fact that the most successful firm drove its competitors into bankruptcy simply allowed the most efficient producer to dominate the market, thereby ensuring economic progress."(302)

"The analogy between commercial competition and natural selection is so vague as to be virtually meaningless, because the inheritance of wealth does not correspond to the inheritance of biological qualities." [mijn nadruk] (302)

"Many now began to claim that the domination of one race or nation over another was a natural part of the process by which the human species had advanced. Darwinism implied that species and races must compete for territory."(303)

"Paleoanthropologists such as Arthur Keith compared the extinction of the Neanderthals with what was happening to the natives of America and Australia—and saw these replacements as essential to human progress. In this respect, at least, the Nazi theory of Aryan supremacy was not significantly different from the form of racial Darwinism prevalent among many scientists in the early twentieth century"(303)

[Brr ... ]

"In America—where there was a much greater flow of immigrants from both Europe and the Far East—the threat that the biological character of the white race might be undermined by faster-breeding but intellectually inferior races became a major concern. Race thus played a role in the emergence of the eugenics movement (see below). The assumption that a race’s superior mental abilities guaranteed its success had seemed natural in the age of imperialist expansion, but the more pessimistic worldview of the early twentieth century acknowledged that the rate of reproduction might be far more important in the long run. Europeans were convinced of their superiority over other races, but there were major rivalries among the European nations themselves." [mijn nadruk] (304)

"In France, too, competition between nations was assumed to be the most obvious social extension of Darwinism (L. Clarke 1984). In Germany, however, the nationalist form of social Darwinism became more explicit."(305)

"The views expressed by Haeckel were typical of many contemporary right-wing intellectuals, not all of whom were influenced by Darwinism, although they may have exploited the metaphors provided by the selection theory. Significantly, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche—who gained notoriety for his proclamation of a new morality based on “might is right”—repudiated any link with the Darwinian theory in biology (Bannister 1979; Call 1998). Nevertheless, many British and American biologists were worried that Darwinism’s name had been tainted by its association with German militarism. The American biologist Vernon Kellogg visited the German army occupying Belgium in the early part of World War I and reported that the officer corps was pervaded by the ideology of nationalist social Darwinism. For this reason, some biologists were encouraged to persevere with the non-Darwinian theories promoted during the “eclipse of Darwinism” (Mitman 1990)." [mijn nadruk] (305)

"Darwin’s theory has acquired a reputation for promoting ruthless social attitudes. But the use of Darwinian catchphrases such as “the survival of the fittest” by a variety of right-wing thinkers creates an exaggerated sense of the theory’s influence and conceals the fact that many had only the vaguest understanding of science."(305)

[Tja, zo gaat dat helaas. De term 'the fittest' zelf is al zo vaag en waardengeladen als maar kan. De meest geschikte, de meest aangepaste, al gauw vertaald als 'de sterkste'. Ook een woord als 'struggle', strijd om het bestaan of wat ook is vreselijk normatief. Mensen pikken een kreet op en doen ermee wat hun goed uitkomt. Opvallend bijvoorbeeld dat ze altijd zichzelf of hun eigen 'ras' of 'land' als superieur ('the fittest') zien. Zelfkritiek ontbreekt. Uiteraard heeft dat met waarden en normen te maken, met normatieve irrationaliteit, en helemaal niets met de natuurlijke selectie - mechanismen op biologisch niveau waarover Darwin het had. ]

"It is sometimes implied that Darwinism was associated with the philosophy of Karl Marx (e.g., Barzun 1958), and at one time it was believed that Marx had offered to dedicate a volume of his Capital to Darwin. Marx and Engels certainly welcomed evolution theory because of its support for a materialist view of human nature. But they also realized from the start that there was an analogy between natural selection and the capitalist system of economic competition, and so were suspicious of Darwin’s theory. Marx’s concept of class struggle has different roots lying in Hegel’s idealism—in the clash and synthesis of coherent social entities reflecting the stages of social evolution rather than competition between individuals or tribes (Heyer 1982). We now know that the claim that Marx offered to dedicate his book to Darwin was based on a misunderstanding of the relevant correspondence (Colp 1974, 1982; Fay 1978; Feuer 1975; on Marx and Darwin, see Pancaldi 1994). In the twentieth century, Soviet communism was always hostile to the Darwinian theory, and Lamarckian theories such as Lysenko’s flourished in Soviet Russia." [mijn nadruk] (306)

[Logisch, vind ik, als je ziet hoe het Darwinisme misbruikt werd door de kapitalisten.]

"Faith in the idea of progress, central to any form of social Darwinism, was now beginning to crumble as late-nineteenth-century thinkers realized that industrial civilization was a mixed blessing."(307)

"One response to this more pessimistic view of social evolution was the eugenics movement, which called for governments to impose a breeding program on the human race. In an age of increasing reliance on management by experts, why not let the experts on heredity determine who should have children and who should not? (...) Far from natural selection weeding out the unfit, in a civilized society it was the unfit who produced most of the next generation. Darwin himself had worried about this, and by the end of the century the eugenics movement was openly pleading for a policy of artificial selection applied to the human race." [mijn nadruk] (307-308)

"Eugenics typified the increasingly popular ideology of genetic determinism, the claim that a person’s character and abilities were predetermined at birth by the power of inheritance. (...) But the fully developed eugenics of the early twentieth century insisted that even within the race, individual character was biologically predetermined. All too often, it turned out that when the expected differences were mapped onto the social classes, the poor class contained the larger proportion of unfit individuals." [mijn nadruk] (308)

[Ook dat is typisch en gewoon weer machtspolitiek van de middenklasse en hogere klasse.]

"In the great debate over whether nature or nurture determined a person’s abilities, eugenics was firmly on the side of nature (Pastore 1949). Once this point was accepted, the policy of selective breeding could be supported without reference to evolution theory. It did not matter where the bad genes came from, if they existed, they should be prevented from reproducing."(309)

[Maar zelfs dan zeg je in feite dat je determinerende factoren in een bepaalde richting stuurt. Hoe tegenstrijdig is dát? Je bent zogenaamd determinist maar jij kiest ervoor om etc. etc. op basis van allerlei ondoordachte normatieve uitgangspunten uiteraard.]

"With the emergence of genetics, however, the logic of hereditary determinism took on a life of its own, supported by various social groups with an interest in arguing that expensive reforms benefiting the poor were a waste of money (for general surveys, see G.Allen 1975b, 1976; Bajema 1977; Blacker 1952; Bowler 1989b; Farrall 1979; Kevles 1985; Roll-Hansen 1988). Some have argued that eugenics was essentially a movement of the professional middle classes, who were convinced of their own high qualities and worried that state-sponsored reform programs would require high taxation. It was popular among those who wanted a well-managed society with themselves as the managers (Semmel 1960)." [mijn nadruk] (309)

"In the early years of the new century, the eugenics movement finally expanded to become a serious lobby group seeking to change government policy. The Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 was eventually passed by Parliament, ensuring in theory that those diagnosed as having low intelligence would be institutionalized and prevented from bearing children. Galton was the figurehead for the movement ..."(310)

"In America too, eugenics flourished in the early twentieth century (M. Haller 1963; Ludmerer 1972; Pickens 1968). The American Breeders Association, a Mendelian group, set up a Eugenics Committee in 1906, and in 1910 the Eugenics Records Office was founded (G. Allen 1986). Efforts were made to trace the alleged hereditary taints of insanity, feeblemindedness, and immoral behavior through generations of poor families. Thanks to constant lobbying, a number of states set up programs requiring the compulsory sterilization of the mentally handicapped. One side effect of the movement was the support it provided for the development of intelligence tests that would simplify the identification of the feebleminded (Evans and Waites 1981; Gould 1981)" [mijn nadruk] (310-311)

[Zo normatief allemaal. En zo klassegebonden.]

"A well-established eugenics program existed in Germany long before the Nazis came to power in 1933 (Weindling 1989b; Weingart 1989; Weiss 1986, 1988), although the Nazis certainly applied far more extreme methods to sterilize and ultimately to liquidate the “unfit” (Harmsen 1955)"(311)

"In America, however, race became a central theme of eugenic concern. Given the large number of freed black slaves and the ever-increasing flood of immigrants from eastern Europe and Asia, white Americans began to fear that the biological quality of their race would be contaminated by fast-breeding but inferior types. A host of writers harped on this theme and called for the influx of immigrants to be stopped (Burr 1922; Fairchild 1926; Grant 1918; Ross 1927). Their campaign was crowned by the passing of an Immigration Restriction Act in 1924. American eugenics thus concentrated on both the purification of the white race and the effort to prevent it from being contaminated by blending with genetically inferior types" [mijn nadruk] (312)

[Wat is er nieuw tegenwoordig?]

"By the late 1930s, all strands of biological determinism were coming under suspicion as the excesses of the previous decades came to a head in Nazi Germany. Biologists now recognized that few characters are controlled by single genes, while the difficulties created by the existence of recessive genes made the hope of purifying the human race seem an illusion in practical terms. More important, even those biologists who accepted the importance of genetics now conceded that environment was crucial too."(312)

"A parallel form of determinism focused on the question of gender; indeed, some of the arguments used to define women’s place in society were remarkably similar to those use by the race theorists. Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century biologists and social scientists, almost all of them men, were anxious to preserve a social order in which women occupied an inferior position. Invoking a biological foundation for the alleged inferiority of female intelligence, or for the assumption that women’s role as mothers made them unfit for an active life outside the home, was a natural tactic for these men to use." [mijn nadruk] (313)

[Nou, een 'natuurlijke' tactiek? Eerder een sociale, sociaal-psychologische tactiek.]

"But feminist writers have become increasingly sophisticated at detecting ways in which male prejudice seems to have influenced biological thinking, and there can be little doubt that most scientists in the post-Darwinian decades were certain that women were fated to play a subordinate role (Alaya 1977; Conway 1973; Duffin 1978; Haraway 1990; Russett 1989)
To some extent, evolutionism merely reinforced value judgments attributed to other scientific foundations. T. H. Huxley was not the only anatomist to insist that women’s brains were smaller or less convoluted than men’s, which was considered a sure sign of intellectual inferiority. Although professing himself a liberal, he campaigned actively to keep women out of the scientific and medical professions (E. Richards 1989b). But his distrust was based on other grounds too: like many of his contemporaries, Huxley believed that women were temperamentally unsuited to the rigors of intellectual, professional, and political life. This sense that the female temperament was predetermined by biology found many opportunities to express itself, not all within the context of Darwinism. Herbert Spencer maintained that the female sex had to devote most of its vital energies to reproduction, leaving less for intellectual development (significantly, he conserved his own reproductive energies and did not marry). Like other Lamarckians, he believed that one consequence of this would be the adaptation of the female moral sense to cherish family values rather than the sterner virtues needed to face the world outside the home. The sociologist Patrick Geddes and the biologist J. Arthur Thomson wrote their Evolution of Sex (1889) to argue that this fundamental difference of temperament was expressed at the cellular level and dated back to the very origins of sexual reproduction. On this model, if women insisted on trying to get an education or a career, they would undermine their femininity and lose the capacity to reproduce.
Darwin’s theory of sexual selection seems to reflect the tendency for male assumptions to become embedded in scientific thinking (Bender 1996; E. Richards 1983)."(313-314)

"The Lamarckian theory of the inheritance of acquired characters implied that a learned habit might eventually become an inherited instinct. Thus improvements made by better education and social conditioning might eventually become part of the race’s biological inheritance. Here was the potential for a social evolutionism which did not depend on the Darwinian struggle for existence." [mijn nadruk] (315)

"But apart from the fact that Lamarckism has turned out to be scientifically unsound, this position ignores the many cases from the historical record where Lamarckians enthusiastically promoted racism, sexism, and even an ideology of struggle. There is a reformist interpretation of Lamarckism, and it played an important role by providing an alternative to social Darwinism. But it was by no means the only social interpretation of the theory, and in the rush to identify Darwinism as the principal source of harsh social values, we all too easily overlook the extent to which the rival theory could be adapted to similar political ends. " [mijn nadruk] (315-316)

"But increasingly, people recognized that the trend toward progress might not be absolutely predetermined; evolution could advance in many possible ways, and our actions might decide which of the possibilities would be realized. Many liberal religious thinkers became comfortable with this view of things, content to assume that the human race had retained its dignity as a key step forward in achieving the divine purpose" [mijn nadruk] (318)

"Huxley’s scientific naturalism was repudiated by the new generation of analytical philosophers, but his cosmic pessimism seemed to resonate with the mood of the time."(319)

"In America, John Dewey (1910) argued that Darwinism undermined the hierarchical view of nature and showed us that we have the freedom to shape our own destiny. The concept of freedom was also important to pragmatists such as Charles Peirce and William James (Wiener 1949). They, too, saw that the lesson of Darwinism was its destruction of determinism. Nature was inherently creative, and the lack of constraints on evolution guaranteed the freedom of the individual will."(320)

[Er worden hier eindeloos veel opvattingen gepresenteerd. Historisch juist, maar wat moet ik er mee? De meeste trekken een lijn door van biologische evolutie met natuurlijke selectie naar de ontwikkeling van de samenleving met de 'survival of the fittest' in al zijn vage betekenissen die helemaal niet getrokken mag worden, vind ik. Darwin zou het niet begrepen hebben, vermoed ik.]

"Instead, all attention turned to the form of Protestant fundamentalism which emerged as the flagship for opposition to evolutionism. The most visible symbol of this campaign was the “monkey trial” of John Thomas Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925. In response to mounting concerns that evolutionism was undermining traditional Christianity, Tennessee had passed the Butler Act forbidding the teaching of the subject in its public schools."(324)

(325) 9 - The Evolutionary Synthesis

"But by the 1920s, the situation had begun to change in a direction few would have anticipated. Genetics steadily undermined the plausibility of Lamarckism and orthogenesis by showing that there was no process by which acquired characters could be incorporated into the fixed units of heredity. It also showed that mutations were not directed along any predetermined path. Variation was effectively random, as Darwin had supposed ..." [mijn nadruk] (325)

[Volgt weer een historische weergave van alle mogelijke variaties van opvattingen. ]

"Even the geneticists began to concede that selection by the environment might affect the degree to which a particular gene could spread within a population."(325)

"From these developments came a revived form of Darwinism which became known as the evolutionary, or modern, synthesis."(325)

"But as Mayr (1959c) claimed, both Fisher and Haldane worked with what has been called a “beanbag” approach to genetics. Each gene was seen as a fixed unit, and selection worked by adding and subtracting units from the gene pool of the whole population. Wright, who approached the problem with the interests of an animal breeder, recognized that genes were not discrete units because they could interact with each other to create a greater degree of variability, especially within smaller subpopulations where inbreeding was common."(328)

[ Een essentieel andere manier van kijken. ]

"What exactly had been achieved has been a subject of controversy ever since. The synthesis was certainly a revival of the selection theory and of a Darwinian perspective more generally. The major non-Darwinian mechanisms were eliminated, and the extent to which even a minor role for nonadaptive processes could be retained was disputed. " [mijn nadruk] (338)

"The wider influence of the revival of Darwinism was enhanced by a parallel development in another field: the study of the origin of life on earth. The early Darwinians had avoided linking their theory to the far more controversial issue of what was called spontaneous generation (Strick 2000). "(339)

(347) 10 - Modern Debates and Developments

"With the consolidation of the evolutionary synthesis in the 1950s, the field had at last come of age. The broad outline of the history of life on earth was now known, and although more details might be revealed by the fossil record, few surprises were expected. The acrimonious debates of the early twentieth century between a range of mutually incompatible theories had been resolved by a broad consensus based on a revived Darwinism. Natural selection was the basic mechanism of evolution, and biologists had to work out the details of how that mechanism operated to produce the diversity of species we observe. Humans were part of the story, of course, but even some biologists conceded that, in this case, progressive evolution had generated an entirely new level of mental activity." [mijn nadruk] (347)

[De vraag is alleen hoe. ]

"Refinements of the selection theory led to new applications suggesting that the focus of selection was not the individual organism but the gene itself. For the sociobiologists, fitness now had to be defined in terms of successful reproduction, not adaptive fitness." [mijn nadruk] (347)

"Most scientists see the debates as a sign of vitality indicating that they are still grappling with significant issues and trying to resolve their differences. But to anyone not actively engaged in scientific research, an admission that theories cannot be immediately verified looks like a sign of weakness. Religious thinkers, convinced that God created the world directly in its modern form, exploit any sign of dissent among scientists as evidence that the materialistic worldview has major flaws. In America, at least, creationism remains a major threat to research and teaching in evolution." [mijn nadruk] (348)

"But if the evidence for the catastrophes is clear, there seems to be no reason why a good Darwinian should be disturbed by the element of unpredictability they add to the story of evolution."(353)

"Much attention is still focused on the origin of the human species and the hominid family to which we belong. New fossil discoveries have thrown light on human evolution. But, to a surprising extent, the interpretation of the fossil record and of the significance of our higher faculties is contested by schools of thought reflecting divisions that arose a century or more ago. There are two chief areas of disagreement. One centers on the degree to which human faculties should be seen as a continuous development from characters already present in the higher animals. The original Darwinians tried to minimize the gulf to be bridged by stressing the extent to which animals already exhibit at least the rudiments of all the higher faculties. Their opponents often insisted that the human mind was unique, and that it represented a divine gift that could only have supernatural origins. Few modern scientists endorse the latter view, yet the idea that humans possess unique faculties has been remarkably tenacious, posing problems for the evolutionist seeking to explain how such innovations could have been produced by natural selection." [mijn nadruk] (353)

"Some modern theories accept that the human capacity for language is an evolutionary novelty requiring a significant restructuring of the brain by natural selection."(355)

"Sexual selection, still largely ignored in the 1950s, has become important for perhaps the first time since Darwin proposed the idea (Cronin 1991). With this shift of emphasis comes a different way of conceptualizing selection as a whole: what matters is not survival but reproduction, the successful transfer of genes to the next generation. Because survival seems essential to reproduction, the two processes are complementary rather than antagonistic; but to some ultra-Darwinians it is the reproductive competition which leads to the more interesting questions." [mijn nadruk] (358)

"To many religious thinkers, the radical materialism of Dawkins and Dennett encapsulates the most threatening implications of the Darwinian theory. There are also biologists who are by no means religious yet fear that gene selectionism produces an impoverished view of nature."(361)

"More fundamental challenges to modern evolutionism claim that it is an illegitimate form of scientific knowledge. Natural selection, critics claim, is a tautology, a play on words, not a genuine proposition with empirical consequences. Some philosophers of science have argued that evolutionary explanations of past events are not scientific because we cannot test them in the way laboratory scientists test their hypotheses. This challenge raises genuine questions about the scientific method. Evolutionists respond that to apply the methodology of physics to any historical science is to miss the point that an empirical study of such questions must adopt different standards. The situation is complicated by the fact that some biologists support the attack on evolutionism, not because they endorse creationism but because they feel that evolutionary relationships cannot be studied scientifically." [mijn nadruk] (369)

"The disagreements within the scientific community provide ammunition for those who would dismantle the whole edifice of a scientific approach to understanding the origin and development of life. Modern creationism feeds upon anything it can use to undermine public confidence in scientists’ efforts; and to a public conditioned to think of science as offering simple factual information, any sign of theoretical disagreement can be presented as evidence that evolutionism is not science at all. At the same time, creationists are adept at challenging the arguments used to support evolution, often by citing grossly oversimplified versions of those arguments. Scientists all too often find themselves enmeshed in an effort to explain precisely why the attacks are based on misrepresentation, only to find that they are then perceived as being on the defensive or as attempting to hide behind a cloud of technicalities." [mijn nadruk] (375)

"Whatever the limitations of the intelligent design movement as perceived by the majority of scientists who actually investigate origins, it has been remarkably successful in sustaining creationist views among educated Americans. Public protests against the teaching of evolution multiply, and in 1999, the Kansas State Board of Education voted to remove all references to evolution from the school curriculum (although the decision was subsequently reversed). The fact that the Kansas board also removed all references to the age of the earth and the big bang theory of cosmology makes it clear that, whatever the public rhetoric, the creationist movement is still being driven at the grassroots level by the young-earth position. Surveys suggest that about 35 percent of Americans accept the literal truth of the Genesis creation story"(378-379)