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Debating Darwin
By Robert J. Richards, Michael Ruse The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-38442-9
CHAPTER 1
Charles Darwin: Great Briton
Prologue
Charles Darwin was first and foremost a scientist, a very great scientist, who not only made scientifically plausible the idea of organic evolutionary change but who came up with natural selection, what today's professional scientists generally consider to be the chief motive force of such change. Yet from the first, as Darwin himself recognized, his thinking was always more than just about scientific explanations of the organisms occupying the physical world. His thinking pointed the way to a new or revived philosophical perspective on reality. A harsher, less-comfortable one than that he inherited. The popular-science writer and ardent atheist Richard Dawkins has written:
In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet A. E. Houseman put it:
For Nature, heartless, witless Nature
Will neither know nor care.
DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
As a staid and very respectable Victorian, Charles Darwin would have been horrified at the frenzied polemics that characterize the writings of the so-called New Atheists. Whatever his personal beliefs, he would never have flaunted his thinking in such a crude and public way. It is doubtful also whether Darwin ever reached quite the state of naturalistic nihilism expressed by Dawkins. Even if he took us all of the way, it is certainly not my claim that Darwin unaided took us to this new world. Internal issues in religion like so-called higher criticism (looking at the Bible as a human-written document) played a crucial role, as did social factors like the move from the land to the city demanding new ideologies for new types of existence. But Darwin's work pointed that way, and he knew it and pursued it. If like Moses and the Promised Land he never quite arrived, he beat the path toward it, consciously and intentionally. Darwin changed not just science; he changed philosophy also, and this is the world in which we now live.
Such is my claim in this, my section of this book. Moreover I argue that Darwin did all of this within a tradition on which he drew. A tradition that in many respects was quintessentially English, the land of his birth, but that was more broadly British, not only because Darwin was in part educated north of the border, but because Darwin always drew heavily on thinking that came from the so-called Scottish Enlightenment. In short, I argue that although Darwin was a great revolutionary — and I bow to no one in my belief that he made major advances in our understanding of the empirical world — he was not a rebel. He did not repudiate his past, hating and trying to destroy and eliminate that from whence he came. It was rather that he took what was offered and then rearranged and transformed the elements into an altogether new picture. Darwin's work was like a kaleidoscope. The pieces were there. Darwin shook them up and made something different. But where did the pieces come from that I claim were so important in Darwin's past? I argue — and here I would stress that I am being totally unoriginal and simply drawing on what one finds in any good textbook — that the Britain into which Darwin was born at the beginning of the nineteenth century had two major elements or themes or traditions. It was his good fortune to be able to draw on both elements and his genius to do with them what he did.
The one element is what we might with reason call the conservative element, the Tory side to Britain. This is the world of the king (George III and the Prince Regent, the future George IV) and of his supporters, political, military (including naval), and most of all clerical. It is the world of landowners, but usually not the biggest men. They were more the leaders in the villages that one finds in the novels of Anthony Trollope (although he was writing a little later), men like Wilfred Thorne, the squire of St. Ewold's in Barchester Towers. It is the world of the Church of England parson, the world (again in Barchester Towers) of Archdeacon Theophilus Grantly. And it is very much the world of England's two ancient universities, Oxford and Cambridge. The clerical world and the academic world were truly but one, for to graduate from the universities one had to be a paid-up, believing member of the Church of England and most of the teachers, the "dons," at Oxford and Cambridge had taken holy orders. To refer one more time to Trollope's great novel, remember that the man who becomes Dean of Barchester, Francis Arabin, is a fellow of Lazarus College (a thinly veiled portrait of Christchurch) and a sometime professor of poetry at Oxford.
The other element is what we might with equally good reason call the liberal element, the Whig side (after the Reform Bill of 1832 joined by the Radical side) to Britain. Their leaders were the great landowners, men like the Duke of Omnium in Trollope's political novels. Somewhat paradoxically, they were often joined by the bishops of the Church of England. Bishoprics are bestowed by the government of the day, sometime Whig or liberal. The politicians wanted supporters not the thanks of the village priests. The plot of Barchester Towers revolves around the fact that Archdeacon Grantly, firmly Tory, does not get to follow his father into the see of Barchester. The post goes instead to the Whig Bishop Proudie. The leaders of the Whigs were allied with the men of industry. Whereas the Tories inclined toward protectionism, looking to the interests of the rural leaders — the notorious Corn Laws enacted after the Napoleonic Wars were the epitome of such inclinations, designed as they were to keep high the value of homegrown grains — the Whigs inclined toward free trade, something that opened up markets for the products, initially and overwhelmingly cotton but later moving more toward manufactured goods in iron and nonferrous metals, flowing from the labors of those directed by the leaders of industry. There was often no conflict between the interests of the big landowners and the industrialists, because the former owned valuable coal and mineral deposits on which the ever-increasing number of factories very much depended.
I shall argue that both of these elements had beliefs and ideologies, secular and sacred, that spoke to their interests. I shall argue also that Darwin almost uniquely was in a position to draw on both sides and that he did. Darwin's genius may be a mystery — why should a young man of somewhat modest gifts (in areas like linguistic or mathematical abilities), who was born to a life of ease, end by doing so much? The influences from the culture in which he was reared, the sources on which he drew, are no mystery. They span the spectrum of ideas and beliefs that formed and molded the society into which he was born. And it was because of this that Darwin was set on his life's quest, one that transformed the life sciences and — as encapsulated in the quoted passage by Richard Dawkins — took us to the world of today, a world that many still resist but that in the end closes off the world of yesterday, the world into which Charles Darwin was born.
Britain before Darwin
The "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 saw the dethroning of the Catholic king, James II, and the accessions of his Protestant daughter and son-in-law, Mary II and William III. As importantly, it saw the real beginnings in Britain of "constitutional monarchy," where increasingly parliament had an effective voice in the running of the country. When James's Protestant daughters, Mary and then Anne, failed to produce heirs, the throne was handed over to the rather dull, but safely Protestant, German royal family from Hannover, whose dynasty lasted through the life of Charles Darwin, ending only with the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. Uninspiring though the family may have been, it ruled over a country that went at the beginning of the eighteenth century from the fringe of Europe to ending the nineteenth century as the greatest power that the world had ever seen, with a quarter of the globe colored red for the British Empire. No one single causal factor can be isolated for this growth, but a major factor was the freeing of the country from the autocratic power of monarchs whose chief interests would have been in preserving the structure of the society that had promoted them to the pinnacle. With others now having not just an interest in the fortunes of the country, but with real power and possibilities of molding things to their own ends, almost uniquely the country had reasons to promote stability and the chance to move forward in new directions. Combine this with massive increases in scientific knowledge in the seventeenth century, often geared to practical ends, and the unrivaled natural gifts of the land — ready supplies of fuel, an abundance of needed minerals, rivers and seas for easy transport, a temperate climate, and much more — and Britain was able to seize the chance and build that industrial land on which its future fortunes were to be based. Ours is a story about one part of that great and progressive change.
From Farm to Factory
If the metaphor of the Scientific Revolution is the timepiece — in the words of Robert Boyle, the world is "like a rare clock, such as may be that at Strasbourg, where all things are so skillfully contrived that the engine being once set a-moving, all things proceed according to the artificer's first design" — then the metaphor of the British Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century is the Newcomen engine (see figure 4). Making its first appearance in the second decade of the century, it transformed mining as it worked its steady pace to suck the water out of the tunnels far below and made possible ever-greater exploitation of the minerals and fuels there for the asking. One may question whether, as has been suggested, its feedback processes — heated steam expanding and then bringing on squirts of cold water and consequent condensation and contraction — are mirrored by the economy of the day — laissez-faire leading to overproduction, contraction, and ever-newer opportunities, all driving the country forward — whereas the never-deviating, endless motions of the clock mirrored the fixed and stifling rules of countries beneath the yokes of all-powerful monarchs. What is beyond question is that the engine and the many subsequent inventions — especially those that transformed the production of cotton — lay at the heart of the great changes that ran through almost every part of the British Isles.
Yet to focus first on industry is to get ahead of ourselves. Napoleon Bonaparte said that "an army marches on its stomach." The same can be said of countries, so let us start there. Britain, England particularly, saw major changes in agriculture and food production in the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth century. The amount produced increased hugely and at the same time the labor required stayed constant, to the extent even of freeing for other opportunities numbers who hitherto had had some connection with the land. There were several reasons for this, although whether cause or effect is often hard to discern. New crops were being introduced, notably clover and turnips. The latter particularly played a crucial role in enabling farmers to feed their livestock over winter without the need for annual mass slaughter at the end of the summer. Methods of livestock improvement were being discovered and refined. Above all it was realized that selective breeding was the key to success. With these changes, the social structure of rural Britain was being changed. To this point, people working on the land had followed rules and practices that reached back into medieval times, with small-holders tilling strips of land that rotated crops, with common land for grazing, and with woodlands for wood collecting and foraging. Now, land was being "enclosed," cut off from public ownership and made the property of individuals, and marginal members of society, who had before subsisted on traditional rights of gleaning and keeping a cow or two on common land and finding fuel in the woods, were either reduced to the roles of employed day laborers or encouraged to leave and move to the ever-growing towns and cities.
Increasingly work was becoming available in the urban centers, particularly the new towns and cities of the British Midlands and the North — Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Newcastle, and up into Scotland. Obviously this more industry-focused labor was not something that appeared overnight, but slowly and surely implements and machines were introduced at various stages of the process and as slowly but surely it became more and more efficient to collect workers all in one place and to impose on them the rules and restrictions of the modern workplace. The reasons for change and where and how it occurred were manifold and often complex, but one thing does stand out, namely, that increasingly fossil fuel was used to supplement or replace hand labor. In a word, coal. Its availability in Britain was perhaps the major factor in the move to industrialism and the amount mined grew almost exponentially in the century and a half beginning in 1700. The amount mined fueled the changes but at the same time demanded changes, especially in devising ever-more-efficient pumps to remove water from the ever-deeper shafts being dug. And there was a ripple effect. Carrying something like coal is far, far easier by water than by land, and so there was an improving of already-existing waterways and the digging of a network of new canals all over the country. Within a year (1761), a new canal (the Bridgewater) linking Manchester with a colliery a few miles outside the city dropped the price of coal by half.
The changes led to new patterns of everyday life and most particularly to an explosive growth in the population. Down on the farm, the younger generation basically had to wait until the older generation could no longer do the daily work. There was therefore strong incentive to postpone marriage and a family until one could take over and build a life for oneself. In the town or city, working in a factory, the highest wage period came early, and so there was much less reason for restraint. Essentially this meant that the childbearing time was longer and so families grew in size. The biology was reinforced by culture, because a lot of the new industries put a premium on the work of women and children, and thus a larger family equaled a more prosperous family.
Making Sense of Change
Naturally these changes attracted the attention of the theorists, and it is in this time that we see the birth of the science of political economy. Even today, the Scot Adam Smith (figure 2) commands respect. He was the theoretician of the factory and its functioning, introducing one of the all-time, best-known, and most powerful metaphors: "the division of labor," or "labour" as he spelled it. Taking the example of the manufacture of pins, Smith argued that a man working on his own, doing everything, would make but a few dozen, if that, a day. But divided into a team, with each doing his allotted task — grinding, polishing, and so forth — literally thousands a day can be produced. There is no magic to this. It is more efficient that each person perfect his or her own skill and do it time in and time out, passing on the semi-finished product to the next down the line until the whole job is finished. Smith was also keen on transport, especially by water. "Six or eight men ... by the help of water-carriage, can carry and bring back in the same time the same quantity of goods between London and Edinburgh, as fifty broad-wheeled waggons, attended by a hundred men, and drawn by four hundred horses."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Debating Darwin by Robert J. Richards, Michael Ruse. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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