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Originally published in 1986.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691633657 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #4796 |
| Pages: | 1152 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x (d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Darwinian Heritage
By David Kohn
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1985 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-08356-8
CHAPTER 1
Going The Limit: Toward the Construction of Darwin's Theory (1832-1839)
Howard E. Gruber
As a cognitive psychologist, my forays into the history of science have as their ultimate aim to contribute something to the psychology of thinking and the psychology of creativity. I hoped to learn from historical studies, and enrich my own rather crabbed, often Philistine field. In the course of this effort, my students and I found ourselves developing what we now call, quite provisionally, an "evolving systems approach to creative work" (Gruber 1980a, b).
In this view, creative work is seen as a purposeful growth process. Much work on the psychology of creativity reveals a certain tropism toward monolithicity. In such diverse ideas as: one great insight, one ruling passion, one overarching metaphor — there is a common term, one. In contrast, our work has persistently revealed a striking pluralism of events and processes. For Darwin there were many insights, each with a complex inner structure; rather than representing a break with his own past, they reflect the ongoing function of the evolving system of thought (Gruber 1981a). Similarly, there are many influences, several candidates for his "father figure", many metaphors (Gruber 1978), and many enterprises.
In addition to this emphasis on growth and pluralism, we stress the idea of creativity as purposeful work. Since it always seems to take a long time, the creative individual must go to some lengths to organize the conditions of life that make possible such continued work. If it were easier, faster, and more straightforward than experience shows to be the case, spontaneity might be enough. But if it were so easy, fast and straightforward, many would accomplish the same thing, and we would not deem it so creative. In the real world, then, purpose is indispensable for creativity.
The person doing creative work exhibits the continuous interplay of three loosely coupled sub-systems: the organizations of knowledge, of purpose, and of feeling. This interplay is displayed with particular clarity when the thinker undertakes to push ideas to their extremes, to abandon cautious middle-of-the-road strategies and instead to test the limits of his innovations. Sailing to the edge of one's intellectual world does not happen by accident: it requires deep knowledge and a sense of direction. It is, moreover, so taxing an effort that it requires intellectual courage and, if not the ability to enjoy life at the edge, at least the resolve to endure it.
The current status of Darwin studies provides an object lesson in the density and complexity of a creative thought process. Instead of being apologetic that we, the collectivity of Darwin scholars, have written so much, we ought to brace ourselves for the probable future. The history and philosophy of science, cognitive science and developmental psychology have reached a promising confluence. The idea that the work of hermeneutic interpretation is a legitimate part of our enterprise has at least taken hold, and description is becoming thicker and thicker. We are, I think, growing more skilled in relating the internal history of science to wider issues in personal psychology and social history. Out of all this will emerge a new generation of Darwin studies, and during its gestation we should all be very patient. Newell and Simon, in their book Human Problem Solving, analyze the thinking of one subject solving one problem, thinking aloud while he did it. The subject took twenty minutes. The analysis covers 100 pages (Newell and Simon 1972).
The study of Darwin's thinking is many orders of magnitude more complex. He was solving not one problem but many. The problems were not chosen for him but by him as part of a broader effort to construct a new point of view. He faced a double task. On the one hand, he had to make the best possible use of a wide array of professionally accepted, normalized scientific knowledge. On the other hand, he had to organize his efforts so as to raise and answer questions hardly dreamt of within that conventional framework. To understand Darwin's thinking, we must study the connections between these quite different aspects of his work — his intellectual navigation in well-charted scientific waters and his explorations of the farthest horizons.
I. Networks of Enterprise
If we are to deal with the complexities of a creative life we absolutely must develop some methodical ways of surveying it as a whole. As we go deeper and deeper into detail, we need to avoid losing our sense of direction. One orienting device that I have proposed is the network of enterprise (Gruber 1977). This is a diagrammatic way of examining the creative person's organization of purpose by depicting all of the activities of the person as they are connected in time. It permits us to see both the continuity within and the diversity among simultaneous ongoing activities. I use the term enterprise to suggest something larger than a problem or project; it has no necessary termination, and the stock of projects within it are usually renewed in order to keep it functional. Of course, at any given time some enterprises are dormant or less active than others.
As it happens, quite independently of my work, Sandra Herbert in her edition of Darwin's Red Notebook has published some excellent diagrams that capture the same idea in a simple and illuminating way (Herbert 1980, pp. 14–17). Although a number of colleagues (and I, too) have drawn up networks of enterprise for Darwin, I believe the best reasonably complex diagram currently available was drawn by Martin Rudwick (Rudwick 1982b). This was constructed in such a way as to show that Darwin's network was not only a set of activities, but an agenda. More specifically, it was a plan for the sequence in which his different enterprises would rise from the privacy of Darwin's mind to the level of public disclosure. Needless to say, a network of enterprise has other dynamic properties. For example, one enterprise can steer another, distract attention from another, provide thought-forms and metaphors useful in other contexts.
More broadly still, the network of enterprise represents the organization of purpose for the creative person. As such, since he or she is more or less aware of its structure, it is a fundamental part of the self-concept.
In Darwin's case, as the present essay and for that matter this entire volume show, it is indispensable to see each part of his activity in relation to the others. Ideas or actions which seem ambiguous in a narrow context are clarified as the frame is widened. The point is not so much that we the interpreters clarify Darwin's meaning, but rather that we come to understand how Darwin, over time, disambiguated himself.
II. The Shape and Function of Controversy
As the fund of solid scholarship mounts, disagreements emerge. If the reconstruction of thought processes were an art form, these differences could simply be allowed to stand. As things are, there is an increasing convergence and even collaboration among relevant disciplines concerned with the growth of scientific knowledge: social history, history of science, philosophy of science, cognitive psychology, and the sociology of knowledge. There is even some hope that this confluence is producing a science of science, in which issues can be settled, questions really answered, and knowledge accumulated. So a productive strategy for dealing with differences should be sought.
At present there seem to be two main strategies at work. I want to describe them and propose a third. For want of better terms I will call them the cave, the shadow box, and the solution tree.
The cave strategy is simply the pessimistic subjectivism inherent in believing that we are all looking at mere shadows of the world, and all from the same station point. We can never decide what is really there: if differences arise they can never be resolved. Since we all see the same shadows, any differences must have a subjective origin. The best solution is to accept our fate.
The shadow box strategy. In Plato's cave there is only one source of illumination and only one wall on which shadows are projected. Imagine, instead, a box with an unknown object in it, with two sources and two screens, and hence two station points. Now if two observers begin by disagreeing about what is in the box, they may discover that they are looking at two different shadows of the same thing. They may be able to settle their differences by synthesizing their two perspectives.
In the cave strategy:
"triangle" versus "circle" -> disagreement
In the shadow box strategy:
"triangle" x "circle" -> "cone!"
I have done this experiment in the laboratory. People can solve quite complex problems fairly soon. But first they must get over the egocentric tendency to discount the other person's report; they must build up trust and a shared descriptive language. For all its merits and its resemblance to some moments in scientific work, the shadow box strategy, or the strategy of multiple perspectives, has two limitations. First, there are really innumerable perspectives and no finite number will tell all. For example, convexities appear nicely in shadows, but to detect concavities other exploratory devices must be introduced. Second, the strategy assumes that there is one unchanging reality, and that a more powerful synthesis will eventually reveal it.
But suppose this is not the case. Suppose, for example, that there is not one Darwin and one sequence of ideas he entertained, waiting to be discovered ... but many! This thought leads to the third strategy — and beyond.
The solution tree. Investigators of problem solving have for some time been interested in an approach which entails mapping out all of the possible solutions to a problem, separately from observations of actual solutions produced by experimental subjects. Armed with such a set of possible pathways one can then more easily identify the one actually chosen. This approach, like the other two, assumes that there is, for a given thinker, only one pathway. Moreover, it requires that the investigator know more than the experimental subject. This is not a good model for us, for a reason that we all tacitly accept — we may not be able to think about the problem in hand as well as Darwin, much less generate all possible solutions. The solution tree strategy may be appropriate for understanding an experimental subject solving a relatively simple, closed problem — where all the rules and conditions are set by the experimenter. But it seems inapplicable for understanding creative scientific thinking, where the limits of the problem and the rules of the game are all constancy changing.
And yet there is a gleam of light in the solution tree approach. It is plausible that a man like Darwin explored many pathways, found partial solutions to numerous problems, and often found several solutions to the same problem. Each successful move would increase his confidence in the general approach that was guiding him. Each unsuccessful move, remembered, would increase his knowledge of the intellectual terrain over which he was moving — and by the same token, increase his confidence in his developing point of view.
As lived by Darwin then, there is not a simple pathway to be charted, but a set of them. If we want to know the moves Darwin actually made, knowledge of the set of moves potentially open to him may be enormously helpful.
But how can we get such knowledge? Must we surpass Darwin? I think not. This is where our pooled knowledge and effort are useful. Instead of each rejecting the other's contributions and vaunting our own as better, we can look at each attempt as one of the many moves necessary to fill out the solution tree. Any description of Darwin by a reasonably competent person is a candidate for inclusion in the solution tree. Moreover, descriptions of anyone else working in the same domain (Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin, Lyell, Owen, Hooker, etc.) are also plausible candidates. So we can and do generate a greatly expanded solution tree, far exceeding our individual capacities. All we need is respect for each other and the patience to organize our combined efforts in such a fashion.
But our use of the solution tree need not be restricted to finding the one pathway Darwin followed. The approach I am proposing is inherently phenomenological. We want to reconstruct Darwin's thinking as he experienced it. He had the time, the energy, and the absence of smugness that allowed him to explore widely in the set of possible solutions. He had also the technique of note making, developed in a powerful way, to help him re-explore, retrace the pathway taken. For him, vagrant thoughts were less ephemeral than for most, because he was committed to writing them down. Finally, he believed that "the subjective probability" of an hypothesis increases as the number of partial proofs, following different lines, rises.
III. The Voyage Begins
When Darwin set out in the Beagle, it took him a while to get his sea legs and longer still to find his feet as a professional naturalist moving towards the life in science we know him for. Even then he remained vulnerable to mal de mer and to a certain mal d'esprit reflected in remarks such as
This multiplication of little means & bringing the mind to grapple with great effect produced is a most laborious & painful effort of the mind ... (C75)
During the voyage, alongside his scientific notes he kept a diary of all sorts of narratives and personal feelings (but nothing too intimate to publish in the Journal he may have already been contemplating). There were in the Diary many observations pertinent to what would eventually play a major role in his evolutionary theories, and become a distinct enterprise in its own right — his reflections on homo sapiens. A few early entries in this Diary reveal his state of mind, his plans, and some of his basic orientation at the time (Darwin 1934).
On 13 December 1831, two weeks before the Beagle weighed anchor, he wrote a brief sketch of plans for work during the voyage.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Darwinian Heritage by David Kohn. Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, pg. vi
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- CONTRIBUTORS, pg. xi
- Introduction: A High Regard for Darwin, pg. 1
- Chapter 1. Going the Limit: Toward the Construction of Darwin's Theory (1832-1839), pg. 9
- Chapter 2. The Wider British Context in Darwin's Theorizing, pg. 35
- Chapter 3. Darwin's Invertebrate Program, 1826-1836: Preconditions for Transformism, pg. 71
- Chapter 4. Darwin's Early Intellectual Development: An Overview of the Beagle Voyage (1831-1836), pg. 121
- Chapter 5. Owen and Darwin Reading a Fossil: Macrauchenia in a Boney Light, pg. 155
- Chapter 6. The Immediate Origins of Natural Selection, pg. 185
- Chapter 7. Darwin as a Lifelong Generation Theorist, pg. 207
- Chapter 8. Darwin's Principle of Divergence as Internal Dialogue, pg. 245
- Chapter 9. Darwin's Intellectual Development (Commentary), pg. 259
- Chapter 10. Speaking of Species: Darwin's Strategy, pg. 265
- Chapter 11. The Ascent of Nature in Darwin's Descent of Man, pg. 283
- Chapter 12. Darwin and the Expression of the Emotions, pg. 307
- Chapter 13. Darwin on Animal Behavior and Evolution, pg. 327
- Chapter 14. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace: Two Decades of Debate over Natural Selection, pg. 367
- Chapter 15. Darwin of Down: The Evolutionist as Squarson- Naturalist, pg. 435
- Chapter 16. Darwin the Young Geologist, pg. 483
- Chapter 17. Darwin and the World of Geology (Commentary), pg. 511
- Chapter 19. Darwin's Reading and the Fictions of Development, pg. 543
- Chapter 20. Three Notes on the Reception of Darwin's Ideas on Natural Selection (Henry Baker Tristram, Alfred Newton, Samuel Wilberforce), pg. 589
- Chapter 21. Darwinism Is Social, pg. 609
- Chapter 22. Scientific Attitudes to Darwinism in Britain and America, pg. 641
- Chapter 23. Darwinism in Germany, France and Italy, pg. 683
- Chapter 24. Darwin and Russian Evolutionary Biology, pg. 731
- Chapter 25. Darwin's Five Theories of Evolution, pg. 755
- Chapter 26: Darwinism as a Historical Entity: A Historiographic Proposal, pg. 773
- Chapter 27. Darwinism Today (Commentary), pg. 813
- Chapter 28. Adaptation and Mechanisms of Evolution After Darwin: A Study in Persistent Controversies, pg. 825
- Chapter 29. Darwin on Natural Selection: A Philosophical Perspective, pg. 867
- Chapter 30. Images of Darwin: A Historiographic Overview, pg. 901
- Chapter 31. The Beagle Collector and His Collections, pg. 973
- Bibliography, pg. 1021
- Index, pg. 1101