Darwin's Origin of Species

DARWIN’S ORIGIN OF SPECIES: A Biography

By JANET BROWNE

Allen&Unwin, 2006, 174 pp, $22.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Fifty five per cent of Americans, according to a New York Times poll in 2004, believe that God created people in their present form. Darwin, it seems, could have saved himself a whole lot of effort in publishing Origin of Species in 1859, for all the treatment evolution receives at the hands of the Christian right today. Janet Browne’s ‘biography’ of Darwin’s book skilfully examines the man and the science which is still at the centre of a heated political struggle.

Darwin, says Browne, was no godless radical out to subvert the system. He was a highly respectable gentleman in Victorian England, ensconced in inherited private wealth and aiming at indulging his hobby of natural history through a comfortable niche as an Anglican clergyman.

The British Navy surveying ship, the Beagle, soon changed that ambition. Darwin’s elite social network got the young naturalist on board in 1831 for a six year hydrographical survey, where Darwin observed, collected, marvelled at and pondered nature’s variety and abundance, firming up the idea that an entirely natural process of small changes over much time could create new species, without the supernatural agency of God.

Darwin also borrowed the social theory that society operated as a ‘struggle for existence’ (popularised by the economist Thomas Malthus, much to the satisfaction of England’s capitalists), applying it to a struggle in nature which results in ‘natural selection’ through the survival of more offspring better adapted to their environment (“survival of the fittest”). Natural selection, said Darwin, was doing, blindly, what farmers and horticulturalists were doing consciously (artificial selection).

Darwin, however, delayed going public for twenty years, a hesitation, says Browne, influenced by the political context. A fierce working class movement for political and economic rights had erupted in the 1830s and 1840s and England’s ruling class had an intense fear of revolution, including any challenge to an ideological status quo which rested heavily on the ‘natural theology’ of the Anglican Church which asserted that God had designed every bit of the natural, and social, world to run on pre-ordained lines. Thus, said the Church, social inequality was divinely authored.Evolution, however, was a subversive, materialist theory whose scientific logic inferred that God had nothing to do with nature -far from God making Man in his own image, we owed our origins to hairy apes and, even further back, bacteria. If evolution was in the air, could revolution be far behind, fretted those of wealth and power.

Ideological eggshells lay everywhere in Darwin’s path. Yet Darwin’s commitment to scientific truth meant that, although he was never an atheist, nor a revolutionary, he kept his grip on a godless, politically subversive weapon. He handled the dilemma by public procrastination which was only partly from a proper concern for scientific caution (he dallied for over a decade with more observational experiments with pigeons, and busied himself with an eight year study of barnacles) but fear of evolution’s political implications also kept him silent.

Darwin’s hand was forced by Alfred Russel Wallace, a naturalist from the opposite end of the social scale, who independently arrived at the same theory as Darwin resulting in a joint announcement of the theory of evolution in 1858. Darwin’s Origin of Species followed in 1859.

The cat was now out of the bag. Rather than God the master designer, it was change, chance, imperfection and a deadly competition for survival which ruled through natural processes. Darwin, however, was a reluctant revolutionary so he still spoke guardedly of a Creator who set the whole show running (although playing no active role in subsequent biological proceedings) and he said nothing about the highly charged issue of the animal origins of human beings.

Karl Marx and other progressive contemporaries celebrated the book’s revolutionary science and its equally revolutionary social implications (despite its strategic silences and understated style) but Darwin left it to others to aggressively confront the social and religious status quo and to apply evolutionary theory to human pre-history - only in 1871 did Darwin venture to show our ape ancestry with the publication of Descent of Man, when some of the heat had gone out of the controversy.

The main scientific deficiency of the book is that Darwin could not explain the biological mechanism behind his theoretical breakthrough of an explanatory cause (natural selection) for evolution. The science of genetics was a long way off and this resulted in “factual overkill” in the book, relying heavily on the towering weight of observational example.

There was a political deficiency, too. Darwin’s subsequent application of biology to culture, says Browne, opened a door for political conservatives to reconcile themselves with Darwin. Darwin reinforced beliefs in the innate, biological origins of racial differences (despite his abhorrence of slavery) and male superiority (allegedly honed by aeons of hunting and fighting).

This melded with the vogue for ‘survival of the fittest’rhetoric, a phrase publicly adopted by Darwin in 1869, and the catchcry of manufacturers, financiers and colonisers. To these victors in the competitive class struggle went the spoils. Browne lists the long roll-call of ‘Social Darwinists’ to the present day – the imperialists, genocidists, anti-welfare state ideologues, segregationists, eugenicists, sociobiologists, ‘race’scientists - who all had it in for those they saw as the socially ‘unfit’, condemned to discrimination (or extermination) by modern scientific ‘law’.

Although Browne could have more thoroughly explored post-Darwin scientific developments in evolution (such as those of Stephen Jay Gould who has credibly challenged Darwin’s belief in evolutionary ‘gradualism’and ‘progress’ as well as Darwin’s ideological, Malthusian underpinnings), Browne rightly shares with other socially responsible scientists a celebration of the spectacular and truly revolutionary transformation of science and society that Darwin’s book represented.