In the light of evolution IV: The human condition

Bold flights of a speculative mind

A Universal Struggle for Life? A comparative study of the reception of Darwinism among religious thinkers in the Anglo-Saxon world and in the Middle East in the second half of the 19th century Sacha Aellen How was Darwinism and its potential implications experienced by religious thinkers in the 19th century? What features of the perception of Darwinism were local, depending on specific socio-political situations, and which ones were not? These are the questions I tried to answer in my Master Thesis that I submitted last summer. Let us start with the beginning: what exactly is Darwinism? Mostly contained in two of Charles Darwin's books -The Origins of Species and Descent of Man (1871) -, Darwinism is an evolutionary theory composed of two particularly crucial features. First, living beings all share a common ancestry. Through time, they have developed genetic modifications that created divisions between species but they all have a common origin. Second, the living beings that are...

ABSTRACTThe historical process underlying Darwin’s Origin of Species (Origin) did not play a significant role in the early editions of the book, in spite of the particular inductivist scientific methodology it espoused. Darwin’s masterpiece did not adequately provide his sources or the historical perspective many contemporary critics expected. Later editions yielded the ‘Historical Sketch’ lacking in the earlier editions, but only under critical pressure. Notwithstanding the sources he provided, Darwin presented the Origin as an ‘abstract’ in order to avoid giving sources; a compromise he acknowledged and undertook to set right in later editions, yet failed to provide throughout the six editions under his supervision. Darwin’s reluctance to publish the historical context of his theory and his sources, particularly sources which were also ‘precursors’, may be attributed as much to the matter of intellectual ownership as science, or even good literary practice. Of special concern to Darwin were issues of priority or originality over ‘descent with modification’ and especially over Natural Selection. Many later historians have argued that Darwin was unaware of the work of his precursors on Natural Selection. Darwin’s theory was an example of independent discovery, albeit along with such obscure precursors as Matthew or Wells, who were unknown to Darwin until after the publication of the Origin. Both Matthew and Wells had a medical education, like James Hutton or Erasmus Darwin earlier in the eighteenth century, or even (in part) Charles Darwin. Evolutionary theory, at least in Britain was a product largely of the medical evolutionists rather than the natural historians which ‘history’ has chosen to select for the focus of attention; and among the medical evolutionists the figure of John Hunter stands out as theorist, experimentalist and teacher: the medical evolutionists were predominantly the product of Hunter’s legacy or of the medical profession and particularly the Scottish Universities. Much recent Darwin scholarship has focused on the private Notebooks, to establish Darwin’s discovery of Natural Selection around 1837–1838 and demonstrate Darwin’s ignorance of his precursors; requiring an explicit acknowledgement by Darwin as the legitimate substantiation of any claim to prior influence. The precursors have been categorized as uniformly obscure or irrelevant to the science of evolution which may be defined exclusively as ‘Darwinian’. The inclination to acknowledge influences, however was not something Darwin was gratuitously given to doing, especially on matters of priority. The Notebooks are not Darwin’s private thoughts; from an early stage he considered them incipient public documents and later sought to protect them as proof of his originality. William C. Wells was not an obscure thinker, but a celebrated scientist whom Herschel, Darwin’s guide to scientific methodology, had recommended as providing a model of scientific method. Darwin discovered Wells through Herschel, and quickly acquired a copy of Wells’ recommended work, no later than 1831, and held it thereafter in his library at Down House. This book, the 1818 edition of Wells’ Two Essays contains a third essay, Wells’ account of Natural Selection. Later, in the Descent of Man (1871) Darwin acknowledged his separate discovery of the correlation of colour and disease immunity in man, also earlier recounted by Wells.

James D. Watson, ed., Darwin: The Indelible Stamp: The Evolution of an Idea, with commentary by James D. Watson (Philadelphia/London: Running Press, 2005), xiv + 1260 pp., illus., S29.95 (cloth); Edward O. Wilson, ed., From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin: The Voyage of the Beagle; On the Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; The Expression of the Emotions in Man and the Ani? mals, with introductions and commentary by Edward O. Wilson (New York/London: W. W. Norton, 2006), xiii + 1706 pp., illus., $39.95 (cloth, boxed).

Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) has a huge array of chapters on sexual selection. But his theorizing about this special kind of selection was essentially completed before he wrote On the Origin of Species (1859). In that book he compared and contrasted this special (sexual) selection theorizing with his theorizing about ordinary (natural) selection. Two analyses of this 1859 ordinary selection reasoning differ strikingly: Graham Burnett’s (Burnett, D. G. (2009) Savage Selection: Analogy and Elision. In On the Origin of Species. Endeavour 33: 121–125) and that by Roger White et al. (White, R. M, Hodge, M. J. S. and Radick, G. (2021) Darwin’s Argument by Analogy: From Artificial to Natural Selection. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Evelleen Richards’ magisterial book, Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection (Richards, E. (2017) Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection. Chicago: Chicago University Press), draws on Burnett’s analysis. Now the White et al. option is available it is, I suggest, better suited for integrating with Richards’ history.

I read the article ‘Paul Broca: from fame to shame?’ with great interest.1 Its balanced presentation compels the readership to weigh in on one view or the other—especially since the title ends in a question mark! Broca, born and raised in the Bordeaux region of France, was unquestionably one of the great clinical neuroanatomists of the 19th century. This recognition led to naming a neuroscience building at the University of Bordeaux after him; this decision is now questioned because of his beliefs in physical anthropology.1 The Broca example is more useful to study if we begin by placing his ideas into the context of his time. Before race became ‘a baseless social construct,’1 intellectual elite and religious scholars had already been discussing the origin of ‘mankind’ (note, the use of the currently preferred term ‘humankind’ would be anachronistic) for centuries. Charles Darwin’s Origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life was published in 1859 and his second major work on evolution, The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex, was published in 1871. These works, and their spirited discussion among religious and secular scholars, quickly and radically changed thoughts about mankind’s origin. These discussions in Paris were further complicated by an ongoing battle between secular savants and the Roman Catholic Church; as the 19th century progressed, French society became progressively more secular.2,3 Contemporary scholars, who were not strictly wedded to a literal interpretation of creationism, were split between two opposing, but not directly testable, theories: monogenism (humanity had a single origin) and polygenism (human races are of different origins). Monogenism was compatible with scientific variations on creationism that were proliferating; polygenism was incompatible and almost uniformly embraced by secular French scholars by the 1820s. Atheist members of the lay public favoured polygenism because it contradicted the biblical account of human creation and because it appeared more scientific. It should be remembered that Broca had founded a society of ‘freethinkers’ (at the time, essentially a synonym for atheists) in Paris in 1848 and the Société d’anthropologie de Paris in 1859, the year Darwin published Origin of species.2,3

In the Preface to the 1896 edition of The Woodlanders, Hardy remarked that in this story, ‘as in one or two others in this series which involve the question of matrimonial divergence, the immortal puzzle — given the man and the woman, how to find a basis for their sexual relation — is left where it stood’. Hardy liked to attach such disclaimers to his work, and all the more where it was bound to prove controversial, and his readers, then and since, have generally ignored them. But in exploring human sexual relations, one of the questions he left unresolved, if hardly where it stood, was how far the man and the woman — especially the woman — are indeed ‘given’. Not very far, according to John Stuart Mill, who argued in The Subjection of Women that what was called ‘the nature of women’ was in truth ‘an eminently artificial thing — the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others’, and so not to be made the basis for a theory of their political rights, nor of their sexual relation with men.1 Begging his own question, Mill saw women’s ‘nature’, so called, as ‘artificial’, ‘unnatural’: socially constructed, not given. Charles Darwin, among others, took the contrary position. Both The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man helped to underpin the biological determinism which shaped so many accounts of the nature of men and women in the years when Hardy was writing fiction.KeywordsSexual DesireSexual RelationHardy StudyBiological DeterminismSexual IdeologyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Beginning with a discussion of the sources in Darwin's writing for Freud's theory of the hysterical symptom, this essay proceeds to a symptomatic reading of Darwin himself. With reference to "The Origin of Species," "The Descent of Man," and "The Expression of the Emotions," this essay shows that Darwin's theories of involuntary expressive behavior and of aesthetic preference in sexual selection are linked by their role in his understanding of racial difference and also by their reliance on the idea that learned habits can be inherited as instincts, a view often identified with Lamarck. They are thus at once theories of the foreign body and theories that appear as foreigners within the body of Darwin's work.

The paper focuses on two individuals who have each made a seminal contribution to the debates between theology and the sciences in Oxford - Charles Darwin (in the mid�19th century), and Richard Dawkins (from the 1990s to the present day). It introduces Darwin by way of a more personal and visual view from Worcester College Chapel. The restoration of the chapel took place at about the same time as the debates between Huxley and Wilberforce in the Oxford University Museum over Charles Darwin�s On the Origin of the Species. The first part of the paper then traces these debates back: first to an earlier period of disputation represented by Galileo Galilei (c. 1564�1642), and then to a period of greater accommodation represented by Isaac Newton (1643�1727). Darwin represents a third, more controversial, stage. The paper then looks at a fourth period, from the mid�20th century onwards, which is marked by more eirenical attempts to demarcate science and theology by seeing the former again as asking the �how� questions and the latter, the �why� questions. It then focuses on a fifth, more disputatious stage, which was initiated by Richard Dawkins, professor in the Public Understanding of Science until 2008. Professor Dawkins challenges the idea that theology cannot be studied, because its focus is a non-existent object, �God�.The second part of the paper looks at various Oxford projects and Oxford theologians who have risen to this contemporary challenge. They include the work of the Ian Ramsey Centre; Justin Barret�s and John Trigg�s joint � 2 million project, supported by the John Templeton foundation, which examines scientific ideas about religion and the mind; Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford from 1987 to 2006, who has conducted a number of media interviews with Richard Dawkins; Keith Ward, who has written several books engaging not only with Dawkins but is also the Cambridge Professor of Mathematics, Stephen Hawking; and Alistair McGrath, who has a doctorate in both science and theology, and who has similarly written and entered into public debates challenging Dawkin�s ideas.The paper ends by referring to John Barton, Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at Oxford, who argues that provided that theology is a subject which is properly critical, open to alien truth and combines both intellectual and emotional modes of perception, it can set an example for almost any academic discipline, both in the humanities and the sciences. The conclusion is therefore that, far from theology having to become more like another science, the sciences might be challenged to become more like theology.

The pioneers of the scientific revolution claimed that the developing system of knowledge they envisioned would be distinguished by its practical usefulness. Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, and Rene Descartes agreed that the newly con- ceived endeavor of unveiling nature's secrets by means of uncovering its lawful regularities would engender practical progress, too. The novel and revolutionary idea was that knowledge of the causes and the laws of nature would pave the way toward technological innovation. As Bacon claimed, inventions bring about supreme benefit to humankind, and this aim is best served by investigating the processes underlying the operations of nature. Knowledge about nature's work- ings makes it possible to take advantage of its forces (1, I.§129). In the same vein, Descartes conceived of technology as an application of this novel type of knowledge. The speculative and superficial claims that had made up the erudi- tion of the past had remained barren and had failed to bear practical fruit. The principles of Descartes' own approach, by contrast, promised to afford knowledge highly useful in life; and instead of the speculative philosophy taught in the schools, to discover a practical one, by means of which, knowing the force and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies that surround us, as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artisans, we might apply them in the same way to all the uses to which they are apt, and thus render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature. (2, IV.2, p.101) The scientific revolution was fueled by the prospect of technological progress. Knowledge of the laws of nature was claimed to be the chief road toward the bet- terment of the human condition. Bacon quite explicitly stated that studying the processes of nature, or, in present-day terms, carrying out fundamental research, is much better suited for ensuring technological invention than mere trial and

Evolution and Our Inner Conflict

by MARC L. RATNER 8 The Romantic Spencerian One thought of the during strongest the late influences nineteenth affecting century American came thought during the late nineteenth century came from the natural sciences. Discoveries and theories in geology and organic evolution undermined the strong religious beliefs of many, affected the idealistic philosophy of romantic transcendentalism, and encouraged a greater interest in the ethical and social implications of man's place in society.1 In the work of Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, Norwegian-American critic and novelist, we can observe the development of a writer who began in the tradition of the European romantic evolutionist and was influenced by the writings of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer toward a new view of evolution. Boyesen was interested in a number of specific social and literary problems, viz., education in a militant or industrial society, heredity and race, woman's place in the new society, political forces, and last, though not in importance, the rise of realism in literature. Because of Boyesen's significance as a critic, interest in his contribution to American culture 1 Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought , 1860-1915 (Philadelphia, 1945) . On page 22 Hofstadter says, "Herbert Spencer, who of all men made the most ambitious attempt to systematize the implications of evolution, . . . was far more popular in the United States than he was in his native country." 204 THE ROMANTIC SPENCERIAN through his literary and social criticism has increased in the last few years.2 At the root of much of Boyesen's thinking was the theory of evolution, which he and many of his contemporaries associated with progress. J. B. Bury distinguished between these two concepts: "Evolution itself, it must be remembered, does not necessarily mean, applied to society, the movement of a man to a desirable goal. It is a neutral, scientific conception, compatible either with optimism or pessimism." 3 The fact is, though, that Darwin often struck a note of optimism in his writings and this led to an association between progress and evolution. He wrote that "natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being" and leads to "progress towards perfection," and he suggested that further development of his theory would lead to a law of progress.4 Herbert Spencer, however, became the foremost interpreter of the new theory and developed the concept of progress through his extension of the tenets of Darwinian evolution to the fields of sociology and ethics. Not all that Spencer drew from evolutionary theory was derived from Darwin, for Spencer was also influenced by the classic economists, Malthus and Ricardo. Making use of the analysis by these thinkers of the effects of severe competition on the economic survival of man, Spencer aimed at joining the ideas of physics and biology and then applying them to man's situation, individual and social. Out of his speculations, he developed the ideas of the persistence of force which conserves energy and the evolutionary process wherein all forms of matter progress from simple to complex forms. He wrote in First Principles: "Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, co2 The outstanding publication on the subject is Clarence A. Glasrud's Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen (Norwegian- American Historical Association, Northfield, 1963) . 3 J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress , 335 (London, 1920) . 4 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 305 (New York, 1884) . 205 Marc L. Ratner herent heterogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation." In the human and social field, the laws of nature, as everywhere, are inescapable and unrelenting, though demonstrating a beneficent necessity seen by Spencer as "equilibration," a state where evolution can end only in the establishment of the greatest perfection and the most complete happiness.5 Spencer's appeal to the postwar generation was influential in all areas of thought. The writers and thinkers who found support in his philosophy were often the men who were to lead the rebellion against the genteel tradition that had become for them a faded faith. In designing a sociology based on natural development which formed individual man for a...

Trilobites are an iconic Paleozoic group of biomineralizing marine euarthropods that appear abruptly in the fossil record (c. 521 million years ago) during the Cambrian ‘explosion’. This sudden appearance has proven controversial ever since Darwin puzzled over the lack of pre-trilobitic fossils in the Origin of Species, and it has generally been assumed that trilobites must have an unobserved cryptic evolutionary history reaching back into the Precambrian. Here we review the assumptions behind this model, and suggest that a cryptic history creates significant difficulties, including the invocation of rampant convergent evolution of biomineralized structures and the abandonment of the synapomorphies uniting the clade. We show that a vicariance explanation for early Cambrian trilobite palaeobiogeographic patterns is inconsistent with factors controlling extant marine invertebrate distributions, including the increasingly-recognized importance of long-distance dispersal. We suggest that survivorship bias may explain the initial rapid diversification of trilobites, and conclude that the group’s appearance at c. 521 Ma closely reflects their evolutionary origins.

Ever since Darwin and The Descent of Man, the existence of humans has been attributed to our intelligence and adaptability. But in Catching Fire, renowned primatologist Richard Wrangham presents a startling alternative: our evolutionary success is the result of cooking. In a groundbreaking theory of our origins, Wrangham shows that the shift from raw to cooked foods was the key factor in human evolution. When our ancestors adapted to using fire, humanity began. Once our hominid ancestors began cooking their food, the human digestive tract shrank and the brain grew. Time once spent chewing tough raw food could be sued instead to hunt and to tend camp. Cooking became the basis for pair bonding and marriage, created the household, and even led to a sexual division of labor. Tracing the contemporary implications of our ancestors' diets, Catching Fire sheds new light on how we came to be the social, intelligent, and sexual species we are today. A pathbreaking new theory of human evolution, Catching Fire will provoke controversy and fascinate anyone interested in our ancient origins-or in our modern eating habits.

Organisms inherently preserve ancestral information within their bodies, proving evidence of evolutionary processes. Selenium, the least abundant essential element in the Earth's crust, has emerged as a limiting factor in the development of animal reproductive systems. By integrating selenium concentration information from plants and animals, this study demonstrates that the decline in Earth's surface selenium abundance may be associated with the origin and extinction of vertebrate species. Coal-derived selenium abundance data indicate that surface selenium may have been continuously lost, with depletion rates consistent with a natural decay process that could contribute to periodic vertebrate extinctions. The conserved selenium levels in animal germ cells imply that animals require selenium more strictly than plants, potentially imposing certain boundary conditions and constraints on the evolution of vertebrate reproductive systems (origin of new species). The syntheses here suggest that the biogeochemistry of selenium, broadly defined, provides new information and insight into the coevolution of vertebrate species and environment.