Reshaping the Roles of Man, God, and Nature: Darwin's Rhetoric in On the Origin of Species
[In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1983 and revised in 1990 for publication, Bergmann discusses Darwin's rhetoric in Origin of Species, describing the ways in which he attempts to persuade his audience to accept a theory that implies human limitation and the possible absence of God.]
Although historians of science may disagree about whether Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species is primarily a synthesis of mid-Victorian evolutionary thought or a dramatically new approach to the relations among the forms of life, few dispute that the publication of the Origin in 1859 began one of the great paradigm shifts in the history of science. Darwin's place among, relations with, and effects on his contemporaries have been well documented, as has the impact of the Darwinian revolution on religion, society, and even the arts. However, perhaps because the argument of the Origin was so obviously revolutionary, Darwin's book has less often been discussed as a piece of literature. My concern in this chapter is to study the Origin as a literary critic, to study the text that precipitated the Darwinian revolution. But although I am bringing the tools of literary criticism to this text, I am not considering it as a piece of imaginative writing. Some interesting work has recently considered the Origin as a fiction or as myth.1 My own interest, however, is less in the imaginative force of the Origin or in its psychological underpinnings and more in Darwin's rhetoric in the sense of how he attempts to persuade his audience. I start from the assumption that Darwin was primarily a scientist—and the author of a canny, subtle, and skillfully crafted scientific argument.2 As well as being, as Darwin claimed, an abstract of a scientific theory, the Origin offers an emotional argument, in the Aristotelian sense, that buttresses the rational structure. The Origin is, in fact, a fervent effort at communicating a theory to an audience that had both specific scientific objections and broader social and religious reservations about that theory. Darwin is aware of this audience, he chooses and arranges his examples to persuade this audience, and the way he chooses and arranges contributes to the success of his argument.
Darwin needed to be very persuasive indeed, since it was obvious to both supporters and detractors of the theory that the Origin would change not only the paradigm by which naturalists worked but also the myths by which Victorians lived. On the Origin of Species shattered the long-standing conventional relationship of man, God, and nature, the "chain of being"3 that had offered the Victorians a sense of human dignity and social stability. This relationship had, of course, already been assaulted by Lyellian geology, the higher criticism of the Bible, and the radical doubt of Tennyson and other artists,4 but it had not yet been replaced. As Michael Ruse notes, "from most of our English writers one gets the distinct impression that God, being himself an Englishman, designed the world primarily for the benefit of the English."5 Darwin's theory, however, explicitly demands that we see God not as a creator of specific beings or even as a designer of types, but at most as the remote originator of the natural law that set creation going, and it represents nature as a force more powerful than God and more immediately involved in creation. Although Darwin barely mentions the origin of man at the very end of the book, most readers are very sensitive to the implication that man is not a special creation of God or even a special kind of creature, but a part of and a product of nature.6 Both man and God seem diminished by Darwin's theory, and the range and efficacy of natural law are vastly increased.
These mythic considerations were more prominent for Darwin and his fellow scientists than they usually are for contemporary scientists. Since science and other intellectual pursuits had not yet become highly specialized,7 the lines between scientific questions and techniques and theological questions and techniques were not sharply delineated. Furthermore, most of the scientists in Darwin's primary audience were traditional and conservative English gentlemen8: men who were generally wealthy or allied with wealth, educated in the classics at Oxford or Cambridge, members of and even ministers in the Church of England.9 The scientists differed in the degree and seriousness of their religious beliefs, but Ruse suggests that their education and social position interested them in theological questions and inclined them toward "showing that science was a true supporter of religion."10 Although by 1859 the younger generation of scientists, who eagerly embraced and promoted the Darwinian paradigm, tended to be more professional and less concerned with religion and the church than their elders, these younger men were still eminently respectable, ethical, and proper.11 They were social insiders, upholders of the empire, men concerned with order, place, and human achievement. It was this successful, comfortable, conservative audience—an audience with a place on the "chain of being" well worth hanging on to—that Darwin was asking to accept a diminished place in a universe without design.
Darwin presents his argument in the first five chapters of the Origin, devoting the rest of the book to meeting objections to and exploring the uses of his theory. I will be primarily concerned with these five chapters, for here Darwin faces explicitly the problems of expanding the power of nature and limiting the powers of man and God. Darwin's argument seems almost classically simple. In the first chapter he describes how human breeders select among variations in domestic animals in order to produce, maintain, and improve breeds. In the second chapter, by describing the wide variation in the state of nature, he establishes that varieties do not differ from species in kind, but only in extent of variation. Varieties can become species when enough variations have been amassed. In the third chapter Darwin discusses the struggle for existence and how it affects the survival or destruction of plants, animals, and habitats in the state of nature. The fourth chapter completes the analogy between human selection among varieties of domestic animals to produce new breeds and natural selection among varieties in nature struggling to produce new species. In the fifth chapter Darwin argues that variation itself is governed by laws, and he opposes this lawfulness to the vagaries of independent creation.
The task Darwin faces in representing this theory is not stating or supporting what he believes or finding the right metaphor for a vision of nature. Instead, his problem is to make his theory acceptable, chapter by chapter, to an audience that has much to lose from it. Adeptly using rhetoric to minimize the disruption of their myths, he moves his readers from their complacent assumptions about human significance and divine design to the acceptance of a much greater subordination to a much more dominating natural law. He invokes his contemporaries' pride in human achievement and their sense of human limitations. He chooses examples that will appeal to these conventional assumptions and arranges them for the greatest impression. He makes it easy for his readers to abandon their assumptions one by one, and hard for them—as rational thinkers and believers in fair play—to turn back and reject what they have accepted. Eventually, they are so positioned that they have less to lose by accepting his theory than by rejecting it.
Chapter 1 sets up the first part of Darwin's analogy between human and natural selection, the analogy on which his theory rests. The idea that all living things vary is crucial to the theory, and Darwin introduces the laws of variation. But he soon leaves this issue, to which he will return in Chapters 2 and 5, to illustrate how breeders' choices perpetuate the variations they find most useful or attractive. Emphasizing the commonplace, Darwin uses homely and familiar examples of the decisions breeders make about dogs, sheep, cattle, horses, pigeons, and other domesticated animals. These prosaic illustrations suggest that such selection is nothing new, suspect, or dangerous. Moving from the knowledge and effectiveness of domestic breeders, Darwin focuses on the selections made by pigeon fanciers, of which he admits himself to be one. The long, intricate paragraphs Darwin devotes to the minutiae of pigeon breeding are not, however, merely the self-indulgence of a man with a hobby, and a very popular hobby at that.12 By characterizing himself as a pigeon fancier, and a garrulous one, Darwin increases the sense of safety and conventionality that he is carefully cultivating. The "I" that is so predominant is a mildly dithering hobbyist as well as a naturalist.
If Darwin makes selection by human breeders seem commonplace, he also shows that it involves considerable observation, experience, and specialized knowledge. By introducing himself as a fancier—as one able to appreciate the work of great breeders, even though only an amateur himself—and then by imparting some of the breeders' detailed information, Darwin offers a personal testimony to the complexity of the process of human selection. Furthermore, he positions himself to mediate between naturalists—scientists—and breeders—essentially technicians. He can bring to, and perhaps even translate for, the scientific community the specialized technical information to which they might not otherwise have access.13 He first lays personal claim to the lore of the breeders and then implies that superior thinkers like himself and his readers can go beyond the limiting perspective of the breeder, can grasp the underlying law:
One circumstance has struck me much; namely, that all the breeders of the various domestic animals and the cultivators of plants, with whom I have ever conversed, or whose treatises I have read, are firmly convinced that the several breeds to which each has attended, are descended from so many aboriginally distinct species. Ask, as I have asked, a celebrated raiser of Hereford cattle, whether his cattle might not have descended from long-horns, and he will laugh you to scorn. I have never met a pigeon, or poultry, or duck, or rabbit fancier, who was not fully convinced that each main breed was descended from a distinct species. Van Mons, in his treatise on pears and apples, shows how utterly he disbelieves that the several sorts, for instance, a Ribston-pippin or Codlin-apple, could ever have proceeded from the seeds of the same tree. Innumerable other examples could be given. The explanation, I think, is simple: from long-continued study they are strongly impressed with the differences between the several races; and though they well know that each race varies slightly, for they win their prizes by selecting such slight differences, yet they ignore all general arguments, and refuse to sum up in their minds slight differences accumulated during many successive generations. May not those naturalists who, knowing far less of the laws of inheritance than does the breeder, and knowing no more than he does of the intermediate links in the long lines of descent, yet admit that many of our domestic races have descended from the same parents—may they not learn a lesson of caution, when they deride the idea of species in a state of nature being lineal descendants of other species?14
Typically, Darwin chooses here to illustrate these perspectives with a suggestion of his later argument for descent, but before defending that argument, he retreats to the security of pigeons and racehorses.
By emphasizing the skill of English breeders and the successes of accumulative human selection, both methodical and unconscious, Darwin seems to celebrate the knowledge and prowess of man as breeder and selector. In this first chapter he makes artificial selection—a term he does not use himself until he completes the analogy with natural selection in Chapter 4—-seem a great human accomplishment, almost a demonstration of the superiority of man, if not over nature, at least over the domestic plants and animals upon which he exercises his selective sovereignty. The key to the development of breeds becomes "man's power of accumulative selection," and man, by adding together nature's variations "in certain directions useful to him . . . may be said to make for himself useful breeds" (30). Darwin's examples of this human achievement are very British: he speaks to his countrymen's pride in the achievements of English breeders, to the prices their pedigreed animals can bring, to the superiority of the last seventy-five years of selective breeding over the unconscious selection of the "savage." Certainly Darwin appeals to the pride of his fellow Englishmen, pride in empire,15 civilization, wealth, and the technological advances of the industrial revolution, as he sets forth the gradualistic mechanisms and the tremendous achievements of breeders—achievements, he implies, that have peaked in his own time and country.
With these carefully chosen examples, Darwin undermines the idea of divine design by exploring the question of how breeds are developed and maintained without even asking whether God created them that way. If breeding works (and Darwin makes it seem obvious that it does), his readers will hardly question the ideas of "selection" and "variation." By the end of Chapter 1, God may be somewhat removed from his heaven—from his role as creator of individual breeds—but the terms of his removal are still careful, limited, hesitant; and all is still right with man's place in the world.
Darwin returns to variation in the second chapter, this time to document the great variation among plants and animals in nature. Unlike Chapter 1, which used variation in domestic animals to celebrate the triumphs of human selection, Chapter 2 considers variation among nondomesticated plants and animals as a problem of classification: whether doubtful forms should be considered varieties or separate species. Although on the surface Darwin is trying to articulate a definition of species, he continually admits to the difficulty of this articulation. He describes how naturalists make species distinctions, always returning to the cases that do not quite work. For instance, although naturalists usually consider intermediate links between forms to be varieties, in some cases they stretch or ignore this guideline. Similarly, naturalists usually rank as species forms that are separated by a wide distance—but the meaning of wide can vary greatly. Man here is no longer a master over nature; instead, he is an observer and uncertain describer, a diminished role that he will ultimately have to accept. Darwin presents the classification disputes among the naturalists Watson, Babington, and Bentham to illustrate the difficulty even of distinguishing varieties, breeds, from species. Nature's great variety is of so many kinds that men have trouble distinguishing one from the other.
Describing the development of the naturalist's powers of observation, Darwin shows how the ability to see differences must be balanced with the ability to see similarities. Naturalists, he argues, tend to see what they know best, and young and mature scientists err equally, if in opposite directions:
When a young naturalist commences the study of a group of organisms quite unknown to him, he is at first much perplexed to determine what differences to consider as specific, and what as varieties; for he knows nothing of the amount and kind of variation to which the group is subject; and this shows, at least, how very generally there is some variation. But if he confine his attention to one class within one country, he will soon make up his mind how to rank most of the doubtful forms. His general tendency will be to make many species, for he will become impressed, just like the pigeon or poultry-fanciers before alluded to, with the amount of difference in the forms which he is continually studying; and he has little general knowledge of analogical variation in other groups and in other countries, by which to correct his first impressions. As he extends the range of his observations, he will meet with more cases of difficulty; for he will encounter a greater number of closely-allied forms. But if his observations be widely extended, he will in the end generally be enabled to make up his own mind which to call varieties and which species; but he will succeed at this at the expense of admitting much variation,—and the truth of this admission will often be disputed by other naturalists. When, moreover, he comes to study allied forms brought from countries not now continuous, in which case he can hardly hope to find the intermediate links between his doubtful forms, he will have to trust almost entirely to analogy, and his difficulties will rise to a climax. (50-51)
What even the most intelligent and eager of men sees, Darwin implies, depends as much on what he knows, on what is in his head, as on what is out there in nature.16 Whereas in Chapter 1 he stressed the skill of breeders in seeing and perpetuating differences, here Darwin stresses the subjective element of this interpretation.17 This shifted emphasis has two effects. First, it sets up his context for the solution to the problem: that all forms are fluctuating, and that species and variety are matters of degree rather than fixed and immutable definitions. By stressing the subjective element in classification, Darwin makes the species problem a matter of human fabrication rather than divine intention. Second, however, we cannot quite take this fabrication as an instance of man's dominance over the natural world; man does not so much impose his perception on the natural world as perplex himself with his own categories. By exposing these dilemmas, disputes, and mistakes, Darwin lets us see at work men who are less successful than the triumphant breeders of the first chapter. Nature seems somewhat stronger now, man somewhat weaker.
As in the first chapter, Darwin here foreshadows his argument for natural selection, this time by contrasting special creation with his own theory.18 He shows how special creation does not explain why species of large genera are more variable than species of smaller genera: "Where many species of a genus have been formed through variation, circumstances have been favourable for variation; and hence we might expect that the circumstances would generally be still favourable to variation. On the other hand, if we look at each species as a special act of creation, there is no apparent reason why more varieties should occur in a group having many species, than in one having few" (55). As Darwin moves man from a position of primacy, he foreshadows the removal of God from the role of designer. Indeed, by the end of Chapter 2, Darwin not only contends that species and varieties are man-made terms, but also argues that species develop from accumulative variations and thus from the regular processes of nature. Now Darwin has widened his attack from mutability within species (breeding) to mutability between species; but once his audience accepts the idea that breeds are mutable and once it has seen naturalists' inability to agree upon classifications, an audience that believes as his did in logical proof must accept the idea that species themselves are mutable.
In Chapter 3 Darwin again anticipates his completed theory, summarizing it at the beginning of the chapter and promising to show later that natural selection "is as immeasurably superior to man's feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art" (61). Having contracted the role of man, Darwin now expands the role of nature. In this chapter he fully describes the "struggle for existence" and emphasizes the dominance of natural processes by piling up examples of the fecundity and complexity of nature. He impresses us with the sheer numbers of geometrically increasing populations and of the possibilities for destruction that face eggs, seeds, seedlings, young animals—any living creature. Nature assumes an elemental grandeur when seen through these basic, powerful forces of procreation and destruction, birth and death. It also assumes greater range and complexity. Chapter 1 describes human selection in the familiar terms of domesticated animals, but here Darwin draws on more exotic examples such as tigers and elephants, condors and ostriches, the Fulmar petrel and the hippobosca, and plants from India, Australia, North and South America. In this chapter nature seems vaster and more powerful than the domestic victories of the English farmyard, and even the English farmyard—or at least the field and forest—seems more various and abundant than in the first chapter. Darwin considers a more intricate range of relationships in Chapter 2 than merely the relationship between breeder and breed. Instead of discussing a more perfect pigeon or a more woolly sheep, he describes the complex interrelationships of the forest or meadow.
As he heightens the impression of the strangeness and complexity of nature, Darwin brings forth a series of metaphors: first the image of nature as a wedge,19 then the entangled bank, and finally, in Chapter 4, the tree of life. Looking at these images in context, we can see how Darwin draws on the power of metaphor to soften the blow of man's displacement. The wedge is a strangely abstract image of nature as an arena of struggle, although never of absolute victory or defeat: "the face of Nature may be compared to a yielding surface, with ten thousand sharp wedges packed close together and driven inwards by incessant blows, sometimes one wedge being struck, and then another with greater force" (67). The prizes won by human breeders seem paltry when compared to this perpetual dominance of nature. Darwin follows this strange image of the brute potency of nature with a confession of human ignorance and uncertainty: "What checks the natural tendency of each species to increase in number is most obscure. Look at the most vigorous species; by as much as it swarms in numbers, by so much will its tendency to increase be still further increased. We know not exactly what the checks are in even one single instance. Nor will this surprise anyone who reflects how ignorant we are on this head, even in regard to mankind, so incomparably better known than any other animal" (67). Darwin contrasts the limited capacity of man to understand even human nature with the wedges and blows of a blind, insensible, but enduringly powerful nature. Notice also his choice of words: "any other animal." Man here is definitely a part of—not the master of—nature.
As he elaborates on how those wedges work, Darwin demonstrates the superiority of natural processes to human accomplishments by contrasting the complex workings of natural ecology with the ignorance of man. First, he argues that Paraguay has no wild cattle, dogs, or horses because of certain flies, which insectivorous birds cannot keep in check because so many birds and beasts of prey feed on insectivorous birds. If insectivorous birds increased, however, more domestic cattle, dogs, and horses would become feral, affecting the vegetation, insects, and birds, "and so onwards in ever-increasing circles of complexity" (73). Immediately, he juxtaposes this intricate balance with the limitations of human perspective and understanding. First we dither, next we marvel, and then we try to impose our own confusion on nature:
Not that in nature the relations can ever be as simple as this. Battle within battle must ever be recurring with varying success; and yet in the long-run the forces are so nicely balanced, that the face of nature remains uniform for long periods of time, though assuredly the merest trifle would often give the victory to one organic being over another. Nevertheless, so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life! (73)
Darwin's repeated assertions of human limitations and scientific ignorance are no mere recurring themes or excuses. How Darwin portrays the human intellect depends on where we are in his argument. In Chapter 1 he appealed to the efficacy of human effort, but in Chapters 3 and 4, by focusing on the brevity, ignorance, and perceptual poverty of human life, he impresses us with the dominating force of nature. Relegated to the role of observer, classifier, and describer, man can barely succeed at that. Even Darwin's "I" has faded; it is "we" who do not understand. The breeder/naturalist, the technician/scientist, is no more competent than the rest of his species.20
This context makes the famous metaphor of the "entangled" bank so powerful. More than a metaphor for a view of nature, the entangled bank is the culmination of a series of examples of the complex ecology of living things in nature. If follows and supersedes the wedge, offering a much more appealing image of a complicated and confusing natural world. It seems appropriate that Darwin uses such a grand image of generation and death at the climax of a chapter that so greatly increases the power of nature. He needs the power of metaphor, since here scientific paradigm will profoundly affect cultural and religious myth, and his audience will be touched as both scientists and Victorian gentlemen:
When we look at the plants and bushes clothing an entangled bank, we are tempted to attribute their proportional numbers and kinds to what we call chance. But how false a view is this! Every one has heard that when an American forest is cut down, a very different vegetation springs up; but it has been observed that the trees now growing on the ancient Indian mounds, in the Southern United States, display the same beautiful diversity and proportion of kinds as in the surrounding virgin forests. What a struggle between the several kinds of trees must have here gone on during long centuries, each annually scattering its seeds by the thousand; what war between insect and insect—between insects, snails, and other animals with birds and beasts of prey—all striving to increase, and all feeding on each other or on the trees or their seeds and seedlings, or on the other plants which first clothed the ground and thus checked the growth of the trees! Throw up a handful of feathers, and all must fall to the ground according to definite laws; but how simple is this problem compared to the action and reaction of the innumerable plants and animals which have determined, in the course of centuries, the proportional numbers and kinds of trees now growing on the old Indian ruins! (74-75)
Darwin uses this image of complexity to protest the idea that such a complex system could result from mere chance.21 The struggle for existence does not let just anyone win, but ensures that only the best suited survive. And Darwin insists that the reader see that survival is not based on chance: forces and laws are at work here, just as in physics. Amidst all this complex fecundity and destruction, we find natural law without any sign of a creator, law without any ultimate purpose or design. But at least we still have law.
Darwin's progressive diminution of human capacity and his expansion of the power and complexity of nature prepare us for his final synthesis, in Chapter 4, of variation and struggle into the idea of natural selection. The tree of life, Darwin's final image, ends this chapter, culminating his exposition of the theory and the problems he has shown it to solve. But near the beginning of Chapter 4 Darwin once again insists that even the best human selection is crudely one-dimensional compared to natural selection:
As man can produce and certainly has produced a great result by his methodical and unconscious means of selection, what may not nature effect? Man can act only on external and visible characters: nature cares nothing for appearances, except in so far as they may be useful to any being. . . . How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by nature during whole geological periods. Can we wonder, then, that nature's productions should be far "truer" in character than man's productions; that they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship? (83-84)
Nature is a better seer than man and also a better doer. Because it is free from the human limitations of vanity, selfishness, and impatience, nature can see beneath external forms and can give its products the time and attention that man can hardly imagine. Near the end of Chapter 4 Darwin labels human selection "artificial selection" (109). If nature is a better selector than man, the products of human selection seem "artificial" in the Platonic sense of being inferior or imitative. Notice, too, how Darwin describes nature in creationist and anthropomorphic language.22 In fact, Darwin's language suggests that nature as a creator has the omniscience and omnipotence that used to be attributed to God the Creator. The lamentations in the quotation above could easily have come from a sermon, with "nature" substituting for God.
Chapter 4, although entitled "Natural Selection," does not so much argue Darwin's theory as pull it together and show how it works.23 Darwin has already argued and amply supported each premise in earlier chapters and, through the foreshadowing I have described, has even shown how the elements of the theory will fit together. In Chapter 4, although Darwin may pretend to be presenting the theory, he merely summarizes and celebrates it and then starts demonstrating it. If we have acquiesced to the elements introduced in the first three chapters—to the ideas of selection, variation, and the struggle for survival—we can hardly back away from the theory at this point. Having coaxed acceptance of each premise, Darwin trusts to his audience's commitment to logical argumentation and fair play—even though it means admitting mankind's newly outlined inferiority to nature.
In this chapter Darwin begins to show how natural selection is a process of natural law, not anarchy.24 It can account for the variety and complexity of natural products and processes, for the shape of wolves, the structure of flowers, the color of birds. Natural selection acts much like human selection, but whereas "artificial selection" serves only one species—mankind—natural selection works to perfect all species. If we can accept the idea of a natural world evolving according to natural law, of each species evolving for its own benefit, we are offered fascinating insights into the minutiae of plant and animal life. In this context Darwin's metaphor of the tree of life is an appeal for the acceptance of the strange but lawful, nonhuman but beautiful significance of this process. He invites us to exchange the images of the pounding wedges and the entangled bank for a much more positive metaphor, one that suggests a meaning for all those dead individuals and extinct species. Like many of Darwin's references to the "beauty" of his theory,25 this metaphor serves as an appreciation of natural selection and as an appeal to the reader to admire nature along with him: "As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications" (130). Thus, at the end of Chapter 4 Darwin shifts his stress from engaging our hope in the mechanistic and lawful aspects of natural selection to letting us enjoy a lusher sense of the generative order he is establishing. By this point he has offered the reader a whole new implication of natural law, replacing human and divine agency with the processes of natural selection.
Chapter 5 culminates this series of rearrangements and dislocations of the roles of man, God, and nature.26 Just as Darwin pushed man from dominance over nature, he now pushes God from his role as creator. The chapter begins with the topic of variation, a topic hitherto associated, not entirely appropriately, with the random action of nature. Darwin explains that although he writes as though variations were due to chance, "this, of course, is a wholly incorrect expression, but it serves to acknowledge plainly our ignorance of the cause of each particular variation" (131). Apologizing for the mere "ray of light" he can add, Darwin outlines what he has observed and deduced about patterns of variation. In the context of these laws of variation he mounts his main attack against special creation, creation as the design and work of God. As he describes the various kinds and possible causes of variation, it is hard not to be impressed by their sheer quantity. Repeatedly, Darwin compares natural selection to special creation as an explanation for patterns of variation. He asserts that his theory explains better than independent creation why important parts are highly variable, why specific characteristics vary more than generic characteristics, and why different species often produce analogous variations.
These are difficult, abstract problems, more appropriate to the post-paradigm specialist than to the preparadigm generalist.27 Perhaps because he is addressing questions that affect both paradigm and myth, Darwin uses a great many examples to illustrate that the problems exist and that they can be explained by natural selection. Finally, he climaxes these repeated assertions with the example of why crossed horse species tend to produce offspring with stripes; he asserts that the species in the horse genus descended from a common ancestor—remember that horses were even more a commonplace of the life of a Victorian gentleman than pigeons—and connects the biological and theological implications of that statement:
He who believes that each equine species was independently created, will, I presume, assert that each species has been created with a tendency to vary, both under nature and under domestication, in this particular manner, so as often to become striped like other species of the genus; and that each has been created with a strong tendency, when crossed with species inhabiting distant quarters of the world, to produce hybrids resembling in their stripes, not their own parents, but other species of the genus. To admit this view is, as it seems to me, to reject a real for an unreal, or at least for an unknown, cause. It makes the works of God a mere mockery and deception; I would almost as soon believe with the old and ignorant cosmogonists, that fossil shells had never lived, but had been created in stone so as to mock the shells now living on the seashore. (167)
A God who created species independently, according to this view, would be merely a meddler, creating characteristics for no purpose or reason except that he wanted them that way. This is the silly, willful, manipulative God that Darwin says we must imagine if we believe in individual creation—a God far from the conventional and benevolent God of the Church of England, who established natural law and works within it.28 Darwin sets up independent, or miraculous, creation and natural selection as polar alternatives, alternatives that do not admit of compromise, and argues the clear folly of trying to cling to the idea that God is directly or immediately involved in the design of species.
With this overt assault on the religious assumptions of many of his colleagues and countrymen, Darwin has completed his rearrangement of the relationship of man, God, and nature. He does, however, return to this relationship, for in succeeding chapters he refutes possible objections to his theory and expands its usefulness in explaining natural phenomena. As he overcomes these objections, he shows that we need not discard the Creator entirely when we look to natural selection for explanations, but merely remove him from the process of selection. In Chapter 6, for instance, Darwin raises the difficult problem of highly specialized organs, such as the eye of an eagle. The eye had served for generations as evidence of divine creation, but Darwin finds in it evidence for the operation of natural selection. In fact, he chides his audience for imagining a God who is too similar to man: "It is scarcely possible to avoid comparing the eye to a telescope. We know that this instrument has been perfected by the long-continued efforts of the highest human intellects; and we naturally infer that the eye has been formed by a somewhat analogous process. But may not this inference be presumptuous? Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man?" (188) God neither provides the variations nor does the selecting, but Darwin gives him the ultimate credit for the final product: "Let this process go on for millions on millions of years; and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?" (189) We may draw an analogy between artificial—that is, human—selection and natural selection, it seems, but not between human creation and divine creation. God is still in his heaven, and Darwin insists that he stay there. Man may still adore God but must credit him only with creating laws, not with imposing a design on the creatures or parts of creatures that those laws produce. A God who engaged in the process of selection, at least on the model of the correcting human intelligence, would be as foolish as the meddling God already proposed and rejected. Nature, Darwin implies, is still the work of the Creator, but of the Creator at a distance, uninvolved.29
As Darwin proceeds to defend his theory, his descriptions of nature grow, if anything, more complex, but he stops using this complexity to disparage the human intellect. His theory has value precisely because of the human capacity to understand nature and because of the kind of understanding that scientists have. Instead of disparaging man, Darwin uses the well-established complexity of nature to compare the idea of natural selection with the idea of independent creation. Natural selection, he shows, always offers the simplest explanation, the explanation that does not rely on miracles or on a capricious creator. Natural selection answers better than independent creation such questions as why the behaviors of some animals do not accord with their structures, why Australian and South American species are so different from European species, and why relatively few species inhabit oceanic islands. Every time Darwin uses his theory to explain a particularly complicated natural problem, he explicitly compares natural selection to the idea of independent creation. Because of the obvious explanatory superiority of Darwin's theory, creationists come to seem nearly as silly as the God Darwin accuses them of believing in. In fact, Walter Cannon insists that "Darwin's opposition is a straw man which he invented for the purposes of this book. There was no theory of 'independent creation' which had all the properties he desired to refute."30 If this is a straw man, it is a useful one, however; by repeatedly returning to give it another kick, Darwin emphasizes the rule of natural law over human and divine caprice.
This emphasis on the lawful over the capricious continues into the conclusion, where Darwin recapitulates his theory and speculates about its implications. Only here does he finish reshaping the role of man, suggesting that through research into the processes of natural selection "light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history" (488). Darwin proposes an exchange: if we accept our place as creatures of natural selection rather than of a divine creator, natural selection will explain even more than it already has. As the potential for knowledge builds, Darwin pulls out all the stops in this conclusion—or finale—to a book he admits has been "one long argument" throughout. With an eagerness of which we previously only saw flashes, he accuses naturalists who reject his theory of being blinded by traditional points of view, foolish hesitations, and misplaced piety: "Although naturalists very properly demand a full explanation of every difficulty from those who believe in the mutability of species, on their own side they ignore the whole subject of the first appearance of species in what they consider reverent silence" (483).
Meanwhile, as Darwin extends the idea of modification and selection to answer more speculative questions and heightens the emotional tone of his attack, he finally suggests, with only a slight, "modest" hesitation, that "I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed" (484). If readers can share his enthusiastic vision and embrace this "considerable revolution in natural history" (484), mankind will be able to tap its enormous potential to know and understand nature:
When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become! (485-86)
All this celebration of the intellectual possibilities of his theory and of the intellectual potential of at least "civilized" man can only help sweeten the statement that is coming, the implication that readers in his time as well as ours have recognized all along: that it is not just the birds and flowers and beasts that were selected by the mechanism of nature rather than independently created by God—but also man.
When Darwin returns to the image of the entangled bank in the last paragraph of the Origin, he focuses on the explanatory power of the metaphor: "It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us" (489). This is certainly a positive image: the entangled bank is no longer a field of death, but a home of active life—animals singing, flitting, and crawling, and men reflecting. But it also is no longer, as it might have been before the Origin, an image of divine design and guidance. It is instead the image of the natural law that Darwin's theory allows man to comprehend, an image of the insight that his theory offers if we accept our place in nature.
Darwin's accomplishment in the Origin is many-faceted. He made it possible, and ultimately necessary, for scientists who had rejected earlier theories of evolution to accept the idea that all of life—even man—was generated by and subject to natural law. At least part of the Origin's success comes from Darwin's skillful use of argument, from his patient consideration of the difficulties his audience would face in accepting his theory. In the Origin Darwin speaks to the problems of naturalists constructing a new paradigm and also to the problems of men coming to grips with a new myth, a new ground for assessing the meaning of their lives. Darwin moves his audience step by painful step from being the lords of nature to being its products. He succeeds because he engages the mind and respects and addresses the emotions provoked by such a new way of seeing the world. That most readers have acquiesced is a measure of his achievement.
Notes
1 Stanley Edgar Hyman, in The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazier, and Freud as Imaginative Writers (New York: Atheneum, 1962), considers the Origin as epic quest, tragedy, and testament. Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), published after this chapter was first written, presents a skillful discussion of Darwin's imagination and the mythic qualities of the Origin and considers how Darwin's theory was influenced by his literary heritage and in turn affected subsequent English literature.
2 Here I disagree with Walter Cannon's claim that "what is important about Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection is what he has to show; the way in which he says it is an offense to our logical and rhetorical tradition. Our logical and rhetorical tradition will simply have to change. The scientific imagination will not be confined in these out-worn intellectual structures." Walter F. Cannon, "Darwin's Vision in On the Origin of Species," in The Art of Victorian Prose, ed. George Levine and William Madden (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), 167. A more fruitful approach is suggested by Thomas S. Kuhn's comments on the relation between science and art: although both artists and scientists are "guided by aesthetic considerations and governed by established modes of perception," the goal of the scientist is the resolution of "technical puzzles"; the goal of the artist is "the production of aesthetic objects." Thus "what are ends for the artist are means for the scientist, and vice versa." The scientist, moreover, sees his problems as having one or one best solution, whereas the artist's values are not founded on a base of "right" or "wrong," "correct" or "incorrect." See Thomas S. Kuhn, "Comment on the Relations of Science and Art," in Comparative Studies in Society and History 11 (1969): 403-12; rpt. in his The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977), 340-51, quotations on pp. 343, 346. Perhaps many contemporary scientists would disagree with Kuhn's absolutes, but I think that Darwin would not.
3 Loren Eiseley, Darwin's Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It (New York: Anchor, 1961), 282-83.
4 Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Revolution (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979), 147-48, 151.
5 Ruse, Revolution, 73. Earlier in the same paragraph he observes that although most Victorian thinkers believed that man was intellectually and morally superior to animals, "an object of God's special attention and favor," they disagreed about whether plants and animals existed for their own or man's benefit. According to Walter Cannon scientists would have found "theologically implausible" the idea "that God made the world for man alone and not for the good of the whole of creation." See Walter F. Cannon, "The Bases of Darwin's Achievement: A Reevaluation," Victorian Studies 5 (1961): 119. However, few scientists were willing to remove God entirely from creation or to abandon totally a special role for man.
6 Ruse, Revolution, 242.
7 For a detailed study of the interactions within the common intellectual context before the Origin and its breakdown afterward, see Robert M. Young, "Natural Theology, Victorian Periodicals, and the Fragmentation of a Common Context," in Darwin to Einstein: Historical Studies on Science and Belief, ed. Colin Chant and John Fauvel (New York: Longman, 1980), 69-107. According to Thomas S. Kuhn, of course, one of the general results of paradigm creation is that research is communicated no longer in books addressed "to anyone who might be interested in the subject matter of the field," but in "brief articles addressed only to professional colleagues." See The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962; 2nd ed., enlarged, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970), 20.
8 I use the terms gentlemen, men, man, and so forth, consciously here and throughout the chapter. Although certainly many Victorian women read the Origin and responded to it, often profoundly, Darwin's primary audience, the audience to which he was writing, was this small group of men.
9 Ruse, Revolution, 19-21, 63-64.
10 Ruse, Revolution, 63.
11 Ruse, Revolution, 254-55, 251. See also M. J. S. Hodge, "England," in The Comparative Reception of Darwinism, ed. Thomas F. Glick (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1974), 3-31. Hodge claims that Darwin "constructed an argumentative case for a definite readership—we know he even had particular individuals—like Huxley—in mind" (6).
12 In a letter to Darwin's publisher written after reading the manuscript, the Reverend Whitwell Elwin, editor of the Quarterly Review, wrote that Lyell had suggested that instead of publishing the Origin Darwin should set forth his ideas about species in a book about pigeons. Elwin agrees: "Everybody is interested in pigeons. The book would be reviewed in every journal in the kingdom, & would soon be on every table." Quoted in Ronald W. Clark, The Survival of Charles Darwin: A Biography of a Man and an Idea (New York: Avon, 1984), 125.
13 Michael Ruse discusses the role of Darwin's reading of breeding pamphlets in "Charles Darwin and Artificial Selection," Journal of the History of Ideas 36 (1975): 339-50.
14 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859, A Facsimile of the First Edition, intro. Ernst Mayr (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), 28-29. Further references to this source will be cited parenthetically in the text.
15 Cannon, "Darwin's Vision," 163.
16 See Kuhn, Structure, 62-65, on the perception of anomaly.
17 Morse Peckham stresses the modernism of Darwin's sense of the subjectivity of species: "to him a scientific law was a mental convenience. The mind organized the data into meaningful structures; it did not discover the principles of organization immanent within the data." Darwin's audience, however, Peckham argues, converted this subjectivity into an extension of the laws of nature. Morse Peckham, "Darwinism and Darwinisticism," Victorian Studies 3 (1959): 31.
18 Barry G. Gale, Evolution Without Evidence: Charles Darwin and "The Origin of Species" (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1982), 122.
19 Darwin dropped this image after the first edition—wisely, I think, since it seems to exacerbate rather than to cushion the shock of the displacement of man in this chapter.
20 Darwin does not, however, completely drop his use of the "I" in this chapter. It remains in such phrases as "I think" and "I believe" and in descriptions of some of his own thought processes and investigations.
21 At this point in the argument, however, although Darwin proclaims the beauty of this diversity, his emphasis is still on the strife and destruction of life in the tangle. And although he proclaims the lawfulness of the process, his focus is on its complexity. When he returns to this image in the last paragraph of the book, having outlined the laws, explicated much of the complexity, and met the major objections to his theory, the foci will be reversed.
22 Beer, Darwin's Plots, 67-70. Beer discusses Darwin's search for a language that was neither creationist nor anthropomorphic and considers how his language serves as a counterpoise to his theory.
23 Walter Cannon uses this chapter to demonstrate Darwin's deficiency in scientific logic, because of Darwin's reliance on clichés such as "let it be borne in mind," "let it be truly said," "we may feel sure." See Cannon, "Darwin's Vision," 169. My own sense is that Darwin has already made his case and here is presenting his theory as a fait accompli, even, as Barry Gale points out, describing the theory in terms such as "indisputable." See Gale, Evolution Without Evidence, 124.
24 Hayden White suggests that natural selection had a particular appeal to the Victorians because of their great concern with avoiding revolution. Although it "dissolved the distinction between 'higher' and 'lower' in nature (and by implication, therefore, in society)," the image of continuity without "cataclysm" and of implied biological progress was reassuring because "for 'cataclysm' we can of course read 'revolution' and for 'secure future,' 'social status quo.'" See Hayden White, "The Fictions of Factual Representation," in The Literature of Fact, ed. Angus Fletcher (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1976); rpt., in Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), 132.
25 Theodore Baird, "Darwin and the Tangled Bank," The American Scholar 15 (1946): 481.
26 Critics disagree about whether Chapter 5 is part of the main statement of Darwin's theory. Barry Gale, in Evolution Without Evidence, 119, views Chapter 5 as a part of the first, "presentation," part of the Origin, whereas Walter Cannon, in "Darwin's Vision," 170, argues that here "Darwin begins his defense, although he pretends that it does not begin until Chapter 6." Because I consider Darwin's most urgent rhetorical task to be rearranging the roles of man, God, and nature and making that rearrangement acceptable to his readers, I think that this chapter's extensive discussion of the role of God makes it part of the main statement.
27 See Kuhn, Structure, 19-20.
28 Such a God, however, is not unlike some of the deities worshipped in the British colonies, an implicit comparison strengthened by Darwin's repeated comparisons of "civilized" and "savage" perceptions and selections.
29 Even Darwin's defenders had trouble with this challenge to God's role as creator. Asa Gray's defense of the Origin in The Atlantic Monthly, for instance, makes much of the distinction between First and efficient causes, but his conception of God as First cause in evolution gives the impression of a God much more involved in the processes of selection than Darwin would allow. See Asa Gray, "Darwin and His Reviewers," The Atlantic Monthly 6 (Oct. 1860): 406-25.
30 Cannon, "Darwin's Vision," 156.
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