Today I’m teaching a perilous topic: the eclipse of Darwinism. There was a period of several decades where you could make an honest intellectual argument against evolution, roughly from the time it was first published (1860) to the development of population genetics (say, roughly 1920). All the arguments since then are fundamentally garbage, but before then, some smart, reputable, qualified scientists did have sincere disagreements with the theory. Also there were some terrible arguments against Darwin, but I’m focusing on just the intelligent principled arguments.
One part of Darwin’s problem is that we have to admit that there were some gigantic holes in his theory — in particular, he didn’t have a good theory of inheritance. He tried to come up with one, his theory of pangenesis, which was a combination of Lamarckian and blending inheritance. It was wrong. It was also incompatible with his theory of evolution.
What I’ll be arguing, though, is that there was a greater problem than the flaws, and that was not that people were punching holes in The Origin. Good criticism is a treasured thing in science, and critical evaluation of an idea is essential to refining and improving it. Eventually, the people ripping on Darwin’s model of inheritance were going to produce a much more solid theory.
I’m going to make the somewhat controversial claim that the people who were burying evolution were the ones who were must uncritical and gung-ho about the idea — the ones who wholeheartedly embraced Darwinism, warts and all, and extended it in unproductive ways. That means that today I’m going to talk about two people who were disastrous to Darwinism while simultaneously acting as prominent cheerleaders for it.
So yeah, I’m going to rake a couple of historical figures over the coals, specifically Haeckel and Herbert Spencer. We’re going to discuss the positive claims of a couple of prominent 19th century boosters of evolution, and I’m going to make the case that their excesses were a contributing factor to the eclipse. Worse, their version of evolution was popular and persuasive and despite their rejection as good science, we’re still dealing with people who think recapitulation and “survival of the fittest” are great shorthand summaries of the principle of evolution.
The reading I’ve assigned for the week is this article, The Beauty and Violence of Ernst Haeckel’s Illustrations, which is an extremely harsh condemnation of Haeckel’s views. “Haeckel’s visions of nature were less objective depictions of life and more projected notions about the proper ‘order’ of nature,” it says. I’m telling the students to read Haeckel critically and also to regard this article skeptically. I’m hoping maybe they’ll be provoked into good, vigorous debate in the classroom, and that they’ll put together some thoughtful essays on the topic.
“Survival of the fittest” always struck me as a tautology — it wouldn’t be much different to say “that which survives, survives”. The problem comes when “fittest” gets over-interpreted, as being some kind of moral judgement. That’s how you get Social Darwinism.
I probably would have been one of those students who responded to your lecture with a blank stare and silence. Only to remember and appreciate it decades later.
When do you get to the conceptual breakthrough of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Not so, because there were hypotheses about evolution which would have made it false if they were true. Some versions of orthogenesis postulated that species could die out because they continued evolving in a particular direction despite it making them increasingly unfit. The huge antlers of the extinct Irish elk (which wasn’t an elk and wasn’t particularly Irish) were a supposed example.
There are really good reasons to think there was no “eclipse of Darwin” in that time period. That the whole idea was invented by the architects of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis in order prop up their own scientific agenda. Once you remove that agenda, we can find Darwinism doing quite well during the so-called “eclipse.” Here’s a good place to start:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/27757422
That’s a good article, but I think the “eclipse of darwinism” was a reality, but not as devastating as some make it to be. It was a period when science was floundering with less fruitful patterns of research. I’m talking about Haeckel as an example of the kind of unproductive distraction that characterized the period, which is not to deny that there was lots of good science going on at that time that would bear fruit later.
From our esteemed host’s link: Haeckel’s capacity to see beauty in an ecosystem is inextricable from his racist and ableist theory of nature and culture.
I find them fairly easy to extricate, just as I can enjoy the music of Miles Davis and the art of Pablo Picasso while knowing of their destructive sexism. Separating the inspiration and what someone does with that inspiration takes some mental effort (and provides endless opportunity for abstruse [yet often worthwhile] analysis), but we can “take the best and leave the rest” just as we build on Newton’s science while rejecting his theology and numerology.
The social eugenics aspect had its roots in official Holy Roman church doctrine. That bias then colored the social science that classified humans as more or less highly evolved based on racist beliefs.
It’s similar to the current proponents of EP.
Haeckle wasn’t entirely wrong about recapitulation though that’s overly simplistic. His illustration of embryonic development between various vertebrates was cutting edge science that provided strong evidence for evolution via common descent. He was also the first person to posit that the nucleus was the repository for whatever was passed to offspring, before the discovery of chromosomes and DNA.
I do admire his camera lucida illustrations of various marine creatures as Art. The only value of his illustrations in his racist works is to provide a helpful example of how bias can be perpetuated via imagery.
Another example of the danger of inaccurate yet common scientific illustrations is the way human evolution is drawn as gorilla- chimpanzee- chimpanzee with fire- cave man- modern human. It creates an entirely false impression of the path of human evolution.
The racist aspects and the illustration by Haeckel are linked within the main assigned reading.
It’s a well written article and includes some of his less well known books and accompanying artwork.
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/human-forms-in-nature-ernst-haeckel-s-trip-to-south-asia-and-its-aftermath/
Thanks for the article, but some points I find rather nonsensical:
“Images of things like jellyfish, or whales, or plants have always been political, right? It’s easy to see these objects as though they’re sort of flattened or removed or taken out of their natural world”
whaaaat. One draws ONE specimen, because drawing all the rest of the world beside it would require a paper sheet as large as, well, the whole world (a bit like that legendary Map of the Empire, as large as the Empire itself).
For the rest yes, the man was quite racist and some illustrations of humans from his books are really painful to see. But interestingly he was no antisemite, which was rather unusual in the Germany of that day. So maybe not a complete disaster.
PZ, it’s good to remind students that there were a few decades after Origin when the evidence still had some big holes in it. But I still think that overall the evidence was pretty overwhelming despite those holes, which is why it was so rapidly taken up by biologists. The reason I say this is that the big holes in Darwin’s theory were holes for everyone. Just to choose the obvious example, the fact that nobody understood the granular nature of inheritance until Mendel’s work was recognised left a big flaw in Darwinian theory, but it was even worse for creationists. If Darwinian evolution implied that species should have blended out almost all heritable variation over time, then Biblical Creationism had to explain why there was any variation at all given all living creatures were descended from two specimens of each on the Ark. Elements here of Galileo’s quote about hiding Aristotle’s ninety-nine cubit error behind G’s two-fingerbreadth error.
At least Lamarckism, although we now know it is mostly wrong, gave an explanatory framework for where heritable diversity could come from. I would say that post-Origins the main debate was between different models of evolution.
There are equally interesting historical arguments in geology that parallel these in biology. The “sudden” appearance of fossils in the geological record was taken by some to indicate multiple creation events, or repeated cycles of creation and destruction of the world.
Just curious, how did the lecture go?
Sounds like an interesting lecture. Must be fun.
@pz “I’m talking about Haeckel as an example of the kind of unproductive distraction that characterized the period”
100 years later and the Nuttings are still using Haeckel as a defense for young earth creationism. (Went to the sermon on campus a few week ago.)