Charles Darwin man and metaphor

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CHARLES DARWIN: MAN AND METAPHOR

by Robert M. Young

One of the ways we make our heroes heroic is to see them as outside histo-

ry - so great, so original that their genius cant be accounted for - pure ge-

nius. This is especially true of the scientific hero. The greater the scientist

the more she or he (almost always he) shows unprecedented intelligence

and insight beyond the ability of colleagues - a timeless vision of immu-

table truth - the eternal truths - the laws of nature. An Einstein, we say -

the purest.

I find it hard to think of Darwin in these terms. What a prosaic man he

was. No eureka moment a la Archimedes in his tub. No apple fell on his

head a la Newton. No abstracted way of life. He was neither absent-min-

ded nor effete nor dandy. He was a quiet, sober family man who rarely left

home and in the last forty years of life rarely left this village and spent

most of his time an invalid on this couch.

And yet, if we were looking for a scientific theory that is important to hu-mankind, I cant think of a more significant one or one with wider and

deeper implications. Moreover, if I was to think through all the intellectu-

als in British history, no matter how disinclined I am to the heroic mode, I

would have to acknowledge that Darwin was the most profound.

More profound than Hobbes or Harvey. More profound than Newton or

Locke or Faraday or Dalton or Rutherford or Crick.

It is said that there were three or four great blows to our self-esteem in the

modern era. The first was that the earth is not the centre of the known

heavens but that it revolves around the sun, displacing us to an eccentric

setting. The second that we descended from the apes, displacing us from a

unique relationship with the earth and God. The third that our behaviour

and motives are ultimately rooted in social and economic causes; and,

finally, that we dont even have access to the most important sources of ourown thought and actions since these are unconscious. Of these four blows

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to human pride at the hands of Copernicus, Darwin, Marx and Freud, it

was Darwin who rooted our humanity to the history of the animal kingdom

and to the history of the earth so that, as they put it in the nineteenth cen-

tury, mans place in nature was a purely historical one, not above or out-

side history. Not specially created. Not apart from the other creatures butone of them. At the same time, in the 1860s when it was being argued that

slaves were our brothers, an even heavier blow to Victorian self-esteem

was felt - that apes were our ancestors and remain our cousins or perhaps -

as some caricaturists thought - our brothers, after all, like the slaves.

All of this added up to a considerable humiliation - rocking many of the

ideological, moral and spiritual foundations of human civility - even hu-

man civilization. But at a deeper level I want to argue that Darwinism wasvery much part of the establishment and constituted a subtle accommoda-

tion with the status quo, one which was suitable for a rapidly changing so-

cial and empirical order. I am suggesting that we should think of Darwi-

nism in three ways: first, its popular reception; second, its deeper cultural

resonances; and third - to which I will now turn - its philosophical and sci-

entific significance.

Newtons laws and the concepts of physics and chemistry dont include re-al historical time. They are eternal and timeless. But geology and the histo-

ry of life - biology - have real time at the heart of their explanations.

It was Darwin who brought history - or historiness - to the heart of science.

His theory of evolution by natural selection is the linchpin of the human

and the biological and the earth sciences. It is the single most general idea

for understanding how we came to be. It makes us natural and unites hu-

manity and nature.

What it says is that over millions and millions of years the process that

eventually led to the species we call man or homo sapiens evolved by pu-

rely natural processes by tiny stages, each conferring a small advantage so

that an animal had more surviving offspring - selected in the struggle for

life. Bit by bit by an infinity of slow processes our kind came to be - de-

scended in the last instance from the apes.

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This seemed extraordinary to a popular opinion in the mid-nineteenth

century and seems utterly commonplace to us now. What is striking about

Darwin as we look back on him is how much he was a man of his own ti-

me - inside history, inside the ideas and society of his era. Evolution by na-

tural selection was a quintessentially Victorian theory. When one looksclosely at his theory, his originality, it is actually an amalgam of a number

of ideas which come from traditions which seem on the surface to be op-

posed to science. What I am saying is first that he was not as original as is

often supposed and second that he got his ideas from some very unlikely

places. Even so - and Ill come back to this - his theory of evolution by na-

tural selection is one of the two or three most important and fundamental

in science. We think of science as pure, clear, objective, unambiguous - the

opposite of arts or literature. Yet Darwins key idea - natural selectionwas a metaphor, a vague ambiguous phrase, and this ambiguity and me-

taphoricalness lay at the heart of its power. This feature of his theory great-

ly helped Darwins concept of natural selection to prevail over its rivals.

What I am out to show is that science and scientists are inside culture -

they are expressions of contending values and social forces rather than

above them. Moreover, that scientific concepts - and the more fundamental

a concept the truer this is - are packed with values - are even expressionsof them and are deeply metaphorical.

The usual way of representing Darwinian evolution is as a challenge to

theology. Indeed, a common phrase in the nineteenth century as in recent

controversies in America is that the battle over Darwinism was the decisi-

ve one in the warfare between science and theology. Darwin is said to

have been godless to have destroyed the link between God and man and

with it to have undermined the concept of free will and responsibility andthe hope for an afterlife. If we are animals, descended from the apes, how

can we have God-given choice and an immortal soul? Do fish have souls?

Do insects? Indeed, at a melodramatic setpiece debate at the meeting of the

British Association at Oxford in 1860, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce chal-

lenged T. H. Huxley and asked if he was descended from an ape on his

grandmothers side or his grandfathers side. Huxley replied with great

dignity that he would rather be descended from an ape than to use his in-

telligence in such a base way.

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But if we look closely there is no evidence that Darwin was attacking the-

ism. The one feature that all of Darwins intellectual mentors have in

common is their belief in God. Indeed, it was not at all unusual for natura-

lists to be clerics in this period. On the contrary, he tells us that the works

of the Reverend William Paley, Archdeacon of Carlisle and author ofworks on Natural Theology and The Evidences of Christianity, were the

only books in the academical course at Cambridge which were any use to

him in the education of his mind. They gave him great delight.

It was Paleys way of reasoning about natures harmony which provided

much of Darwins framework of ideas. He drew attention to the mutual

adaptedness of living things in relation to each other and to the environ-

ment. Paley said there was beautiful God-given harmony. Darwin agreedbut set out to explain how it came to be by means of natural causes. Anot-

her parson who saw nature and humanity in religious terms was the Reve-

rend Thomas R. Malthus, who provided much else - the key to Darwins

mechanism of natural selection. This became clear to Darwin as he was

ruminating the fruits of his 55-month-37,000 mile voyage round the world,

starting in 1831. The experience of such a journey led Darwin to see the

relationship between present and extinct plants and animals on a grand

scale. Indeed, the time scale was greatly enhanced by the Principles ofGeology by Darwins mentor Charles Lyell of whom he said I always

think my books came half out of Lyells brain. Volume One of Lyells

Principles went with him when he sailed from England and Volume Two

was waiting for him when he arrived in Montevideo. Lyell argued that on-

ly causes now in operation and in their present intensity produced the

changes in the earth and life which we observe to have come to pass. This

process took many millions of years rather than the few thousand allowed

for by a literal reading of the Bible. Lyell, too, was a theist and wished toexempt mans origins from his framework of naturalistic ideas.

If we put together Paleys harmony with Lyells time scale and the ideas of

Malthus, which pointed to a competition produced by the pressure of ever-

increasing populations, it is not difficult to arrive at Darwins theory of the

development of species through the struggle for existence or natural selec-

tion. He is quite explicit about this in his autobiography and his notebooks

and the early sketches of his theory. He said,

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In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic

enquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and be-

ing well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhe-

re goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and

plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable vari-ations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed.

The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had

at last got a theory by which to work;

There is a breathless quality about the sense of discovery in his notes.[show ms]

It is the doctrine of Malthus applied in most cases with ten-fold force . . .

the pressure is always ready . . . a thousand wedges are being forced into

the economy of nature. In the course of a thousand generations infinitesi-

mally small differences must inevitably tell. In his notebook for October

1838, he says, One may say that there is a force like a hundred thousand

wedges trying to force every kind of adopted structure into the gaps in the

economy of nature, or rather forming gaps by thrusting out weaker ones.

You might think that Darwin thoroughly secularized theistic ideas and ba-

nished religion. But if that was so, why did he put three theological quota-

tions at the beginning of his great work On the Origin of Species by Means

of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle

for Life? [show]

These said respectively that God acted through general laws, that he acted

once and that there is no conflict between the book of Gods word - theBible - and the book of Gods works - science - they are complementary.

Once again, if Darwin was an enemy of theism, why did he conclude On

the Origin of Species with this flourish:

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted ob-

ject which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the

higher animal, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with

its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into afew forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on ac-

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cording to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless

forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evol-

ved.

The phrase by the Creator was not in the first edition. Darwin added it to

the second edition and kept it in all later ones. All of this seems pretty the-

ological to me. But Id say it was a secular natural theology. It was not the

personal god of the Christian life. It was a rather abstruse deistic god ac-

ting through natural laws. Indeed, there has been a huge controversy about

whether or not Darwin was a believer, and current theologians battle over

the fate of his soul. There is even talk of a deathbed conversion. The pas-

sage in his writings which I find most convincing was a remark he made to

the Duke of Argyll in the last year of his life: that a sense of design in na-ture often came over him with overwhelming force but at other times - and

he shook his head vaguely - it seems to go away.

The popular controversies surrounding Darwins theory were colossal. In-

deed, even the listing of the periodicals containing substantial articles

about it covers 15 pages, and then there were all the pamphlets and books.

But lets look more deeply and focus on what was happening among the

elite.

Public debate happens at several levels. There is what we would now call

the media hype, and theres the - sometimes very different - reaction of the

intellectuals. One of Darwins supporters was Frederick Temple, who was

prosecuted in the theological courts in 1860, but went on to write a book

downplaying the notion of conflict between religion and science (and after

that he became Archbishop of Canterbury). Indeed, Darwin was a serious

supporter of the church in the village of Down where he lived out the lastfour decades of his life and where he died. He was a pillar of the parish,

something of a squire/parson, and when he died his respectability was so

great that Sir John Lubbock along with 20 Members of Parliament and a

future Prime Minister argued that it was appropriate that he should be bu-

ried in Westminster Abbey. The editorial in The Times said this:

By every title which can claim a corner in that sacred earth, the body of

Charles Darwin should be there. . . Charles Darwin has, perhaps, borne thefiat of science farther, certainly he has planted its standard more deeply,

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than any Englishman since Newton. . . The Abbey has its orators and Mi-

nisters who have convinced reluctant senates and swayed nations. Not one

of them all has wielded a power over men and their intelligences more

complete than that which for the last twenty three years has emanated from

a simple country house in Kent.

So much for Darwin the anti-theistic iconoclast. His theory was a synthesis

of prevailing views which were themselves primarily theistic, and he was

not anti-theistic at all in the intentions of his own work. Nor were the Es-

tablishment scandalized: they buried him next to Newton in the nations

shrine. Moreover, his originality was of a kind which I find often in the

history of great ideas. As soon as one sees the elements which went into it,

the puzzle is why no one else thought of it. His friend and champion, T. H.Huxley, actually said when he first heard it, How stupid of me not to have

thought of that. Of course, people had thought of all of the elements of it

and there were other evolutionists aplenty for him to ponder. Indeed, his

grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had put forward a theory of evolution in the

1790s, and other evolutionary ideas were current in the 1840s and 50s, but

he gave it scientific credibility and - the mark of genius - synthesized the

ideas of his time.

Now I want to go back to Darwin the pure scientist. Here I am after very

big game and want to argue that the usual distinction that puts science and

objectivity on one side and arts and subjectivity on the other - with facts

clearly separated from values - is balderdash and part of a conspiracy to

hide the values and politics and ideological positions deeply embedded in

science.

If we think of Darwins concept of natural selection and follow closely itshistory in his own thinking and in the controversy surrounding his work,

we find it deeply value-laden, deeply anthropomorphic - that is, partaking

of human attributes and treating the idea of nature as if it was a person -

just the way scientific concepts arent supposed to be. Darwin wrote that

nature was always scrutinizing, that she picked out with unerring skill,

that she favoured this and rejected that.

Indeed, his colleagues were at pains to point this out to him and his replyis very interesting indeed. He says that natural selection is no worse than

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chemists speaking of elective affinities of elements or physicists speaking

of gravity as ruling the movements of the plants. Everyone knows what

is meant and is implied by such metaphorical expressions.

I am arguing that at the heart of science lies metaphor - a concept usually

associated with literature, especially poetry. We think of science as literal

but at its heart lie figures of speech, in this case the idea that nature selects

rather like a breeder or a deity.

Darwin is not alone in this kind of thinking. On the contrary, he points out

that affinity and other scientific concepts are no more or less scientific

than his. The same thing applies to all basic concepts in science. The other

candidate for Britains greatest scientist, Isaac Newton, derived the con-cept of gravity from gravitas: affinity, natural selection, gravity - all these

are metaphors drawn from ideas of human nature and projected on to natu-

re as a way of seeing things and providing a framework for a philosophy

of science. Not all such projections turn out to be so fruitful, but that do-

esnt set facts apart from values or literal statements apart from metaphors.

The history of scientific ideas, like the history of other ideas, is a moving

army of metaphors - some more general than others, but literalness is the

enemy of scientific progress.

This point connects to my last one. The values in science are not only

connected to those in the wider society. Rather, the values in the wider

society throw up the issues in science which come to be revered. This is

particularly true of the extension of the concept of natural selection into

what has come to be known as Social Darwinism. The social survival of

the fittest had a great vogue in the period of the 1870s to the 1890s and has

regained new respectability in Reagan America and Thatcher Britain. Pe-ople often write about Darwin as if one could separate his scientific views

from Social Darwinism. However, this simply wont wash for two reasons.

The first is that as we have seen, Darwin was deeply indebted to the

writings of Thomas Malthus about social competition as the motor of pro-

gress. Beyond this debt, however, we find his own writings shot full of so-

called social Darwinist ideas. They are found in the Origin of Species and

again in the book in which he spelled out the human implications of his

thinking, The Descent of Man.

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In The Origin of Species he sees nature quite as red in tooth and claw as

Tennyson ever did. The chapter on instinct speaks of slave ants and other

apparent cruelties as small consequences of one general law, leading to

the advancement of all organic beings - namely, multiply, vary, let the

strongest live and the weakest die.

In the Descent of Man he extols the inheritance of property and the repla-

cement of the lower races by the higher.

Man, like every other animal, has no doubt advanced to his present high

condition through a struggle for existence consequent upon his rapid mul-

tiplication; and if he is to advance still higher, it is to be feared that he

must remain subject to a severe struggle. Otherwise he would sink into in-dolence, and the more gifted men would not be more successful in the

battle of life than the less gifted. Hence our natural rate of increase, though

leading to many and obvious evils, must not be greatly diminished by any

means. There should be open competition for all men; and the most able

should not be prevented by laws or customs from succeeding the best and

rearing the largest number of offspring.

So - we find Darwins scientific theory derived from prevailing theologicaland social ideas, feeding back into the competitive and imperialist social

philosophy of his age, and we find the man honoured and entombed by the

nation in Westminster Abbey.

Darwin is certainly Britains greatest intellectual. Moreover, genius - espe-

cially intellectual genius - is not outside history or above it. It is the distil-

lation of the times, its quintessence. In the same way we see that science is

not separate from values or above them, it is their embodiment. This is trueof theories, therapies and things just as it is of industrial processes and

commercial products. And if science is inside history and is the embodi-

ment of values, then science and politics - which is values linked to power

- are ultimately one topic. Science, values and politics are part of a single

set of issues about how we see ourselves and live together on the earth -

which Darwin showed us is one world.

This is the text of a television documentary in the series Late Great Victo-rians, BBC1, 1988. It was published in Science as Culture 5:71-86, 1989.

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http://www.human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/paper7h.html

Address for correspondence: 26 Freegrove Road, London N7 9RQ

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Charles Darwin man and metaphor