Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God

7: Inventing ‘Darwinism’

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

Darwinism on the Ropes

It is often thought that it did not take long before Darwinism was generally accepted, and that it has been sailing before the wind ever since. What was quite soon accepted, though in the teeth of rugged resistance, was the fact of evolution, not Darwin’s theory as such. André Pichot writes in one of his thoroughly researched books: “In the years which separate us from the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, there has practically not been a single moment when Darwinism was not in crisis. … It is doubtlessly in the years around 1900 that the confusion [about Darwinism] reached its peak.”¹ In his Evolution Edward Larson confirms this: “By the end of the nineteenth century Darwinism was on the ropes.”²

We remember that a theory of evolution – any such theory – evoked quasi-instinctive resistances all around, in religious, non-religious and anti-religious people, and not the least in scientists, who most often had thought out their own explanations and systems, or held on to the creationist status quo. Lyell accepted the theory of his friend Darwin only in 1869, after having defended him for a decade. Huxley, the champion of the theory, had his reservations up to the very publication of the Origin, and never accepted Darwin’s gradualism. Asa Gray agreed with Darwin only within a framework which held that all species had been created over time. Herbert Spencer, propagandist of Darwinism, remained a Lamarckist at heart. And of Ernst Haeckel, “the German Darwin” and “universal promoter of Darwinism,” Larson writes: “Haeckel saw evolution proceeding through the accumulation of Lamarckian acquired characteristics selected for fitness in a Darwinian fashion.”³ All these were persons close to Charles Darwin physically or in their way of thinking.

There were enough rival theories of Darwinism to keep the “X Club” occupied. The creationist theory of evolution budded into several variants: literalist, short-term and long-term, with some more theories composed according to the idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible by their inspired authors. Then there was orthogenesis, which held that evolution was the work of an inner driving force. And Lamarckism and neo-Lamarckism were intertwined or confused with natural selection in many minds. This is understandable if one considers that the environment plays a dominant role in both theories. Each time the environment has come into play, Lamarckism has raised its head, favoured by the fact that the “mechanism” of Darwinian evolution remained problematic.

Among the major scientific problems bothering Darwin during his lifetime was the age of the Earth. William Thomson, later known as Lord Kelvin, “during most of his life widely thought of as the leading physicist and electrical engineer in the world,” still thought that the Sun’s energy was generated by coal. Basing himself on this supposition, he calculated an age for the Earth much too short for the evolution of life to be possible. As Darwin mentions in his Origin: “Sir W. Thomson concludes that the consolidation of the crust [of the Earth] can hardly have occurred less than 20 or more than 400 million years ago, but probably not less than 98 or more than 200 million years.”⁴ The age of the Earth as accepted at present is 4.57 billion years.

Another problem, still alive today, was that the mechanism of inheritance remained unknown. And a third problem was the apparent persistence of gaps or discontinuities in the fossil record. It was this last fact that gave rise to saltation theories. Now associated with the names of Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, saltation theories opposed dogmatic gradualism already in Darwin’s days. They hold that evolution has not happened gradually, tiny step by tiny step, but as it were in sudden eruptions of life forms, of which the most dramatic, as known now, was the “Cambrian Explosion” half a billion years ago.

“By the turn of the twentieth century no consensus existed among biologists about how evolution operated,” writes Edward Larson.⁵ “Had evolution and Darwinism indeed triumphed? Hardly. In fact, ‘from about 1890 to 1910 Darwin’s theory was threatened to such an extent by various opposing theories that it was in danger of going under.’”⁶ The source quoted here is none other than Ernst Mayr, “dean of evolutionism” and “one of the architects of contemporary Darwinism.” “In 1903 the German botanist Eberhard Dennert proclaimed: ‘We are now standing by the death-bed of Darwinism, and making ready to send the friends of the patient a little money to insure a decent burial of the remains,’” concludes Edward Larson.⁷ And Pichot asserts that around the turn of the century every biologist had more or less assembled his own theory of evolution.

A Hollow Theory?

“Darwinism was built bit by bit between 1859 and 1910, integrating into the original Darwinian theory various elements which were not part of it, and eliminating at least as many. The whole process came about with many difficulties and controversies, for the theses which were to be adjusted were sometimes antagonistic. … This constant crisis was in a way normal, for Darwinism has never been able to provide evolution with a theoretical necessity, and it has always depended on external supports, with very few arguments deduced from its own premises.” (Pichot⁸)

As pointed out before, what was accepted was not Darwinism properly speaking, but evolution under the name of Darwinism. This acceptance was facilitated by the obvious fact that the human physiology resembles the physiology of primates quite closely, and that nature apparently manifests a hierarchy of gradations of consciousness in its mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, with other discernible degrees in the specification of living beings. There was a kind of instinctive memory of evolution in the many myths of life emerging from “the waters,” e.g. in India the succession of avatars: fish, tortoise, boar, dwarf [hominid], Rama with the ax [Homo habilis], Rama with the bow [Homo sapiens], Krishna, the Buddha. Now the fossils discovered by the new sciences of geology and paleontology presented the theorists with a gradually increasing complexity which suggested transformation, and of which the relationships could be “descent with modification.”

It was also the time that the myths of the Bible, which had become an integral part of the mental implementation of the Western world, could at last be openly put into question, albeit not yet without risk. The medieval, Catholic paradigm could be challenged by the paradigm of “man the rational being.” Living on a fault line between two paradigms is dangerous and demands heroism, if not their lives, of the individuals who contribute to the transition consciously. The enthusiasm of such individuals, animated by the spirit of a new time, has always been admirable – e.g. the sophists in Greece, the Christian Church Fathers and martyrs, the Renaissance men of the New Learning, the philosophers of the Enlightenment.

To switch from one God, who is supposed to be non-existent or to have died, to another is a world-rending event. The “X Club”, like Darwin’s “four musketeers,” although limited in the immediate awareness of their aims, was one of the instruments necessary to give shape to a new time, in this case the era of modern science with its own myth of scientific materialism and Darwinism. They contributed to the advent of the end of an era and the opening of the gates of a new one, not yet envisioned and therefore not yet named.

As we have seen in the chapters on Darwin, the two main pillars of his “transmutationism” were the geological theory of Charles Lyell and the economic theory of Thomas Malthus. On the unexplained fact of evolution, Darwin projected his combination of Lyell and Malthus. Geology and economics had to explain biology. According to Ernst Mayr “Darwin advanced numerous theories, among which five are most important”: the non-constancy of species, which is the basic theory of evolution; the descent of all organisms from common ancestors; the gradualness of evolution (no saltations, no discontinuities); the multiplication of species; natural selection.⁹

The non-constancy of species and the descent of all organisms from other organisms are common to all naturalistic theories of evolution, also of Lamarck’s transformism. Specific to Darwin are the small variations, the problem of adaptation to the environment which leads to natural selection, and the inheritance of the variations which are best suited to the environment and therefore belong to the “fittest.” How the small variations in each individual came about, Darwin had no idea, but they formed the basis on which the plant and animal breeders made their selections. How the variations were inherited, Darwin did not know, but he proposed his theory of “pangenesis” and the “gemmules,” which was pure guesswork. That the fittest animals were the best to survive and breed in their environment was an experiential fact which many have called a tautology: the fittest are most fit. Darwin – and he was well aware of the fact – had put together a superficial explanation without an inner justification or substance, and therefore in point of fact hollow.

In other words, Darwin had solved the many questions cropping up in his explorations during the Beagle voyage, and his constant studies and interrogations of breeders and naturalist colleagues, by outlining a scheme consisting of a mixture of geology and economics, without explaining the actual “mechanism” of the evolutionary process. To use a simile: a triangle or a circle can be drawn through any three points that are not in a straight line. Taking the three essential tenets of Darwin’s theory – variations, inheritance and natural selection – as three such points, Darwinians have always connected them by a circle, showing that their idol’s theory is the ideal one, or by a triangle, imposing the dogmatic knowledge of Darwinism as the only valid explication of the evolution of life. But Darwinism is no more than an intellectual idealization of a fact that is mentally definable in many other ways, all of which lack the cardinal understanding of the actual mechanism – the three points can be connected by an infinite number of figures, from the simplest to the most bizarre, none of which actually explains the secret of the evolution of life.

In Darwinism “on the one hand, one admits that the interaction of the laws of physics does not suffice to explain a living being, and one ads to it a ‘command structure’ [the Darwinian dogma] which corrects this insufficiency. On the other hand, one pretends that this ‘command structure’ does not refer to anything that is not strictly physical, and that therefore the living being results from the interaction of the physical laws,” notes Pichot. And he adds that one has to admit that the “improbable” structure of the living being, its gestation and the way it stays alive have not yet received, even today, a satisfactory physical explanation.¹⁰

It is from an analysis like this one that Pichot concludes: “It is in the society of that time, and not in the biology, that one has to look for the cause of the success of Darwinism, either biological as well as social.”¹¹ “Darwin’s whole theory of evolution by natural selection bears an uncanny resemblance to the political economic theory of early capitalism as developed by the Scottish economists,” writes Richard Lewontin, the best known exponent of that school being Adam Smith (1723-90). And he adds: “What Darwin did was take early-nineteenth-century political economy and expand it to include all of natural economy.”¹²

Larson sees things in an analogous way: “Essential to Darwin’s conception was a modern worldview influenced by ideas of utilitarianism, individualism, imperialism, and laissez-faire capitalism. Of course Malthus was a utilitarian-minded political economist who championed the laissez-faire ideal. Darwin also read the writings of Adam Smith and other utilitarian economists who presented individual competition as the driving force of economic progress. Perhaps more important, he lived in a society that embraced this view; Darwin himself came from a family of successful capitalists. Further, he rode on the rising tide of British economic, political, and cultural imperialism … Natural selection intuitively seemed the right answer to a man thoroughly immersed in the productive, competitive world of early Victorian England.”¹³

A Passion for Peas

The following sections of this chapter are more than an enumeration of names and data: they narrate the steps by which the biological sciences tried to provide experimental support for Darwin’s hypothetical outline. It is the reason why this chapter is called “Inventing ‘Darwinism’” – ‘Darwinism’ in inverted commas because, once again, the gradually assembled scientific argumentation of evolution differs considerably from the sketch of a theory of evolution as worked out by Charles Darwin.

Johann Gregor Mendel (1822-84), an Augustinian monk, was a younger contemporary of Charles Darwin. ‘Johann’ was the name given him at his baptism, ‘Gregor’ the name he chose when becoming a monk at the abbey of Brno, now in the Czech Republic. Towards the end of his life Mendel wrote about himself (in the third person): “When he looked back on his own past, as a peasant lad in Heitzeindorf, who had had so hard a struggle to achieve a high-school education, often ailing and always poor … he cannot but have been amazed to find himself at forty-six a mitred abbot.”¹⁴ But when having become the abbot, the guidance of the monks and the administration of the abbey put and end to what had been Brother Gregor’s passion: the cultivation of pea plants and the search for their ways of hybridization. By that time he had planted and studied some 30,000 such delicately coloured and scented plants in the gardens of the monastery.

Mendel is often represented as a lonely monk with an obsession, tending his pea plants between four grim walls. In fact he was a learned man whom his monastery had sent to the University of Vienna, and he was for some time a teacher of physics. Far from being lonely and somewhat abstracted, Brother Gregor was well-informed about the scientific literature in his branch of research, and he communicated with several prominent authorities about his findings in particular and biological topics in general. He read his paper, Experiments in Plant Hybridization, at two meetings of the Natural History Society of Brno, and it was published in Proceedings of the Natural History Society of the same town in 1866.

Mendel’s laws are still the fundamental laws of heredity today. They say that if you hybridize, or cross, or mix two different plants, “one in four plants of their offspring has purebred recessive alleles, two out of four are hybrid, and one out of four is purebred dominant.”¹⁵ In simpler terms: if you cross a red plant with a yellow one, in the offspring you will find one red, one yellow, and two orange. This is a statistical statement that says nothing about the way this happens, about the hereditary mechanism. For “Mendel [like Darwin] knew nothing about the mechanism of fertilization, nor about genes, nor did he know the rudimentary facts of genetics.”¹⁶ The reason of this ignorance was quite simple: none of this knowledge was yet available. The process by which a sperm cell fertilizes an egg cell was discovered in 1875; in the same year the division of a plant cell and chromosomes were observed; and around 1875 was found that there is the same number of chromosomes in the egg and the spermatozoon. Genes, mutations and the cell components would become known many years later, and the history of genetic discoveries is far from over at present.

Why are Mendel’s laws so important? They were the first experimental explanation of the way in which plants and animals descend from each other. Up to Mendel biologists supposed that offspring was simply a mixture of the characteristics of both parents.

In a child you would find half the characteristics of the father and half of the mother. Close observation showed that this was not true, and the closest observers were evidently people who worked with plants and animals day-in and day-out. The controversies about evolution had sharpened the interest of many gardeners and breeders, and this resulted in a spate of hereditary theories.

One of these theories was Darwin’s idea of “pangenesis” and the “gemmules,” which we have encountered earlier. He proposed that every organ and part of an organ secreted a kind of replica which was carried via the blood stream to the sex organs, through which it was communicated to the offspring. Without the slightest experimental justification for this process, this idea illustrates the extremes to which his guesswork could go. Even though Mendel published his findings in 1866, six years before the publication of The Descent of Man, Darwin never knew about them and therefore did not take them into account in his revisions of the Origin. Mendel’s work will remain practically unknown till its rediscovery around the turn of the century. Up to then it was just another among the many theories presented in all sorts of learned meetings and publications by “gardener-crossbreeders.”

Cutting the Tails of Mice

“What at present we consider to be Darwinism should in fact be called Weismannism,” writes André Pichot. “Weismann is the author of the first coherent and complete theory of heredity.”¹⁷ This is high praise for a man whose name is barely remembered, except by the experts. Yet there is no gainsaying that the German evolutionary theorist August Weismann (1834-1914) has played a leading role in the study of the evolution of life on our planet. “With Weismann we really witness the birth of ‘Darwinism’, through the formulation of a theory of heredity.”¹⁸

Darwin’s sketch of an evolutionary theory had remained a kind of hollow construction because it lacked the essential filling of, precisely, a scientific theory of heredity. Darwin improvised his explication of “pangenesis” and “gemmules,” but nobody took it seriously because it was so patently spun by fancy. Weismann, a physician by training, became interested in the problem of evolution, which was then the topic among the intelligentsia thanks to Darwin’s Origin and the propaganda by his proponents in Britain (the X Club, Francis Galton and Herbert Spencer), France (Clémence Royer) and Germany (Ernst Haeckel).

The Germany of those years was the most advanced industrial nation in the world, hard-working and of a dutiful accuracy in all its undertakings. It was the topmost chemical producer, and its machinery, especially its optical instruments, enjoyed worldwide renown. The discoveries of the composition of the cell and of genetics in general should be seen against this background; they were made mainly by German scientists and others who in one way or another were connected with German universities. The cell nucleus, mitosis, meiosis, chromosomes and gametes were all discovered and given their names in this period. It was the work of these cytologists that Weismann used to formulate his theoretical conjectures.

In 1889 he presented his “germ plasm theory” at the University of Göttingen. It states that “multicellular organisms consist of germ cells containing heritable information, and somatic cells that carry out ordinary bodily functions. The germ cells are influenced neither by environmental influences nor by learning or morphological changes that happen during the lifetime of an organism, which information is lost after each generation.”¹⁹ This meant that each multicellular organism consisted of two kinds of cells: the small mass of the reproductive cells and the huge mass of all the other cells. The reproductive cells, the “germ plasm,” cannot be influenced or changed by anything from the rest of the organism or its environment. The reproductive cells will reproduce themselves in the reproductive acts of the organism, but the other cells of the organism will die and disintegrate into their molecular components.

Seen like this, there was an insurmountable separation between the germ cells and the rest of the body cells. This separation was called “the Weismann barrier” and is central to the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis. Weismann made evolution become a matter of the germ cells, more specifically of the small particles which he said they contained: the biophores (“carriers of life”). It should be stressed that those biophores were fictitious; neither they, their composition or their effects had been observed. Still they may be seen as the ancestors of the genes.

Weismann sharply opposed his theory against the inheritance of acquired characteristics. He supposed this theory to be Lamarck’s, misled by the fact that the work of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was becoming neglected, or heedful not to stain the fame of the idol of the evolutionists, Charles Darwin. Weismann was actually an anti-Darwinian on two accounts: Darwin had in the revised editions of the Origin integrated more and more Lamarckian elements, and the germ plasm with its biophores condemned the gemmules to oblivion. When Weismann proclaimed his theory, Mendel had not yet been rediscovered. Once this happened, one or two decades later, the original Darwinism would be hardly recognizable: ‘Darwinism’ was born – and Lamarck was burdened with a reputation which will turn him into the semi-grotesque antagonist of ‘Darwinism’ even in writings of present-day authors.

To prove the futility of the theory of acquired characteristics, Weismann cut the tails of 1500 mice (some say rats) belonging to 20 successive generations. He did this to show that the thesis that characteristics could be transferred from parents to their offspring was false. In the chapter on Lamarck we have seen that such transfers were (and are) not only a popular belief, but that this was a common conviction among all naturalists, including Darwin. Weismann also wanted to disprove the myth that some Jewish men were born without a foreskin, due to the millennia-old practice of circumcision. Like so many others he had a wrong understanding of Lamarck, thinking that the inheritance of characteristics was acquired through “effort or will.” What Lamarck had said was that they were acquired through a besoin, a need of the organism, caused by the necessities of its living conditions, which created a habit that would result in the change of an organ or the growth of a new one.

Behind this historical facts something essential and dramatic unfolded: “life” disappeared from the biological sciences. The soft sciences of biology were generally estimated to be at least a century behind the hard physical sciences. In physics things could be measured, counted and calculated in order to make predictions. In biology things could also be counted, sometimes measured, but never calculated to make predictions. It was the ambition of the biological theorists to forge their discipline into a hard science too.

What could not be defined, measured, counted or calculated was the element of “life” in living things, that what made biology “the knowledge of life.” An important aspect of the impulse driving Darwin had been to prove natural theology wrong and describe evolution in terms of a hard science. He had wrestled with the “Creator,” and grudgingly allowed room for him in the revisions of his Origin. Weismann’s first publication on evolution had been a comparison between creationism and Darwinism. His biophores were still “carriers of life,” but the hereditary process began now to be seen as a ‘mechanism’, and life would soon dry up among the lifeless components of the mechanism. We are approaching the year 1900, the turn of the century when occultism had a heyday, but in academic science “mysticism” became a funny word.

Mutations and Saltations

The third pillar of ‘Darwinism’, sometimes called neo-Darwinism, was, after Mendel and Weismann, the Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries (1848-1935). He was one of those foreigners who were trained at German science institutions, in his case the University of Heidelberg and the laboratory of Julius Sachs at Würzburg.

In his experiments of plant breeding, not with peas but with the evening primrose, de Vries had come to the same statistical conclusions as Gregor Johann Mendel. This drew his attention to Mendel’s obscure paper of some thirty years earlier. When in 1900 he published his findings, though, he omitted to refer to Mendel’s work, an ‘oversight’ which was found out by another botanist, Carl Correns. At the same time a third botanist, Erich von Tschermiak, blew the dust from Mendel’s publication, with the result that this (still) essential contribution to the science of heredity was suddenly brought to light by three researchers at once.

De Vries’ Intracellular Pangenesis appeared in 1889. The word ‘pangenesis’ reminds of Darwin, and it was indeed from Darwin that de Vries had his original idea. However, his theory differed from Darwin’s in a way which will turn him eventually into an opponent of Darwinism. Doing away with the fictional “gemmules,” he proposed that heredity depended on particles within the cells, intracellular, which he called “pangenes.” The inherited characteristics were then no longer a fifty-fifty mixture of the characteristics of the parental progenitors, but depended, each of them, on some particle in the core of the cell. This is the origin of the idea that each characteristic of an organism is tied to a specific material element in the hereditary matter, now called a ‘gene’, which is an abbreviation of ‘pangene’. De Vries’ pangenes were no less theoretical than Darwin’s gemmules; the confirmation of their existence and function will have to wait another half century.

Around 1900 a drastic turnabout in de Vries’ theory of heredity ensued. In that year the original German edition of the first volume of his Mutation Theory was published. By “mutation” de Vries meant a sudden unexplainable change in one of the pangenes, resulting in a change of one of the phenotypic characteristics of the organism. (The ‘genotype’ is the hereditary material of an organism, the ‘phenotype’ the way this material is expressed in its physical make-up.) But what de Vries understood by his revolutionary notion of the mutation was quite different from what this concept, fundamental in biology, means now. He conceived a mutation as radical to such a degree that it did not contribute to or cause a phenotypic characteristic, but that it created a new species. “For him species do not change progressively, they appear directly in their finished form through sudden jumps, without any apparent reason, and he calls such jumps ‘mutations’.”²⁰

According to Darwin, the whole process of evolution took place gradually, bit by bit, small modification by small modification. This law of his theory may be found on every other page of the Origin. For example: “Why should not Nature take a sudden step from structure to structure? On the theory of natural selection, we can clearly understand why she should not; for natural selection acts only by taking advantage of slight successive variations; she can never take a great and sudden leap, but must advance by short and sure, though slow steps.”²¹ Therefore de Vries’ “theory of mutation has originally been conceived against Darwin’s hypothesis of the gradual transformation of the species … The mutation is an abrupt and sudden variation, a jump from one form to another, a discontinuity … It is a replacement of Darwin’s theory of gradual transformation … One single mutation suffices to effect a change of species …”²²

Mutations were supposed to explain Darwin’s variations, for which he had no explanation (de Vries could not explain mutations either). They set up de Vries’ evolutionary theory as “a rival of Darwin’s theory; in fact, they turn it into anti-Darwinism.” The anti-Darwinian stance was enforced by the fact that the concept of the mutations led to a theory of saltationism, which holds that evolution has not happened gradually but by something like quantum jumps. Even Daniel Dennett recognizes that “the people early in [the twentieth] century who rediscovered Mendel at first thought of themselves as anti-Darwinians.”²³ This may come as a surprise, for the mutation theory in its revised version is at present one of the essential concepts of ‘Darwinism’, and de Vries has been added to the pantheon of great Darwinians.

Seen from the viewpoint of the period around 1900, this accumulation of theories – for there were also the several versions of Lamarckism, saltationism (e.g. St George Mivart), orthogenesis, the ever resistant creationism, and others – resulted in “an astounding hodgepodge of biological theories,” in the words of Pichot. Larson agrees: “No consensus existed among biologists about how evolution operated.”²⁴ The scientific problems remained enormous: the age of the Earth (calculated by Kelvin) was too short; the mechanism of inheritance remained unknown; the gaps in the fossil record persisted. “Lamarckism and orthogenesis seemed to solve too many problems to be dismissed out of hand,” writes Larson, and they continue to ask questions of the standard theory. All the same, the fame of Darwinism, built up by the crusading activism of its proponents, had in academic circles augmented to a degree that “Darwin had become the obligatory reference” and all plausible theories, even anti-Darwinian, were in some way integrated into in what was in the course of being invented: ‘Darwinism’.

“The Modern Synthesis”

Trying to overcome the unholy confusion in the field of evolutionary theory, a new instrument was used: mathematics. This may seem a rather inappropriate instrument to grasp the phenomenon of life with its infinite variations, often alike but never exactly the same, and of which the evolution is a flowing, historical, one-time process. Yet, Mendel’s statistical approach could be analyzed mathematically, and instead of taking single organisms as their object of study, the mathematical biologists turned their attention towards whole groups or populations. “A satisfactory theory of natural selection must be quantitative,” wrote J.B.S. Haldane. “By 1932, Haldane could open his book The Causes of Evolution by mocking the allegedly popular refrain ‘Darwinism is dead’. The eclipse of Darwinism that had spread across evolutionary thought during the preceding generation had passed, he asserted.”²⁵ All the same, if it had had to pass, it had certainly been there.

Not only was this therefore an effort to overcome the deadlock in the theoretical interpretation of the evolution of life on Earth, essential to it was also an eagerness of biology to match the physical sciences in the accuracy of their measurements and calculations. The time that the various subjects of biology were the study of amateurs lay, as shown in the previous chapters, not far in the past. Besides, the haziness of much of the acquired knowledge, be it in evolution, anthropology, paleontology, genetics, or whichever of the life sciences, stamped them as amateurish and ‘soft’ in the eyes of the practitioners of the ‘hard’ sciences. Any theory of evolution remained defective as long as it could not be based on an explanation of the way in which the characteristics of one organism were transmitted to an other, in other words on a theory of inheritance, of genetics.

Considerable progress had been made in the study of the unit of all life-forms, the cell, and its components, the organelles. It had been discovered that the secret of inheritance was to be sought in the nucleus, more specifically in its minuscule, threadlike components which a German scientist had called ‘chromosomes’ because, when preparing them for observation under a microscope, they were so easy to colour (“chromos” means colour). Still, at the time Thomas Morgan (1866-1945) worked towards a theory of inheritance, he knew nothing of the nature or the functions of the gene. He was quite aware of this, as he was of the dangers of speculation. The terms he used at first, in The Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity (1915) were the neutral words “factor” or “unit” within the framework of Mendel’s system.

If Drosophila melanogaster, the humble fruit fly, has become one of the star performers in genetics, it is mainly because of the work of Morgan, whose team bred them by the millions in his laboratory. This kind of fly was well-suited to study: it had only four pairs of chromosomes, was extremely prolific so that the generations succeeded each other rapidly, and it was quite susceptible to mutations. All kinds of tiny monsters were produced, flies with white eyes instead of black, with four wings instead of two, with legs on their heads instead of antennae … Thanks to the fruit fly the intricacies of the statistical laws of heredity were deciphered. Not the gene yet, however. The gene became “a certain location on a chromosome which corresponded to a phenotypic character, and in this location there had to be an undefined ‘something’ causing the character to be in a certain way …”²⁶

Statistics can only be applied to the perceptible appearance of organisms, their behaviour, their populations – to their ‘phenotypes’. What remained of at least as great an importance was what actually happened inside the cell, in its nucleus, and in the components of which both consisted, and this had to do with the ‘genotype’, the complexities related to the elusive gene. Here were clearly two separate subjects of study which, though occasionally overlapping, moved on different terrains. For the time being the gene was supposed to be the part of a chromosome which caused a certain characteristic of the phenotype to be produced. This was supposed to be effected by the newly discovered enzymes, which were proteins. ‘Enzyme’ became the buzzword and the explanation of all wonders, great and small.

From this rudimentary phase in genetics has sprung the idea, still commonly accepted, that there is a gene that causes alcoholism, super-intelligence or its opposite, anger, unusual sexual potency or its opposite, religion, and all sorts of illnesses or malformations. This will lead to the idea that in the constitution of an organism the genes are of prime importance, for they decide what the organism will consist of and look like. The genotypic level dominates the phenotypic level. We – you and me – are nothing but vehicles built by our genes, who have as their sole aim to survive and multiply. But more of this later.

At last towards the end of the 1930s a theoretical structure was built, strong enough to withstand most criticism, by joining genetics with populations genetics, mainly based on mathematics, and tying both of them together in the cover of Darwinism, authentic or not. This composite theory was called: “the modern synthesis,” or “the new synthesis,” or “neo-Darwinism.” Edward Larson calls it “the modern neo-Darwinian synthesis;” and the Oxford Dictionary of Biology declares it to be “the current theory of the process of evolution.”

One understands the pride with which the birth of ‘Darwinism’ was saluted. The hollowness of the original Darwinian theory was at last stuffed with some substance, provided by the disciplines of genetics and mathematics. Several great scientists worked on this, among the best known J.B.S. Haldane, Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright; most of them were “primarily mathematicians who constructed statistical models.” There was also Theodosius Dobzhansky, an evolutionary geneticist who had pioneered the experiments with fruit flies, and who formulated the thesis that natural selection took place through mutations in genes. (The structure of the gene molecules remained unknown.) His Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937) became one of the foundations of the New Synthesis. And there were also Ernst Mayr and George Simpson, researchers as well as popularizers of ‘Darwinism’ in its new formula of “ genetics plus natural selection.”

And there was Julian Huxley (1887-1975), who in his person integrated and symbolized this whole scientific upturn. It was his influential book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942) that gave the movement its name. It was he, grandson of the famous Thomas Huxley and brother of Aldous, the writer, and Andrew, Nobel laureate for medicine, who became the founding director-general of UNESCO, starred in BBC programmes, supervised the production of nature films and won an Oscar for one of them. For a time the names Julian Huxley and evolution became more or less synonymous, and he was ranked as one of the five best brains of Britain. “Huxley believed in human progress with a religious zeal, and he wanted others to share his belief. For him, progress was embodied in the evolutionary process that gave us birth and would carry us ever upward if we let it.”²⁷

Evolution, in its new, neo-Darwinian look, was riding a very high wave indeed. About Huxley’s Evolution has been written that this book “declared the triumphal advent of neo-Darwinism,” and “triumphal” is the word for the scientific and cultural mood in which the movement was steeped. The veteran evolutionist Ernst Mayr himself wrote about two Darwinian revolutions, the first in 1859, the second being the advent of the “new synthesis”. “The Darwinism accepted since the evolutionary synthesis is best simply called ‘Darwinism’, because in most crucial aspects it agrees with the original Darwinism of 1859.”²⁸ Really? Is a Darwinism with Malthusianism and without any notion of the all-important genetics the same as a ‘Darwinism’ without Malthusianism and with genetics – not to mention the dizzying increase in the knowledge of all related sciences by which evolution was put in a transformed perspective? “Darwin must be distinguished from modern Darwinism,” writes Tim Lewens. “One of the primary justifications for examining Darwin’s own views is precisely to expose the frequent mismatches between the Darwin who is invoked by today’s biologists eager to defend their corner, and the Darwin who wrote the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man.”²⁹

All those prominent scientists aforementioned will nonetheless continue to label their new synthesis of the evolutionary doctrines ‘Darwinism’ and thereby perpetuate the distortion of the history of biology and the never-ending discussions about it. Even Stephen Gould, who in 1980 declared the New Synthesis effectively dead after launching the anti-Darwinian theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” will shout his love of Darwin from the widely read pages of his writings and be dubbed “North America’s Darwinist-in-chief.”

Darwinism Triumphant?

A century after the publication of the Origin and a century and a half after Darwin’s birth, DNA was identified as the hereditary material in the cells by Oswald Avery (in 1947), and the structure of the DNA molecule was unravelled by James Watson and Francis Crick (in 1953). “The late 1950s saw a celebration of Darwinism. With scientists all but agreed on how evolution operated, its study had gained standing in science.” The scientists named in the previous paragraphs had all acceded to high positions in learning and scientific authority. “Then came the centennials of the Darwin-Wallace papers in 1958 and The Origin of Species in 1959. Books and articles on Darwinism marked these occasions for the public. Scientific associations commemorated them with conferences hailing the founders of population genetics and the modern synthesis. Among these major symposia, Haldane presided over an international conference in Singapore; Huxley gave a keynote address at the University of Chicago; and Fisher, Haldane, Huxley, Mayr and Simpson received specials medals at festivities in London.”³⁰ (There is a similar wave of celebrations of ‘Darwinism’ in progress at the time of writing this book, the year 2009.)

This rise into prominence and fame of ‘Darwinism’ had the effect it has in most cases: popularization, unreflecting acceptance, distortion, bias, abstraction into irrationalism, dogmatization … “By the widely celebrated centenary of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1959, the modern synthesis had become virtual dogma within biology and its leading proponents sat atop the profession in chaired professorships at elite universities and on the boards of all the relevant societies.”³¹ The dictum of Theodosius Dobzahnsky became its slogan: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” once more identifying the fact of evolution in general with the theory of neo-Darwinism in particular. Paul Davies words the same idea: “Darwinism is the central principle around which our understanding of biology is constructed,” in fact meaning that evolution, unlabeled, is the central principle. The difference is pivotal, has consequences in all fields of human endeavour, and is the cause of a host of unending, vicious squabbles.

But is the science of evolution that monolithic, even in recent times? The late Stephen Gould was one of the most articulated voices in evolutionary biology, and the many volumes of his articles and essays are still on the shelves of bookshops everywhere. Being closely involved in the problem, he was quite aware of it and wrote: “We [evolutionists] have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory – natural selection – to explain the mechanism of evolution.”³²

From a recent vantage point Steven Rose said in an interview: “Alas, poor Darwin, more idle speculation and dogmatic assertion have been published in your name in the past two decades than in the full preceding century, and still the torrent continues.”³³ But, as “criticizing Darwin is extremely unpopular among English-speaking biologists” (Jonathan Wells), one or two influential French voices may also be heard, e.g. Pierre Sonigo: “More than 150 years after having been formulated, the Darwinian theory of evolution is accepted but still not perfectly understood.”³⁴ Or Gerard Amzallag: “Darwinism [i.e. neo-Darwinism] is not a scientific but a metaphysical theory.”³⁵ While Jean Swyngedauw states forcefully: “To attribute the inventions of nature to the chance action of viable mutations, which is the basic principle of all forms of Darwinism, is a gross barbarism unworthy of the biological sciences.”³⁶ All these commentators, putting ‘Darwinism’ into question, are experts in their fields of biology.

So closely are the sciences of life connected with the meaning we give to life that any statement about the basics of evolution acquires an ideological or metaphysical aura. Darwinism has since its beginnings carried atheism, not to say anti-theism, in its banner, and ostentatiously so. This is totally understandable after reading in the Origin: “I formerly spoke to very many naturalists on the subject of evolution, and never once met with any sympathetic agreement,”³⁷ and realizing that professing a naturalistic theory in the open meant confronting the near-totality of the established order. As a result the stance of the biological sciences against religion in all its aspects is much more outspoken than that of the physical sciences. A mathematical formula can be considered neutral; a statement about life is often implicitly judgmental, philosophical, metaphysical.

Yet it is difficult to gainsay that some biological scientists are revelling in the authority they think their knowledge confers upon them. In this spirit Carl Zimmer writes about “taking Darwin’s cold bath,” by which he means accepting the pointless view of life which is the reality propagated by Darwinian evolution. “By taking the Darwinian ‘cold bath’, and staring a factual reality in the face, we can finally abandon the cardinal false hope of the ages – that factual nature can specify the meaning of our life by validating our inherent superiority, or by proving that evolution exists to generate us as the summit of life’s purpose.”³⁸ Some materialistic-minded persons-of-science seem to find a delight without end in proclaiming that the human being is no longer made in the image of God, but that he is “an accidental and incidental product of the material development of the universe, almost wholly irrelevant and readily ignored in any general description of its functioning.” (Scott Atran³⁹)

“Darwinism espoused an ultimate materialism,” writes Larry Witham. “Even the modern synthesis, adding the variable of genes to natural selection, viewed chemical mutations as being shaped by chance forces in the environment.”⁴⁰ It is against these “chance forces” effecting extremely complex and meaningful results that Jean Swyngedauw protested a few paragraphs ago. Others are at least as forceful in their reaction, e.g. David Berlinski: “Darwinism is no longer merely a scientific theory but an ideology. … The term ‘Darwinism’ conveys the suggestion of a secular ideology, a global system of belief. So it does, and so it surely is. … Darwinism has achieved the status of inviolable science, combining the dogmatism of religion with the entitlement of science.”⁴¹ Arthur Koestler signalled already half a century ago that the sciences of life had built a “citadel of orthodoxy.” To them “the only scientific method worth that name is quantitative measurement; and, consequently, complex phenomena must be reduced to simple elements accessible to such treatment, without undue worry whether the specific characteristics of a complex phenomenon, for instance man, may be lost in the process.”⁴²

Julian Huxley and George Simpson “saw belief in God as a remnant of a prior stage in human psychological evolution. Like the human appendix, it no longer served an adaptive purpose and instead could harm.” And Edward Wilson, the founder of sociobiology, “described religion (or at least ethics based on religion) as ‘an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate’.” Still, according to Larson, acceptance of the modern synthesis coexisted with all manner of religious faith. “Fisher clung to his Anglican heritage, while Wright tilted towards Protestant process theology and Haldane warmed to Hinduism. Dobzhansky remained a professing Orthodox Christian and, during the 1950s, embraced the efforts of Teilhard de Chardin … Lack converted from agnosticism to evangelical Protestantism in the very year he published Darwin’s Finches. Like many mainstream Catholics and Protestants, he accepted evolution to a point, but believed that God created human souls.”⁴³

What had, almost unnoticed, slipped through the fingers of the scientists, or through the intricate network of neurons in their brains, was the subject of all biology: Life. Weismann’s “biophores” and de Vries’ “pangenes” were material particles, but still carriers of life. “Because of the progress in biochemistry, the theory of ‘elementary living particles’, at the origin of the biophores and pangenes, fell in disuse. There is no clean and abrupt break, but mentions of those elementary living particles have little by little disappeared.”⁴⁴ The modern synthesis will accept nothing but “a purely materialistic chemical process”. And so it has been ever since.

The problem of course is: how does one measure life, omnipresent but invisible and ungraspable? How does one even define life? If science is materialistic, it is because to us, beings incarnated in matter, only matter is directly perceptible, and only experiments with material objects are communicable and repeatable. This is the starting point of the last four centuries in the history of humanity, when science has been such a powerful support for the realizations of the technology which shaped an amazing new world.

However – and this is a resounding ‘however’ – that life differs from matter, and that organisms cannot live without this different element, is also a fact. A dead bird does not move, a living bird flies away. The fault is not with materialism as such, as a practicable theory invented with great pains and propagated with great risk: materialistic science is one of the great achievements of humankind. At fault is the fact that this materialism has been declared the exclusive metaphysical basis of the understanding of anything whatsoever. Materialism is a partial approach of Reality of which Life and Mind (or Consciousness) are equally essential elements. This is the reason that vitalism and the countless unorthodox mental interpretations of our world keep cropping up again and again. Our knowledge is incomplete. The knowledge of our world and ourselves is incomplete.

“Perhaps the problem is that for some scientists reductionism [i.e. the method of scientific materialism] functions as a security blanket. It avoids the need to ask too many questions, to stare into the abyss of fundamental uncertainty. If we abandoned the universality of the reductionist approach, who knows what would happen? For sure, the nature of biological science would change. But so it should! This change is long overdue.”⁴⁵ Thus writes Denis Noble, emeritus professor of Oxford University. In this opinion he is seconded by Jean Dorst, former director of the Muséum d’histoire naturelle: “Biology can agree with a conception which differs from materialism and reductionism. The latter are solutions of the easy way: it is so easy not having to ask oneself questions anymore. … I would even say that what the science of our day has gained, is that it goes against the reductionist view of nature.”⁴⁶

In ‘evolution’ there is room for matter and life and mind; in ‘Darwinism’ there is not. This is the reason why it has been controversial for the greatest part of its existence, and that it will remain controversial in spite of the superficial triumph it has been enjoying for some time. Among the people in disagreement there are fanatical hecklers, but there are also savvy experts, as knowledgeable in their field of expertise as their colleagues in the opposite camp. Jonathan Wells, embryologist and author of Icons of Evolution, has said recently: “I predict that within twenty years people will look back on the present and wonder how so many seemingly smart people could have believed in Darwinian evolution.”⁴⁷ In Darwin’s Black Box, Lynn Margulis, at present one of the most famous biologists in the world, is quoted as saying that history will ultimately judge neo-Darwinism as “a minor twentieth century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon biology.”⁴⁸

And there is for example the testimony of the esteemed evolutionary biologist Robert Shapiro: “Adherents of the best-known theory [neo-Darwinism] have not responded to increasing adverse evidence by questioning the validity of their beliefs, in the best scientific tradition; rather, they have chosen to hold it as a truth beyond question, thereby enshrining it as mythology. In response, many alternative explanations have introduced even greater elements of mythology, until finally science has been abandoned in substance, though retained in name.”⁴⁹

Evolution is important; the theories to explain it must necessarily be tentative at present; the fast advancing scientific knowledge, especially in biochemistry, will prove the existing dogmatic doctrines wrong, and readjust our understanding of matter, life and mind. In this way the biological sciences from one side, and the physical sciences from the other, advance towards the grail of all knowledge: Reality.