Notes on Michael Ruse: The Darwinian Revolution

Kevin T. Kelly

Department of Philosophy

Carnegie Mellon University

Chapter 6: Eve of the Origin

1840's tumultuous. 1850's quiet. Trouncing Vestiges exhausted the conservative opposition.

Lyell holds out against progression in the fossil record.

1. Earliest plants were aquatic and hence more primitive.
2. Earliest land plants were palms: among the most advanced forms.
3. Stonesfield deposit contains birds and mammals with pterodactlys: mistake to think mammals appeared late. Probably larger mammals kept the number of small ones down in the fossil record.
4. Whale parasite found in a shell before whales were supposed to appear, pushing whales earlier than expected.
5. Predators probably ate early birds.

Owen's response (majority position):

1. No reason to think early terrestrial plants were complex.
2. No need to suppose large mammalian predators of Stonesfield mammals.
3. Stonesfield mammals merely change the schedule of progression.
4. No independent evidence of whales at time of shell.
5. Given the rate of bird reproduction, madness to suppose they would all be eaten before fossilizing.

Owen's progressionism was new:

1. Branching rather than linear up to man. Incorporates von Baer's embryology.
2. Progression within the fish class. No proper vertebrae prior to Silurian period.

Lyellian anti-evolutionists who eventually sided with Darwin:

Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911)

• Father was director of Kew botanical garden.
• Trained as doctor.
• 1839-1843, Australea, naturalist on H.M.S.Erebus New Zealand, Tasmania, Antarctic.
• 1848-1851, Nepal.
• 1855 assistant director of Kew.
• Married Henslow's daughter.
• Good friend of Darwin after Erebus trip.
• Hot temper, good friend.

Thomas Huxley (1825-1895)

• Brilliant medical student.
• Supported on scholarships.
• 1846-1850 Naturalist on H.M.S. Rattlesnake in South Seas.
• 1854 Lecturer in natural history at the Royal School of Mines.
• 1855 Naturalist of Geological Survey.
• Dyspepsia, outward confidence
• Withering character attacks on opponents.
• Great public speaker.

Hooker's pre-evolutionary position: "Introductory Essay (1853)

Usual negative arguments.

Other observations strongly suggesting evolutionism.

• Broad conception of species suggested significant variation.
• Isolated island populations may change.
• Experiments at Kew showing mechanisms of plant distribution.
• Similar islands have variant species.
• Current distributions of species could be explained by uniformitatian movements of continents. Cites Lyell and Darwin.

Huxley's pre-evolutionary position: Croonian Lecture, Royal Society (c. 1857).

• Vertebrate skulls are all on the same plan.
• They are not made out of vertebrae.
• Special homologies exist.
• Serial homology not true in general.
• General homology and archetypes irrelevant.
• Developmental forms are more important than adult forms for classification (von Baer).

Huxley vs. Owen pushed Owen toward anti-evolutionism after Huxley adopted it.

• Owen got Huxley extended Navy pay after his voyage.
• Later, tried to block publication of one of his papers.
• Huxley attacked Owen in his vicious review of Vestiges.
• Owen's classification of Radiata: "one of the most thoroughly retrograde steps ever taken since zoology has been a science"
• Owen's archetype theory: "later writers on the Theory of the Skull who have given a retrograde impulse to inquiry and who have thrown obscurity and confusion upon that which twenty years ago had been made plain and clear."
• "introduces the phraseology and mode of thought of an obsolete and scholastic realism into biology".

1850s philosophy of science

• Universality of law: John Stuart Mill's System of Logic 1843.
• Herschell agreed with Chambers that Quetelet had found statistical laws of human behavior.
• H. T. Buckle, History of Civilization in in England: human history regulated by demographic laws.

1850s religion

Revealed:

German "higher criticism" makes inroads into Britain.

• George Eliot translates Strauss's Life of Jesus, which presents "mythic theory" of Jesus.
• Francis Newman (conservative John Henry's brother) wrote a highly critical review of Christianity.
• Charles Hennell, Unitarian minister writes a similar skeptical analysis of the Bible.
• 1855: Benjamin Jowett, Professor or Greek, argued for a very liberal interpretation of Christianity

Even the pious opened doors to evolution:

• Hugh Miller's "long days" interpretation of Genesis. Underscored progressiveness of fossil record!
• Lyell: "It is strange how much the 6-day theories have led towards C. Dawin. Hugh Miller is more of an advocate for the evolution of Man out of preexisting inferior grades than I have been".

Natural:

• Shift of the design argument from funcionality (1830s) to harmony and symmetry in morphology (1840s). Concedes the strongest case for evolutionary explanations.
• Whewell's faux pas: debates David Brewster (1854) over extraterrestrials. Would threaten man's unique relationship to God. Whewell appeals to morphological necessary conditions for life.
• Owen's theory makes it very difficult to stop at static adaptation.
• Carlyle's mystical deism emphasized governance by law.

1850s evolutionism

Alfred Tennyson (Poet Laureate of England)

• Student of Whewell.
• In Memoriam (1850) tremendously popular Victorian poem.
• Endorsed by Queen Victoria herself.
• Inspired by Vestiges.
• Death and randomness vindicated by evolutionary progress.

Herbert Spenser (1820-1903)

• Dabbler education.
• Railway engineer: noticed fossils on railway siding.
• Read Lyell.
• Immediately converted to Lamarckism!
• 1850 subeditor of the Economist.
• Flood of evolutionary publications.
• Inorganic, organic, and cultural evolution.
• Englishman is the culmination of evolution.
• Members of advanced societies have bigger brains. This is because advanced societies arise from population pressure which induces Lamarckian evolution.
• Natural selection: those who don't rise to the challenge of competition do not reproduce. Only the select continue the race. Irish failed to meet the challenge.
• Technical progress ends the struggle for survival, so Englishman culminates evolution.

Baden Powell

• Already evolutionist in 1840s.
• Out of closet in 1855.
• Influential as Oxford professor and Anglican divine.
• Emphasis on God working through law.
• Lyellian geology demands evolution.

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913)

• Humble background, weak education.
• Wrote on spiritualism, phrenology, opposition to vaccination, socialism, and evolution.
• Surveyor.
• Collected plants and beetles.
• Layman impressed by Vestiges.
• 1848 Amazon trip. Ship burned and destroyed specimens.
• Impressed by species differences on opposite sides of Amazon.
• 1854 Eighteen years in Malay archipelago.
• 1854 Read Lyell and paleontology. Thought Lyell's geology demanded evolution.
• 1855 "On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species".
• Every species comes into being together in time witha pre-existing, similar species.
• Galapagos islands.
• Older islands have more diversity from original form than newer islands.
• Fundamental argument from homology and distribution: "We can account for the separate islands having each theri peculiar species, either on the supposition that the same original emigration peopled the whole of the islands with the same species from which differentlymodified prototypes were created, or that the islands were successivelypeopled from each other, but that new species havebeen created in each on the plan of the pre-existing ones"
• "Analogous to law of gravitation."
• 1858 cause of evolution. Read Thomas Malthus' "Essay on the Prinicple of Population."
• Struggle for existence + natural selection.
• Counters Lyell's argument that domestic breeds revert to wild types: artificial breeds are unviable in the wild environment, so the selective pressure is not continuous.
• Sent paper to Darwin for advice.