Retrieving Darwin's Revolutionary Idea: The Reluctant Radical 9781793632494, 9781793632500, 1793632499

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Russell’s Protest
Darwin’s Conflicts
Michel Foucault’s Critical Approach
A Summary of the Reluctant Radical
Layout of the Book
Notes
Part I: From Science to Counter-Science
Chapter 1: “I think!”: Science and the Union of Nature and Thought
Introduction: The Claim to Scientific Status
Death of the Author
Nature and Thought
Principles of Scientific Reason
Language and Representation
Power/Knowledge/Representation
Conclusion: Elimination of the Author
Notes
Chapter 2: “I can’t think!”: Counter-Science and the Unthought
Introduction: The Claim to Counter-Scientific Status
Return of the Author
Nature and the Unthought
Principles of Counter-Scientific Reason
Language and Misrepresentation
Power/Knowledge/Interpretation
Conclusion: Scientific Authors?
Notes
Chapter 3: Conflictual Science: Darwin’s Theories of Evolution and Natural Selection
Introduction: An Hysterical Reaction
Nature and Thought/Unthought
Principles of Scientific and Counter-Scientific Reasoning:
Language: Representation versus Interpretation
Conclusion: Concealing the Unthought
Notes
Part II: The Reluctant Radical
Chapter 4: The Death of God: Darwin’s Adaptation to an Imperfect Science
Introduction: “Whither is God?”
Design before Darwin
The Last Natural Theologian
After Darwin: A Conflict of Interpretation
Conclusion: From Design to Ideology
Notes
Chapter 5: The Dismal Science: Darwin’s Struggle for a Ruling Interpretation
Introduction: A Conjurer’s Trick
Identifying Evolution: A Malthusian Struggle
Struggle, Dependence, and the Problem of Endless Relations
Identifying Causes: A Smithian Struggle
Principle of Divergence = Struggle for Existence
Principle of Divergence ≠ Struggle for Existence
After Darwin: Survival of the Fittest
Conclusion: From Ideology to Narcissism
Notes
Chapter 6: Specious Origins: Darwin’s Selections in an Age of Narcissism and Doubt
Introduction: The Horrid Doubt
The Laws of Selection
The Lawfulness of the Contingent
Nature’s Reason
The Death of Man
After Darwin: Social Darwinism
Conclusion: A Reluctant Radical
Notes
Part III: Darwin’s Century
Chapter 7: A Crisis of Representation: Representations of Evolution 1859–1929
Introduction: The Eclipse of Darwinism
Perfection and Neo-Lamarckism
Identity and Heterogenesis (Saltationism)
Laws and Orthogenesis
The View from the Laboratory (from Kelvin to Fisher)
Conclusion: A Tyranny of Representation
Notes
Chapter 8: Reaction and Containment: Darwinian Interpretations 1929–2009
Introduction: The Reorder of Things
The Restoration of Faith: Ecumenical Interpretations 1929–1969
The Return of Capital: Ruling Interpretations 1959–1989
The Resurrection of Man: Archimedean Interpretations 1969–2009
Containment: Heterodox Interpretations 1979–2002
Conclusion: Recovering the Unthought
Notes
Conclusion: An Anxiety of Influence
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Retrieving Darwin’s Revolutionary Idea

Retrieving Darwin’s Revolutionary Idea The Reluctant Radical

Samuel Grove

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Grove, Samuel, 1980- author. Title: Retrieving Darwin’s revolutionary idea : the reluctant radical / Samuel Grove. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Darwin’s discovery of evolution is as celebrated as Galileo’s laws of motion or Newton’s discovery of gravity. But this was only half the story. Not content to prove that evolution had happened, Darwin sought to convey its full humbling implications. Thus he formulated the theory of natural selection. Contrary to popular belief, this theory ran exactly counter to scientific reason and was consequently rejected by the scientific community of the time. This wasn’t the only reason Darwin’s critics recoiled. His theory robbed the ruling orders of any easy recourse to consolatory tales of nature’s harmony and design. The fate of his ideas, for the time being at least, would be left to the heretics he inspired in other domains. Darwin’s radical thought anticipated Nietzsche’s Godless philosophy, Marx’s class-based economics and Freud’s psychological theories of the unconscious. It would take a further 80 years for Darwinism to become accepted as mainstream science, but it came at the expense of its counter-scientific core. For the remainder of the twentieth century a popularized Darwinism would become the touchstone for backlash movements in philosophy, economics and psychology-disciplines he once so radicalized. This is the story of how the most revolutionary idea of the nineteenth century became the most reactionary idea of the twentieth”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021014815 (print) | LCCN 2021014816 (ebook) | ISBN 9781793632494 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793632500 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Darwin, Charles, 1809–1882. | Evolution (Biology)—History— 19th century. | Evolution (Biology)—History—20th century. Classification: LCC QH361 .G76 2021 (print) | LCC QH361 (ebook) | DDC 576.8/2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021014815 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021014816 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

“Darwin may not know it, but he belongs to the Social Revolution.” Karl Marx, cited in J. Spargo, Karl Marx: His Life and Work. (BW Huebsch, 1912), 200.

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Introductionxi PART I: FROM SCIENCE TO COUNTER-SCIENCE1 1 “I think!”: Science and the Union of Nature and Thought 2

3

“I can’t think!”: Counter-Science and the Unthought

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3 Conflictual Science: Darwin’s Theories of Evolution and Natural Selection

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PART II: THE RELUCTANT RADICAL61 4 The Death of God: Darwin’s Adaptation to an Imperfect Science

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5 The Dismal Science: Darwin’s Struggle for a Ruling Interpretation

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6 Specious Origins: Darwin’s Selections in an Age of Narcissism and Doubt

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PART III: DARWIN’S CENTURY: FROM CRISIS TO REACTION151 7 A Crisis of Representation: Representations of Evolution 1859–1929

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8 Reaction and Containment: Darwinian Interpretations 1929–2009167 vii

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Conclusion: An Anxiety of Influence

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Glossary239 Bibliography243 Index265 About the Author

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Gary for originally sparking my interest in Darwin and evolutionary theory. As my argument developed I had very productive conversations with Reuben, Ed, Ziyad and May which helped me to clarify some of my thoughts and ideas. Reuben, in particular, has been a constant source of encouragement throughout the whole process. Winnie was very helpful for the final edits of my draft. Finally, without the support of my family (and I mean support in the very broadest sense) it is difficult to imagine how this book could have been written. I am very lucky to have friends and family that can endure such obsession and repetition. I hope, for their sake, it has been worth it.

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A new sort of history: not a thread but a web. —Eric Hobsbawm1 The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life, base of branches dead; so that passages cannot be seen. —Charles Darwin2

RUSSELL’S PROTEST Ever since Immanuel Kant, there has been an understanding that knowledge is only possible within certain prescribed limits. That we only really know something once we have become acquainted with its frontiers. Since Charles Darwin, all reflections within the life sciences have run up against the frontier of evolutionary history. All living things evolved and any speculations that do not take this into account are thus barred from consideration. Inspired by Darwin, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud sought to impose historical boundaries on the human sciences: history that was nightmarishly political for Marx and traumatically personal for Freud. All three also profoundly understood the limit that history entails. History is something we can tentatively interpret but not something we can ever represent with certainty. In an attempt to transcend this limitation, followers of Darwin, Marx and Freud have often ascribed to their respective theories a measure of infinite possibility, elevating their founders to the plane of deities. When I started researching this book, Marx and Freud were more derided than deified. “Put back in their box” as one commentator put it. Claims made in Darwin’s name however, the same commentator, lamented often went “well beyond reasonable xi

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bounds.”3 The year, fittingly, was 2009—the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and 150 years since the publication of The Origin of Species—and Darwin was now occupying the space he once had to share with his great nineteenth-century contemporaries. This wasn’t the first time. A few years removed from Darwin’s centennial in 1909, Bertrand Russell bemoaned that “evolutionism” had become the “prevailing creed of our time.” It dominates “our politics, our literature, and our philosophy.” Against so “fashionable a creed,” he wrote, it seems “useless to raise a protest.”4 Darwinism today, apparently, has much to tell us about our political and economic history, our wars and ethnic conflicts, our political beliefs, and even our voting patterns.5 Social Darwinism has been used to justify, by virtue of biologizing, social, racial, and sexual inequalities.6 In the realm of literature, Darwinism has spawned its very own discipline, inspiring Darwinist readings of the works of Homer, Shakespeare, and the Victorian novel.7 Russell might have been most disheartened about the state of philosophy. Philosophers of science rarely interrogate Darwinism, confining themselves instead to what John Locke called “underlabouring”—“clearing the ground and removing the rubbish” that lies in the way of a true scientific understanding.8 In its modern form, philosophical engagements with Darwinism tend to consist of translating science to lay audiences, clarifying its concepts and implications, and defending it from outside attack. Locke’s eulogy to “the incomparable Mr. Newton” also suggests that “underlabouring” might be also an implicit work of worship—and there is plenty of worship going around, beginning, fittingly, with Alfred Russel Wallace’s claim that Darwin was “the Newton of natural history.”9 Intrigued by the hyperbole, I sat down to research Darwinism’s limits with a view to—op cit. Kant—attaining a truer understanding of it. Twelve years later and approaching another anniversary—the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s The Descent of Man— I’m convinced the limits are actually what make Darwin’s work so imaginative and transgressive. DARWIN’S CONFLICTS If the limits lie at the core, rather than the margins of Darwin’s theory, it is ironic that the defining characteristic of Darwinian debates is a failure to agree on what those limits are. Broadly speaking conflicts of interpretation over Darwin’s work fall into three categories. (1) Darwin’s legacy: Almost all Darwinists agree that Darwin founded two distinct traditions.10 Reviewing the evolutionary literature of the previous century, George C. Williams distinguished those that “emphasize natural selection as the primary or exclusive creative force” and another that minimizes the role of selection in relation to other proposed factors.11 From the perspective of the second group, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin

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distinguished their “pluralist” approach from what they call the “adaptationist program.”12 Critiquing the narrow focus on adaptationism in evolutionary theory, Gould and Lewontin employed various rhetorical techniques, one of which was to claim Darwin for their own side (“We support Darwin’s own pluralistic approach”13). Following Gould and Lewontin’s article, Niles Eldredge referred to “ultra-Darwinians” that “tend to see themselves as arch defenders of the Darwinian tradition” but in fact reformulated natural selection so that it could explain “all manner of organismic activity.”14 The tactic of appropriating Darwin, was also adopted by the “adaptationists.” If the “pluralists” accused the “adaptationists” of betraying Darwin’s “pluralist” approach, the “adaptationists” accused the pluralists of abandoning Darwin entirely. John Maynard Smith concluded a critical essay of Gould that “those who would like to believe that Darwin is dead [. . .] would be well advised to be cautious: the reports of his death have been exaggerated.”15 Reviewing Gould’s work as a totality, Daniel Dennett argued that Gould’s “ultimate target is Darwin’s dangerous idea itself.”16 My interest is less about which side is right and more on the nature of the split itself. Newton’s underlabourers did not divide into two camps and debate who was more loyal to Newton. Darwin, as W. H. Auden once wrote of Freud, is “no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion.”17 (2) Darwin’s politics: Darwinian conflicts often have a political dimension. From its inception Darwinism has been championed by different political ideologies. From the left, Marx hailed The Origin of Species as providing the “natural-history basis of the historical class struggle.”18 From the political right, Léon Dumont argued that “the theory of evolution bears within it the very philosophy of conservative doctrine.”19 In the mid-twentieth century, George Gaylord Simpson located Darwinism within centrist liberalism20 More recently Darwin has been cast as a figure aboved or removed from politics. As James Bonar put it, the want of unanimity on matters of politics suggests “the principles of the Master are perfectly neutral on such questions.”21 Associations with politics have therefore generally come in the form of accusations leveled against the other side in the Darwin wars. When Gould and Eldredge suggested that evolution proceeds in fits and starts rather than gradual incremental steps, Lambert Halstead charged them with pandering to a Marxist view of history.22 When Richard Dawkins published his modern exposition of Darwinism in The Selfish Gene in 1976, Steven Rose located the book within the ideological current of Thatcherism.23 These political conflicts concern the implications of Darwin’s portrayals of nature for human society. But there is also the question of the specific application of Darwin’s ideas to Man.24 Controversy surrounding this has accompanied Darwinism ever since Darwin’s own enigmatic conclusion at the end of The Origin

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that “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”25 Despite proclaiming that “psychology will be based on a new foundation,” Darwin made no mention of Man in The Origin, setting up two opposing viewpoints on the relevance of Darwinism to human evolution. Today every Darwinist accepts human beings evolved. Rather there has been a division between those that believe Darwinism should provide the foundation of the human sciences, and those that believe the question is beyond our understanding. The political character of Darwinian conflicts struck me as a dilemma for a science that claims political impartiality as a central tenet—or at least aspires to do so. (3) Darwin’s ethics: Debates surrounding the political implications of Darwin’s theory also extend to the particular moral persuasions of Darwin himself. Silvan Schweber argued that it was Darwin’s bourgeois liberalism that acquainted him with the writings of economists, Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith, and ultimately inspired his naturalistic theory.26 Adrian Desmond and James Moore have argued that Darwin’s progressive liberalism, and particularly his affinity with the abolitionist cause, disposed him to the idea of common descent. The “core project” of The Descent of Man, they contended, was this universalist cause.27 Notwithstanding the fact that Darwin had convinced the scientific community that all races were of the same species, The Descent is littered with elitist claims. Darwin’s politics, as André Pichot has pointed out, are hard to pin down as he was “in the habit of expressing in his writings quite opposing views.”28 Couple, for example, Darwin’s eugenical recommendations in The Descent that “all ought to refrain from marriage who cannot avoid abject poverty” with his humanist warning that “if the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”29 What interests me is the way these political questions relate to the problem of Darwin’s ethics—the means by which we manage our own internal conflicts. Darwinists have called upon Darwin’s ethics as a model for navigating complex and conflicting evidence. Tellingly, discussion of Darwin’s ethics relates precisely to this question of limits with Darwin either receiving praise for his “courage” in following the limitless consequences of his theory, or praise for his “caution” in not extrapolating too far.30 We tend to associate scientific truth with something that transcends this or that interpretation, remains impartial on the question of politics, and is indifferent to the person speaking it. Darwinism’s conflicts confound all three associations, having interpretive, political, and ethical dimensions. Together these problems can be expressed in the form of a blunt question: Why does Darwinism need Darwin?31

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MICHEL FOUCAULT’S CRITICAL APPROACH For those of us interested in this question we might find an ally in the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984). Known widely for his critical histories of modernity, Foucault also examined the role of authorship in Western thought and its relation to broader political and ethical themes in a series of works in the 1960s. Rather than assuming their relation to be selfevident and proceeding to probe the political and ethical commitments of individual authors, Foucault preferred to place a question mark against their relation. What, Foucault asked, are the peculiar political and ethical dilemmas embedded in thought that we want or expect the figure of the author to figure out? Charting his own history of science, he found nothing “universal” or “constant” in the role of authors suggesting, in turn, that they serve particular historical functions.32 There are three other very good reasons to adopt Foucault’s approach. (1) The Blackmail of rationality: It’s not quite true that there have been no critiques of Darwinism. The intelligent design literature has produced a steady raft of literature against Darwinism ever since the publication of The Origin. This, in turn, has provoked vociferous secular responses from Darwin’s allies. However, the target of intelligent design has not been the theory of natural selection per se, so much as evolution as a whole. The volume of the debate threatens to drown out any rational critique of natural selection. Massimo Pigliucci’s review of Jerry Fodor’s recent secular criticisms of natural selection concluded that the only result of his intervention will be to “give further ammunition to creationists.”33 This despite Fodor’s explicit support of evolution. Foucault was acutely sensitive to the danger of this form of debate: I think that the blackmail which has very often been at work in every critique of reason (either you accept rationality or you fall prey to the irrational) operates as though a rational critique of rationality were impossible.34

These comments are particularly germane to a polarized field like Darwinism where the charge of promoting creationism or crypto-design arguments is frequently leveled, not just at critics outside the field, but at Darwinists within it.35 (One observes the same blackmail deployed in Marxist and psychoanalytic discourses where critics are accused of ideology and resistance, respectively.) Anyone wishing to critically engage with Darwinism must forcefully reject the blackmail that any criticism of Darwinism amounts to a denial of evolution.

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(2) Truth and power: The opposition Darwin encountered is often compared to Galileo’s battle with the Catholic Church. In both cases, truth is portrayed as being independent from power. Foucault discounted the possibility, reserving the “political question” to “truth itself.”36 For Foucault, all truths are connected in varying ways to political institutions and social and economic processes.37 If the fact of this relation does not impair the validity of Darwinism, the character of this relation can at least inform the particular status we afford to Darwinism. (3) The Game of truth: One of the reasons why Darwinism is prone to such polarized debate is because critics of Darwinism tend to get entangled in what Foucault called “the game of truth,” in which critics have got drawn into casting judgments on the truth or falsity of Darwinism.38 I suspect the criticism Fodor received would have been severely tempered, had he couched his criticism not as proof of the falsity of Darwin’s theory’s, but, as I will go on to argue, something that is necessary to the theory in the first place. Foucault was aware of the danger of conceding to the rules of the field under interrogation and refused to be drawn on ultimate questions of truth. It is not for philosophers to make judgments on the correspondence of a science to a pre-conceived reality, still less offer an alternative theory if they think the prevailing one is inadequate. Rather the task of a philosopher is to focus upon the theory itself. This grants the philosopher certain rights; the right “to remain unconvinced, to perceive a contradiction, to require more information, to emphasize different postulates, to point out faulty reasoning, and so on.”39 Foucault never applied himself specifically to Darwinism. Part of this might have something to do with the historical marginalization of Darwin in French circles where he was reduced for many years to the role of a “paraphraser of Lamarck.”40,41 Foucault’s few remarks on the subject suggest that he considered Darwinists, if not Darwin himself, as operating in the narrow domain of the “specific intellectual” along with physicists and chemists.42 This may have contributed to his reticence. When asked about whether his analysis of the relation of knowledge and power concerned “the exact sciences,” Foucault responded in the negative—“Oh no, not at all! I would not make such a claim for myself. And, anyway, you know, I’m an empiricist: I don’t try to advance things without seeing whether they are applicable.”43 Darwin may have aspired to the status of a “specific intellectual,” but his theory, as we shall see, touched upon the most universal and contentious of subjects. Applying Foucault’s ideas to the work of Darwin must be done faithfully—which is to say creatively. Hopefully my own way of using Foucault will become clear as my argument unfolds. However, the reader may find it useful if I signpost two areas of disagreement I have with Foucault from the beginning. Ever the contrarian, Foucault was inclined to play down the role of big political events in his histories, and indeed omitted to discuss any

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causes at all for the tectonic shift in European culture and thought at the end of the eighteenth century. For my part, I am closer to Victor Hugo’s estimate that the nineteenth century has for its august mother, in its ideas at least, the French Revolution.44 I also depart from Foucault in retaining emphasis on the political divisions of right and left that are the Revolution’s legacy. As Norboto Bobbio has argued, there are reasons that go beyond tradition and dogma for this enduring political distinction.45 Societies under capitalism are divided between the haves and the have nots. How one aligns oneself in relation to this divide fundamentally determines one’s politics and worldview. Darwinists have been no different, even if much of this happens at an unconscious level. Beyond scientists’ own conscious affiliations in the science wars, conflicts have emerged surrounding the intelligibility of nature and the value of rendering it scientifically in a visible system of differences and hierarchies. (In the case of at least one brilliant but conflicted scientist—the subject of this book—these tensions are at play in his own work). The right is invested in naturalizing difference and hierarchy, the left, in flattening and reversing them. In the process, the left has also become sensitive to the danger of producing differences in the act of describing them, as well as the lofty assumptions and privileges that undergird any claim to merely describe the world. “The levelers,” Edmund Burke would claim of the revolutionaries and their successors, “only change and pervert the natural order of things.”46 He was right in more ways than he realized. The central problem around which this book revolves is that which Foucault outlined in The Order of Things. Once history is introduced into the life sciences, a system of thought premised upon representation is no longer tenable. It is untenable for the simple fact that we can never represent everything that has ever happened. This apparently trivial fact wrought havoc on modern thought as scientists and philosophers scrabbled to justify the same degree of certainty they had enjoyed in the Classical era. Alas this was not to be. History can only be interpreted, partially and subjectively. I have, however, refrained from using Foucault’s terminology in favor of Darwin’s; a preference that inevitably raises the question whether Darwin actually considered the problem of history as Foucault articulated it. The short answer to this is “yes.” Darwin formulated his theory in the late 1830s. He would spend the next forty years thinking through every conceivable problem that could arise from it. Some of these problems were technical and scientific (the source of natural variation or the difference between “habit” and “instinct”). Others were expansive and philosophical (the status of first cause, or the adequacy of explanation). More often he would address the former in the hope it might bear on the latter (Darwin regarded “free will” a mere expression of variation and the appearance of novelty as a by-product of gradualism). Darwin thought tirelessly about the problem of history, but he did so using his own terms. The promise of a

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definitive interpretation of evolutionary history was, for Darwin, a question of whether adaptations were perfect or imperfect. The possibility that all these interpretations could cede to a single ruling interpretation depended on the nature of the “struggle for existence”—whether it was reducible to a conflict between finite identifiable entities or infinite in its relations and ramifications. The prospects for scientists ever achieving knowledge of their origins was a question of what constitutes knowledge; knowledge of the intersection of laws that produce natural selection, or the vast contingent history this intersection of laws gives rise to. Darwin remained resolutely committed to his theory, but this also meant fidelity to its consequences. My approach is the same. I make no claims here beyond those that Darwin recognized were necessary. It might then serve the reader to clarify briefly what this book is not about: (1) This is not a critique of science in toto: My critique is confined to the notion of Darwinism as a “historical science.” I reserve the term “science” for theories that go beyond interpretation to represent nature in some way. Properly historical theories, I contend, are by their nature interpretive. By employing this definition of science, I am putting to one side the question of whether the theory is true or not. Newton’s theory turns out not to be entirely true. By my argument, it still qualifies as a science. By the strict criteria employed here, Darwin’s Theory of Evolution (TfE) is scientific, his historical Theory of Natural Selection (TfNS) is not. (2) This is not an attempt to prove Darwin wrong: For the purposes of this book, I assume that Darwin was right; both about evolution and its causes. Rather my critique concerns the immanent problems with his historical theory (scientia difficultatem facit47). These problems were identified by Darwin himself and this book tries to examine them as Darwin understood them. The material I am assessing is not nature, but Darwin’s writings. The criteria I am assessing it by are the axioms of his theory. (3) This is not an attack on historical interpretations: I have borrowed Darwin’s language in emphasizing our ultimate “ignorance” of evolutionary history. I mean “ignorance” in the sense that Darwin intended; not that interpretations of evolution are impossible or obsolete, or indeed that many evolutionary interpretations aren’t adequate or satisfactory. Only that interpretations are always indefinite, partial, and subjective. Darwin had to reconcile himself with the fact that he would never achieve for history what he managed for science. Readers hoping for any of these three things will need to look elsewhere. For those still interested, here is a summary of my one long argument. A SUMMARY OF THE RELUCTANT RADICAL Darwinism needs Darwin in order to resolve a conflict between two hitherto conflated theories; Darwin’s scientific TfE and what I will call his

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counter-scientific TfNS. This conflict is not symptomatic of Darwin’s failure, but rather his achievement. At the heart of Darwin’s discovery is a historical process that defies scientific rationalization. Darwin is generally considered a paradigmatic “founder of science” in the mold of a Newton or an Einstein. I think we should interpret Darwin’s contribution differently. Darwin wasn’t simply a founder of a science that grounds our understanding of life. He was a founder of a counter-science that disturbs the ground beneath our feet. The radical idea at the core of Darwin’s theory is that the historical causes of evolution are ultimately unknowable. In making evolution historical, Darwin showed there could never be a science that could conclusively account for its causes. The best we can hope for are interpretations that will remain forever inconclusive. The scientific community was not ready to accept this. It was during the period of the late nineteenth century when Darwin’s theory was arguably best understood. Understood and rejected. In general, alternative theories were preferred that, unlike Darwin’s, did promise to provide a scientific account for the course and cause of evolution. However, none of these theories could restore to the biological sciences the unity they enjoyed prior to Darwin’s percussive impact. It was not just on scientific grounds that Darwin’s critics recoiled. Darwin’s demolition of natural theology had robbed the ruling orders of any easy recourse to consolatory tales of nature’s harmony and design, ultimately contributing to a more general crisis that would engulf the liberal establishment at the beginning of the twentieth century. If Darwinism was to haul itself from the brink, it would not simply have to resolve its own immanent scientific problems but also bear some responsibility for remaking a world it had previously contributed so much to unmaking. The form of Darwinism that would emerge from the wreckage would travesty Darwin’s radical idea. In a series of spurious, popularized interpretations, Darwin’s radical idea was suppressed. Moreover, this suppression and popularization was pressed into the service of the most conservative and reactionary of causes. When the age of extremes finally gave way to a restoration of the liberal order in the 1940s, Darwinism would align itself with this new order, in part by reviving the traditional and comforting theological and philosophical beliefs that the world could be pieced together in a single all-encompassing way. As opponents of social democracy began mounting their counter-attack against organized labor in the 1960s and 1970s, Darwin’s “struggle for existence” appeared to vindicate their fantasy that society consisted of individuals struggling in their own economic selfinterest. In the wake of the Civil Rights and feminist movements that drew attention to the contingent nature of the traditional man of science, a new generation of Darwinian psychologists came along to reassure us the problem lay elsewhere. There was always a lot riding on establishing and preserving Darwinism’s scientific status.

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Darwin would not necessarily have disapproved of these applications. However, he was also very honest. In his more solemn moments, he conceded the enormity of interpreting history. At the culmination of his argument for the universal “struggle for existence,” he identified a crucial error in his reasoning. When pressed on questions of human nature he relented, “the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.”48 Darwin’s most reluctant radicalism is most clearly revealed in his imagery. In The Origin, Darwin called upon two images that are, in the two senses, distinct. Distinct in the sense of being vivid; and distinct in the sense of irreconcilable. The first image is the “tree of life.” Science is an exercise in representation, and a representation bares all. In Darwin’s “tree of life,” it is possible to think of the entire span of life, every living thing that has ever existed, in a single representation. The second image is an “entangled bank.” History is an exercise in interpretation, and interpretation conceals as much as it reveals. It is impossible to think of all the hidden connections in Darwin’s “entangled bank,” rather we can only glimpse at their complexity in an endless relay of interpretations. Darwin spent most of his career, the best part of five decades, trying to hold these two images together in one single theory. His failure to do so would be ignored by scores of his successors. Ignored or buried in hagiography. The fate of his counter-scientific idea would be left to the radicals he inspired in other domains. Like Darwin, Marx and Freud understood that history contravenes scientific reason and formulated theories designed to accommodate this contravention. Unlike Darwin, they would be denounced and decried for doing so. Part of the reason for their contrasting receptions may be related to the contrasting prestige of the “sciences” the counter-sciences sought to depose. The targets of Marxism and psychoanalysis—economics and psychology—remain, to this day, largely recognized as sciences; the exemplars by which one approaches the domains of society and mind scientifically. To this list, we can add Friedrich Nietzsche’s target. Philosophy, at least its analytic variant, has been largely reduced to the role of parroting scientific claims. In contrast, natural theology, the science of Darwin’s day, has become a symbol of irrationality; an exemplar of how not to approach the domain of biology. Pushed to the margins, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud have at least retained their status as heretics; their marginalization helping to preserve the integrity of their counter-scientific ideas. Alas, the heretical nature of Darwin’s ideas has been almost entirely disavowed, as the most revolutionary idea of the nineteenth century became one of the most reactionary ideas of the twentieth. However reluctant Darwin may have been to admit of his radicalism, my hope is this book will go some way toward retrieving it.

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Figure 0.1  Courtesy of Betty Grove.

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LAYOUT OF THE BOOK In part I, I define what I mean by science and counter-science, before moving onto Darwin’s theory itself. At the core of Darwin’s counter-scientific theory is our necessary ignorance of evolutionary history. In part II, I discuss Darwin’s difficulty with, and attempts to resolve, this core tenet of his theory, especially in light of the way it challenged the ideas and legitimizing beliefs of the ruling orders in the nineteenth century. I do this by probing deeper into Darwin’s concepts of “adaptation,” “struggle,” and “selection”; concepts that revealed a profound affinity with the ideas of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, respectively. In part III, I show how Darwin’s failure to resolve the problem of “ignorance” in his theory initially led scientists to favor alternative evolutionary theories before Darwinism was finally accepted in the 1930s. In the years that followed popularizations of Darwinism were made to service the very ideas and beliefs that Darwinism in the nineteenth century had so threatened (figure 0.1). NOTES 1. E. Hobsbawm, 'European Exchanges', Times Literary Supplement, October 13, 1961, 698-9. 2. C. Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin. Edited by his son, Francis Darwin. In three volumes—Vol. II (London: John Murray, 1887), 6. 3. D. Sewell, The Political Gene: How Darwin’s Ideas Changed Politics (London: Pan Macmillan, 2009), 243. 4. B. Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 8. 5. See M. Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (London: Harper Collins, 2010); B. A. Thayer, Darwin and International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict, 1st ed. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004); P. Rubin, Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002); P. Hatemi et al., “A genomewide analysis of liberal and conservative political attitudes,” in Journal of Politics 73.1 (January 2011): 271–85. 6. See R. Herrnstein and C. Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004); J. P. Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1997); J. P. Rushton and A. R. Jensen, “Thirty years of research on race differences in cognitive ability,” in Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 11.2 (2005): 235–94; S. Moxon, The Woman Racket: The New Science Explaining How the Sexes Relate at Work, at Play and in Society (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2008). 7. See J. Gottschall, The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); M. Nordlund, Shakespeare

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and the Nature of Love: Literature, Culture, Evolution. Rethinking Theory (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007); C. Machann, Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics: A Darwinist Reading (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 2016). 8. See discussion in S. Fuller, Kuhn Vs Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science (Revolutions in Science) (London: Icon Books, 2006), 85. 9. A. R. Wallace, Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection with Some of Its Applications (London & New York: Macmillan & Co, 1889), 9. 10. See here for examples: G. J. Romanes, Darwin, and After Darwin; An Exposition of the Darwinian Theory and a Discussion of Post-Darwinian Questions (Open Court Publishing, 1895), 266–7; T. H. Morgan, Evolution and Adaptation (London: The Macmillan Co, 1903), 454; J. B. S. Haldane, The Causes of Evolution (London: Longmans Green, 1932), 3; R. A. Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection: A Complete Variorum Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930), 47; T. Dobzhansky and T. G. Dobzhansky, Genetics and the Origin of Species. Vol. 11 (1937; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 11–12; G. G. Simpson, “The history of life,” in Evolution after Darwin: The University of Chicago Centennial, 3 volumes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 119; E. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1982), 400–1; J. Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (London: Allen and Unwin, 1945), 16. 11. G. C. Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought (1966; repr., New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2008), 3. 12. S. J. Gould and R. C. Lewontin, “The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme,” in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences 205.1161 (1979): 581–98. 13. S. J. Gould and R. C. Lewontin, “The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm,” 581. 14. N. Eldredge and L. D. Hurst, Reinventing Darwin: The Great Evolutionary Debate (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), 35–9. 15. J. M. Smith, Did Darwin Get It Right: Essays on Games, Sex and Evolution (London: Penguin Books, 1988), 156. Maynard-Smith was repeating Julian Huxley’s play off of Mark Twain half a century earlier. For Huxley’s quote see J. Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, 22. 16. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 266. 17. W. H. Auden, “In memory of Sigmund Freud,” in Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 100. 18. K. Marx, The Letters of Karl Marx: Selected and Translated with Explanatory Notes and an Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979), 452. 19. Dumont cited in A. Pichot, The Pure Society: From Darwin to Hitler (London: Verso Books, 2009), 7–8. 20. “I believe with all my heart and head that the democratic principles are biologically sound [. . .] It is our duty to maintain the true place of the individual in our social and in our biological philosophy.” G. G. Simpson, “The role of the individual in evolution,” in Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 31.1 (1941): 20.

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21. J. Bonar, Philosophy and Political Economy (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1992), 361. 22. Lambert Halstead cited in D. L. Hull, Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 267. 23. Steven Rose cited in R. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 30th ann. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), xiii–xiv. 24. Owing to convention “Man” is the term generally used for human beings in the evolutionary literature. I have persisted with this anachronism in order to underscore its racialized and gendered properties. My capitalization of “Man” serves to indicate the dubious nature of the designation. 25. C. Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859; repr., London: CRW Publishing LTD, 2004), 525. 26. S. S. Schweber, “Darwin and the political economists: divergence of character,” in Journal of the History of Biology 13.2 (1980): 195–289. 27. A. Desmond and J. Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins (London: Penguin Books, 2009). 28. Pichot, The Pure Society, 128. 29. C. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1874), 618; C. Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839; repr., London: Marshall Cavendish, 1987), 479. 30. Dawkins commended Darwin for giving “courage to the rest of science that we shall end up understanding literally everything, springing from almost nothing” while Dennett described the “amount of nerve” required to reconcile oneself to Darwin’s dangerous idea. (Richard Dawkins cited in A. Brown, “No knockout blows in Richard Dawkins v Rowan Williams bout,” in Guardian February 23, 2012; Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 22). Others have emphasized Darwin’s caution. Michael Ruse took Darwin’s “fastidious caution” as a defining characteristic (M. R. Rose, Darwin’s Spectre: Evolutionary Biology in the Modern World (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000), 87; See also Ghiselin, The Triumph of the Darwinian Method, 237). Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 244. (Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 244). 31. I was originally inspired to ask this question from reading Carolyn Miller and Michael Holloran’s excellent literary critique of Gould’s and Lewontin’s Spandrals essay. See C. R. Miller and S. M. Halloran, “Reading Darwin. Reading nature; or, on the ethos of historical science,” in J. Selzer. Understanding Scientific Prose (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin, 1993), 106–26. 32. M. Foucault, “What is an author?,” in The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 101. 33. Pigliucci, Massimo, “What darwin got wrong,” Philosophy Now 81 (London: 2010): 38–9. 34. M. Foucault, “Critical theory/intellectual history,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 27.

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35. See, for example, Steve Pinker’s criticisms of Gould in S. Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (London: Penguin Books: 2003), 121–2; or Brian Goodwin’s criticisms of Dawkins in B. C. Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004), 31. 36. M. Foucault, “Truth and power,” in The Foucault Reader, 75. 37. M. Foucault, “The ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom: an interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984,” in Paul Rabinow, The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Volume 1: Ethics (New York: The New Press, 1997), 281–301, 297. 38. Ibid. 39. M. Foucault, “Polemics, politics, and problemizations,” in The Foucault Reader, 381. 40. T. F. Glick, The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe. Vol. 17 (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), 402. 41. Jean-Baptist Lamarck was a French naturalist who proposed one of the first Modern evolutionary theories in 1802. 42. Foucault, “Truth and power,” 68. 43. M. Foucault, “On power,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984 (London: Routledge, 2013), 106. 44. V. Hugo, William Shakespeare (London: Savill and Edwards, 1864), 325. 45. N. Bobbio, Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction. Translated by Allan Cameron (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 46. Burke cited in C. Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 8. 47. The theory creates the problems. 48. C. Darwin, Letter 2814 Darwin, C. R. to Gray, Asa May 22, 1860. https​:/​/ww​​ w​.dar​​winpr​​oject​​.ac​.u​​k​/let​​ter​/D​​CP​-LE​​​TT​-28​​14​.xm​​l.

Part I

FROM SCIENCE TO COUNTER-SCIENCE

Chapter 1

“I think!” Science and the Union of Nature and Thought

For God, who first writ His law in the “tables of our hearts,” —John Donne1 Oh, what I know, everyone can know. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe2

To understand Darwin’s work, we need to understand something of the science he inherited. Philosophy has been trying to separate science from interpretation since the Greeks, but it wasn’t until the seventeenth century that a distinction was found. Before this the authority of a science was tied up with the authority of the scientist. Scholars would appeal to the figure of the author to resolve conflicts of interpretation. The Scientific Revolution initiated a separation of science from its authors. Scholars of a given science no longer had to read and correctly interpret the works of the preeminent scientific authors. This separation was achieved on the basis of an assumption that nature and thought conform. The conformity of nature and thought is provided by representations that transcend interpretations. Representations are elicited by three principles of scientific reason. The first principle is that nature reveals itself in its perfections. The second is a principle of identity that posits that a thing is known in itself. The third principle is that nature obeys timeless laws. These principles eliminated conflicts of interpretation of authors. From the Scientific Revolution onwards, science no longer required authors to validate its texts.

3

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INTRODUCTION: THE CLAIM TO SCIENTIFIC STATUS An inquiry into the scientific status of Darwinism requires, first and foremost, a definition of science to apply it to. This is not an easy task. “Science” is a term used to describe disciplines, from physics to psychology. It isn’t since the “Unity of Science movement” in the 1930s and 1940s, that philosophers have tried to pin down a single scientific method, and well before that “science” has been used as an umbrella term to cover a wide variety of methodologies. One way to circumvent this problem is to focus on the way the label “science” is used. This means considering “science” as a performative utterance. Performative utterances are statements used to create the reality they describe.3 Saying “I love you” is as much about establishing a bond as it is a confession of a feeling. Equally “I apologize” is often as much about reestablishing a bond as it is a recognition of guilt. Foucault treated the label “science” as a performative utterance when he argued that we should preface any question on the scientific status of a discourse with the prior question—what is “the aspiration to power that is inherent in the claim to being a science.”4 In other words, what is the claim to science supposed to do? This question promises a much clearer conception of the scientific label. While the term “science” is used with a variety of intentions, it is generally used to separate an assertion from a mere interpretation. If someone attaches the label “science” to a statement, it is a way of appealing to its objective validity independent of the person expressing it. If I am right, it is worth asking how science came to have this association. The answer is integrally related to the problem of authorship raised in the Introduction. DEATH OF THE AUTHOR Can the term “science” be used with consistency? One of the reasons why this might be difficult is because of the degree of change in scientific conceptions of the universe since the Scientific Revolution. The most radical of these changes was the shift from notions of a fixed time and space that had served to organize Newtonian physics, to a relative space-time in Einstein’s relativity theory. Closer inspection of this history, however, reveals changes of different orders taking place in different fields and at different temporal scales. The non-Euclidean geometry that served as the foundation for Einstein’s discoveries was developed in the nineteenth century entirely independently from physics. Equally James Clerk Maxwell’s discovery of the electromagnetic field early in the nineteenth century initially promised only a revision of Newtonian conceptions of light, but later paved the way toward Einstein’s reconfiguration of space the following century.

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5

Nevertheless, many of the protagonists of the revolution in physics were eager to stress their fidelity to the Scientific Revolution. Einstein regretted the phrase “relativity theory” fearful of the implication that he had abandoned two of the pillars of the Scientific Revolution—logical consistency and objectivity. The validity of his theory, he maintained, rested on the fact that it transcended Newton with a set of laws that had greater applicability and objective precision.5 Despite pioneering the revolution in quantum physics, Max Born declared that, fundamentally, the “scientific attitude and methods of experimental and theoretical research have been the same through the centuries since Galileo.”6 In this vein, the philosopher Edmund Husserl credited continuity in science to the persistence of a “Galilean attitude.”7 Foucault preferred to steer away from histories of science, which attributed change “to the genius of an individual,” or “the fecundity of a single discovery.”8 Nevertheless, he followed Husserl in crediting Galileo with introducing a “totally new conception” of science. Philosophers had been trying to distinguish truth from interpretation since Plato, but it wasn’t until the Scientific Revolution that this was achieved. The entanglement of truth and interpretation prior to this was belied by the importance assigned to authors. Documents were only accepted when marked with the name of their author. Scientists were not just authors of a text, they were an “index of truthfulness.”9 The scholasticism of the Medieval era insisted upon scholarship not just of this or that aspect of nature, but scholarship of the established authors of the field as well. Science was an exercise in interpretation. In order to demonstrate this scholarship, one had to read, interpret, and cite its most renowned authors. To interpret the world meant interpreting authors. In the process, authors became ciphers for political conflicts well after their time. Plato and Aristotle were read and interpreted in accordance with the “contemporary needs” of scholastics, their works functioning as “imaginary constructions” to give rhetorical strength to contemporary arguments.10 Finally, questions of truth in Classical Antiquity concerned not just “the criteria of true statements” and what counted as “sound reasoning” but also a question of ethics; ethical questions regarding the activity of “truth-telling as an activity.”11 Questions such as “Who is able to tell the truth?” and “What are the moral, ethical, and spiritual conditions which entitle someone to be considered as a truth-teller?” were not peripheral to questions of truth but fundamental to them. As Foucault put it, the accession to truth either required a “conversion of the soul,” or was part of a broader “spiritual transformation” that made the subject capable of knowing the truth.12 Plato and Aristotle were not simply authors of texts, they were standard bearers of an ethical relation to truth.13 Prior to the Scientific Revolution, scientists were mired in political and ethical conflicts which authors were invoked to transcend.

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The Scientific Revolution marked a conscious break with the author function. In the Dialogue Concerning Two Chief World Systems Galileo mocked the assumption that science had to be the science of someone. “Who would there be to settle our controversies if Aristotle were to be deposed?” demanded Simplico, Galileo’s fictional archetype of scholastic dogma. “What other author should we follow in the schools, the academies, the universities? What philosopher has written the whole of natural philosophy, so well arranged without omitting a single conclusion?”14 Having tried and failed to show that his philosophy was faithful to Aristotle, René Descartes had become equally frustrated by simplistic recourse to authors.15 To repeat the “maxims of philosophers” is “not to teach them” he wrote in a letter to Beeckman. “Plato says one thing, Aristotle another, Epicurus another [. . .] all the innovators say different things.” The one that “teaches me” is the one who persuades me “with his reasons.”16 Galileo and Descartes sought a form of explanation indifferent to the person expressing it. This meant overthrowing the power, not just of the prevailing authors, but the importance of authorship in general. Their success in doing so was the defining feature of the Scientific Revolution. Ever since, scientific texts have been “received for themselves, in the anonymity of an established or always redemonstrable truth.”17 Science became authorless. If a scientist’s name is preserved in the annals, it is merely to christen a theory or a proposition. The intrinsic relation between truth and the scientist’s view of the world was broken. Physicists do not have to read Newton’s Principia or Einstein’s “Annus Mirabilis” papers in order to understand the theories of gravity and relativity, respectively. Likewise, Linus Pauling, James Watson and Francis Crick are not required reading for chemists and biologists. It is only in reference to this authorless science that any consistent notion of science can be maintained. NATURE AND THOUGHT On the surface, science’s elimination of authors appears to derive from its simplicity. François Jacob appealed to simplicity when he wrote that science began when “such general questions as, ‘How was the universe created?’ ” were replaced by “such limited questions as ‘How does a stone fall?’.” This substitution, Jacob wrote, “had an amazing result.” While asking “general questions led to limited answers, asking limited questions turned out to provide more and more general answers.”18 The early scientists worked on the assumption that, as Pierre de Fermat put it, “nature operates by the simplest and most expeditious ways and means.”19 Galileo gave this starting point a democratic slant by asking “why should I not believe that [nature operates] in a manner which is exceedingly simple and obvious to everybody?”20

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This provides us with a preliminary solution—answers that are obvious to everybody do not require the carriage of authoritative figures. However, such recourse to science’s simplicity is, itself, simplistic. For a better understanding of the disappearance of the author, we must probe the peculiar order of knowledge from which the Scientific Revolution emerged. While observing the disappearance of the author in scientific texts, Foucault also sought to diminish the significance of the author in history as well. Thought is historical, for Foucault, but it does not progress primarily through authorial innovation, as conventional histories of thought often imply. Rather, thought proceeds through sudden and unpredictable shifts. His method assumes that the rules and regulations of any discipline rest upon an “a-priori” that endows “thought” at any given time with a “well defined regularity.”21 The organization of thought governing any particular epoch, Foucault called an “episteme” and in The Order of Things he presents a history of three periods; the Renaissance, the Classical, and the modern epistemes. The episteme of least importance for our purposes is the first, and I will discuss the Renaissance episteme only as a means to illustrate certain characteristics of the Classical episteme (see “Language and Representation” in this chapter). The episteme relevant to Darwinism is the modern episteme which I shall come to in the next chapter (see “Language and Misrepresentation”). For present purposes, our main concern is the Classical episteme, which gave rise to the Scientific Revolution. Popularizations of the Scientific Revolution often pit intrepid pioneers of scientific reason against the custodians of religious dogma. This simplistic narrative is a well-worn and tremendously self-serving view of science. Nevertheless, there is some value in emphasizing the crisis in faith in ecclesiastical orthodoxy that characterized early science if only to provide a historical backdrop to the emerging disposition of scientists toward inquiries that could be carried out independently of established institutions. Scientists retreated to deep thought and trusted the results over the interpretations of established authorities. The epistemic a priori of the Classical period was the intuition that nature and thought conform. Through this conformity, thought was thus able to represent nature. This provides the relevant background to Jacob’s principle of simplicity. For example, Descartes’s “simple natures” aren’t simply intrinsic to nature—as say we might refer to atoms as the basic building blocks of matter, or genes as the basic building blocks of life. Rather “simple natures” are simple by virtue of how the mind apprehends them.22 Descartes’s “simple natures” refer to basic building blocks of thought that we all intuit “easily” and with “certainty.”23 The intuition of conformity was not exclusively Cartesian. Before Descartes, Galileo’s principal criticism of Aristotle was that he privileged the senses over reason. Science could only proceed, Galileo believed, once

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this priority had been reversed; once reason had been allowed to prevail over the senses.24 Popular accounts of the Scientific Revolution have obscured the significance of this move, emphasizing instead Baconian induction and scientists’ radical engagement with “reality.”25 Legend has it that “science” was born when Galileo gave sacred texts a reality check by dropping two different weights off of the Tower of Pisa. When the objects landed at the same time, Galileo discovered the universal laws of motion. In fact, Galileo did not carry out this experiment and if he had the result would have supported Aristotle.26 Instead Galileo demonstrated the laws of motion with a thought experiment. If we were to suppose that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter bodies, then tying two different weights could logically produce two contradictory results—both the slowing down and speeding up of the heavier object. From this logical contradiction, Galileo deduced that objects must fall at the same speed. Thought experiments have played a significant role in the history of science from “Newton’s bucket,” “Maxwell’s demon,” “Einstein’s elevator,” and “Schrödinger’s cat.” Nevertheless, they are only admissible on the assumption of nature and thought’s conformity. To be more precise, thought experiments rest upon certain principles we presume to operate in the natural world. These are the principles of scientific reason. PRINCIPLES OF SCIENTIFIC REASON The pioneers of the Scientific Revolution made frequent reference to principles of scientific reason. Thereafter they became so embedded in scientific inquiry they were barely mentioned. The principles would return to the surface in the nineteenth century when Darwin led a generation of thinkers to turn them on their head. (1) Perfection: The “Galilean attitude” referred to by Husserl is neatly contained in the couplet found in Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences: “nature is absolutely perfect and creates nothing in vain.”27 The subsequent task facing Galileo and scientists thereafter was to prove this intuition correct.28 This quest for perfection and harmony has often been understood as an end in itself, but at least for Galileo, the drive for perfection served a crucial purpose—that of acquainting scientists with “perfect familiarity” of the phenomena under consideration so as to avoid any conflicts of interpretation that might arise between them.29 Accordingly, scientific theories confine themselves to the best examples nature has to offer, and generalize from them. It was in the seventeenth century that there emerged a sudden interest in mechanical explanations for perfect natural shapes such as spheres (bubbles), crystals (snowflakes), and hexagons (honeycombs).30 Nature’s perfection isn’t always so evident, however, and must often be

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elicited in controlled experiments. Far from engaging more thoroughly with reality, scientists became disposed to withdraw from it; putting to one side “accidental variations” that did not fit with the models—like heavy bodies landing before lighter bodies.31 The principle of perfection might be the knot that ties thought and nature together, as it is in its idealized form that science could be regarded as obeying principles of deep thought. Nevertheless, there are at least two facets of perfection that warrant their own separate status as principles of reason. (2) Identity: Descartes believed that to go beyond mere interpretation (which he believed had provided a history of illusions, superficial resemblances and chimeras) required a “scientific” understanding of the identity of things.32 “We should attend only to those objects of which our minds seem capable of having certain and indubitable cognition.”33 The emphasis upon concepts as they exist in the mind might be misleading for the point of Descartes’s schema was to ground the essence of things in a philosophical system so that they remained true irrespective of the person experiencing them. With similar aspirations in mind, Gottfried Leibniz stipulated an “axiom of identity”; an axiom that would tie the “nature of things” to primary propositions (“A is A”) that brook no qualification or equivocation. Like Galileo and Descartes, Leibniz sought to go beyond this or that interpretation to a realm of perfect communication in which “if controversies were to arise, there would be no more need of disputation between philosophers.”34 The principle of identity has always maintained a close association with scientific reductionism. To name things has entailed breaking things down into their constituent parts. “I have described this earth and indeed the whole visible universe as if it were a machine,” Descartes wrote in his Principles of Philosophy. “I have considered only the various shapes and movements of its parts.”35 This association is logical on the assumption that things are made up of smaller things that are more stable and concrete. 3) Laws: If nature is perfect, it is also lawful. Galileo understood that nature’s perfection entailed that it was “unchangeable and always the same.”36 The point of experiments is to create the “perfect conditions” in which nature can be made to “repeat itself always in the same manner.”37 This was a novel idea in the seventeenth century. As the historian and philosopher J. R. Milton points out, the notion that the “main aim” of a natural philosopher should be the discovery of laws only emerged clearly in this period.38 Jacob put the Classical concern with laws down to an order which subjected the universe to a fixed arrangement of signs accessible to scientific inquiry. As he put it in The Logic of Life, the Classical period “arranged, connected and harmonized” everything, “not from without as a result of some occult force inaccessible to human reason, but from within by the chain of laws themselves.”39 The science, that emerged from the Scientific Revolution is

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concerned with propositions that are, as Descartes put it, “stable and likely to last.”40 Reiterating this principle in the twentieth century Werner Heisenberg insisted that science had no concern with the “accidental, changeable and relative determinations.”41 LANGUAGE AND REPRESENTATION The three principles of scientific reason owe their enduring power to the achievements of the mathematical sciences. For Johannes Kepler, it was mathematics that was “the archetype of the beautiful” and the “perfect familiarity” to which Galileo referred were “the elements of Euclid.”42 Nevertheless, Foucault insisted that the order of the Classical episteme was not essentially mathematical.43 To imply that it was underestimates the preeminent role that language played during this period.44 Prior to the Classical episteme, thought could not be considered to conform with nature because there was no distinction to be made between them. During the Renaissance both nature and thought collapsed into language. What we might call articles of thought (signs, texts, scriptures, etc.) and natural entities (rocks, plants, stars, etc.) were considered to be parts of a single text. Knowledge in this configuration consisted of “relating one form of language to another form of language” in an endless relay of resemblance and interpretation.45 In the shift to the Classical period, language broke off “its old kinship with things” and attained its own “sovereignty.”46 No longer part of nature in a chain of resemblances, the role of language became to represent nature instead. Language is therefore not what provides us access to truth, but the form of knowing itself. To know something was to give it a name (to name was to know). In this order, “simple natures” were comprehensible to the language of mathematical algebra, while “complex natures” were constituted taxonomically establishing “a system of signs” ordered on the basis of the identity and difference of things.47 The ordering of “complex natures” is spelled out most clearly in the realm of natural history, which became exclusively an activity of classification. To write the history of a living being prior to the Classical era was to describe the semantic network within which it existed. Not just its “elements or organs” but also the “legends and stories” it had been involved in its place in “heraldry” and “antiquity,” its “virtues,” its medicinal uses, and so on.48 Upon entry into the Classical period, this information was stripped from the living being leaving only its anatomy, its form and habits.49 A bastion of this classical approach, Carl Linnaeus gave each living being just two names—the first referred to the genus it belonged to, the second, the name of its species. Each species was then deposited in a grand table in which its identity was defined in a fixed order of differences

“I think!”

11

with other species. The act of nomination served to conjoin words and things in a relation of duplication and equivalence. The effect was to close the gap between words and things that would otherwise have needed to be plugged by the author. POWER/KNOWLEDGE/REPRESENTATION ‘Truths’ must be established. The notion that the Earth moves around the Sun was originally met with such “obdurate” opposition that it took years to be accepted.50 Equally the notion of the mutability of species remained a heresy until the middle of the nineteenth century. And yet popular folklore has it that this is the sum of their relation. That is, it is popularly conceived that “power” only plays a negative role in relation to “truth” and that should “truth” be released from the shackles of “repression,” it would emerge free from “illusion and error.”51 This distinction between truth and power impedes our understanding of the genesis of scientific discoveries. Foucault rejected the notion of a “primordial truth” on one side, and a power that carries “the force of a prohibition” on the other as it underestimates the “productive” character of power. Power, Foucault insists, does not “only weigh on us as a force that says no [. . .] it produces things [. . .] produces discourse.”52 This is hidden by popular narratives that place great emphasis on early modern scientists, such as Galileo, working diligently on their own and finding “consolation” in knowledge for themselves.53 Even Galileo required backers and he began his Mathematical Demonstrations by praising his patrons in the Venetian army, for providing the arsenal of munitions for his scientific studies. It wasn’t just the technological concerns of the military that “advanced in tandem with the work of the most prominent physicists.”54 Newtonian mechanics was largely born out of the technological concerns of the naval merchants (providing substance to the old adage that the Europeans turned violence, expansion and conquest into a science).55 Turning to the science itself the canonical discovery of the Scientific Revolution—a moving planet circling a stationary star in empty space—assumes notions of a fixed time and space, which were not unrelated to the interests of an emerging class to render the world passive and predictable. Broadly speaking the new bourgeoisie found in nature the reflection of the order they wished to impose upon it—and this was reflected in science’s principles of reason.56 (1) Perfection, design and the elimination of interpretation: The idea that science opposed religion was, as far as the seventeenth century was concerned, a myth. Early scientists did not distinguish between their natural philosophy and natural theology. If Galileo departed from Church doctrine, he never questioned that nature was designed. The theological underpinnings

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of science were more explicit in the work of Newton, for whom nature’s laws “shed new light on God’s intentions.”57 Extending this principle to living things, Robert Boyle wrote that it was “rational, from the manifest fitness of some things to cosmical or animal ends or uses, to infer, that they were framed or ordained in reference thereunto by an intelligent and designing agent.”58 The scientific principle of perfection; embodied the union of science and religion. In the conformity of nature and thought, harmony begets harmony. The perfection of nature, the pioneers of the new science hoped, would provide the basis for science’s ultimate unification (what Nietzsche would later refer to pejoratively as the “ascetic ideal”). The conceit of a unified knowledge flourished during the Classical period when all knowledge, from physics to philosophy, was devoted to the same organization of its material in a grand order of differences.59 For God, Leibniz wrote, “created the world so perfect that it can never fall into disorder.”60 The assumption of design was not just a metaphysical afterthought. It was an intuition that helped to consolidate early science against lingering scholasticism.61 Science could claim closer fidelity to the Bible. Just as Man had been made in God’s image so too had God “designed the human mind that it could grasp [nature’s] harmonies.”62 The lofty ideals of a perfect science have since been abandoned. Nevertheless, a properly scientific representation renders the notion of perfect knowledge conceivable. Perfect knowledge is achieved in a table of classification in which every element is represented and all relationships between these elements are indicated in their correct and natural order.63 In a perfect representation, there is only one possible interpretation and that is the “correct interpretation” of a visible series.64 There can be no conflicts of interpretation, between science and the non-scientific interpretations science seeks to depose. Science represented nature “without any reference to religious notions.”65 Galileo’s conflict with the Church was not strictly a conflict of interpretation because the universe he observed was entirely incompatible with the celestial heavens of Biblical scripture. Science and religion certainly engaged in a conflict of representation, but this happened “as if by accident and only for the moment it takes to dissipate ignorance.”66 With no labor of interpretation required to understand a scientific theory, there is no room for conflicts of interpretation between scientific theories either. Commenting on the conflict of representation between classical mechanics and the physics of relativity, Thomas Kuhn wrote “the two theories are fundamentally incompatible in the sense illustrated by the relation of Copernican to Ptolemaic astronomy.”67 Conflicts of representation are all or nothing contests that brook no compromise. There is no space within a scientific representation for contestation, disagreement, or dissent. If the term “science” is used to

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stress the separation of science from one’s own interpretation, this is because the separation of “science” from interpretation is fundamentally integral to Classical scientific representations. (2) Identity, objectivity and the elimination of politics: Part of the appeal of the label of science is that it pertains to be separate from politics. For Noam Chomsky, it’s the comparatively meagre goals of science that explain this separation.68 Newtonian mechanics might give us an understanding of the speed at which the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Einstein’s equations might give us an understanding of what happened when the bomb exploded, but neither explains why the bomb was dropped. However, it’s not just the science of “simple natures” that claims to be separate from politics but any science employing a principle of identity. This is because the Classical priority of knowing things in themselves (identity) precludes an understanding of things in relation to other things—which is the very essence of understanding things politically. There is no complex interaction of elements as was understood in either the Renaissance or modern epistemes, only the congealed hierarchy of differences between things that are fixed and invariant and subordinate to a natural order.69 A natural order, properly represented, cannot be challenged on its own terms. It cannot be reversed, reviewed, or reinterpreted without losing its identity. In hindsight one can hardly think of a system of classification more dubious and political than Linnaeus’s classification of human beings; and yet his system provides no means of conceiving the differences between the human groups as political—still less interpreting these differences differently. The appropriate question might not be whether science is bound up with power, but when is its concealment of the political legitimate? Or to put it slightly differently, when are its procedures of verification sufficiently autonomous that any relation to power does not impair its validity? In this narrower sense, Foucault grants the natural sciences an autonomy from the political conditions of their emergence.70 This is not something Foucault grants “empirical sciences” like biology, economics, and psychology; disciplines that remain “controversial in character,” “open to philosophical or ethical options,” and susceptible to “political manipulation.”71 (3) Laws, certainty, and the elimination of ethics: Archimedes had once boasted that if he had a fulcrum and a long enough lever, he could move the earth. Descartes adopted this metaphor to describe the imaginary vantage point of the scientific observer. From an Archimedean point (punctum Archimedis) that was “fixed and immovable” the scientist could attain certainty in his propositions.72 This vantage point is quite explicitly beyond representation—a space from nowhere in which everything is visible apart from itself. In the Classical era, there could be no representation of the specific act of consciousness that constitutes this classification for in the Classical age

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“nothing is given that is not given to representation.”73 This is the basis for Foucault’s bold claim that in Classical thought, the personage for whom the representation exists, and who represents himself within it, recognizing himself therein as an image or reflection, he who ties together all the interlacing threads of the “representation in the form of a picture or table”—he is never to be found in that table himself. Before the end of the eighteenth century, man did not exist.74

Foucault is not denying Man’s biological, social, or psychological existence in the Classical episteme. He is merely pointing out that subjects who represent, are not themselves, subject to representation. If Man could be represented in a table of elements, He could not also be the source of that representation. This complicated philosophical point is made clearer when we look at specific Classical texts. Consider this passage from Linnaeus’s Reflections on the Study of Nature: If the Maker has furnished this globe, like a museum, with the most admirable proofs of his wisdom and power; if this splendid theater would be adorned in vain without a spectator; and if man the most perfect of all his works is alone capable of considering the wonderful economy of the whole; it follows that man is made for the purpose of studying the Creator’s works that he may observe in them the evident marks of divine wisdom.75

What is Man in this allegory? An actor, a museum piece, or a spectator? Moreover, where is He? In the auditorium or behind glass? Or is He really nowhere; lying in the nether space between God and Nature? Descartes incorporated this absence into his logical system by appealing to the principle of laws. Anything that is amenable to scientific classification had to be, on Classical assumptions, subordinate to a set of laws. But for Descartes, this excluded human nature, for the defining characteristic of human nature is our free-will.76 Emphasizing human freedom from mechanistic science, Descartes described free-will as “the noblest thing we have because it makes us in a certain manner equal to God and exempts us from being his subjects” (i.e., exempt from natural law). Regarding any possibility of a conflict between divine law and divine free-will Descartes wrote that it “would be absurd to doubt” something “we comprehend intimately, and experience within ourselves” merely “because of theoretical difficulties” (i.e., conceiving it scientifically).77 The separation of freedom from science also eliminated the need for a set of practices to regulate this freedom (ethics). How and why requires some unpacking. Descartes believed that the condition of doubt was our most acute experience of freedom. As he put it, free-will “consists purely” in that “we are

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moved in relation to that which the intellect presents to us as to be affirmed or denied [. . .] in such a way that we feel we are not being determined in that direction by any external force.”78 With such doubt comes the danger that what we apprehend may be untrue, imaginary, or chimerical. For this reason, freedom and truth have historically been mediated through a set of ethics; a way to assuage doubt arising from freedom. Descartes was skeptical of any such recourse to ethics. “For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough” for even the “greatest minds” are open to “the greatest aberrations.”79 Galileo’s answer was to replace doubt in pre-scientific dogma with certainty in scientific reason. In Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo reserves praise for Aristarchus and Copernicus who were able to make reason so conquer the senses that they made the former a “mistress of their credulity.”80 Descartes was dissatisfied with this move, accusing Galileo of building a philosophy “without foundations.”81 Descartes sought certainty in a formal philosophical argument. If every investigation is faced with the challenge of distinguishing truth from error, then all thought appears to begin on a premise of doubt. However, this doubt is secondary to a prior premise, namely the certainty that we are thinking. Descartes’s Cogito placed certainty in his thinking before doubting the content of his thoughts because the “ill-thought,” the “non-true,” and the “chimerical” are themselves already proof that we are thinking.82 Cartesian metaphysics was by no means universally accepted, but it was indicative of a moment when an ethics to regulate doubt in relation to freedom gave way to certainty in scientific reason. “If man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts,” wrote Francis Bacon, “but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.”83 CONCLUSION: ELIMINATION OF THE AUTHOR Foucault’s discussion of the representative order of the Classical episteme provides us with the key to understanding the disappearance of the author. Prior to the Scientific Revolution, the author had served the function of regulating interpretation. This function became obsolete once nature and thought were consigned to a general science of order. In a world that is perfect, made up of discrete identifiable entities and lawfully determined, what need do we have of authors to resolve conflicts of interpretation? The principles of scientific reason that were established during the Scientific Revolution have survived to this day. The intuition and representative order that had provided its foundation did not. The collapse of the Classical episteme and the emergence of the modern episteme would ultimately give rise to a CounterScientific Revolution from which the life sciences never recovered.

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NOTES 1. J. Donne, Essays in Divinity (1651; repr., London: John Tupling, 1855), 20. 2. J. W. von Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werther—Buch 2 (Weygandsche Buchhandlung, 1825), 156. 3. See discussion in J. L. Austin and J. Urmson, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). 4. M. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 9. 5. See G. Holton and Y. Elkana, A. Einstein: Historical and Cultural Perspectives. The Centennial Symposium in Jerusalem (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982), xv. 6. Max Born cited in L. Fermi and G. Bernardini, Galileo and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Dover Publications, 2003), 9. 7. E. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Northwestern University Press, 1970), 59. 8. M. Foucault, The Order of Things (1966; repr., Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), viii. 9. M. Foucault, “What is an author?,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (New York: Cornell University Press), 126–7. 10. M. Foucault, “What is an author?,”, 126–7. 11. M. Foucault, Discourse and Truth and Parresia (Chicago: Chicago Foucault Project, 2019), 223. 12. M. Foucault, “On the genealogy of ethics: an overview of work in progress,” in The Foucault Reader, 190. 13. ibid, 190. See also W. Detel, Foucault and Classical Antiquity: Power, Ethics and Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 163–5. 14. G. Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Vol. 1 (1632; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 56. 15. See discussion in R. Ariew “Descartes and Scholasticism: the intellectual background to descartes’ thought,” in J. Cottingham. The Cambridge Companion to Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 58–90. 16. Descartes cited in ibid, 85. 17. Foucault, “What is an author?,” 106. 18. F. Jacob, “Evolution and tinkering,” in Science 196 (1977): 1161–2. 19. Pierre De Fermat cited in D. S. Lemons, Perfect form: Variational Principles, Methods, and Applications in Elementary Physics (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), 3. 20. G. Galilei, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences (1638; repr., New York: Cosimo Press, 1914), 161. 21. Foucault, The Order of Things, 172 and ix. 22. Descartes cited in J. L. Marion, “Cartesian metaphysics and the role of simple natures,” in The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, 115.

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23. See discussion in G. Gutting, Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason: Science and the History of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 151–2. 24. Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 51. 25. See for example S. J. Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From The Big Bang to Black Holes (Transworld, 1991), 179. 26. T. S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1957), 95. 27. See Galilei, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, 3 and Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 397. 28. N. Chomsky, “Reply to Poland,” in L. M. Anthony and N. Hornstein. Chomsky and His Critics (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 264. 29. Galilei, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, 248. On nature’s harmony see J. Kepler, The Harmony of the World (1619; repr., American Philosophical Society, 1997) 465, 419. 30. Isaac Newton first gave soap bubbles a “scientific” treatment in his optical papers between 1670–2—I. Newton and A. E. Shapiro, The Optical Papers of Isaac Newton: Volume 1, The Optical Lectures 1670–1672: Volume 1. The Optical Lectures 1670–1672. Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). In 1611, Kepler wrote a treatise entitled On the Six-Cornered Snow Flake—the first treatise of its kind. It was toward the end of the seventeenth century that scientists such as René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, Georges-Louis Leclerc, and Comte de Buffon examined honeycombs as a mechanical problem—See discussion in F. Jacob, The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), 37–8. 31. Galilei, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, 3. 32. Foucault, The Order of Things, 56–7. 33. R. Descartes, “Rules for the direction of mind,” in Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 9–10. 34. Leibniz cited in B. Russell, History of Western Philosophy (1945; repr., Abingdon: Routledge, 2002), 572–3. 35. R. Descartes, “Principles of first philosophy,” in Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 200. 36. Galilei, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, 3. 37. ibid, 161. 38. J. R. Milton, “Laws of nature,” in D. Garber and M. Ayers. The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 680. 39. Jacob, The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity, 30. 40. R. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies (Oxford University Press, 2008), 76. 41. W. K. Heisenberg, The Physicist’s Conception of Nature (Hutchinson: 1958), 104. 42. See Jacob, The Logic of Life, 31. 43. For the same reason Foucault rejects the placing of Descartes and Newton at the forefront of Classical knowledge. In Order of Things, he writes “Under cover of the

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empty and obscurely incantatory phrases ‘Cartesian influence’ or ‘Newtonian model,’ our historians of ideas are in the habit of [. . .] defining Classical rationalism as the tendency to make nature mechanical and calculable.” Foucault, The Order of Things, 62. 44. ibid, 54. 45. Foucault, The Order of Things, 44–5. 46. ibid, 54. 47. ibid, 79. 48. ibid, 140. 49. ibid, 141. 50. Galileo cited in G. De Santillana, The Crime of Galileo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 14. 51. Foucault, “Truth and power,” 59. 52. ibid, 60–61. 53. Galileo cited in De Santillana, The Crime of Galileo, 14. 54. B. Hessen, “The social and economic roots of Newton’s Principia,” (1931) in The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution, ed. Gideon Freudenthal and Peter McLaughlin (Springer, 2009), 50. 55. ibid, 52–55. 56. See, for example, discussion in M. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution: 1689–1720 (Harvester Press, 1976), 189–90. 57. J. H. Brooke, “Natural theology,” in J. L. Heilbron. The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 565. 58. Robert Boyle cited in M. Ruse, “Natural theology: the biological sciences,” in R. R. Manning and J. H. Brooke. The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 400. 59. Foucault, The Order of Things, 377. 60. Gottfried Leibniz cited in R. Olson, Science and Religion, 1450–1900: From Copernicus to Darwin (London: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004), 113. 61. J. H. Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 266–7. 62. Brooke, “Natural theology,” 564. 63. Foucault, The Order of Things, 93. 64. ibid, 223. 65. Heisenberg, “The physicist’s conception of nature,” 4. 66. L. Althusser and W. Montag, “On Marx and Freud,” in Rethinking Marxism 4.1 (1991): 17–30. 67. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962; repr., Chicago Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), 91. 68. See discussion in M. Foucault and N. Chomsky, “Human nature: justice versus power,” in M. Foucault. Foucault and His Interlocutors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 107–145. 69. Foucault, The Order of Things, 47 and 73. 70. “The sciences of nature [have] become detached from its politico-juridical model” from which they originated. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 227.

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71. M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1970; repr., Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 39. 72. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 80. 73. Foucault, The Order of Things, 86. 74. ibid, 336. 75. Carl Linnaeus cited in Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives, 197. 76. See, for example, David Hume’s discussion on human nature, causation, and indeterminacy in footnote 15. D. Hume, Treatise on Human Nature (1740; repr., Portland: Floating Press, 2009), 836. 77. Descartes cited in D. M. Clarke, Philosophy of Science (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), 27. 78. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 41. 79. ibid. 80. E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (Рипол Классик, 1932), 69. 81. J. Roger and K. R. Benson, The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought (Stanford University Press, 1997), 589. 82. Foucault, The Order of Things, 353. 83. Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 90.

Chapter 2

“I can’t think!” Counter-Science and the Unthought

He who replies to words of doubt, Doth put the light of knowledge out. —William Blake1 The old saying Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, can never be trusted in science. —Charles Darwin2

“Counter-science” describes a truth that moves in the opposite direction to science. If “science” is a label we use to emphasize our certainty of something, then the “counter-scientific” label can be used to emphasize our doubt. In the next chapter I will argue that Darwin founded the canonical counter-scientific theory, but to fully grasp the concept and its scope, we must apply it to the discourses Foucault intended—Marxism and psychoanalysis. Marxist and psychoanalytic theorists would not, historically, accept such a label. Indeed many have resurrected the role of the author precisely in order to recover the kind of certainty in Marxism and psychoanalysis that would establish them as sciences—and yet the obligation to read the works of Marx and Freud is surely the clearest evidence that Marxism and psychoanalysis are not scientific. At the heart of the counter-sciences (and the deep reason for the resurrection of the author) is the break between thought and nature. The Counter-Scientific Revolution was founded on the assumption that nature and thought are alienated from one another. What I call the counter-scientific unthought is elicited by three principles of counter-scientific reasoning. The first principle is that nature reveals itself in its imperfections. The second principle is that scientific concepts are to be understood not by their inherent identity but by their 21

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relations. The third principle is that the history of nature is not lawful but contingent. These principles embed interpretive, political, and ethical conflicts in the literature, which the figure of the author is employed to resolve. INTRODUCTION: THE CLAIM TO COUNTER-SCIENTIFIC STATUS Contemporary science bears the marks of a democratic revolution that stopped halfway. A bourgeois revolution that pronounced its commitment to universalism at the same moment it instituted the rule of a new governing elite. Thus, the age of science, in Jacques Rancière’s words, “turns back and forth” upon a contradiction. On the one hand, it is “founded upon simple principles available to all minds.” On the other, it coincides with the emergence of a new hierarchical social order in which truth is confined to a technocratic elite and subordinated to the diktats of state.3 To call a statement scientific is not simply a judgment about its veracity. It is an implicit order that the statement is something we are compelled to accept. To honor a statement with the label “scientific” is precisely to deny its status as an interpretation. If Foucault refrained from critiquing the “exact sciences,” he was deeply suspicious of the propagation of the label “science” in other, interpretive, domains. In a lecture to the Collège de France, Foucault identified the aspiration to power inherent in the scientific claims of Marxism and psychoanalysis: [You] know how many people have been asking themselves whether or not Marxism is a science. One might say that the same question has been asked [of] psychoanalysis. [My] answer to the question “is it a science or not?” is: “Turning Marxism, or psychoanalysis, or whatever else it is, into a science is precisely what we are criticizing you for.” [What] type of knowledge are you trying to disqualify when you say that you are a science? What speaking subject, what discursive subject, what subject of experience and knowledge are you trying to minorize when you begin to say: “I speak this discourse, I am speaking a scientific discourse, and I am a scientist”[?] When I see you trying to prove that Marxism is a science, to tell the truth, I do not really see you trying to demonstrate once and for all that Marxism has a rational structure and that its propositions are therefore the products of verification procedures. I see you connecting to Marxist discourse [the power] reserved for those who speak a scientific discourse.4

Foucault’s critical approach was designed precisely to lay bare the motivation behind any such claim and it is in this sense that Foucault placed himself in opposition to the claim to “science” in empirical domains such as economics

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and psychology. In the same lecture, he described his own critical analyses as “antisciences.” Not against scientific methodology, but “against the centralizing power-effects that are bound up with any scientific discourse.”5 If his comments on Marxism and psychoanalysis had been quite scathing, his description of his historical critique as an “antiscience” is reminiscent of his more positive descriptions of Marxism and psychoanalysis in his earlier work in the 1960s. Against the “centralizing power-effects” of scientific discourses, Foucault credits Marx in The Archaeology of Knowledge with having operated a “decentring” of economics and history.6 In a similar vein, Foucault refers to psychoanalysis in The Order of Things as a “counter-science.”7 By this Foucault did not mean psychoanalysis was any “less rational or objective” than science, but rather that it moves in the “opposite direction.”8 I like the term “counter-science.” It isn’t as antagonistic as the term “antiscience” and its simplicity promise a broader application than maybe Foucault intended. Above all, it enables us to approach the term in the same way we treated science in the previous chapter. That is as a performative utterance. If science is a label we use to punctuate statements (!), separating it from mere interpretation and compelling our acceptance of it, could the counter-scientific label be made to do the opposite? Serving the function of placing a question mark against a statement (?)—rendering it provisional and underscoring its status as an interpretation? In the next chapter, I will argue that Darwinism is the foundational counter-science. This is a controversial argument that requires some preparation. Allow me then to lay out my theory of counter-science as it pertains less controversially to Marxism and psychoanalysis. RETURN OF THE AUTHOR In “Preface to the First German Edition” of Das Kapital, Marx warned his readers that “every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences” before going on to invoke Galileo and Newton in describing “the ultimate aim of this work” to “lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society.”9 While psychoanalysis “was originally the name of a particular therapeutic method,” Freud wrote in 1924, “it has now also become the name of a science—the science of unconscious mental processes.”10 However, for Foucault, there is a crucial difference between Marx and Freud and a “founder of science.” Marx and Freud did not simply found theories, but entire discourses in which it became possible to say something different from, yet faithful to what they founded. Freud is not “just the author of The Interpretation of Dreams or Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious”; nor is Marx “just the author of the Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital.” They are authors of an endless possibility of interpretation. The recurring practice of the “return of the origin” whereby Marx and Freud’s

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loci classici are pored over by contemporary Marxists and psychoanalysts respectively is symptomatic of this. It is not simply that Das Kapital and The Interpretation of Dreams founded Marxism and psychoanalysis (in the way that Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems founded modern physics), it is that they continue to lay the basis for new Marxist and psychoanalytic interpretations. The return of the author in Marxism and psychoanalysis was indicative of a return to conflicts of interpretation. If Marxists and Freudians have been committed to Marxist and psychoanalytic “science,” this is about the only thing they have agreed upon. While science achieved a mode of explanation that went beyond this or that interpretation, Marxists and psychoanalysts frequently propose different interpretations, each vying for the mantle of “science.” This poses a problem for their claim to the status of “science” that is after all, supposed to transcend interpretation. One way in which those invested in the scientific status of Marxism and psychoanalysis might seek to preserve this status is to portray the original texts of the founders as coherent and unified and explain the subsequent diversity within Marxist and psychoanalytic discourse as a proliferation of perversions or misreadings that betray this original unity. “The author,” Foucault wrote “is a principle of a certain unity of writing” that serves to neutralize the contradictions that may emerge in a series of texts: there must be—at a certain level of his thought or desire, of his consciousness or unconscious—a point where contradictions are resolved, where incompatible elements are at last tied together.11

The question at stake here is not whether the work of the author is coherent and unified, but rather that the author is always already a cipher for the conflicts of interpretation they made possible. There is a disconnect between what Foucault believes the author founded and what the author is subsequently employed to do. Having founded the possibility of difference, the author is used to eliminate difference. The irony is compounded by the fact that the original achievement of science was the elimination of authors. When discourses reintroduce the possibility of interpretation, they also wind up appealing to the author. Not to signify the discourse’s lack of scientificity, but precisely to stem the tide of interpretations that would render any such claim to “science” meaningless. But surely then arises the question: if the invocation of the author is so disingenuous, what can Marx and Freud (and indeed Darwin) be said to have discovered? NATURE AND THE UNTHOUGHT Just as science’s elimination of authors seemed to depend upon its simplicity, it appears that the return of authors might derive from their complexity. In

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particular, the abstract schemata of Marxism and psychoanalysis cannot be isolated—rather they must be interpreted from complex events. Such complex inferences can always be made differently. While Marx sought to lay bare the “economic law of motion,” his historical analyses were not content with remaining at this level. As he insisted in the Grundrisse, having moved “from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions,” the journey has “to be retraced,” back to the world of human relations—“a rich totality of many determinations.”12 Equally Freud reflected that “the more deeply we probe in our study of psychical processes, the more we become aware of their richness and complexity.”13 A superficial solution to the author function might argue that recourse to the author is what allows the full complexity of Marxism and psychoanalysis to flourish. Such allusions to “complexity” underestimate the radicality of the Counter-Scientific Revolution. If the intuition of science is that nature reveals itself to deep thought, then the intuition of counter-science is that nature conceals itself to thought. This concealment is exposed in the sciences that precede Marxism and psychoanalysis; sciences that obscure the true relation of things precisely by their prescribing to them a natural, rational order. The view of classical economics was that “value” was intrinsic to commodities and therefore a natural given. Marx called this view “commodity fetishism,” arguing that the value of commodities has “absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this.”14 Marx proposed instead that “value” derives from the social relations of production. In the capitalist mode of production, in which production is divided between the owners and the workers, the production of value is inherently tied to exploitation and the class struggle. However, “commodity fetishism” is not simply an error to be corrected by a revised science. It is an error that expresses the logic of the capitalist system; a system that operates as if “value” were inherent to things thereby obscuring underlying relations of exploitation. “Fetishism” is “inseparable from the production of commodities.”15 Classical political economy is not a science that reveals the nature of the economy so much as a sophisticated expression of the interests of the people that run it—what Marx called ideology.16 Similarly psychoanalysis informs us that the notion of the fully self-conscious subject is a myth that conceals unconscious mental processes. Freud’s psychical apparatus was not specifically a critique of the Cartesian subject. Nevertheless, in The Claims of Psycho-Analysis to Scientific Interest, he criticized much of philosophy’s foundation on psychology, rendering it incapable of “taking the psycho-analytic contributions fully into account” as it had done with “every considerable advance in the specialized sciences.”17 As with “commodity fetishism,” the myth is not just an error to be corrected but an object to be explained. In Freud’s view, the “self-conscious subject” features as a tier in the psychical apparatus (the Ich) that conceals

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“the unconscious” (the Es) through a process of repression. Freud associates belief in the mastery of the Ich with narcissism—the mistaken belief in the unity of thought and nature. Marx and Freud’s discoveries of the “class struggle” and “the unconscious,” respectively broke the bond of nature and thought. Both authors were inclined to express this break in terms of a contradiction. Marx proposed a series of contradictions in Das Kapital; among them the “fundamental” contradiction between the relations of production and the means of production, the conflict of interests between classes, and the irrationality of producing commodities we need for purposes of exchange. Referring to our capacity to love and hate something at the same time, Freud wrote that the “laws of logic, above all the law of contradiction, don’t apply to processes of the Es.”18 Nevertheless, Marx and Freud had sought to bring their discoveries back into the fold of science; chiefly by presenting their work in terms of their materialist revolutions, and thereby rooting the contradictions in the empirical world. There is a parallel here to be noted with the popularizations of the Scientific Revolution, only this time with an emphasis on Marx and Freud’s radical engagement with material reality. This way of presenting Marx and Freud’s discoveries is not necessarily invalid. Marx was no doubt justified in prioritizing the “the production of material life itself,” given that “men must be in a position to live in order to be able to ‘make history.’ ”19 Equally there must be some truth to Freud’s “basic assumption” that there is a process that takes us from the material operations of the brain, of which we are not aware, to the psychical operations that we are.20 However, the significance of Marx and Freud for Foucault is not that they reveal the material world for what it really is, behind an idealized form and free from contradiction. It is that they are committed to a material world that we are always already alienated from. While scientists of the seventeenth century retreated from the empirical world into deep thought to reveal nature’s secrets, the nineteenth-century author committed themselves to empirical discoveries that unsettle thought. Foucault calls this the “unthought”—the form of reflection that short-circuits the “I think” upon which science is founded.21 To the extent that Marx and Freud “decentred” or “ruptured” thought, their work has been made to conform to it as well; that is, when their contradictions are posited as “fundamental,” or as the “founding, secret law that accounts for all minor contradictions giving them a firm foundation.”22 By subordinating “the unconscious” within a broader theoretical scheme, Foucault warned that we are in danger of losing that “terrible and rocky” thing that Freud discovered in the “depths of the human psyche.”23 Likewise Foucault argued that “Marxism after Marx” has generally pacified “the violence and incompleteness” unleashed by Marx in favor of theoretical unity.24 Another way of putting it is to say that Marxists and psychoanalysts have sought to overcome the “shock effect” of the

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“unthought” by re-establishing the bond of nature and thought within Marxist and psychoanalytic discourses in order to establish them as sciences. This neglects how their initial interventions were very much counter to scientific reasoning. Marx and Freud deployed principles of counter-scientific reason in order to disrupt any pretense toward a natural order through inverting scientific principles of reason, driving a wedge between thinking and being. PRINCIPLES OF COUNTER-SCIENTIFIC REASON (1) Imperfection: Counter-sciences begin with the assumption that nature’s truths are revealed in its imperfections, what Freud once called the “dregs of world phenomena.”25 Against economists who have been inclined to dismiss economic crises as “market failures,” anomalies to be put down to aberration, Marx sought to show that the classical political economists were wrong on their own terms. “The real barrier of capitalist production” Marx argued, “is capital itself.”26 Marx rendered crises intrinsic to capitalism and it is during such crises when the truth of the system is exposed; when the “antagonism of all elements in the bourgeois process of production explode.”27 Psychoanalysis is concerned with crises of a more personal nature—ones in which deep psychical conflicts rise to the surface to produce pathological episodes. Breakdowns often inspire breakthroughs. Freud was also interested in more mundane “imperfections”—forgetting, slips of the tongue, bungled actions, superstitions, and errors of communication—he argued also reveal “the unconscious.” If human beings were entirely consciously aware, then our occasional failure to express ourselves would be of no significance. In light of “the unconscious,” “imperfections in mental activity” such as these take on a special significance, often revealing deeper, unintended, truths.28 (2) Relation: If scientific experiments isolate entities so as to endow them with definite identities, counter-sciences give priority to indefinite relations that defy isolation. Marx wrote that a “science of political economy” would only become possible once it had disposed of the primitive notion that value derives from commodities in themselves. Ridiculing crude applications of scientific reductionism, Marx wrote, “so far no chemist has ever discovered exchange value either in a pearl or a diamond.”29 “As values, commodities are social magnitudes, that is to say, something absolutely different from their ‘properties’ as ‘things.’ As values, they constitute only relations of men in their productive activity.”30 More broadly Marx’s whole approach is based on the premise that “society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations.”31 This implies a different conception of human essence to the liberal scientific tradition; not an “abstraction inherent in each single individual” but rather “the ensemble of the social relations.”32 For Freud, “the

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unconscious” is not a thing either, but a relation between drives. These drives become jumbled up to form ambivalent impulses.33 Freud is also interested in the way we are formed in our relations with people, particularly our parents. This triumvirate of relations (relation of drives, relation between people, and relation between drives and people) testifies to the inseparability of individual and group psychology so called. “From the very first,” Freud wrote in an essay on group psychology, “individual psychology, in its extended but entirely justifiable sense of the word, is at the same time social psychology as well [. . . .] In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved.”34 Darwin understood the principle of relation in terms of the metaphor of dependence. For present purposes, I want to emphasize two consequences entailed by dependency. The first consequence relates to dependence upon the whole. Against scientific reductionism, the principle of relation forces us to treat a thing as an indissoluble unity with everything else. Both Marx and Freud suggest which relations may be the most important, (in Marx the relations of production and in Freud relations within the family) but these institutions are necessarily porous. “The more deeply we go back into history,” Marx writes in the Grundrisse, “the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole.”35 The second consequence relates, rather cryptically, to the dependence of a thing upon itself. If a thing is defined in relation with other things (that are themselves defined by their relations), then the thing is also defined in a relation to itself. Freud elaborated on this rather complicated consequence in his concept of “counter-transference,” arising out of the patient’s influence on the analysts’ unconscious. According to Freud, the analyst can only relate to the patient as far as his “own complexes and internal resistances permit.”36 The analyst is therefore required to undergo a degree of “self-analysis”; a self-analysis that is, in turn, only possible “with the support of what I find on the outside (as if I were another).”37 Unlike the Cartesian subject that achieves self-knowledge from withdrawal, the Freudian subject achieves self-knowledge from their encounter with the other. Thus, the self and the other are caught in a continuous relation of reciprocal definition. In essence, there is no thing outside relations.38 (3) Contingency: Darwin was the first theorist to break from a universe of determined laws, emphasizing instead nature’s contingency. After him it would become a staple of counter-scientific thought. Marx stated that “no credit was due to me” for discovering the class struggle. Rather his achievement was proving that its existence was specific to a “particular phase” of history.39 Das Kapital might be Marx’s work most associated with “scientific determinism,” but the thrust of the book is oriented toward

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showing that what classical political economy presents as the “absolutely final form of social production” is in reality just a “passing historical phase of its evolution.”40 Nothing is determined in history. The contradictions within capitalism produce the possibility for fatal crises—though “no more than the possibility.”41 Freud appeals variously to “laws of association” or “the laws of the unconscious.” Moreover, his reference to “instinctive drives” or “biological impulses” implies a certain attempt to “discover” something fixed. However, Freud also conceded that “we are not as yet able to distinguish [. . .] between what is rigidly fixed by biological laws and what is open to movement and change under the influence of accidental experience.”42 Moreover, “the unconscious” is historical in both an “ontogenic” (related to the development life history of the individual) and “phylogenetic” sense (related to the development history of a lineage). In relation to the latter, Freud speculated in The Phylogenetic Fantasy whether neurotic and psychotic illnesses may have originated in traumatic events in our “pre-history” (for good Darwinian reasons these speculations have since been rejected).43 In respect of the former, the very point of the therapeutic situation is to come to grips with the unique life histories of the analysands. Far from subordinating everything to “psychoanalytic laws,” psychoanalysis was a way to come to terms with the “great and lasting” impact of what Freud called “accidental external contingencies.”44 LANGUAGE AND MISREPRESENTATION The background to the Counter-Scientific Revolution was the shift from the Classical to the modern episteme initiated by the “discovery” of history in the empirical sciences. Prior to the modern episteme, it was thought the universe was essentially timeless and unchanging. This stability underpinned the system of representation of the Classical episteme; a system shattered by the twin upheavals in France and Britain that the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm called the “dual revolution.”45 The French Revolution and the British “Industrial Revolution” transformed the world irrevocably and impressed upon a generation of scientists that the world could undergo radical and irreversible historical change.46 In light of this, a merely representative system of knowledge became untenable and soon the “whole solar system” came to be “conceived as a process of constant historical change.”47 This was a radically new way of thinking, for Classical thought did not have a conception of history. The representative nature of the Classical episteme explicitly forbade any concept of temporality. Events would take place, but in an essentially timeless, unchanging cosmos (like the seasons they would

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come and go in an endless cycle but never instituting any real change). To think an object was to employ ideas to represent it. In turn, representations derived their meaning from their relations of propinquity in ordered tables. It is this system of representation that provided the basis for the scientific intuition of the conformity of nature and thought. With the collapse of the Classical system of representation, a new conception of the relation in terms of a proximity in “temporal series” emerged.48 Foucault chronicled the impact of the “discovery” of history on three “life sciences” in The Order of Things. In the realm of biology, Georges Cuvier established the fact of extinction and the historical origin of organic beings (1796); in economics, David Ricardo showed that “value” derived from a process of labor (1817); and in philology, Franz Bopp showed that languages develop and change over time (1833).49 The demotion of language from its royal function in the Classical episteme might have been the most significant shift. From being a neutral indicator of signs, language became an object, with its own history and form. While the sciences of “simple natures” (i.e., mathematical sciences) could continue (albeit without foundation), the ramifications for the sciences of “complex natures” (i.e., sciences that relied upon language) were profound. It meant that they had to depend upon a system of signs, which conceal as much as they reveal. At approximately, the time that Marx and Freud were reacting against their “sciences,” Nietzsche was reacting against science in general. Nietzsche wasn’t opposed to science so much as the idea that it revealed nature for what it really is. “Science has today resigned itself to the apparent world; a real world—whatever it may be like—we certainly have no organ for knowing it.”50 It is significant that Nietzsche was trained in philology because his skepticism toward science reflected this shift in the conception of language; from the transparency of the classical sign to a modern conception of language that fundamentally falsifies the world. The following metaphor could have come straight from The Origin: Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept “leaf” is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the “leaf”: the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted—but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model.51

Nietzsche extinguished the concept of “leaf” only to resurrect it in the form of the unthought; a specific form of misrepresentation. In their separate ways, Marx and Freud understood there was no retrieving a timeless scientific

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concept from history. In rendering all labor social labor and identifying the production of value in a particular historical mode of production, Marx robbed economics of its “Robinsonade”—“the individual [that] appears detached from natural bonds.”52,53 In exposing language to “the unconscious,” Freud detached words from their meaning, making them the junction point “of a number of ideas” and possessed of a “predestined ambiguity.”54 In the previous chapter, we showed how nature and scientific thought are tied in a reciprocal relation that forecloses an analysis of the political conditions of science. Nature and counter-scientific thought are caught in a reciprocal relation as well. Only this time it is a relation that both reveals and expresses them. POWER/KNOWLEDGE/INTERPRETATION Foucault insists all knowledges are underpinned by power relations; however, he is less interested in blanketing all forms of knowledge than he is distinguishing science from non-science and interrogating “dubious disciplines” that claim the mantle of the former. Representations do not brook dissent, and an epistemic order of knowledge characterized by representation broadly reflected the hegemony of the ruling class. Revolutions beginning at the end of the eighteenth century would radically challenge this picture. In an era when working-class people, slaves, and women began contesting their place in the natural order, and town squares, factories, and plantations emerged as spaces of conflict and struggle, the interpretations of Darwin, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud contested the harmony of the scientific world-view. Marx and Freud did not offer their work “passively” to us. In Foucault’s words, they “violently seized” interpretations posing as representations, reversing them and shattering them “with blows of a hammer.”55 Discussing the impact of Marx and Freud’s discoveries, Louis Althusser invoked Marx’s description of Das Kapital as “a weapon aimed at the head of the bourgeoisie” as well as the words of Freud as psychoanalysis arrived in the United States. “They don’t realize that we are bringing them the plague.”56 Plagues infect all. The principles of counter-scientific reasoning aimed at the dubious scientific disciplines condemned counter-sciences to the very imperfections, relations, and contingencies they claim of nature, with all the interpretive, political, and ethical consequences this entails: (1) Imperfection and the return of interpretation: The bond between science and religion reveals itself most conspicuously in the search for the “ascetic ideal,” that is, a single all-encompassing Truth. No doubt it was easier to sustain the aspiration for a perfect all-encompassing truth when scientists were openly seeking answers to God’s designs, but even with the rise of atheism

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in eighteenth-century France, philosophers retained their faith in the “allpowerful, self-founding, self-determining power” of Reason and the perfect representation it could produce.57 With the separation of words and things, however, there can be no perfect representation. Instead, what the countersciences make room for is a space for conflicts of interpretation. They are quite explicitly interpretations of the imperfections of established doctrine. This entailed, in turn, engaging with nature’s current form as it had been interpreted historically. This is why counter-sciences are first and foremost critiques directed at the sciences they oppose. Marx did not “interpret the history of relations of production” but the interpretation of these relations from the classical economists. Freud did not “interpret signs, but interpretations”— certain “fantasies” that were already the interpretations of his patients. For Althusser, the process of donning the mask of the adversary does something else. It serves to ensure that a conflict of interpretation that begins with an external enemy quickly produces enemies within: What is remarkable in the dialectic of resistance-criticism-revision is that the phenomenon that begins outside of Freudian theory (with its adversaries) always ends up within Freudian theory. It is internally that Freudian theory is obliged to defend itself against attempts at annexation and revision: the adversary always ends up by penetrating it and producing a revisionism that provokes internal counterattacks and, finally, splits. A conflictual science, Freudian theory is also a scissional science and its history is marked by incessantly recurring splits.58

Marxism and psychoanalysis are “conflictual sciences” because every new Marxist or psychoanalytic interpretation is necessarily a reinterpretation of a previous Marxist or psychoanalytic interpretation. Put more positively we could say every new interpretation lies an inspiration for its successor. Nietzsche hoped that recognition of this might inspire more imaginative interpretations than scientific (read mechanical) explanations that, besides, are an ill-fit for history.59 A commitment to such an openness can also be read in Freud who warned against the assumption that the validity of multiple interpretations necessarily belies “errors in our views and premises.”60 Freud favored what he calls “over-interpretation” in which our understanding of a dream, a symptom, and an art piece is enhanced in a multiplicity.61 An interpretation is the opposite of representation. While a representation pertains to include everything, an interpretation can only include at the expense of exclusion. Interpretation always requires selection of its material. An interpretation, therefore, by its very nature, is imperfect because it excludes from consideration factors that it could have included. A perfect interpretation, as Nietzsche scholar Alexander Nehamas illustrated with a visual metaphor, is really no interpretation at all:

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[Let’s] consider the case of painting. There is no sense in which painters can ever paint “everything” that they see. What they “leave out” is in itself quite indeterminate, and can be specified, if at all, only through other paintings, each one of which will be similarly “partial.” Analogously, Nietzsche believes, there can be no total or final theory or understanding of the world. On his artistic model, the understanding of everything would be like a painting that incorporates all styles or that is painted in no style at all—a true chimera, both impossible and monstrous.62

Before Nietzsche, Darwin had conveyed the impossibility of representing history with his own juxtaposition of images in The Origin—the tree of life and the entangled bank. This was a controversial move. The prospect of science descending into an endless relay of interpretations posed a fundamental challenge to the authority of science. If all science is interpretation—as Nietzsche maintained—what distinguished scientific and non-scientific interpretations? From the nineteenth century onward, many philosophers would be concerned with providing science with a rationale for this distinction. In chapter 4, “The Death of God,” I will explore Darwin’s own ambivalent relation to religion; his reliance upon the theological interpretations he was critiquing and his reckoning with the imperfections of his own. It is an ironic then that philosophers of the twentieth century would turn to Darwin of all people, to restore to science the kind of unity once provided by religion (see “The Restoration of Faith” in chapter 8). (2) Relation and the return of politics: If the principle of perfection dovetails with a very general religious disposition to venerate nature, then the scientific principle of identity (by which knowledge and understanding is conferred by knowledge of things in themselves) accords neatly with liberal bourgeois ideals of individual freedom and autonomy. Truth, for Descartes, was something we “find within ourselves, without any help from anyone else.”63 Just as human nature only realizes itself once human beings have freed themselves from external constraint, we only realize the true nature of things once we have isolated them from external interference. More recently Evelyn Fox-Keller has drawn attention to a “consilience of values” between a traditional scientific endeavor that favors “autonomy, competition [and] simplicity” on methodological grounds and a right-wing political ideology that heralds “autonomy and competition” as social ideals. Scientists more inclined to the political left tend to place a greater emphasis on “interdependence, cooperation, complexity.”64 It is noteworthy that it is only scientists on the left who are inclined to admit their preferences, for there is no way of interpreting the relation of science to the political when the relation itself is excluded from analysis.65 The divorce between classical political economy and its object reflects the divorce of bourgeois scientists from the

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class struggle. Political theory has tended “to articulate a Manichean opposition between Foucault and Marx” when it came to sketching the relation of the empirical sciences to the political, Foucault actually inclined toward Marxist abstractions.66 Referring to economic “science” he wrote, “broadly speaking, and setting aside all mediation and specificity” it “has a role in capitalist society [. . .] it serves the interests of the bourgeois class [and] it was made by and for that class.”67 These interests were broadly in establishing the kind of order in the sciences that the bourgeoisie presided over society at large. By the nineteenth century, this comfortable arrangement was beginning to break apart. The chain of events set off by the dual revolution caused a split in the bourgeoisie between the aggressive inheritors of the Scientific Revolution, determined to preserve the principles of reason and the self-evidence of reality this guaranteed, and the pioneers of a CounterScientific Revolution, composed of an “outsider stratum” whose faith in scientific reason had been shaken by political upheaval.68 Hailing from the haute bourgeoisie, Darwin struggled to reconcile evolution with bourgeois conceptions. His honesty about his failure made him a noble exception in more senses than one. What was this failure? Just as the imperfection of scientific thought opened the door to a possible endless relay of interpretations, so did the infinite relay of relations unveiled by the counter-scientists suggest that all configurations of the relation were necessarily partial and political. In chapter 5 (“The Dismal Science”), I will explore how Darwin had hoped to extract an impartial “ruling interpretation for evolutionary history by drawing on the model proposed by Adam Smith in economics. Smith’s model, beholden as it was to the principle of identity, was ultimately incompatible with Darwin’s relational theory and Darwin was forced to confront some of the contradictions that Marx himself would later come to identify. Far from being impartial, Darwin’s use of Smith served to embed thoroughly bourgeois assumptions into nature. Ignoring Darwin’s own recognition of its contradictions, subsequent ideologues in the twentieth century would lean on Darwin’s prestige so as to precisely circumvent the problem of the relation in both biology and economics (see “The Return of Capital” in chapter 8). (3) Contingency and the return of ethics: Shorn of contingent details, psychological analyses tend to become as formulaic as certain perversions of Marxism. In the setting of the therapy room, psychoanalysis carves out a space for madness to speak, creating the “possibility for a dialogue with unreason.”69 Outside the therapy room, symptomatic readings without input from the analysand are often highly speculative. Perhaps it was for this reason that Foucault toyed with the idea of undergoing psychoanalytic therapy, while stubbornly refusing to apply psychoanalytic concepts to reflect on his

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own theoretical positions. Foucault even specifically warned his readers away from imputing deeper psychological motivations behind his writings (“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same”70). Above all, he regarded the directed gaze, psychoanalytic or otherwise, as a form of violence. On the rare occasion, he was exposed to psychiatric scrutiny, Foucault apparently turned the tables on the unsuspecting analyst. “Do you know who you are? Are you sure of your reason? Of your scientific concepts? Of your categories of perception?”71 This theoretical rebuttal to a personal question had, contained within it, its own psychoanalytic jibe—the implication that analysts of the mind were probably repressing a fair amount of doubt in their own methods. In The Order of Things, Foucault extended this doubt to the life sciences and philosophy. Here “the unconscious” was transformed from a cauldron of seething excitations to a foreground for modern thought. Psychoanalysis, arriving at the back end of modernity, at least had the virtue of finally giving it a name: Whereas all the human sciences advance towards the unconscious with their back to it, waiting for it to unveil itself as fast as consciousness is analysed, as it were backwards, psychoanalysis, on the other hand, points directly towards it, with a deliberate purpose—not towards that which must be rendered gradually more explicit by the progressive illumination of the implicit, but towards what is there and yet is hidden, towards what exists with the mute solidity of a thing.72

From the Romantics onward, Western thought became fascinated with, as Matt Ffytche put it, the “obscure tiers, functions and forces” at work beneath the surface of experience and yet it took over a hundred years for this to be formalized into a concept.73 The “unconscious” was the last of modernism’s great discoveries, at least in part, because the status of science was always tangled up with the prestige of scientists. Science’s elimination of authors did not mean that scientists themselves were not revered figures. The legend of the traditional man of science, certain of himself and his reason, provides the basis for popular intellectual histories that celebrate the great thoughts of great men. However, the crises spawned by the dual revolution would come to threaten the man of science’s comfortable self-image. Historians William Leach and Michael Kimmel have written about a general crisis of masculinity in the nineteenth century related to the precariousness of men’s “economic, political and social identities.” Nothing was fixed anymore; “everything became a test—his relationships to work, to women, to nature and to other men.”74 In the shift to the modern age, truth itself was becoming precarious as scientists were forced to reconcile with the contingency of their existence that threatened any basis for certainty.

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In this context, the problem of human freedom took on a completely different complexion than it had in the Classical episteme. Freedom was no longer a philosophical encumbrance to be set aside for the purposes of scientific knowledge. Rather, philosophers turned to freedom as a metaphysical scaffold from which scientists might retrieve the basis for an Archimedean view that they had enjoyed during the Classical period. Freedom, in a modern context, is principally freedom from the historical process. Freedom from doubt. Foucault referred to this as the birth of Man. The moment when scientists began to imagine themselves as being both a part of, yet free from history. “Only thought re-apprehending itself at the root of its own history could provide a foundation, entirely free of doubt, for what the solitary truth of this event was in itself.”75 In the late eighteenth century, efforts to exempt Man from the contingency of history manifested themselves in a preoccupation with a “return to origins.” It was by returning to the still point before the deviating effects of time that Man could come “as near as possible to the mere duplication of representation.”76 By the nineteenth century, Man was generally a figure at the end of history. Having ascended to this summit, in a lawlike fashion, he could once again enjoy the privileges of an Archimedean view. They admit “the past mocks” them, but insist “the present decides in their favor”—to quote a critical sociologist of the period.77 The early recourse of the empirical sciences to laws must be understood in this context. Not simply as a way to make history abide by scientific principles of reason, but also to chart a trajectory that could give rise, by way of destiny, to a figure at the summit of a history in which laws of nature were united with laws, which “rule the intellect.”78 This guarantee became embodied in the figure of Man; a figure invented to stabilize the empirical sciences while history replaced representation as the organizing principle of the modern episteme; when the power to represent became attached to a particular moment in time. As Immanuel Kant would put it at the dawn of the modern episteme, “we leave it to Nature to produce the man capable of composing it”: Thus Nature produced Kepler, who subjected, in an unexpected way, the eccentric paths of the planets to definite laws; and she produced Newton, who explained these laws by a universal natural cause.79

The birth of Man coincided with a return to a privileged view of truth that confined its apprehension to a “high-minded few.”80 This required its own peculiar rationalization with the high-minded few often justifying their supremacy in ethical terms. Man was a figure with sufficient autonomy, maturity, and above all courage to recognize truth. For Auguste Comte, “man’s moral courage” was the “awakener and director of his intellectual

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activity” that ultimately led him to “obtain a gradual control over nature” and “a knowledge of her laws.”81 The Kantian motto “Sapere aude!” (Have the courage to use our reason! ) was actually a modern commandment to persist with scientific laws in the face of doubt.82 While Man was supposed to have risen above the historical conditions that gave rise to him, it was left to other human subjects to bear the marks of history. The poor, women, slaves, the colonized, the mentally ill and so forth constituted lower down the historical scale, and were deemed incapable of truth. Just as men of science prided themselves for their ethics of courage, so they cited ethical failings (“weakness,” “cowardliness,” and “feeble-mindedness,” etc.83) on the part of non-free people for their failure to apprehend truth. And yet these charges only served to express the inherent fragility of the Modern Cogito; a subject at whose core lay not the certainty of his thought, but the “serious doubt” that he may never grasp “the notorious complexity” of history of which he is a part.84 Rather than concede their anxiety, men of science have historically preferred to project it onto others. A classic colonial reaction according to the psychoanalyst Oscar Mannoni: Repelled by the thoughts he encounters in his own mind [. . .] it seems to him that they are the thoughts of the people he is observing. In any such act of projection the subject’s purpose is to recover his own innocence by accusing someone else of what he considers to be a fault of himself.85

Modern diatribes against oppressed people are a corollary of Man’s narcissistic resort to “courage,” the projection of his fears of emasculation. In an effort to guarantee the scientific status of psychoanalysis, Freud sometimes sought recourse in the figure of Man. In his writings, the ego appears not just as the locus of “narcissism” in which the subject mistakes what he is for what he wants to be, but also that which in the figure of the analyst serves the “reality function” in which nature and thought are reconciled.86 Neither was Freud averse to racism. Casting the ego in the seat of reason, Freud compared the instinctual impulses to “human half-breeds who, taken all around, resemble white men, but betray their colored descent by some striking feature or other, on account of which they are excluded from society and enjoy none of the privileges of white people.”87 This would not do. To begin with, Freud’s subjects were not members of the “savage races”—they were, by his own admission, the “upper-class” and “urban representatives” of the “white race.”88 Second, his discovery came from listening not projecting. It was by taking the words of his patients seriously that Freud discovered “the unconscious.” However much Freud would have preferred to confine the consequences of his theories to those who fell beneath the status of Man, this

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was not tenable. At the heart of Freud’s discovery was the fracturing of Man. Freud confronted this in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Having discounted any general process of development and advance for human beings, Freud proceeded straight to its Darwinian consequences: Many of us will also find it hard to abandon our belief that in man himself there dwells an impulse towards perfection, which has brought him to his present heights of intellectual prowess and ethical sublimation. [I] do not believe in the existence of such an inner impulse, and I see no way of preserving this pleasing illusion. The development of man up to now does not seem to me to need any explanation differing from that of animal development.89

Deprived of the grounds for certainty, psychoanalysis demands an entirely different ethical system. As early as 1895, Freud suggested that the buried truths of the mind are only brought to light after “considerable hesitations and doubts.”90 By the time of the Introductory Lectures of 1915, Freud had elevated doubt and anxiety to the “nodal point at which the most various and important questions converge.”91 Reflecting upon his own convictions surrounding the truth of psychoanalysis, Freud went onto concede that I am neither convinced myself, nor am I seeking to arouse conviction in others. More accurately: I do not know how far I believe in them. It seems to me that the affective feature “conviction” need not come into consideration at all here. One may surely give oneself up to a line of thought, and follow it up as it leads.92

It was in recognition of this that Foucault placed psychoanalysis in a “privileged position” in modern knowledge. While the sciences rest on the figure of Man’s certainty of his reason, psychoanalysis, through its discovery of “the unconscious,” perpetually calls this figure into question.93 And yet the status and recognition of doubt is not just important for psychoanalysis. It may be as fundamental to our modern condition as certainty was for the Classical. Any discourse that is committed to a contingent history requires an entirely different ethics entailed by a lawful history; not the courage to free oneself from history but the requisite caution, given our inescapable and arbitrary relation to it. As Freud put it, “caution [is] prescribed by the importance, novelty and obscurity of the subject.”94 This constituted a reversal of the Cartesian couplet that arrived at truth from certainty. Descartes obtained certainty from doubt; a certainty which he used to foreclose any doubts about the conformity of nature and thought. Counter-sciences raise doubts from the certainty of their discoveries; doubts that advance all the way up to the author themselves.95 “Ce qu’il y a de certain, je ne suis pas un Marxiste!”96,97

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Darwin’s reflections on the evolution of Man (discussed in chapter 6 “Specious Origins”) sit at the messy intersection between the personal and the political. Darwin was very conscious of the social mores of his Victorian age and the rules surrounding what he could and couldn’t write about weighed upon him heavily. Unconsciously, certain experiences and encounters were perhaps no less burdensome—pushing him to conform with these mores in some instances and to rebel against them in others. In The Descent of Man, Darwin caved to the “transcendental narcissism” of his time by constructing a convenient tale justifying Man’s certainty in his origins. In his other writings, however, Darwin constructed an alternative way of writing evolutionary history that accommodated his anxieties and doubts about the evolution of human reason. As with so much of Darwin’s work, this second more subversive approach to history has been conveniently forgotten. Not least by evolutionary psychologists in the twentieth century who have used Darwin to ward off precisely the kind of horrid doubts that Darwin himself suffered so profoundly (see “The Resurrection of Man” in chapter 8.) Moving beyond Darwin and Darwinism will require a reckoning with uncertainty. CONCLUSION: SCIENTIFIC AUTHORS? It is here that our own note of caution must be raised. For an emphasis on an ethics of caution can be a way of giving the author the trappings of a scientist.98 Invocations of the author’s caution can be used expressly to assuage doubts regarding the scientific status of the discourse, by shifting the problem to the status of the scientist. In history, a cautious approach is obviously preferable to bold assumption, but this cannot provide the basis for an “historical science”—as otherwise quite heterodox popularizers of Darwinism would argue in the twentieth century (see “heterodox interpretations” in chapter 8). The reason for caution in the first place, is that history, as Freud puts it, “is full of countless causes “ragioni” that never enter experience.”99 Psychoanalysis and Marxism are not simply theories of contingency, for contingency already represents the limits of theory. In this same passage, Freud recalls Hamlet’s address to Horatio: “There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”100 Psychoanalysis is in a better position to conceive of this, Foucault argued, because its object in the first place is the very disjunction between nature and thought, the very thing of the unthought. “There is at least one spot in every dream,” Freud wrote, “[which] is unplumbable—a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown.”101 This uninterpretable point is not unique to psychoanalysis but is the defining characteristic of the counter-sciences—Darwinism included. Imperfection, relation, and contingency are synonyms of the unknown. While the Classical

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episteme hinges upon the totality of the visible, the counter-sciences reveal that the modern episteme hovers around an invisible point. At the core of the counter-sciences is not just an alternative way of understanding the world, but a question mark attached to knowing itself. Counter-sciences are the underbelly of the sciences, reminding us of the fundamental disorder of things and the coalescence of interests and desires that may lie behind efforts to bring this disorder into order. Having unleashed the disorder of the unthought the author maybe no more than a “superficial glitter above an abyss.”102 By now there is nothing controversial about denying the scientific status of Marxism and psychoanalysis. Indeed, if this chapter is controversial, it is describing “the class struggle” and “the unconscious” (still largely denied or ignored by mainstream economics and psychology) as discoveries. But then isn’t this what is to be expected from discoveries that are both “true and dangerous”?103 Darwin’s discovery of evolution held the promise of being every bit as true and dangerous. It might even be argued that Darwin trumped Marx and Freud for his discovery anticipated, maybe even entailed, their discoveries. However, instead of being ignored and ridiculed, the establishment did something far worse. They appropriated him.

NOTES 1. W. Blake, The Poems of William Blake (1863; repr., London: Basil Montagu Pickering, 1874), 149. 2. C. Darwin, Origin of Species, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1860), 186. 3. J. Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 35. 4. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 10. 5. Ibid, 10. 6. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 14. 7. Opposition to science is as old as science itself and through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ alternative forms of knowing were proposed by such figures as Giambattista Vico, Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and William Blake. However, as Isaiah Berlin pointed out, opposition up until the midnineteenth century lacked a “common ground” and was unable to generate sufficient momentum to properly counter the sciences, see I. Berlin, “The counter-enlightenment,” in I. Berlin. Against the Current Essays in the History of Ideas (Princeton University Press, 2013), 1. 8. Foucault, The Order of Things, 414. 9. K. Marx, “Preface to the first German edition,” in Marx. Capital: An Abridged Edition. Edited with an Introduction by David McLellan (1867; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3–5. 10. S. Freud, “An autobiographical study,” (1925) in Freud—The Complete Works, ed. James Strachey and Ivan Smith (Open Library, 2000), 4243.

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11. Ibid, 111. 12. K. Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (1958; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 100. 13. S. Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940; repr., London: Penguin Books, 2003), 84. 14. K. Marx, Capital: An Abridged Edition, 43. 15. ibid. 16. See K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology (1845; repr., International Publishers, 1970). 17. S. Freud, “The claims of psycho-analysis to scientific interest,” (1913) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIII (1913–1914): Totem and Taboo and Other Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 178. 18. Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 68. 19. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 48. 20. ibid, 48. 21. Foucault, The Order of Things, 355. 22. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 168. 23. Badiou and Foucault, “Philosophy and psychology,” 54. 24. M. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Marx, Freud,” (1964) in Ormiston, Gayle L., and Alan D. Schrift. Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy (New York: SUNY Press, 2010), 59–67. 25. Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 31. 26. Marx, Capital: An Abridged Edition, 455. 27. K. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy; Vol III the Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole (1894; repr., London: Penguin Books), 681. 28. S. Freud, “On dreams,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume V (1900–1901): The Interpretation of Dreams (Second Part) and On Dreams (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 28. 29. K. Marx, Capital, A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1—Part 1, The Process of Capitalist Production (1867; repr., New York: Cosimo, 2007), 95. 30. K. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value: Volume 3 (1863; repr., London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1969), 129. 31. Marx, Grundrisse, 265. 32. Marx, The German Ideology, 122. 33. Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 95. 34. S. Freud, “Group psychology and the analysis of the ego,” (1921) in Freud— The Complete Works, 3765. 35. Marx, Grundrisse, 84. 36. S. Freud, “The future prospects of psycho-analytic therapy,” (1910) in Freud—The Complete Works, 2309. 37. S. Freud, “Letter to Fleiss November 14th 1897,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume I, 259–260. 38. It isn’t just Marxists that have made this error. Assuming a thing exists prior to its relations is the essential error of logic Darwin and Darwinists would make in the levels of selection debate (see chapter 5 “The Dismal Science” and section

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“The Return of Capital” in chapter 8). With this in mind it is worth providing E. P. Thompson’s quote in full. “There is today an ever-present temptation to suppose that class is a thing. This was not Marx’s meaning [...] “It”, the working class, is assumed to have a real existence, which can be defined almost mathematically [...] If we remember that class is a relationship and not a thing, we can not think in this way. “It” does not exist, either to have an ideal interest or consciousness, or to lie as a patient on the Adjustor’s table.” E. P. Thompson. The Making of the English Working Class, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1966): 10–11. 39. K. Marx, “Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer,” in K. Marx and F. Engels. Collected Works 39 (New York: International Publishers, 1983), 60. 40. K. Marx, “Afterword to the second German edition,” in Capital: An Abridged Edition, 7. 41. Marx, Capital: An Abridged Edition, 73–4. 42. S. Freud, “On female sexuality,” in Freud—The Complete Works, 4606. 43. S. Freud, A Phylogenetic Fantasy: Overview of the Transference Neuroses (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1987). 44. S. Freud, “Three essays on the theory of sexuality,” (1905) in Freud—The Complete Works, 1510. 45. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution. Europe 1789–1848 (Preston: Abacus, 1961), 2. 46. See discussion in J. Hodge, 'The notebook programmes and projects of Darwin’s London years’, in The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 65. 47. Ibid, 2. 48. Foucault, The Order of Things, 164. 49. Ibid, 272–329. 50. F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and RJ Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), 583. 51. F. Nietzsche, “On truth and lies in a nonmoral sense,” (1873) in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, ed. and trans (New York: Humanity Books, 1993), 83. 52. Marx, Grundrisse, 83. 53. The term “Robinsonade” is a reference to Robinson Crusoe. 54. Freud, “Interpretation of dreams,” 810. 55. This was a play off Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, the subtitle of which was How to Philosophise with a Hammer. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Marx, Freud,” 64. 56. Althusser and Montag, “On Marx and Freud,” 26. 57. T. Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 16. 58. Althusser and Montag, “On Marx and Freud,” 19. 59. See discussion in F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (1882; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 337. 60. Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 284. 61. Freud, “Interpretation of dreams,” 743.

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62. A. Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1985), 51. 63. L. Marin, On Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 80. 64. See E. F. Keller, “Demarcating public from private values in evolutionary discourse,” in Journal of the History of Biology 21.2 (1988), 195. 65. As Althusser wrote, bourgeois political economy “could only be thought of as an autonomous, independent discipline on the condition that the class relations and class struggle that it had as its ideological mission to obscure were themselves distorted.” (Althusser and Montag, “On Marx and Freud,” 22–3). 66. See B. J. Macdonald, “Marx, Foucault, Genealogy,” in Polity 34.3 (2002). 67. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 204. 68. The term “outsider stratum” derives from Carl E. Schorske who was specifically referring to Freud’s experience—See C. E. Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage, 2012), 7. The influence of the 1848 revolutions on Marx is well known, but for the influence of the abolitionist movement on Darwin, see A. Desmond and J. Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins. See also Darwin’s autobiography for discussion of his feelings of being an outsider arising from his agnosticism and abolitionist views—C. Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882: With Original Omissions Restored. Edited with Appendix and Notes by his grand-daughter (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1958), 50–1. 69. Foucault cited in J. Whitebook, “Against interiority: Foucault’s struggle with psychoanalysis,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 322. 70. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 19. 71. Foucault cited in Whitebook, “Against interiority: Foucault’s struggle with psychoanalysis,” 316. 72. Foucault, The Order of Things, 408. 73. M. Ffytche, The Foundation of the Unconscious: Schelling, Freud and the Birth of the Modern Psyche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 2. 74. M. S. Kimmel et al., The History of Men: Essays on the History of American and British Masculinities (New York: SUNY Press, 2005), 44. 75. Foucault, The Order of Things, 236. 76. Ibid, 358. 77. A slight rewording of Finot’s assessment of scientific racism during the turn of the century. See J. Finot, Race Prejudice (Boston: EP Dutton, 1906), xiv. 78. A. Comte, Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1975), 81. 79. I. Kant, “Civilization and Enlightenment: ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” (1874) in Classical Readings on Culture and Civilization (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 48. 80. Foucault, The Order of Things, 371. 81. Comte, Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings, 287–8.

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82. I. Kant, An Answer to the Question: “What Is Enlightenment?” (1784; repr., London: Penguin Books, 2009), 1. 83. Comte, Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings, 269; on black people and women see I. Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 60; on the mentally ill see I. Kant, Kant: Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 157–8; on nonwhite people see G. W. Hegel, “Anthropology” in R. Bernasconi. The Idea of Race (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2000), 43. 84. Kant, “Civilization and enlightenment: ‘idea for a universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view,’” 50. 85. O. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonisation (1956; repr., Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 19. 86. See discussion in M. Safouan, Four Lessons of Psychoanalysis (New York: Other Press, LLC, 2013), 1–2. 87. S. Freud, General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology. Vol. 6 (1916; repr., New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 133. 88. S. Freud, The Problem of Anxiety (Psychoanalytic Quarterly Press, 1963), 90. 89. S. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926), 52. 90. S. Freud and J. Breuer, “Studies on Hysteria,” (1895) in Freud—The Complete Works, 299. 91. Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 488. 92. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 76. 93. ibid, 407. 94. Freud cited in S. Hyman, The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as Imaginative Writers (Cambridge, MA: Athenaeum, 1962), 399. 95. See discussion in Foucault, The Order of Things, 353. 96. Marx cited in T. M. Kemple, Reading Marx Writing: Melodrama, the Market, and the “Grundrisse” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 1. 97. “There is one thing of which I am certain, I am not a Marxist!” 98. See for example Althusser’s praise for Marx’s “conscientiousness,” “acuity,” “perseverance,” and “rigor” was always an implicit sanctification of Marx’s status as a scientist (L. Althusser, For Marx. Vol. 2 (London: Verso, 1969), 36 and 73). In a similar vein Ernest Jones described Freud’s “cautious method of deduction” as a fundamental quality of a “scientific researcher.” (E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud: The Last Phase, 1919–1939. Vol. 3 (New York: Basic Books, 1953), 72). 99. S. Freud, Leonardo Da Vinci: A Memory of his Childhood (1910; repr., Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 96–7. 100. ibid, 97. 101. Freud, “Interpretation of dreams,” 610n. 102. Foucault, The Order of Things, 273. 103. Althusser and Montag, “On Marx and Freud,” 19.

Chapter 3

Conflictual Science Darwin’s Theories of Evolution and Natural Selection

Far into the abyss—of Heaven or Hell through, To the depths of the Unknown to find something new! —Charles Baudelaire1 It is one thing to prove that a thing has been so, & another to show how it came to be so. —Charles Darwin2

Like Marx’s and Freud’s theories, Darwin’s theory begins as a critique. Darwin proposed that the origin of species arose not from a creation from on high, as the theologians had argued, but a natural selection process from below. And yet Darwin was equally keen to emphasize the intricacy of a selection process, which defies our understanding. Evolutionary history, Darwin insisted, was something of which we are “profoundly ignorant.” This conflict between thought and the unthought is manifest in Darwin’s three concepts, each having two meanings corresponding to scientific and counter-scientific principles of reason. Adaptation is either a perfect effect or an imperfect cause of evolution; the struggle for existence is either a literal transmission of identifiable evolutionary entities, or a metaphorical relation between the organism and environment. Selection is either a law of nature or a contingent historical process. Small wonder that interpretations of Darwin’s work have been so polarized. Darwin’s theory is really two theories: the first a scientific theory of evolution (TfE), the second a counter-scientific theory of history (TfNS).

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INTRODUCTION: AN HYSTERICAL REACTION In his Anatomy of the World, published in 1611, John Donne wrote of the “new philosophy” that it “calls all in doubt.” On the effect the early astronomers had upon traditional conceptions of the universe, he lamented, “Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.”3 The crisis in ecclesiastic faith that helped produce the Scientific Revolution eventually spawned a science that foreclosed this crisis. Descartes found certainty in a state of hyperbolic doubt. Having made nature obvious to everybody, evangelists of the new science neglected that Galileo had begun with puzzlement about Aristotelian metaphysics.4 Jacques Lacan described this foreclosure as inaugurating the “era of the ego” characterized by a “passionate desire peculiar to man to impress his image on reality.”5 However, it was the initial refusal to accept ecclesiastic or ideological dogma that moved Lacan to liken science more favorably to the “hysteric’s discourse.”6 That is, it is only once we have an hysterical reaction to something that appears obvious, that we can begin to say something true about it. For millennia, scientists were perfectly satisfied with the explanation that rocks fall and steam rises because they were going to their natural place. As Chomsky has pointed out, it was only when scientists allowed themselves to be puzzled by this explanation that Modern science was born.7 Countersciences are also hysterical discourses. Marxist economics began with the questioning of value “in itself,” Freudian psychoanalysis is first and foremost an hysterical reaction to the Cartesian subject. Darwin’s own theories were born of puzzlement at the apparently obvious design of nature, but he subsequently replaced the argument from design with something that now appears to us equally obvious. Here is Darwin’s theory laid out in a neat syllogism: (i) Superfecundity: not all organisms survive to reproduce. (ii) Variation: all organisms vary. (iii) Inheritance: some of this variation is heritable. (iv) Selection: variations better adapted to survival are more likely to be passed onto future generations. Upon encountering the syllogism for the first time, Darwin’s friend Thomas Henry Huxley is said to have remarked “How incredibly stupid not to have thought of that!”—and on the surface there does appear something obvious about it. However, what happens if we allow ourselves to be puzzled by Darwin’s syllogism? Could it reveal something inherently contradictory about it? Over the course of a century and a half, Darwinism has been defined in many different ways.8 I would like to propose just one; Darwinism is a compound term for two different, hitherto conflated, theories; a scientific theory of evolution (TfE) and a counter-scientific theory of history (TfNS).

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NATURE AND THOUGHT/UNTHOUGHT Strictly speaking, Darwin could not “discover” evolution, in the traditional sense, because he did not have a mechanism of evolution. Rather he had to infer evolution from appearances, which meant, in turn, relying upon reinterpreting nature as it had been conceived by the theologians. Darwin had once been convinced of the theological view. In a letter to John Lubbock, just a few days before the publication of The Origin, Darwin recounted his youthful reverence for Paley’s Natural Theology—“I do not think I hardly ever admired a book more [. . .] I could almost formerly have said it by heart.”9 Darwin was ultimately to become disillusioned with it. Any attempt to account for the origin of species encounters one intractable problem; how to reconcile a plurality of species into a single explanation. Paley found an answer in God. On first inspection, theologians are “in danger of being confounded by variety,” Paley wrote. “But having intuited further they find that they can ‘scarcely look upon any thing without perceiving its relation to him’ [sic].”10 Thus, the infinite variety of form is united by God’s unique creative power. God is a cause of Himself and His existence need not be accounted for. Darwin came to regard Paley’s move as an abandonment of the problem. Paley’s argument, he wrote, even if correct, “adds nothing to our knowledge.”11 Science supposes a conformity between nature and thought. A science of natural history therefore required both rooting the problem in nature and rendering it viable to the mind. With this in mind, Darwin began The Origin with an analogy to domestic selection. Pointing out the methods used by breeders to isolate and enhance certain features of domestic animals, Darwin asked “Can the principle of selection which we have seen is so potent in the hands of man, apply in nature?”12 I think we shall see that it can act most effectually [. . . .] Can we doubt that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call “natural selection.”13

Darwin partially regretted the phrase “natural selection” as it “seems to imply conscious choice.” He hoped, in time, that this association would be “disregarded after a little familiarity.”14 Nevertheless, ascribing some conformity between nature and thought was essential for his “scientific” argument. To emphasize this conformity, Darwin proceeded, in typically scientific fashion, to appeal to a thought experiment: I must beg permission to give one or two imaginary illustrations. Let us take the case of a wolf, which preys on various animals, securing some by craft, some

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by strength, and some by fleetness; and let us suppose that the fleetest prey, a deer for instance, had from any change in the country increased in numbers, or that other prey had decreased in numbers, during that season of the year when the wolf was hardest pressed for food. Under such circumstances the swiftest and slimmest wolves have the best chance of surviving [. . .] I can see no more reason to doubt that this would be the result, than that man should be able to improve the fleetness of his greyhounds by careful and methodical selection.15

Against critics that “objected” that this was an “unsafe method of arguing,” Darwin added in a later edition of The Origin a remark somewhat reminiscent of Galileo’s principle that nature should operate in a fashion obvious to everybody: that these were the methods used “in judging of the common events of life.”16 However, the point of Galileo’s principle, and the premise of any thought experiment, is that nature and thought conform. What happens if nature confounds our expectations? What if the wolves did not improve their fleetness? Do we abandon the theory? Not at all. Theorists would simply assume that there had been selection for different traits (e.g., craft or strength). Or none at all. Darwin was torn. Despite his analogy to domestic selection and later appeal to common judgments, he was equally eager to underline the intricacy of the selection process. Having begun by drawing an analogy between natural selection and domestic selection, Darwin swiftly shifted to emphasizing the gulf separating an historical process from our meager attempts to render that process knowable. Darwin warned his readers in “Introduction”: No one ought to feel surprise at much remaining as yet unexplained in regard to the origin of species and varieties, if he makes due allowance for our profound ignorance in regard to the mutual relations of all the beings which live around us.17

To further elucidate the unthought, Darwin counterposed principles of scientific reasoning with principles of counter-scientific reasoning. PRINCIPLES OF SCIENTIFIC AND COUNTER-SCIENTIFIC REASONING: (1) Perfection versus Imperfection or Adaptation as Cause and Effect:18 Darwin’s evolutionary idea was already, in essence, a perfect solution to the problem of origins. Darwin’s TfE makes “perfect knowledge” of our “common origin” conceivable by rendering it representable. Not in a table of elements as the Classical taxonomists might have once supposed, but in “a great

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Tree of Life.”19 If all life evolved from a common origin, then all life forms that have ever existed can be represented in their proper place. However, simply demonstrating evolution was not, on its own, adequate. No theory would be satisfactory, Darwin insisted, “until it could be shown how the innumerable species inhabiting this world have been modified, so as to acquire that perfection of structure and coadaptation which most justly excites our admiration.”20 Darwin’s solution was that organisms become perfected not from creation from on high, but natural selection from below. Here adaptations are not the effect of divine decree but an effect of evolution. When we view an organism, we bear witness to the accumulated success of its ancestors that were better equipped for survival. Darwin’s admiration for nature’s apparent design is indicated by his prose. “We see beautiful adaptations everywhere and in every part of the organic world.”21 However, Darwin’s achievement was as much his transgression of the principle of perfection. The “great Tree of Life” might perfectly represent our common origin, but it provides a thoroughly imperfect representation of different species. “Perfect knowledge” on Darwin’s account obfuscates rather than clarifies biological distinctions. Emphasizing the unthought of his argument, Darwin described the “number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living things” as “inconceivably great.”22 The problem of classification flagged up a second problem for Darwin; the preservation in nature of imperfect organs. For “the same reasoning power which tells us plainly that most parts and organs are exquisitely adapted for certain purposes,” Darwin confessed, “tells us with equal plainness that these rudimentary or atrophied organs, are imperfect and useless.”23 Connecting these two problems together in The Origin, Darwin wrote: It might have been thought [. . .] that those parts of the structure which determined the habits of life, and the general place of each being in the economy of nature, would be of very high importance in classification. Nothing can be more false. No one regards the external similarity of a mouse to a shrew, of a dugong to a whale, or a whale to a fish, as of any importance.24

The deceptiveness of superficial resemblances disposed Darwin to view rudimentary and atrophied organs as of “high value in classification.”25 However, the principle of imperfection was not just of practical use for systematists.26 It was the kernel of Darwin’s counter-scientific theory. The apparent perfect fit of organisms to their conditions is an illusion. If all organisms were perfectly adapted, then nature could not evolve and there could be no explanation apart from separate creation. As Darwin was keen to emphasize, there are no organisms “so perfectly adapted [. . .] that none of them could anyhow be improved.”27 Moreover, nature’s imperfections are often more revealing than nature’s perfections. What the rudiments of teeth in unborn calves and

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birds, mammae in males, “the bastard wing” in birds, or the “soldered wings” in insects demonstrate far more clearly than organs of extreme perfection is the absence of design in nature. Rather than be viewed as exceptions they are extreme example of a more fundamental principle. On Darwin’s theory, adaptations are never directly designed for the present. Rather they are always living relics of the past: By far the most important consideration [in respect of organs of inutility] is that the chief part of the organisation of every being is simply due to inheritance; and consequently, though each being assuredly is well fitted for its place in nature, many structures now have no direct relation to the habits of life of each species.28 Natural selection will not necessarily produce absolute perfection; nor, as far as we can judge by our limited faculties, can absolute perfection be everywhere found.29

Even when organic structures show no sign of atrophy, this does not guarantee they serve the function for which they evolved. “What can be plainer than that the webbed feet of ducks and geese are formed for swimming? Yet there are upland geese with webbed feet which rarely or never go near the water.”30 Such a structure, Darwin continues, “may be said to have become rudimentary in function.”31 Darwin believed it was nature’s imperfections that provide the best evidence for evolution; for how else can we receive them, except, as Darwin put it, as a “clue for its derivation”?32 Darwin’s TfE separates adaptations from the environment by considering them from the perspective of their historical form, independently from the environment. The deeper we probe into this history the less adaptive such adaptations become. The deep unities that organisms of the same class share are, as Darwin stressed, often “quite independent of their habits of life.”33 There is no current adaptive explanation for why insects have six appendages while mammals have four—they are simply a product of a shared history (“unity of descent”). It is when considering the causes of evolution that characters are reassessed in relation to the environment (TfNS). Only this time the relation is indirect. Darwin’s TfNS renders adaptations a relative concept covering the spectrum from perfection to imperfection. When characters are perfectly adapted to their environment, they might give the appearance of a design, but what imperfect characters demonstrate, far more than perfect characters, is that this is never the case. A theory initially designed to explain the perfect “structure and coadaptation,” which Darwin so admired, wound up stripping from the organism any guarantee of perfection.

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(2) Identity versus Relation or Struggle as Literal and Metaphorical: Darwin’s use of the term “adaptation” as a cause and effect of evolution is certainly confusing, but it pales in comparison with Darwin’s discussion of the “struggle for existence.” Darwin posits that “as more individuals are produced than can possibly survive” there must be “a struggle for existence” across the “whole animal and vegetable kingdoms.”34 For one of the most renowned passages of The Origin, it is also one of the most perplexing. Let us begin with the first part. The law of mortality dictates that the number of individuals produced is exactly the same number of individuals that survive and do not survive (by virtue of the fact that all animals must have both lived and died). But this would render Darwin’s statement meaningless. The only way to make this statement viable in terms of natural selection is to add “survive to the next generation.” But if this is the case Darwin is no longer referring to the life of individuals, but to the heritable material that gets passed onto future generations. One of the first to notice this was Herbert Spencer: The thought of survival inevitably suggests the human view of certain sets of phenomena, rather than that character which they have simply as groups of changes. If, asking what we really know of a plant, we exclude all the ideas associated with the words life and death, we find that the sole facts known to us are that there go on in the plant certain interdependent processes, in presence of certain aiding and hindering influences outside of it; and that in some cases a difference of structure or a favourable set of circumstances, allows these interdependent processes to go on for longer periods than in other cases.35

In other words, the “struggle for existence” is, in one sense, a literal accounting device for recording the comparative success of heritable entities across generations, some of which died out, others that survived and grew in number. Darwin’s identification of evolution was literal not metaphorical: Naturalists [use evolutionary] language only in a metaphorical sense: they are far from meaning that during a long course of descent, primordial organs of any kind—vertebræ in the one case and legs in the other—have actually been modified into skulls or jaws. Yet so strong is the appearance of a modification of this nature having occurred, that naturalists can hardly avoid employing language having this plain signification. On my view these terms may be used literally (my emphasis).36

However, this cannot explain why evolution proceeded in the way it did. To do this, Darwin went onto provide an entirely different conception of “struggle”; one that went beyond simply identifying evolution and attempts to

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capture why certain individuals are successful in procreating their kind. This definition of the “struggle for existence” was indeed metaphorical: I should premise that I use the term “struggle for existence” in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny. Two canine animals in a time of dearth, may be truly said to struggle with each other which shall get food and live. But a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be dependent on the moisture [. . . .] In these several senses, which pass into each other, I use for convenience sake the general term of struggle for existence. (my emphasis)37

Darwin’s point is that we cannot account for why organic beings have their particular characters by analyzing the heritable entities in themselves. As Marx would later insist of commodities, it is only in terms of a relation that we can understand why evolution has proceeded in the way it has. Thus, Darwin’s second metaphorical conception of “struggle” defines the struggles of organisms not in terms of their material constitution, but in relation to their environments. In positing a relational definition of struggle, Darwin had to confront the same problems of dependence that Marx and Freud would later encounter. Consider again Darwin’s thought experiment with wolves. In this hypothetical scenario, the slimmest, swiftest wolves are selected over larger stronger wolves. Darwin’s explanation for this is that there is selection for the character of “fleetness.” However, this is only one possible relation that slim wolves may have with their environment. “Fleetness” might be an adaptation to deer, but the character could be defined differently in relation to a different component of the environment; “slenderness” in relation to the elements, “metabolic efficiency” in relation to the food supply, or “reproductive appeal” in relation to sexual selection. In other words, the relation begins a relay of interpretations that extends to the whole ecosystem of wolves. The relation also collapses the distinction between organism and environment. In the thought experiment, Darwin specifies some initial “change in the country” that triggered an evolutionary change in the population of deer. But could this initial change have been the fleetness of wolves itself? Surely wolves are an important factor in the environment of deer? If so, then can we not posit that the character of “fleetness” among wolves is also a factor in the environment of wolves? The dilemma of distinguishing organism from environment is even more pronounced in Darwin’s second hypothetical example of wolves in which a cub is born with “an innate tendency to pursue certain kinds of prey.”38 If there was some advantage attached to the tendency to catch rats

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rather than mice, Darwin speculated, then the wolf that acquired it would have the best chance of surviving and leaving offspring. In this case, the heritable character is already a relation between organism and environment—in the absence of this environmental stimulus (i.e., rats), the character would also cease to exist. (3) Laws versus Contingency or Selection as Deductive and Inductive: Darwin’s conception of science was superficially traditional. “Science consists of grouping facts so that general laws may be drawn from them,” he wrote in his autobiography.39 History has looked upon Darwin’s science favorably. Today “natural selection” is considered a law ranked with the other great physical and chemical laws of the scientific canon. However, this was not how it was received at the time. For one thing, Darwin’s theory rested upon laws of variation that were neither proven to exist or operate in the required fashion. In order for “selection” to be the agent of evolution, variation must be sufficiently profuse, so that selection has something to work with, but not so turbulent that it was variation itself that was the creative force. Darwin was particularly vexed by this issue; not least because it forced him to tackle head on the apparent proclivity for some animals (e.g., dogs) to vary more than others (e.g., cats) and show that they were simply an effect of environmental pressures.40 In other words, it wasn’t enough that evolution should follow from a law—evolution should be lawlike; proceeding “only by short and slow steps.” Natura non facit saltum (“nature makes no jumps”) was critical for Darwin because to suggest otherwise (that something can come from nothing) would be to invoke the supernatural.41 In Darwin’s TfE, there is no intervention of outside forces, only a selection process, which follows deductively from laws of inheritance, variation, and the high geometrical ratio of increase common to all organic beings. Darwin’s commitment to a law-governed universe was unwavering. In the final sentence of The Origin, he tied his argument to Newton: “Whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms have been, and are being, evolved.”42 At the same time an overemphasis on laws detracts from what the law makes possible; namely a contingent history. Darwin proposed not one fixed overarching law, but several laws including laws not associated with his theory (e.g., growth with reproduction and variation from use and disuse). Confining ourselves to Darwin’s theory, natural selection is actually composed of three separate laws that intersect to produce a fourth law of selection (see syllogism at the beginning of this chapter). This is how Darwin introduced the role of chance into his system.43 We may live in a law-governed universe, he conceded, but

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if there are many laws that interact in complex indeterminable ways, “we may call this chance.”44 (“Shake ten thousand grains of sand together [and] one will rise according to law.”45) Of these only the law of inheritance was determinable and endogenous to the organism. In The Origin, Darwin had speculated that heritable variation derived from indirect effects of the environment acting upon the reproductive organs of organisms producing random variation in their offspring. In time, heritable variation was found to be endogenous as well, albeit no less random. However, Darwin’s speculations served to emphasize the special importance he placed upon conditions external to the organism. In Darwin’s TfE, “selection” is simply a record of an endogenous sequence. It cannot, alone, account for either change or diversification, a particular problem given that the deductive core of the theory provided as much an argument for stasis as modification. Darwin’s TfNS is the causal theory to account empirically for change and divergence in living things. Concerned to demonstrate the power of selection in his early sketches, Darwin placed particular emphasis on the random interventions of the environment in the form of chains of mountains, river and sea flows, and deserts; barriers that would enhance selection by isolating certain varieties.46 Having formulated a specific “principle of divergence” in the 1850s, Darwin placed less emphasis upon this in The Origin, although they remained factors “favourable to selection” (see discussion in chapter 5 “The Dismal Science”).47 What remained consistent throughout Darwin’s writings was his commitment to the infinite complexity of the conditions of life that would act upon the organism in equally complex and indefinite ways. This was the most radical aspect of Darwin’s theory. Previous evolutionary theories had all proposed a fixed direction for evolution. Darwin’s TfNS was distinct because it rejected any “fixed law of development” that would cause “all the inhabitants of a country to change abruptly, or simultaneously, or to an equal degree.” In Darwin’s theory, the evolutionary course for one species “is quite independent of that of all others.” Far from obeying any law, the production of new forms, is determined by “many complex contingencies.”48 Darwin’s invocation of laws is therefore misleading. As he clarified nine years later, “I mean by [. . .] laws only the ascertained sequence of events.”49 If Darwin was adamant that “the process of modification must be extremely slow” this was perhaps the only thing he insisted upon. In a passage that anticipates Freud’s famous refrain on the superstitions that burnish chance, Darwin highlighted the conceit of concealing our ignorance behind fixed laws. 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.50

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LANGUAGE: REPRESENTATION VERSUS INTERPRETATION Foucault wrote that the author founds “not only a certain number of analogies, but also a certain number of differences.”51 Within the rubric of Darwinism are two quite different theories, built upon different epistemic premises. Darwin’s TfE renders “selection” a deductive consequence of the intersection of the laws of inheritance, variation, and differential survival; the “struggle for existence” is then the literal transfer of evolutionary characters over generations, and adaptations are its necessary and universal effect. This is a scientific theory because adaptations are perfect, “the struggle” is identified and “selection” is lawful. However, having provided an evolutionary account for the appearance of design, Darwin had to account for the specific course of individual evolutionary histories. In Darwin’s TfNS, selection must be deduced empirically from a metaphorical struggle between differentially adapted living things, which causes evolutionary change over generations. This is a counter-scientific theory because adaptations are imperfect, “the struggle” is derived from a relation and “selection” is contingent. Darwin’s two theories have spawned two quite different, conflicting traditions. Part of the reason for this conflict lies with Darwin’s failure to make the distinction between the two theories explicit. The closest Darwin came was when he distinguished between the twin problems of natural history; the problem of origins and the problem of adaptations: It was evident that such facts as these, as well as many others, could only be explained on the supposition that species gradually become modified; and the subject haunted me. But it was equally evident that neither the action of the surrounding conditions, nor the will of the organisms (especially in the case of plants) could account for the innumerable cases in which organisms of every kind are beautifully adapted to their habits of life.52

Reflecting on Darwin’s work some fifty years later, Edward S. Russel wrote, “all Darwin’s varied subsequent work revolved round these, for him, essential problems—How do species change, and how do they become adapted to their environment?”53 The principal reason for their conflation is that any evolutionary account requires their temporary fusion. In order to tell an evolutionary story, we are required to specify both what evolves and how. On its own, TfE is merely a representation of evolution devoid of historical causes. On its own, TfNS is just an interpretation of historical events with no evolutionary connection. Yet the amalgamation of these two theories creates as many problems as it solves. TfE represents an adaptation as a heritable “character” and therefore a universal effect of evolution. When considered from a causal

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perspective, however, adaptations are stripped of their necessary universality. Not all organisms are adapted. TfE represents the “struggle for existence” as the literal transfer of characters (individual units of inheritance) across generations. Darwin’s TfNS presents the “struggle for existence” as a metaphorical struggle between an individual and its environment in a single lifetime. TfE represents “selection” as a gradual, lawlike process on the grounds that slight variations are not, in themselves, powerful enough to produce substantive morphological change. However, there is no reason to assume a constant speed for different and contingent, “selection” processes from the perspective of Darwin’s TfNS. Conflicts that have arisen since concerning the scope of adaptations, the site of struggle and the speed of selection, ultimately boil down to the distinction between Darwin’s two theories; the first a representative theory, the second an interpretive theory. The tension between Darwin’s two theories may best be expressed by the alternating status of language in the two theories. Before Darwin, natural history was a scheme of classification in which living things were arranged in degrees of likeness. To name was to know. Darwin’s TfE revealed that these degrees of likeness were really degrees of modification from a common progenitor, but despite Darwin’s replacing the plan of creation with a tree of life, his system of classification remained largely the same. If the specific distinction between individual differences, varieties, breeds, and species was to some degree arbitrary, the grand scheme by which we designate the genealogical order is not: From the first dawn of life, all organic beings are found to resemble each other in descending degrees, so that they can be classed in groups under groups. This classification is evidently not arbitrary like the grouping of the stars in constellations.54

The task of language in Darwin’s TfE is to correctly represent, in “plain signification,” the place of every organic being in the tree of life—a task that language can perform with adequate precision.55 However, when it comes to outlining the causes for this order, as his TfNS seeks to do, language proves less precise. “The meanings of words,” Darwin once wrote in a note to self, “must be made out.”56 For example, it might seem uncontroversial on the surface to say a bird’s wing evolved for flying. Leaving aside whether this is actually the case, and the wing did not evolve for swimming or thermoregulation, and so on, how do we define “flying”? Does it include gliding, swooping, hovering, or floating? There is no definitive answer to this question. At least not an answer that Darwin’s TfNS can provide. In fact, this is only scratching the surface. Darwin’s TfNS relies upon a language that has itself evolved. Darwin observed in The Descent that the “formation of

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different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process are curiously the same.”57 Languages like organisms sometimes appear to be designed for the world they inhabit. History says different.

CONCLUSION: CONCEALING THE UNTHOUGHT Language both reveals and conceals. Having clarified that Darwin’s concepts each has two definitions, the distinction between the two theories is patent. Alas history has conspired to make one from two. Should we be surprised? Just as Marxism and psychoanalysis anticipate, to some degree, their own repression behind veils of ideology and narcissism, could the radicalism of Darwinism have been concealed by the recalcitrance of the belief in design? Such was the radicalism of Darwin’s counter-scientific theory, I will argue, it has required the repressive force of all three. It is as much scientists’ entanglement in ideology and narcissism that has prevented them from appreciating Darwin’s radical idea as it has been the recalcitrance of a belief in design. Part II explores in greater detail how threatening Darwin’s idea was to the scientific order and his herculean struggle to contain it within the rubric of science—one that was matched only by his fidelity to its heresy. I can think of no better summary of Darwin’s revolutionary idea than Robert Mackenzie’s précis in Transmutation of Species Examined. “By a strange inversion of reasoning,” he wrote, Darwin “seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill.”58 Mackenzie’s opposition to Darwin’s “strange inversion” was religious as well as scientific, and thus reveals something of the bond they shared. Popular folklore has it that science and religion have been incompatible since Galileo’s conflict with the Catholic Church. This is a myth that conceals a relationship so indissoluble that it was “only in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Darwin successfully challenged that explanation of nature” that the “whole edifice of science-supported religion come crashing down.”59 The result was a crisis for science as much as religion.

NOTES 1. Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes de Charles Baudelaire Volume 1 (Michel Lévy frères, 1869), 351. 2. C. Darwin, Notebook E: [Transmutation of species (10.1838–7.1839)] Transcribed by Kees Rookmaaker. Retrieved from Darwin Online, http://darwin​ -online​.org​.uk/

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3. John Donne cited in S. Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 28. 4. See discussion in Chomsky, Noam Chomsky on Language and Cognition, 11. 5. Jacques Lacan cited in T. Brennan, History after Lacan (Abingdon: Routledge, 1993), 43. 6. J. Lacan, Television. A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 23. 7. A. Moro and N. Chomsky, The Boundaries of Babel: The Brain and the Enigma of Impossible Languages (Boston: MIT Press, 2015), xx. 8. For instance, Ernst Mayr suggested five different meanings for the term. See discussion in E. Mayr, One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1991), 90–108. 9. C. Darwin, Letter 2532 Darwin to John Lubbock 22nd November 1859. 10. W. Paley, Natural Theology or Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 277–9. 11. C. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 447. 12. ibid, 93. 13. ibid, 93–4. 14. C. Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication Volume 2 (London: John Murray, 1868), 6. 15. C. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 104. 16. C. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 6th ed. (London: John Murray, 1872), 421. 17. C. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 14. 18. That adaptation has two meanings has been commented upon by numerous evolutionary theorists. The earliest example I have found was in Ernst Mayr’s 1942 book E. Mayr, Systematics and the Origin of Species, from the Viewpoint of a Zoologist (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1942), 85. 19. ibid, 148. 20. ibid, 11. 21. ibid, 73. 22. ibid, 307. 23. ibid, 488. 24. ibid, 447. 25. ibid, 449. 26. A systematist is someone who studies the diversification of life forms. Systematics is the more modern term for classical taxonomy. 27. ibid, 96. 28. ibid, 221. 29. ibid, 228. 30. ibid, 206. 31. ibid, 206. 32. ibid, 491. 33. ibid, 228. 34. ibid, 76.

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35. H. Spencer, The Factors of Organic Evolution (Boston: Appleton and Company, 1887), 42. 36. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 473. 37. ibid, 75. 38. ibid, 104–5. 39. Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 45. 40. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 53. 41. See discussion in Gruber, Barrett, and Darwin, Darwin on Man, 125. 42. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 526. 43. E. Manier, The Young Darwin and His Cultural Circle (Dordrecht and Boston: Reidel, 1978), 121. 44. Darwin, Letter 2814 Darwin, C. R. to Gray, Asa 22 May 1860. 45. C. Darwin, “Notebook M,” in Darwin on Man, 309. 46. See comments on “geographic distribution” in C. Darwin, “Essay of 1844,” in The Foundations of the Origin of Species: Two Essays Written in 1842 and 1844 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), 30. 47. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 119–22. 48. ibid, 341. 49. C. Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication Volume 1 (London: John Murray, 1868), 6. 50. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 86. 51. Foucault, “What is an author?,” 114. 52. Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 80. 53. E. Russell, Form and Function: A Contribution to the History of Morphology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 231. 54. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 444. 55. ibid, 522. 56. C. Darwin, “Old and useless notes,” in Darwin on Man, 393. 57. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 456. 58. R. B. MacKenzie, The Darwinian Theory of the Transmutation of Species Examined (London: Nisbet & Co., 1867), 295. 59. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution: 1689–1720, 16.

Part II

THE RELUCTANT RADICAL

Chapter 4

The Death of God Darwin’s Adaptation to an Imperfect Science

When gods die, they always die many kinds of death. —Friedrich Nietzsche1 What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature! —Charles Darwin2

Darwin was originally inspired to study nature from reading the natural theologians, and the imperatives of his historical theory required that he interpret nature as it had been rendered theologically. If theology had assumed that nature was perfect, so would Darwin—even if evolution was predicated on nature’s imperfection. Darwin was conflicted and it was reflected in his concept of “adaptation.” In order to show that all living beings had evolved Darwin had to cede to the design argument that adaptations were a perfect and pervasive fact of nature. In his more optimistic moments, he hoped, in time, this might provide the basis for a more perfect understanding of evolutionary history. In his more sober moments, Darwin realized that the necessary imperfection of nature precluded a perfect interpretation of it. Organisms are never adapted for their present conditions but are always living relics of the past. Darwin’s equivocations gave rise to conflicts in the literature over the scope of adaptations. It wasn’t just God that had been eliminated from Darwin’s theories, but the scientific endeavor, born of the same enterprise, to construct a single grand unifying picture of the world.

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INTRODUCTION: “WHITHER IS GOD?” Darwin passed away in 1882. In the same year, Nietzsche wrote The Parable of the Madman. In hindsight, there may be no more fitting epitaph for this most prescient and heretical of thinkers: Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!”—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?—Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I.” [. . .] “How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us—for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.” Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not yet.”3

All knowledge, for Nietzsche, is interpretation (“facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretations”4). Belief in God is an appeal to judgment that goes beyond interpretation. Science was born from this tradition; a determination to render the world in a single transcendental Truth—what Nietzsche called the ascetic ideal. This is epitomized in scientific representations that admit of no other interpretation. Nietzsche observed that by the mid-nineteenth century, faith in the ascetic ideal was becoming more tenuous. Science had turned against itself. Its search for Truth had eliminated its own foundations and brought it face to face with the prospect of its own partial status as an interpretation. And yet by and large scientists persisted in their endeavor as if nothing had changed. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche lamented: It is still a metaphysical faith that underlies our faith in science—and we men of knowledge of today, we godless men and anti-metaphysicians, we, too, still derive our flame from the fire ignited by a faith millenia old, the Christian faith, which was also Plato’s, that God is truth, that truth is divine.5

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Today popular consensus lies with Nietzsche’s detractors; the “noisy agitators” that insist that modern science “possesses the courage for itself” and has “survived well enough without God.”6 Rather than address this crisis, they have preferred to gloss over it with convenient tales of a science gradually liberating itself from religious dogma. Nowhere was this myth propagated more fervently than within Darwinism. Anton Pannekoek was right that Darwinism was “a theory forged in battle” between “its enthusiastic advocates and passionate opponents.”7 However, his portrayal of this battle was a caricature—between straightforward supporters of science “who understood something of his theory” and his religious detractors that “knew nothing” and “were surely unqualified to judge from a scientific standpoint the correctness or falsity of Darwin’s theory.”8 This owed more to revisionist folklore than to history (in fact opposition to Darwin’s theory emerged as much from within scientific institutions as from without). It was a folklore that Darwin himself helped to foment. Accounting for his conversion from a religious to a scientific worldview, Darwin pinpointed not just his growing incredulity toward divine miracles but also his realization that the ideal of perfection as described in the Bible was never a properly scientific one. Its power being figurative rather than literal, the Bible demanded a labor of interpretation from its readers, which a scientific representation was supposed to transcend. “Beautiful as is the morality of the New Testament,” Darwin wrote in his autobiography, “it can hardly be denied that its perfection depends [more] on the interpretation which we now put on metaphors and allegories [than it does to] plain language.”9 Once God had to be interpreted, then He could always be interpreted differently. “Hindoos, Mahomadans and others might argue in the same manner and with equal force in favour of the existence of one God, or many Gods, or as with the Buddhists of no God.”10 Having questioned the tenets of Christianity, Darwin was now in a position to extinguish the theological vestiges of biology in the service of a properly scientific account: The old argument from design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. [. . .] There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.11

From one point of view, this is correct. Darwin replaced the image of separate creation represented in a table of fixed differences with a branching tree of life representing our common origin. From a second point of view, however, this account has it backward. His intervention did not resolve a conflict of interpretation—it started one. On other occasions, Darwin was well aware of the interpretive nature of his work. “How odd it is” he wrote in a letter to

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Henry Fawcett, “that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service.”12 The Origin is one long argument against the interpretation of natural theology. As the Christian paleontologist Louis Agassiz pointed out shortly after the publication of The Origin—the facts upon which Darwin based his views “were in the possession of every well-educated naturalist. It is only a question of interpretation, not of discovery of new and unlooked-for information.”13 Agassiz held steadfast to the notion that animals and plants were “the free conception of the Almighty Intellect, matured in his thought, before it was manifested in tangible external forms.”14 Agassiz found himself increasingly in the minority as religious opposition to Darwin’s idea was swept aside. Scientists were forced to confront a world less perfect and less transparent; a world less amenable to scientific representation. Ironically, the arguments Darwin had leveled against natural theology were soon turned on Darwin himself as he was accused of hedging between two irreconcilable positions, one that either “admits of antecedent knowledge by which the structure of organized beings has been arranged [. . .] or that in the formation of a perfect and beautiful machine it is not requisite to know how to make it.”15 The subsequent folklore surrounding Darwinism’s conflict with religion has served as an elaborate smoke screen for a much more significant conflict that both sides of the Darwinian debate have been wont to deny—the conflict between traditional science and an insurgent theory that moved in the opposite direction. If science can claim a secular status then it remains in Heisenberg’s words, a “specifically Christian form of Godlessness.”16 In imbuing the scientific principle of perfection with a premise of design, theologians were following the lead of scientists for centuries. In making the case for our common origins, Darwin’s TfE preserved the principle of perfection—evolution could be represented perfectly. Darwin’s TfNS abandoned it—henceforth the causes of evolution could only be rendered imperfectly. DESIGN BEFORE DARWIN In 1658, the scientist and polymath Sir Thomas Browne published an extended ode to God and Nature. Written in the wake of Newton’s discoveries, The Garden of Cyrus derived divine intent from mathematical pattern. “All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again according to the ordainer of order and mystical mathematics of the city of heaven.”17 To appreciate the significance of Darwin’s demolition of design, we must understand something of the importance of arguments from design in the history of science. In spite of their conflicts with the Catholic Church, all the early scientists held steadfast to the notion of a designed universe

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and conceived of their role as one to reveal God’s design in nature. With their success came further confirmation that they were reading from (in an analogy with the Bible) what they termed the “book” of Nature.18 “There are two books from whence I collect my Divinity,” Browne wrote, the “written one of God, another of his servant Nature.”19 Far from receding with the advance of scientific knowledge, faith in design actually gained strength through the seventeenth, eighteenth, and even early nineteenth centuries, particularly through the work of Joseph Priestly, Michael Faraday, and James Clerk Maxwell.20 Jan Swammerdamm’s assertion that “proof of God’s Providence” could be found in the “anatomy of a louse” encapsulated the confidence scientists had in the theological basis of their studies.21 It wasn’t until the shift from the Classical to the modern episteme that religious presuppositions would be challenged. However, the disclosure that the earth had a long, and perhaps impenetrable, history posed as much of a threat to science as it did to religion. It was a challenge they would face together. In the eighteenth century, David Hume and Immanuel Kant gave good reasons to separate natural philosophy from natural theology. Kant’s view, that it was enough that the principle of perfection applied to a natural science formed of logical propositions, accords well with contemporary views.22 However, a separation between science and religion became distinctly less appealing at a time when the bond between nature and thought was beginning to break down. At this time, theological assumptions of design became more, not less, important for they promised to anchor words and things against the tide of history.23 It was the French naturalist Georges Cuvier who first broke from the tradition of abstract classification, treating organisms as historical objects. As Edward Russell would later put it, Cuvier dismissed the question of a “science of possible organic forms” (a staple of the Classical episteme) considering “only the forms or combinations actually existing.”24 Rather than withdraw into an abstract table of elements, Cuvier concentrated on the functions of organisms as a means to ascertain their “necessary conditions of life.”25 It was Cuvier whom Foucault credited with founding modern biology: From Cuvier onward, the living being wraps itself in its own existence, breaks off its taxonomic links of adjacency, tears itself free from the vast, tyrannical plan of continuities, and constitutes itself as a new space [. . .] that of the conditions of life.26

Cuvier was an unlikely radical. Uninterested in grand questions of origins, still less grand evolutionary theories to account for them, Cuvier was a strict

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believer in the fixity of species and remained content to classify organisms.27 Faithful to scientific convention, Cuvier sought a perfect system of classification; an endeavor that required, in turn, the perfect harmonization of their functional parts. He believed that it was possible to map the entire bauplan of an organism on the basis of a tripartite scale of functions beginning with a core set (“origin by generation, growth by nutrition, end by death”) followed by a second layer (“feeling and moving”) and concluding with the tertiary level by which nutrients and blood is distributed around the body.28 Cuvier referred to this correlation of parts as the organisms’ “conditions of existence” and the perfection he ascribed to their functional coherence explained his opposition to evolution—any change in their relation must compromise their perfection thereby depriving the organism of its means of survival: It is evident that the seemly harmony between organs which interact is a necessary condition of existence of the creature to which they belong and that if one of these functions were modified in a manner incompatible with the modifications of the others the creature could no longer continue to exist.29

When referring to the laws that guaranteed the perfection of functions, Cuvier observed that “we are accustomed to personify nature, and to use its name for that of its Creator.”30 In the more secular setting of France, this was as close as Cuvier would come to addressing the theological underpinnings of his system.31 In the more pious setting of Britain, his interpreters readily elicited them. In a footnote to the first English edition, his translator observed that Cuvier’s functions reside in “a general place in organized bodies” but “proceed from some other cause still more general” (i.e., God).32 In a supplementary chapter, the Cuvierian biologist Edward Pidgeon attributed “the harmonious adaptations of means to ends” to the “contrivance, wisdom, and power of the Creator.”33 Pidgeon’s reference to adaptation serves as a reminder that the term was never Darwin’s, but rather a trope of natural theologians dating back to the seventeenth century.34 Natural theology reached its apotheosis in 1802 with William Paley’s book of the same name. Paley, like Cuvier, took function as the basic concept unifying all organisms and sought to prove their design by a Creator. In the famous opening passage of his book, Paley imagined chancing upon a watch during a walk across a heath. “Should it be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place,” Paley concluded that as its “several parts are framed and put together for a purpose” the logical inference is “that the watch must have had a maker.”35 Paley then extrapolated this argument to organisms. It is easy to dismiss Paley’s argument today, but Paley’s natural theology was a science every bit as venerated by the establishment as the liberal economics

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Marx took to task in Das Kapital. For Darwin’s part, Paley provided virtually all of his formal training in natural history and Darwin had taken a great deal of “delight” in reading him.36 What he discovered was a theory that served both scientific and religious orthodoxy. The point of the scientific principle of perfection was always to provide a representation that could be ascertained perfectly by the mind. In keeping with scientific tradition, Paley identified perfection with simplicity and, likening natural design to the work of an artist, posited the relation of simplicity and perfection as a union of form and intention.37 Throughout Natural Theology Paley placed emphasis upon those most “simple yet beautiful mechanical contrivances,” which bear the marks of a Creator.38 When Paley is confronted with complexity, as in the case of the mechanics of an eye, he asks “Why this circuitous perception; the ministry of so many means?”39 Could not he just invent a simpler contrivance for vision? Paley’s answer is that recourse to complexity is specifically a device used by God to illustrate the conformity of nature and thought. If the eye resembles the complex technology of a man-made telescope, it is because it was intended to: It is only by the display of contrivance, that the existence, the agency, the wisdom of the Deity, could be testified to his rational creatures. This is the scale by which we ascend to all the knowledge of our Creator which we possess, so far as it depends upon the phaenomena [sic], or the works of nature. Take away this, and you take away from us every subject of observation, and ground of reasoning; I mean as our rational faculties are formed at present.40

Cuvier and Paley both provided concepts of function that in their perfection and design lay outside of history. If organisms were dependent upon their constituent characters for their historical survival, the functions these characters performed remained products of divine intervention. Their commitment to sealing the scientific status of their biology with trans-historical concepts is most clearly revealed by their attitude to cases that apparently contravened the principle of perfection. In cases where organs ceased to serve the function for which they were designed, Cuvier and Paley both applied a principle of latent perfection. As Cuvier put it, the persistence of certain abortive structures revealed a “determination to adhere to a plan once adopted: and it is from these very circumstances, that we become satisfied respecting an original thought, or design.”41 Equally for Paley: While we are inquiring simply after the existence of an intelligent Creator, imperfection, inaccuracy, liability to disorder, occasional irregularities, may subsist in a considerable degree, without inducing any doubt into the question

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[For] a watch may frequently go wrong [. . .] without the smallest ground of suspicion [that it was not] made for the purpose ascribed to it.42

In the shift to the Modern episteme, design was offered as a supplement to the principle of perfection, serving as a transcendental guarantor for its scientific validity and safeguarding it from the vicissitudes of history. Darwin robbed functions of both their perfection and design, and with it any pretensions to a unified science of evolutionary history. THE LAST NATURAL THEOLOGIAN Darwin sought to show that what natural theologians took to be evidence for the divine, could be accounted for by evolution history. He was not first. A decade earlier Robert Chambers had published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a pro-evolutionary broadside that had come in for widespread ridicule, particularly from religious quarters. The reception of Vestiges impressed upon Darwin the importance of presenting a convincing argument. His meticulous discussion of the geological record in The Origin certainly provided this, but an exclusive focus upon the empirical evidence for evolution underestimates the rhetorical power of The Origin. In the absence of a specific evolutionary mechanism, Darwin remained reliant on interpretations of nature, which ran contrary to his evolutionary view. In the Introduction to The Origin, Darwin conceded that “scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived” (i.e., special creation).43 To convince the religiously inclined, Darwin would have to appeal to more than the facts. In his book Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze wrote that in order to master an object, an interpretation must first “put on the mask of the forces which are already in possession of the object.” It must “borrow the features of the forces with which it struggles.”44 In the realm of interpretation, there is no material to interpret that isn’t already an interpretation. A new interpretation must interpret the old. Darwin made only one reference to Paley in The Origin, but it’s a telling reference—revealing their shared commitment to nature’s perfection—“No organ will be formed, as Paley has remarked, for the purpose of causing pain or for doing injury to its possessor.”45 If this reference seems obliquely buried, then consider that in the Introduction, Darwin made clear that the ascription of common descent and a process of modification (the fact of evolution in other words) are not, on their own, sufficient. A truly scientific theory, he argued, must meet Paley’s challenge of explaining nature’s perfection:

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In considering the origin of species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist, [. . .] might come to the conclusion that species had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species. Nevertheless, such a conclusion, even if well founded, would be unsatisfactory, until it could be shown how the innumerable species inhabiting this world have been modified, so as to acquire that perfection of structure and coadaptation which justly excites our admiration.46

Darwin had abandoned Paley’s static conception of adaptations but retained Paley’s conception of design. Consistent with scientific protocol, Darwin used the words “perfect,” “perfection,” and “perfected” 123 times in The Origin.47 Those inclined to make a sharp distinction between religion and science point out that Paley’s was not just a scientific monograph, but a religious tract filled with “wonder,” “admiration,” and “astonishment” at God’s design. What this conveniently ignores is that Darwin’s prose matched Paley stride for stride. If science and theology are premised upon the conformity of nature and thought, then a full comprehension of nature’s perfection required an expansion of the realm of thought in the orbit of the sublime. Darwin’s continuously described nature in the order of the “remarkable,” the “incredible,” the “marvelous,” the “unimaginable,” and the “extraordinary,” while simultaneously describing his own boundless “admiration,” “wonder,” and “astonishment.” This was not just rhetorical flourish. It was indicative of a strategy, borrowed from Paley, of rendering the improbable probable.48 Throughout The Origin, Darwin rejoiced in cases apparently only intelligible on the behest of a Creator that on closer inspection were explicable through natural means.49 The task was to show that every character of the organism was a product of evolution. As if addressing Paley directly, Darwin cloaked his blasphemous idea in flattery and persuasion. I share your admiration for nature’s designs, he is saying; I also exult in the glory of nature—this is what converted me to a naturalistic view! This is no prosaic reconciliation with the facts. Darwin is charting the transformation of a belief system, a religious-like conversion, in which a power once reserved for God is embedded in Nature (note that Darwin makes references to his “belief” well over two hundred times in The Origin). Darwin’s deification of nature was neither incidental nor subtle and it is for good reason that The Origin has been described as the “last great work of Victorian natural theology.”50 We must suppose that there is a power always intently watching each slight accidental alteration in the transparent layers; and carefully selecting each alteration which, under varied circumstances, may in any way, or in any degree, tend to produce a distincter image.51

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It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.52

If the delivery read like a sermon, the content served a strict scientific purpose—that of rendering every “internal organ [. . .] every shade of constitutional difference [. . .] the whole machinery of life” visible (i.e., representable) to evolution.53 Darwin wanted to impress upon his readers the creative power of natural selection, the capacity of his theory to account for all of nature’s living forms. The pervasiveness of perfection in Darwin’s TfE is a corollary to Darwin’s argument that all characters of living beings had evolved and that every feature of the organism belonged on the “great Tree of Life.” When it came to interpreting the causes of evolution, however, adaptations went from universal and apparent to the particular and obscure. Darwin’s deification of nature was designed to encourage readers to make the leap of faith required of his naturalist view, but it was also misleading. Darwin conceded in the same edition that “in the literal sense of the word, no doubt natural selection is a false term” as it implies “an active power or Deity,” before defending its usage on Newtonian grounds: “Who objects to an author speaking of the attraction of gravity as ruling the movements of the planets?”54 Darwin’s post hoc justification for the metaphor of selection obscures its more subversive origins. Unlike adaptations the term “natural selection” was not theological, but rather a term used by breeders. Natural theologians had also distinguished between the powers of Man and God with priority given to the latter who, in Paley’s words, is by far the “superior agent.”55 However, in glorifying God, Paley never broke the union of thought and nature. If God’s powers do indeed “exceed all computation,” we, nevertheless, retain the power to comprehend his work. Paley’s comparison of the eye with a telescope encapsulated this. For if the former was the superior contrivance, it was nonetheless intelligible through comparison with the latter: “As far as the examination of the instrument goes, there is precisely the same proof that the eye was made for vision.”56 In a decisive act of lèse-majesté, Darwin used Paley’s most treasured example to foreground his counterscientific theory; severing the union of thought and nature: 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?

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Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man?57

The true significance of Darwin’s question for science is highly obscured by references to a Creator. What Darwin is really asking us to question is the “high presumption” held by theologians and scientists alike that we might know natural history.58 And as much as Darwin counseled his readers that nature’s secrets could be unlocked through the power of imaginative thought, he was equally inclined to dispatch nature’s secrets to the unthought, a realm “insuperable by our imagination.”59 We are so “confessedly ignorant,” he even gestured in the conclusion, we “do not know how ignorant we are.”60 In the previous chapter, we considered the special importance of “imperfect organs” for expounding Darwin’s evolutionary view. Challenging the presupposition that “rudimentary or atrophied organs” were examples of latent perfection, created “for the sake of symmetry” or to “complete the scheme of nature” devised by the Creator, Darwin showed that imperfection was an evolutionary prerequisite. No organism is “so perfectly adapted” that “none of them could anyhow be improved.”61 I didn’t elaborate on its corollary; namely that “imperfect organs” also provide insight into the necessarily imperfect nature of evolutionary interpretations. The peculiar paradox facing Darwin was that in asserting a common origin, he had to deprive organs of their original functions. While Cuvier and Paley had anchored their doctrines to concepts of function that were transhistorical, Darwin lodged functions firmly in the realm of history; a history of shifting functions: Although an organ may not have been originally formed for some special purpose, if it now serves for this end, we are justified in saying that it is specially adapted for it. On the same principle, if a man were to make a machine for some special purpose, but were to use old wheels, springs, and pulleys, only slightly altered, the whole machine, with all its parts, might be said to be specially contrived for its present purpose. Thus throughout nature almost every part of each living being has probably served, in a slightly modified condition, for diverse purposes, and has acted in the living machinery of many ancient and distinct specific forms.62

It wasn’t just a matter of shifting functions but stripping any guarantee of function. An “organ useful under certain conditions,” Darwin insisted, “might become injurious under others.”63 Distinguishing when an organ was useful was easy in Cuvier’s system, for Cuvier had largely confined “conditions of existence” to an organism’s correlation of parts, its perfection was presupposed by its very existence. Darwin had reinterpreted Cuvier’s “conditions of existence” to mean the entire ecology of an organism (a creative

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misinterpretation) and then proceeded to consign these conditions to the unthought: “we are much too ignorant in regard to the whole economy of any one organic being, to say what slight modifications would be of importance or not.”64 Interpreting an organ’s function from its immediate relation to its environment was one thing, but an evolutionary interpretation must probe deeper into its historical relations. And the deeper we probe, the more buried these functions become: We cannot believe that the same bones in the arm of the monkey, in the fore leg of the horse, in the wing of the bat, and in the flipper of the seal, are of special use to these animals. We may safely attribute these structures to inheritance. [. . .] We may further venture to believe that the several bones in the limbs of the monkey, horse, and bat, which have been inherited from a common progenitor, were formerly of more special use to that progenitor, or its progenitors, than they now are to these animals having such widely diversified habits.65

A striking fact rarely commented on is that Darwin refrained from committing himself to a single definitive adaptive story in The Origin. The examples of wolves, short-beaked pigeons, grouse and the plumage, and song of birds were “imaginary illustrations” designed to show how species could have become adapted on the acceptance of certain premises.66 As Darwin put it, “It is good thus to try in our imagination to give any form some advantage over another.”67 In a clever rhetorical ploy, this sometimes entailed placing the burden of proof upon his detractors. We are far too ignorant, in almost every case, to be enabled to assert that any part or organ is so unimportant for the welfare of a species, that modifications in its structure could not have been slowly accumulated by means of natural selection (my emphasis).68

In truth, Darwin was skeptical that a definitive evolutionary story would ever be possible: “probably in no one case could we precisely say why one species has been victorious over another in the great battle of life.”69 AFTER DARWIN: A CONFLICT OF INTERPRETATION Conflicts of interpretation arising from Darwin’s work stem not from varying fidelity to Darwin’s original view but tensions actually within his own writing stemming from conflicting aims. When Darwin insisted that natural selection “will never produce in a being anything injurious to itself, for natural selection acts solely by and for the good of each,” he was conveying the point that

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all organs must have an evolutionary origin. But from a causal perspective not all characteristics of an organism will be beneficial. Darwin had relied upon the appearance of perfection to defeat the argument for separate creation, but having separated the organism from the environment, imperfections became equally vital. These imperfections transferred onto our own interpretations as Darwin recognized that we can never precisely say how species evolved owing to the many “complex contingencies on which the existence of each species depends.”70 Reservations such as these should be allied with his conspicuous warning in the Introduction not to interpret his theory as allencompassing (“I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification”71), particularly as this warning would be given greater emphasis in the main body of the text through subsequent editions. Today, it is the first edition of The Origin that is generally favored by Darwinists—when shortness of time and confidence in his ideas made for a more elegant argument. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, it was the sixth edition that was regarded as the superior edition. Agitated by the discussion and challenges his theory had provoked, Darwin assigned a greater role in this edition to the use and disuse of parts and directed and spontaneous variations. Even then Darwin was prone to fluctuations in faith. In a letter to Karl Semper, he enthused: As our knowledge advances, very slight differences, considered by systematists as of no importance in structure, are continually found to be functionally important [. . . .] Therefore it seems to me rather rash to consider slight differences between representative species, for instance, those inhabiting the different islands of the same archipelago, as of no functional importance, and as not in any way due to natural selection.72

In another letter to Moritz Wagner, Darwin was more despondent: The greatest error which I have committed, has not been allowing sufficient weight to the direct action of the environment [. . .] independently of natural selection. Modifications thus caused, which are neither of advantage nor disadvantage to the modified organism, would be especially favoured, as I can now see chiefly through your observation.73

Fittingly we can find both tendencies in The Origin, sometimes even in the same sentence: “Let it be borne in mind how infinitely complex and close fitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life.”74 Contained in this statement is both an answer to the vacillating creationist and a perennial warning for the overzealous scientist. If the organism is “infinitely close-fitting” with its environment, then

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we are reassured that the power of selection to create perfection matches that of a Creator. However, if the organism’s fit with the environment is “infinitely complex,” then we must dispense with any simple intelligible relation implied by perfection. Darwin produced a discourse that leaves readers with two possible interpretations of the scope of perfection in nature: A “scientific” interpretation that tries to match the perfection of Darwin’s representation of a single tree of life with perfect interpretations of the “closefitting” relation of organisms to their environments and a counter-scientific interpretation that challenged this alignment, appealing instead to the organism’s “infinitely complex” relation to its environment that eschews any such perfection. It didn’t take long for conflicts of interpretation to emerge. The first scientists to clash over the principles of perfection and imperfection were Alfred Russel Wallace and George Romanes. Wallace’s booklength treatment of Darwinism focused on Darwin’s original creationist opponent declaring “the idea of special creation is absolutely extinct!” before aiming his sword at “lingering criticisms and objections” to Darwin’s theory.75 Wallace’s approach involved repeating Darwin’s strategy in The Origin, beginning with the appearance of nature given by the theologians. This self-acting process which, by means of a few easily demonstrated groups of facts, brings about change in the organic world, and keeps each species in harmony with the conditions of its existence, will appear to some persons so clear and simple as to need no further demonstration.76

Wallace then offered the prerequisite scientific puzzlement about this harmony. But to the great majority of naturalists and men of science endless difficulties and objections arise, owing to the wonderful variety of animal and vegetable forms, and the intricate relations of the different species and groups of species with each other.77

Rather than proceed through a scientific theory of common origin to the counter-scientific conclusion that nature really is not designed, however, Wallace reinstalled the harmony perceived by the theologians: [The] more we know of nature the more we find it to harmonise with the development hypothesis. [M]ost of the difficulties in the way of comprehending how species have originated through natural selection will disappear. [We] have the means of producing modifications which will certainly bring the species into harmony with its [. . .] conditions.78

For Wallace, it was the very appearance of harmony that required explanation. The possibility that nature was not harmonious was excluded by this

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premise. Wallace was so committed to the principle of perfection that not even the arbitrary intervention of the environment could puncture its totality: All animals in a state of nature are kept, by the constant struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest, in such a state of perfect health and usually superabundant vigour, that in all ordinary circumstances they possess a surplus power in every important organ—a surplus only drawn upon in cases of the direst necessity when their very existence is at stake. It follows, therefore, that any additional power given to one of the component parts of an organ must be useful.79

Romanes was as vociferous in his opposition to theology as Wallace, but, in contrast to Wallace, found the most powerful evidence against design in nature’s imperfections: How much more reasonable is the naturalistic interpretation; for here the very irregularity of their appearance in different species, which constitutes rudimentary structures one of the crowning difficulties to the theory of special design, furnishes the best possible evidence in favour of hereditary descent; seeing that this irregularity then becomes what may be termed the anticipated expression of progressive dwindling due to inutility.80

Criticizing Wallace for his monolithic account of selection, Romanes poured scorn on the notion that “in the enormously complex and endlessly varied processes of organic evolution, only a single principle should be everywhere and exclusively concerned.”81 Romanes then proceeded to take Wallace to task for ascribing this view to Darwin (“This is not the interpretation adopted by Darwin”) before going on to quote Darwin extensively on the importance of vestigial and rudimentary structures for classification.82 Wallace was particularly irked by Romanes’s recruitment of Darwin and his response, like Romanes’s, focused as much upon Darwin’s texts as it did the vestigial structures in question. “I have looked in vain in Mr. Darwin’s works to find any such acknowledgement [of the importance of rudimentary structures],” before concluding that “Mr. Darwin is very cautious in admitting inutility.”83 Ironically, but by no means exceptionally, Romanes’s criticisms of Wallace were warmly received by creationists who welcomed any dents inflicted upon Darwin and Wallace’s explicit critique of design, no matter their source or content. Writing in Nature, the Duke of Argyll heralded Romanes’s work as signaling a break from the “Reign of Terror” established by anti-theists.84 The irony of course was that it was Wallace’s argument that was far more theological. The conflict between Wallace and Romanes was a mark of things to come as Darwin would become the cipher for conflicts of interpretation

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throughout the following century. It also signaled the return of a rhetorical trope that had remained dormant ever since the Scientific Revolution—the appeal to the authority of an author to justify a scientific claim. CONCLUSION: FROM DESIGN TO IDEOLOGY Midway through writing his Big Species Book, the masterwork that would unveil his master theory, Darwin pledged in a letter to a friend “to make my book as perfect as ever I can.”85 Wallace’s own letter to Darwin, bearing more or less the same theory, cut this enterprise short. Darwin had to settle for an abstract, he described as “necessarily imperfect.”86 How fitting that the trajectory of publication so typified the trajectory of his declining faith. Initially impressed by the breadth of his discovery, Darwin endeavored to establish a perfect scientific theory that could encompass the whole of natural history. In the course of his attempt, however, Darwin was forced to confront the ungodly consequence that his theory forbids us from every really knowing nature. Darwin would have to make peace with an imperfect understanding of an imperfect world. “What an infinite number of generations, which the mind cannot grasp, must have succeeded each other in the long roll of years!” Darwin wrote of the “Imperfection of the Geological Record.” “Now turn to our richest geological museums, and what a paltry display we behold!”87 The concluding passage of the chapter can be read as an allegory for his diminishing ambitions: I look at the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines.88

This passage is reminiscent of the “confused and entangled parchments” that characterized Nietzsche’s view of history.89 Nietzsche’s debt to Darwin probably exceeded that of either Marx or Freud, yet unlike Marx and Freud, Nietzsche was only very grudging in his praise. In Beyond Good and Evil, he described Darwin as a “mediocre Englishman,” if allowing that his “narrowness” and “aridity” may have helped lead him to a scientific discovery.90 Nietzsche’s condescension may have derived, in part, from Darwin’s dogged faith in a single all-encompassing truth. Referring to Darwin among others, Nietzsche wrote, “that which constrains these men [. . .] is faith in the ascetic ideal itself.”91 For Nietzsche, the futility of searching for a final comprehensive interpretation of history meant the onus was upon historians to

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create rather than reveal. History is an art not a science because it begins on the premise of our not knowing—our “will to ignorance.”92 Despite his constant avowals of ignorance, Darwin never gave up on science. If organisms were not separately created, could there be another agent behind their apparent design that could provide the key to a properly scientific interpretation of history? Nietzsche was suspicious of any invocations of “agency,” believing it to be an illusion generated by language. By separating the subject from a predicate, we naturally, if mistakenly, infer a doer behind the deed: The popular mind in fact doubles the deed; when it sees the lightning flash, it is the deed of a deed: it posits the same event first as cause and then a second time as its effect. Scientists do no better when they say “force moves,” “force causes,” and the like—all its coolness, its freedom from emotion notwithstanding, our entire science still lies under the misleading influence of language and has not disposed of that little changeling, the “subject.”93

Bemoaning these false metaphysical implications, Nietzsche lamented “I fear that we shall never rid ourselves of God, since we still believe in grammar.”94 Well before Nietzsche had announced the death of God in the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie had been lining up His successor. Indeed prominent theologians, such as Paley, were already preaching his ontological priority. Writing on his moral and political philosophy, Paley wrote: “Although we speak of communities as sentient beings nothing really exists or feels but individuals—the happiness of a people is made up of the happiness of single persons.”95 In the next chapter, I will discuss how Darwin, anxious to escape the impasse of endless interpretation, threw his lot in with the God of the bourgeoisie. Not a benevolent agent from on high, but a self-interested agent from below.

NOTES 1. F. Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus spake Zarathustra, tr. by Thomas Common (Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1911), 318. 2. C. Darwin, (13 July 1856). “Letter to J D Hooker.” Retrieved from The Darwin Correspondence Project, University of Cambridge. 3. Nietzsche, Nietzsche: The Gay Science, 119–20. 4. Nietzsche cited in Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 42. 5. Nietzsche, Nietzsche: The Gay Science, 201–2. 6. F. Nietzsche, “On the genealogy of morals,” (1887) in F. Nietzsche and W. A. Kaufmann. Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1968), 582.

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7. A. Pannekoek, Marxism and Darwinism (Chicago: Kerr, 1913). Marxist Internet Archive, accessed May 4, 2017, https​:/​/ww​​w​.mar​​xists​​.org/​​archi​​ve​/pa​​nneko​​e​ /191​​2​/mar​​xism-​​​darwi​​nism.​​htm 8. ibid. 9. Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882, 86–7. 10. ibid. 11. ibid, 87. 12. C. Darwin, Darwin, C. R. to Fawcett, Henry 18 Sept1861 Letter 3257. 13. L. Agassiz, “Evolution and permanence of type,” in Life, Letters, and Works of Louis Agassiz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 209. 14. L. Agassiz, An Essay on Classification (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, Roberts, 1859), 10. 15. MacKenzie, The Darwinian Theory of the Transmutation of Species Examined, 306–7. 16. Heisenberg, “The physicist’s conception of nature,” 9. 17. T. Browne, Urne Buriall and The Garden of Cyrus (1658; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 114. 18. Karl Löwith cited in D. Owen, Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity: A Critique of Liberal Reason (London: Sage Publications, 1995), 87. 19. T. Browne, Religio Medici (1643; repr., Frankfurt: Outlook Verlag, 2019), 18. 20. See discussion in Olson, Science and Religion, 1450–1900: From Copernicus to Darwin, 3–4. 21. Karl Löwith cited in Owen, Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity, 87. 22. See discussion in I. Kant, Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics (1783; repr., Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Company, 2001), 45. 23. Kant argued that biology’s reliance on teleology condemned it to fall beneath the threshold of science. See I. Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790; repr., Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 416. 24. Russell, Form and Function, 33. 25. G. de Cuvier, The Animal Kingdom Arranged in Conformity with Its Organization, Vol. 4. The Class Mammalia (London: Whittaker Treacher & Co, 1827), 16. 26. Foucault, The Order of Things, 299. 27. Cuvier, The Animal Kingdom Arranged in Conformity with Its Organization, 7. 28. Russell, Form and Function, 32. 29. Georges Cuvier cited in M. Ruse, Darwin and Design: Does Evolution have a Purpose? (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2009), 35. 30. Cuvier, The Animal Kingdom Arranged in Conformity with Its Organization, Vol. 4, 1. 31. Russell, Form and Function, 43. The theological dimension to Cuvier’s argument had to be inferred from his belief in catastrophic floods and his maintaining “a providential concern for His Creatures.” See discussion in T. A. Appel, The CuvierGeoffroy Debate: French Biology in the Decades before Darwin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 56–9.

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32. H. McMurtrie, “Translators note,” in Cuvier. The Animal Kingdom Arranged in Conformity with Its Organization, Vol. 4, 13. 33. E. Pidgeon, “Supplement on the quadrumana,” in G. de Cuvier. The Animal Kingdom Arranged in Conformity with Its Organization, Vol. 4, 231. 34. See discussion in J. H. Brooke, “Darwin’s science and his religion,” in Darwinism and Divinity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 43. 35. Paley, Natural Theology, 1–2. 36. Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882, 33. 37. W. Paley, Natural Theology, 72. 38. ibid, 61. 39. ibid, 26. 40. ibid, 26–7. 41. Georges Cuvier cited in C. Darwin, “Essay on natural theology,” in H. Gruber, P. Barrett, and C. Darwin. Darwin on Man, 417. Darwin was scathing of Cuvier’s resort to theology. In his notes, he wrote “The determiner of a God-head—the designs of an omnipotent creator, exhausted & abandoned. Such is man’s philosophy, when he argues about his Creator!”—ibid, 417. 42. Paley, Natural Theology, 35. 43. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 10. 44. G. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 4–5. 45. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 247 and 243. 46. ibid, 11. 47. See discussion in Mayr, One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought, 58. 48. Brooke, “Darwin’s science and his religion,” 50. 49. See in particular Darwin’s discussion “On the origin and transitions of organic beings with peculiar habits and structure” Darwin, The Origin of Species, 200–7. 50. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 211. 51. ibid, 97. 52. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 65. 53. ibid, 63. 54. ibid, 63. 55. Paley, Natural Theology, 212. 56. ibid, 16. 57. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 209. 58. ibid, 86. 59. ibid, 207–8. 60. ibid, 501. 61. ibid, 489 and 96. 62. Charles Darwin cited in M. Ghiselin, The Triumph of the Darwinian Method, 154. 63. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 490. 64. ibid, 216.

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65. ibid, 222. 66. ibid, 104. 67. ibid, 91. 68. ibid, 227. 69. ibid, 89. 70. ibid, 350. 71. ibid, 14. 72. Darwin cited in W. B. Provine, Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 215. 73. Darwin cited in ibid, 215. 74. Darwin cited in ibid, 93. 75. Wallace, Darwinism, viii. 76. ibid, 12. 77. ibid, 12. 78. ibid, 12–13. 79. ibid, 128. 80. Romanes, Darwin, and After Darwin; An Exposition of the Darwinian Theory and a Discussion of Post-Darwinian Questions, 67–8. 81. ibid, 2. 82. ibid, 261–2. 83. Wallace, Darwinism, 131. 84. J. E. Lesch, “The role of isolation in evolution: George J. Romanes and John T. Gulick,” in Isis 66.4 (1975), 489. 85. C. Darwin, Letter 2049 C. Darwin to W. D. Fox, 8 Feb 1857. 86. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 10. 87. ibid, 313. 88. ibid, 337–8. 89. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Marx, Freud,” 76. 90. F. Nietzsche, “Beyond good and evil,” (1886) in F. Nietzsche and W. A. Kaufmann. Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1968), 381. 91. Nietzsche, “On the genealogy of morals,” 587. 92. Nietzsche is not saying here that we should simply fictionalise history. Rather he is making the more modest point that the best histories are the most imaginative. This is why he offers the “will to ignorance” not as an opposite to the “will to know” but “as its refinement.” Nietzsche, “Beyond good and evil,” (1886), 225. 93. Nietzsche, “On the genealogy of morals,” 481. 94. Nietzsche cited in Foucault, The Order of Things, 325. 95. W. Paley, An Epitome of Paley’s Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy: Containing the Substance of the Arguments comprised in that Work, in the Catechetical Form (London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1824), 238.

Chapter 5

The Dismal Science Darwin’s Struggle for a Ruling Interpretation

If man is shaped by his environment, his environment must be made human. —Karl Marx1 The centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere as long as this is so! —Charles Darwin2

Classical economics, Marx insisted, was characterized by a contradiction: its commitment to the agency of the individual led it to identify individuals in themselves, divorced from their social relations. Embedded in the ideology of the bourgeoisie, Darwin was specifically drawn to the agent of classical economics because it promised a “ruling interpretation” of evolutionary history in the form of a struggle between individual organisms of the same species. In this way of seeing things, historical causes could be made to mirror his evolutionary mechanism as the entities that differentially survive become agents of change. If true, this would unite his two theories and eliminate the consequences of the counter-scientific principle of relation. Alas, it was not to be and Darwin had to concede just how profound and intractable was the problem of the relation. His lesson went unheeded by generations of ideologues intent on preserving Darwinism’s union with the dismal science.

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INTRODUCTION: A CONJURER’S TRICK In The German Ideology, Marx considered three separate conceptions of “ideology”: (1) The means by which meaning is produced and the world is pieced together. (2) The ideas of the ruling class. (3) A set of ideas characterized by a contradiction. The first conception is the broadest. What Marx described as the “production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness,” in the very general sense; all that “men say, imagine, [and] conceive” in the fields of “politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc.”3 The world and consciousness do not appear to us as they are, still less can different portions of it “retain an independence” from each other. Rather Marx argued they are all “interwoven with material activity [. . .] the material intercourse of men, the language of real life.” There is no extracting a pure identity of consciousness, Marx insisted, from its relation to the “historical life process.”4 We encountered this version of ideology in the last chapter. Darwin could not reveal nature for what it was, but rather had to reinterpret nature as it had been given historically by the theologians. In so doing, Darwin did more than just import the theological concept of adaptation and the premise of design into his theory; he borrowed much of its rhetoric and grandiosity as well. Marx’s second conception of ideology placed it in a more political context. As he put it, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”5 The priority Marx gave to the ideas of the ruling class derives from their control of the means of production. In Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx made his privileging of economics more explicit. The “economic structure of society [provides] the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.”6 If Darwin’s engagement with natural theology provided a powerful demonstration of Marx’s first conception of ideology, then Darwin’s discovery of evolution gave us equally good reason to support Marx’s second conception. In his eulogy at Marx’s funeral, Friedrich Engels justified the primacy accorded to the economic realm in explicitly Darwinian terms: Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and

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consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved.7

Generally our priority is our own survival and it is reasonable to expect this priority to be manifest at the level of our social arrangements. In capitalist societies, this means the dominant interpretations tend to reflect, by virtue of their control over the means of survival, the interests of the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, Marx’s attitude toward Darwin was an ambivalent one. Despite honoring Darwin’s work as having provided the “basis in natural science for the historical class struggle” he could not help noticing the reflection of bourgeois norms and values in Darwin’s portrayal of nature.8 In a letter to Engels in 1862, he wrote: It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, “inventions” and Malthusian “struggle for existence.” It is Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes and is reminiscent of Hegel’s Phenomenology, in which civil society figures as an “intellectual animal kingdom,” whereas, in Darwin, the animal kingdom figures as civil society.9

Darwin’s conservative interpretations of nature broadly correspond with the reception of his work. Darwin always maintained a broad appeal across the political spectrum, but his work has been exploited most effectively by the right, and in particular, exponents of the free market. Initially inspired by the classical economists, Darwin would come to influence generations of economists himself as his theory rapidly spread across Europe in a triumphalist age of capital.10 The left have never had much truck with this marriage of convenience. Engels described the procedure by which biological interpretations of nature, originally borrowed from social theories, are then recycled by social theorists (only with the added acclaim of being “natural,” and therefore “scientific”) as a “conjurer’s trick” so “puerile” that “not a word need be said about it.”11 Little more need be said, for now, of social Darwinism, but Darwin’s reliance on classical economics and the continued appeal of economic theory to Darwinism does merit further examination. Much of the critical discussion has centered upon ideology in the first two senses.12 Darwin could not passively reveal nature for what it was, he had to actively produce it in his texts. The array of images and metaphors he used to piece nature together were indicative of the context in which he was embedded. Born into significant wealth (his relatives, the Wedgewoods, were powerful pottery manufacturers), Darwin’s interpretations of nature reflected

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his lineage as he wrote of “profit, increments, persistence, diligence, inheritance, saving, utility, progress through competition”—the “common coin” of “Victorian social and economic discourse.”13 However, explanations that revolve around Darwin’s inheritance and social milieu do not go far enough, in my view, toward explaining the specific reliance of Darwin’s theory on the ideas of the free market. Marx’s concept of ideology always went beyond the mere observation that interpretations reflect and naturalize the interests of the capitalist class. For Marx, ideology “has hitherto always developed within the framework of a contradiction.”14 In classical political economy, this contradiction expresses itself in appeals to an “isolated individual outside society” that somehow bears the secrets of the individual in society’s “midst.”15 Marx held that this contradiction reflected contradictions inherent to the material relations of production that alienated workers from themselves and each other. Foucault rejected this conception of contradiction on the grounds that there was no material process, beyond interpretation that any contradiction could passively reflect.16 In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault explicitly criticized Marxist and psychoanalytic discourses for establishing contradictions as “the very law of [their] existence [. . .] the basis upon which discourse emerges.”17 As if contradiction revealed something true and essential about nature or thought, or both. Foucault’s preferred terrain of analysis was the empirical sciences themselves; an analysis that revealed ideological contradictions internal to discourse. (Foucault reminds us in “What is an Author?” that when a “historically given function is represented in a figure that inverts it, one has an ideological production.”18) In fact, Marx was amenable to this kind of analysis, observing in Theories of Surplus Value the internal nature of the contradictions embedded in the work of Adam Smith: Adam Smith’s contradictions are of significance because they contain problems which it is true he does not solve, but which he reveals by contradicting himself. His correct instinct in this connection is best shown by the fact that his successors take opposing stands based on one aspect of his teaching or the other.19

This observation captures the fate of the empirical sciences. Caught between representation and interpretation, wishing the status of the former, while embroiled in the latter, the empirical sciences, Foucault wrote, are no more than “warped and twisted forms of reflection.”20 To put it in more explicitly political terms, the “empirical sciences” become ideological when they present their interpretations as representations—“ruling interpretations” in other words—that should prevail over other interpretations. When Darwinists make such claims, they suffer the same fate. In the previous chapter, we left Darwin reeling from his discovery that there may be no more sense to evolutionary

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history than the course with which the wind blows. Darwin’s overtures to economics must be understood as an effort to elicit a single history from evolution. The emphasis Darwin placed upon struggle in the economy of nature reflected more than bourgeois values. At the heart of its appeal was an entity that could transcend the counter-scientific implications of the relation; an agent that could provide the basis for a “scientific,” or “ruling” interpretation of evolutionary history. This promise has never been fulfilled. Darwin’s attempt, as he himself would partially recognize, was beset with internal contradictions, ultimately testifying to the impossibility of containing his theory within the confines of science. IDENTIFYING EVOLUTION: A MALTHUSIAN STRUGGLE The bond between economics and biology has been a staple of Western thought ever since Linnaeus’s treatise Oeconomia Naturae in 1749. In his classic History of European Thought, John Theodore Merz described physiology and economics as “joined by the hand” and one need only glance at the work of many of Darwin’s antecedents from Alexander von Humboldt, William Paley, and Charles Lyell to appreciate this.21 In The Origin, it is the French zoologist Henri Milne-Edwards who Darwin credited with elucidating what he called the “economy of nature.”22 In his Elemens de Zoologie (1834), Milne-Edwards had likened “the principle which seems to have guided nature in the perfection of beings [to] the one which has had the greatest influence upon the progress of human industry: the division of labour.”23 When Darwin originally picked up a paper by the economist Thomas Malthus, he was already, as he put it, “well prepared to appreciate” its potential relevance to the study of nature.24 In this paper, Malthus observed that human populations naturally increase at a faster rate than the means of subsistence. From this “natural law,” Malthus inferred that there must be “a perpetual struggle for room and food” between tribes, some of which will become “great and powerful” while others will be “utterly exterminated.”25 Darwin applied this law to nature as a whole and made the same inference. “As more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence.”26 Finally Darwin had “a theory by which to work.”27 But which theory? What Darwin had extracted from Malthus was a way to identify the history of life. Evolution became the differential success of different lineages; some of which survived and grew in size, others which became extinct (TfE). Darwin’s identification of evolution had two distinguishing features. First, it identified living beings as separate from non-living entities. Previous evolutionary theories had not done this. For example, Lamarck’s theory, had

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endowed the conditions of life with the power to express themselves directly upon living forms, blurring the distinction between the animate and the inanimate. Darwin’s alternative formulation “lay very little weight on the direct conditions of life.”28 As he put it later in The Variation of Plants and Animals: [The] nature of the variation depends but little on the conditions to which the [organism] has been exposed, and not in any especial manner on its individual character, but much more on the inherited nature or constitution of the whole group of allied beings to which the [organism] in question belongs.29

Second, Darwin identified all levels of life in a single ontology. Previous evolutionary theories had not done this either, generally persisting with the priority that Classical taxonomists had placed upon the general over the specific—“the characters do not give the genus, but the genus gives the characters” as Darwin wrote of Linnaeus.30 Darwin’s “tree of life” showed all living things in a single representation. Species lost its status as an essential category as all levels of life were revealed on a single ontological plane: I look at the term “species,” as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily, and for mere convenience sake.31

If species were purely “artificial combinations made for convenience,” the tree of life, promised to provide other, hitherto metaphorical concepts used by naturalists, with precise, literal, meanings: The terms used by naturalists of affinity, relationship, community of type, paternity, morphology, adaptive characters, rudimentary and aborted organs, etc., will cease to be metaphorical, and will have a plain signification (my emphasis).32

However, what are advantages from the perspective of identifying evolution turned out to be disadvantages for accounting for evolutionary causes. STRUGGLE, DEPENDENCE, AND THE PROBLEM OF ENDLESS RELATIONS To identify a cause, Darwin’s TfNS would first have to reunite life with its conditions of existence and identify a level that gets selected. Malthus’s

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conclusion that a “struggle for room and food” would follow a population exceeding its means of subsistence was justified on the grounds that humans have agency and therefore maybe consciously competing to survive and procreate.33 The beauty and, as it turns out, great confusion of Darwin’s extrapolation from Malthus was that his was explicitly an “unconscious process of selection” (more on this in the next chapter). Aware of the difference, Darwin qualified his inference. While in the case of his TfE, the struggle for existence is merely an accounting device, in his TfNS, the struggle for existence was meant in metaphorical sense, including “dependence of one being on another [. . .] a plant on the edge of a desert is more properly said to be dependent on the moisture.”34 The metaphor of dependence is Darwin’s counter-scientific solution to the paired problem of defining the conditions and entity of selection; neither have a strict identity, rather they are defined in relation to each other. There is no environment as such, only particular environments. Likewise, there is no organic entity as such, only particular entities selected in their environments. This was not so much a solution, however, as a reiteration of the problem and Darwin was dissatisfied. Having implied that relations between living things maybe “more properly” expressed by the metaphor of dependence, Darwin only called upon it ten times in The Origin (compare this to his eighty-two uses of the metaphor of struggle).35 Why so? Examining the occasions when Darwin actually used the metaphor of dependence in The Origin suggests it was indeed the counter-scientific implications of the metaphor that made Darwin most uncomfortable. In his chapter on “Instincts,” Darwin noted that while natural selection demands some degree of heritable variation to work upon, identifying which variations are inherited and which are merely features of the environment can be very difficult—“So it is with the nests of birds” that vary both according to the “instinct” but also “in dependence on the situations chosen, and on the nature and temperature of the country inhabited, [and] from causes wholly unknown to us.”36,37 Nests, it transpires, are both a character of the bird and part of a bird’s environment. When the metaphor of dependence wasn’t problematizing the distinction between organisms and their environments, it helped expose the endless complexity that consideration of relations as a whole entails—as when Darwin described the intricate relations of cats and flowers: [The] number of mice is largely dependent, as every one knows, on the number of cats; and Col. Newman says, “Near villages and small towns I have found the nests of humble bees more numerous than elsewhere, which I attribute to the number of cats that destroy the mice.” Hence it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district!38

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Presumably, the number of cats is dependent on the number of people and so the web of relations continues. In this vein, Darwin used the clause of dependency as a way of qualifying the role of any single selection process. Having constructed an argument for the evolution of honey collecting among bees, Darwin warned us against any simplifying picture: Of course the success of any species of bee may be dependent on the number of its parasites or other enemies, or on quite distinct causes [. . .] altogether independent of the quantity of honey which the bees could collect.39

If Darwin was uncomfortable with the metaphor of dependence, it is because it confronted him with the fundamental incomprehensibility of the relation. “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere.”40 Henry James considered this to be a problem for the artist not the scientist. Determined to perform the role of the latter, Darwin sought a resolution in the metaphor of struggle. Using the example of the parasitic plant of the mistletoe that is “dependent” on the trees upon which it grows and therefore “can only in a far-fetched sense be said to struggle” with them, Darwin considered several interpretations in which the metaphor of “struggle” maybe more apposite before subordinating all cases of relations to a metaphorical struggle: But several seedling mistletoes, growing close together on the same branch, may more truly be said to struggle with each other. As the mistletoe is disseminated by birds, its existence depends on birds; and it may metaphorically be said to struggle with other fruit-bearing plants. [In] these several senses, which pass into each other, I use for convenience sake the general term of struggle for existence.41

The purpose of this example was to show that if even a plant as dependent as the mistletoe could be described as struggling for its existence, then surely every other organic entity could as well. Darwin’s hope was that the metaphor of struggle could overcome the problems entailed by the metaphor of dependence through simplifying the relation between organisms and their environments. The inspiration for this move did not come from Malthus, but Adam Smith. IDENTIFYING CAUSES: A SMITHIAN STRUGGLE Failure to distinguish Darwin’s use of Malthus and Smith is quite common in the Darwinian literature. Arguably the confusion began with Adam Smith who, inspired by the self-regulating machines of the eighteenth century, had

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explicitly proposed a mechanistic theory of history. To understand Smith’s relevance to Darwin, it is helpful to locate Smith in the epistemic contours of his time. The problem Smith confronted (and the problem Darwin hoped Smith could solve) was a problem of history.42 Smith sought to demystify history through revealing the “hidden chains of events which bind [them] together,” rebuking what he called the “savage” superstition that they could be ascribed to the “agency and power of the Gods.”43 In The Wealth of Nations, Smith proposed a reductionist explanation for the workings of society—the spontaneous order we experience as society is merely the accumulation of individuals striving independently in their own self-interest.44 A power of causation that had once been invested in the agency of the Gods Smith deposited in the individual. If the frailties of the Modern episteme had motivated Cuvier and Paley’s appeal to the principle of perfection and a theological premise of design to underpin it, Smith’s response was to double down on the principle of identity. Darwin first encountered Smith’s economics through Dugald Stewart’s biography, and then later via J. R. McCulloch. In his Principles of Political Economy (1825), McCulloch rendered Smith’s model accordingly: Every individual is constantly exerting himself to find out the most advantageous methods of employing his capital and labor. It is true, that it is his own advantage, and not that of the society, which he has in view; but a society being nothing more than a collection of individuals, it is plain that each, in steadily pursuing his own aggrandisement, is following that precise line of conduct which is most for the public advantage.45

The Origin is an unapologetic application of this principle to nature, containing causes exclusively at the level of individuals. Natural selection, Darwin wrote, “will adapt the structure of each individual for the benefit of the community [only] if each in consequence profits by the selected change”; or as he also put it, selection will only take place in “so far as it profits the individual in its complex struggle for life.”46 Parsing this reductionist argument conveniently required jettisoning the metaphor of dependence by presenting the individual as independent of its conditions. Testifying to the symbiotic relation of economics and biology, Smith drew evidence from the natural world, observing that in almost every “race of animals each individual, when it is grown up to maturity, is entirely independent, and in its natural state has occasion for the assistance of no another living creature” and used this as the basis for his ethos of self-interest. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”47 In the same vein, Darwin presented animals as independently willing their own

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increase: “There is no exception to the rule that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair.”48 This rule presents organisms as striving independently to survive and procreate against the countervailing forces of the environment—the exact opposite of organisms dependent upon the environment for their survival and procreation. This may only appear a minor slip in emphasizing the inevitability of death and extinction. But it also served another purpose. It identified individual organisms as the unique site of selection by endowing them with the agency. If Malthus had been justified in inferring a struggle for existence based on human consciousness, Darwin attempted to resolve the problem of what gets selected by effectively endowing organisms with the same property: In looking at nature, it is most necessary to keep the foregoing considerations always in mind—never to forget that every single organic being around us may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers.49

By singling out organisms in this way Darwin was ruling out selection at higher levels. Darwin was aware that his deductive argument had opened the door to selection at multiple levels and devoted a great deal of space in The Origin to defending the exclusive selection of individual organisms. The greatest challenge came in explaining sterility among the social insects and hybrids, as sterility is a character that self-evidently cannot be propagated directly by selection. How could its evolution be explained except through recourse to the good of the group?50 In the case of sterility in ants, group selection did not just appear to be the obvious explanation, but also Darwin’s own explanation: How the workers have been rendered sterile is a difficulty; but not much greater than that of any other striking modification of structure; for it can be shown that some insects and other articulate animals in a state of nature occasionally become sterile; and if such insects had been social, and it had been profitable to the community that a number should have been annually born capable of work, but incapable of procreation, I can see no very great difficulty in this being effected by natural selection.51

As Darwin’s discussion developed, however, it became clear that he had in mind natural selection in the “ordinary” sense, albeit acting in the specifically out of the ordinary state of worker ants.52 Beginning with an analogy to the longhorns found in castrated oxen through the artificial selection of bulls and cows, Darwin pointed out it is not the struggle between sterile workers but the struggle between the parents we should be considering; “by the

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long-continued selection of the fertile parents which produced most neuters with the profitable modification, all the neuters ultimately came to have the desired character.”53 On this view, the desired character of sterility actually belongs to the fertile parent.54 However, one cannot seek recourse in the fitness of fertile parents in the case of sterility among hybrids as it serves, for example, neither the interest of the jack or the mare to produce a sterile mule. The general view of naturalists at the time was that sterility among hybrids served the functional purpose of preserving their adaptive integrity for the good of the species. For Darwin, committed to individual selection alone, the status of sterility as a “specially created endowment” among hybrids would be a “fatal” for his theory.55 For this reason, it was important that he show that sterility was “incidental on other acquired differences.”56 After a chapter considering the topic, Darwin concluded that there is no more reason to think that species have been specially endowed with various degrees of sterility to prevent them crossing and blending in nature, than to think that trees have been specially endowed with various and somewhat analogous degrees of difficulty in being grafted together in order to prevent them becoming inarched in our forests.57

Darwin continued to consider group selection in general and the sterility of hybrids in particular throughout the 1860s, adding to subsequent editions of The Origin, engaging in a lengthy correspondence with Wallace and devoting a chapter to the subject in The Variation of Plants and Animals.58 This only emboldened Darwin in his view. By the end of the decade, as Michael Ruse concluded, “there was nothing implicit about Darwin’s commitment to individual selection. He had looked long and hard at group selection and rejected it.”59 Darwin had offered a solution to the problem of identifying what gets selected, but what about the problem of identifying the environment? The virtue of the metaphor of struggle is not just that it implies agency but that it implies different agents struggling against one another. Strictly speaking Darwin’s TfNS only stipulates a relation between an organism and its environment. However, if the uniquely important component of that environment is other organisms, then the struggle for existence locates not just the entity of selection, but the principal conditions of selection as well. Above all, it confined environmental causes to the preferred lower level. Smith’s reductionist economics had explicitly bypassed higher-level “cultural” causes in human behavior treating interaction “strictly from the point of view of individual gain.”60 Circumventing higher-level causes was less tenable for Darwin whose commitment to the principle of relation necessitated a consideration of the environment as a whole. This created problems, for even if selection was

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exclusive to the individual, if the interaction that comprises selection takes place at all scales of nature then we are still confronted with the bewildering complexity of relations that threatens the status of a budding “historical science.” At the highest level, Darwin could not ignore the role of climate in “determining the average number of species” in a given annual cycle.61 However, Darwin was unwilling to grant parity to this higher-level cause, opting instead to marginalize it in the service of his reductionist account. Darwin proposed that the effects of climate can only be properly understood in the context of a competitive struggle for existence: The action of climate seems at first sight to be quite independent of the struggle for existence; but in so far as climate chiefly acts in reducing food, it brings on the most severe struggle between the individuals.62 While it might appear as if extreme climate is directly responsible for extinction of species, Darwin insisted this was a “very false view.”63

Rather, the direct cause comes “from enemies or from competitors for the same place and food” that have been “favoured by any slight change of climate.” I regard this as one of the weakest arguments in The Origin—one that reveals just how determined Darwin was to parse his reductionist argument.64 Having subordinated the climate to the struggle for existence Darwin was in a position to posit “the relation of organism to organism” as “the most important of all relations.”65 In a move that satisfied the twin objectives of identifying both the agent and environment, Darwin concluded the chapter with the submission that the “struggle for existence” will be “most severe between the individuals of the same species.”66 Darwin’s justification for this priority was at first empirical; individuals of the same species will compete because they generally occupy “the same districts, require the same food, and are exposed to the same dangers.”67 But elsewhere in The Origin, Darwin suggested that the competition to which organic beings are exposed is shown “philosophically” (i.e., logically).68 The value Darwin placed on struggle and competition in the history of life was born not primarily from experience but from his objective of amalgamating his two theories into a single scientific argument. Darwin hoped that his identification of evolution could also provide a “scientific” interpretation of history. If evolution was the differential survival of evolutionary lineages, then wasn’t history best interpreted as a competition between what differentially survives? This need not necessarily have been individual organisms, but by fixing selection at the level of the individual Darwin could add an empirical struggle to a logical argument. History could become deductive. However, Darwin was nothing if not meticulous, and persistent discomfort with tying his logical and empirical

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arguments together ultimately brought him to propose a further principle, that he ranked second only to natural selection in importance in his life’s work. This principle represented the apex of his economic inspired argument and appeared also to guarantee the union of his two theories. On closer inspection, however, the principle only served to make the deficiencies of Darwin’s metaphor more patent. PRINCIPLE OF DIVERGENCE = STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE Darwin revealed the degree of significance he placed upon his “principle of divergence” in his autobiography: “I can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me.”69 This passage is often attributed to Darwin’s discovery of Malthus in 1838 but the revelation was actually a solution to “the gravest objection,” which could be leveled against his Malthusian deduction. Aside from not identifying either the entity or conditions of selection, Darwin’s Malthusian deduction could not actually guarantee evolution. Variations of Darwin’s deductive argument had been proposed before Darwin, but rather than being invoked as an agent of change it was proposed as an agent of conservation. Edward Blythe suggested that natural selection was the means by which “the original and typical forms” of life were “kept up” by eliminating unfit variants that strayed too far from an optimal norm.70 It is worth pausing to reflect on the irony here. Darwin was initially inspired to pick up Malthus’s paper from his apprehension of the shared affinity of the “economy of man” and the “economy of nature,” but having deduced a theory of evolution from Malthus, Darwin could not guarantee that it would actually produce the division of labor and complex economy of forms that had originally served as the basis of this affinity. Darwin’s “principle of divergence” was supposed to bridge this gap.71 Darwin identified diversity both within and between organisms and attributed to them the same advantage. As he put it, “The advantage of diversification in the inhabitants of the same region is, in fact, the same as that of the physiological division of labor in the organs of the same individual body.”72 Just as the division of labor in economics promised to maximize profits, Darwin saw divergence in nature as a way to guarantee the maximization of life: No physiologist doubts that a stomach by being adapted to digest vegetable matter alone, or flesh alone, draws most nutriment from these substances. So in the general economy of any land, the more widely and perfectly the animals

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and plants are diversified for different habits of life, so will a greater number of individuals be capable of there supporting themselves.73

However, the fact that diversity could be observed at different scales posed a prima facie problem for Darwin’s reductionist argument. If a divergence of characters serves to benefit the individual, then couldn’t diversity between individuals serve the group? Even while his ideas on the matter were not fully formed, Darwin was adamant this was not the case. In this long note penned in 1855, pay particular attention to the final comment in parentheses: Now in considering amount of life supported in given area, besides size as an element, as in trees and elephants, besides period of nonaction during winter in cold climates, I think some such element as amount of chemical change should if possible be taken as measure of life, viz. amount of carbonic acid expired or oxygen in plants. I have been led to this by looking at a heath thickly clothed by heather, and a fertile meadow, both crowded, yet one cannot doubt more life supported in second than in first; and hence (in part) more animals are supported. This is not final cause but mere result from struggle (I must think out last proposition).74

Darwin’s hunch and hope was that the struggle for existence between individuals could explain divergence across all scales of nature.75 It would take three more years for Darwin to think out this last proposition. In 1858, Darwin’s outline of the “principle of divergence” was one of the papers presented to the Linnaean Society along with Russel Wallace’s paper. Its advocacy for the privileged role for the struggle for existence between individual organisms was unequivocal: [The] principle of divergence, plays, I believe, an important part in the origin of species. The same spot will support more life if occupied by very diverse forms. [. . .] We know that it has been experimentally shown that a plot of land will yield a greater weight if sown with several species and genera of grasses, than if sown with only two or three species. Now, every organic being, by propagating so rapidly, may be said to be striving its utmost to increase in numbers. So it will be with the offspring of any species after it has become diversified into varieties, or subspecies, or true species. And it follows, I think, from the foregoing facts, that the varying offspring of each species will try (only few will succeed) to seize on as many and as diverse places in the economy of nature as possible. Each new variety or species, when formed, will generally take the place of, and thus exterminate its less well-fitted parent. This I believe to be the origin of the classification and affinities of organic beings at all times.76

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To parse the argument that the entire gamut of nature’s complex diversity could be accounted for by a struggle between organisms alone, Darwin had to insist upon the primacy of competition and, in turn, upon the conditions under which competition would thrive. It is here that we find the closest correspondence between Darwin and Smith. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith had specified three conditions by which a society could develop from a simple rude state composed of few occupations to a complex civilized society composed of an almost “infinite variety” of occupations.77 Darwin’s “principle of divergence” stipulates essentially the same conditions for the development of complex divergent forms. (1) Competition in large breeding groups: Smith tied the division of labor to the size of the market, judging that “when the market is very small no person can have any encouragement to dedicate himself entirely to one employment” (in small villages “every farmer must be butcher, baker, and brewer”78). It is only “populous countries” that can support a complex division of labor.79 Analogously Darwin judged that the relatively smaller degree of variation in isolated areas acts as a “check on competition” and therefore stunts adaptation. With limited divergence, smaller environments wouldn’t be able to support as much life.80 Alternatively, in large breeding groups, the greater availability of variation would provide the process of selection with more material to work with: Although I do not doubt that isolation is of considerable importance in the production of new species, on the whole I am inclined to believe that largeness of area is of more importance [. . . .] Throughout a great and open area [. . .] there will be a better chance of favourable variations arising.81

(2) Competition and niche creation: Competition in “extensive markets,” Smith argued, doesn’t simply provide the conditions for a division of labor; it is what generates it. As he put it, competition is what occasions the “separation of different trades and employments from one another.”82 Competition equally serves as the architect of diversity in Darwin’s “principle of divergence.” No great physical change is “actually necessary to produce new and unoccupied places for natural selection” when “all inhabitants of each country are struggling together.” The fine balance of forces means that any “slight modification in the structure or habits of one inhabitant” is sufficient to trigger a new selection process.83 Other organisms would be forced to improve “in a corresponding degree or they will be exterminated.”84 In Darwin’s hypothetical case of a carnivorous quadruped that could only increase its numbers by seizing a new place in the polity of nature, Darwin was keen to stress that the place wasn’t unoccupied; but rather a place already occupied (and presumably also fostered) “by other animals.”85

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(3) Competition and the elimination of parent forms: Once competition initiates a division of labor, then specialization is further accelerated, Smith argued, by the “the rivalship of competitors who are all endeavouring to justle one another out of employment [sic].”86 Competition between extreme variants and their more original forms plays a similar role in Darwin’s “principle of divergence”: There will be a constant tendency in the improved descendants of any one species to supplant and exterminate in each stage of descent their predecessors and their original parent. For it should be remembered that the competition will generally be most severe between those forms which are most nearly related to each other in habits, constitution, and structure.87

The effect of this is to accelerate divergence as “the intermediate forms” between the “less and more improved state of species” will generally become extinct ensuring a steady process of diversification and improvement.88 From “branching out and seizing on many new places in the polity of nature” Darwin wrote, new variants will “constantly tend to supplant and destroy the earlier and less improved” forms.89 Smith and Darwin’s affinity lies in a shared resolve to decipher the problem of diversity from a single cause. Anyone with “the inclination to examine,” the economy of a civilized state, Smith wrote, is presented with “an almost infinite variety of objects” that can be subjected to “endless comparisons and combinations.”90 However, this bewildering prospect could be averted, Smith submitted, by examining the self-interest of its actors. This was also Darwin’s solution. Darwin proposed that the bewildering array of diversity observed in nature could be explained by the struggle between individual organisms.91 By equating the division of labor to diversity in the economy of nature, Darwin was appealing to the popular perception, which held there to be correspondence between the economy of man and the economy of nature. More importantly, he was appealing to the closest union between his two theories. The only figure Darwin used in The Origin appears midway through his discussion on divergence; it is reproduced here as figure 5.1. On first inspection, the diagram appears to represent the branching process of evolution. The three pages of surrounding text make clear it is actually an illustration of his “principle of divergence.” The horizontal axis denotes degree of variation and the vertical axis denotes time (each horizontal line representing a thousand generations). The letters “A” to “L” represent a set of genera placed in the order to which they vary from each other. Each genus produces a fan of descendants that differ not only from their parents but also from each other. The diagram reveals that the most successful descendants are generally those that lie at the extreme end of each fan. Of the original set only “A,” “F,” and “I” have

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Figure 5.1  Reproduced with permission from John van Wyhe ed. 2002-. The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online. (http://darwin-online.org.uk/).

produced descendants alive to the present day, and while the descendants from “F” have been little modified over time (owing perhaps to their isolation and therefore insulation from competition), descendants from “A” and “I” are those that have varied most from the original form. The diagram provides a visual representation of the struggle for existence. The relative success of extreme variants is represented by the competitive advantage they enjoy over their closest relatives. That is, the fan of descendants that differentially survive also represent the principal conditions of selection that pit allied forms in the closest competition. Proximity in the diagram represents both a degree of likeness and degree of competition (those most closely related are also in the closest competition). The diagram represents diversity at all scales; however, Darwin proposed that diversity at the lowest scale, manifest in the competition between the closest variants, is the ultimate cause of diversity at the highest scale. It is significant that it was only after Darwin had identified this model of evolutionary change, a model in which change is generated in the competition between struggling organisms, that he saw fit to introduce his tree of life metaphor. In his exposition of this metaphor note how careful he was to emphasize the war of nature: The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. The green and budding twigs may represent existing species; and those produced during

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each former year may represent the long succession of extinct species. At each period of growth all the growing twigs have tried to branch out on all sides, and to overtop and kill the surrounding twigs and branches, in the same manner as species and groups of species have tried to overmaster other species in the great battle for life (my emphasis).92

The close proximity of Darwin’s “tree of life” metaphor and the tree-like figure of the “principle of divergence” has fed the popular misconception that the figure was used to illustrate the branching process of evolution.93 However, could this “misconception” be indicative of a deeper intention? If the figure resembles the visual representation of evolution, he was to describe only a few pages later, maybe this was because it was supposed to. By presenting the “principle of divergence” in this way, Darwin was able to equate the struggle for existence interpreted by Smith as the overt competition between closely related organisms, with the struggle represented by Malthus in the differential survival of lineages. This equation, he hoped, could identify the historical causes of evolution with the same degree of precision as evolution. Darwin’s “principle of divergence” represents his most audacious attempt to unite his two theories. The literal struggle for existence was an accounting device charting the differential survival of allied forms. Darwin sought to bring this process to life in a metaphorical struggle between these allied forms, transforming the branching tree of evolution into a visual representation of the causes of evolutionary history. His attempt failed. As much as Darwin wished to encapsulate all evolution in the metaphor of struggle he kept getting tripped up by the counter-scientific implications of the relation. PRINCIPLE OF DIVERGENCE ≠ STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE Darwin was aware of the multitude of problems entailed by the struggle for existence. In The Origin, he put some of them on hold, resolving to address them “in more detail” in a “future work.”94 This future work was the “big species” book Darwin had already begun writing at the time he received the letter from Wallace. Darwin had still intended to publish the book in his own lifetime but ill-health prevented him from finishing it. The incomplete manuscript was finally published in 1975 under the title Natural Selection.95 True to his word the struggle for existence is discussed at much greater length. Certain differences between Darwin’s two theories were irreconcilable. TfE contains the problem of divergence between living things. By defining organisms and environments in relation with each other, TfNS extends the problem of divergence to the environment; for any diversification of

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organisms necessarily entails a corollary diversification of its living conditions. Darwin’s “principle of divergence” hinges upon it. As he put it, “The more diversified the descendants from any one species become in structure, constitution, and habits, by so much will they be better enabled to seize on many and widely diversified places in the polity of nature.”96 But rather than support his argument, it reignites all the problems associated with dependence. It may have been for this reason that Darwin downplayed the role of inorganic conditions of existence, and, mirroring TfE, contained divergence between living things. In The Origin, he emphasizes that the complex relation of organisms derives “in large part on the presence of other species”:97 [The] most important of all causes of organic change is one which is almost independent of altered and perhaps suddenly altered physical conditions, namely, the mutual relation of organism to organism.98

In Natural Selection, Darwin went further, arguing that while relations between organisms become more complex as they diversify, their relation to “inorganic conditions [. . .] do not tend to become infinitely more varied.”99 However, relegating the role of inorganic conditions only served to compound the dependence of organisms upon other organisms they were ostensibly struggling against. Darwin frequently preferred to put this to the back of his mind. In Natural Selection, he sought to resolve this problem by confining relations of dependence to organisms “remote in the scale of nature” thereby preserving the sense of struggle between closely related organisms. To justify this proposition Darwin had drawn upon, by way of analogy, the competitive economic conditions Smith had stipulated for the generation of a division of labor. And yet competition was even more important for Darwin’s argument than it had been for Smith. Smith’s economics was premised upon the rational self-interest of economic actors. Smith afforded the individual an ontological priority that preceded empirical considerations. Cooperation within larger firms did not violate Smith’s system so long as these entities served the rational self-interest of its actors. Darwin could not rely upon this ontological priority. If the full gamut of evolution was to be reduced to the interaction between individual organisms, then this would have to be demonstrated empirically. Above all, cases that seemed to favor cooperation in groups would have to be shown to be reducible to competition among the individuals that composed them. In other words, competition in Darwin’s argument served the purpose not simply of identifying causes but of excluding them as well—and it is here that Darwin’s argument fell apart. (1) Competition in large breeding groups: Just as a complex division of labor relies upon a large market, so will it thrive in large firms. In what today would be referred to as the advantages of economies of scale, Smith gave the

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example of the comparative production of pin manufacturers. Larger manufacturers, “divided into a number of branches” could produce many more pins than a firm that employed only a few employees performing “two or three distinct operations’ each.100 Observing advantages of economies of scale in nature, Darwin was sometimes motivated to extend the analogy of struggle to levels higher than the individual organism as when he described “species” and “varieties” of “striving [their] utmost to increase in numbers.”101 Is Darwin advocating group selection? Not if, as Darwin believed, competition between groups is ultimately reducible to the competition between individuals: Not only do the individuals of each group strive one against the other, but each group itself with all its members some more numerous, some less, are struggling against all other groups, as indeed follows from each individual struggling.102

This note provides particularly clear evidence, I believe, of Darwin’s genuine confusion. Reduction is permissible for the purposes of identifying evolution (TfE) for in this case groups are indeed no more than the sum of their members. But causes must, by definition, be irreducible for if a cause is reducible to a lower scale it ceases to be a cause and becomes an effect. This is actually borne out by one of Darwin’s examples. Darwin specified his preference for selection in large breeding groups not just from the greater availability of variation, but also the greater vulnerability to extinction of smaller groups. As he put it “any form represented by few individuals will, during fluctuations in the seasons or in the number of its enemies, run a good chance of utter extinction.”103 How else are we to characterize this advantage except as a numerical one; one that, by definition, is only disclosed at the level of the group? (2) Competition and niche creation: Smith could argue that a division of labor arises from competition on the basis that workmen consciously compete—that is they are sufficiently “educated to [the] business” that they realize they can gain a competitive advantage from devoting their energies to specialized tasks.104 Moreover, they are specializing in tasks that other workmen are already performing, if less efficiently. Neither of these conditions apply in the case of Darwin’s “principle of divergence.” In fact, in seizing a new place in the polity of nature, organisms are rewarded precisely for evading competition. Consider Darwin’s analogies from artificial selection: A fancier is struck by a pigeon having a slightly shorter beak; another fancier is struck by a pigeon having a rather longer beak; and on the acknowledged principle that “fanciers do not and will not admire a medium standard, but like extremes,” they both go on (as has actually occurred with tumbler-pigeons) choosing and breeding from birds with longer and longer beaks, or with shorter and shorter beaks. Again, we may suppose that at an early period one man

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preferred swifter horses; another stronger and more bulky horses. [. . .] Here, then, we see in man’s productions the action of what may be called the principle of divergence, causing differences, at first barely appreciable, steadily to increase, and the breeds to diverge in character both from each other and from their common parent.105

In neither example is diversification prompted by competition. Shorterbeaked pigeons are not in competition with longer-beaked pigeons, still less do they replace them. Equally, the separate preferences of fanciers serve to insulate swifter and stronger horses from competing against one another. Darwin was reluctant to acknowledge this dimension to his argument, highlighting instead the “constant tendency” of modified forms to “supplant and exterminate” their less modified predecessors.106 Such is Darwin’s eagerness to emphasize the role of competitive replacement in his “principle of divergence” that in one passage the whole basis for the principle—that modified offspring discover new and separate stations—is consigned to a caveat!: [All] the intermediate forms between the earlier and later states, that is between the less and more improved state of a species, as well as the original parentspecies itself, will generally tend to become extinct. So it probably will be with many whole collateral lines of descent, which will be conquered by later and improved lines of descent. If, however, the modified offspring of a species [become] adapted to some quite new station, in which child and parent do not come into competition, both may continue to exist (my emphasis).107

(3) Competition and the elimination of parent forms: Smith took the freedom and rationality of individuals as a priori given. Rarely did he justify his assumption. He sought, rather, to provide the most rational economic arrangement for the flourishing of individual freedom and wealth accumulation. This, he argued, was found in the complex division of labor of advanced societies. The one exception to this rule is when he considered the possibility that a complex division of labor, taken to a logical absurdity, could endanger the very rational self-interest of the individuals it was supposed to serve: “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations [. . .] generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”108 Darwin treated the principle that “the greatest amount of life can be supported by great diversification of structure” as equally axiomatic. In Natural Selection, however, he considered an equally disquieting scenario. If diversification was pervasive and inexorable, may there not come a time “when there will be almost as many specific forms as individuals?” (i.e., as many species as individuals).109 Darwin ruled this possibility out, invoking the numerical advantage larger groups enjoy over smaller groups

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(see point i) as a “regulator or fly-wheel” against “further modification.”110 Here group selection is offered as a counter-weight to the universal advantage of specialization enjoyed by the individual. Having gone to extreme lengths to avoid group selection in cases of social insects and hybridism, Darwin must have only very reluctantly ceded to it for his “principle of divergence.” However, by seeking a resolution in the negative feedback of group selection, Darwin could avoid a more uncomfortable implication of his thought experiment. Darwin’s reductio ad absurdum does not simply provide a protoargument for group selection, but highlights precisely the limitation of defining relations as a zero-sum game. Individuals of the same species may often be in close competition, but they must, by definition, also be in the closest cooperation. There is no adaptive advantage to being the fittest member of a species if one is also the only member of the species. Darwin could not avoid this problem and in his presentation of the struggle for existence in Natural Selection, he added a disclaimer so vast that it probably absorbs all animal behavior: That part of the complex term struggle for existence, which is more correctly expressed by dependency, generally relates to organic beings remote in the scale of nature; & individuals of the same species are hardly ever dependent on each other, excepting in their sexual, parental & social relationship (my emphasis).111

This disclaimer is noticeably absent from The Origin. At the heart of Darwin’s commitment to the struggle for existence lay his preoccupation with uniting his two theories. If the causes of evolution could be confined to the differences between organic forms, then this might provide the basis for a science of history. The torturous, lengths Darwin went to justify the universality of the struggle for existence and the pre-eminence of the “principle of divergence” at least showed that Darwin realized he had to make the case. If history did resemble a tree of life composed of branches and twigs battling one another in the struggle for life (the anomaly of which should probably have alerted him to the futility of the exercise), this would have to be demonstrated. What Darwin knew he couldn’t do was simply merge the two theories by fiat, and locate the causes of differences between living things in the very differences themselves. Nothing could be more bogus, Darwin warned in the conclusion to The Origin, than “to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact.”112 Incredibly this is precisely what successive generations of Darwinists have done (see also “Return of Capital” in chapter 8).

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AFTER DARWIN: SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST In “Afterword to the Second German Edition” of Das Kapital, Marx lamented the death of “scientific bourgeois economy” complaining that “genuine scientific research” had given way to “the bad conscience and the evil intent of apologetic.”113 Marx’s lament might also be applied to late-nineteenth-century biology as Darwinism proved inordinately receptive to political forces. This is not necessarily surprising. If the amalgamation of Darwin’s two theories relied upon an analogy from the ideology of the free-market economics, then this amalgamation was easier to make at times when free-market ideology was ascendent. The trajectory of Darwin’s own work suggests this. For example, it was during the more radical Chartist period of the 1830s that Darwin placed considerably less stress upon the struggle of nature. Living in London at the time and moving in some progressive circles, Darwin was more inclined toward an interdependent conception of nature.114 In his Notebooks on Transmutation between 1837 and 1878, he wrote: If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow brethren in pain, diseases, death, suffering and famine—our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements—they may partake [of] our origin in one common ancestor—we may be all netted together.115,

This emphasis continued into the 1840s where Darwin relegated the war of nature to sporadic moments prompted by major environmental changes. In his Essay of 1844, “the war in nature” was of only “slight degree at short periods” and “not constant.”116 This was also the time when Darwin was his most whiggish. “If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions,” he warned in The Voyage of the Beagle, “great is our sin.”117 As this radical period gave way to an era of bourgeois triumphalism, the “war of nature” was duly expanded.118 Darwin’s “principle of divergence” was formulated at a time when the political and economic climate provided a more hospitable context for competitive interpretations of nature. Had this been a more politically progressive time, the contradictions within Darwin’s argument might have been laid bare. As it was, the shared affinity of economics and biology helped to ensure that by the time of The Origin, the war of nature had been made permanent. One of the first to draw out the policy implications of Darwinism was Clémence Royer, who wrote in the preface to her French translation of The Origin: The law of natural selection as well, when applied to humanity, makes us see with surprise and pain how false our political and civil legislation has been up to now. [. . .] I mean that imprudent and blind charity towards badly constituted

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individuals [that] democracy would like to transform into a source of compulsory solidarity, even though its most immediate consequence is to aggravate and multiply in the human race the very ills it claims to remedy.119

Returning to Darwinism’s more pressing technical questions, foremost in the mind of biologists, following the publication of The Origin, was a mechanism that would validate Darwin’s theory. Even before this mechanism was discovered, Herbert Spencer formalized this assumption into a concept, coining the term “survival of the fittest” to emphasize evolution in both the “mechanical” and “competitive” sense.120 What Spencer sought was a way to distinguish between the “vague conception of cause” implied by the organism’s relation with its environment and “a distinct conception of it” identified in “definite physical forces admitting of measurement.”121 This was a flagrant conflation of mechanical and historical processes (one that would be repeated with the concept of the “selfish gene” a century later) but nonetheless allowed Spencer to propose that causes for the development of species could only be “truly conceived” through analyzing “the concrete agencies at work.”122 It also conveniently allowed him to embed his politics in nature: Society in its corporate capacity, cannot without immediate or remoter disaster interfere with the play of these opposed principles under which every species has reached such fitness for its mode of life as it possesses, and under which it maintains that fitness.123

Evolutionary theorists of a left-wing persuasion have often sought to distance Darwin from Spencer’s crude “war of each against all,” which, they maintained, was “much to Darwin’s regret.”124 Would that it were. Buoyed by the convergence of a struggle in economics and in nature, or dissatisfied with his empirical argument for competition, or genuinely confused by his own metaphors, Darwin picked up the phrase “survival of the fittest” for the fifth edition of The Origin, renaming chapter 4 as “Natural Selection; or The Survival of the Fittest.” Darwin even suggested that the “expression used by Mr. Herbert Spencer” may be the “more accurate.”125 At the same time, Darwin’s own politics had shifted markedly to the right. In The Descent, Darwin lamented legislation favorable to the poor, efforts that went against nature: With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. [. . .] Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind [. . .] this must be highly injurious to the race of man.126

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A year later Darwin was railing against unions and cooperative societies, that, by opposing competition, threaten “a great evil for the future progress of mankind.”127 Darwin’s adoption of the phrase “survival of the fittest” also helped provide momentum for a slew of Darwinists to identify competition in heritable characters and thereby circumvent all the problems of the relation tout court. Over the coming years, Huxley and August Weismann would each propose that the particles of the organism were in conflict with each other, while Wilhelm Roux even developed the theory that organs were struggling with each other for nourishment, “kidneys against lungs, heart against brain.”128 In the background, hired prize-fighters of the bourgeoisie proclaimed that Darwinism proved that “all legislative effort to prevent vice is really protective of vice” and that societies’ victims are “just where [they] ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of things.”129 By the turn of the century, Darwinism was in the peculiar situation of being decried in the technical literature at the same time it was being venerated in the popular literature. The ideology was so vociferous that George Bernard Shaw was moved to write: Never in history, as far as we know, had there been such a determined, richly subsidized, politically organized attempt to persuade the human race that all progress, all prosperity, all salvation, individual and social, depend on an unrestrained conflict for food and money, on the suppression and elimination of the weak by the strong, on Free Trade, Free Contract, Free Competition, Natural Liberty, Laisser-faire: in short, on “doing the other fellow down” with impunity [. . . .] People were tired of governments and kings and priests and providences, and wanted to find out how Nature would arrange matters if she were let alone. And they found it out to their cost [while] their masters, becoming richer and richer, were very well satisfied, and Bastiat proved convincingly that Nature had arranged Economic Harmonies which would settle social questions far better than theocracies or aristocracies or mobocracies, the real deus ex machina being unrestrained plutocracy.130

And yet buried beneath all the bourgeois triumphalism, there lay the most recalcitrant and steadfast of contradictions. CONCLUSION: FROM IDEOLOGY TO NARCISSISM The pioneers of the Scientific Revolution were never simply passive stooges of the emerging economic order. The principle of identity was principally a way to classify things. If it would later varnish the values of the free market in a scientific gloss, Marx conceded, this was a secondary priority for once “disinterested inquirers” seeking to ground a science of human history in a

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fixed set of categories.131 Likewise, Darwin’s overtures to economics weren’t simply a reflection of his class prejudice. Darwin actively sought in classical political economy a solution to a problem that threatened not necessarily either of Darwin’s two theories, but certainly their amalgamation. When properly separated, there’s nothing necessarily ideological about either theory. The struggle for existence as it pertains to his TfE refers simply to the transfer of life over the course of generations. In respect of his TfNS, Darwin was correct in his suspicion that dependence was the more appropriate term for the relation of organism and environment, but this refers simply to the fact that living things are not independent of their conditions. The myriad forms that this relation may take certainly includes struggle and competition, but in their totality, surely exhaust the panoply of metaphors we could bring to bear on the subject. (“They say: the world is only thought, or will, or war, or love, or hate; separately, all this is false: added up it is true.”132) It is the specific applications of Darwin’s TfNS that are necessarily ideological—at least in Marx’s first definition. The means by which we piece the world together is an exercise of interpretation and is therefore necessarily partial. The mutual dependency of all living and non-living things entails this. Disposed to a single, impartial interpretation of evolutionary history as truly befitted a scientific explanation, Darwin hoped he could transcend the problem of the relation by identifying an “evolutionary agent” built on a model derived from classical economics. The struggle for existence, Darwin’s “ruling interpretation” of evolutionary history, turned out to be so riddled with contradictions, that it was only sustainable because it was so favorable to the interests of the ruling class. While Marx was proposing a counter-scientific theory that argued we were defined by exploitative economic relations, Darwin’s struggle for existence offered the bourgeoisie a vindication of their preferred solution—we have largely fixed identities determined by our genetic inheritance. It followed that any attempts to address inequalities would run up against our inherent natures. Whatever the merit of Darwin’s scientific argument, it served a broad function of depoliticizing social relations and biologizing the status quo. But Darwin was also disposed to an alternative conception of nature extrapolated from his metaphor of dependence—one that emphasized relations of “mutual love,” “sympathy,” and “kindness” between living things. These metaphors would inspire radical evolutionary theorists of the left, beginning with Peter Kropotkin, to stress the role of mutual aid in evolution.133 Darwin once even suggested that if we were to ever become fully conscious of our own “community of descent” with every other living thing, then we might come to transcend the provincialism of the struggle for existence and realize a more universal understanding of our relations.134 However, just as the struggle for existence fell upon a logical contradiction, Darwin’s

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more idealistic interpretation of dependence radically underestimated the consequences of his own theory—and on some level, he was aware of this. In Natural Selection, Darwin expressed discomfort with the metaphor of dependence on more legitimate counter-scientific grounds. As he put it, “dependence” expressed “far too much quiescence,” implying a harmony between organic beings and their environments when, in fact, evolution is premised on their disharmony.135 If organisms are dependent on their environments, they are also alienated from them. In Darwin’s hasty compromise, he tried to imply that organisms could at least be conscious of themselves. Alas, this allowed the principle of identity a return through the back door in the service of repressing something far more disturbing. If organisms are defined by their relations, and they are unconscious of these relations, then they must, by logical necessity, also be unconscious of themselves. Well before Freud’s discovery, Darwin’s “unconscious process of selection” had placed the entire foundation of science in doubt. And he knew it.

NOTES 1. Karl Marx, The Holy Family (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956), 175. 2. Charles Darwin, Notebook C: [Transmutation of species (1838.02-1838.07)]. CUL-DAR122.-Transcribed by Kees Rookmaaker. Retrieved from Darwin Online, http://darwin​-online​.org​.uk/. 3. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 47. 4. ibid. 5. ibid, 64. 6. K. Marx, “Preface to a contribution to the critique of political economy,” (1859) in Marx: Selected Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1994), 211. 7. F. Engels, “Speech at the grave of Karl Marx,” (1883) in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, 24. 8. Marx cited in J. E. Browne, The Power of Place: Volume 2 of a Biography (New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2002), 188. 9. Marx cited in Pichot, The Pure Society, 41. 10. E. Hobsbawm, Age of Capital: 1848–1875 (Preston: Abacus, 1995), 305. 11. Engels cited in Pichot, The Pure Society, 41. 12. See for example R. M. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); D. Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 13. C. C. Gillispie cited in D. P. Crook and P. Crook, Darwin’s Coat-Tails: Essays on Social Darwinism (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 2. 14. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 116.

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15. Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, 84. 16. See discussion in Foucault, “Nietzsche, Marx, Freud.” 17. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 166. 18. Foucault, “What is an author?,” 119. 19. K. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value: Volume 1 (1863; repr., London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1969), 151. 20. Foucault, The Order of Things, 373. 21. John Theodore Merz cited in Schweber, “Darwin and the political economists: divergence of character,” 198. For examples of Darwin’s antecedents, see Alexander von Humboldt’s comments on the “economy” of plants in A. Von Humboldt and A. Bonpland, Essay on the Geography of Plants (1805; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 180; William Paley’s use of Adam Smith’s metaphor of the “invisible hand” Paley, Natural Theology, 169; and Charles Lyell’s liberal use of the term “economy of nature,” C. Lyell, Principles of Geology, Volume 1, First Edition (1830; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 1. 22. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 131. 23. H. Milne-Edwards, Outline of Anatomy and Physiology (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1841), 12. 24. Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882, 82. 25. T. Malthus, Population: The First Essay (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 17. 26. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 75. 27. Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882, 82. 28. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 152. 29. Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication Volume 2, 282. 30. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 451. 31. ibid, 64. 32. ibid, 522. 33. Malthus, Population: The First Essay, 17. 34. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 116–7. 35. ibid, 75. For examples of Darwin’s use of the metaphor of dependence in The Origin see 75 (twice), 87, 242, 246, 257, 354, and 526. Darwin’s uses of the metaphor struggle are too numerous to cite, but note this count does not include synonyms such as “war,” “fighting,” and “competing,” which are also numerous. 36. ibid, 234. 37. Offspring will also generally inherit the nature and temperature of the country inhabited by their parents, and indeed some consistency in the environment is essential for selection to have enough time to work. Or to put it slightly differently, it is not just organisms that are dependent upon environments. Specific evolutionary processes are as well. That is, evolution depends upon the reproduction of specific selective environments as well as the reproduction of organisms. Darwinian change presupposes a degree of stasis. Everything changes, everything stays the same. This will be particularly important when we come to the work of G. C. Williams in “The Return of Capital” in chapter 8. 38. ibid, 87.

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39. ibid, 257. 40. H. James, Literary Criticism: French Writers. Other European Writers. Vol. 23 (Library of America, 1984), 1041. This passage is also quoted by Gillian Beer. See G. Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 145. 41. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 75. 42. See discussion in Foucault, The Order of Things, 245. 43. A. Smith, “History of astronomy,” in Essays on Philosophical Subjects (London: T. Cadell Jun. and W. Davies, 1795), 23–5. 44. A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 220. 45. J. R. McCulloch cited in Schweber, “Darwin and the political economists: divergence of character,” 268. 46. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 100 and 380. 47. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 13. 48. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 76. 49. ibid, 79. 50. I draw extensively in this discussion from Michael Ruse’s article M. Ruse (1980). “Charles Darwin and group selection,” in Annals of Science 37.6, pp. 615–630. 51. ibid, 260–1. 52. ibid, 260. 53. ibid, 263. 54. See discussion in Ruse, Darwin and Design: Does Evolution have a Purpose?, 102. 55. C. Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection. Being the Second Part of His Big Species Book Written from 1856 to 1858 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 390. 56. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 270. 57. ibid, 302. 58. For overview see Ruse, “Charles Darwin and group selection.” 59. Ruse, “Charles Darwin and group selection,” 620. 60. See discussion in M. J. Shapiro, Reading “Adam Smith”: Desire, History and Value. Vol. 4 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 72. 61. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 81. 62. ibid. 63. ibid. 64. ibid, 81–2. 65. ibid, 89 and 72. 66. ibid, 88. 67. ibid. 68. ibid, 74. 69. Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882, 83. 70. E. Blyth, “An attempt to classify the ‘varieties’ of animals, with observations on the marked seasonal and other changes which naturally take place in various

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British species, and which do not constitute varieties,” in Magazine of Natural History 8 (1835), 46. 71. For a thorough and illuminating discussion of Darwin’s “principle of divergence” see Gould’s discussion in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 224–46. 72. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 131. 73. ibid. 74. Darwin cited in S. Schweber, “The wider British context in Darwin’s theorizing,” in The Darwinian Heritage (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985), 63. 75. See discussion in Schweber, “Darwin and the political economists: divergence of character”; D. Kohn, “Darwin’s Keystone: The Principle of Divergence,” in M. Ruse and R. J. Richards, The Cambridge Companion to the “Origin of Species” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 76. Darwin, Charles, and Alfred Wallace, “On the tendency of species to form varieties; and on the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection,” Journal of the proceedings of the Linnean Society of London. Zoology 3.9 (1858): 52. 77. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, xlii. 78. ibid, 26. 79. ibid. 80. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 119. 81. ibid, 120. 82. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 13. 83. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 95–6. 84. ibid, 120. 85. ibid, 128. 86. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 420–1. 87. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 139. 88. ibid. 89. ibid, 143. 90. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, xlii. 91. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 129. 92. ibid, 146–7. 93. For a recent example of this misconception see T. W. Pietsch, Trees of Life: A Visual History of Evolution (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2012), 87. 94. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 74. 95. Darwin, Natural Selection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 96. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 127–8. 97. ibid, 195. 98. ibid, 524. 99. Darwin, Natural Selection, 247. 100. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 12. 101. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 129. 102. Darwin cited in Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 233. 103. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 124.

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104. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 12. 105. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 127. 106. ibid, 139. 107. ibid. 108. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, xxxv. 109. Darwin, Natural Selection, 247. 110. ibid, 248. 111. ibid, 199. 112. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 518. 113. Marx, “Afterword to the Second German Edition,” 8. 114. J. Hodge, ‘The notebook programmes and projects of Darwin's London years’, 41. 115. C. Darwin, “Extracts from the B-C-D-E transmutation notebooks,” in Darwin on Man, 447. Darwin had notoriously bad handwriting and in some translations of his notes the final line reads—“we may be all melted together.” This is a more radical interpretation that, correctly in my view, denotes a dissolution of identity. 116. Darwin, “Essay of 1844,” 88. 117. Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, 479. 118. See discussion in Hobsbawm, Age of Capital. 119. Clémence Royer cited in Pichot, The Pure Society, 94. 120. H. Spencer, The Principles of Biology, Volume 1 (Boston: Appleton and Company, 1896), 73. 121. Spencer, The Factors of Organic Evolution, 39. 122. ibid. 123. H. Spencer “The sins of legislators,” (1884) in H. Spencer and J. Offer. Spencer: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 128. 124. P. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902; repr., New York: Dover Publications, 2006), xviii and viii. 125. C. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 5th ed. (London: John Murray, 1869), 91 and 72. 126. Darwin, The Descent of Man, 102. 127. C. Darwin, Letter to Heinrich Fick 26 July 1872. 128. See discussion in N. Macbeth, Darwin Retried (London: Garnstone Press, 1974), 56–7. 129. W. G. Sumner cited in S. Davis, American Political Thought: Four Hundred Years of Ideas and Ideologies (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1996), 260. 130. G. B. Shaw, Back to Methuselah (1922; repr., Portland: Floating Press, 2010), 77–8. 131. Marx, “Afterword to the second German edition,” 8. 132. Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 50. 133. P. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. 134. See discussion in D. Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 187. 135. See discussion in Darwin, Natural Selection, 186–8.

Chapter 6

Specious Origins Darwin’s Selections in an Age of Narcissism and Doubt

Of comfort no man speak: Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs. —Richard II1 Man selects only for his own good. –Charles Darwin2

Freud was torn on whether “the unconscious” belonged to a tradition of great scientific discoveries or his discovery had brought the enterprise of science in doubt. He went on to propose two ethical solutions to resolve his uncertainty: an ethics of courage to accept the disturbing consequences of his discovery; and an ethics of caution to recognize the indeterminate ramifications of “the unconscious.” He had been inspired by Darwin who, fifty years earlier, faced a similar dilemma and called upon near identical ethical solutions. What faith may I have, he asked, “in the convictions of a monkeymind.” Darwin proceeded to formulate two elaborate ways of overcoming his doubt. First by interpreting evolutionary history as proceeding lawlike to the ascent of Man in a selection for courage. Darwin paired this with an appeal to his readers to have the courage to accept evolutionary laws. However, when considering the contingent consequences of his theory, Darwin sought to account for novelty and divergence in a slow gradual process that reduced what looked like large categorical changes into small changes of degree. This required the requisite caution and humility regarding our capacity to understand evolutionary history. This, Darwin hoped, could provide the foundation of certainty requisite for a truly scientific theory. And yet by Darwin’s axiom 115

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of Darwin’s theory no such certainty was legitimate. The unconscious nature of selection dictates that Man can never truly know his historical origins. INTRODUCTION: THE HORRID DOUBT Freud was always very concerned about the status of psychoanalysis among the sciences and, in his efforts to seal its status in the popular imagination, was not averse to placing himself alongside other “great men” in the history of science. In a famous passage of his Introductory Lectures, Freud located his discovery of “the unconscious” in a tradition of unsettling scientific discoveries that also included Darwin’s discovery of evolution: In the course of centuries the naive self-love of men has had to submit to two major blows at the hands of science. The first was when they learnt that our earth was not the centre of the universe but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness. This is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus [. . . .] The second blow fell when biological research destroyed man’s supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature. This revaluation has been accomplished in our own days by Darwin [. . . .] But human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house.3

The problem with Freud’s account was that “the unconscious” had not just wounded man’s self-love—it had removed the basis for scientific thought. Since Descartes, science had been founded upon a subject certain of their thoughts—a subject capable of making representations without questioning themselves as the source of those representations. A subject located at an imaginary Archimedean point beyond representation. With his discovery of “the unconscious,” Freud had inverted the Cartesian Cogito, replacing the subject of certainty with a subject of profound doubt. From a psychoanalytic perspective, any pretense to self-certainty is the result of narcissistic delusion—the subject who mistakes themselves for what they want to be. But if this is the case, where does this leave Freud’s discovery? In his essay, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” Foucault turned the narcissistic blow dealt by “the unconscious” on Freud himself: Freud says somewhere that there are three great narcissistic wounds in Western culture: the wound imposed by Copernicus; that made by Darwin, when he discovered that man was descended from an ape; and the wound made by Freud

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himself when he, in his turn, discovered that consciousness was based on the unconscious. I wonder whether we could not say that by involving us in an interpretive task that always reflects upon itself, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx did not constitute around us, and for us, those mirrors which reflect to us the images whose inexhaustible wounds form our contemporary narcissism.4

Having challenged the claim of scientists to be speaking from an Archimedean point, the nineteenth-century interpreters could not very well resurrect this claim for their own purposes. As products of the history they interpret, interpreters always expose themselves to interpretation: Since these techniques of interpretation concern ourselves: since we interpret, we interpret ourselves according to these techniques. It is with these techniques of interpretation, in return, that we must question these interpreters who were Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx, so that we are always returned in a perpetual play of mirrors.5

The psychoanalytic subject cannot claim an Archimedean view beyond representation. Rather they are inextricably caught up in a relay of interpretation that places the validity of their claims in doubt. This is what Foucault had meant when he described psychoanalysis as flowing in the “opposite direction” to science, “ceaselessly ‘unmaking’ that very man who is creating and re-creating his positivity.”6 Their efforts to interpret only serve to draw attention to themselves as interpreters. A deeper look at the formative years of psychoanalysis provides a personal context for this philosophical shift; a period in which, by all accounts, Freud was engulfed in the crisis wrought by his own discovery. Lacan described how during the late 1890s, “at the height of his need to know,” Freud was simultaneously “living through the putting into question of the very foundations of the world [. . . .] He lives in an atmosphere of anxiety with the feeling that he is making a dangerous discovery.”7 Echoing these sentiments, but broadening the time frame, Masud Khan characterized the “heroic period in Freud’s life” between 1887 and 1902 as one of acute stress, anguish, anxiety, distress, discouragement, and exultation of unmatchable discoveries.8 At its core, “the unconscious” encapsulates the disjunction between nature and thought stipulated by the counter-sciences. If science was still to proceed on the basis of the subject’s self-knowledge, then the subject would have to attain the means for acquiring it. Ethics, as a set of practices and considerations for the subject’s acquisition of truth, was reintroduced into science and philosophy by Kant at the dawn of the Modern episteme. With the nineteenth century interpreters, including Freud, ethics acquired a counter-scientific formulation. From the 1890s onward, Freud oscillated between two conflicting

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desires; between an Enlightenment clamor to restore thought and nature to a foundation of scientific certainty on the one hand, and an anti-Enlightenment unease that his own clamor for certainty might be symptomatic of something else.9 This produced two conflicting ethical systems. Freud, preoccupied with establishing the scientific status of psychoanalysis, was disposed to follow scientific convention and subordinate mental processes to objective laws. In Totem and Taboo, Freud went as far as to represent Man’s evolutionary and maturational ascent together in fixed scientific laws of development. In this formulation, narcissism recedes with scientific advance: If we may take the now established omnipotence of thought among primitive races as proof of their narcissism, we may venture to compare the various evolutionary stages of man’s conception of the universe with the stages of the libidinous evolution of the individual. We find that the animistic phase corresponds in time as well as in content with narcissism, the religious phase corresponds to that stage of object finding which is characterized by the dependence on the parents, while the scientific stage has its full counterpart in the individual’s state of maturity, where, having renounced the pleasure principle and having adapted himself to reality, he seeks his object in the outer world.10

Throughout his writings, Freud wrote continuously of the need for courage to overcome comforting illusions. And yet recourse to courage might be the last attempt to salvage the most comforting of illusions (the subject certain of himself) from the wreckage wrought by the unconscious. Far from liberating Man from his narcissistic prison, Freud’s appeal to scientific laws and the courage required to recognize them, was symptomatic of precisely the “transcendental narcissism” for which Foucault had taken Modern thought to task in The Order of Things.11 However, there was also another Freud. A Freud who attached lasting importance to accidental events beyond scientific laws. A Freud prepared to confront, as Lacan put it, the “horrendous” possibility that the ego, far from obeying scientific laws, was the “sum of its radical contingency (my emphasis).”12 According to this Freud, recourse to laws maybe rooted in the primitive superstitions of the interpreter: If one considers chance to be unworthy of determining our fate, it is simply a relapse into the pious view of the Universe [. . . .] We naturally feel hurt that a just God and a kindly providence do not protect us better from such influences during the most defenceless period of our lives. At the same time we are all too ready to forget that in fact everything to do with our life is chance, from our origin out of the meeting of spermatozoon and ovum onwards—chance which nevertheless has a share in the law and necessity of nature, and which merely lacks any connection with our wishes and illusions.13

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This second Freud was inclined to an alternative set of ethics. Not the courage of one who is certain of his motives and the laws underlying them, but a subject armed with the requisite caution for one who both recognizes, and is plagued by, doubts surrounding the contingency of his desire. Freud contrasted these two forms of ethics in relation to two of his colleagues in The Interpretation of Dreams: My friend Leopold [was] a relative of Otto’s. Since the two practice the same speciality, fate has made them competitors, so that they are constantly being compared with one another. Both of them assisted me for years [. . . .] While I would be discussing the diagnosis of a case with Otto, Leopold would examine the child anew and make an unexpected contribution [. . . .] There was a difference of character between the two men [. . . .] Otto was remarkably prompt and alert; Leopold was slow and thoughtful, but thorough. If I contrast Otto and the cautious Leopold in the dream I do so, apparently, in order to extol Leopold.14

What has been “attributed to the genius of Freud,” Foucault wrote in The History of Sexuality, “had already gone through a long stage of preparation.”15 Freud was not the first to address the ethical consequences arising from the recognition of “the unconscious.” Revealingly Freud identified such concerns in Darwin’s writings, and held him up as an ethical ideal for how to manage them. It was “the great Darwin” he wrote, who laid a “golden rule” for the “scientific worker based on his insight into the part played by unpleasure as a motive for forgetting.”16 Freud then proceeded to quote this passage from Darwin’s autobiography: I had, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones.17

Darwin’s doubts about his motives emerged, at least in part, as a consequence of his own chastening discovery. Darwin had set out to humble the “prejudice” and “arrogance,” which “made our forefathers declare that they were descended from demi-gods.”18 Man, he argued, was not the creation of conscious design but rather an “unconscious process of selection.”19 In the process of establishing this, a “horrid doubt” occurred to him: [Are] the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals [. . .] of any value or at all trustworthy[?] Would any one

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trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?20

In a classically Freudian way, much of Darwin’s anxiety hung upon a conceptual ambiguity. If it could be proved that selection obeyed certain laws, then Man would indeed be free to represent his origins. But if it turned out that selection was contingent, then attention would immediately turn upon the selections of the interpreter; the peculiar choices, judgments, and preferences of the evolutionary historian—a selective process every bit as beguiling as the natural process it purports to describe. THE LAWS OF SELECTION In The Origin, Darwin invited us to view all of nature’s forms, not as “specially endowed” but rather as “small consequences of one general law.”21 Darwin’s TfE is not so much a law as the conjunction of three laws: the law of inheritance, the law of variation, and the law of the ratio of increase— which “lead to the universal struggle for life, and as a consequence to natural selection,”22 Darwin’s choice of terminology was indicative of his strategy. Darwin is responsible for the greatest understatement in the history of science when he buried his hope in the final chapter that “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”23 Having established the laws of evolution, Darwin hoped that others would draw the necessary conclusions, and take responsibility for applying them to Man. However, Darwin could not avoid the topic entirely, especially as previous evolutionary theorists had stopped short of a thoroughgoing materialism. Lamarckian evolution, for example, had made room for the conscious responses of the organism to its environment—what Lamarck called “the influence of the moral on the physical.”24 Darwin was dismissive, writing to his friend Joseph Hooker, “Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense [. . .] adaptations from the slow willing of animals.”25 From an evolutionary point of view, selection is entirely independent of the environment. Another way to put it is Darwin’s TfE strictly considers form not function. What matters is not what organisms do, but what they are. A bird’s wing remains the same character whether it is used for flying, swimming or for purposes of thermoregulation. However, the distinction is not so easy to make, for how does animal behavior originate? Surely an eagle is evolved to fly, a penguin to swim and an ostrich to regulate its body temperature. At some point, the evolutionist must confront aspects of nature that are apparently immaterial. The most obvious and unavoidable example being thought. Darwin sought to resolve the latter through discussing the former. If it could be shown that characters regarded as mental were exposed to the

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same laws as every other corporeal character, then it was highly probable they had been produced by natural selection. Darwin prepared his strategy well in advance. As early as his 1844 manuscript, Darwin had his argument primed: As the instincts of a species are fully as important to its preservation and multiplication as its corporeal structure, it is evident that if there be the slightest congenital differences in the instincts and habits, or if certain individuals during their lives are induced or compelled to vary their habits, and if such differences are in the smallest degree more favourable, under slightly modified external conditions, to their preservation, such individuals must in the long run have a better chance of being preserved and of multiplying. If this be admitted, a series of small changes may, as in the case of corporeal structure, work great changes in the mental powers, habits and instincts of any species (my emphasis).26

Darwin was well aware of the radical nature of his argument and the likely resistance it would provoke among his contemporaries. As far back as 1838, Darwin had posed the following rhetorical question to himself: “Why is thought being a secretion of brain, more wonderful than gravity a property of matter? It is our arrogance, our admiration of ourselves.”27 But when he finally sat down to write Natural Selection, Darwin erred on the side of caution. “Experience shows the problem of the mind cannot be solved by attacking the citadel itself,” he wrote in a note to himself in 1856, “the mind is function of body—we must bring some stable foundation to argue from.”28 The chapter ultimately published in The Origin, suitably entitled “Instinct,” can be read as Darwin attacking the citadel without attacking it itself. In the opening paragraphs, Darwin deliberately equivocated about the relevance of his discussion for human evolution by, (a) declining to provide a specific definition; (b) retaining plausible deniability; and (c) hinting towards the larger ramifications of his argument to his more careful and sympathetic readers: (a) I will not attempt any definition of instinct. It would be easy to show that several distinct mental actions are commonly embraced by this term.29 (b) An action, which we ourselves should require experience to enable us to perform, when performed by an animal, more especially by a very young one, without any experience, and when performed by many individuals in the same way, without their knowing for what purpose it is performed, is usually said to be instinctive.30 (c) Frederick Cuvier and several of the older metaphysicians have compared instinct with habit. This comparison gives, I think, a remarkably accurate notion of the frame of mind under which an instinctive action is performed, but not of its origin. How unconsciously many habitual actions

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are performed, indeed not rarely in direct opposition to our conscious will! (my emphasis)31 The onus on Darwin was not necessarily to prove that instincts could impact upon “the law of the ratio of increase” (for this “will be universally admitted”) but to show that instincts, to begin with, are subject to the same laws of inheritance and variation as every other corporeal structure (i.e., physical aspect of the organism).32 Here Darwin continued in a more provocative vein, suggesting that Mozart’s musical gifts may have been partly inherited: If we suppose any habitual action to become inherited—and I think it can be shown that this does sometimes happen— then the resemblance between what originally was a habit and an instinct becomes so close as not to be distinguished. If Mozart, instead of playing the pianoforte at three years old with wonderfully little practice, had played a tune with no practice at all, he might truly be said to have done so instinctively.33

Darwin could not rule out the impact of practice—what biologists since Lamarck have referred to as the effects of use and disuse—however, he remained adamant that it was of “quite subordinate importance to the effects of the natural selection of what may be called accidental variations of instincts.”34 Much of Darwin’s argument was speculative. When, for example, do the many random and unrepeated acts of animals in their habitat start to become sufficiently habitual and instinctual for selection to act upon them? Here Darwin appealed to the reader’s trust that “I do not speak without good evidence.”35 My own feeling is that Darwin, consciously or unconsciously, was also accounting for his evasion of the subject of man—a subject about which, dating back to the 1830s, he had accumulated substantial evidence on, but remained doubtful that it would be enough to sway the skeptical reader. Writing in his autobiography years later, he explained: “It would have been useless and injurious to the success of the book to have paraded without giving any evidence my conviction with respect to [man’s] origin.”36 At any rate, the chapter takes an apparently idiosyncratic turn as discussion shifted to the “slave-making instincts of ants” and the “comb-making power of the hive bee [. . .] justly ranked by naturalists as the most wonderful of all known instincts.”37 Darwin’s reasons for this may have been clear only to him at the time, but become more clear after consulting his private notes in which he compares favorably the social instincts of insects with Man’s higher mental faculties. Here are some examples: Circumstances having given to the Bee its instinct is not less wonderful than man his intellect.38

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Society could not go on except for the moral sense, any more than a hive of Bees without their instincts.39 It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another. We consider those, where the cerebral structure, intellectual faculties, most developed, as highest.—A bee doubtless would where the instincts were.40 People often talk of the wonderful event of intellectual man appearing.—the appearance of insects with other senses is more wonderful. its mind more different probably & introduction of man nothing compared to the first thinking being, although hard to draw line— l not so great as between perfect insects & Forms hard to tell whether articulate or intestinal, or even a mite.—A bee / compared with cheese mite/ with its wonderful instincts, 〈might well say know [sic]〉.41

The implication—intimated by the clause “justly ranked by naturalists as the most wonderful of all known instincts”—was that if natural selection could create instincts as wonderful as those of the social insects, then why not also man’s intellect? Readers not privy to Darwin’s rationale, however, could be forgiven for not drawing the necessary inference. It was entirely legitimate, as Gruber has written, for a careful reader of The Origin to accept Darwin’s argument for the evolution of instincts but draw a line at man’s higher mental faculties.42 Indeed this was precisely what some of Darwin’s most high profile readers did. Charles Lyell’s Antiquity of Man, published a year after The Origin, acknowledged the evolution of man’s bodily structures, but stopped short of his mental faculties; an argument later adopted and expanded by Russel Wallace, of all people, who turned to spiritualism in the 1860s, partly on the grounds that “the large brain” man possesses “could never have been solely developed by any of those laws of evolution.”43 Even Huxley, an expressed agnostic, held steadfast to the principle of human uniqueness: No one is more strongly convinced than I am of the vastness of the gulf between civilized man and the brutes; or is more certain that whether from them or not, he is assuredly not of them. No one is less disposed to think lightly of the present dignity, or despairingly of the future hopes, of the only consciously intelligent denizen of this world.44

According to Darwin’s biographers, Darwin had no initial intention of addressing human evolution.45 Among his reasons for changing his mind was the “dreadful disappointment” and “severe distress” caused by Lyell and Wallace’s rejections.46 The Descent took Darwin three years to write, is filled with a copious data, and devotes substantial treatment to a subject only

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briefly broached in The Origin (sexual selection), and yet the basic argument remained, in essence, unchanged. Chapter 1 begins where Darwin left off twelve years ago; substituting “man” for “instinct”: HE who wishes to decide whether man is the modified descendant of some pre-existing form, would probably first enquire whether man varies, however slightly, in bodily structure and in mental faculties; and if so, whether the variations are transmitted to his offspring in accordance with the laws which prevail with the lower animals [. . .] are the variations the result, as far as our ignorance permits us to judge, of the same general causes, and are they governed by the same general laws, as in the case of other organisms?47

The Descent may not have convinced all dissenting voices but it was at least now clear where Darwin stood. Summarizing his argument, he concluded: “Man is liable to numerous, slight, and diversified variations, which are induced by the same general laws, as in the lower animals.”48 In the course of his demonstration, Darwin also made his analogy with the social insects explicit, but he also went further; attending not only to the citadel, but to the highest mental faculties—wonder, curiosity, attention, memory, imagination, reason, self-consciousness—faculties, in other words, that make up the scientific mind.49 Darwin argued that all of these faculties, though manifest in the highest degree in Man, can be found in rudimentary form among the higher animals, especially primates.50 Darwin’s aim was clear—to convince the reader that natural selection could take us from the most primitive progenitor to elective genius; from “the lowest animal, to the mind of a Newton.”51 And yet just as Darwin made his own position on human evolution certain, then arises the doubt: C]an the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions? May not these be the result of the connection between cause and effect which strikes us as a necessary one, but probably depends merely on inherited experience.52

Darwin’s question is very specific. By what contingent process of selection could Darwin’s “monkey mind”—subject to laws of inheritance and variation—come to grasp the laws of selection? THE LAWFULNESS OF THE CONTINGENT In the eighteenth century, Kant speculated on the relation between historical laws and a subject capable of coming to know them. For Kant, this came in

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the form of an ethical obligation. Man must have the courage to think lawfully. Having embedded Man in a natural historical process in the nineteenth century, Darwin would appeal to this same ethical subject in The Descent of Man: I FULLY subscribe to the judgment of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important. This sense, as Mackintosh remarks, “has a rightful supremacy over every other principle of human action”; it is summed up in that short but imperious word ought, so full of high significance. It is the most noble of all the attributes of man, leading him without a moment’s hesitation to risk his life for that of a fellow-creature; or after due deliberation, impelled simply by the deep feeling of right or duty, to sacrifice it in some great cause. Immanuel Kant exclaims, “Duty! Wondrous thought, that workest neither by fond insinuation, flattery, nor by any threat, but merely by holding up thy naked law in the soul.”53

Kant’s follow up question—“Where find we the root of thy august descent?”—posed a further problem for Darwin; one that perhaps he would have preferred to ignore.54 Darwin’s superficial answer was that the capacity to think lawfully might naturally accompany any improvement in “intellectual faculties” until at last Man can say, “I am the supreme judge of my own conduct, and in the words of Kant, I will not in my own person violate the dignity of humanity.”55 However, Darwin knew this answer was inadequate, as it conveniently bypassed the problem of contingency. The trouble was that selection appeared not only indifferent to moral laws, but positively opposed to them. Evolution is supposed to select for survival not truth. Darwin considered this conundrum and his conclusion was initially skeptical: At the moment of action man will no doubt be apt to follow the stronger impulse; and though this may occasionally prompt him to the noblest deeds, it will far more commonly lead him to gratify his own desires at the expense of other men.56

It was even more difficult to see how moral faculties could have evolved through natural selection; a process that would seem to favor treachery and cowardice above courage: [It] may be asked, how [man became] endowed with these social and moral qualities, and how was the standard of excellence raised? It is extremely doubtful whether the offspring of the more sympathetic and benevolent parents, or of those which were the most faithful to their comrades, would be reared in greater number than the children of selfish and treacherous parents of the same tribe.

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He who was ready to sacrifice his life, as many a savage has been, rather than betray his comrades, would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature. The bravest men, who were always willing to come to the front in war, and who freely risked their lives for others, would on an average perish in larger number than other men. Therefore it seems scarcely possible [that] the number of men gifted with such virtues, or that the standard of their excellence, could be increased through natural selection.57

The seriousness with which Darwin approached this problem is demonstrated by his solution; namely by abandoning the exclusivity of individual selection he had been so adamant about in The Origin. Darwin proposed that while a self-sacrificing courage might not be rewarded at an individual level of selection, groups that contained more courageous members would have an advantage over other groups. Having gone to such considerable lengths in The Origin to confine selection to the individual, Darwin was sufficiently agitated to make a special case for humans. It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe, yet that an advancement in the standard of morality and an increase in the number of well-endowed men will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.58

The exception Darwin made for group selection among humans has been explained away in various ways ranging from his recoiling from the unpalatable idea of a pervasive amoral individualism to an embrace of a still more objectionable ideology of racial conquest and extermination.59 Gould justified this exception on the basis of “the uniqueness of human consciousness” that could dispose us to the abstract advantage of altruistic acts over personal gain.60 What Gould didn’t consider was the possibility that the exception was employed precisely to account for “the unique consciousness” of Man in the first place. Darwin was so rattled by the horrid doubt that he was moved to make the one concession he could not bring himself to grant the rest of the animal and plant kingdom. For Darwin, as for Kant, “there cannot be fidelity without truth” and neither of these without courage.61 In time, truth becomes “so deeply rooted in the mind” that it fosters its own courage—“practised by savages, even at a high cost, towards strangers.”62 The history presented in The Descent was lawlike and inexorable. The tribe possessing the highest

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degree of “fidelity and courage” will conquer other tribes until it is overcome by a “still more highly endowed tribe.”63 In this way, “the social and moral qualities would tend slowly to advance and be diffused throughout the world” until Man “thus prompted, will acquire such perfect self-command, that his desires and passions will at last instantly yield to his social sympathies.”64 It was the English, according to Darwin, that came closest to this intellectual zenith: The remarkable success of the English as colonists over other European nations [has] been ascribed to their “daring and persistent energy”; [. . .] a nation which produced during a lengthened period the greatest number of highly intellectual, energetic, brave, patriotic, and benevolent men, would generally prevail over less favoured nations.65

Beneath this veil of bravado, I suggest, lay a great deal of ambivalence and anxiety. Darwin was a child of the modern era—a time when war, conquest, revolution, and political upheaval had disrupted the order of people as well as things. “The ghost of the former colonial subject,” the psychoanalyst Oscar Mannoni would write, “haunts (without their being aware of it) relationships among whites who have never left Europe.”66 Darwin was both contemporary with colonialism and had left Europe–so it is not too surprising that he should have been affected more than most. Having actually encountered non-Europeans, he knew that categorical differences between the races were impossible to sustain. The differences separating the “highest men” and the “lowest savages” may only be of the “finest gradations”—even “negro women” teach their young children to “love truth.”67 And yet the harrowing truth of Darwin’s discovery was not the affirmation of a universal human subjectivity, but rather its radical contingency. What had struck Darwin most during the voyage of the Beagle was, in fact, just how great were the differences “between savage and civilized man.”68 In a letter to Charles Whitley in 1834, he described his first encounter with a Fuegian: I have seen nothing, which more completely astonished me, than the first sight of a Savage; It was a naked Fuegian his long hair blowing about, his face besmeared with paint. There is in their countenances, an expression, which I believe to those who have not seen it, must be inconceivably wild. Standing on a rock he uttered tones & made gesticulations than which, the crys of domestic animals are far more intelligible [sic].69

The encounter was profoundly distressing for Darwin. “What will become of me hereafter, I know not,” he wrote in the same letter, “I feel, like a ruined man.”70 Quite plainly it rocked his progressive liberal belief that humans are

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all basically alike. Cognitive scientists sometimes talk of an “uncanny valley” of human resemblance, whereby something that appears almost but not quite human evokes feelings of eeriness and repulsion in the observer. A number of explanations have been proposed for this, the most basic and in some ways most Darwinian is that it is an emotional reaction to the sorites paradox that connects categories through a quantitative metric, that we prefer to experience as qualitatively separate.71 On Darwin’s theory, the difference separating Man from animals is only ever one of degree and Darwin’s encounter with the Fuegian brought this fact home in a disturbing way. Darwin’s private notes support this, for it was only shortly after this encounter that Darwin began to refer to the distinction between “man and animals” as a mere “travelling instance.”72 Another, more psychoanalytic interpretation might suggest the observer is caught between feelings of empathy for a subject in whom one recognizes oneself and an aversion deriving from a sense of otherness. Pursuing this formulation, Gillian Beer has suggested speculatively, but persuasively, that Darwin’s distress arose from the reciprocal nature of the gaze. If Darwin shared close ancestry with the Fuegian what did this mean for Darwin’s own wild contingency? “From the moment this gaze exists” Lacan wrote, “I am already something other, in that I feel myself becoming an object for the gaze of others.”73 In the course of experiencing the Fuegian’s otherness, Darwin was forced to confront his own. Albeit temporarily. By the time of The Descent, Darwin had resolved to reconstruct evolution in a comforting linear form: The fact that ancient races, in this and several other cases, more frequently present structures which resemble those of the lower animals than do the modern races, is interesting. One chief cause seems to be that ancient races stand somewhat nearer than modern races in the long line of descent to their remote animal-like progenitors.74

Perhaps keen to keep his own sense of otherness at bay, Darwin’s discussion of mental variations among humans is confined to groups that fall below the status of Man. It was Fuegians, Malays, Papuans, Negros, Hottentots, and Mongolians who would have to carry the burden of biology, animality, and nature. It wasn't just racial boundaries that were becoming blurred This period witnessed the first rumblings of a feminist movement as industrialization and economic advance conspired to subvert older sexual divisions of labor and invite women into arenas formerly the strict province of men.75 The first organized campaign for women’s suffrage in Britain began in the 1850s and it didn’t take long for campaigning to extend to broader legal reforms, employment, education, and marriage rights. Still more radical feminists demanded

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the right to exercise control over their bodies and sexual relations. Harriet Taylor and her husband John Stuart Mill brought women’s emancipation into mainstream discourse with Enfranchisement of Women and The Subjection of Women, respectively. This provoked an inevitable reaction. The misogynistic “religious tracts, medical treatises, and political pamphlets” that followed, the historian Michael Kimmel noted, “almost always resorted to arguments about the supposed natural order of things.”76 As with politics, so with science. Darwin’s own encounter with women’s liberation came via the eminent feminist, Frances Power Cobbe. In the course of debating her, he would boast that men had acquired their superior “vigour and courage” in an evolutionary struggle “for the possession of women.”77 By Cobbe’s recollection at least, she gave as good as she got: Mr. Darwin was writing his Descent of Man, and he told me that he was going to introduce some new view of the nature of the Moral Sense. I said: “Of course you have studied Kant’s Grundlegung der Sitten?” No, he had not read Kant, and did not care to do so. I ventured to urge him to study him, and observed that one could hardly see one’s way in ethical speculation without some understanding of his philosophy.78

Cobbe proceeded to send Darwin an unsolicited copy of the Master text. Darwin’s humble response was typical of his Victorian modesty but probably contained more truth about his own bruising encounter with Cobbe than he would have cared to admit: It was very good of you to send me nolens volens Kant, together with the other book. I have been extremely glad to look through the former. It has interested me much to see how differently two men may look at the same points. Though I fully feel how presumptuous it sounds to put myself even for a moment in the same bracket with Kant—the one man a great philosopher looking exclusively into his own mind, the other a degraded wretch looking from the outside through apes and savages at the moral sense of mankind.79

Darwin had been left smarting, but not sufficiently shaken to shift him from his male-centered view. In Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors, published three years before The Descent, Cobbe had posed the question: “Ought Englishwomen of full age, in the present state of affairs, to be considered as having legally attained majority? or ought they permanently to be dealt with, for all civil and political purposes, as minors?”80 Darwin’s evolutionary answer was emphatic. Despite the debt that Darwin owed Cobbe for his use of Kant, women remained closer to the lower races and children “and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization” than men:

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The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman—whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands. If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music (inclusive both of composition and performance), history, science, and philosophy, with half-a-dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison.81

Even when Darwin turned away from the human condition, he found reasons to bolster masculinity. His theory of “sexual selection,” discussed in the second half of The Descent, firmly installed the male of the species as history’s chief protagonist: There are many other structures and instincts which must have been developed through sexual selection—such as the weapons of offence and the means of defence possessed by the males for fighting with and driving away their rivals— their courage and pugnacity—their ornaments of many kinds— their organs for producing vocal or instrumental music—and their glands for emitting odours; most of these latter structures serving only to allure or excite the female. That these characters are the result of sexual and not of ordinary selection is clear, as unarmed, unornamented, or unattractive males would succeed equally well in the battle for life and in leaving a numerous progeny, if better endowed males were not present.82

Darwin’s history was characteristic of his time; a period in which Man reacted to the wound of history with a form of denial. However, it was also strategic—the grateful recipients of Darwin’s “transcendental narcissism” were also, by and large, his own readers, the very people he was trying to convince. It is no secret that Darwin feared being denounced as a heretic, and generally conflict averse, it is maybe not surprising he chose flattery and persuasion in an attempt ward off criticism. In this way, Darwin’s praise for Man’s courageous capacity for lawful thinking turned narcissism against itself—cajoling his male readers to accept their origins even as it wounded their vanity. Further comparisons between The Origin and The Descent bear out the peculiarly ethical nature of The Descent. In The Origin, selection is presented as a necessary consequence arising from fixed natural laws. Darwin was always fond of neat deductive arguments that compelled the reader’s assent (count the number of times Darwin prefaced an argument in The Origin with a “we must admit/believe/infer” or etc.), but generally the invocation of necessity was confined to the natural process of selection. In The Descent, this terminology was extended to the reader as an ethical injunction to apply the laws of selection to Man.83 The “imperious word ought” that

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Darwin, via Kant, embedded in a natural “persistent instinct” was promptly brought to bear upon the reader: Thus we can understand how it has come to pass that man and all other vertebrate animals have been constructed on the same general model, why they pass through the same early stages of development, and why they retain certain rudiments in common. Consequently we ought frankly to admit their community of descent (my emphasis).84

Certain passages in The Descent read like a sermon. “The highest stage in moral culture at which we can arrive, is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts” even if it means rethinking “the sins that made the past so pleasant to us.”85 On other occasions, Darwin evinced a level of impatience with his intransigent reader—“Consequently ‘there is no justification’ ” borrowing Huxley’s phrase, “ ‘for placing man in a distinct order.’ ”86,87 Darwin’s irritability in these passages stands out precisely because it is so unusual. As his son Francis pointed out, Darwin’s writing is distinctive for its “courteous and conciliatory tone.” The reader is not normally “scorned for any amount of doubt which he may be imagined to feel, and his scepticism is treated with patient respect.”88 Nevertheless Darwin’s ethical exhortations may well have served the same function of warding off criticism as his venerations of AngloSaxon Man. By claiming the standpoint of the brave Victorian, Darwin could define his own role in advance of critics that might paint him otherwise. If Darwin appealed to ethical laws in the hope of convincing his readers of their evolutionary origins, the more specific question regarding the origin of The Origin did indeed require more private introspection. In this vein, Darwin speculated whether a preoccupation with laws might be a personal characteristic. “From my early youth,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I have had the strongest desire to understand or explain whatever I observed—that is, to group all facts under some general laws.”89 Then after years of cultivating this desire in scientific study, “My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of a large collections of facts.”90 John Bowlby has suggested that Darwin’s early obsessions may have been part product of the loss of his mother when he was only eight years old.91 The young Darwin was prevented from seeing his mother before she died and forbidden by his father to even mention her name thereafter.92 Around this time, Darwin began taking long solitary walks, during which, he reported, “I often became quite absorbed [. . .] but what I thought about I know not.”93 Time, it seemed, did not reconcile Darwin with his loss. In a letter to a cousin who had just lost his wife to illness, the thirty-three-year-old Darwin wrote “I truly sympathize with you though never in my life having lost one near relation, I daresay I cannot imagine how severe grief such as yours must be.”94

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Bowlby goes on to recount a no less extraordinary episode later in Darwin’s life. A favorite family game in the Darwin household was a word-game in which a word could be stolen from another player by adding a letter to it to create a new word. On one occasion, Darwin saw someone add an “M” to “Other.” After looking at it for some time, he exclaimed “ ‘MOE-THER’! There’s no such word ‘MOE-THER.’ ”95 That nature, which contemns its origin, cannot be border’d certain in itself.96 Quite how Darwin’s repression of his own origins contributed, if at all, to his later preoccupation with the origins of life we cannot say. What we can say is that Darwin’s concern with the more contingent circumstances surrounding his discovery was indicative of a much deeper epistemological problem related to the broader contingent nature of history. NATURE’S REASON For all the pious exhortations in The Descent that Man have the courage to confront his origins, Darwin spent almost his entire career apparently avoiding this uncomfortable truth. In the decades following his discovery, he devoted most of his attention to the study of coral reefs and barnacles. Aside from The Origin and The Descent, texts he published only reluctantly, Darwin’s bibliography consists of treatise on orchids, insectivorous plants, the movement of plants, and cross and self-fertilization in vegetables. For Robert Young, this was evidence enough that Darwin lacked interest in human evolution.97 This could scarcely be less true. As Gruber pointed out, the subject of human evolution was so “woven into Darwin’s thoughts” that it formed an “indispensable part of the network of his beliefs.”98 Darwin wasn’t opposed to addressing human evolution or accompanying metaphysical questions, so much as the peculiar method hitherto taken by philosophers and psychologists; a method that generally favored rank speculation over hard-won facts. In his autobiography, Darwin singled out Spencer, in particular, for his arrogant and incautious conjectures: Herbert Spencer’s conversation seemed to me very interesting, but I did not like him particularly, and did not feel that I could easily have become intimate with him. I think that he was extremely egotistical. After reading any of his books, I generally feel enthusiastic admiration for his transcendent talents, and have often wondered whether in the distant future he would rank with such great men as Descartes, Leibnitz, etc., about whom, however, I know very little. Nevertheless I am not conscious of having profited in my own work by Spencer’s writings. His deductive manner of treating every subject is wholly opposed to my frame of mind. His conclusions never convince me: and over and

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over again I have said to myself, after reading one of his discussions—“Here would be a fine subject for half-a-dozen years” work.99

Against Spencer’s bold theorizing, Darwin, like Freud after him, extolled the virtues of cautious, patient observation: On the favourable side of the balance, I think that I am superior to the common run of men in noticing things which easily escape attention, and in observing them carefully. My industry has been nearly as great as it could have been in the observation and collection of facts.100

Darwin’s extolling of the virtues of caution was no doubt born, in part, from recognition of the contingent nature of historical interpretation. More than that, however, it was an ethical response to the humbling implications of his discovery. It was Man’s narcissism that had led him to believe that answers to all the great mysteries of the universe may be within his reach. But if Man had evolved from animals, it followed that there must be some limits on his capacities. With regard to the origins of the higher mental faculties, Darwin wrote in The Descent that “neither my ability nor knowledge permit the attempt.”101 In his notebooks, he wrote that “our faculties are more fitted to recognize the wonderful structure of a beetle than a Universe.”102 Darwin’s humbling of Man entailed placing limits on his knowledge; limits that could preclude our understanding the contingency of our origins. For someone less resolute, this might have offered a plausible escape from the “horrid doubt,” but for Darwin, it wouldn’t do. Darwin was keen to show there were limits on our knowledge, but not in such a way as to impinge upon the certainty of his theory. To assuage his doubts and preserve the scientific status of his theory, it was imperative that he show that Man retained the capacity to understand not just the laws underpinning evolution, but also something of the contingent history that these laws give rise to. Metaphysics was not something Darwin could simply ignore. Determined not to commit the narcissistic errors of philosophers, however, Darwin’s “scientific” approach sought to turn metaphysics on its head. “To study Metaphysics, as they have always been studied appears to me to be like puzzling at Astronomy without Mechanics.”103 Here Darwin was following a scientific tradition that sought answers to large universal problems from the study of small apparently parochial questions. It is also this that provides the proper context for Darwin’s specialist studies—they were his preferred method for addressing more profound problems. Preoccupied with Man, philosophers had treated him in his singularity. However, evolution proved that Man was just a “frontier instance”—faculties that appear unique to Man are, on closer inspection, not unique at all. As he put it in his notebooks, “all Science is

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reason acting [. . .] on principles, which even animals practically know.”104 Darwin expressed an early optimism for this approach in his Transmutation Notebooks: “My theory would give zest to /recent & fossil/ Comparative Anatomy: it would lead to study instincts, heredity & mind heredity, whole metaphysics.”105 For example, as someone committed to both the contingency of events and a subject of science that was sufficiently free from the laws of inheritance to recognize their contingency, Darwin was profoundly concerned with the evolutionary origin of free-will. These problems, he believed, were intimately, if indirectly, connected. The degree of significance Darwin ascribed to the random effect of “conditions of existence” is evidenced by the fundamental role he attributed to it, not just in the process of selection, but in variation as well. Darwin’s hypothesis was that congenital variations arose from the indirect action of the “external conditions of life” on the reproductive systems of animals and plants.106 From there, he suspected, privately, that this natural variation might provide the biological basis for what we conceive of as free-will. “Free will,” he wrote in his notebooks, is simply “to mind what chance is to matter.”107 Darwin refrained from asserting anything as bold as this in his published writings. The closest he came was in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication where he showed that the external conditions of domestication produced a greater degree of variation than in nature—shedding light, he hoped, on the greater degree of freedom that civilized men enjoy over savages in the state of nature. Whatever Darwin’s implicit concerns, it was only in the final paragraph of his laborious two volume thesis that he dared appeal to their connection: [We] can hardly follow Professor Asa Gray in his belief “that variation has been led along certain beneficial lines,” like a stream “along definite and useful lines of irrigation.” If we assume that each particular variation was from the beginning of all time preordained, the plasticity of organisation, which leads to many injurious deviations of structure, as well as that redundant power of reproduction which inevitably leads to a struggle for existence, and, as a consequence, to the natural selection or survival of the fittest, must appear to us superfluous laws of nature. On the other hand, an omnipotent and omniscient Creator ordains everything and foresees everything. Thus we are brought face to face with a difficulty as insoluble as is that of free will and predestination. (my emphasis)108

Freedom may be necessary for Man to come to understand history, but it is hardly sufficient. Descartes had pointed out that free-will could be grounds for Man’s greatest errors as well as his greatest achievements. Like many scientists and philosophers of his time, Darwin was concerned with the kind of reason required for a true understanding of history. An early influence on Darwin in this regard was the philosopher John Abercrombie who was

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concerned with the question of distinguishing correct from false reasoning. Abercrombie defined Man’s capacity for reason in distinctly ethical terms: The process of mind which we call reason or judgments [. . .] consists in comparing and weighing facts, considerations and motives, and deducing from them conclusions, both as principles of belief, and rules of conduct. In doing so, a man of sound judgment proceeds with caution, and with due consideration of all the facts which he ought to take into the inquiry (my emphasis).109

In his copy of Abercrombie’s book, Darwin made a marginal note contrasting two modes of reason; the first mode a lawful, deductive reason, which entails “merely to find the step, & then to pursue this deep train” and a second mode of reasoning that requires “memory and knowledge of all contingencies.”110 Darwin’s theory requires both modes of reasoning. Selection is not just the necessary conjunction of laws but also a contingent historical process; one that actually hinges upon the interpreter’s power of selection to discern cause from effects. The problem Darwin faced was that his theory appeared to have removed the basis upon which Man could make any such conscious selections. From a strictly historical point of view, the power of selection is confined to the environment. An environment, moreover, that Man is unconscious of. Another way to put it is Darwin’s TfNS strictly considers function not form. An adaptation such as a bird’s wing could be selected for any number of purposes including flying, swimming, or thermoregulation—depending upon the selective whims of the environment. What about the evolution of thought—you might ask—the organism’s conscious response to its environment? Following Darwin’s theory, what we might consider to be present, conscious thought is merely the concatenation of instincts acquired from a purely “unconscious process of selection” over previous generations.111 Darwin was adamant that evolution proceeded “without any conscious intelligence on the part of the animal during each successive generation.”112 For the purposes of selection, Man, like all other animals, must be guided more by instinct than by reason. If it seemed otherwise, it was only because reason itself had become instinctual and “thereby degraded in character.”113 It was for this reason that Darwin specified that Man’s self-consciousness did not mean consciousness of the selective forces surrounding him. If we are conscious of certain sentiments, he noted, it does not follow that we are conscious that they have been inherited.114 It might even be that consciousness is an “incidental result” of other highly advanced intellectual faculties and therefore not a target of selection at all.115 And yet the problem remains. For Darwin’s theory to be possible, Man must have evolved some conscious power of selection (for how otherwise could he come to know and apply his theory?). Assuming

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that this capacity did not emerge suis generis, he would have to locate it in organisms as well. Darwin was always assiduously aware of the limits of his theory, cautioning in the opening paragraph of his chapter on “Instinct” that “I have nothing to do with the origin of the primary mental powers, any more than I have with that of life itself.”116 Darwin repeated this more strongly in The Descent: In what manner the mental powers were first developed in the lowest organisms, is as hopeless an enquiry as how life first originated. These are problems for the distant future, if they are ever to be solved by man.117

The problem of the origin of Man’s mental powers was related to another profound problem for Darwin: how evolution could produce anything new at all. It is easy enough to see how selection could work to improve or perfect a character once it appeared, however, it wasn’t clear how a selection process begins in the first place. It is here that we arrive at the importance of gradualism in Darwin’s argument. For Gould, gradualism represents the “most central conviction” of Darwin’s thought, antedating natural selection, and casting “a far wider net” over his life’s work.118 According to Gruber, gradualism was Darwin’s antidote to theology, the counter-argument from design that something could come from nothing.119 What is incontrovertible is the centrality of gradualism to Darwin’s concept of selection. Making “selection” the creative force of evolution entailed discounting the possibility that evolutionary novelty could come from large discontinuous variations.120 In The Origin, Darwin had devoted substantial attention to proving that variation was not so abundant that it could become the creative force of evolution.121 On the origin of mental actions in particular, Darwin was emphatic—“No complex instinct can possibly be produced through natural selection, except by the slow and gradual accumulation of numerous, slight, yet profitable, variations.”122,123 If the origin of mental powers was beyond our reach, Darwin hoped the problem could be made manageable by cutting it down to size. What might look like large qualitative changes from a certain distance could on closer inspection merely be the result of small insensible changes of degree. We might also suggest that gradualism served as Darwin’s alternative, more compassionate response to his encounter with the Fuegian. While the gulf separating Man from the brutes was generally portrayed in The Descent as immeasurable, his wider gradualist argument made space for identification and mutual recognition. On the gradual evolution of Man’s mental powers, Darwin was keen to stress that virtues such as “love,” “sympathy,” “the power to reason,” and “fidelity to the truth”—are shared by all humans. And not just humans. A “little dose of judgment or reason,” Darwin observed in The Origin, could be

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detected “in animals very low in the scale of nature.”124 In The Descent, he was more explicit: If no organic being excepting man had possessed any mental power, or if his powers had been of a wholly different nature from those of the lower animals, then we should never have been able to convince ourselves that our high faculties had been gradually developed. But it can be clearly shewn that there is no fundamental difference of this kind.125

Of these high faculties, Darwin is in no doubt that “reason stands at the summit” and yet the “more the habits of any particular animal are studied by a naturalist, the more he attributes to reason and the less to unlearnt instincts.”126 Darwin’s argument is circular. If a level of caution and judgment is required on the part of the scientist to properly interpret evolutionary history, then the capacity “to pause, deliberate, and resolve” must be found in animals lower down in the scale of nature.127 Darwin took this problem up again in his final publication—The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms—showing that even worms display a power of judgment that could not be explained by either blind instinct or chance: If a man had to plug up a small cylindrical hole, with such objects as leaves, petioles or twigs, he would drag or push them in by their pointed ends; but if these objects were very thin relatively to the size of the hole, he would probably insert some by their thicker or broader ends. The guide in his case would be intelligence. It seemed therefore worthwhile to observe carefully how worms dragged leaves into their burrows; whether by their tips or bases or middle parts. [If] worms acted solely through instinct or an unvarying inherited impulse, they would draw all kinds of leaves into their burrows in the same manner. If they have no such definite instinct, we might expect that chance would determine whether the tip, base or middle was seized. If both these alternatives are excluded, intelligence alone is left. (my emphasis)128

Darwin’s final study on worms serves as an elaborate metaphor for his ethical view of science. Aided by their reason, the accumulated small acts of these modest creatures could ultimately account for the formation of vegetable mold that covers much of the surface of the earth.129 This, in essence, was how Darwin wanted to view science. Scientific advance comes not from the grandstanding of great philosophers but the “gradual illumination of men’s minds” from the more modest scientist.130 Where science was once guaranteed by a metaphysical premise that nature and thought conform, Darwin sought to guarantee the science of evolution within the evolutionary process itself. Was this enough to resolve Darwin’s “horrid doubt”? I don’t think it

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was and I suspect that Darwin’s choice of earthworms betrayed his lingering anxiety. Earthworms carry out their activities hidden underground. These activities are not just concealed from our view, Darwin points out, they are concealing. The “sifting actions of worms” serve to “conceal the whole beneath fine earth.” This “work of concealment” also pertains to our own history as “worms have played a considerable part in the burial and concealment of several Roman and other old buildings in England.”131 Of course this cover-up is unconscious—“worms are purely provided” and “learn but little of the outside world.”132 And yet they act “in nearly the same manner as would a man.”133 In the final paragraph of The Formation, indeed perhaps the crescendo to his life’s work, Darwin compares the action of worms to the more conspicuous work of corals—the subject of Darwin’s first study when perhaps he was more optimistic about the prospects of science: It is a marvelous reflection that the whole of the superficial mould over any such expanse has passed, and will again pass, every few years through the bodies of worms [. . . .] Some other animals, however, still more lowly organized, namely corals, have done far more conspicuous work in having constructed innumerable reefs and islands in the great oceans; but these are almost confined to the tropical zones.134

Isn’t this the navel point of Darwin’s idea? The question whether we can bring the hidden causes that surround us, to consciousness? How many buried truths can we bring to the surface? How much of what we see is really the consequence of infinite causes and effects that will remain buried from view? THE DEATH OF MAN Darwin’s doubts grew with age. At the time of writing The Origin, his confidence was such that he was inclined to believe in a “First Cause” that had “an intelligent mind some degree analogous to that of man”—for how else could one explain “this immense and wonderful universe including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity.” In subsequent decades, his faith “gradually with many fluctuations [became] weaker.”135 It was toward the end of his life that he expressed his “horrid doubt” regarding the convictions of a “monkey mind,” first in his autobiography (1876) and finally in a late letter to Asa Gray (1881). And yet the doubts were there from the beginning. As early as his Transmutation Notebooks, Darwin was questioning whether “all reasoning, of which human nature is the object” had a “starting place” given “there is nothing more elementary than that complex nature itself with which our speculations must end as well as begin.”136 The

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fluctuations to which Darwin tended continued at least into the 1870s. In The Descent, Darwin submitted to the high probability “that with mankind the intellectual faculties have been gradually perfected through natural selection; and this conclusion is sufficient for our purpose.”137 Looking to the future he also expressed his hope that Man might someday be freed from his inner conflicts, having acquired a habit of “such perfect self-command, that his desires and passions will at last instantly yield to his social sympathies, and there will no longer be a struggle between them.”138 In truth, Darwin was far from convinced. Science since Descartes was premised upon a subject conscious of himself. In order to establish the scientific basis for his theory, Darwin dutifully charted an evolutionary process that could give rise to Man’s conscious apprehension and deliberation on his history. And yet this process was “unconscious.” Darwin’s counter-scientific theory rests upon a subject that cannot become conscious of his contingent origins. Were there to come a time when this “unconscious process of selection” ceded to “Man’s conscious power of selection,” natural selection would no longer apply to him. Armed with full knowledge of the causes acting around him, he would be able to govern selection. Man would have overcome his origins and could conquer his destiny. Like a deity he would become a cause of himself (causa sui).139 From the 1830s to the 1880s, Darwin was unyielding on one point. This time would never come. Natural selection, the evolutionary process that had bestowed life and death upon every organic being, applied with equal force to Man. Man is given no special treatment by Darwin.140 The fact that he had evolved some “conscious power of selection” did not detract from the far greater power of natural, unconscious, selection. Lest there be any ambiguity in his original analogy with artificial selection in the first chapter of The Origin, Darwin was careful to pair all references to Man’s power of “methodical selection” with the overriding power of “the unconscious”: Hence, if man goes on selecting, and thus augmenting, any peculiarity, he will almost certainly unconsciously modify other parts of the structure.141 Youatt gives an excellent illustration of the effects of a course of selection, which may be considered as unconsciously followed, in so far that the breeders could never have expected or even have wished to have produced the result which ensued.142 Over all these causes of Change I am convinced that the accumulative action of Selection, whether applied methodically and more quickly, or unconsciously and more slowly, but more efficiently, is by far the predominant Power (my emphasis).143

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When Darwin finally got round to discussing natural selection in chapter 3, whatever his metaphysical assumptions when writing The Origin, he did not hedge on his belittlement of “feeble man.”144 What a piece of work is man how fleeting are his wishes and efforts! 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?145

However cautious and “scientific” Darwin’s reflections upon the origins of Man and his reason may have been, his concerns were never strictly empirical. At the heart of his writings was a fixation with creating a transcendental figure subject to biological laws that “by a sort of internal torsion” had “acquired the right [. . .] to know them and subject them to total clarification.”146 Darwin also recognized this endeavor was untenable. “Man selects for his own good.”147 Darwin may have been referring to artificial breeding, but the same could equally be true of Man’s selective, parochial, interpretations of evolutionary history. Natural selection is premised upon a subject subordinate, not equal, to nature. A subject that cannot fully know himself. If by Man was meant “homo sapien,” the mammal born not so long ago, Darwin was unequivocal—“he is not a deity his end under present form will come.”148 If by Man was meant the subject of science, born even more recently, his time was already up. AFTER DARWIN: SOCIAL DARWINISM “At core,” Hilary Rose has argued, Darwin’s theory “sustains” the belief in “Western Man’s right to treat nature, women and other others as his things.”149 This is to grant too much confidence and self-assurance to both Darwin and his scientific audience. As Rose herself points out, Darwin suffered “intense anxiety lest his science should disturb his social acceptability.” Moreover, within his single biography [we have] a metonym for the story of science as an institution both continuously seeking to represent nature and anxious about negotiating its place among the powers.150

Indeed. But then, doesn’t Darwin’s life serve as an ideal metonym precisely because his theory, at core, provides Man no such guarantee? Unlike a

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Linnaean classification of human differences that was fixed, hierarchical and unambiguous, natural selection presented evolution in strictly horizontal terms, specifying no grounds for superiority or value beyond survival (“never say higher or lower”151). This also cleared the way for Darwin’s theory to be imagined and interpreted in different ways. It is in this sense that Darwin’s theory had the potential to be politically incendiary. It creates its own space for counter-interpretations. These were tumultuous times and it did not take long for Darwin’s ideas to find a feminist voice. Antoinette Brown Blackwell accused Darwin of “misinterpreting” evolution “by giving undue prominence to such as have been evolved in the male line”: With great wealth of detail, [Darwin] has illustrated his theory of how the male has probably acquired additional masculine characters; but he seems never to have thought of looking to see whether or not the females had developed equivalent feminine characters.152

A few years later Eliza Burt Gable argued in The Evolution of Women that “the female among the orders of life, man included, represents a higher stage of development than the male.”153 Recruiting Darwin to the cause she added that Darwin himself “had proved that the female organization is freer from imperfections than the male, and therefore is less liable to derangements.”154 It wasn’t just women that were converted to the feminist perspective as Lester Frank Ward introduced what he called a “gynecocentric” view of human evolution. He would later reinterpret Darwin’s theory of sexual selection so as to make the female of the species the chief protagonist of evolution.155 The contributions of Blackwell, Gamble, and others would be largely drowned out by a tidal wave of racist and sexist evolutionary interpretations as defenders of Man sought to contain the fallout from Darwin’s discovery. If Man had evolved by a contingent evolutionary process, then his fate was equally contingent. One of the first to raise this concern was Francis Galton who, upon reading The Origin, was inspired “to pursue many inquiries [on] the central topics of Heredity, and the possible improvement of the race.”156 From 1865 until his death in 1911, Galton devoted himself to this cause of preserving and enhancing the health of the human species, writing several books on the subject and founding the Eugenics Society in 1901. In English Men of Science (1874), Galton insisted that the qualities of scientific men were almost entirely inherited, with little influence of environment or training. As Darwin’s first cousin, Galton may have had his own reasons for insisting that genius runs in families, nevertheless, when considering the specific qualities of men of science, he found “vanity to be at a minimum,” emphasizing instead a certain “manliness, honesty and truthfulness.”157 Above all, Galton emphasized the need for courage and independence. While “the mass

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of mankind plods on [. . .] too fearful [to] judge for themselves,” the man of science, “thoroughly independent in character,” has an “unshrinking pursuit of truth.”158 More generally, a man “must have confidence in himself, [to be able to] stand absolutely alone in the presence of the severest trials of life.”159 This last quotation alone suggests a fair degree of anxiety beneath the bluff and bluster. Galton’s specific concern was that the most intellectually gifted members of our race would soon be outnumbered and overrun by its less gifted but more prolific members. To guard against this, Galton promoted the idea that intellect could be bred in the same way that speed could be bred among race horses. In the meanwhile, those that fell beneath the category of Man were the convenient repositories for his anxieties about Man’s past. If “Caucasions” shared common ancestry with the “lowest savage,” the “range of mental power” between them was “enormous [. . .] reaching from one knows not what height, and descending to one can hardly say what depth.”160 Galton was not alone in making such distinctions. In the same year that Darwin published The Origin, Paul Broca founded The Anthropological Society in Paris, in part, to “delineate human groups and assess their relative worth.” He would conclude that the brain is larger “in men than in women [and] in superior races than in inferior races.”161 Echoing these sentiments, the German biologist Carl Vogt argued that “from the intellectual point of view, the adult Negro simultaneously resembles the child, the woman and the old man in the white races.”162 Ludwig Büchner was equally insistent that “the Negro serves as a transition between man and animal” and that the “cerebral differences between the lower and the higher races are identical to those observed between the human and simian brains.”163 When Ernst Haeckel finally got round to discussing the potentially thorny issue of the evolution of the white race, the underlying agenda was patent: The immense superiority that the white race has won over the other races in the struggle for existence is due to Natural Selection [. . . .] That superiority will, without doubt become more and more marked in the future, so that still few races of man will be able, as time advances, to contend with the white in the struggle for existence [. . .] it is the more perfect, the nobler man that triumphs over his fellows, and that the end of this terrific content is in the vast perfecting and freedom of the human race, the free subordination of the individual to the lordship of reason. (my emphasis)164

Haeckel’s confidence, unlike Darwin’s, grew with age. “At the summit” of history, he would write a couple of decades later, “we see a Goethe, a Shakespeare, a Darwin” while “at the bottom of the scale” we find “the Bushmen and Patagonians.”165 The excesses of Galton, Haeckel, Vogt, Büchner, Broca, and others say more about the psychology of certain

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nineteenth century scientists than they do those they defamed. “The science of inequality,” the sociologist Jean Finot would write in 1906, “is emphatically a science of White people. It is they who have invented it and set it going, who have maintained, cherished, and propagated it, thanks to their observations and their deductions.”166 In some ways, the Social Darwinists were merely carrying on from where Darwin had left off—insulating Man from the disturbing consequences of evolution with a comforting tale of ascendant laws. If we are to follow Darwin’s more cautious conclusions on historical contingency, however, they may have been doing no more than feathering his deathbed. CONCLUSION: A RELUCTANT RADICAL Freud was a notoriously poor interpreter of Darwin, despite his avowed appreciation of him. His principal error was to have confused Darwin’s theory with that of Lamarck’s; assuming evolution to be driven by the slow willing of animals.167 This was ironic not simply because Freud (of all people) had imputed organisms with consciousness, but because Darwin’s theory was actually much closer to Freud’s all along. Both Darwin’s “unconscious process of selection” and Freud’s “unconscious” are founded upon the same epistemic premise—that the historical events that form us are too vast in extent, too immense in their scope, to ever be held in conscious thought. At least in our own lives, these experiences become buried, only to be manifest in ways we can’t control and don’t understand. Psychoanalysis grants no privileged position to the historian, evolutionary or otherwise. Hostages to the past, his efforts to render history always wind up, to varying degrees, as “involuntary or unconscious memoir.”168 Darwin was highly ambivalent about questions of origins—symptomatic perhaps of his evident failure to process the loss of mother—and the specific origin of human intellect was the source of a great deal of anxiety for him. Darwin’s expositions of the ascent of Man and descent of Reason say as much about his “horrid doubt” as they do about the nature of human history. Whatever Darwin’s actual views on race and sex (and the evidence suggests that Darwin’s views were fairly conventional), it is clear that Darwin felt moved to cloak his humbling idea in flattery and praise of his Anglo-Saxon readers. Darwin was explicit that Man was subject to the same knowable laws as every other living thing, but when discussing the more uncomfortable consequences of a contingent history (né his own contingent experiences), he turned to allusion and disavowal. Man must have evolved the power to reason on causes and effect (the power to select), but not a power so great that he could come to know the circumstances of his origins (natural

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selection). Darwin was not prepared to yield on his axiom that selection is unconscious. If Man could be the product of known laws, the contingent details remain too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Darwin’s attempts to rescue Man from his monkey-mind ultimately testify to his very reluctant radicalism. Having denied the perfection of nature, he never lost hope that his theory would reveal more of nature’s latent perfection as our knowledge advanced. After revealing the causes of evolution to lie in a complex web of relations, he threw his lot in with the agent of liberal economics that could render these relations transparent to science. Just as he proved that Man was no deity, he proceeded to relate two elaborate evolutionary tales for how, nonetheless, he could come to think like one. Darwin’s reluctant radicalism hovered over a tragic navel point—his theory was premised upon a subject that not only might not know his history, but couldn’t. If natural selection indeed applies to us we remain largely unconscious of its workings. It was this recognition that informed his balladry upon feeble man. Darwin’s reluctance came to form the basis for the twentieth century’s reaction as Darwinists, in various ways, sought to rein in the counter-scientific consequences of Darwin’s theory with spurious “scientific” solutions. If this wasn’t bad enough, their solutions would be used to foreground a popular backlash in philosophy, economics, and psychology—disciplines he once so radically and seditiously inspired. Once a friend, hitherto a foe. It is one of the great tragic ironies that the most revolutionary idea of the nineteenth century proved to be one of the most powerful counter-revolutionary weapons of the twentieth.

NOTES 1. W. Shakespeare, Richard the Second, The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 354. 2. C. Darwin, Origin of Species: 4th ed. (London: John Murray, 1866), 94. 3. Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 353. 4. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Marx, Freud,” 61. 5. ibid. 6. Foucault, The Order of Things, 414. 7. J. Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 162. 8. Masud Khan cited in A. Phillips, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 109–10. 9. See discussion in A. Phillips, Becoming Freud, 51–2. 10. S. Freud, Totem and Taboo (1913; repr., New York: Cosimo, 2009), 117

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11. The phrase “transcendental narcissism” is from The Archaeology of Knowledge—see M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 203.. 12. Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 154–5. 13. Freud, Leonardo Da Vinci: A Memory of his Childhood, 96–7. 14. S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899; repr., Ware: Wordsworth, 1997), 25. 15. M. Foucault, “The history of sexuality. Volume one: an introduction,” in Power/Knowledge, 159. 16. Darwin cited in S. Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901; repr., London: Penguin Books, 1975), 199. 17. ibid, 199–200n. 18. Darwin, The Descent of Man, 43. 19. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 116–7. 20. C. Darwin, Letter to William Graham 3 July 1881. 21. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 268. 22. ibid, 526. 23. ibid, 525. 24. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck cited in M. B. Madaule, Lamarck, the Mythical Precursor: A Study of the Relations Between Science and Ideology (Boston: MIT Press, 1982), 77. 25. Darwin cited in ibid, 77. See also comments in Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882, 119. 26. Darwin, “Essay of 1844,” 120. 27. Darwin, “Extracts from the B-C-D-E transmutation notebooks,” 451. Darwin’s frustration with man’s narcissism was a recurring theme in his early note taking. Elsewhere in Transmutation Notebooks, Darwin remarked upon the “instance of arrogance” that led his contemporaries to believe that the universe was adapted to man and “not man to Planets” (455). 28. C. Darwin, “Notebook N,” in H. Gruber, et al., Darwin on Man, 331. 29. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 229. 30. ibid, 229–30. 31. ibid, 230. 32. ibid, 231. 33. ibid. 34. ibid, 232. 35. ibid, 235. 36. Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882, 130–1. 37. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 239. 38. Darwin, “Notebook N,” 350. 39. Darwin, “Old and useless notes,” 390n. 40. Darwin cited in Gruber et al., Darwin on Man, 21. 41. Darwin, “Extracts from the B-C-D-E transmutation notebooks,” 446. 42. See discussion in Gruber et al., Darwin on Man, 231.

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43. A. R. Wallace, “The limits of natural selection as applied to man,” in A. R. Wallace and A. Berry. Infinite Tropics: An Alfred Russel Wallace Anthology (London: Verso, 2002), 199. 44. Thomas Huxley cited in Olson, Science and Religion, 1450–1900, 199. 45. J. Moore and A. Desmond, “Introduction,” in C. Darwin. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex: With an Introduction by James Moore and Adrian Desmond (London: Penguin Books, 2004), xxxviii–xl. 46. ibid, xlii–xliii. 47. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1st ed., 9. 48. ibid, 185. 49. ibid, 38. 50. ibid, 48–9. 51. ibid, 106. 52. Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882, 93. 53. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1st ed., 70–1. 54. I. Kant, The Metaphysic of Ethics (1785; repr., Edinburgh: Hamilton, Adams, & Co, 1836), 136. 55. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1st ed., 91. Darwin is citing Kant’s The Metaphysic of Ethics, 267. 56. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1st ed., 91. 57. ibid, 163. 58. ibid, 166. 59. See for example M. Ruse, “Charles Darwin and group selection,” 627–8; R. J. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 13. 60. Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 134–5. 61. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1st ed., 95. 62. ibid. 63. ibid, 162. 64. ibid, 91. 65. ibid, 179–80. 66. O. Mannoni, “The decolonisation of myself,” in Race 7.4 (1966): 330. 67. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1st ed., 95 and 35. 68. Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, 195. 69. Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, 195. 70. C. Darwin, Letter to Charles Whitley 23 July 1834. 71. See C. H. Ramey, “The uncannyvalley of similarities concerning abortion, baldness, heaps of sand, and humanlike robots,” in Proceedings of Views of the Uncanny Valley Workshop: IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoidrobots (2005): 8–13. 72. Darwin, “Notebook N,” in Gruber, H., P. Barrett, and C. Darwin. Darwin on Man. (London: Wildwood House, 1974), 339. 73. Lacan cited in G. Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 24.

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74. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1st ed., 29. 75. Kimmel, The History of Men: Essays on the History of American and British Masculinities (New York: SUNY Press, 2005), 75. 76. ibid, 77. 77. F. P. Cobbe, Life of Frances Power Cobbe. Vol. 2 (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1894), 124. 78. ibid, 125. 79. Darwin cited in ibid, 126. 80. F. P. Cobbe, “Criminals, idiots, women, and minors,” in Fraser’s Magazine 78 (1868): 92. 81. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd ed., 564. 82. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1st ed., 257–8. 83. Like Kant before him, Darwin’s appeal to ethical laws to ground Man’s understanding of natural laws was in some sense paradoxical; implying that Man has attained some degree of independence from the laws to which he is also subordinate. Darwin’s own speculations gave priority to the natural laws, with “free will” operating as a kind of necessary illusion: “By my theory no animal as now existing can be cause of itself [. . .] hence there is great probability against free action.—on my view of free will, no one could discover he had not it” (C. Darwin “Notebook N,” 372). 84. ibid, 32. 85. ibid, 91 and 101. The phrase “the sins that made the past so pleasant to us” is a quotation from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. 86. ibid, 192. 87. Darwin’s irritability in these passages stands out precisely because it is so unusual. As his son, Francis, has pointed out, Darwin’s writing is distinctive for its “courteous and conciliatory tone.” The reader “is never scorned for any amount of doubt which he may be imagined to feel, and his scepticism is treated with patient respect.” Francis Darwin cited in Beer, Darwin’s plots, 34. 88. Francis Darwin cited in Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 34 89. Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882, 141. 90. ibid, 139. 91. J. Bowlby, Charles Darwin: A New Life (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), 78. 92. A. Desmond and J. Moore, Darwin (London: Penguin, 1991), 14. 93. Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882, 25. 94. J. Bowlby, Charles Darwin: A New Life (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), 78. 95. ibid, 78. 96. King Lear 4.2. 32–33. 97. R. M. Young. “The role of psychology in the nineteenth century evolutionary debate,” in C. Chant and J. Fauvel. Darwin to Einstein: Historical Studies on Science and Belief (London: Open University, 1980), 157. 98. Gruber, Barrett, and Darwin, Darwin on Man, 10. 99. Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882, 108–9. 100. ibid, 140–1.

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101. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1st ed., 160. 102. Darwin, “Notebook N,” 337. 103. ibid, 331. 104. ibid, 333. 105. Darwin, “Extracts from the B-C-D-E transmutation notebooks,” 447. 106. Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication Volume 2, 255. 107. Darwin, “Notebook M,” 278. 108. Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication Volume 2, 432. 109. J. Abercrombie, Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers and the Investigation of Truth (London: John Murray), 137. 110. Charles Darwin cited in Gruber, Barrett, and Darwin, Darwin on Man, 303. 111. J. Hodge, 'The notebook programmes and projects of Darwin’s London years', in The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, 56. 112. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1st ed., 39. 113. ibid, 38. 114. ibid, 85. 115. See Darwin’s discussion in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1st ed., 105. 116. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 229. 117. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1st ed., 18. 118. Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 148. 119. Gruber, Barrett, and Darwin, Darwin on Man, 125. 120. See also discussions in Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 149– 51; and Mayr, One Long Argument, 44–7. 121. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 53. 122. ibid, 232. 123. This provides another alternative interpretation of the phrase “unconscious selection.” It wasn’t simply that selection is carried out by a non-conscious environment, but that it takes place on a time scale that is remote from human consciousness, a scale Darwin rather fittingly described as “incomprehensibly vast.” Darwin, The Origin of Species, 307. 124. ibid, 230. 125. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1st ed., 17. 126. ibid, 46. 127. ibid. 128. C. Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits (London: John Murray, 1881), 14. 129. ibid, 1. 130. C. Darwin, Letter 12757 Darwinto E. B. Aveling 13thOctober 1880. 131. Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits, 313. 132. ibid, 312. 133. ibid, 313. 134. ibid.

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135. Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882, 92–93. 136. Darwin, “Extracts from the B-C-D-E transmutation notebooks,” 453. 137. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1st ed., 160. 138. ibid, 91. 139. Darwin, “Notebook N,” 339. 140. See discussion in Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 44–70. 141. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 20. 142. ibid, 46. 143. ibid, 54. 144. ibid, 123–4. 145. ibid, 97. 146. Foucault, The Order of Things, 338. 147. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 96. 148. Darwin, “Extracts from the B-C-D-E transmutation notebooks,” 449. 149. Rose, Love, Power, and Knowledge: Towards a Feminist Transformation of the Sciences, 232. 150. ibid. 151. This was Darwin’s note to self in the margins of his copy of Robert Chambers’s Vestiges. Darwin cited in S. J. Gould, Full House (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2011), 137. 152. A. Brown-Blackwell, “Sex and evolution,” in A. S. Rossi. The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir (New England: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 357–9. 153. Eliza Burt Gamble cited in C. N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 109. 154. ibid. 155. ibid, 110. 156. Galton cited in V. L. Hilts, “A guide to Francis Galton’s English men of science,” in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 65.5 (1975): 6. 157. ibid, 148. 158. F. Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry Into Its Laws and Consequences (London: Macmillan, 1869), 196. 159. Galton cited in Hilts, “A guide to Francis Galton’s English men of science,” 7. 160. Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences, 26. 161. Paul Broca cited in S. J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), 83. 162. Carl Vogt cited in Pichot, The Pure Society, 260. 163. Ludwig Büchner cited in ibid, 258. 164. E. H. Haeckel, The Pedigree of Man, and Other Essays (London: Freethought Publishing, 1883), 85. 165. Ernst Haeckel cited in Pichot, The Pure Society, 257. 166. Finot, Race Prejudice, 311. 167. L. B. Ritvo. Darwin’s Influence on Freud: A Tale of Two Sciences (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 31–60. 168. Nietzsche cited in T. Dufresne, Returns of the French Freud: Freud, Lacan, and Beyond (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 119.

Part III

DARWIN’S CENTURY FROM CRISIS TO REACTION

Chapter 7

A Crisis of Representation Representations of Evolution 1859–1929

We now understand his creative mystery: it is a Trimurti of three principles, Accident, Absolute Ignorance, and Extermination. —Robert Mackenzie1 A religion, almost a religion and no quarrel and a single scientific statement and no darkness and no question. —Gertrude Stein2

Darwin’s eschewal of scientific protocol convinced a generation of evolutionary theorists to cast his theory aside in favor of alternatives that could promise to provide a properly scientific account of the course and cause of evolution. If Darwin’s theory was to win scientific acceptance, it would have to do the same. The Modern Evolutionary Synthesis did this by effectively replacing historical causes with mechanical ones. What was a triumph of Darwinian science would travesty Darwin’s counter-scientific idea. INTRODUCTION: THE ECLIPSE OF DARWINISM Distinguishing between Darwin’s two theories is useful because it separates an evolutionary process itself (TfE) from its historical causes (TfNS). More importantly, it serves to separate science from counter-science, allowing us to segregate our discussion of their contrasting historical receptions. However, it bears repeating that Darwin never committed to a distinction between his two theories; a fact confirmed by his characterization of The Origin as “one long argument,” his affectionate allusion to “my theory” and, above all, 153

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his terminology. Selection, adaptation, and struggle refer to both heritable characteristics that survive across generations (TfE), and the historical fate of organisms in just one (TfNS). If a distinction is to be made in The Origin, it is between Darwin’s inductive argument that evolution had happened, and his deductive argument that evolution would happen, on the premise that certain conditions were fulfilled. The trouble was that Darwin had neither a mechanism of heredity nor of variation to underpin his TfE and upon which his TfNS was based. This forced him to infer hereditary characteristics from individual organisms; an inference that encouraged a conflation between the two theories, but more significantly at the time, placed both theories in jeopardy. To demonstrate why let’s take a very simple example. Imagine we have a population of red organisms that live in a blue environment. Over the course of successive generations, the organisms turn blue. We might infer that the quality of being blue originated in a selective process for camouflage. However, what if the quality of being blue was a direct effect of the environment, or the result of a single genetic leap, or the product of an internal developmental process independent from the environment? These three alternative possibilities constitute different kinds of evolution, requiring, in turn, different causal theories. While Darwin’s conviction was that in general “the nature of variation depends but little on the conditions to which [the organism] has been exposed,” without a mechanism of heredity and variation, he was unable to distinguish direct environmental or developmental modifications from the selection of random variations in hereditary constitution.3 With alternative “means of modification” available, Darwin’s two theories were aggregated under the label “natural selection” and the term “evolution” was employed to designate a generic process by which species change over time. Applying this distinction twelve years later, Darwin wrote in The Descent; “I may be permitted to say [. . .] that I had two distinct objects in view; firstly, to shew that species had not been separately created, and secondly, that natural selection had been the chief agent of change.”4 If the scientific community had comparatively little difficulty accepting evolution, they had more difficulty accepting the specific process advocated by Darwin. As William Bateson wrote some years later, natural selection had taken on “an increased and perilous burden” as efforts to “expand or magnify [its] powers” were becoming “more improbable.”5 Biologists took exception to Darwin’s scientific theory precisely on the grounds of its counter-scientific consequences. In particular, they opposed a theory that could not guarantee perfection, could not identify organisms into categories and rejected laws. Most evolutionary theorists were willing to accept selection as a factor in evolution. What they couldn’t grant was the primary status of selection in accounting for the direction, design, and distinction of species. On these grounds, many relegated natural selection to the periphery and sought alternative scientific theories of evolution.

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In his book-length appraisal of Darwinism in 1907 (Darwinism To-day), Vernon Kellogg identified the three main alternatives to Darwinian evolution.6 These were neo-Lamarckism (based on the inheritance of characters acquired due to the effects of “use and disuse”); heterogenesis (based on the sudden, saltational mutation of “sports”); and orthogenesis (based on an internal development process). While it was possible, and not uncommon, for all these theories to bleed into one another, they were sufficiently independent of each other that Kellogg offered them as “distinctly substitutional methods of species forming.”7 The popularity of the alternatives to Darwinism stemmed from their fidelity to scientific protocols. All, in different ways, could claim to provide a more authentic scientific account of evolution. Neo-Lamarckism directly provided for nature’s perfection; heterogenesis retained the identity of species and orthogenesis rendered evolution in a lawful process. It is worth discussing the perceived merits of these alternatives as they serve to highlight the radicalism of Darwin’s argument. It was considered so extreme that biologists couldn’t consider Darwin’s argument on its own terms. Rather during “Darwinism’s eclipse,” biologists received Darwin’s counter-scientific argument as a failed science. To varying degrees, each of the favored alternatives found a way to represent the causes of evolution, thus abiding by principles of scientific reason where Darwin’s theory was perceived to have failed. If Darwinism was to win acceptance, it would have to do the same. PERFECTION AND NEO-LAMARCKISM Darwin’s denial of a perfect direct fit of organisms to their environments contradicted not only theology but the most popular naturalistic (i.e., secular) explanation for nature’s perfection—the inheritance of acquired characteristics due to “use and disuse” of parts. This is the theory associated with Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, but as Madeleine Barthélemy-Madaule has pointed out since, was also just folk wisdom. “No one either defended or contested” it, it “simply went without saying.”8 Just as “the weightlifter develops strong arms, the hypothetical giraffe stretches its neck reaching leaves”—and these improvements are passed onto future generations.9 It wasn’t even denied by Darwin who proposed that use-inheritance worked alongside natural selection. In subsequent editions of The Origin, Darwin placed greater emphasis on the Lamarckian mechanism at the expense of natural selection, while his opponents turned to Lamarck not as an auxiliary factor in evolution but as a wholesale alternative. George Henslow considered the idea that the “steady perfecting of an organ” could be explained by “the variations needed by selection” just happening to appear “at the right time” far-fetched. “It is highly improbable” that “during the gradual perfecting of an adaptive modification,

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the numerous necessary variations will appear successively in such a series that a harmonious combination of the single variations will be possible.”10 Like Henslow, Edward Drinker Cope could not see how Darwin’s theory could produce creative change as it included “no actively progressive principle whatever [. . . .] It must first wait for the development of variation, and then, after securing the survival of the best, wait again for the best to project its own variations for selection.”11 Henslow and Cope’s critiques reveal their unwillingness to question the notion of a “perfect” fit between organism and environment; a question as scientifically heretical as it was religious. Lamarck had reassured us that nature is perfect and offered the most expeditious explanation for it. If there appears to be a direct relation between organisms and their environments, Lamarck argued, we should infer that the causes are direct as well. Incorporating neo-Lamarckism into his orthogenetic theory, Alpheus Hyatt stipulated that the origin of form, “can only be explained by the action of physical surroundings directly working upon the organization and producing by such direct action the modifications or common variations above described.”12 Alfred Packard’s interpretation was more charitable to Darwin, granting that natural selection could work in conjunction with Lamarckism. However, resolute “that natural selection by itself was not a vera causa,” he afforded priority to Lamarck. “The transforming,” he wrote, “should naturally precede the action of the selective agencies.”13 Darwin had interpreted Cuvier’s principle of the “conditions of existence” almost exclusively in relation to organism and environment, neglecting Cuvier’s own emphasis on the morphological problem of the correlation of parts, whereby the various characters of an organism are functionally coadapted to each other.14 For neo-Lamarckists such as Spencer, a focus on the “correlation of parts” placed an even greater burden upon Darwin’s theory. Spencer noted that random variation couldn’t guarantee that increases in size of hind limbs will be “simultaneous” with an increase in size of the forelimbs, nor with the necessary structural changes that increases in size in limbs necessitate, such as the “strengthening of attached muscles.”15 On the other hand, a Lamarckian process, in which the environment could act directly on the organism, would not encounter this problem as co-operative parts would “be kept in adjustment and be re-adjusted to meet new requirements.”16 Spencer’s conclusion brooked no qualification: Close contemplation of the facts impresses me more strongly than ever with the two alternatives—either there has been inheritance of acquired characters, or there has been no evolution.17

Neo-Lamarckism enjoyed its heyday during the 1870s and 1880s whereupon it fell out of favor. Entering this new century two other alternatives would vie for priority.

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IDENTITY AND HETEROGENESIS (SALTATIONISM) Darwin eliminated “species” by subordinating it to the more general principle of “variety” (a term given to “less distinct” forms). From a Darwinian perspective, differences between species are no more than distinct cases of differences within species. There is no essential difference between “species” and “variety” and “varieties,” in turn, do not differ essentially from “individual differences.”18 According to Darwin, any “well-marked variety” could be looked upon as an “incipient species.”19 The scientific consensus at the time was that Darwin’s equation did not square with nature. If there was no categorical difference between “species” and “variety,” we would expect to see “a continuous chain or series” among all organic beings. But what was generally found were “many chains or series of discontinuous but obviously connected species” (Vernon Kellogg).20 Bateson’s objection was both empirical and theoretical. Darwin theorized that “specific diversity of form” was “consequent upon diversity of environment,” but, Bateson argued, while we find that “diverse environments often shade into each other insensibly,” the life forms that are “subject to them” tend to form a “discontinuous series.”21 For many, Darwin’s definition of species represented a step backward—the minimum a scientific theory can do is to adequately name things. Darwin’s theory, however, had rendered any species’ name arbitrary meaning that he had failed “at exactly the point where it was devised to help: Specific distinction.”22 For Hugo de Vries, Darwin had cast biology back to a “pre-Linnean attitude.”23 Separating the problem of the origin of species from the problem of adaptation, Thomas Hunt Morgan concluded in 1903 that “selection does not account for the origin of new species; and adaptation cannot be taken as the measure of a species.”24 Bateson, Morgan, and de Vries all sought a resolution to the “species problem” in saltationist theories. In their reading, species emerge all “at once” and “fully equipped, without preparation, or intermediate steps. No series of generations, no selection, no struggle for existence was needed.”25 De Vries’s system distinguished between two types of variation; “one slow” that accounted for slight variations within species, and the other one “sudden” that accounted for differences between species. Contra Darwin, de Vries sought to show that there was “a real difference between elementary species and varieties.”26 Bateson’s saltationism was premised upon the supposition that “no variation, however small, can occur in any part without other variations occurring in correlation to it in all other parts.” From Bateson’s perspective, evolution had to be saltational, because any incremental process (op. cit. Spencer) would deprive the organism of its systematicity.27 Thus, he looked upon the “continuity” and “discontinuity” of form, not as an external effect of “Natural Selection” but as a product of the “natural and intrinsic stability of chemical constitution.”28

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LAWS AND ORTHOGENESIS If Darwin’s TfE was based upon the existence of fixed laws of inheritance and variation, the historical process this gave rise to did not entail any “fixed law of development.” Reflecting upon the “eclipse of Darwinism,” Edward Russell wrote that it “was precisely this element in Darwinism that was repugnant to most of Darwin’s opponents.” They objected to the fact that Darwin “had enunciated no real Entwickelungsgesetz, or law governing evolution.”29 If science is concerned with laws, Darwin’s recourse to fortuity amounted to an abandonment of the eminent problem at stake—“the origin, the causes, and the primary control of these congenital variations.”30 Few biologists denied selection, particularly its power to produce modifications of a quantitative nature, however, most concurred with Gustav Wolff that natural selection is “completely at a loss to account for modifications or adaptations requiring qualitative changes.”31 Or in Arthur Harris’s neat phrase, “natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest.”32 If the problem of variation could be solved, many hoped this would resolve the problem Darwin had apparently abandoned—“the real first causes of species-change.”33 Some sought a solution in a “developmental” model of evolution in which the development of organic beings repeated the path of their evolutionary origins (“ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” in the popular catechism). In this schema, evolution follows definite directions conditioned by internal laws. An early exponent of this view, Ernst Haeckel, observed that the “very early and low stages” in vertebrates “correspond completely in many points of structure with conditions that last for life in the lower fishes.”34 A few years later Theodor Eimer coined the term “orthogenesis” to denote such a process. While Eimer maintained an analytic distinction between “individual growth” and “phyletic growth,” he rendered the latter an analogue of the former. “The individual growth of every living being is thus a stage of phyletic growth [. . .] fundamentally they cannot be separated.”35 Another exponent of orthogenesis, Alpheus Hyatt, rejected any such thing as “indefinite or unlimited variations.” All “variation in the species,” he maintained, correspond “to the growth of an individual.” Accordingly, “the struggle for existence” was relegated to the status of a “secondary law grafted upon laws of growth, and governed by them in all its manifestations.” “Natural selection” is only “one of the transient conditions of the physical surroundings” and has “no value as a cause of origin of characteristics.”36 Justifying the appeal of the orthogenetic argument a century later, Gould wrote that in “stating claims for predictability of phyletic directions” orthogeneticists were “in better tune with the physical and deterministic spirit of the age” while Darwinists “fell into disharmony by committing themselves to undirected variation and unpredictable contingency of change.”37 This was an understatement. Darwinism did not simply contravene

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the “spirit of the age,” it had contravened the spirit of science going back as far as the Enlightenment. All three alternative representations of evolution had one thing in common. They all found a way to represent the causes of evolution in the evolutionary process itself. The neo-Lamarckians endowed organisms with the capacity to adapt directly and perfectly to their environments—making organisms a cause of themselves. Even while identifying the causes of evolution in random giant mutations, the saltationists made their origin representable in single original steps. The orthogeneticists restored a degree of predictability to evolution through making novelty an extension of the past. If Darwinism was going to win scientific acceptance, it would have to follow the same path. Leading up to the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, this is broadly what happened, as the problem of causation shifted from an historical to a mechanical problem. THE VIEW FROM THE LABORATORY (FROM KELVIN TO FISHER) Summarizing objections to Darwinism in 1916, Edward Russell wrote that the majority of morphologists38 “found it impossible to believe” a theory that “enunciated no law governing evolution,” that instead rooted evolution in a process of “fortuitous selection” with “no definite and orderly tendency towards perfection.”39 Instead priority was given to non-Darwinian mechanisms of evolution. Field naturalists like C. O. Whitman preferred the orthogenetic argument that promised to fulfill all three requirements of a scientific theory. As the “laws of nature are constant,” Whitman surmised, “it is not essential to trace entire histories.” Rather it suffices to concentrate on the “more favorable cases,” which would reveal the “direction” of evolution and render its “future course [. . .] predictable.”40 The course of evolution would also reveal “indubitable evidence of species-forming variation” through identifiable “transitional stages” of development.41 Finally, by rooting species formation in an internal process orthogenesis better accommodated for nature’s “perfection.” As Whitman put it, just as the “form and symmetry in perfection” of a crystal is self-determined, “so it must be in the case of the organism.”42 However, the importance of nature’s “perfection” for science was always primarily that it lent itself to experimentation, and neither Lamarckism or orthogenesis proved productive on this count. On the other hand, de Vries hoped that his saltationist account could “be observed like any other physiological process,” one which would “realise the possibility of elucidating, by experiment, the laws to which the origin of new species conform.”43 Darwin’s emphasis on gradualism explicitly forbade any experimental demonstration of the transmutation of species. The unthought

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in The Origin appears not only in its counter-scientific principles of reason but in the immense gulf separating experiential and evolutionary time. In a phrase peculiarly apt for emphasizing the unthought of his argument, Darwin described this gulf as “incomprehensibly vast.”44 Opposition to gradualism was not confined to biologists. Lord Kelvin, whose mathematical physics had been critical in establishing the second law of thermodynamics, sought to implement experimental analysis to determine a definite age of the earth. Taking issue with uniformitarian geology in general and Darwin’s TfE in particular, Kelvin inferred a much younger age for the earth based on the temperature of the Sun. “Is it probable” he asked rhetorically, that “the physical conditions of the sun’s matter differ 1,000 times more than dynamics compel us to suppose” from experiments carried out “in our laboratories”?45 Reiterating the superiority of his experimental approach in his essay “The Doctrine of Uniformity Refuted,” he asserted that geologists’ estimates of the age of the earth violated all that scientists had come to understand of “chemical action, internal fluidity, effects of pressure at great depth, or possible character of substances in the interior of the earth.” “No hypothesis,” Kelvin insisted, could “justify the supposition” of “millions of millions of years” for the earth’s age.46 Kelvin was adamant that his own estimate of approximately 100 million years for the age of the earth (and for much of this time the earth was a “red-hot globe”47) deprived Darwin’s theory of the requisite time to produce evolution. Kelvin, a creationist, was opposed not only to Darwin’s theory, but any naturalist explanation for evolution that did not allow for the role of design.48 Darwin’s argument for the age of the earth had been based largely on Charles Lyell’s geology. “He who can read Sir Charles Lyell’s grand work” and not be convinced of the vast age of the earth, “may at once close this volume,” he wrote.49 Darwin’s own discussion was restricted to an estimate of the “denudation of the Weald” in the South-East of England. In light of his uncharacteristically fleeting discussion, Kelvin’s challenge struck a nerve. In the second edition of The Origin, Darwin added the disclaimer that his estimate might have to be cut down by a factor of two or three. The disclaimer did not last a year. Writing to Lyell on the changes to be made for the third edition, he instructed, “The confounded Wealden Calculation to be struck out, and a note to be inserted to the effect that I am convinced of its inaccuracy.” A few days later he wrote to Lyell again: “Having burned my fingers too consumedly with the Wealden, I am fearful for you [. . .] for heaven’s sake take care of your fingers: to burn them severely, as I have done, is very unpleasant.”50 Kelvin’s criticisms struck a chord with the wider scientific community as well, strengthening the conviction of Darwin’s opponents that evolution must have taken place over a much shorter amount of time.51 Finding support for his own saltationist view in Kelvin’s deductions, de Vries wrote that “it seems evident that the duration of life does not comply with the demands of the conception of very slow and continuous evolution,”

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but rather “must have been very rapid, especially at the beginning.”52 De Vries inferred from Kelvin’s physical investigations that “the conception of mutation periods producing swarms of species from time to time,” should inform future biological “experimental investigations.”53 De Vries found further support for his saltationist view in the experiments on pea plants carried out by a German monk in 1866. What had inspired de Vries’s rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work was, in part, his frustration with Darwin’s inferences from morphology. “We have a doctrine of descent resting on a morphological foundation,” he wrote in Mutation Theory, “the time has come to erect one on an experimental basis.”54 Mendel’s experiments with pea plants gave biologists just this. Through cross-breeding of pea plants over many generations, Mendel discovered certain particulate units of inheritance that manifest themselves randomly as different morphological characters in offspring. Mendelian genetics shattered the orthogenetic argument that rendered evolution an analogue of growth.55 Ironically, it would ultimately do for the saltationist argument as well. The early Mendelians had embarked on experiments designed to demonstrate the efficacy of saltationism but wound up proving that selection of small heritable variations could be equally efficacious. Reflecting on these developments some years later, Ronald Fisher wrote: The early Mendelians thought of Mendelism as having dealt a death blow to selection theory, a particulate theory of inheritance implied [to them] a corresponding discontinuity in evolution. [They] could scarcely have misapprehended more thoroughly the bearings of Mendel’s discovery [. . .] on the process of evolution.56

Fisher first began publishing articles on the evolutionary significance of Mendelian genetics in 1918 and explicitly on “Darwinian Evolution of Mutations” in 1922.57 From there followed a stream of articles in the 1920s culminating in his book-length treatment of the subject; The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection published in 1930. Fisher maintained a distinction between evolution and natural selection, but this distinction is obsolete for our purposes because the distinction Fisher intended was between Darwinian and non-Darwinian theories of evolution.58 Fisher managed to show that the particulate units of inheritance proposed by Mendel were better suited to Darwinian evolution. Once this mechanism was applied broadly it also proved the death-knell of alternative, non-Darwinian theories of evolution. Fisher gave Lamarckism, already out of favor among geneticists, short shrift. The possibility of “establishing pure lines of inheritance” that were genotypically identical provided convincing evidence, he argued, that all inheritance is Mendelian—excluding Lamarckian soft inheritance entirely.59 Of more pressing concern were the saltationist theories to which Mendelian

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geneticists had initially lent their support. Recall that de Vries had committed to discontinuous variation because he believed it held greater promise for experimental results. Fisher’s extrapolation favored small-scale mutations with limited effects for two reasons. First, large-scale saltations were difficult to prove because, even by de Vries’s own admission, they were extremely rare.60 Minor variations, on the other hand, were omnipresent. Second, Fisher argued, saltationism could not guarantee adaptive evolutionary development.61 If saltationism could be expelled on the grounds of the rarity and destructiveness of large-scale mutations, the almost opposite argument could be leveled against orthogenesis. Orthogenetic evolution proceeds in directions either inconsistent with or sometimes even opposed to selective pressures. For this to work, Fisher argued, “it would be necessary to postulate mutation rates immensely greater than those which are known to occur” in order to offset the effects of selection.62 Bringing his various arguments together, Fisher concluded: The whole group of theories which ascribe to hypothetical physiological mechanisms, controlling the occurrence of mutations, a power directing the course of evolution, must be set aside, once the blending theory of inheritance is abandoned. The sole surviving theory is that of Natural Selection.63

Fisher’s objective was not to provide specific interpretations of evolutionary history, rather to provide “a rigorous mathematical theorem, by which the rate of improvement of any species of organisms in relation to its environment is determined by its present condition.”64 Fisher was not concerned with particular occasions of evolution but with its object. His achievement was to turn “evolution” from a generic term for species transformation into a technical term for genetic change of populations across generations. The causes Fisher was concerned with were mechanical (what he called the “mode of causation”65), a problem, he clarified, that was scientific not historical: With a clear grasp of scientific principle, [Darwin] felt that the mere historical fact of descent with modification, however great its popular interest, could not usefully be discussed prior to the establishment of the means by which such modification may be brought about. Once the nexus of detailed causation was established, evolution became not merely History, but Science (my emphasis).66

In a narrow sense, Fisher’s scheme had clarified the material basis of evolution. More broadly he had provided a scientific riposte to objections leveled against Darwinism’s counter-scientific consequences. Fisher’s genetical theory of natural selection was identifiable, lawful, and guaranteed perfection. This did no favors for Darwin’s counter-scientific theory. At least during “Darwinism’s eclipse,” Darwin’s subversion of science had been recognized.

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Fisher’s genetical defense of Darwinian evolution inspired a generation of theorists to ignore Darwin’s historical argument altogether in what would become known as the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis. CONCLUSION: A TYRANNY OF REPRESENTATION As well as convincing the scientific community of the fact of evolution, The Origin sparked a series of conflicts over how evolution should be represented. After initial euphoria surrounding Darwin’s discovery, his theory generally fell out of favor, surpassed by alternative mechanisms perceived to have succeeded where Darwin’s theory failed. Neo-Lamarckism, heterogenesis, and orthogenesis all safely contained the causes of evolution in their representations. Darwin’s theory located the causes of evolution outside the “tree of life” in history. In many ways, it was during Darwinism’s eclipse that it was best understood. Understood and rejected. Like Nietzsche’s madman Darwin might have come too soon, his bifold pronouncement of the Death of God and the Death of Man proved untimely, precipitating his own premature demise. Darwin’s resurrection came at a price. In discovering a causal mechanism the Neo-Darwinists were able to establish the validity of Darwin’s scientific representation of evolution at the expense of his historical, interpretive theory. Darwinism didn’t become hegemonic straight away. Even by the mid-1930s, most naturalists still held that Darwinism was “inadequate.”67 It took a second wave of Neo-Darwinists to export the findings of the population geneticists to the fields of natural history before Darwinian evolution became properly established. The staggered nature of the Synthesis can be partly attributed to the complexity of the mathematics involved. Haldane wasn’t entirely exaggerating when he boasted that he was one of only three people who knew its mathematical theory.68 It was Theodosius Dobzhansky that first connected the abstract formulations of the geneticists with the concrete experiences of naturalists, and yet, in spite of his background in experimental genetics, he wasn’t necessarily clued into the mathematics either, deferring to his teacher, Sewall Wright, on the basis that “father knows best.”69 Some have argued that the difficulty Dobzhansky and others had with the mathematics also led to an uncritical dependence upon the “genetical theory.”70 I’m inclined to find cause in the longer-term conflation between Darwin’s TfE and TfNS and the more immediate concern of the Synthesis to bring Darwinian evolution within the rubric of science. Fisher sealed the scientific status of Darwinism through locating its mechanical cause—the immediate effect of which was to exclude the historical dimension of Darwin’s theory. Darwin’s three concepts became strictly scientific concepts: adaptations became effects rather than causes; the struggle for existence became literal rather than metaphorical and selection

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became deductive rather than inductive. This remained the case even after Darwinism’s incorporation of historical disciplines. The Synthesis might have been a misnomer. It might better be called the Modern evolutionary subsumption in which mechanical scientific principles invoked to demonstrate Darwinian evolution were superimposed on history. Pars pro toto.71 In answering the reservations of Darwin’s opponents, the Synthesis effectively foreclosed Darwin’s counter-scientific argument. In this chapter, I have tried to deal with the strictly scientific nature of this foreclosure. In the following chapter, we turn our attention to Darwin’s popularizers. During Darwinism's eclipse Social Darwinism remained a popular recourse for the vengeful old order seeking to reimpose religion, regiment and rank. However, the conservatives' use of Darwin became increasingly untethered from the science as the forces of reaction descended into barbarism and mania.72 It was rather a revanchist liberal order that revived Darwinian science proper to find meaning and order in the aftermath of two devastating world wars. It was they who, for the remainder of the century, would assume responsibility for enforcing this foreclosure and bringing this strictly scientific incarnation of Darwinism to wider audiences. Ostensibly concerned with the scientific status of Darwinism, they would employ traditional principles of scientific reason to combat not just Darwin’s counter-scientific argument but counter-scientific thought in adjacent domains of philosophy, economics, and psychology. Having once inspired Nietzsche Marx and Freud, Darwin’s ideas would be deployed in the twentieth century to beat them back—with all the reactionary consequences this entailed.

NOTES 1. R. Mackenzie, The Darwinian Theory of the Transmutation of Species (London: J Nisbet, 1867), 319. 2. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (New York: Claire Marie, 1914), 73. 3. Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication Volume 2, 282. 4. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1st ed., 152. 5. W. Bateson, “Heredity and variation in modern lights,” in W. Bateson and B. D. Bateson. William Bateson, FRS, Naturalist: His Essays & Addresses, Together with a Short Account of His Life (CUP Archive, 1928), 90–1. 6. V. L. Kellogg, Darwinism Today (New York: Henry Holt and Co, 1908), 262. 7. Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 353. 8. Madaule, Lamarck, The Mythical Precursor: A Study of the Relations Between Science and Ideology, 73. 9. P. J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press), 257.

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10. George Henslow cited in Kellogg, Darwinism Today, 47. 11. E. J. Pfeifer, “The genesis of American neo-lamarckism,” in Isis 56.2 (1965): 158. 12. A. S. Packard, Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution: His Life and Work (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1901), 388. 13. ibid, 388. 14. See discussion in Russell, Form and Function: A Contribution to the History of Morphology, 34–5. 15. H. Spencer, “The inadequacy of natural selection,” The Contemporary Review, 1866–1900 63 (1893): 153–166, 439–456 (1893): 445. 16. ibid, 446. 17. ibid. 18. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 63. 19. ibid, 63. 20. Kellogg, Darwinism Today, 73. 21. W. Bateson, Materials for the Study of Variation: Treated with Especial Regard to Discontinuity in the Origin of Species (1894; repr., Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 1992), 5. 22. ibid, 2–3. 23. H. d. Vries, Species and Varieties: Their Origin by Mutation: Lectures Delivered at the University of California (New York: Garland Publishing, 1912), 3. 24. Morgan, Evolution and Adaptation, 455. 25. Vries, Species and Varieties: Their Origin by Mutation: Lectures Delivered at the University of California, 550. 26. ibid, 247. 27. Bateson cited in Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 398. 28. W. Bateson, Materials for the Study of Variation: Treated with Especial Regard to Discontinuity in the Origin of Species (1894; repr., Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 1992), 5. 29. Russell, Form and Function: A Contribution to the History of Morphology, 241–2. 30. Kellogg, Darwinism Today, 30. 31. ibid, 70. 32. ibid, 89. 33. ibid, 33–5. 34. Ernst Haeckel cited in Russell, Form and Function: A Contribution to the History of Morphology, 256–7. 35. Theodor Eimer cited in Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 357. 36. A. Hyatt, “Genesis and evolution of the species of Planorbis at Steinheim,” in Anniversary Memoirs of the Boston Society of Natural History (Boston Society of Natural History, 1880), 20 and 102. 37. Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 352. 38. Morphology is a branch of biology dealing with the study of the form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features. 39. Russell, Form and Function: A Contribution to the History of Morphology, 241–2.

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40. C. O. Whitman, Posthumous Works of Charles Otis Whitman: Professor of Zoölogy in the University of Chicago, 1892–1910 (London: Forgotten Books, 2013), 12 and 8. 41. ibid, 10. 42. ibid, 194. 43. Vries, Species and Varieties, viii. 44. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 307. 45. J. D. Burchfield, Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 32. 46. W. Thomson, “The ‘doctrine of uniformity’ in geology briefly refuted,” in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 5 (1866): 512. 47. Lord Kelvin cited in J. Munro, Heroes of the Telegraph (Religious Tract Society, 1891), 111. 48. Burchfield, Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth, 72. 49. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 307. 50. See discussion in Burchfield, Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth, 71–2. 51. P. J. Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992), 24. 52. Vries, Species and Varieties, 712. 53. ibid, 714. 54. Hugo de Vries cited in Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 420. 55. Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth, 6. 56. Fisher cited in Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance, 547. 57. R. A. Fisher, “Darwinian evolution of mutations,” in The Eugenics Review 14.1 (1922): 31. 58. Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection: A Complete Variorum Edition, vii–viii. 59. Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection: A Complete Variorum Edition, 112. 60. De Vries cited in Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 435. 61. Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection: A Complete Variorum Edition, 114. 62. ibid, 20. 63. ibid. 64. ibid, 22. 65. ibid, 178. 66. ibid, 178–9. 67. S. Wright, “‘Genetics and twentieth century Darwinism’—A review and discussion,” in American Journal of Human Genetics 12.3 (1960): 367. 68. Haldane, The Causes of Evolution, 12. 69. Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 520. 70. Provine, Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology, 413–4; Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 519–21; Bowler, Evolution: The History of An Idea, 314. 71. A part of something taken as representative of the whole. 72. See discussion in A. J. Mayer, ‘World-View: Social Darwinism, Nietzsche, War’, in The Persistence of the Old Regime, (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 275-330.

Chapter 8

Reaction and Containment Darwinian Interpretations 1929–2009

These are the wreckers of the outworn empires and civilisations, doubters, disintegrators, deicides. —J. B. S. Haldane1 After such knowledge, what forgiveness? —T. S. Eliot2

Ever since the publication of The Origin, Darwin’s popularity ensured that his influence extended well beyond biology. Darwin inspired a counter-scientific revolution not just in biology but also—by virtue of his influence on Nietzsche, Marx and Freud—the disciplines of philosophy, economics, and psychology. Popularizations of Darwinism would continue to influence adjacent disciplines in the twentieth century only this time with a reactionary bent. Darwinism’s demolition of the argument from design seemed to have destroyed the belief that science could condense into a single belief system. Darwinism’s own conversion into an orthodox science, however, rekindled this possibility and from the 1940s onward, Darwinism would provide the most popular, philosophical explanations for the design of life, the universe, and everything. Liberal economics established the individual as the locus of freedom and the agent of history. In attempting to locate an equivalent agent in evolution, Darwin wound up revealing, if inadvertently, the contradictions that were always inherent to it. These contradictions became buried under a deluge of reductionist fervor from the 1960s that would reunite Darwinism with the ideology of economic liberalism. Since Kant, scientists and philosophers have resorted to laws to justify Man’s Archimedean view—the imaginary point from where scientists can see everything but themselves. Darwin’s rejection of laws robbed Man 167

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of this expediency—and yet it was to Darwin who many popular evolutionary psychologists turned to toward the end of the twentieth century to authorize the certainty and universality of their claims. Vestiges of Darwin’s counterscientific idea would reappear in a conscious attempt by more progressive scientists to wrest Darwin from his conservative captors. Their criticisms never went far enough. Their efforts to contain their grievances within the realm of science were fraught with their own contradictions. INTRODUCTION: THE REORDER OF THINGS ‘Was natural selection ever a ruling idea? And, if so, when?’ Jonathan Hodge’s pointed question is complicated by the fact that the very notion of a ‘ruling class’ at any of these times is a contested one.3 And yet it is precisely the ‘protean’ character of Darwin’s ideas that lent itself so favorably to different class factions and alliances at different times.4 Nevertheless, science doesn’t just passively reflect the interests of the powerful. “Scientific” interpretations of nature have a powerful role in governing our social imagination, and radical challenges to these interpretations have laid the basis for re-imagining society. So far I have focused on the technical character and controversies of Darwinism, but Darwinism—a catechization after all—is as much a popular phenomenon as it is scientific. Darwin wrote The Origin for a general audience and its effect on the public was both profound and contradictory. It was the counter-scientific implications of Darwin’s theory that helped incite a crisis of representation extending well beyond biology. However, this was never Darwin’s intention and he strove tirelessly to reconcile evolutionary history with his representation of a tree of life. If he never publicly conceded his failure, he retained a profound respect for the problems entailed by the syncretic union of his two theories. Not every Darwinist, still less every Darwinist popularizer, shared Darwin’s acute understanding of the logical ramifications of his theory. Most have just imposed a Darwinian representation onto natural history by fiat, replacing historical causes with mechanical ones. This should not surprise us. Not only did this conflation promise to seal Darwinism’s scientific status, it suppressed the radical implications of Darwin’s theories that had been so threatening to the social and scientific order in the nineteenth century. Darwinism in the twentieth century largely comprised efforts, very often in a popularized setting, to reestablish the hegemony of scientific principles against a backdrop of crises that threatened the political and social orders. In the wake of a “crisis in representation” it helped foment, Darwinism came to satisfy its continued conditions of existence through a very public rapprochement with old foes and a rekindling and deepening of old alliances. This chapter tells the story of how Darwinism

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pulled itself back from the brink by bearing part responsibility for remaking a world that in the previous century it had contributed so significantly to unmaking. This Darwinian century would belong to the Thermidors. THE RESTORATION OF FAITH: ECUMENICAL INTERPRETATIONS 1929–1969 Science, in effect, creates philosophy. Gaston Bachelard5

“From the right height everything comes together—the thoughts of the philosopher, [to] the work of the artist.”6 The nineteenth century inherited liberal scientific conceptions of society from the eighteenth century; ideas that themselves had their origins in an even older religious tradition that conceived of society in perfect harmony. It was for good reason that early science was called natural philosophy (philosophia naturalis). Darwin’s theory epitomized the disharmony modern thought had wrought upon nature. No longer were organic forms either perfectly adapted to their surroundings or perfectly classifiable. What appeared to be perfect design was, in truth, only greater or lesser degrees of imperfection. Darwin’s demolition of design would anticipate a much broader “crisis in representation” that began in the nineteenth century and would culminate in a full-scale revolt against representation in the twentieth. Along with Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, Darwin helped to inspire generations of artists and scientists to seek hidden meanings beneath the surface. In the following years a generation of radical physicists would transform Newtonian representations of time and space, painters would make non-representational images the essence of modern art and writers would experiment with new forms of story-telling that went beyond mere representations of events. All, in separate ways, would follow counter-scientific form by employing chance, accident, and incongruity to puncture representation; “mistakes” became “the portals of discovery.”7 “Science and religion have between them destroyed belief” Virginia Woolf wrote, “it is in this atmosphere of doubt and conflict that writers have to create.”8 All this anticipated and coincided with a more far-reaching crisis of representative democracy as the carnage unleashed during World War I triggered two waves of revolutions that rocked the liberal establishment to its core. Ruling ideologies were not immune as bourgeois thought found itself, in the words of Lukács, “disintegrating into a multitude of irrational facts” and Western civilization was, for T. S. Eliot at least, becoming buried beneath “a heap of broken images.”9 Eliot’s imagery neatly captures, if not the state of science during this period, then certainly the life sciences. One of the casualties of Darwin’s

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denial of perfection was the project for a single unifying theory that could unite biology. In defeating Paley’s argument for design, Darwin had contributed to his own eclipse as biology splintered into a cluster of irreconcilable theories. The project for a unified biology was effectively dead by the 1920s. Joseph Henry Woodger’s general survey of biology found that it suffered from splits, feuds, and fragmentation unknown in any other science.10 Alfred North Whitehead regarded biology as no more than “a medley of ad-hoc hypotheses” as philosophy almost uniformly turned its back on evolution in favor of a Positivism that seemed to hold greater promise for scientific unification.11 And yet the Positivist movement in philosophy was proof positive that not all modernist movements were an insurrection against representation. Some were just as much about putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. Many of the king’s men were either direct protagonists in, or inspired by, the “Late Enlightenment” of fin-de-siècle Austria.12 Even Freud wrote sometimes favorably of a belief in a scientific “weltanschauung,” a term he defined as an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly, leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place.13

Freud had argued that a weltanschauung can defend us against the threat of mysticism and superstition in unstable times, while providing comfort for those that wish to “feel secure in life” and “know what to strive for.”14 “The Unity of Science Movement,” born from the Vienna Circle, was founded on the belief in the “ascetic ideal”—the idea that physical, biological, and social phenomena could be reduced to a common method and language. Many of the pioneers of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis were profoundly influenced by modernist attempts to restore order and stability to the sciences. Their own influence would come to exceed it. Darwinism’s resilience through its period of eclipse was always owed, in part, to its amenability to a popularized theological reading. While the consensus generally lay with T. H. Huxley that the concept of design had “received its deathblow at Mr. Darwin’s hands” even he had to concede “how differently one and the same book will impress different minds.”15 On the other side, Asa Gray heralded “Darwin’s great service to Natural Science in bringing back to it Teleology; so that, instead of Morphology versus Teleology, we shall have Morphology wedded to Teleology.”16 Even the response among natural theologians was mixed. Contrast the geologist and theologian Adam Sedgwick’s comment that he received the arguments laid out in The Origin “with absolute sorrow, because I think them utterly false

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and grievously mischievous” with the response of the Anglican naturalist Charles Kingsley who contended that Darwinian evolution provided “just as noble” if not a more “loftier” “conception of Deity” as separate creation.17 After the initial shock of The Origin, there was, according to John Durant, a general “process of assimilation” in which Darwinism was reconciled with church scripture.18 It was this theological tradition that was picked up by Fisher on the eve of the Darwinian synthesis. Fisher was a devout Anglican whose published work was to be found in church magazines as well as scientific journals. Fisher well understood that Darwin’s representation of evolution was irreconcilable with separate creation, but he was also aware that Darwin’s critique of natural theology was entirely compatible with the interpretation of nature given by the theologians. It was for this reason he found nothing “unedifying or disquieting” about evolution.19 For Fisher, the radicality of Darwin’s theory was not the absence of design, but, as for Gray before him, the immanence of a designer: To the traditionally religious man, the essential novelty introduced by the theory of the evolution of organic life is that creation was not all finished a long time ago, but is still in progress, in the midst of its incredible duration. In the language of Genesis we are living in the sixth day, probably rather early in the morning, and the Divine artist has not yet stood back from his work, and declared it to be “very good.” Perhaps that can only be when God’s very imperfect image has become more competent to manage the affairs of the planet of which he is in control.20

Fisher’s commitment to science was equally orthodox as he sought to demonstrate the efficacy of Darwinian selection in perfect “optimum” solutions, the most famous of which was his famous sex ratio model whereby the number of males and females in a population are kept at a perfect equilibrium.21 This problem had also occurred to Darwin and in the 1930s, Ronald Fisher astutely extracted an elegant mathematical solution for it: Let us consider the reproductive value [of] offspring at the moment when this parental expenditure on their behalf has just ceased. If we consider the aggregate of an entire generation of such offspring it is clear that the total reproductive value of the males in this group is exactly equal to the total value of all the females, because each sex must supply half the ancestry of all future generations of the species. From this it follows that the sex ratio will so adjust itself, under the influence of Natural Selection, that the total parental expenditure incurred in respect of children of each sex, shall be equal; for if this were not so and the total reproductive value of the males is equal to that of the females, it would follow that those parents, the innate tendencies of which caused them to produce males

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in excess, would, for the same expenditure, produce a greater amount of reproductive value; and in consequence would be the progenitors of a larger fraction of future generations than would parents having a congenital bias towards the production of females.22

The elegance of the solution reinforced Fisher’s conviction that selection was a perfect optimizing force. “I think of species not as dragged along laboriously by selection like a barge in treacle” he concluded, “but as responding extremely sensitively whenever a perceptible selective difference is established. All simple characters, like body size, must be always very near the optimum.”23 Fisher was not solely responsible for establishing the genetic basis of evolution. During this same period, Haldane published a series of papers outlining mathematical models for evolution from selection and Sewell Wright completed the trinity of population geneticists who inaugurated the Synthesis with articles on inbreeding and mating systems. Neither Haldane nor Wright were as convinced as Fisher of nature’s perfection. However, it was Fisher’s contributions that came to hold the most sway—not least because this principle was more amenable to application. One of the first to apply Fisher’s conclusions to historical cases was the Oxford scholar E. B. Ford whose Mendelism and Evolution popularized cases such as the peppered moth and the phenomenon of “Industrial Melanism.”24 Above all, Fisher’s commitment to perfection lent itself to synthesis—a seductive ambition among biologists seeking a unified world view. Where once adaptations were considered “exceptions,” or “departures” from the norm, they now encompassed the “totality of the relations of the organism to its environment” (T. H. Morgan).25 As Fisher’s models spread to other realms of biology, Dobzhansky hailed the synthesis for having brought an end to “excessive specialization” in favor of a “greater unity”—a “science of general biology appears to be emerging.”26 This unity was effectively a subordination to the new genetics. “Any evolution theory which disregards the established genetic principles” Dobzhansky wrote by way of emphasis, “is faulty at source.”27 One biologist who did not need convincing of the pervasiveness of adaptations was Ernst Mayr who in his early years had been a Lamarckian—partly on the basis that it provided a more straightforward explanation for nature’s perfection.28 In an interview in 1984 about the synthesis, Mayr reflected upon the motives informing the emerging consensus: We all had the same goal, which was simply to understand fully the evolutionary process [. . . .] By combining our knowledge, we managed to straighten out all the conflicts and disagreements so that finally a united picture of evolution emerged.29

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Over the years, Mayr would become increasingly resistant to the evolutionary subsumption in which historical disciplines were reduced to genetic mechanics (what he called “beanbag genetics”30). But in order to sustain the momentum of unification, there had to be a common basis for interpretation. It is not so surprising then that his commitment to the pervasiveness of adaptations increased as his resistance to genetic reductionism hardened. Having adopted a pluralist stance in his first major treatise on Darwinian evolution, he concluded in his second treatise that every species was “the product of a long history of selection” and thus “well adapted to the environment in which it lives.”31 Mayr was also more disposed to employ the argument for latent perfection (first deployed by Paley) to sustain his view (“close analysis often reveals unsuspected adaptive qualities”32). Whatever Mayr’s motives, he was part of a growing trend. Both Gould and Provine reported a “hardening of the synthesis” from an initial restriction to Mendel’s laws (TfE) to an expanded scope for adaptations among all the principal synthesizers including Wright, Dobzhansky and Simpson.33 The main catalyst for the synthesis was the publication of the book that gave its name to the movement. Julian Huxley’s Evolution: The Modern Synthesis brought together developments in a wide range of fields—genetics and cell theory, systematics and taxonomy, ecology and geology—in a single compendium and probably stands out as his crowning professional achievement. Huxley was not just a biologist, he was also a popular writer, broadcaster, and statesman. His prestige and influence certainly contributed to the success of the synthesis he championed. Moreover, his particular interest in biology derived from more lofty ideals, “conditioned and directed” in the words of his biographer, by his belief that “the next great task of science will be to create a religion for humanity.”34 As the crisis of representation was unfolding in the 1920s, Huxley placed his faith in humanism—a secular religion that believed that Man was not “supernaturally created” but a “product of evolution” while remaining equally optimistic that evolution guaranteed progress; that “knowledge and understanding can be increased, that conduct and social organization can be improved, and that more desirable directions for individual and social development can be found.”35 In many ways, he had taken up where his grandfather had left off. Conscious of the void left by special creation, T. H. Huxley had sought to replace a science underpinned by religion with a science-based religion—a secular alternative to Christianity in which men could place their certainty. “This New Nature begotten by science upon fact” would become “the foundation of our wealth and the condition of our safety,” the “bond which united into a solid political whole,” the “source of endless comforts” and the guarantor of our “physical and moral well being.”36 T. H. Huxley’s failure to

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establish any lasting alternative to religion owed, in part, to the perceived failure of Darwin’s causal theory. By Julian’s time, natural selection had been elevated to a fact of nature, “capable of verification by observation and experiment.”37 Circumstances were now ripe for unification: Biology in the last twenty years, after a period in which new disciplines were taken up in turn and worked out in comparative isolation, has become a more unified science. It has embarked upon a period of synthesis, until to-day it no longer presents the spectacle of a number of semi-independent and largely contradictory sub-sciences, but is coming to rival the unity of older sciences like physics, in which advance in any one branch leads almost at once to advance in all other fields, and theory and experiment march hand-in-hand. As one chief result, there has been a rebirth of Darwinism.38

Huxley wasn’t just reporting the synthesis, he was preaching it. Evolution: The Modern Synthesis was a rallying call to the life sciences and beyond and both form and content was designed to fit a single narrative conducive to adoption by different fields. “Adaptation” he wrote, “cannot but be universal among organisms, and every organism cannot be other than a bundle of adaptations, more or less detailed and efficient, coordinated in greater or lesser degree.”39 Although Huxley was sometimes prone to amplification, more often perfection operated as a kind of tacit principle of his writing, rarely stated explicitly, but rather implied by a weight of emphasis. Even his qualifications wound up expanding the explanatory scope of Darwinism rather than delimiting it. For example, his concession that Darwin’s theory was only a “pseudo-teleology” did not detract from selection’s power to create “adaptations,” which were, by now, a general “fact” of biology.40 Huxley devoted a section to his chapter on adaptations to “pre-adaptations,” cases in which characters of an organism were not selected for the environment it inhabits, but then proceeded to largely relegate “pre-adaptations” to the role of a genetic “sifting device” that restricted the number of options that selection can work on rather than cases where organisms were either no longer adapted to their surroundings or adapted in different ways.41 It was Huxley’s qualifications on the principle of perfection that were maybe the most illuminating for they revealed his deeper commitment to what the principle of perfection was supposed to achieve, that is, a universal explanation. For example, Huxley lamented the association that adaptations have with the “wonders of nature” precisely because it “distracts attention from the bedrock fact that some degree of adaptation is omnipresent in life” and therefore “demands an explanation.”42 What had started out as a synthesizing of a number of different disciplines around the exclusivity of Darwinian evolution progressed seamlessly

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into a collective paean to nature’s perfection as biologists lined up to apply the new genetics to an old problem—“how has this marvelous system of Animate Nature come to be as it is?”—as George Gaylord Simpson put it.43 That Simpson had joined in the homage is testament to its coercive effect. It was Simpson who had stoutly defended alternative means of modification throughout the 1930s. By 1949, Simpson was optimistic that the “unified theory” was “capable of facing all the classic problems of the history of life and of providing a causalistic solution of each.”44 Old enough to remember a time when Darwinism was not so “highly prized,” the biologist Edwin Grant Conklin lamented (a year after Huxley’s treatise) that Darwinism was becoming “an object of genuinely religious devotion.”45 Conklin was in a minority. Where once Darwin was the figure associated with the splintering of biology into a cacophony of representations, now he was the alibi for just one—the pervasive perfecting force of selection. Devotion climaxed during Darwin’s centennial celebrations in 1959 when biologists from a variety of fields gathered for a conference in Chicago to pay tribute to the “all-pervading power” of natural selection.46 The biochemist Hans Gaffron honored natural selection as “a perfectly logical and demonstrable solution to the problem of life”; Bernhard Rensch enthused optimistically that “as more perfect structures and functions are advantageous [. . .] most lines of descent tend toward evolutionary progress”; a sentiment echoed by both Mayr and A. J. Nicholson who asserted, in turn, that all animals are “gradually rendered more perfect through natural selection” and that “natural selection tends to make each organic being as perfect as the other inhabitants of the same country.”47 Encapsulating the missionary zeal of the conference, Huxley rallied the conferees to carry their message beyond the academy: It is essential for evolution to become the central core of any educational system, because it is evolution, in the broad sense, that links inorganic nature with life, and the stars with earth, and matter with mind, and animals with man.48

“What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent,” Nietzsche once asked, “to comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”49 By now it wasn’t just biologists that were claiming redemption. The 1950s proved a high-water mark for the scientific humanism Huxley had campaigned for most of his life. This manifested itself in conservatism across many fields, including Marxism and psychoanalysis, each in thrall to Marxist humanism and ego psychology, respectively. Nowhere was this more keenly felt than in philosophy. During Modernism’s crisis of representation, Positivist philosophers had regarded Darwinism with suspicion. Cognizant of its historical foundation, Bertrand Russell denied it was “a truly scientific philosophy.” Evolution was concerned with minute and mundane changes to

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matter. Philosophy with what was grand and unchanging.50 Russell’s recalcitrance would not last. Caught up in the euphoria of the synthesis, Russell inducted Darwin in the pantheon of canonical scientists. Darwin, he wrote in The History of Western Philosophy, was to the nineteenth century “what Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth.”51 Russell wasn’t alone, as even the most supposedly skeptical philosophers were transformed into ardent converts. It was in the nineteenth century that philosophy—particularly through the work of Auguste Comte—began to break free from theology while still holding steadfast to the objective of unifying scientific knowledge. Not on the basis of an “ontology” or “pre-given theory,” but on an allegedly secular basis of a scientific “method.”52 The most famous philosophy of the scientific method in the twentieth century was the one laid out by Popper in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934) and Conjectures and Refutations (1963). A member of the “Vienna School” and “The Unity of Science Movement,” Popper was at the forefront of efforts to reimagine liberalism in the postwar era. His philosophy must be understood in this context; as an attempt to reassert liberal scientific reason against what he perceived as twin threats emanating from political extremes. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper associated various ideologies, including Marxism with “closed societies” and totalitarianism.53 Strangely missing from Popper’s list was the fascist co-option of Darwinism. Popper regarded Darwin a quintessentially liberal scientist and Darwinian competition and receptivity to change as quintessentially liberal values. In a footnote, Popper conceded that the “intrusion” of Darwinism into the human sciences was a problem but emphasized that Darwin himself was “not to blame.”54 Indeed Popper’s preferred line of attack was to slay the Social Darwinists with their own sword. It is the eugenicists, he claimed, that threaten to arrest social evolution by “returning us to the cage of the closed society and of establishing, for ever and ever a perfect zoo of almost perfect monkeys.”55 The exemption Popper was willing to grant Darwinism could be relegated to an anomaly were it not so woven into his philosophical method as well. Popper sought to distinguish science from “pseudo-science,” insisting that a system was only “scientific” if it was “capable of being tested by experience.”56 Popper sought to define science through exclusion and specified Marxism and psychoanalysis as examples of disciplines that fall beneath the threshold of science, having more in common with “primitive myth.”57 For Popper, positive instances that confirm a hypothesis should not be the basis for judgments on their validity. Rather science should proceed in the opposite fashion—seeking to falsify its propositions. It was this level of risk, on account of making specific claims, that Popper believed was absent from Marxism and psychoanalysis. Popper illustrated the “unfalsifiability” of psychoanalysis by taking two contradictory examples of

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human behavior—one of a man pushing a child into a lake with the intention of drowning it, and second that of a man who sacrifices his life in an attempt to save a child that has fallen into a lake. Psychoanalysts could claim to be able to explain both actions; the first being the result of “repression” and the second by “sublimation.” In similar fashion, Popper derided Marxists for not being able to “open a newspaper without finding on every page confirming evidence for his interpretation of history.”58 But what of Darwinism? Could not the same charge (of “always fitting”) be leveled at its door as well? Initially, Popper stuck to his guns... I have come to the conclusion that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory [. . .] Take “adaptation.” At first sight natural selection appears to explain it, and in a way it does, but it is hardly a scientific way. To say that a species now living is adapted to its environment is, in fact, almost tautological.59

. . .albeit with a qualification: And yet, the theory is invaluable. I do not see how, without it, our knowledge could have grown as it has done since Darwin. [A]lthough it is metaphysical, it sheds much light upon very concrete and very practical researches [it] suggests the existence of a mechanism of adaptation, and it allows us even to study in detail the mechanism at work. And it is the only theory so far which does all that.60

Popper’s reluctance to abandon either his falsifiability thesis or natural selection led him to an unsatisfactory compromise. He described natural selection as an “invaluable metaphysical research programme.”61 Later Popper went even further, making the following retraction: I too belong[ed] among the culprits [that denied natural selection’s status as a science]. “Influenced by [. . .] authorities I have in the past described the theory as “almost tautological,” and I have tried to explain how the theory of natural selection could be untestable (as is a tautology) I have changed my mind about the testability and the logical status of the theory of natural selection; and I am glad to have an opportunity to make a recantation.”62

Popper never gave an adequate explanation for his retraction and in my view his equivocation wasn’t simply a matter of his pulling back from the radical consequences of his thesis. It was indicative of the specific origins of his thesis in the first place. Popper’s image of science was of a research probe that proceeded through trial and error in a way precisely analogous to natural selection. It was Darwin’s theory of evolution that had inspired Popper’s model of scientific change. In Conjectures and Refutations, Popper

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speculated on the role of selection in the formation of ideas. “Everything is interpreted, selected, on some level or other,” he wrote. “On the animal level, this selection is the result of natural selection. On the highest level, it is the result of conscious criticism—of exposing our theories to a critical process of scrutiny.”63 Rather surprisingly for a philosopher so adamantly opposed to metaphysical speculations and “assertions on ultimate questions,” Popper began to see evidence of the creative power of selection everywhere I think that scientists, however sceptical, are bound to admit that the universe, or nature, or whatever we may call it, is creative. For it has produced creative men: it has produced Shakespeare and Michelangelo and Mozart, [. . .] it has produced Darwin, and so created the theory of natural selection. Natural selection has destroyed the proof for the miraculous specific intervention of the Creator. But it has left us with the marvel of the creativeness of the universe.64

even when—contra his falsification principle—the evidence suggested otherwise: Many years ago I visited Bertrand Russell in his rooms at Trinity College and he showed me a manuscript of his in which there was not a single correction for many pages. With the help of his pen, he has instructed the paper. This is very different indeed from what I do. My own manuscripts are full of corrections—so full that it is easy to see that I am working by something like trial and error; by more or less random fluctuations from which I selected what appears to me fitting. We may pose the question whether Russell did not do something similar, though only in his mind, and perhaps not even consciously, and at any rate very rapidly. For indeed, what seems to be instruction is frequently based upon a roundabout mechanism of selection, as illustrated by Darwin’s answer to the problem posed by Paley (my emphasis).65

It is highly ironic that, faced with no evidence of a mechanism of selection, Popper would go on to impute one to Russell’s unconscious, especially given Popper’s expressed antipathy to psychoanalysis. However, Popper’s speculations were indicative of the deep bind he was in. Having built his philosophy on the premise of natural selection, he couldn’t simply dismiss natural selection on the basis that it conflicted with his philosophy. The problem remains, however. Having included natural selection in the canon of scientific theories he needed some way to confine its scope so as not to descend into the “pseudo-science” of Marxism and psychoanalysis. What is Popper’s solution? He turned away from the TfNS and toward Darwin’s authority as a scientist. By now it wasn’t just biologists who were employing the author function:

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Darwin is not only the greatest of biologists—he has often been compared to Newton—but also a most admirable, venerable, and indeed a most lovable person. From [his] books there speaks a human being almost perfect in his simplicity, modesty, and devotion to truth [. . . .] The counter-revolution against science is intellectually unjustifiable; morally it is indefensible. On the other hand, scientists should resist the temptations of scientism. They should always remember, as I think Darwin always did, that science is tentative and fallible.66

One of the counter-revolutionists against “science” Popper may well have had in mind was Thomas Kuhn. And yet his philosophy of science was just as reliant upon Darwinism. The popular image of science pertaining to a specific methodology is in large measure derived from science’s success. Given its success, it is natural to assume that there is a privileged scientific method that distinguishes science from non-science. For Kuhn, this image is an illusion. According to Kuhn, scientific theories do more than simply provide explanations of their object—they also come to constitute scientific methodology. They define the territory of scientific interest, the lines of inquiry applied to this territory, and a model of questions and answers. Kuhn referred to these collective designations as a “paradigm.” The paradigm that is produced defines science at any given time. Paradigms impel scientists to address a particular aspect of nature “in a detail otherwise unimaginable.”67 However, what science acquires in meticulousness, it loses in universality. A paradigm usually offers the promise of wider successes, but this promise is often manifested by an “attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies.”68 Consequent failures to do so (contra Popper) are very often blamed on the scientist themselves rather than the theory. Kuhn, a historian of science, observed that the trajectory of scientific knowledge is characterized by periods of relative stability, in which a paradigm predominates, followed by revolutionary shifts in which the paradigm is replaced. A “paradigm shift” does not only involve a set of different answers to scientific questions, but a whole new set of questions. Shifts in scientific knowledge cannot be dismissed as mere modifications in the existing body of knowledge but entail a fundamental reworking of our universe. The new science that emerges from a “scientific revolution” is, Kuhn wrote, often “incommensurable” with the science that reigned before.69 Kuhn’s use of the term “incommensurable” to describe the relation between paradigms invited the charge of relativism as it appeared to render void any objective criteria for scientific truth—a position eagerly adopted by radical social theorists and social constructionists. However, Kuhn was always an adamant believer in scientific progress. If his work was warmly received by political radicals, it was in spite of his conservatism. The Structure of Scientific

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Revolutions makes absolutely no mention of politics beyond the laboratory and reflecting upon this question years later Kuhn confirmed that his conception of science was “pretty straight internalist.”70 Away from political influence science progresses; not just in its radical shifts, but also between shifts in the “problem solving” within paradigms (“normal science”). Kuhn argued that this progress is demonstrated by the diminishing importance of the founding works of a science. A science might begin in a book form, addressing wide, even popular, audiences, but once the paradigm is established, these books become no more than historical documents. Henceforth, the task of sustaining first principles and justifying concepts is left to textbooks. The real scientific work tends to come in much shorter articles addressing a much narrower range of specialists. As the paradigm is taken for granted, the scientist can “concentrate exclusively upon the subtlest and most esoteric aspects of the natural phenomena that concern his group.”71 Kuhn was making an implicit reference to Marxism and psychoanalysis—discourses that preserve the importance of the founding works. Marxism and psychoanalysis were not scientific, according to Kuhn, precisely because they do not progress from the founding texts. But what of Darwinism? Could the enduring relevance of The Origin give us reason to question Darwinism’s scientific status? Did not the practice of returning to The Origin place Darwin in the same camp as Marx and Freud? Kuhn never did raise this question and indeed specifically cited The Origin as an example of a popular book that paved the way for the development of the science of evolution.72 Kuhn was never in quite the bind that Popper was because he eschewed any strict criteria that might define “science,” preferring instead to delegate this responsibility to scientists themselves. Science becomes whatever scientists do. Nevertheless, such deference to scientists created its own problems. At numerous times in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn called upon the authority of scientists to justify his own thesis. Here, Kuhn called upon Darwin to support his argument against a naive empiricism: The difficulties of conversion have often been noted by scientists themselves. Darwin, in a particularly perceptive passage at the end of his Origin of Species, wrote: “Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume . . . I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. [But] I look with confidence to the future—to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality.”73

Kuhn actually called upon Darwin’s scientific authority twice in this passage. First to establish the scientific status of Darwinism (by dint of Darwin’s status as a scientist), and second to support his argument that knowledge indeed proceeds via paradigmatic shifts. For if even Darwin could have faced

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“difficulties of conversion,” then surely isn’t this something all founders of a new science must face? Kuhn’s deference to Darwin was not incidental. Like Popper, his philosophy was basically Darwinian. Kuhn viewed the scientific enterprise as proceeding via selection. “Verification is like natural selection” he wrote, “it picks the most viable among the actual alternatives in a particular historical situation.”74 On another occasion, he used an analogy with natural selection to justify his more radical anti-teleological claim that science doesn’t naturally progress to a perfect truth: For many men the abolition of that teleological kind of evolution was the most significant and least palatable of Darwin’s suggestions. The Origin of Species recognized no goal set either by God or nature. Instead, natural selection, operating in the given environment and with the actual organisms presently at hand, was responsible for the gradual but steady emergence of more elaborate, further articulated, and vastly more specialized organisms [. . . .] The belief that natural selection, resulting from mere competition between organisms for survival, could have produced man together with the higher animals and plants was the most difficult and disturbing aspect of Darwin’s theory. What could “evolution,” “development,” and “progress” mean in the absence of a specified goal? To many people, such terms suddenly seemed self-contradictory. The analogy that related the evolution of organisms to the evolution of scientific ideas can easily be pushed too far. But with respect to the issues of this closing section it is very nearly perfect.75

If science evolves like organisms, that is, without any ultimate purpose or rationale beyond survival, how can we have any faith in the truth of scientific propositions? For critics, this was further evidence of Kuhn’s relativism. Kuhn always denied this, and it is interesting to observe his response; namely to double down on the analogy to organic evolution by appealing to the ultimate truth of Darwin’s theory and its tendency to produce ever more perfect solutions. This is Kuhn’s rejoinder to his critics in a 1969 postscript: Imagine an evolutionary tree representing the development of the modern scientific specialties from their common origins . . . scientific development is, like biological, a unidirectional and irreversible process. Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different environments to which they are applied. That is not a relativist’s position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress.76

Ernst Mayr once credited Darwin with anticipating many “tenets of the current philosophy of science,” but in Popper and Kuhn’s case, it might be more accurate to say that Darwin invented them.77 By the strict logic of both their philosophical systems, Darwinism was not scientific. But that is already

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to misconceive their relation. It wasn’t Darwinism that required a scientific foundation but the reverse; it was science that had a Darwinian foundation. When confronted with this paradox, they both fell back on Darwin’s status as a scientist. Their faith was infectious. Not long after Popper’s retraction, the philosopher Donald T. Campbell championed an even more overt evolutionary epistemology: Are you awed by the exquisite fit between organism and environment, and find in this fit a puzzle needing explanation? [Do] you marvel at the achievements of modern science, at the fit between scientific theories and the aspects of the world they purport to describe?78

This was a rhapsody for which Paley would have been proud. Writing against the grain of high modernism, Isaiah Berlin complained of the “fanatical faith” engulfing the humanities that events, persons, and predicaments may be rendered with scientific certainty and predictability; “a chimera” he wrote, born of a “lack of understanding of the nature of natural science, or of history, or of both.”79 Neo-Darwinism both catalyzed and consolidated this spirit of the age. First by subordinating history to mechanism, then cloaking this foreclosure with religious fables of nature’s perfection. “The Creator has created the living world not by caprice but by evolution propelled by natural selection” Dobzhansky wrote. “Evolution is God’s, or Nature’s method of creation.”80 Not everyone, of course, would have subscribed quite so forcefully to this. Nevertheless his more pared down claim that “nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution” proved to be just as appealing to philosophers seeking to establish a foundation of certainty for the scientists that religion once had.81 In The Order of Things Foucault described the contempt with which philosophy viewed the attempts of the human and empirical scientists to “provide their own foundation.”82 This proved premature as Popper, Kuhn, and a host of epistemologists turned to Darwinism to provide a meta-explanation for the apparent localization of Modern knowledge. From the “ever-branching, ever ramifying tree of life” to the “ever-branching, ever ramifying tree of knowledge.”83 Order, it appeared, had been restored; from science to philosophy. THE RETURN OF CAPITAL: RULING INTERPRETATIONS 1959–1989 We are on strike, we, the men of the mind. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged84

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The rich man in his castle / The poor man at his gate / God made them high and lowly / And ordered their estate. The hailing of all things bright and beautiful, whether religious or scientific, was always as much about venerating an order between people. However, the order restored after World War II came at a cost; a cost in the lives of ordinary people and a cost in political power for elites. To prevent a repeat of the catastrophes that befell Europe in the first half of the twentieth century and to placate the millions returning from war demanding a people’s peace adequate to their sacrifice, governments had to concede to substantial democratic restructuring, spelling an end to laissez-faire economics. A broad international consensus emerged that governments would commit to thorough market regulation, basic provision free at the point of delivery and a welfare state. In Britain, responsibility for running the economy would proceed on the basis of cooperation between government, business, and organized labor. However, this was not so much an end of class warfare but rather its shifting to a new terrain. From 1945, three years of nationalizations and progressive legislation from the Labor government gave way to a further two years of stalemate and stagnation, followed then by an “unstable compound” in which the right was able to forestall further political defeats without necessarily being able mount an assault on the concessions it had already made.85 To reverse the defeats would require an overhaul and reinvention of free market ideas. One of the first to realize the scale facing the right was Friedrich Hayek, an economist of the Austrian school who in The Road to Serfdom (1944) laid out an ideological blueprint for an assault on organized labor.86 In 1950, Hayek moved to the University of Chicago inspiring a new generation of economists led by Milton Friedman. Friedman’s work reprised utilitarian claims of the Classical liberal economists to fit the Cold War context. “A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither,” Friedman famously wrote, while a “society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”87 However, one of the distinguishing features of this neoliberal economics, as S. M. Amadae has been keen to point out, was its departure from utilitarianism. Neoliberalism championed a competition that separated the wheat from the chaff. These convictions were reinforced with the emergence of a new technology of game theory devised by the RAND Corporation that tended to model social interactions on zero-sum conflicts where there were only winners and losers. One of the deep appeals of game theories to opponents of the social-democratic consensus was that they presupposed the self-interested agent of classical economics and in doing so seemed to render any collective action, public concern, voluntary cooperation, or social solidarity obsolete. For those with more traditional scientific concerns, game theory offered sophisticated models premised on the principle of identity.88 From the 1950s onward, game theory enjoyed a steady increase in popularity and market

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ideas in general became the common currency of the social sciences.89 In times of crisis, Friedman famously declared, “it is the ideas that are lying around” that determine “what actions are taken.” When social democracy descended into crisis in the 1970s, it was neoliberal ideas that emerged from the rubble. Inspired by these ideas, a new generation of Darwinists played a vital ideological role in making, as Friedman put it, the “politically impossible” become the “politically inevitable.”90 Part of the reason for neoliberalism’s success lies in the way it has managed to engineer consent through the organization, management, and disciplining of ideas.91 Science was not exempt. This should not necessarily surprise us. Scientists, overwhelmingly drawn from the ranks of the bourgeoisie, would, as a general rule, be favorably disposed to their ideas. However, they also had their own parochial concerns as well. From a strictly scientific perspective, the modern synthesis was never entirely satisfactory. Darwin had understood that the concept of adaptation was not, on its own, sufficient to stem the tide of interpretations required of a scientific explanation. Accordingly, Darwin had sought to establish a “ruling interpretation” that could transcend an endless relay of historical interpretations. In the euphoria of the synthesis, evolutionary theorists were identifying adaptations at all levels and scales. Sewall Wright incorporated arguments for selection of the deme (a community of organisms of the same species) as part of his broader argument for “genetic drift,” Dobzhansky and Mayr both spoke of the advantages bestowed in certain cases to the group, and Alfred Emerson devoted his article in the Chicago Centennial to endorse a multilevel selection thesis from the selection of genes, the individual, intra and inter-specific population systems to entire ecosystems.92 The power of group selectionist arguments may be most clearly evidenced by the shifts it forced on in its natural opponents. Committed to the universality of the struggle of genes and individual organisms, Fisher had initially ruled out group selection on principle. Realizing his error by the time of the second edition of The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, nearly thirty years on, he conceded the logical possibility of group selection, while still denying its potency.93 During the postwar years of social democracy, the “struggle for existence” had lost its necessary equation with competition. Huxley’s definition of struggle—one that refers only to “survival of the stock”—was a faithful representation of its literal meaning with no metaphorical allusion to an agent in history. Above all, the tenor of evolutionary language had changed, from an emphasis on individual competition to cooperation and mutual interest. As Julian Huxley put it: The essential economic and mechanistic ideals of the great era of laisser-faire no longer either satisfy or convince [. . . .] The new belief must be a social one, based on the concept of society as an organic whole, in which rights and duties

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are balanced deliberately, as they are automatically balanced in the tissues of the animal body. Economic values must lose their primacy, and become subordinated to social values.94

Huxley’s interpretation of nature reflected his optimism that evolutionary progress relied upon “an increase of intraspecific co-operation until it preponderates over intraspecific competition.”95 Huxley’s was not an isolated case, as other prominent figures such as Dobzhansky gave equal weight to cooperation and struggle in the adaptive process.96 Simpson went further. “Struggle is sometimes involved,” he wrote in The Meaning of Evolution (1949), “but it usually is not, and when it is, it may even work against rather than toward natural selection. Advantage in differential reproduction is usually a peaceful process in which the concept of struggle is really irrelevant.”97 Revealing that biology and economics could share an affinity in less cut-throat times Samuel J. Holmes inflected nature with a heavy social-democratic bent: The survival of the organism must depend primarily upon the aptitude of its members for getting on well together. [The] self-perpetuating assemblage of genetic factors is mostly a well-ordered body whose members for the most part co-operate most admirably to promote the common weal. Government, as in societies of insects, seems, on the whole to be on a democratic basis, which, after all, is the organismic method of regulation.98

One of those dissatisfied with group selectionist arguments in particular and the tenor of evolutionary theory in general was W. D. (Bill) Hamilton. Reflecting upon the source of these views years later Hamilton criticized the baleful influence of Marxism and trade unionism on biology.99 An early exponent of game theory, Hamilton sought to transcend left-wing ideologies with a properly scientific explanation of natural selection. Initially, his ideas were deemed too dangerous to engage with. Like his hero of R. A. Fisher, Hamilton was a passionate supporter of eugenics and he suspected that his early career development had been impeded as a result.100 Rejected and ignored by a host of academic institutions as, in his words, a “eugenical spectre” hung over him, his luck began to change (tellingly) once he forged alliances with like-minded researchers at the London School of Economics in the early 1960s.101 It was here that Hamilton’s ideas would thrive. What followed over the next few years was something of a paradigm shift in evolutionary biology as Hamilton’s ideas, propelled by a resurgent right, went from heterodoxy to orthodoxy. Evolutionary history, like any history, can be imagined in different ways. Nevertheless, many group selectionist arguments during the 1940s and 1950s were tenuous at best. One of the consequences of Darwin’s universalization

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of the concept of struggle was that biologists confined instances of cooperation to group selection. This both disregarded Darwin’s metaphor of dependence that had retained some prominence in The Origin, and relied upon highly dubious definitions of evolutionary agency. For example, Emerson contended that natural selection could apply to entities as large as ecosystems, neglecting the fact that ecosystems don’t reproduce, still less differentially (organisms are certainly dependent on ecosystems however). V. C. Wynne-Edwards suggested that the “good of the group” need not manifest itself at the level of the group at all, but could be passed on directly “from parent to offspring.”102 This mistake would prove their downfall. Hamilton’s target was many of these group selectionist arguments; however, he also understood that the problems were deep-rooted. Reflecting upon his motivations a decade later, he related the problem to the distinction between evolution and its underlying causes. The phrase “survival of the fittest” may “direct attention to differential survival,” he wrote, but it fails to provide “a precise and general definition of biological fitness.”103 However, Hamilton’s identification of the problem stopped short of a counter-scientific solution. Like Darwin and Spencer before him, he hoped the problem of “fitness” could be resolved by identifying the correct level of selection: Part of the difficulty [of defining fitness], is that of saying exactly what are the things that natural selection is supposed to select. The fittest what? Is it a trait, an individual, a set of individuals bearing a trait, or bearing its determinants expressed or latent? Can it be a population, a whole species, perhaps even an ecosystem?104

Spencer had introduced “fitness” into biology precisely in order to circumvent the problem of the relation by identifying causes in the process of differential survival. By persisting with the term, Hamilton sought causation at the lowest level available to him. Following the synthesis, this meant casting the gene in the role of historical agent. (“For safe conclusions [we must] descend to the level of the individual gene [. . .] lower levels of selection are inherently more powerful than higher levels.”105) Hamilton’s mathematical models presupposed that “altruistic” group selection could only arise on the condition that the recipient of the altruism was a close relative carrying the same gene. [We] may imagine a pair of genes g and G such that G tends to cause some kind of altruistic behaviour while g is null. Despite the principle of “survival of the fittest” the ultimate criterion which determines whether G will spread is not whether the behaviour is to the benefit of the behaver but whether it is to the benefit of the gene G; and this will be the case if the average net result of the

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behaviour is to add to the gene pool a handful of genes containing G in higher concentration than does the gene pool itself. With altruism this will happen only if the affected individual is a relative of the altruist.106

Hamilton coined the term “inclusive fitness” so as to include behavior that promotes the propagation of a given gene among close relatives. In truth, Hamilton’s innovation was little more than a Mendelian version of Darwin’s insistence that the “struggle for existence” also include “success in leaving progeny.”107 And yet Hamilton’s equations were also highly misleading for they completely precluded any consideration of the organism’s relation with its environment. Hamilton only considered the relation between organisms as they pertained to their relative fitness. As he put it, “The individual will seem to value his neighbors’ fitness against his own according to the coefficients of relationship appropriate to that situation.” But there is no “valuing of a neighbor’s fitness” carried out by the organism, only adaptation to local circumstances; circumstances that include dependency on other organisms. In a hypothetical scenario in which gene G is altruistic and gene g is selfish, gene g may well propagate at the expense of G. But what if the selection of g is dependent upon an environment that includes G? In this scenario, the elimination of G would precipitate the elimination of g also. Alternatively, a scenario in which genes G and g were adapted to each other and had evolved to promote the other, then both genes would stand to benefit. Relations of mutual dependence were excluded by Hamilton as a matter of definition, as altruism was defined as individual behavior that benefits other organisms at a cost to that individual—a straw man argument that gave the impression that relations of competition pervaded nature. Hamilton’s subsequent papers did little to contradict this impression: Incidents in which an animal attacks another of the same species, drives it from a territory, or even kills and devours it are commonplace. They may be described as examples of biological selfishness. The effect consists of two obvious parts: the gains (in fitness) of the victor and the losses of the victim.108

Inspired by Hamilton’s equations, though maybe less by his interpretations, the evolutionary biologist George C. Williams (1966) understood that for differential survival, it was “not necessary for the individuals of a species to be engaged in ecological competition.”109 He continued: Natural selection may be most intense when competitive interactions are low. [Indeed] natural selection may be operative in the complete absence of competition in the usual sense. In most animal populations there is no competition for oxygen. The fact that dog A gets enough oxygen in no way influences dog B’s efforts to get his share.110

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Williams was also one of the only Darwinists to really confront Darwinism’s counter-scientific consequences and bring himself to question the scientific status of aspects of Darwinism in the process. Adaptation and Natural Selection was partly born of frustration with the surfeit of meaning released during the second wave of the synthesis. A “biologist can make any evolutionary speculation seem scientifically acceptable,” Williams complained, “merely by adorning his arguments with the forms and symbols of the theory of natural selection.”111 Writing against the grain of Darwinian euphoria, Williams offered a comparatively sober judgment of Darwinism’s scientific status: The study of adaptation [. . .] has already had its Newtonian synthesis, but its Galileo and Kepler have not yet appeared. The “Newtonian synthesis” is the genetical theory of natural selection, a logical unification of Mendelism and Darwinism [. . . .] For all its formal elegance, however, this theory has proved very limited guidance in the work of biologists.112

Williams’s reservations regarding the scientific status of Darwinism stemmed from the counter-scientific consequences of the relation. When he wrote that “acceptance” of natural selection “necessitates the immediate rejection of certain kinds of selection,” he was explicitly objecting to definitions of selection that specified a relation between organisms and environments; a relation that offers “a universe of problems” as selection “can be expected to change continually in all but the most stable environments.”113 Nature, Williams insisted, defies modeling because she “plays at random [. . .] seeks no saddle points [and is] highly imperfect.”114 Williams effectively conceded the counter-scientific argument in order to seal the scientific status of evolution. “If we cannot adequately detect and measure design for success,” due to the impossibility of rendering an organism’s relation with its environment, “perhaps we can measure the less interesting but necessarily correlated factor of success itself.”115 Like so many Darwinists before him, Williams sought to resolve the problem of the relation by identifying a distinct level of selection. Williams ruled out phenotypes (characters of the organism) from consideration on the basis that they were “extremely temporary manifestations” that could not have any “cumulative effect:116 Seeking to circumvent the problem of “interaction,” Williams wedded fitness directly to the gene. If individuals bearing gene A replace themselves by reproduction to a greater extent than those with gene A’, and if the population is so large that we can rule out chance as the explanation, the individuals with A would be, as a group, more fit than those with A’. The difference in their total fitness would be measured by the extent of replacement of one by another. By definition of mean, the mean effect on individual fitness of A would be favourable and of A’ unfavourable.117

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The advantage of this from Williams’s perspective was that theorists could move beyond “fitness in a vernacular sense” to a “theoretically important kind of fitness”—that which “promotes ultimate reproductive survival.”118 This “theoretically important kind of fitness” apparently wrested an evolutionary entity from the vortex of the relation: No matter how functionally dependent a gene may be, and no matter how complicated its interactions with other genes and environmental factors, it must always be true that a given gene substitution will have an arithmetic mean effect on fitness in any population. (my emphasis)119

But what was the gene? All appeared fine on the surface. Franklin, Watson and Crick had provided a material basis for life with the discovery of DNA in 1953. Deoxyribonucleic acid is a molecule that carries biological information across generations. This information is contained in a sequence of nucleotides and organized along structures called chromosomes. In the process of reproduction, these sequences are broken up and passed on. The challenge facing Williams was to derive from this discovery an entity with sufficient constancy and distinction that it qualified as a “stable unit of transmission.”120 Accordingly, the analytic gene concept Williams formulated placed a strong emphasis on “a high degree of qualitative stability”:121 I use the term gene to mean “that which segregates and recombines with appreciable frequency.” Such genes are potentially immortal, in the sense of there being no physiological limit to their survival, because of their potentially reproducing fast enough to compensate for their destruction by external agents. They also have a high degree of qualitative stability.122

There is a problem with this formulation. If stability was his exclusive concern, then why did he even require the concept of the gene in the first place? Why not just make the unit of information a single nucleotide? Or even just DNA? The answer was that Williams was not trying to identify a unit of life, but a causal unit of selection and this entailed addressing the unit’s relation with its environment. Williams could not simply posit a gene’s durability, he had to justify it. So where could this stability arise? Surely not within the environment which was, by Williams’s estimations, far too capricious to confer stability? Aware of this as a problem, Williams devoted most of his initial attention to endogenous rates of mutation. But this wouldn’t do either, because he believed it was selection that determined mutation rates. Concluding his discussion in this passage he wrote, the “prevalence of such stable entities in the heredity of populations is a measure of the importance of natural selection.”123 In other words, it was selection

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that conferred upon the gene a stable identity. Williams found himself facing a peculiar conundrum. Having dismissed any level above the gene as too temporary to qualify as an entity of selection, he then had to resurrect these levels as stable enough environments that could confer adequate stability to genes. The way Williams generally did this was to emphasize the power of genes to control their environments and thus the selection process. Williams specified three planes of analysis; the genic, the somatic, and the ecological. For Williams’s purposes, the genic level posed the fewest problems. At the “most intimate” level, all he had to do was show that the complexity of interactions did not “impugn the general principle that at any time a given gene will have a certain selection coefficient relative to its alleles.”124 At the somatic level, however, in which “the interaction of the genetic and the ecological” produces the “normal development of a multicellular organism,” Williams was on shakier ground. Forced to extend selection to this higher level, he wrote “the physical natures [and durations] play an essential role in determining selection.”125 Anticipating that this might raise objections to his prior argument that selection could not take place at the level of the phenotype, he added: “the recognition of this fact in no way compromises the principle of selective gene substitution as the sole and ultimate force of adaptive evolution.”126 Moving onto the ecological level, the level “usually meant by the unqualified term environment” and the recipient of the largest “share of the attention in the literature on adaptive evolution” Williams’s argument broke down.127 Having at once poured scorn on the notion that nature could be modeled, he redefined the environment as an “organism’s ecology”—in order to guarantee its stability through its relation with the organism: Since the ecological environment is so largely chosen by the soma during development, and since the choice is of precisely the best environment available, we can say that the selection of an ecological environment is part of the normal machinery of development [. . .] Development cannot be regarded as a self-contained package of activity but as a program of events in which selected parts of the ecological environment form specific components of the epigenetic system. In more than a rhetorical sense, the organism and environment are parts of an integrated whole.128

This passage encapsulates the problem of the relation Darwin had articulated with the metaphor of dependence—that of distinguishing organism from environment. It also presented an unequivocal example of selection at the organismal level. Having gone to elaborate lengths to defend selection exclusively at the level of the gene, Williams finally ceded the argument—almost:

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The phenomenon of fitness can be seen at all epigenetic levels, from genic interactions to the ecological niche. [. . .] All of this is a logical inevitable result of the natural selection of alternative alleles in Mendelian populations. Each level offers innumerable problems for our understanding of adaptation and each is a legitimate field of investigation. It is at the level of the gene, however, that we have the most fundamental and most universally applicable understanding of adaptation. (my emphasis)129

What is the justification for Williams’s final qualifier? The only possible way the gene could be “universally applicable” was if organisms were genetically determined—but in which case, it would make no difference whether we referred to genes or organisms anyway as they would become effectively synonymous, the latter a mere aggregate of the former.130 Besides Williams had already expressly dismissed this possibility. It was the very fact that levels above the organism were exposed to contingent interactions with the environment that had driven him to delve as low as the gene in the first place. Williams’s argument came full circle. Dissatisfied with the capriciousness of the relation, he sought a stable unit of transmission independent from the environment. However, Williams had to account for the stability of the gene and he did this precisely by falling back on selection by the environment—at multiple levels from the genic environment all the way to an organism’s ecology. There was just no escaping the relation. Williams’s gene selection theory was the most ambitious attempt, since Darwin’s “principle of divergence,” to identify the causes of evolution in the fact of evolution itself. Despite his awareness of the counter-scientific consequences of the relation, he hoped that the specter of endless interpretation could be transcended by identifying an evolutionary agent. For all the advances in molecular biology in the 1950s, it was the mythical property— the capacity of self-replication beyond the relation—associated with the Mendelian gene that inspired Williams’s theory. Having initially justified gene selection on the basis of tracking evolution, he proceeded to make the gene itself “the creative force in evolution.”131 Williams’s exclusive interest in the mechanism underlying Darwin’s TfE was, in large part, hidden by the complexity of his mathematical formulations. Occasionally, however, it leaped out from the text: We must take the theory of natural selection in its simplest and most austere form, the differential survival of alternative alleles, and use it in an uncompromising fashion whenever a problem of adaptation arises.132

The differential survival of alternative alleles is just a modern definition of Darwin’s TfE. Popularizations of Williams’s analytic gene lacked his

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technical sophistication, but none of its mythical properties. To the power of self-replication, Hamilton added to the gene, for the purposes of being “more vivid,” the power of “intelligence” and “self-interestedness” in a 1972 paper.133 Four years later, this would become the “selfish gene” in Dawkins’s pop-science book of the same name: Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness.134

Like Hamilton and Williams before him, Dawkins had sought a genetic basis to explain the fallacy of group selection. But in identifying the gene as the site of selection, he then faced the prospect that the selection of the individual itself was a case of group selection. In coining the metaphor of the “selfish gene,” Dawkins encountered a paradox entirely of his own making: [We] seem to have a paradox. If building a [body] is such an intricate cooperative venture, and if every gene needs several thousands of fellow genes to complete its task, how can we reconcile this with my picture of indivisible genes, springing like immortal chamois from body to body down the ages: the free, untrammelled and self-seeking agents of life?135

To resolve the paradox Dawkins abandoned the metaphor of selfishness in favor of the counter-scientific metaphor of dependence: The manufacture of a body is a cooperative venture of such intricacy that it is almost impossible to disentangle the contribution of one gene from that of another. A given gene will have many different effects on quite different parts of the body. A given part of the body will be influenced by many genes, and the effect of any one gene depends on interaction with many others [. . . .] The intricate inter-dependence of genes may make you wonder why we use the word “gene” at all (my emphasis).136

But having allowed the effects of genes to manifest themselves at the level of individual organisms, there was no reason to stop there. In The Extended Phenotype, Dawkins addressed the gene’s role in the constitution of its own environment. In The Origin, Darwin had used the example of birds’ nests. Dawkins’s example was beaver dams and termite mounds: Beaver dams and termite mounds are collectively built by the behavioral efforts of more than one individual. A genetic mutation in one individual beaver could

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show itself in phenotypic change in the shared artefact [. . . .] The gene’s extended phenotypic effect, say an increase in the height of the dam, affects its chances of survival in precisely the same sense as in the case of a gene with a normal phenotypic effect, such as an increase in the length of the tail.137

With The Selfish Gene Dawkins revealed a gift for the most elegant of oxymorons. When pushed, Dawkins conceded that it only made sense to think of genes as selfish in terms of replication into future generations (the literal struggle for existence of Darwin’s TfE).138 Seeking to clarify the distinction between what differentially survives and what causes differential survival, some years later, Dawkins distinguished between “replicators” and “vehicles,” with the latter reserved for “integrated and coherent” instruments of “replicator preservation.” However, Dawkins wasn’t ready to deprive the replicator of a causal function; as he wrote, “natural selection will therefore, at least to some extent, favor replicators that cause their vehicles to resist being destroyed” (my emphasis).139 Drawing on Dawkins’s terminology, David Hull preserved the term “replicators” for characterizing evolution but proposed replacing the term “vehicle” with “interactors” so as to remove any doubt about where causal relations lie. At last, the principle of relation had finally been distilled from the principle of identity: Replication by itself is sufficient for evolution of sorts, but not evolution through natural selection. In addition, certain entities must interact causally with their environments in such a way as to bias their distribution in later generations.140

Hull’s description of the two functions of selection provided a rare distinction between the what and why of evolution of Darwin’s two theories, but it lacked the rhetorical power of Dawkins “selfish gene.” In his more brazen flourishes, Dawkins had claimed to have identified the “fundamental, independent agent of evolution”; a claim that resonated with a long tradition dating back as far as the Scientific Revolution to identify agents that could be the cause and effect of themselves.141 Dawkins would come in for heavy criticism for his claim that individual genes were both “immortal” and “active agents, working purposely for their own survival,” but, to be fair on Dawkins, this was the same mistake that Darwin made when he characterized organisms as independently striving to the next generation. As with Darwin, such slippages were never separate from a political context. Conservatives have long learned to borrow from the radical theories they opposed.142 In the context of the Cold War, conservatives and liberals accomplished something of a strategic reversal. Ideology became a smear deployed against the political left, manifesting itself in politically correct metaphors of dependence and cooperation that masked the uncomfortable reality of

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“individualism” and “conflict.”143 After all of Dawkins’s many clarifications, disavowals and retractions, there wasn’t actually much left of his argument beyond this strategic reversal, but Dawkins caught the winds of time. The second half of the 1960s saw an upsurge of popular evolutionary books portraying the crude “struggle for existence” including Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression (1966), Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative (1966), Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape (1967), and Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox’s The Imperial Animal (1971). In 1974, Michael Ghiselin provided this macabre depiction of nature: The economy of nature is competitive from beginning to end. Understand that economy, and how it works, and the underlying reasons for social phenomena are manifest. They are the means by which one organism gains some advantage to the detriment of another. No hint of genuine charity ameliorates our vision of society, once sentimentalism has been laid aside. What passes for cooperation turns out to be a mixture of opportunism and exploitation. The impulses that lead one animal to sacrifice himself for another turn out to have their ultimate rationale in gaining advantage over a third; and acts “for the food” of one society turn out to be performed to the detriment of the rest. Where it is in his interest, every organism may reasonably be expected to aid his fellows. Where he has no alternative, he submits to the yoke of communal servitude. Yet given a full chance to act in his own interest, nothing but expediency will restrain him from brutalizing, from maiming, from murdering—his brother, his mate, his parent, or his child. Scratch an “altruist,” and watch a “hypocrite” bleed.144

Dawkins opens The Selfish Gene with similar rhetoric. “Tennyson’s famous phrase ‘nature red in tooth and claw’” he wrote, “sums up natural selection admirably.”145 In fact, much of The Selfish Gene comprised an elaborate retraction of the book’s title, with passages emphasizing the cooperative behavior of genes. Over the years such passages would be cited by Dawkins and his supporters to rebut charges of right-wing ideology. I would agree that Dawkins’s priority was a misguided scientific attempt to identify the causes of evolution in a single entity, but the ideological question is not about what Dawkins “professes,” but about analyzing the relation of his writings to wider political circumstances. Dawkins himself helped to provide some of this context in the Preface to the 1989 edition: “I began the book in 1972 when power-cuts resulting from industrial strife interrupted my laboratory research.”146 This context perhaps go some way toward accounting for a book that was positively dripping with anti-unionism. Some of this was metaphorical, as when he clarified the motivations of worker bees: “There is no trade-union spirit among the workers as a class. All that each one of them “cares” about is her own genes.”147 Other times it was more literal:

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If only the individual in a group had the gift of foresight they could see that in the long run their own best interests lay in restraining their selfish greed, to prevent the destruction of the whole group. How many times must this have been said in recent years to the working people of Britain?148

Elsewhere Dawkins seemed to provide a biological justification for the Tory argument that the miners were striking for themselves at the expense of other British workers, reminding us that “altruism within a group goes with selfishness between groups. This is a basis of trade unionism.”149 This contradicted the unionist claim to be raising the lot of the majority and so, fittingly, Dawkins followed up with a swipe against one of the union movement’s greatest universal achievements: The welfare state is a very unnatural thing. In nature, parents who have more children than they can support do not have many grandchildren [. . . .] Since we humans do not want to return to the old selfish ways where we let the children of too-large families starve to death, we have abolished the family as a unit of economic self-sufficiency, and substituted the state. But the privilege of guaranteed support for children should not be abused.150

On the other hand, Dawkins found precursors to neoliberal institutions all over nature as he waxed lyrical about natural “markets,” “competition,” “investments,” “costs,” “benefits,” and “profit.” Dawkins wasn’t alone in borrowing so liberally from economics. Across the Atlantic, E. O. Wilson had published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) a year before, a book with a similar predilection to map the economy onto nature: The members of human societies sometimes cooperate closely [. . .] but more frequently they compete for limited resources allocated to their role-sector. The best and most entrepreneurial of the role-actors usually gain a disproportionate share of the rewards, while the least successful are displaced to other, less desirable positions.151

The ideological applications of the “selfish gene” were not an unfortunate inconvenience but probably the secret to its resilience, given just how patent were its contradictions. As early as 1979, the Marxist biologist Steven Rose wrote in the New Scientist: When the history of the move to the right of the late 1970s comes to be written, from law and order to monetarism and to the (more contradictory) attack on statism, then the switch in scientific fashion, if only from group to kin selection models in evolutionary theory, will come to be seen as part of the tide which has rolled the Thatcherites and their concept of a fixed, 19th century competitive and xenophobic human nature into power.152

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I don’t disagree with this conclusion, I wish only to add an addendum. Dawkins was not just swayed, as he put it, by “new ideas hovering in the air.”153 He was a rhetorician whose ploys, wittingly or not, were taken straight from the play book of the political right; a play book that places a peculiar emphasis upon audacious assertions.154 Dawkins made the outlandish claim that we are lumbering robots at the mercy of our selfish genes and then challenged anyone to suggest otherwise. Critics did. In their droves.155 But the failure to properly distinguish between Darwin’s two theories—in this case the literal struggle for existence that amounts to the differential rate of survival, and the metaphorical struggle for existence that describes relations of dependence—meant their critiques never carried the full force or conviction of Dawkins’s bold if confused polemic. In many ways, the criticism wound up having the opposite effect than intended; fueling its legend as the pop-science book became the basis swathes of academic discussion. When in 1998 Oxford University published The Philosophy of Biology—thirty-nine articles laying out the major themes and discussions of contemporary biology—the number of entries for Dawkins was second only to Darwin!156 Dawkins inspired a steady stream of disciples at a time when free market ideology was finding its way into many other aspects of intellectual life. Summarizing the period, the sociologist Daniel T. Rogers wrote that “not since the late-nineteenth-century vogue of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species had the idea of the beneficent results of competition cut so broad a swath through public and academic discourses or been called upon to do and explain so much.”157 Darwinism had always had a steady appeal among proponents of laissez-faire economics beyond the age of capital in the late nineteenth century. The early postwar pioneer of neoliberal ideas, Ludwig von Mises, famously based his work on the premise that “struggle and merciless annihilation of the weak” prevail in nature.158 However, this influence was deepened in the 1980s beginning with Richard R. Nelson and Sidney G. Winter’s book An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (1982).159 Ultimately Evolutionary Economics wound up constituting a whole field of its own, prompting the economist Robert H. Frank to make the prediction that in a hundred years economists generally will herald Charles Darwin, not Adam Smith, as the “intellectual founder of their discipline.”160 It is difficult to gauge the specific impact of Darwinism in the neoliberal turn, but ideas do matter. It was no accident that at the precise moment that Darwinian-inspired economics took center stage, Marxist economics was exiting stage left—for the whole value of drawing from Darwin’s “struggle for existence” was that it appeared to rule out the possibility of class struggle. There was nothing inevitable about the ascent of neoliberalism—although much of its success was in convincing people that it was. Margaret Thatcher’s famous edict that “there is no alternative” was compelling partly because of

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the groundwork already laid by Darwinists who helped convince a generation of readers—general and academic—that any collective alternative to the reign of individualism and the free market was unnatural. THE RESURRECTION OF MAN: ARCHIMEDEAN INTERPRETATIONS 1969–2009 Man’s ego is inflated, His laws are outdated. Bob Dylan161

Since Kant, Western thought has been preoccupied with a figure free from doubt and certain of his reason—a figure privileged with an Archimedean view. Foucault’s birth of Man was a specific metaphysical ruse by which men of science and philosophy could repress their uncertainties surrounding history by confining its consequences to other, often oppressed, people, while identifying with an image of themselves as all seeing and all knowing. There is good evidence that Darwin’s own encounter with a Fuegian helped trigger his own horrid doubts about the necessarily provincial character of his monkey-mind. In an effort to foreclose these doubts, Darwin resorted to a convenient tale of Man’s ascent to universal reason in a selection for courage. It was this, rather than his more muted conclusions about Man’s limitations, that would hold sway as he became the inspiration for a litany of racist and sexist evolutionary histories in the late nineteenth century. Social Darwinism would continue to dominate the social sciences until World War II, whereupon its negative association with the Nazis prompted its retreat.162 A form of progressivism in which evolution would give rise inexorably to a subject capable of knowing his history, on the other hand, remained a fixture of Darwinism for a hundred years. Spencer and T. H. Huxley opposed natural selection in the interest of guaranteeing Man his “New Nature” at the top of the evolutionary tree.163 Once mechanical causes were substituted for historical causes, the early synthesizers had little difficulty reintegrating progressivism into their models. For Fisher, natural selection could explain all living things up to and including Man’s most “sublime” characteristics.164 For Dobzhansky, “Man was and is being created in God’s image by means of evolutionary development.”165 Fisher and Dobzhansky were Anglican and Russian Orthodox Christians, respectively, so maybe this much was to be expected, but the figure of Man was every bit as fundamental for the secular humanism of Julian Huxley for whom human evolution was a process that made Man the “trustee of evolution” the figure that must “work and plan” to “achieve further progress.”166 By the 1960s and 1970s, Man’s divine privileges came under threat as a generation of students inspired by

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the Civil Rights Movement was moved to challenge Man’s racialized dimension. Arguments that had been considered consensus a century ago were now highly controversial. Bill Hamilton found this out to his cost in 1978 when he spun Darwin’s yarn in a contemporary jargon about how a contingent evolutionary process could give rise, lawlike, to the great man of science through a selection for courage: By the time of the Renaissance it may be that the mixing of genes and cultures [has] continued long enough to bring the old mercantile thoughtfulness and the infused daring into conjunction in a few individuals who then find courage for all kinds of inventive innovation against the resistance of established thought and practice.167

The response to Hamilton’s article was overwhelmingly negative. Writing in the Anthropology Newsletter Sherwood Washburn referred to Hamilton’s speculations as “racist, reductionist and ridiculous.”168 Even Hamilton’s friends and colleagues referred to it as “Hamilton’s racist paper.”169 Over the course of the 1980s, Hamilton would become increasingly indignant about the culture of “political correctness” “heaped” upon him by his “insolent” students.170 The new militancy among students and activists was made evident again in 1981 when the journal of the far-right, New Nation, claimed support from Dawkins, Wilson, and John Maynard Smith (all three responded with letters distancing themselves from the claim and the journal.171) Controversies would continue to smolder and occasionally flare-up over the coming years. Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray’s New York Times best seller The Bell Curve (1994) explicitly connected different IQ scores with different racial groups. Darwin’s single cameo appearance in the introduction was to remind us that variation in intelligence was, in part, inherited; presumably in order to justify the authors’ subsequent inference that any statistical variation between groups must be biological.172 The book, which was not peer-reviewed and panned by critics, nonetheless received a great deal of media attention. In a more recent high-profile case, James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, lent his prestige to scientific racism when he lamented in an interview that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically” and that “our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”—he was forced to resign from his job and cancel a book tour (2007).173 The fate of Watson and others reflected changes in political discourse, driven in part by the realization among the political classes that the aspiration for black liberation may be more effectively contained through regressive legislation ostensibly indifferent to race. This shift in approach manifested

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itself in a shift in political language. On the fringes there were still the forces of the extreme right championing segregation, race purity and deportations. However, the conservative and liberal mainstreams discovered that a “colorblind” rhetoric maybe better suited to combating specific efforts to confront racial inequality, forcing black intellectuals to fight a rearguard battle to convince people that “race matters.”174 This was not so much a departure from Darwin’s time as it was the amplification and adaptation of a certain nineteenth-century tendency. Darwin himself had always veered between the two prevailing pillars of nineteenth-century racial theory; between bold claims of savage inferiority and an aggrandizement of Anglo-Saxon whiteness on one side, and a kind of “benevolent despotism” of enlightened liberalism on the other. Today’s enlightened liberalism sought alternative means to achieve largely the same ends. The kind of racist providentialism that had served as the guarantor for Man’s universal reason in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries now served only to draw further attention to the narrowness of Man’s purview. Overtly racist arguments never disappeared from Darwinism. Indeed, the Civil Rights Movement initially provoked a vociferous backlash as scientific journals published a slew of articles staking renewed claims for biological accounts of race.175 The difference now was there was a concerted resistance to it. By the 1990s, biological accounts of race were more rare and there was now a cost involved in making them. One of the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement was to partially invert the effect of overtly racist statements, exposing the prejudices and parochialism of the subject making the statement rather than those subject to it. In this context, it is not too surprising that the majority of Darwinists switched to a panhuman psychology that emphasized “human universals” as an “antidote to racism,” uniting the species in a “biological oneness.”176 This was the only approach left to scientists wishing to preserve the status of Man’s Archimedean view. Movements for racial equality and liberation were not the only things to emerge from the ferment of the 1960s and arguably it was the women’s movement that would provide the widest and most far-reaching challenge to the order of things in the second quarter of the twentieth century; unsettling and destabilizing gender boundaries in all areas of life. The most conspicuous change came in the economy as millions of women left the confines of their homes to forge careers. This would find expression in the academy as a new generation of feminist intellectuals began calling into question received wisdom on sex and gender. This new wave of feminism made incursions into the natural sciences in the 1970s as “women flooded into the field of animal behaviour” transforming ways of viewing the natural world. A shift chronicled by the feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling:

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Most dramatically [women] began to carefully watch the behaviour of female animals in the field—with astonishing results. For example, they found that female kin groups are responsible for determining much of the social lives of baboons. Why were earlier observers “unable” to see what today seems obvious? It is possible that their a priori notions about sex roles hindered their abilities to observe. It was not feminists who were blind to the scientific truth. Rather, their male-biased predecessors made one-sided observations that led them to lopsided accounts of sexual difference.177

In the 1980s, Linda Marie Fedigan, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, and Donna Haraway all separately explored the reproduction of gender norms in the study of primates.178 The themes of these books would challenge the universal claims of men, and do it by highlighting the contingency of nature—the very counter-scientific principle that Darwinists had found so threatening. However, two things must be noted here. The first is that while Darwin pioneered the principle of contingency those that would come to champion it in the human sciences naturally gravitated to other forms of historical explanation—social, cultural, political, and so forth. Feminist and race theorists espousing strict Darwinian reductionism would be in short supply. The second is that any theory that abides by a principle of contingency must admit of uncertainty. Critiques of science, as Hilary Rose has put it, therefore “share the vulnerability of the epistemological and theoretical crises of the knowledges [they] seek to analyze.”179 The counter-scientific message, in other words, can always be turned against the messenger. It didn’t take long for the feminist movement to generate a reaction and, as was the form in the twentieth century, much of this reaction emanated from the Darwinian literature. Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox published The Imperial Animal (1971) as an antidote to what they called a “militant version” of the truth propagated by a “noisy” modern feminism.180 In particular, they lamented that the important “issue of mothers and children” had been “sunk in a sea of feminist indignation which saw only abortion and day care as relevant issues.”181 In The Inevitability of Patriarchy (1974), Steven Goldberg predicted that the “inexorable pull of sexual and familial biological forces” would “eventually overcome the initial thrust of nationalistic, religious, ideological or psychological forces that had made possible the temporary implementation of Utopian ideas.”182 All that feminism would achieve is “the right to meet men on male terms” where “she will lose.”183 A less obviously political intervention followed a year later with E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology. Wilson’s main focus was the social behaviors of animals, but it did contain a number of speculations in the final chapter on the genetic component to the human social order. At a time when conservative Americans were bemoaning the breakdown of the male-headed nuclear family, Wilson insisted that “the

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building block of all human societies” remained “the nuclear family” with women confined to the role of homemakers.184 In an article in The New York Times, Wilson went even further: In hunter-gatherer societies, men hunt and women stay at home. This strong bias persists in most agricultural and industrial societies and, on that ground alone, appears to have a genetic origin [. . . .] My own guess is that genetic bias is intense enough to cause a substantial division of labor even in the most free and egalitarian of future societies [. . . .] Even with identical education and equal access to all professions, men are likely to continue to play a disproportionate role in political life, business and science.185

Wilson’s bias may have been more an inclination to solidify the social order so as to render it scientifically intelligible than any explicit political agenda. In the same article, he conceded that this was “only a guess, and even if correct, could not be used to argue for anything less than sex-blind admission and free personal choice.”186 Perhaps this explains his lack of preparedness for the animus he generated, including a host of accusatory reviews, protests outside and inside his lectures, and even a critical letter published on the front page of The New York Times Magazine.187 In the previous chapter, we discussed how Darwinism was deployed in a broad ideological offensive against Marxism. In the 1980s and 1890s, it was similarly marshaled against psychoanalysis.188 The fact that this coincided with the backlash against feminism might not be an accident. Not because psychoanalysis was a practice in which women theorists were particularly prominent—although they were.189 Still less that the critiques themselves were explicitly anti-feminist. Some of them, indeed, drew attention to Freud’s own checkered history with women. Rather, that the critics’ narrow focus on the vulgar scientism to which psychoanalysis sometimes tended betrayed their own priorities. For a particular type of scientist invested in establishing certainty in his claims, a science of telling trumped a science of listening. At any rate, the retreat of psychoanalysis left the space for a new field in popular psychology that would subordinate all questions of personal contingent experience to a fixed evolutionary heritage. The Adapted Mind edited by Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby (1992) became the founding text of a movement that promised to “locate ‘Man’s place in nature’” and “to understand for the first time what humankind is and why we have the characteristics we do.”190 Evolutionary Psychology was, in some ways, less reductionistic than its sociobiological predecessor. One of its core principles is that human beings are not adapted for present conditions, but rather environments many thousands of years older than ourselves. In other ways, however, it represents the apotheosis of Darwinian conservatism. Beginning with its Palean presupposition

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of design, Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby viewed their project as initiating no less than a “cognitive revolution” in which all of the “disparate branches of psychology” could be drawn together “into a single organized system” by the selfish genery of Dawkins, Hamilton, Maynard Smith, and Williams.191 This claim was not necessarily reflected in the collection of essays, which followed, many of which focused, parochially, upon themes of sex and gender. Donald Symons argued that men had evolved to find young, nubile women attractive while women had evolved to favor men of high rank and status.192 Margo Wilson and Martin Daly argued that men had evolved to regard women as their property.193 Bruce J. Ellis argued that theories that tied sexuality to structures of power were contradicted by the evidence.194 Evolutionary Psychology would carry on very much in this vein. In The Evolution of Desire (1995), David Buss accepted that “structural powerlessness” was a contributing factor in constituting relations between men and women; however, it cannot explain the origin of male dominance. Evolutionary Psychology, by contrast, can account for a “constellation of findings” including men’s physical dominance and control of resources, and women’s sexual preferences for physically and politically powerful men.195 The peculiar focus on sex and selection might appear idiosyncratic but in fact makes sense when considered in light of its specific Darwinian lineage. Darwin had established male supremacy and the ascent of reason in a struggle and competition between men. In this new paradigm of selfish genery in which everything was conceived of in terms of competition and struggle, it became increasingly important to differentiate male and female competition so that the latter wouldn’t impinge upon the former. At a time when what was once conceived an exclusively male attribute was revealed to be culturally contingent, Evolutionary Psychology could reassure its readers that the nature of this competition is historically invariant. Men compete for rank and status, women for the rank and status of men. Matt Ridley elaborated on this theme in The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature a year earlier. “From fish to Mercedes, the history is unbroken [. . .] Wealth and power are means to women; women are means to genetic eternity.”196 On the question of whether this history could be changed, Ridley was as skeptical— feminism “is trying an impossible trick: to change the nature of men while insisting that the nature of women is unchangeable.”197 At a time when it was becoming politically inconvenient to naturalize race and ethnicity, it was all the more important that the line separating the two sexes was reinforced. The politics of gender is a major reason that the application of evolution, genetics, and neuroscience to the human mind is bitterly resisted in modern intellectual life. But unlike other human divisions such as race and ethnicity, where any biological differences are minor at most and scientifically uninteresting, gender cannot possibly be ignored in the science of human beings.198

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Jonathan M. Marks points out the remarkable continuity between the evolutionary psychologists and their less euphemious Social Darwinist forebears—just substitute race in place of gender and “you produce the normative ideas of wealthy Americans in the 1910s and the shrill cries of frustrated segregationists in the 1960s.” It was an “extraordinary accomplishment of the evolutionary psychologists,” he continues, to have resurrected this “kind of reasoning” at a time when so many regarded it as anachronistic.199 Nevertheless, evolutionary psychologists still often found themselves on the back foot. Defending Evolutionary Psychology from the charge that it was a “sexist discipline,” Pinker pointed out that it was “perhaps the most bigendered academic field I am familiar with.”200 And yet many of the female evolutionary biologists he listed believed that “what has been left out of our evolutionary analyses are important female perspectives.”201 Even within Evolutionary Psychology then, Man—the subject of certainty unto whom all authority on matters of truth are bestowed—was being accused of purveying partial self-affirming interpretations. Those determined to preserve the status of Man were caught in a bind, not too unlike the aforementioned trap of race. Challenge feminists claims and be prepared to be accused of bias and prejudice. Leave them unchallenged and Man is destined to lose his privileged Archimedean view anyway. In general, the preferred solution has been to simply assert that their evolutionary claims do not conflict with feminism. In The Imperial Animal in 1971, Tiger and Fox lamented women’s access to abortion and day care. Twenty-seven years later, for the book’s second edition, they lamented how this had cast them “as resident enemies of the feminist cause [when] we assert nothing in the book that is anti-feminist.”202 Eager to preserve his own universalism, Buss was careful to distinguish his evolutionary claims from a contaminating “political agenda.”203 The most imaginative response maybe Pinker’s who redefined feminism specifically so that it couldn’t conflict with his own investigations. Equality, he wrote. “is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.”204 What Pinker was apparently unable or unwilling to countenance was the possibility that his own interpretation of these “average properties” was anything less than universal. In The Age of Scientific Sexism, Mari Ruti argued that the core arguments of Evolutionary Psychology are best interpreted as the “intellectual arm of a backlash phenomenon” that “strives to arrest” the political shift toward “greater equality” between the sexes and a “cultural shift” toward a “more fluid understanding of gender.”205 And yet the diatribes of Dawkins, Wilson, Wright, Buss, Pinker, and others were never simply offensive but defensive—they were as much about restoring the pride and pomp of the traditional man of science as they were restoring women to their natural

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place. Thus, it was in a rediscovery of Kantian ethics that Darwinian conservatives found their voice toward the turn of this century. Recall that Kant had proclaimed that Man lifts himself from his self-incurred immaturity from the moment he has the courage to use his reason. Darwin had invoked this same courage to explain the lawlike evolutionary ascent of Man. Now this same courage was needed to face down the “pompous high priests of political correctness.”206 Dawkins was inclined to find fault among the “literary dukes” of cultural theory departments who had left scientists to feel like their “shabby curates.”207 However, “political correctness” is not primarily an artifact of academic discourses. It emerged as much from the private domain of power—the intimate spaces of personal relationships. It was battles in the home, communities, work spaces, and classrooms that challenged our traditional conceptions of race, masculinity, femininity, and sexuality.208 It was in these encounters that men were forced to consider just how limited and contested their views might be—providing a literal slant on Freud’s aphorism that Man was no long master in his own house. In the foregoing discussion, Man has been presented as a largely discursive concept in which representation and the conditions for representation coincide. Yet the psychological attachment to this figure ran deep and it shouldn’t surprise us that some scientists took this challenge so personally. Or that in defending their terrain, they called upon the most private and personal ethics—conviction, courage, resolution—as a last line of defense. Reflecting back upon his career, Hamilton turned his own conflicts into an Ancient Greek epic. “A scientist or philosopher” with a heretical program, Hamilton wrote, “has to be tough if he or she is to communicate it and, while doing so and for long after, must endure the tortures of Orestes.”209 Invoking the “ethics of courage” is powerful because it puts detractors back on the defensive; accusing them of cowering from an inconvenient truth. Wilson and Murray both blamed the controversies that shadowed their work on an “unfettered” and “self-destructive” political correctness, respectively.210 Likening proponents of political correctness to defenders of the Catholic Church at the time of Galileo, Edward H. Hagen rejoiced in the fact that Evolutionary Psychology “has something to offend just about everyone” for “slavish support for the reigning political and moral attitudes is a sure sign of scientific bankruptcy.”211 “Fortunately for us” Dennett opined, Darwin was not “politically correct” before decrying the doctrine of “political correctness” for being “antithetical to almost all surprising advances in thought.”212 Darwin certainly was prepared to take controversial positions, but the people he feared offending, and to whom he was inclined to pander, were not historically marginalized groups, but those who have been historically dominant—the Anglo-Saxon men of courage. This was predictable, given that they were, by and large his readers, and the gatekeepers to his success.

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Moreover, what he sought to conceal from them was not his discovery, so much as the radical implications that followed from it. These radical implications caused Darwin profound anxiety, and no doubt this contributed to his preference for long, laborious studies on subjects he believed bore only a tangential relation to them. Anxiety and doubt were fundamental to Darwin’s cautious ethical approach to science. With this in mind, it is interesting to consider the place of anxiety and doubt in Dennett’s 1995 book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. All scientists and philosophers pay lip service to doubt. In general, however, a distinction can be made between those, beginning with Descartes, that employ doubt in the service of an overriding certainty, and those, more closely associated with Freud (but arguably beginning with Darwin), who extol the ethical virtues of doubt. Dennett’s homage to doubt is classically Cartesian: “We are” he wrote, “the species that discovered doubt [. . . .] We alone can be racked with doubt, and we alone have been provoked by that epistemic itch to seek a remedy: better truth-seeking methods.”213 Note that Dennett takes the decidedly unDarwinian step of making a qualitative distinction between us and animals. It is ironic, then, that the basis of Dennett’s certainty is no less than Darwin’s dangerous idea itself: Perhaps, you may think [there] are the parts of Darwin’s idea that really are established beyond any reasonable doubt, and then there are the speculative extensions of the scientifically irresistible parts. Then—if we were lucky—perhaps the rock-solid scientific facts would have no stunning implications about religion, or human nature, or the meaning of life, while the parts of Darwin’s idea that get people all upset could be put into quarantine as highly controversial extensions of, or mere interpretations of, the scientifically irresistible parts. That would be reassuring. But alas, that is just about backwards. [Darwin’s] idea, which is about as secure as any in science, really does have far-reaching implications for our vision of what the meaning of life is or could be.214

This paragraph is the inverse of my argument. However, Dennett’s starting point is actually no different from my own. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea begins with a very elegant exposition of Darwin’s TfE. What I defined as a logical syllogism, Dennett represented as a logical algorithm, “a formal process that can be counted on to yield a certain sort of result whenever it is ‘run’ or instantiated.”215 When certain laws are apposed, certain outcomes are guaranteed—however improbable they may, at first, appear. This, in essence, is Darwin’s dangerous idea. Dennett even goes onto concede the underlying counter-scientific principle that the algorithm does not tell us how or why things evolved. In Darwin’s “strange inversion of reasoning,” Dennett writes, it is “not requisite to know how to make [a] perfect and beautiful

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machine.”216 In the majority of cases, the course of evolution may be “‘merely historical’—a trivial fact about the competitor’s past history that has no bearing at all on his or her future prospects.”217 From there Dennett proceeds to the consequences for ourselves: Ever since Darwin proposed his theory, people have often misguidedly tried to interpret it as showing that we are the destination, the goal, the point of all that winnowing and competition [. . . .] Evolution can be an algorithm, and evolution can have produced us by an algorithmic process, without its being true that evolution is an algorithm for producing us.218

But if Darwin’s dangerous idea is that “life and all its glories” evolved in a mindless and contingent way, how is it an idea that “promises to unite and explain just about everything”?219 Rather than, say, call just about everything into question? Evolution gave rise to humans capable of recognizing the fact of their evolution. On this, Dennett and I agree. However, it also gave rise to a virtually infinite variety of organisms that didn’t. A theory that can encompass this infinite variety must, I have argued, by way of logical necessity, admit of an infinite variety of interpretations. How then, can Dennett find in natural selection “reductionism incarnate”—a single “magnificent vision” that burns through, like a “universal acid [. . .] every monument that we cherish”?220 It is here that Dennett throws himself fullbodied into the realm of speculative extension—in spite of his expressed provision not to. Dennett’s first step toward a resolution is to collapse the distinction between biological and cultural evolution. By this, Dennett does not simply mean the trivial point that culture must have a biological basis, but rather to make the more contentious claim that culture evolves in a specifically Darwinian fashion. Here Dennett took inspiration from Dawkins who, in the final chapter of The Selfish Gene, had proposed that culture could be divided up into discrete, replicating, entities that, like genes, differentially survive. Can we measure this transmission of Design in culture? Are there units of cultural transmission analogous to the genes of biological evolution? Dawkins has proposed that there are, and has given them a name: memes. Like genes, memes are supposed to be replicators, in a different medium, but subject to much the same principles of evolution as genes.221

It remains unclear whether Dennett considers “meme evolution” to be “analogous” to “genic evolution” and its usefulness “open to question” or quite specifically “not just analogous,” but a “phenomenon that obeys the

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laws of natural selection quite exactly.”222 At any rate, it strikes me that a topic as vast as human culture cannot be satisfactorily settled in the course of a single chapter. Indeed, I am reminded of Darwin’s ethical objection to Herbert Spencer who was similarly inclined to incautious speculations— Here would be a fine subject for half-a-dozen years’ work. But let’s, for the sake of argument, grant that Dennett is correct that “all the achievements of human culture—language, art, religion, ethics, science itself—are themselves artefacts of the same fundamental process that developed the bacteria, the mammals, and Homo sapiens.”223 What guarantee is there that these cultural artifacts evolve toward truth? Dennett doesn’t provide any. Only denunciations of anxious, fearful subjects that cower from the possibility that it could: The most common fear about Darwin’s idea is that it will not just explain but explain away the Minds and Purposes and Meanings that we all hold dear. People fear that once this universal acid has passed through the monuments we cherish, they will cease to exist, dissolved in an unrecognizable and unlovable puddle of scientistic destruction. This cannot be a sound fear.224

Dennett returned to this topic in a book Freedom Evolves (2003). In it, he formulated a neat logical argument in which natural selection, by way of selecting organisms better capable of avoiding harm, could give rise, lawlike, to a subject endowed with the sufficient “freedom of thought and action [. . .] necessary for discovering truth.”225 As with Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, there is little in the way of argument, only excoriations against what he, Dennett, perceived as cowardice among critics unwilling to make similarly bold pronouncements. In the introduction, Dennett describes the aim of his book quite precisely as to “expose the misbegotten defensive edifices people have constructed” in response to their fears of evolution.226 Dennett definitively rejects the great injunction of the Counter-Scientific Revolution that we allow anxiety to guide our intuitions. Here are some examples: Some of the most popular objections to a naturalistic account of free will are propelled by fears rather than reasons.227 I encounter pockets of uneasiness, a prevailing wind of disapproval or anxiety quite distinct from mere skepticism. Usually this discomfort is muffled, like a faint rumble of distant thunder, a matter of wishful thinking almost subliminally distorting the agenda.228 So it is not surprising that our attempts to study it dispassionately are distorted by anxiety.229

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People’s fears tend to amplify the purported implications of the different analyses and distort the arguments.230

It would be churlish to suggest that Dennett is projecting his own anxieties onto others. And yet I don’t, in fact, believe Dennett is certain of his speculations. Recall that he had already granted Darwin’s strange inversion by which we need not know how something evolved to know that it did evolve. Surely this applies with equal force to the evolution of culture, or, if Dennett likes, truth? Rather, what Dennett is championing is an ethics of courage to “climb out of the trenches” of adversity and go for the “panoramic view”: The only way to answer questions about huge and experimentally inaccessible patterns it to leap boldly into the void with the risky tactic of deliberate oversimplification. This tactic has a long and distinguished history in science, but it tends to provoke controversy, since scientists have different thresholds at which they get nervous about playing fast and loose with the recalcitrant details [. . . .] My tastes in science are more indulgent.231

Dennett associates speculation with the Darwinian approach and doubt and caution with its enemy. “Contrary to what the enemies of Darwinian approaches declare, novel insights tumble out” of “speculative exercises in agent-design” with “gratifying frequency.”232 The truth is Dennett’s approach could not have been less Darwinian. The tendency to equate science with rank speculation poses a certain dilemma for the critic. Critique begins on the premise that there is some flaw, some contradiction, embedded in a piece of work, which it is the task of the critic to draw out. But what happens when the flaws and contradictions are already at the surface of the text and presented as strengths? When “certainty,” as the anthropologist Susan McKinnon put it, is “read from the fragments of bones and stones?”233 The critic is reduced to simply quoting what the author has said. (In this vein, fellow anthropologist Roger N. Lancaster has suggested, facetiously, that a “proper arrangement” of speculative evolutionary stories could instantiate a new form of critique—“one story would undermine or contradict another, so that, read in sequence, the net effect would be that of a spontaneous deconstruction.”234) Rather than engage with the substance of some of Darwinism’s most egregious vulgarizers then, it might be more instructive to analyze these claims when they are posed as questions. In What Is Your Dangerous Idea? Pinker challenged the “moral rectitude” of his readers, daring them to consider “statements of facts [. . .] which offend the ‘decency of an age’ and ‘incite moral panic’”:

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Do women, on average, have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men? [D]o men have an innate tendency to rape? Did the crime rate go down in the 1990s because two decades earlier poor women aborted children who would have been prone to violence? Are Ashkenazi Jews, on average, smarter than gentiles because their ancestors were selected for the shrewdness needed in money lending? Do African American men have higher levels of testosterone, on average, than white men? Is homosexuality the symptom of an infectious disease? Would it be consistent with our moral principles to give parents the option of euthanizing newborns with birth defects that would consign them to a life of pain and disability? Do parents have any effect on the character or intelligence of their children? Is the average intelligence of Western nations declining because duller people are having more children than smarter people?235

Pinker is well-aware of the personal discomfort certain people might experience from these types of questions and appears to thrive upon it. “Can you feel your blood pressure rise”? Are you “appalled that people can so much as think these things”? “Perhaps you think less of me for bringing them up?”236 Few of these people, I suspect, would be scientists who identify with the imaginary construct of Man. They are however the subjects that have traditionally been made to embody the forces of unreason; the subjects burdened with the contingency of history so that Man wouldn’t have to. Can they be forgiven for reacting with suspicion or hostility when these arguments are resurrected and once again afforded the trappings of science? In Darwin’s Counter-Scientific Revolution, anxiety and doubt were the gateway to further discovery. In Freud’s work, anxiety and doubt were not simply the gateway to the “unconscious,” but what emerges in the encounter with—when one really listens—to “the other.”237 In Dennett and Pinker’s formulations, however, anxiety and doubt signify the exact opposite: a symptom of psychological resistance—exhibited by others—which Dennett and Pinker must cast aside to confront dangerous truths. Political correctness is not immune to excess or misuse. But behind some of the acrimony toward it, especially as it pertains to the Darwinian literature, lies a nostalgia for a time when those who would identify with the figure of Man could project their anxieties directly onto “the other” without repercussions. If Darwin had this tendency, he was also prepared to ask himself dangerous questions. Had either Dennett or Pinker paid more attention to Darwin, or allowed themselves greater self-reflection, they might have included questions somewhat closer to home. Pinker’s macabre set of questions highlights the major frustration I have with Evolutionary Psychology. Not that its ideas and propositions are courageous and groundbreaking. If only they were. In Darwin’s Plots, Beer describes evolutionary theory as “first a form of imaginative history.”238 In a narrow sense, she simply means it “cannot be experimentally demonstrated.”

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Evolutionary history, like any history, is a form of story-telling. But Beer also meant “imaginative” in a wider, more positive sense: [The Origin of Species] with its unruly superfluity of material gradually and retrospectively revealing itself as order, its superfecundity of instance serving an argument which can reveal itself only through instance and relations. [It is] one of the most extraordinary examples of a work which included more than the maker of it at the time knew, despite all that he did know.239

Darwin didn’t just interpret nature, he reimagined it—and inspired a host of nineteenth-century writers in the process. Applied to latter day Evolutionary Psychology, however, Beer’s appraisal of evolutionary theory comes across as overly hopeful. Feminist critics Donna Haraway (1989) and Elana Gomel (2014) inadvertently implied this. Both have subsequently misquoted Beer as having described evolutionary theory as a form of “imaginary history.”240 From the context of their own discussions, it is clear that Gomel and Haraway meant to write “imaginative.” However, Beer, familiar as she is with psychoanalytic parlance, would probably endow this slip with greater significance. The Imaginary is Lacan’s term for the ego’s narcissistic fascination and identification with itself. An “imaginary history” could therefore be one preoccupied with justifying and reinforcing the standing and stature of the architects of evolutionary histories (i.e., Man). “The force of Darwin’s story,” Beer writes more recently, is that it “displaces the human from a central role in the past of this planet. Yet human beings always restore the human to the center of interpretation.”241 What Evolutionary Psychology, and its forebears, have shown us, above anything else, is that applications of Darwin’s theory are often not nearly imaginative enough.

CONTAINMENT: HETERODOX INTERPRETATIONS 1979–2002 Many a man’s tongue shakes out his master’s undoing. All’s Well That Ends Well242

In 1979, Margaret Thatcher assumed prime ministerial office in the UK. In the same year, Jean-François Lyotard announced the “end of metanarratives” in what looked, superficially, like a reprisal of the “crisis in representation” that characterized early Modernism. Biology wasn’t quite the “medley of ad-hoc hypotheses” that Whitehead had found it to be in the 1920s, however, developments in microbiology, especially the discovery that not all DNA

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was functional, challenged the unity of the synthesis. It was here that the gap between the technical and popular literature began to widen—especially with the increasing specialist interest in non-Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms. Two of the foremost academics that attempted to bring the more technical developments in the evolutionary literature to a wider audience were Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould. In the process, they would revive the three counter-scientific principles that had lain dormant, for almost a century. Their work helped provide the basis for a wave of popular critiques of ecumenical, ruling, and Archimidean interpretations that had dominated Darwinism since the 1940s. Indeed, it was their heterodox readings of Darwin that initially got me to think critically and creatively about Darwin. And yet for all their radicalism, their critiques of Darwin may ultimately have served to contain dissent. During a postmodern turn when students and academics were encouraged to call all of the most treasured assumptions into question, they served as gatekeepers for Darwinian criticism and ultimate guarantors of Darwinism’s scientific status. (1) Perfection/Imperfection: Historically Darwinism has been dominated by the haute bourgeoisie—the strata of the bourgeoisie with the most interest in preserving the order of things. As urban Jews radicalized in the 1960s, Lewontin and Gould belonged to the “Outsider stratum” that had historically gravitated toward dissent. Lewontin, via the tutelage of Richard Levins, identified himself explicitly as a Marxist biologist, while Gould had written of the formative experience of learning his Marxism “on his father’s knee.”243 Gould, moreover, was a polymath and wrote extensively on a wide range of subjects, including topics (critical theory, psychoanalysis, literary modernism) that had foreground the twentieth century’s early crisis of representation. Both were already well-established scientists by the time of their first excursion into critique. Lewontin was a world-renowned geneticist, while Gould, some thirteen years Lewontin’s junior, helped pioneer new research in paleontology. It was with their joint publication of the article “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme” that properly established them as Darwinian dissidents.244 Originally a paper presented to the Royal Society in 1978, it then appeared as the final article among the other nine papers presented at the symposium in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London in 1979. In it, they challenged what they described as an “adaptationist programme” that “has dominated evolutionary thought in England and the United States during the past 40 years.”245 [The adaptationist programme] is based on faith in the power of natural selection as an optimizing agent. It proceeds by breaking an organism into unitary “traits” and proposing an adaptive story for each considered separately.

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Trade-offs among competing selective demands exert the only brake upon perfection; nonoptimality is thereby rendered as a result of adaptation as well. We criticize this approach [and] support Darwin’s own pluralistic approach to identifying the agents of evolutionary change.246

Gould and Lewontin argued that many characteristics of organisms are not adaptive. An example they give is the human chin, which studies suggest, did not have a functional origin beyond connecting other facial features that were functional, that is, the jaw and teeth. The chin, in this respect, would be called a “spandrel”—Gould’s term, borrowed from architecture, to describe an evolutionary byproduct of another adaptive process. Their critique repeated many of the points Bateson had raised against “pan-selectionists” half a century earlier, including Bateson’s specific gibe that Darwinian scientists were guilty of a theological dogma worthy of Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide. Just as for Pangloss, it was “impossible for things not to be where they are, because everything is for the best,” every evolutionary character must be “made for the best purpose.”247 The weaknesses of the “adaptationist programme” become particularly manifest, they argued, in the dogged adherence to adaptive explanations in the face of failure: (“If one adaptive argument fails, try another [or] attribute failure to imperfect understanding.”248) In an implicit reference to Popper’s principle of falsifiability, they suggested they wouldn’t object to the “adaptationist” approach so strongly if it “could be dismissed after failing some explicit test.”249 But recall that Popper’s principle of falsifiability was not a test of the theorist but the theory. Gould and Lewontin’s acquittal of the TfNS required that they provide an ideal theorist. Their employment of the author function followed logically from this premise: Since Darwin has attained sainthood (if not divinity) among evolutionary biologists, and since all sides invoke God’s allegiance, Darwin has often been depicted as a radical selectionist at heart who invoked other mechanisms only in retreat, and only as a result of his age’s own lamented ignorance about the mechanisms of heredity. This view is false. Although Darwin regarded selection as the most important of evolutionary mechanisms (as do we), no argument from opponents angered him more than the common attempt to caricature and trivialize his theory by stating that it relied exclusively upon natural selection.250

Invoking Darwin’s “pluralist spirit,” they went onto suggest a series of alternatives to the “adaptationist programme.” Gould and Lewontin’s embrace of the principle of imperfection forced them to consider, before dismissing, the possibility that evolutionary history might not lend itself to scientific understanding. “We do not offer a council of despair” they insist

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in the conclusion, “for non-adaptive does not mean non-intelligible.”251 They closed the article with what reads to me at least, like a hostage to fortune: “A pluralistic view could put organisms, with all their recalcitrant, yet intelligible, complexity, back into evolutionary theory” (my emphasis).252 And yet, the Spandrels essay posed more questions than it answered. Indeed, except for challenging the scope of perfection, the Spandrels essay hadn’t really addressed the counter-scientific dimension of the concept of adaptation—only the possibility of alternative causal mechanisms beyond natural selection. This was rectified in an article a few years later in which Gould along with Elizabeth Vrba proposed an auxiliary concept (“exaptation”) that recognized characters of the organism that had evolved for a different functional purpose to which they were now employed. Natural selection assumes a consistency in the environment to which the organism is adapted. But what if there is a sudden change in the environment for which a trait of the organism was “pre-adapted,” or the organism later “discovers” an available niche? An “exaptation” refers to a shift in the function of a trait: If many features of organisms are non-adapted, but available for useful cooptation in descendants, then an important concept has no name in our lexicon (and unnamed ideas generally remain unconsidered): features that now enhance fitness but were not built by natural selection for their current role. We propose that such features be called exaptations and that adaptation be restricted, as Darwin suggested, to features built by selection for their current role.253

They went on to cite Darwin directly from The Origin: The sutures in the skulls of young mammals have been advanced as a beautiful adaptation for aiding parturition, and no doubt they facilitate, or may be indispensable for this act; but as sutures occur in the skulls of young birds and reptiles, which have only to escape from a broken egg, we may infer that this structure has arisen from the laws of growth, and has been taken advantage of in the parturation of the higher animals.254

However, the problem of relying on the author as a “principle of a certain unity” is that it is, by and large, a fiction. Darwin was just as inclined to subordinate all functional characters to the term adaptation (“although an organ may not have been originally formed for some special purpose, if it now serves for this end we are justified in saying that it is specially contrived for it”255). On a superficial level what we are dealing with here is a kind of language game. Whether what I am using to type this sentence is an adaptation or an exaptation rather depends on whether I define it as a human hand, a mammal’s forelimb, a vertebrate appendage, and so on. But on a more

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profound level, aren’t we actually dealing not with the pervasiveness of adaptations but the pervasiveness of exaptations (my hand/arm never actually evolved to type)? This was the radical consequence of Darwin’s counterscientific theory; that characters are never evolved for the present, but are always living relics of the past. In the most extreme sense, no adaptation will ever be utilized in exactly the same way twice. The assignation of an adaptation is only ever possible by ignoring its exaptive features. By confining the term to select evolutionary cases, Gould was able to contain Darwinism’s counter-scientific consequences beneath a veil of what he called “testable propositions” and “enlightened science.”256 (2) Identity/Relation: In The Dialectical Biologist, Lewontin, with his collaborator Richard Levins, continued his attack on the adaptationist program even likening it to the vulgarizers of Marxism and Freudianism.257 However, in this book, they preferred to address the problem of adaptation by critiquing science’s principle of identity. Since Descartes, they argued, science has been in thrall to the dogma of “atomism,” whereby a thing is reducible to the sum of its parts. For all its successes in the physical sciences, this was also a motif of bourgeois ideology that took individuals to be “ontologically prior to the social.”258 In spite of what may have been implied by Darwin’s struggle for existence, Lewontin and Levins insisted that the relation between organism and environment was inextricable. Drawing from Darwin’s discussion on dependence, Lewontin called upon the same example: The environment is a product of the organism, just as the organism is a product of the environment. The organism adapts the environment in the short term to its own needs, as, for example, by nest building, but in the long term the organism must adapt to an environment that is changing, partly through the organism’s own activity, in ways that are distinctive to the species.259

Implicit in the critique of atomism is the impossibility of understanding a thing as the sum of its parts. In the Spandrels essay, Gould and Lewontin had criticized the dominant tendency to break an organism down into its discrete characters. This tendency, Lewontin and Levins argued, suffers the same fate as the effort to separate the organism from environment: “Part” and “whole” have a special relationship to each other, in that one cannot exist without the other, any more than “up” can exist without “down.” What constitutes the parts is defined by the whole that is being considered. Moreover, parts acquire properties by virtue of being parts of another whole. It is not that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, but that the parts acquire new properties. But as the parts acquire properties by being together, they impart to the whole new properties, which are reflected in changes in the parts, and so on.

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Parts and wholes evolve in consequence of their relationship, and the relationship itself evolves. These are the properties of things that we call dialectical.260

The term “dialectical” derives its recent history from Hegel and Marx and is generally used to describe the interaction between things and their opposites. The relation between organism and environment and parts and wholes is dialectical in as far as “one thing cannot exist without the other, that one acquires its properties from its relation to the other, that the properties of both evolve as a consequence of their interpenetration.”261 Lewontin and Levins were in no doubt about the value of the dialectical method: “As biologists who have been working self-consciously in a dialectical mode for many years, we felt a need to illustrate the strength of the dialectical view in biology.”262 While I am familiar with the term “dialectics,” I avoided using the term in my own discussion of the principle of relation. One reason was that I cannot see how simply calling the relation “dialectical” resolves it as a problem. As Jean Piaget once put it, to “note the existence of wholes at different levels and to remark that at a given moment the higher “emerges” from the lower is to locate a problem, not to solve it.”263 Irrespective of whether one is using a “dialectical method” to understand the relation they are, as I see it, still interpreting the relation. Another difficulty I have with dialectics is the looseness of the term. If “dialectics” was simply used to elucidate the relation, that would be one thing. In fact, as Foucault suggests, it is a term deployed to plug the holes in modern thought wherever they may appear— a method that “would keep separate the empirical and the transcendental, while being directed at both” a way to analyze “man as a subject” but at the same time provide a foundation for this analysis “in a theory of the subject.”264 It may not be so surprising that Lewontin and Levins’ extolment of dialectics becomes more passionate the larger the hole they are trying to plug—reaching a kind of crescendo in the conclusion to The Dialectical Biologist in which dialectics promises nothing less than the salvation of science—“Alienated science deals with the alienated world of these projections, while a dialectical view attempts to understand the object in its full dimensionality.”265 Lewontin invokes dialectics again in Not in Our Genes—a book Lewontin coauthored along with Steven Rose and Leon Kamin—this time to resolve the contradictions of Man as they hailed the power of human consciousness to understand “the essential dialectical unity of the biological and the social, not as two distinct spheres, or separable components of action, but as ontologically coterminous.”266 That they attribute this view to specific authors—the “Marxist philosophers like György Lukács and Agnes Heller, and of revolutionary practitioners and theorist Mao Tse-tung”—is really indicative of the

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failure of dialectics to move beyond a dependence upon authors.267 Indeed, this was more or less conceded by Lewontin in The Dialectical Biologist: The book does not follow a single logical development from first page to last but rather is meant to be a sampler of a mode of thought. That is why we have called it The Dialectical Biologist rather than Dialectical Biology, which would announce a single coherent project that we do not intend.268

Applying “dialectics” to Darwinism serves no more than to, as Djuna Barnes once put it, “dress the unknowable in the garments of the known.”269 Gould also devoted himself to the problem of identity and relation in the course of his critique of selfish genery. The details of this should not concern us, except as far as it led Gould to give a definition of evolutionary individuality. An evolutionary individual, he argued, must be subject to laws of (1) reproduction, (2) inheritance, (3) variation, and—here is where the gene selectionists got it wrong in his view—capable of (4) interaction with an environment in such a way that it causes some individuals to achieve relative reproductive success over its equivalents.270 One can construct testable causal scenarios for the selection of individual organisms, and in more limited cases, species, but not, Gould argued, the gene. The gene may be the real existing unit we can use to track evolutionary change (“bookkeeping”) but individual organisms and species are the natural units (“agents”) that cause evolution.271 For all Gould’s efforts to resolve the levels of selection debate, he was never entirely happy with his solution. In a footnote to his discussion, he admitted he had “struggled with this issue all my professional life.”272 I think part of the difficulty Gould had arose from his commitment to the unity of Darwin’s theory. The first three criteria he provided for evolutionary individuals derived from Darwin’s TfE and could be represented mechanically. From there, Gould sought to achieve the same degree of certainty in the fourth criterion of interaction—something that could only be interpreted historically. This relied, fundamentally, upon conceiving of the individual as ontologically separate from what it interacts with. A dubious move even in some of the more certain and elegant cases of selection. Consider again Fisher’s sex ratio model in which the environment consists of the distribution of males and females in a population of organisms. In this example, individual organisms are two things at once—agents and environments. In applying Fisher’s sex ratio model, we must make an implicit distinction between the agential properties of the evolutionary individual and the agential properties of the environment that derive from the properties of the individual. The point is not that Gould is wrong to add a criterion of interaction but that he underestimates the destabilizing consequences of it—especially in his appeals to what

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he calls “real-existing” “natural units.” Reflecting upon these consequences, the philosopher Susan Oyama’s observations are salutary: [The] vocabulary of interactionism has been widely adopted, but the full implications of a constructivist interactionism have not been accepted nearly as readily as its terminology [. . . .] Interaction requires a two-way “exchange of information”: Genetic and organismic activity are informed by conditions, even as they inform those conditions [. . . .] My complaint is not with the concept, but with the fact that often it is not taken seriously enough.273

Taking the concept seriously requires accepting that “interaction” always compromises and disperses the identities of the agents interacting. For the sake of convenience, Gould had confined agency to individual organisms and species, reducing genes to the role of bookkeeping. But if we are to try to chart the interaction of genes—as the late geneticist Gabriel Dover has done—What do we find? [From] the perspective of a single gene, all of its subsequent interactions with the relevant other genes in the specific networks in which it participates are its nurturing environment. This instantaneous environment of other relevant genes is no different in kind from the many other internal and external influences on a given gene, from mother’s milk to atmospheric oxygen. The milieu of around 30,000 human genes is an important component of the processes of nurturing involved in the specific realization of a given gene in the emergence of an individual phenotype.274

Dover’s point is not that all can be reduced to genes, but the opposite. That there is no stable distinction to be made in the interaction between an entity and its environment—the distinction is always a matter of interpretation: “The effect of a gene can only emerge through its interactions with other genes: an individual gene has no meaningful function that can be the separate, autonomous target of selection.”275 For both Oyama and Dover, “interactionism” (like dialectics) is “not a resolution” so much as an overdue “statement of the problem.”276 (3) Laws/Contingency: Neither Lewontin or Gould identified with the gendered or racialized dimensions of Man. Indeed both were active members of the Sociobiology Study Group formed specifically in opposition to the efforts of sociobiologists to naturalize sex and racial differences. In Not in Our Genes, Lewontin, along with his coauthors Steven Rose and Leon Kamin, likened his activism to being “members of a fire brigade,” constantly being called upon to “put out the latest conflagration.” The urgency of their political work meant they never had the time to come up with a conception of human

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nature of their own. Bombarded with so-called science linking race with IQ or asserting the biological inferiority of women, “critics of determinism,” they wrote, are “doomed to constant nay-saying, while readers, audiences, and students react with impatience to the perpetual negativity.”277 In true modernist spirit, though, they did manage to salvage a subject with free-will from the mire of materialism. “Our biology” they wrote “has made us into creatures who are constantly re-creating our own psychic and material environments.” Freedom, they argued arises from “an immense array of interacting and intersecting causes [. . . .] It is our biology that makes us free.”278 In later years, Lewontin cooled considerably on the prospects of a science of human evolution. The contingent complexity of human consciousness and the difficulty of assembling evidence made it an impossible artifact of evolutionary inquiry. He closed with this pointed, counter-scientific, note to his readers that could well serve as a précis for my entire argument: We must give up the childish notion that everything that is interesting about nature can be understood. History, and evolution is a form of history, simply does not leave sufficient traces [. . . .] Form and even behaviour may leave fossil remains but forces like natural selection do not. It might be interesting to know how cognition (whatever that is) arose and spread and changed, but we cannot know. Tough luck.279

Gould also studiously avoided the citadel, specializing instead in the study of snails and more technical questions surrounding the mode and tempo of evolution. The closest he would come to an investment in the figure of Man came in his invocation of the author function. Appeals to Darwin in the Spandrels essay was almost certainly Gould’s innovation—a device he would continue to deploy for the rest of his career.280 It would arise most passionately when he considered the principle of historical contingency. In Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1989), Gould endorsed a radically contingent view of history in which the few surviving descendants of the Cambrian explosion of life some 500 million years ago owed their fate more to chance than adaptational superiority. Were we to “replay life’s tape” back to just before the mass extinctions that followed the Cambrian explosion there would be no guarantee, he argued, that history would not proceed in a way “strikingly different” from the course it has actually taken. Gould then asked rhetorically “What could we then say about the predictability of self-conscious intelligence? or of mammals? or of vertebrates? or of life on land? or simply of multicellular persistence for 600 million difficult years?”281 Gould was always adamant that to impute any innate progressive tendency to natural selection was a misinterpretation born of narcissism. Darwinists, Gould insisted, “have never been willing to

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complete [Darwin’s] revolution in Freud’s sense by owning the true implications for the dethronement of human arrogance.”282 But what, we might add, does Darwin’s non-progressivism and emphasis on contingency mean for the subject that is supposed to know history? On this score, Gould’s answer was more reassuring. Whatever the answer, we may be no less certain about the conclusions we arrive at in the so-called harder sciences. Just because history is contingent, he repeated, does not mean it is any less intelligible. The common epithet linking historical explanation with stamp collecting represents the classic arrogance of a field that does not understand the historian’s attention to comparison among detailed particulars [. . . .] The historical scientist focuses on detailed particulars—one funny thing after another— because their coordination and comparison permits us, by consilience of induction, to explain the past with as much confidence [as] chemical measurement. We shall never be able to appreciate the full range and meaning of science until we shatter the stereotype of ordering by status and understand the different forms of historical explanation as activities equal in merit to anything done by physics or chemistry. When we achieve this new taxonomic arrangement of plurality among the sciences [we] shall then finally understand that the answer to such questions as “Why can humans reason?” lies as much (and as deeply) in the quirky pathways of contingent history as in the physiology of neurons.283

Gould seems to be endorsing an empirical solution to the problem of contingency and human reason (just as Lewontin had when he made dialectics an essential character to our coterminous ontology). By rooting contingency in history, we can achieve sufficient certainty that our means for comprehending this history is equally contingent. Gould’s conclusion was precisely opposite to Darwin’s who retained a profound doubt in his monkey-mind. It is ironic then that Gould deposited his remaining doubts in the Master—it was after all “Charles Darwin” who first made the central distinction between “laws in the background and contingency in the details.”284 Gould was the greatest Darwinist of the twentieth century. His book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, published shortly before his untimely death in 2002, was the most important book on evolution since The Origin. He was also the most faithful heir to Darwin’s most reluctant radicalism. Gould understood the religious origins of the concept of adaptation and its rootedness in an ascetic ideal that longed to reduce evolutionary history to a single story, only to fall back on an expanded range of concepts that could preserve history’s intelligibility. He provided a stinging critique of gene selectionism, alleging it amounted to no more than evolutionary bookkeeping, but nonetheless persisted with a conception of “agency” that fundamentally underestimated the consequences of the relation. He devoted most of his career to

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emphasizing the contingency of evolutionary history but was not prepared to really address its consequences for the figure that was supposed to come to know this history. With sufficient ethical caution, Gould urged, evolutionary historians “can reach the same level of confidence as any physical resolution under invariant law.”285 What doubts remained, Gould sublimated in the figure of Darwin. If there were consequences that Gould had not the confidence to face, then at least Darwin did: [If] historically-minded scientists, myself included, often develop an admiration bordering on reverence for Darwin, our judgement arises from [his] insistence on following a train of complex thought into all ramifications and difficulties, and his internal need to resolve each and every puzzle before achieving satisfaction. Darwin therefore, over and over again, provides resolutions to puzzles that none of his contemporaries even considered or conceptualized. In this sense, no other evolutionist of his generation came closer to rivalling Darwin in sophistication—and extensive logical sloppiness permeates the work of other thinkers. Darwin never resolved several difficult issues [but] he thought about them with almost chilling clarity and integrity.286

Some of the difficulties Darwin never resolved, and from which Gould set aside, bore considerably upon the scientific status of evolutionary history. On some level, Gould realized this and sought recourse in the strategy of the scholastics, assuaging his doubts by placing his faith in the “unspeakable holiness” of Darwin’s sacred text.287 The Origin of Species contained the hidden secrets that exonerated evolution from the limitations of history—establishing evolutionary history firmly within the domain of science.288 What are we to make of the phrase “historical science”? I ask this not to denigrate the historian, whose work is just as challenging, in fact in many ways, far more challenging, than the scientist, but in order to establish the function of the term “science” in this phrase. There is an understanding that any historical account is imperfect, partial, and provisional. That there is no separating the historian from the events that he or she is recounting. That historical accounts wind up saying as much about the historian as they do historical events. If evolutionary history is, by virtue of its status as a science, exempt from these consequences, then we are entitled to ask—why? What is it about the claims of the evolutionary historian that elevates their claims above the humble historian? If these consequences are granted for evolutionary history, what does “science” really mean in this instance? Is it merely an honorific term? It certainly isn’t due to any special advance in our understanding of history. No revolution in historical theory comparable with the breakthroughs in molecular biology was forthcoming. What was available to the twentieth-century historian was also to hand for the historian of

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the nineteenth. The principal achievement of the twentieth-century Darwinist was to have taken what had previously been perceived to have been failures of Darwinian theory, including by Darwin himself, and recast them as successes. The possibility for endless interpretation became, for Darwin’s vulgarizers at least, a foreground for universal validity. From tragedy to farce. CONCLUSION: RECOVERING THE UNTHOUGHT “We do not know what is happening to us, and that is precisely the thing that is happening to us—the fact of not knowing what is happening to us.”289 José Ortega y Gasset’s bleak estimation of a post-Galilean age owed much to the Counter-Scientific Revolution of the nineteenth century. Darwin was the revolution’s chief instigator and inspiration. There was every reason to believe that, in spite of their obvious reactionary applications, his ideas could continue to inspire challenges to the order of things in the twentieth century. In theory at least, Darwinism was quite finely balanced between conservative science and radical counter-science. If those inclined to the status quo could find in evolution a justification for the natural order, stability in its hierarchies and solace in its invariant laws, then, equally those in defiance of the status quo could find in evolutionary history reason to destabilize that natural order, uproot its hierarchies and triumph in its contingency. It did not quite turn out that way. Darwinism’s counter-revolution largely succeeded in turning the weapons of the counter-science against itself. To be sure, both Marxism and psychoanalysis had their reactionary tendencies. Nevertheless, both Marxism and psychoanalysis maintained their radical traditions. In part, this was because they embraced the possibilities for interpretation and reinterpretation that their radical principles had made room for. The foundation of “not knowing” was never far from the surface of their waters. Darwin’s fundamental doubt, by contrast, was submerged so deep that it caused barely a ripple. As a consequence, it became an effective means to quench conflagrations happening elsewhere. Every time, it seemed, an urgent question was asked of the ruling orders, Darwinists proved their most powerful ideological allies. When the weltanschauung of the bourgeoisie threatened to disintegrate beneath a proliferation of irreconcilable claims, Darwin was transformed from a polarizing figure to a grand unifier of discourses, the quasi-divine guarantor that a world without God did not also mean a world without science. While economists on the political right were planning their counter-attack against the cooperative creed and equalizing tendencies of social democracy, their counterparts in biology endeavored to prove that all cooperation in nature was really an illusion concealing relations of competition and struggle. When, in the century’s final quarter, the Civil Rights and

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women’s movements challenged the supposed neutrality and universality of scientific claims, a new generation of psychologists came along to restore the pride and pomp of the traditional man of science. If I may put it brutally, evolutionary epistemology, evolutionary economics and evolutionary psychology were all constructions deployed, in different ways, to deny the consequences of the death of God, the class struggle, and the unconscious, respectively. The conservative uses of Darwinism were never separate from the sealing of Darwinism’s scientific status and it is entirely legitimate to ask whether, without these applications, Darwinism would have ever attained the status of an uncontested science. The extent of the conservative hold over Darwinism is perhaps best demonstrated by the opposition it has generated. Unable to match the length and breadth of the right’s populist and reactionary claims, what exists of a radical Darwinism has been reduced, like the left in general in recent years, to a strategy of containment and amelioration of its worst excesses. As with politics so with science; the best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.290 As another crisis engulfs the political center, difficult questions of ourselves and our history will be asked. No doubt some answers will be sought in evolution. It’s time to retrieve Darwin’s own more radical imagination.

NOTES 1. J. B. S. Haldane, Daedalus; Or, Science and the Future A Paper Read to the Heretics, Cambridge, on February 4, 1923, (London: Kegan Paul & Trench, 1924) 78. 2. T. S. Eliot, “Gerontion,” Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920). Retrieved from Project Gutenberg. https​:/​/ww​​w​.gut​​enber​​g​.org​​/file​​s​/156​​7​/156​​7​-h​/1​​ 567​-h​​.ht​m#​​linkg​​eront​​ion 3. J. Hodge, ‘Capitalist contexts for Darwinian theory: land, finance, industry and empire.’ Journal of the History of Biology 42, no. 3 (2009), 412. 4. J. Hodge and G. Radick, "Introduction," inThe Cambridge Compasion to Da 5. Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 3. 6. Nietzsche cited in R. H. Grimm, Nietzsche’s Theory of Knowledge (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2013), 23. 7. J. Joyce, Ulysses (1922; repr., Jovian Press, 2017), 125. 8. V. Woolf, “Poetry, fiction and the future,” in Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 75. 9. Lukács, History and Class-Consciousness, 155; T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland and Other Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), 27. 10. J. H. Woodger, Biological Principles: A Critical Study (Abgindon: Routledge, 2004), 11. 11. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 21.

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12. See Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna. 13. S. Freud, “Lecture XXXV: the question of a weltanschauung,” (1915) in J. Strachey and S. Freud. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 22. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis and Other Works:(1932–1936) (New York: Vintage, 2001), 158. 14. ibid. 15. T. H. Huxley, “Criticisms on ‘the origin of species,’ ” in The Natural History Review (1864). 16. Asa Gray cited in Ruse, Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose?, 91. 17. C. Kingsley, Letter 2534 Kingsley, Charles to Darwin, C. R. 18 Nov 1859. 18. Durant, “Darwinism and divinity: a century of debate,” 19. 19. R. A. Fisher, Creative Aspects of Natural Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), 20. 20. Fisher cited in M Ruse. M. Ruse, Can a Darwinian be a Christian?: The Relationship Between Science and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 9. 21. Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, 104. 22. ibid, 158–9. 23. Fisher cited in Ruse, Darwin and Design: Does Evolution have a Purpose?, 159. 24. E. B. Ford, Mendelism and Evolution (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1957), 102–5. 25. Thomas Hunt Morgan cited in Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, 417. 26. Dobzhansky cited in Mayr, Systematics and the Origin of Species, from the Viewpoint of a Zoologist, vii. 27. Dobzhansky, Genetics and the Origin of Species, 12. 28. For discussion on the links between the “Unity of Science” Movement and the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis see V. B. Smocovitis, Unifying Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996). 29. Mayr cited in P. Weintraub, The Omni Interviews (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1984), 47. 30. Mayr, “Where are we?,” 1–14. 31. Ernst Mayr cited in Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 537. 32. ibid. 33. ibid, 505–84. See also, Provine, Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology, 404–56. 34. R. W. Clark et al., Huxleys (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 195. 35. ibid, 196. 36. T. H. Huxley cited in F. M. Turner, “Victorian scientific naturalism,” in C. Chant and J. Fauvel. Darwin to Einstein: Historical Studies on Science and Belief (London: Open University, 1980), 47. 37. Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, 16. 38. ibid, 26.

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39. ibid, 420. 40. ibid. 41. ibid, 455. 42. ibid, 414. 43. G. G. Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and of Its Significance for Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 127. 44. ibid, 279. 45. Edwin Grant Conklin cited in Macbeth, Darwin retried, 127. 46. This phrase is from the paper N. Tinbergen, “Behaviour, systematics, and natural selection,” in S. Tax and C. Callender. Evolution after Darwin; the University of Chicago Centennial, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 609. 47. H. Gaffron (1960). “The origin of life,” in Evolution Darwin, 38; B. Rensch, “The laws of evolution,” in Evolution after Darwin, 108; E. Mayr, “Evolutionary novelties,” in Evolution after Darwin, 367; A. J. Nicholson, “The role of population dynamics in natural selection,” in Evolution after Darwin, 499. 48. J. Huxley, “ ‘At random’ a television preview,” in Evolution after Darwin, 42. 49. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 120. 50. B. Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World (1914; repr., Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 8. 51. Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 696. 52. See Georges Canguilhem and Jean Hyppolite in Badiou, A. Badiou and the Philosophers: Interrogating 1960s French Philosophy, 15, 87. 53. K. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Abingdon: Routledge, 1946), 1. 54. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 268. 55. ibid. 56. K. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (Abingdon: Routledge, 1963), 18. 57. ibid, 45. 58. ibid, 46. 59. K. Popper, “Darwinism as a metaphysical research programme,” in The Philosophy of Karl Popper (Chicago: Open Court, 1974), 134. 60. ibid. 61. ibid. 62. K. Popper, “Natural selection and the emergence of mind,” in Dialectica 32.3–4 (1978): 344–5. 63. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, 547. 64. Popper, “Natural selection and the emergence of mind,” 343. 65. ibid, 347. 66. ibid, 341–343. 67. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 24. 68. ibid. 69. ibid, 103. 70. T. Kuhn, “The road since structure,” in The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 287.

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71. ibid, 20. 72. ibid. 73. T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970), 151. 74. Kuhn, “The road since structure,” 146. 75. ibid, 172. 76. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 206. 77. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, 27. 78. D. T. Campbell, “Unjustified variation and selective retention in scientific discovery,” in Studies in the Philosophy of Biology: Reduction and Related Problems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 141. 79. I. Berlin, “History and theory: the concept of scientific history,” in History and Theory 1.1 (1960): 31. 80. T. Dobzhansky, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” in The American Biology Teacher 75.2 (2013): 87–91. 81. ibid, 87. 82. Foucault, The Order of Things, 377. 83. V. B. Smocovitis, “Unifying biology: the evolutionary synthesis and evolutionary biology,” in Journal of the History of Biology 25.1 (1992): 42. 84. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957; repr., Hamilton Books, 2016), 334. 85. See discussion in P. Foot, The Vote: How It Was Won and How It Was Undermined (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 340–366. 86. F. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1943; repr., Routledge, 2004), 205. 87. Friedman cited in D. L. Bennett and R. J. Cebula, “Misperceptions about capitalism, government and inequality,” in Economic Behavior, Entrepreneurship and Economic Freedom, Northampton (MA: Edward Elgar, 2015), 376. 88. S. M. Amadae, Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 9–10. 89. See D. T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2011), 10. 90. M. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), xiv. 91. D. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2007), 39–40. 92. A. E. Emerson, “Adaptation in population systems,” in Evolution after Darwin, 335. For an overview of this period see Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory and Provine, Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology. 93. Ronald Fisher cited in Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 285. 94. Julian Huxley cited in Clark, Huxleys, 285. 95. Foucault, The Order of Things, 478 and 574. 96. See discussion in Dobzhansky and Dobzhansky, Genetics and the Origin of Species, 104. 97. Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution, 376. 98. S. J. Holmes cited in A. Montagu, Darwin: Competition & Cooperation (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1973), 376.

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99. W. D. Hamilton, “Innate social aptitudes of man: an approach fromevolutionary genetics,” in Narrow Roads of Gene Land: Volume 1: Evolution of Social Behaviour. Vol. 1. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 331. 100. W. D. Hamilton, Narrow Roads of Gene Land, 25. 101. ibid, 11. 102. V. C. Wynne-Edwards cited in Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 549. 103. Hamilton, “Innate social aptitudes of man: an approach from evolutionary genetics,” 329. 104. ibid, 329–30. 105. ibid, 330. 106. W. D. Hamilton, “The evolution of altruistic behavior,” in Narrow Roads of Gene Land, 7. 107. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 75. 108. W. D. Hamilton, “Selfish and spiteful behaviour in an evolutionary model,” in Nature 228.5277 (1970): 1218. 109. Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection, 32. 110. ibid, 32–3. 111. Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection, 21. 112. ibid, 20–1. 113. ibid, 57. 114. A saddle point is a mathematical term for a stationary point. ibid, 68. 115. ibid, 103. 116. ibid, 25. 117. ibid, 25–6. 118. ibid, 26. 119. ibid, 57. 120. See discussion in E. F. Keller, The Century of the Gene (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2000), 47. 121. Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection, 24. 122. ibid. 123. ibid, 24–5. 124. ibid, 58. 125. ibid, 65. 126. ibid. 127. ibid, 66. 128. ibid, 70. 129. ibid, 71. 130. ibid, 69. 131. ibid, 124. 132. ibid, 270. 133. W. D. Hamilton, “Altruism and related phenomena, mainly in social insects,” in Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 3.1 (1972): 195. 134. R. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 3.

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135. ibid, 38. 136. ibid, 24. 137. R. Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (1982; repr., Oxford Paperbacks, 1999), 209. 138. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 24–5. 139. ibid, 114. 140. D. L. Hull, “Individuality and selection,” in Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 11 (1980): 317. 141. See discussion in L. Moss, What Genes Can’t Do (Boston: MIT Press, 2004), 194–5. 142. See discussion in Robin, The Reactionary Mind, 19. 143. See discussion in Keller, “Demarcating public from private values in evolutionary discourse.” 144. M. Ghiselin, The Economy of Nature and the Evolution of Sex (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 274. 145. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, p. 2. 146. ibid, x. 147. ibid, 179. 148. ibid, 8. 149. ibid, 9. 150. ibid, 117. 151. E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1975), 554. 152. Steven Rose cited in Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. 30th ann. ed., xiii–xiv. 153. This was John Maynard Smith’s characterization of the year 1975—“one of those mysterious periods in which new ideas are hovering in the air.” See ibid, pp. xiii–xiv. 154. See Robin, The Reactionary Mind. 155. See, for example, H. Rose and S. Rose, Alas Poor Darwin: Arguments against Evolutionary Psychology (New York: Vintage Press, 2001), 376; G. A. Dover, Dear Mr. Darwin: Letters on the Evolution of Life and Human Nature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); L. Moss, What Genes Can’t Do (Boston: MIT Press, 2004). 156. In the index, there are forty-two entries for Darwin and thirty-six for Dawkins. See D. Hull and M. Ruse, The Philosophy of Biology: Oxford Readings in Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 157. Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 41–2. 158. L. von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949) (1949; repr., Alabama, Lulu Press, 1998), 175. 159. R. R. Nelson and S. G. Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2009). 160. R. H. Frank, The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2012), xii. 161. Bob Dylan, Slow Train Coming, Sony Music, 1979.

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162. W. B. Provine, “Geneticists and the biology of race crossing,” in Science 182.4114, (1973): 790–6. 163. See discussion in Turner, “Victorian scientific naturalism,” 57–61. 164. Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection: A Complete Variorum Edition, 171. 165. Theodosius Dobzhansky cited in ibid, 188. 166. See J. Huxley, The Uniqueness of Man (London: Chatto & Windus, 1947) 115; Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, 578. 167. Hamilton, “Innate social aptitudes of man: an approach from evolutionary genetics,” 155. 168. Sherwood Washburn cited in Segerstråle, Defenders of the Truth, 147. 169. Robert Trivers cited in ibid, 147. 170. Hamilton, Narrow Roads of Gene Land: Volume 1: Evolution of Social Behaviour, 261 and 488. 171. See discussion in Segerstråle, Defenders of the Truth, 180. 172. Herrnstein and Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, 1. 173. James Watson cited in R. L. Anemone, Race and Human Diversity: A Biocultural Approach (London: Routledge, 2015), 51. 174. C. West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). 175. See discussion in M. Yudell, Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 184. 176. David P. Barash cited in ibid, 187. 177. A. Fausto-Sterling, “Beyond difference: feminism and evolutionary psychology,” in Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments against Evolutionary Psychology, 182. 178. L. M. Fedigan, Primate Paradigms: Sex Roles and Social Bonds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); S. B. Hrdy, The Woman that Never Evolved: With a New Preface and Bibliographical Updates (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2009); D. J. Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (London: Psychology Press, 1989). 179. H. Rose, “Hyper-reflexivity—A new danger for the counter-movements,” in Counter-Movements in the Sciences (Springer, 1979), 277. 180. L. Tiger and R. Fox, The Imperial Animal. Vol. 4141 (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1997), xii. 181. ibid, xx. 182. R. Lewontin, S. Rose, and L. Kamin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature (London: Penguin Books, 1984), 148. 183. Steven Goldberg cited in Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin, Not in Our Genes, 148. 184. Wilson, Sociobiology, 553. 185. Segerstråle, Defenders of the Truth, 211. 186. Wilson cited in Defenders of the Truth, 211. 187. See E. Allen et al cited in Defenders of the Truth, 14; S. J. Gould, “Biological potentiality vs. biological determinism,” in Ever since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History, 251–259; B. Chasin, “Sociobiology, a pseudo-scientific synthesis,” in Science and Liberation, (Boston: South End Press, 1980), 35; Fedigan, Primate

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Paradigms: Sex Roles and Social Bonds, 37. For a general discussion see Segerstråle, Defenders of the Truth, 17–34. 188. See for example M. Daly, Martin, and M. Wilson, Sex, Evolution, and Behavior (Boston: Willard Grant Press, 1983); J. Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths, and Modern Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1985); F. J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1992). G. C. Williams, “Why Freud was Wrong (book review),” in The Quarterly Review of Biology 73.1, 1998; R. Dawkins, “Postmodernism disrobed,” Nature 394. 6689 (1998): 141–3. L. Tiger and R. Fox, “Introduction to transaction edition,” in The Imperial Animal (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1998). 189. For a discussion on the profile of women in psychoanalysis, see S. Alexander, “Primary maternal preoccupation: D. W. Winnicott and social democracy in midtwentieth century Britain,” in S. Alexander and B. Taylor. History and Psyche: Culture, Psychoanalysis and the Past (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): 149–72. 190. J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides and J. Tooby, The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 191. ibid, 3–9. 192. D. Symons, “On the use and misuse of Darwinism in the study of human behavior,” in The Adapted Mind, 137–62. 193. M. Wilson and M. Daly, “The man who mistook his wife for a chattel,” in The Adapted Mind, 289–326. 194. B. J. Ellis, “The evolution of sexual attraction: Evaluative mechanisms in women,” in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 273. 195. D. M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 47. 196. Ridley, The Red Queen, 236. 197. ibid, 235. 198. Pinker, The Blank Slate, 340. 199. J. M. Marks, Why I’m Not a Scientist: Anthropology and Modern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 251. 200. ibid, 342. 201. P. Gowaty, Feminism and Evolutionary Biology: Boundaries, Intersections and Frontiers (New York: Springer Science, 2012), 15. 202. L. Tiger and R. Fox, “Introduction to the transaction edition,” in The Imperial Animal. Vol. 4141 (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1997), xii. 203. Buss, The Evolution of Desire, 18. 204. Pinker, The Blank Slate, 340. 205. M. Ruti, The Age of Scientific Sexism: How Evolutionary Psychology Promotes Gender Profiling and Fans the Battle of the Sexes (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 110–1 and 22. 206. R. Dawkins, “Foreword to the Canto Edition,” in J. M. Smith. The Theory of Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), xiv.

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207. L. Segal, Why Feminism?: Gender, Psychology, Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 79. 208. See discussions in Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 145–79; and C. Robin, The Reactionary Mind. 209. Hamilton, Narrow Roads of Gene Land: Volume 1, 189. 210. E. O. Wilson, “Science and ideology,” in Academic Questions 8.3 (1995): 78; C. Murray, “Abolish the SAT,” in SAT Wars: The Case for Test-Optional College Admissions, ed. Joseph A. Soares, 69-81. (New York: Teachers College Press, 2007). 211. E. H. Hagen, “Controversial issues in evolutionary psychology,” in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, 165–70. 212. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 464–5. 213. D. C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 165. 214. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, 18. 215. ibid, 50. 216. ibid, 74. 217. ibid, 59. 218. ibid, 56. 219. ibid, 83. 220. ibid, 82. 221. ibid, 143. 222. ibid, 18–19. 223. ibid, 144. 224. ibid, 82. 225. Dennett, Freedom Evolves, 303. 226. ibid, xiv. 227. ibid, 21. 228. ibid, 15. 229. ibid, 305. 230. ibid, 306. 231. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, 102. 232. Dennett, Freedom Evolves, 270. 233. S. McKinnon, Neo-liberal Genetics: The Myths and Moral Tales of Evolutionary Psychology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2009), 139. 234. Roger N. Lancaster, The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture (California: University of California Press, 2003), 53. 235. S. Pinker, “Introduction,” in J. Brockman and R. Dawkins. What is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today’s Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), xvii–xviii. 236. ibid, xvii–xviii. 237. S. Freud, The Problem of Anxiety (Psychoanalytic Quarterly Press, 1963). 238. Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 6. 239. ibid, 2–6. 240. See E. Gomel, Narrative Space and Time: Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 14 and Haraway, Primate Visions, 188.

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241. G. Beer, “Reflections on the power of Darwin’s writing in our culture,” in Theoretical Biology Forum 111.1–2 (2018): 77. 242. William Shakespeare, “All’s well that ends well,” in The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1043. 243. Gould and Eldredge, “Punctuated equilibria: the tempo and mode of evolution reconsidered,” 146. 244. Gould and Lewontin, “The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme,” 245. ibid, 581. 246. ibid. 247. ibid, 583–87. Gould claimed to have only discovered Bateson’s criticisms after the article. See Bateson, “Heredity and variation in modern lights,” 231. 248. Gould and Lewontin, “The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme,” 585. 249. ibid, 587. 250. ibid, 585. 251. ibid, 597. 252. ibid. 253. S. J. Gould and E. S. Vrba, “Exaptation—a missing term in the science of form,” in Paleobiology 8.01 (1982): 4. 254. Darwin cited in Gould and Vrba, “Exaptation—a missing term in the science of form,” 5. 255. Darwin cited in Keller, The Century of the Gene, 132. 256. Gould and Vrba, “Exaptation—a missing term in the science of form,” 13. 257. R. Levins and R. C. Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1985), 65. 258. ibid, 1. 259. ibid, 69. 260. ibid, 3. 261. ibid. 262. ibid, vii. 263. J. Piaget, Structuralism (Abingdon: Routledge, 1968), 46. 264. Foucault, The Order of Things, 349. 265. Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, 274. 266. Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin, Not in Our Genes, 76. 267. ibid. 268. Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, viii. 269. D. Barnes, Nightwood (London: Faber & Faber, 2007), 123. 270. Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 610–11. 271. ibid, 703. 272. ibid, 598. 273. S. Oyama, Evolution’s Eye: A Systems View of the Biology-Culture Divide (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 68–9. 274. G. Dover, “Human nature: one for all and all for one?” in R. H. Wells and J. McFadden. Human Nature: Fact and Fiction: Literature, Science and Human Nature (London: Continuum Press, 2006), 91.

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275. ibid, 91. 276. S. Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 7. 277. Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin, Not in Our Genes, 265. 278. ibid, 290. 279. R. C. Lewontin, “The evolution of cognition: questions we will never answer,” in An Invitation to Cognitive Science 4 (1998): 132. 280. In a follow up essay Gould described how the ideas were mostly Lewontin’s, the writing almost entirely his—S. J. Gould, “Fulfilling the spandrels of world and mind,” in Understanding Scientific Prose, 1993, 320. 281. S. J. Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (London: Penguin Books, 1989), 48–50. 282. Gould, Full House, 290. 283. Gould, Wonderful Life, 281. 284. ibid, 290. 285. Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 1342. 286. ibid, 244. 287. ibid, 1342. 288. ibid, 1343. 289. J. Ortega y Gasset, Man and Crisis (London: WW Norton & Company, 1958), 19. 290. See W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming (1919, repr. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 2008), 200.

Conclusion An Anxiety of Influence

It is the privilege of the author to leave us in uncertainty. The beauty of his language and the ingenuity of his ideas, are the provisional reward for the trust we place in him. —Sigmund Freud1 Masters, must be combined and surmounted but finally, it is always disastrous to deny them. —Alain Badiou2

Machines, competition, empire and progress fascinated the Victorians. It should not be a surprise then that the genesis of a theory that tells of ‘machine-like organisms that compete, colonize and improve’ should be so rooted in social history. But is the theory of natural selection independent of this history? Gregory Radick’s follow up question gets to the very heart of many of the conflicts affecting the Darwinian literature chronicled in this study.3 Darwinists asserting such independence like to counterpose Darwin’s achievement in The Origin against Kant’s grand prediction that there will never be a Newton for a blade of grass.4 They are half right. Darwin’s TfE provides us with a way to scientifically represent the history of life that is independent of history. However, Kant cast biology outside the realm of science specifically because he believed that identifying causes entailed imputing a teleology to nature that was unscientific. Darwin, for his part, had given Kant’s argument short shrift. “All this reasoning is vitiated when we look at animals on my view.”5 However, Darwin’s abandonment of teleology was also at the expense of science. Darwin’s TfNS reveals that the best we can hope for are mere historical interpretations of evolution’s causes; 233

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interpretations that are themselves rooted in history. Indeed there may be no more crude expression of the prevailing interests and anxieties of our time than the specific effort to separate the telling of evolutionary history from history tout court. How then to appraise Darwin’s theory? Newton’s theory was the crowning glory of Enlightenment science and he could afford to be humble. In a famous passage he likened himself to “a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of undiscovered truth lay all undiscovered before me.”6 Darwin’s uncertainty surrounding his achievement meant he couldn’t always afford to be so modest. In a letter to Henry Fawcett, Darwin invoked a similar metaphor to defend the urgency of bold theorizing. The task of a scientist wasn’t merely to describe, Darwin insisted, but to explain: About 30 years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorise; and I well remember some one saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours.7

Facts might stand out, but they need theories to stand up. Absent a theory of evolution, and the discovery of an egg-laying mammal might seem like an elaborate hoax. Yet by investing too much in a theory, we are in danger of losing that terrible and rocky thing Darwin discovered at the crossroads of biology and history. Faced with a choice between truth and coherence, most Darwinists plugged for the latter in a vain pursuit of the former. Or they were content to count pebbles. As we have seen, neither option was exactly a betrayal of Darwin’s methods, but then following in the Master’s footsteps turned out to be their main error. “Much of the intelligent work done by man is due to imitation and not to reason,” Darwin once wrote.8 A warning reminiscent of Descartes’s original complaint of scholastic philosophy, but one that could equally serve as an indictment of Darwinism after Darwin; a literature obsessed with pseudo-scientific solutions or, failing that, His Master’s Voice—the imaginary figure in whom nature and thought are reunited. If science is the term we reserve for statements that go beyond the particular interpretations of authors, then it is highly disingenuous to elevate the interpretations of one author as scientifically validating. In this book, I have tried to go beyond a superficial description of Darwin’s theory in order to explain why Darwinism has been so dependent on Darwin. We might be better served placing Darwin in a counter-scientific tradition of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud than in the tradition of canonical scientists where he is usually located. The historian, Nietzsche once wrote, must be “the good excavator of the underworld.”9 Darwin was the ultimate excavator. His discovery of evolution

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was the single most important discovery of the nineteenth century, not least because it already contained the seeds of the century’s other great counterscientific ideas. “Criticism of religion,” Marx argued, “is the premise of all criticism.”10 Darwin robbed science of its theological underpinnings and, with it, its claim to transcend the relation and reveal objects for what they really are. Ideas, including scientific ideas, are bound by material processes that have a relation with life and death, not truth. Our consciousness is not our own, but rather a living vestige of history. Darwin would not just influence Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, but inspire generations of scientists, artists, poets, and philosophers to look beneath the surface of representations for the underlying, often lowly, origins of things. And yet Nietzsche always insisted that “depth” was an invention of philosophers.11 Foucault took up this critique of depth in his essay “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx”: When one interprets, one can in reality traverse this descending line only to restore the sparkling exteriority that has been covered up and buried. The fact is that whereas the interpreter must go himself to the bottom of things like an excavator, the movement of interpretation is, on the contrary, one that projects out over the depth, raised more and more above the depth, always leaving the depth below, exposed to ever greater visibility. The depth is now restored as an absolutely superficial secret.12

Interpretation never reveals a deeper underlying truth—only a ubiquity of surfaces. Trace the history of human values and you will discover only a history of their peculiar uses. For all the complexity of psychoanalysis, its material is banal and everyday—focusing on what people actually said, not what they think they meant. Natural selection, as Henry Gee recently put it, exists “in the continuous present” with “no memory of its previous actions, no plans for the future or underlying purpose.”13 What presents itself as depth is no more than platitude, “everything that exercised the profundity of man” turns out to be “child’s play.”14 So it was that I first read The Origin for pleasure. The first thing that struck me was how Darwin veered continuously between the thrill of revelation and his confessed ignorance. Darwin begins The Origin stating his hope that he “might shed some light on the origin of species—that mystery of mysteries,” but by the book’s end, and having convincingly put the case for common descent, it still wasn’t clear whether our origins were shrouded in an even deeper mystery.15 Over the course of the next few years, I would probe deeper into Darwin’s work hoping to uncover a more profound understanding of his theory—only to finally arrive back where I started. If Darwin appeared conflicted about the nature of his findings, it’s because he was. Darwin’s ambivalence was matched only by his ambition. His obsession with proving the scientific status of his theory has served largely to conceal

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what’s obvious. And yet this obsession was what, ironically, went into producing his own very distinctive view of life. Just how personal Darwin’s theory was to him comes across most clearly in his struggle to convince people of his views. Consider these examples: Such objections as the above would be fatal to my views. Lord, how savage you will be if you read it, and how you will long to crucify me alive! The objections and difficulties which may be urged against my view are indeed heavy enough almost to break my back, but it is not yet broken! If I am wrong, the sooner I am knocked on the head and annihilated so much the better.16

When his very personal investment in his ideas was pointed out to him, Darwin expressed surprise: [H. C. Watson] says that in the first four paragraphs of the [The Origin], the words “I,” “me,” “my,” occur forty-three times! I was dimly conscious of the accursed fact. He says it can be explained phrenologically, which I supposed civilly means, that I am the most egotistically self-sufficient man alive.17

It also comes out with equal force in his writing. Quite averse to the aphoristic, the exalted and sometimes hyperbolic styles of his counter-scientific counterparts, Darwin’s understated delivery is shot through with disclaimers—but no less distinctive for it. Like the poet, the historian must find a way to accept and express the knotted profusion of existence, and yet few poets or historians have ever managed to convey this quite so vividly as Darwin did in his closing metaphor in The Origin. Sometimes there is more than poetic merit in giving to airy nothing, the forms of things unknown, a local habitation and a name:18 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.19

The metaphor of the “entangled bank” is the essence of Darwin’s counterscientific theory and as reluctant as he was to admit of its consequences, it is to his eternal credit that he concluded The Origin with it. An image that, in Gillian Beer’s choice words, “poises us on the edge of the unknown.”20 Aware, perhaps that Darwin had gone beyond science, Stanley Edgar Hyman

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placed him in a cast of “imaginative writers” along with Marx, Frazer, and Freud; writers who managed to shape the modern mind not simply from the force of their ideas but the power of their prose.21 Darwin is eminently more readable than any of his contemporaries or successors. This is my own, very personal view of Darwin’s work; a view that was born of wonder and fascination with Darwin’s texts and a not quite equal frustration with much of the Darwinian literature that followed it. If I may briefly depart from philosophical convention, in the course of writing this book, I suffered my own malaise, out of which I came to realize that if I was going to avoid suffering a perpetual anxiety of influence, I would have to work through much of my original wonder and fascination.22 It required allowing for Descartes’s qualification that “even the greatest minds are open to the greatest aberrations.”23 But it also means treating these aberrations as veritable achievements in themselves. In honor of Darwin’s achievements, allow me to close with Deleuze’s principle as an antidote to Descartes’s: [W]hen you’re facing such a work of genius, there’s no point saying you disagree. First you have to know how to admire; you have to rediscover the problems he poses, his particular machinery. It is through admiration that you will come to genuine critique. The mania of people today is not knowing how to admire anything: either they’re “against,” or they situate everything at their own level while they chit-chat and scrutinize. That’s no way to go about it [. . . .] You have to be inspired, visited by the geniuses you denounce.24

One must face the problems he poses but one must be determined, finally, to go beyond them. Darwin, for all that he did achieve, never went beyond the anxiety of his age; of achieving the negative capability of living in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts without reaching after fact and reason.25 We, those that come after him, must learn to bear these states without him. NOTES 1. Sigmund Freud. Der Wahn un die Träume in W. Jensens Gradiva, (Leipzig, Hugo Heller & CIE, 1907). Retrieved from Project Gutenberg. 2. Alain Badiou. Philosophy as Biography. Published with the permission of Lacan​.co​m. 3. G. Radick, ‘Is the theory of natural selection independent of its history?’, in The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 143. 4. See for example A. Rosenberg, Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 9 and M. v. Sydow, From Darwinian Metaphysics towards Understanding

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the Evolution of Evolutionary Mechanisms-A Historical and Philosophical Analysis of Gene-Darwinism and Universal Darwinism (Universitätsverlag Göttingen, 2016), 173. 5. Darwin cited in C. N. Johnson, Darwin’s Dice: The Idea of Chance in the Thought of Charles Darwin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 92. 6. Isaac Newton cited in Heisenberg, “The physicist’s conception of nature,” 9. 7. C. Darwin, Letter 3257 Darwin to Henry Fawcett 18th September 1861. https​:/​/ww​​w​.dar​​winpr​​oject​​.ac​.u​​k​/let​​ter​/D​​CP​-LE​​​TT​-32​​57​.xm​l Last accessed 2nd January 2015. 8. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1st ed., 39. 9. Nietzsche cited in Foucault, “Nietzsche, Marx, Freud,” 62. 10. K. Marx and F. Engels, On Religion (New York: Courier Corporation, 2012), 41. 11. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Marx, Freud,” 62. 12. ibid. 13. H. Gee, Deep Time: Cladistics, the Revolution in Evolution (London: Fourth Estate, 2001), 94. 14. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Marx, Freud,” 62. 15. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 9. 16. Darwin cited in Hyman, The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as Imaginative Writers, 33. 17. ibid, 36. 18. A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1. 14–17 19. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 526. 20. Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 43. 21. Hyman, The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as Imaginative Writers. 22. The phrase “anxiety of influence” is Harold Bloom’s. See H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 23. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 41. 24. G. Deleuze, Desert Islands: And Other Texts, 1953–1974 (Boston: MIT Press, 2004), 139. 25. John Keats’ December 22, 1817 letter to George and Thomas.

Glossary

Adaptations:  An adaptive trait of an organism that is either a cause or an effect of evolution (see also ascetic ideal, design, perfection). Archimedean Point:  A philosophical concept indicating a stance from which scientists can see everything except themselves. After Darwin, scientists would seek to retrieve this privileged position through ‘Archimedean interpretations’ (see also Cartesian Cogito, Man, Modern Cogito, narcissism, laws). Ascetic Ideal:  The belief that science can condense into a single worldview. After Darwin, scientists would seek to retrieve this unity through ‘ecumenical interpretations’ (see also adaptations, design, perfection). Cartesian Cogito:  Descartes’s philosophical justification for the figure at the Archimedean point. Classical episteme:  An era in which nature is perceived to be representable by thought (see also representation). Contingency, principle of:  The absence of governing, overarching laws (see also counter-science, ethics, selection, unthought). Counter-Science:  A theory that reveals the non-conformity of nature and thought through historical interpretations (see also Modern episteme). Darwinism:  The literature pertaining to Darwin’s scientific theory of evolution (TfE) and his counter-scientific theory of natural selection (TfNS). Design:  The conceit of natural theology. The illusion that living things are the single artifice of a designer (see also adaptations, ecumenical interpretations, ascetic ideal, perfection). Episteme:  The conditions structuring the possibility for knowledge in a given time and place (see also Classical episteme, Modern episteme). Ethics:  The means by which a scientist resolves doubts arising from the contingency of history. 239

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Evolution:  A generic process by which species change over time. Identity, principle of:  The assumption that things can be known in themselves separate from their context (see also ideology, science). Ideology:  The conceit of economics from a Marxist perspective. The illusion that things can be understood in themselves. After Darwin, scientists would resurrect this conceit in order to reestablish a ‘ruling interpretation’ for history (see identity, struggle for existence, survival of the fittest). Imperfection, principle of:  The assumption that nature reveals itself in its imperfections (see also, counter-science, adaptations, unthought). Interpretation:  A reading that transforms its text. Necessarily indefinite, partial, and subjective and therefore also contestable. Every interpretation is a reinterpretation. Premised upon the unthought (see also Modern episteme). Laws, principle of:  The assumption that nature abides by timeless discoverable rules (see also Archimedean interpretations, ethics, Man, narcissism, science, selection) Man:  The figure at the summit of history that can come to know himself and his history through ascertainable laws (see also Modern Cogito, Modern episteme) Modern Cogito:  Kant’s philosophical justification for Man. Modern episteme:  An era in which nature and thought are both perceived to be historical (see also Man, Interpretation). Narcissism:  The conceit of Man from a psychoanalytic perspective. The illusion by which subjects mistake what they are for what they want to be. Foucault and Lacan referred to a ‘Transcendental Narcissism’ and “Age of the Ego,” respectively, to designate the epistemic bar upon—and then collective refusal of—scientists to reflect upon the origins of their own ideas and theories (see also, Archimedean point, ethics, Man, laws).Perfection, principle of:  The assumption that nature reveals itself in its perfections (see also, adaptations, ascetic ideal, design, ecumenical interpretations, science). Relation, principle of:  The assumption that things only be understood in relation to other things (see also counter-science, struggle for existence, unthought). Representation:  The conformity of nature and thoughts. A single description that is unmodifiable. Ostensibly total, impartial, and objective and therefore also uncontestable. Saltationism:  See heterogenesis. Selection:  The logical outcome of a conjunction of known laws, or an empirical interpretation of particular evolutionary histories (see also Archimedean interpretations, narcissism, contingency, laws, ethics). Science:  A theory that goes beyond interpretation to reveal the conformity of nature and thought.

Glossary

241

Struggle for Existence:  The literal process by which organisms differentially survive, or a metaphorical relation between organism and environment (see also ideology, identity, relation, survival of the fittest). Survival of the Fittest:  An idea originating from Herbert Spencer that proposed that the mechanical causes of evolution (Darwin’s TfE) could also account for history. Rehabilitated in the twentieth century with ‘the selfish gene’ theory as scientists sought to reestablish a ruling interpretation of evolutionary history (see also identity, ideology, struggle for existence). Unthought:  The non-conformity between nature and thought.

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Index

Page references for figures are italicized Abercrombie, John, 134–35 adaptation, 68–78; as cause and effect, 48–50; and design, 68–70, 170–71; and evolutionary epistemology, 175–82; and modern evolutionary synthesis, 170–75; and perfection, 70–74, 172–75. See also Darwinism; theory of evolution (TfE); theory of natural selection (TfNS) Agassiz, Louis, 66 Althusser, Louis, 31, 32 Archimedean point, 13–15, 36–37, 116–17, 197–203 Aristotle, 5–8 ascetic ideal, 12, 31–33, 64, 78, 170, 219 author function, xii–xv, 4–5, 23–25, 178, 180, 182, 212, 220; disappearance of, 6–7, 15; and ethics, 38; and politics, 34 Bateson, William, 154, 157, 212 Beer, Gillian, 128, 209–10, 236 Blackwell, Antoinette Brown, 141 bourgeoisie, xiv, 11, 31, 33–34, 79, 85, 87, 105, 107–8, 184, 221; and crisis, 169; haute, 34, 211; outsider stratum,

34, 211; and revolution, 22, 34. See also classical economics; ideology Brown, Sir Thomas, 66–67 Cartesian Cogito, 14–15, 116, 139. See also certainty caution, ethics of xiv; Darwin’s ethics of, 39, 119, 121, 132–37, 140; Freud’s ethics of, 38–39, 119 certainty, xvii, 7, 13–15, 38–39, 46, 116, 118, 182, 197, 201, 203, 205, 219. See also Cartesian Cogito; Descartes; Man Chambers, Robert, 70 Chartism, 105 civil rights movement, xix, 198–99 classical economics, 25, 32, 85, 108, 183. See also bourgeoisie, ideology; principle of divergence; struggle for existence Classical episteme, 7, 10–11, 13–15, 29–30. See also Foucault; modern episteme; representation class struggle, xiii, 25–26, 28, 33–34, 40, 196–97, 222; Darwinian basis of, 84–85. See also identity; ideology; Marx; Marxism; relation

265

266

Index

Cobbe, Frances Power, 129 Comte, Auguste, 36–37, 176 contingency, principle of, xviii, 28–29, 132, 143–44, 200, 217–21; and caution, 38–40, 132–33; and freewill, 134; and horrid doubt, 119–20, 124, 127–28, 133; and Man, 36–38, 124–25, 198, 209; and reason, 134–35; rudimentary and atrophied organs, 73; and selection, 53–54; and the unconscious, 34–35, 118–19; and the unthought, 39–40. See also caution; courage; doubt; selection; unconscious counter-science, 21–40; and interpretation, 22–23; performative utterance, 23; power/knowledge, 31–39; and principles of reason, 27–29; return of the author, 23–24; unthought, 24–27, 47–48. See also Darwinism; Marxism; modern episteme; psychoanalysis Counter-Scientific Revolution, 15, 25, 29, 34, 207, 209, 221 courage, xiv; Darwin’s ethics of, 124–30; Freud’s ethics of, 117–19; Kantian ethics, 36–38; and political correctness, 204–5 creationism, xv, 49, 68–70, 75–76 Cuvier, Georges, 30, 67–69, 73, 91, 156 Darwin, Charles: and author function, xiii–xv, 74–78, 178, 180–81, 212– 13, 220; ethics of, xiv–xv, 39, 119, 130–33, 204–5, 208; and faith, 47, 70–76; horrid doubt, 119–20, 124, 126, 133, 136–40, 143, 197, 219; imaginative writer, 236–37; politics of, xiv, 105–7; trauma and loss, 127, 131–32 Darwinism: conflicts of interpretation, xii–xv, 74–78, 140–43; defined, 46– 54; limits of, xi, 233; two theories contrasted, 55–56, 100, 153, 163–64. See also adaptation; selection;

struggle for existence; theory of evolution; theory of natural selection Dawkins, Richard, xiii, 192–96, 198, 202–4, 206 death of God, 64–66 Dennett, Daniel, xiii, 204–9 dependence, 28, 90, 104, 108, 185, 187. See also relation; struggle for existence Descartes, René, 132, 214, 234; aberrations, 15, 237; and Archimedean point, 13; break with authors, 6, 234; certainty, 7, 13–15, 38, 46, 116, 205; democratic truth, 6–7, 33; doubt, 14–15, 38, 46, 205; free-will, 14, 134; and identity, 9, 214; and laws, 9–10, 13–14; simple natures, 7. See also Cartesian Cogito; certainty; modern Cogito design, 47, 78–79, 169–71; ascetic ideal, 31; before Darwin, 66–70; concealing the unthought, 57; Darwin’s critique of, 70–74; perfection, 11–13 de Vries, Hugo, 157, 159–62 dialectics, 214–17 Dobzhansky, Theodosius, 163, 172–73, 182, 184, 185, 197 doubt, 14–15, 35–39, 46, 169, 197, 205–9, 221; Cartesian doubt, 14–15, 46; horrid doubt, 119–20, 124, 126, 137–40, 143, 197, 219. See also caution; contingency; selection Dover, Gabriel, 217 dual revolution, 29, 34–35 Engels, Friedrich, 84, 85 entangled bank, xx, 33, 236 evolution, alternative theories of, 155– 59, 162–63. See also heterogenesis; Lamarckism/neo-Lamarckism; orthogenesis evolution, Darwin’s theory of (TfE), xviii, xix, 55, 158, 160, 216; and gene selection, 191, 193; and

Index

modern evolutionary synthesis, 163–64, 173; and principle of divergence, 100–102; and representation, 55–56, 66, 233; as syllogism, 46, 205. See also adaptation; Darwinism; selection; struggle for existence; tree of life evolutionary economics, 196–97, 222 evolutionary epistemology, 181–82, 222 Evolutionary Psychology, 39, 201–4, 209–10, 222 exaptations, 213–14 feminism, xix, 128–29, 141, 199–203. See also sexism Fisher, Ronald, 161–63, 171–72, 184, 185, 197, 216 Foucault, Michel: archaeology, 5–7, 10–11, 15, 30–31, 35–39, 67, 182, 215; author, xv, 4–6, 15, 23–24, 55, 119; birth of Man, 36, 197; on claim to scientific status, 4, 22–23; on counter-science, 23, 26. 38–39, 235; critical approach of, xv–xvii; on ideology, 86; on narcissism, 116–18; on power, 11–14, 31–34; use of Marxism, 34; use of psychoanalysis, 34–35, 38. See also Classical episteme; Man; modern episteme free-will, xviii, 14–15, 134, 207, 218 French Revolution, xvii, 29 Freud, Sigmund, xi, xiii, xx, xxii, 31, 46, 54, 233, 236; author function, 23–25; and contingency, 28–29; Darwin’s influence on, 38, 119, 143; ethics of, 37–39. 118–20, 209; and imperfection, 27, 38; and interpretation, 31–32, 46; and narcissism, 37–38, 116–18; and relation, 27–28, 52. See also narcissism; unconscious Friedman, Milton, 183 Fuegians, 127–28, 136, 197 Gable, Eliza Burt, 141

267

Galileo, Galilei, xvi, 23, 175, 188, 221; break with authors, 6; conflict with the Catholic Church, xvi, 12, 57, 204; critique of Aristotle, 6–8, 46; democratic truth, 6–7, 46, 48; and design, 11; Galilean attitude, 5; and laws, 9; and perfection, 8–10; reason over the senses, 7–8, 15; relation with Venetian army, 11 Galton, Francis, 141–42 gene selection, 182–97 Ghiselin, Michael, 194 Gould, Stephen Jay, xiii, 136, 158, 173; critique of adaptationist program, 211–14; critique of group selection, 216–17; heterodox interpretations of, 211–20; human consciousness, 126, 218–19; use of author function, xii–xiii, xiv, 212, 219–20 Gray, Asa, 134, 138, 170–71 group selection, 92–93, 102, 104, 126, 184–86 Haeckel, Ernst, 142–43, 158 Haldane, J. B. S., 163, 167, 172 Hamilton, W. D., 185–87, 192, 198, 202, 204 heterogenesis, 155, 157, 163 history: contrasted with science, 30–31, 36, 39–40, 78–79, 107–8, 233–34; discovery of, 29–30; and entangled bank, xx; ignorance of, xviii, xxi– xxii, 48, 54, 73–74, 79, 218, 235; and imagination, 209–10; limits of, xi, xvii–xviii, 33; mechanistic theory of, 90–91, 94, 182; as memoir, 143; as a science, 220–21; and tree of life, 100, 104, 168. See also contingency; laws; modern episteme; science Hodge, Jonathan, 168 Hull, David, 193 Huxley, Julian, 173–75, 184–85, 197. See also modern evolutionary synthesis

268

Index

Huxley, Thomas Henry, 46, 107, 123, 131, 170, 173–74, 197 identity, principle of, 9, 28, 109; and heterogenesis, 157; and ideology, 33–34; and objectivity, 13; and relation, 28. See also Descartes; gene selection; representation; struggle for existence ideology, xiii, xvi, 78–79, 107–8; concealing the unthought, 57; and contradiction, 26, 34, 86; identity, 33–34; Marx’s theories of, 25, 33–34, 84–87; and principle of divergence, 95–104; ruling interpretation, xviii, 34, 86, 108, 184. See also gene selection; struggle for existence; survival of the fittest imperfection, principle of, 27, 66, 220; and Darwin’s faith, 73–74, 78–79; and death of God, 64–66, 169; rudimentary and atrophied organs, 73; and the unthought, 40. See also adaptation; interpretation Industrial Revolution, 29 instinct, xviii, 89, 121–24, 135–37 interpretation, xviii–xx, 22; author function, 5–6, 15, 23–24, 234; conflicts of, xii–xv, 5, 9, 31, 70, 74–78, 141; contrasted with representation, 4–5, 7, 8, 11–13, 55–57, 86; and critique, 31–33, 47, 66, 70, 84; and death of God, 64–66; endless relay of, 10, 34, 52, 79, 184, 191, 206; entangled bank, xx; heterodox, 211–20; and history, 78–79, 87, 94, 133, 137, 220–21; and ideology, 85–86; and illusion of depth, 235; and imperfection, 31–34, 75–78; and misrepresentation, 29–31; and narcissism, 116–18, 210. 218–19; power/knowledge, 31–39; ruling interpretation, xviii, 34, 86–87, 108, 184; and the unthought,

39–40. See also counter–science; entangled bank; imperfection Jacob, François, 6–7, 9 Kant, Immanuel, 67, 129, 131; birth of Man, 36, 197; ethics of courage, 37, 117, 124–26, 204; and laws, 124; and limits, xi–xii, 233. See also modern Cogito Kelvin, Lord, 160–61 Kuhn, Thomas, 12, 179–82. See also evolutionary epistemology Lacan, Jacques, 46, 117, 118, 128, 210 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, xvi, 87–88, 120, 122, 143, 156 Lamarckism/neo-Lamarckism, 87–88, 120, 143, 155–56, 162–63 language, 10–11, 29–31, 55–57 laws, principle of, xviii, 9–10; and certainty, 13–15; and contingency, 28–29, 217–20; and courage, 126–31, 198, 204; and gradualism, 136; and Man, 36–37, 124–25, 143, 198, 205; and orthogenesis, 158–59; and selection, 53–56, 120–24; syllogism, 46, 205; and transcendental narcissism, 118–19. See also selection Leibniz, Gottfried, 9, 12, 132 Levins, Richard, 211, 214–15 Lewontin, Richard, xii–xiii; critique of adaptationist program, 211–14; dialectics, 214–16; heterodox interpretations of, 211–18; human consciousness, 218 liberalism, xiii, xiv, xix–xx, 27, 33, 169–70, 176. See also classical economics Linnaeus, Carl, 10, 13, 14, 87, 88, 140–41 Locke, John, xii Lyell, Charles, 87, 123, 160

Index

Mackenzie, Robert, 57, 153 Malthus, Thomas, xiv, 85, 87–90, 92, 95, 100 Man: birth of, 36–37, 197; death of, 138–40; evolution of, 120–36; racialized and gendered properties of, xxivn24, 37; and transcendental narcissism, 39, 118, 130. See also certainty; courage; Foucault; Kant; laws; representation Marx, Karl, xi, xiii, xx, xxii, 31, 46, 54, 236; author function, 23–25; class struggle, xiii, 25–26, 28, 85; and contingency, 28–29; Darwin’s influence on, 38, 119, 143; and imperfection, 27; and interpretation, 31–32, 46; and relation, 28, 52. See also class struggle; ideology Marxism, xvi, xx, 57, 86, 175–76, 201, 221; backlash against, 185, 193–95, 201; comparisons with psychoanalysis, xx, 22, 24–25, 57, 175, 221; as counter-science, 22–34, 39–40; critique of Darwinism, 85; Foucault’s critique of, 22–23; Kuhn’s critique of, 180; Popper’s critique of, 176–78; and relation, 27, 33–34. See also counter-science; Foucault; ideology; Marx Maynard Smith, John, xiii, 198, 202 Mayr, Ernst, 172–73, 175, 181, 184 Mendel, Gregor, 161–62, 173, 187, 188, 191 misrepresentation. See interpretation modern episteme, 7, 13, 15, 29–30, 35–38, 40, 67, 70, 91, 117. See also Classical episteme; Foucault; interpretation; Man modern evolutionary synthesis, 159, 163–64, 170, 173–75, 184 monkey-mind, 119–20, 124, 138, 144, 197, 219. See also doubt; Man Morgan, Thomas Hunt, 157, 172

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narcissism, 107–8; concealing the unthought, 57; courage, 36–37, 125–27, 204–5, 208; and evolutionary psychology, 210; illusion of certainty, 116; and selection, 120–40; and Social Darwinism, 140–43; transcendental, 39, 118, 130. See also courage; Freud, Sigmund; laws; Man; psychoanalysis natural selection, Darwin’s theory of, 45–57; contrast with theory of evolution (TfNS), xviii, 46, 48–54, 66, 89, 100–101, 108, 153–54, 163–64; as syllogism, 46. See also adaptation; counter-science; entangled bank; selection; struggle for existence Newton, Isaac, xviii, xx, 8, 12, 13, 23, 36, 66, 124, 144; comparisons with Darwin, xix, 53, 72, 179, 188, 233–34; and representation, 169; and Scientific Revolution, 4–6, 176; and underlabouring, xii–xiii Newtonian mechanics, 11, 13 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xx, xxii, 163, 164, 169, 175, 234–35; ascetic ideal, 12; critique of language, 30, 79; Darwin’s influence on, 78–79; death of God, 63–66; interpretation, 31–33. See also design; interpretation orthogenesis, 155, 158–59, 161–63 Oyama, Susan, 217 Paley, William, 47, 65, 68–73, 79, 87, 91, 169, 173, 178, 182 perfection, principle of, 8–9; and ascetic ideal, 12, 31; Darwin’s faith in, 70–73; and death of God, 65–66; and design, 11–13, 66–70; and imperfection, 27, 70–73, 169, 211–13; and modern evolutionary synthesis, 171–75, 182; and neo-

270

Index

Lamarkism, 155–56. See also adaptation; representation performative utterance. See certainty; counter-science; doubt; science politics, xiii–xiv, 13, 33–34; and the political left, xiii, xvii, 33, 85, 108, 211, 222; and the political right, xiii, xvii, 85, 106, 183, 195, 222. See also ideology Popper, Karl, 176–82, 212. See also evolutionary epistemology principle of divergence, 54, 95–104, 99, 105, 191 psychoanalysis, xvi, 46, 57, 86, 143, 210, 211, 235; comparisons with Marxism, xx, 22, 24–25, 57, 175, 201, 221; as counter–sciences, 22– 35, 37–40; ethics of, 34–39, 116–20; Kuhn’s critique of, 176–78; Popper’s critique of, 180. See also counterscience; Freud, Sigmund; narcissism; the unconscious racism, xii, 13, 141–43, 197–99. See also Man Radick, Gregory, 233 reason, xx, 7; birth of Man, 36–37, 124–28, 141–43, 197, 199; counterscientific, 27–29; courage, 37, 204; Darwinian, 48–55; evolution of, 124, 132–40, 143–44, 219; over the senses, 7–8, 15. See also Abercrombie, John; contingency; Man; selection relation, principle of, 27–28, 31, 40, 55, 144, 196, 214–16, 220; and gene selection, 186–91, 193; and ideology, 86–87, 107–9, 222; and politics, 33–34; and struggle for existence, 51–53, 55–56, 88–95; and the unthought, 4. See also counterscience; dependence Renaissance episteme, 7, 10, 13, 19. See also Classical episteme; modern episteme

representation, xvii, 233; and alternative theories of evolution, 155, 159; and ascetic ideal, 64–66; contrasted with interpretation, 4–5, 7, 8, 11–13, 32–33, 55–57, 86; crisis of, 153–64, 168–70, 173, 175, 210, 211; elimination of the author, 4–6, 15; language and, 10– 11, 55–57; Linnaean classification, 140–41; and Man, 14, 120, 204; and power/knowledge, 11–15; and principle of divergence, 95–104; and science, xviii, 6–8, 233; and thought, 69, 116–17; tyranny of, 163–64. See also Classical episteme; tree of life Ridley, Matt, 202 Romanes, George, 76–78 Rose, Hilary, 140, 200 Rose, Steven, xiii, 195, 215, 217 Roux, Wilhelm, 107 Royer, Clémence, 105 Russell, Bertrand, xi–xii, 175, 178 Russell, Edward, 67, 158, 159 science, 3–15; and Darwin’s theory of evolution (TfE), 47–57; death of the author, 4–6; historical science, 220– 21; performative utterance, 4; power/ knowledge, 11–15; principles of reason of, 8–10. See also certainty; Classical episteme; representation Scientific Revolution, 4–9, 11, 15, 26, 34, 46, 78, 107, 179, 193 selection: and caution, 121, 133, 135, 137; and contingency, 53–56, 120, 125–40; as deductive and inductive, 53–54; and doubt, 119–20, 138–40, 143–44; of the interpreter, 119–20, 137; and laws, 53–56, 120–24; and narcissism, 120–40; and the unconscious, 109, 121–22, 135, 138– 39, 143–44. See also contingency; counter-science; Darwinism; laws; unconscious

Index

sexism, xii, 141–43, 200–204. See also feminism; Man Simpson, George Gaylord, xiii, 175, 185 Smith, Adam, xiv, 34, 86, 90–91, 93, 97–103, 196 Social Darwinism, xii, 85, 140–43, 176, 197, 203 Spencer, Herbert, 51, 106, 132–33, 156, 157, 186, 197, 207 struggle for existence, xx, 51–53, 55– 57, 142, 164, 222; and dependence, 88–90; and gene selection, 186–93; and identity, 87–88, 90–95; and ideology, 85–87, 105–9, 184–85, 193–97; as literal and metaphorical, 51–53, 87–90; and principle of divergence, 95–104; and ruling interpretation, xviii, 86, 108, 182, 184. See also counter-science; Darwinism; identity; relation survival of the fittest, 105–7, 134, 186. See also gene selection; identity; ideology; Spencer thought. See representation thought experiments, 8, 47–48, 52, 104 Tiger, Lionel, 194, 200, 203 tree of life, 72, 163, 182; and entangled bank, xx, 33; and principle of divergence, 99–100, 104; and representation, xx, 48–49, 56, 65, 76, 88, 98, 168, 181

271

unconscious, 23, 25–29, 35, 37–40, 116–20, 178, 209, 222; Darwinian basis of, 143. See also contingency; Freud, Sigmund; psychoanalysis; selection Unity of Science movement, 4, 170, 176 unthought, 49, 57, 73–74, 160; Darwinism and, 47–48; and misrepresentation, 30–31; nature and, 24–27; recovering the, 221–22; and the unconscious, 39–40. See also counter-science variation, xviii, 47, 56, 88, 89, 120, 134, 154; and alternative theories of evolution, 155–59; and chance, 54; and free-will, xviii; and Mendelism, 161–63; and reason, 124; and selection, 53–54, 136, 216; and syllogism, 46 Vienna circle, 170, 176 Wallace, Alfred Russel, xii, 76–78, 93, 96, 100, 123 Weismann, August, 107 Whitman, C. O., 159 Williams, George C., xii, 187–92, 202 Wilson, E. O., 195, 198, 200–201, 204 worms, 137–38 Wright, Sewell, 163, 172, 173, 184, 204 Young, Robert, 132

About the Author

Samuel Grove has a BA in modern history and politics from the University of Liverpool and a master’s and PhD in critical theory from the University of Nottingham. His writings have previously been published in Tribune Magazine, MRZine, Ceasefire Magazine, Salvage, Review 31, and Red Pepper. While still an ardent reader in critical theory and philosophy, he has run health and exercise programmes for North London communities for the past ten years and is a political activist and organiser in his local community. He has appeared in interviews for Telesur and Red Fish and is also a contributing editor for Alborada, a magazine dedicated to Latin American politics, media, and culture.

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