Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution

by Gertrude Himmelfarb

In her enduring study of the impact of Darwinism on the intellectual climate of the nineteenth century, Gertrude Himmelfarb brings massive documentation to bear in challenging the conventional view of Darwin's greatness. Touching on biography, history, and philosophy, she traces the origins and development of Darwin's views against the opinions of his time; assesses the influences on him; and shows what he intended his theory to mean, what his readers took it to mean, and what it has in fact meant. By such a route Ms. Himmelfarb recaptures "a sense of how a scientist, with the most innocent of intentions and the best of faith, can give birth to a theory that has an ancestry and a posterity of which he may be ignorant and a life of its own over which he has no control. "A thorough and masterly book punctuated with a delicate sense of humor.... Until he has read, marked, learnt and inwardly digested this authoritative volume, no one should presume henceforth to speak on Darwin and Darwinism." Times Literary Supplement "An illuminating contribution...a dramatic story."― Yale Review "Absorbing, well written, and splendidly organized."―I. Bernard Cohen

Genres: History, Science, Biography, Evolution, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Biology

526 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Gertrude Himmelfarb, also known as Bea Kristol, was an American historian. She was a leader and conservative interpretations of history and historiography. She wrote extensively on intellectual history, with a focus on Britain and the Victorian era, as well as on contemporary society and culture.

Reviews

[Ronald Wise · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thoroughly researched account of Darwin's life, voyage on the Beagle, scientific writings, and reactions by his contemporaries. My previously sketchy knowledge of Darwin and his relationship to the theory of evolution/natural selection are much more complete after reading this book. Of great interest to me, as well, was the British attitude toward science in the mid-19th century. I learned of this book from the "References" section of Bernard Cohen's Revolution in Science.

[Dietrich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Himmelfarb’s last sentence in her 1959 study Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution captures the spirit of ambiguity present in her analysis: “But if it is important for later generations not to deny the fact of revolution because they cannot concede its truth or justice, it is no less important not to concede truth or justice merely because they cannot deny the fact of revolution.” (p.452)

History, asserts Himmelfarb, can be divided into pre and post darwinian epochs, with the latter basically coterminous with a culturally actualized modernity. Of course, Darwin did not singlehandedly turn the world upside down. “For most men…the Origin was not an isolated event with isolated consequences. It did not revolutionize their beliefs so much as give public recognition to a revolution that had already occurred. It was belief made manifest, revolution legitimized.” (p.452) This “revolution legitimized” can be understood scientifically as well as culturally. Scientifically, as Butler famously said: “Buffon planted, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck watered, but it was Mr. Darwin who said ‘That fruit is ripe,’ and shook it into his lap.” (p. 448) (I would add that Himmelfarb also makes clear Charles Lyell’s enormous contribution in laying the groundwork for Darwin.) In a broader cultural sense, the Origin broke through the crust of conventional opinion: “What the Origin did was to focus and stimulate the religious and nihilist passions of men. Dramatically and urgently, it confronted them with a situation that could no longer be evaded, a situation brought about not by any one scientific discovery, nor even by science as a whole, but by an antecedent condition of religious and philosophical turmoil. The Origin was not so much the cause as the occasion of the upsurge of these passions.” (p. 400)

Himmelfarb’s book is well known for its criticism of Darwin’s theory. However, her treatment of Darwinism as a “conservative revolution” indicates nuance in the approach to her subject matter. Darwin’s revolution proved conservative in two senses. First, as already mentioned, Darwinism legitimated a revolution that had largely already occurred. There were thus powerful contextual reasons for the theory’s acceptance and perpetuation. Though Himmelfarb articulates cogent and longstanding criticism of Darwinism, she is not under the impression that such criticism is decisive: “It is the critic’s conceit to think that what has been criticized has been destroyed. In fact, however, the Origin, so far from being destroyed, still dominates the thinking of most men today, and for the same reasons that it captured the minds of a considerable number of Darwin’s contemporaries.” (p. 349) Himmelfarb’s book helps bring these reasons to light, and one does not get the impression that she views all these reasons with disdain. Secondly, “A more important sense in which Darwin was conservative, even old-fashioned, was his lack of self-consciousness as a scientist confronting his subject, his unquestioned faith in an objective universe in which both he and his subject occupied fixed and independent positions. He never doubted that he was a passive, disinterested observer accurately recording the laws revealed in nature. In this faith in the possibility of an objective science he was reverting to a tradition that even in his own time had begun to be questioned…It was for this reason that Darwinism did not turn out to be the implacable enemy of religion that was first suspected. For Darwinism shared with religion the belief in an objective knowledge of nature. If religion’s belief was based on revelation and Darwinism on science, with good will the two could be-as indeed they were-shown to coincide. The true challenge to orthodox religion came with the denial of the possibility of all objective knowledge…Post-Kant and post-Kierkegaard, Darwinism appears as the citadel of tradition.” (p.448-49) Though Himmelfarb is no cheerleader for Darwinism, this quote is a good example of how at various points in her book she finds ways to accommodate it to what one might call her “neo-conservative” world-view.

Himmelfarb’s multifaceted critique of darwinism is well worth reading, all I can do here is note some highlights. On page 336, Himmelfarb summarizes a chapter on the argument of the Origin by stating “The difficulty with natural selection, however, is that if it explains too much, it also explains too little, and that the more questionable of its hypotheses lie at the heart of its thesis. Posing as a massive deduction from the evidence, it ends up as an ingenious argument from ignorance.” To unpack this, lets begin with the last sentence, followed by the first:

Posing as a massive deduction from the evidence-
Himmelfarb shows how Darwin and later darwinians at times confused-deliberately, and to their rhetorical advantage-evolution (common descent with modification) with natural selection. Darwinians thereby surreptitiously drew support from evidence for evolution to bolster their theory, and also sometimes suggested that examples of natural selection on a small scale somehow bolstered Darwin’s larger argument concerning natural selection being powerful enough to generate the whole tree of life. (I’ll add that I have noticed the rhetorical conflation of evolution and natural selection in Jerry Coyne’s popular recent book Why Evolution is True, and also point out that Jerry Fodor mentioned Coyne’s conflation of the two in his own book, What Darwin Got Wrong.)

it ends up as an ingenious argument from ignorance-
Himmelfarb talks about Darwin’s cleverly constructed “logic of possibility”: “Unlike conventional logic, where the compound of of possibilities results not in a greater possibility, or probability, but in a lesser one, the logic of the Origin was one in which possibilities were assumed to add up to probability.” (p. 334) As Whewell complained, “For it is assumed that the mere possibility of imagining a series of steps of transition from one condition of organs to another, is to be accepted as a reason for believing that such transition has taken place. And next, that such a possibility being thus imagined, we may assume an unlimited number of generations for the transition to take place in, and that this indefinite time may extinguish all doubt that the transitions really have taken place.” (p. 333-4) (I’ll add that Whewell’s complaint would certainly apply to argumentation found in The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins.) Darwin’s argument not only converted possibilities into probabilities, it turned liabilities into assets, as can be seen by his claiming that his theory explained the fossil record, a claim that Himmelfarb says necessitated a deliberate confusion between “explaining” and “explaining away.” (And Coyne’s aforementioned book treats the fossil record as an asset for darwinism without really even attempting to address controversial issues like the Cambrian explosion.) Also, “this technique for the conversion of possibilities into probabilities and liabilities into assets was the more effective the longer the process went on,” as the reader who had conceded certain claims was expected to go all the way with Darwin and not to shy away from extensions of the argument. Further, “When imagination exhausted itself and Darwin could devise no hypothesis to explain away a difficulty, he resorted to the blanket assurance that we were too ignorant of the ways of nature to know why one event occurred rather than another, and hence ignorant of the explanation that would reconcile the facts to his theory.” (p.335) (Consider the following from Richard Dawkins, who, when talking about the problem of the origin of life, combines the assurance of an answer ultimately compatible with what he takes to be the Darwinian world view with an appeal to his argument as already elaborated: “The present lack of a definitely accepted account of the origin of life should certainly not be taken as a stumbling block for the whole Darwinian world view, as it occasionally-probably with wishful thinking-is. The earlier chapters have disposed of other alleged stumbling blocks, and the next chapter takes up yet another one…” )(The Blind Watchmaker, p. 166)

explains too much-
Himmelfarb notes how critics pointed out how the undisciplined nature of Darwin’s concept of adaptation had great plasticity, permitting almost any conjecture and resisting all control or verification. Darwinian adaptation was thus criticized for explaining too much. (Relatedly, Jerry Fodor has recently argued that it is overly ambitious and fallacious to assume that natural history can be placed under the control of a theory.) Also, one critic commented on the “labor saving” quality of Darwin’s conception of adaptation: “By suggesting that the steps through which an adaptive mechanism arose were indefinite and insensible, all further trouble is spared. While it could be said that species arise by an insensible and imperceptible process of variation, there was clearly no use in tiring ourselves by trying to perceive that process.” (p.320) (This “labor saving” aspect of darwinism can be seen in replies to Michael Behe that he is being unrealistic to ask that darwinians develop complex models for the emergence of molecular machines rather than speak in general terms of gene duplication and mutation, followed by recruitment to new functions.)

Explains too little-
Himmelfarb notes that from the beginning, darwinism was criticized for lacking an explanation for the variations that natural selection was supposed to work on. Neo-darwinism came along to suggest genetic mutations as an answer, but Himmelfarb is not impressed with the neo-darwinian claim that that the rarity of potentially beneficial genetic mutations just goes to show how powerful natural selection really is. She says that natural selection “has become the deus ex machina rescuing nature from the impossible situation in which the Darwinians had put her. Long before Darwin, men had recognized the improbability that nature, working blindly and by chance, could have evolved the universe as we know it. The triumphant discovery of the neo-Darwinians is, after all, only a feeble echo of an ancient cry. The laborious calculations of probability-the number represented by an infinity of noughts, the monkey pecking out the works of Shakespeare-are at least as much an argument in favor of the creationist theory as of natural selection, insofar as they can be said to be an argument in favor of anything.” (p.330)

more questionable of its hypotheses lie at the heart of its thesis-
Himmelfarb discusses doubts regarding core darwinian assumptions such as the “survival of the fittest,” a concept whose truth can be questioned not only in light of the apparently different demands sometimes placed by natural selection and sexual selection, but for other reasons as well. (Relatedly, Jerry Fodor recently argued that because there simply are no “laws” of trait selection, natural selection is reduced to a truism.) Himmelfarb also mentions problems relating to the darwinian concept of struggle for survival. Although the later development of reciprocal altruism theory may be a solution to these problems in some instances, such would not seem to be the case, I would argue, with regards to humans.

Himmelfarb makes many other criticisms of darwinism as well. She argues that darwinism has offered no satisfactory explanation for man as an intellectual or spiritual creature, and that Darwin’s heavy reliance on sexual selection in The Descent of Man was an acknowledgement that natural selection was not up to the burden of explaining mankind’s distinctiveness from other animals, and much else besides. (Not that sexual selection turned out to be up to the burden either, thinks Himmelfarb.) She also brings to light how many critics have viewed the argument of the Origin as excessively teleological (a criticism Fodor makes as well), and she mentions how in the Descent, Darwin “had explained that if the Origin erred in putting too great an emphasis on natural selection, it was because he had not yet entirely thrown off the prevailing teleological habit of mind that was a vestige of the old theory of creation.” (p. 349) (For the Darwin quote itself, see p. 367-68)

Whatever problems one can catalogue concerning darwinism (and Himmelfarb has a more extensive list than I have indicated), Himmelfarb makes clear that the theory managed to became established orthodoxy in a remarkably short period of time. How does one account for this? She points out many advantages the darwinian theory possessed: The simplicity of the theory; the impression of a massive structure of evidence supporting this simple skeleton; a well constructed argument that probably carried more weight than the facts. More important still, says Himmelfarb was the bankruptcy of Darwin’s opponents. Special creation was the only other general alternative/rival, and it of course came with its own set of problems that rendered it unattractive from a scientific point of view.

Himmelfarb also points out how many scientists in Darwin’s day and later recognized their commitment to darwinism was more an act of faith in the scientific enterprise in general than a scientifically validated belief: “The theory of natural selection is in many respects almost the ideal scientific theory…’the desire for some such hypothesis,’ as the authors of a work on zoology put it, is as powerful a factor in its perpetuation as it had been in its original acceptance. And when there is no alternative, or rather when the alternative is making due without any theory at all, the pull to Darwinism becomes very nearly irresistible. Science abhors gaps in its logical structure as it abhors leaps in nature-and for the same reason. Without the continuum of scientific theory, without the uniformity of nature, scientific knowledge, indeed science itself, feels jeopardized. Scientists cannot long-and a century is a long time as the history of modern science goes-live with the unknown, particularly when the unknown resides at the heart of their subject, and when it threatens to pass from the transient condition of the unknown into the permanent unknowable. Tyndall was once indiscreet enough to write ‘The logical feebleness of science is not sufficiently borne in mind. It keeps down the weed of superstition, not by logic, but by slowly rendering the mental soil unfit for its cultivation.’ The moral is that the mind must be so entirely habituated to the ideas of uniformity and continuity that even in the failure of fact and logic, the faith in science would remain intact.” (p. 446) Endnote 25 for this passage, which quotes from a review of Himmelfarb’s book when it first came out-my copy is a later edition-is wonderfully illustrative of the point Himmelfarb makes here regarding the appeal of darwinism.

Of course, as Himmelfarb makes apparent through her treatment of Charles Lyell, to counter superstition though uniformitarianism and continuity does not necessarily entail hostility to religion in general, merely to religious zealotry. Himmelfarb, like Lyell and like Leo Strauss (guru to neocons such as Himmelfarb) viewed religion as socially necessary, though potentially dangerous to the philosophic/scientific enterprise if unrestrained. Darwinism, both by enduring as an affirmation of faith in science that dampens religious zealotry, and by proving itself ultimately compatible with religion (as in the case of the theistic evolutionists), thus provides a fair amount of social utility from Himmelfarb’s perspective. Even so, utility is not truth, and one gets the sense that for Himmelfarb, though Darwinism is not entirely devoid of explanatory value, evolution is at bottom a mystery we just do not understand very well.

Himmelfarb is less ambiguous in her judgments concerning attempts to extend darwinian ideas into the social and political realm. Nationalism/Imperialism, laissez faire, socialism, all drew support in various ways from Darwin’s theory. Himmelfarb distances Darwin’s theory from such appropriations, which do not impress her, to put it mildly. Darwin’s theory in her estimation does not really offer useful guidance for political and social problems. Interestingly enough, she shows great sympathy here with “Darwin’s Bulldog” Thomas Huxley, who Himmelfarb presents as eventually repudiating the notion of evolutionary ethics: “…what he (Huxley) feared was not only the individualism of Spencer, which would leave men to the mercies of an unrestricted struggle for existence, but also the regimentation of the Comtists and eugenicists, who would try to enforce upon society the notions of fit and unfit derived from nature. If it was dangerous to forbid to intelligence any part in the organization of society, it was equally dangerous to assume that any one man or group of men could have so preternatural an intelligence as to enable them to determine the ‘points’ of a good or bad citizen, in the way breeders judge the points of a calf; a presumed ‘scientific’ administration of society would be as intolerable a tyranny as any yet known.” (p.407)

Time marches on, and so does science. However, as I tried to indicate in my review, many of Himmelfarb’s general criticisms of darwin’s theory still seem valid in light of my own (admittedly not yet extensive) exposure to darwinian literature and critiques of such literature. However, I am open to considering another point of view should someone wish to articulate why they think Himmelfarb’s analysis is wrong and/or dated.

At any rate, I consider this a thought provoking and informative book, and intend to look for any more recent musings Himmelfarb may have produced relating to darwinism. I would be interested to find out what she thinks about the Intelligent Design movement, for instance, or if she thinks the evolutionary psychologist Jonathan Haidt is an instructive social theorist.

[Peggy Metcalf · Rating 4 out of 5]

A revolution that wasn’t really a revolution that nevertheless turned out to be revolutionary.
Gertrude Himmelfarb’s Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution is a fascinating study of a man and his ideas. I picture a plodding, somewhat sickly, upper middle class Victorian gentleman meandering about his greenhouse and home laboratory growing odd plants, making copious notes on generations of fruit flies, and being generally oblivious to the rest of the world. He was originally spurred to scientific action by his trip on The Beagle and, thanks to inherited wealth, spent the rest of his life nurturing and exploring ideas stemming from that trip.

The Origin of Species was published in 1859. Himmelfarb goes to great lengths (sometimes much further than I was interested in going) to show that much of Darwin’s work was not new. There were evolutionary ideas floating around the European natural science community before the publication of the Origin. It was the straightforward statement of his evolutionary theory centered on the concept of natural selection that captured the zeitgeist and spawned debate and discussion on the application of the ideas to science and society.

Dr. Himmelfarb’s argument in her own words: “The Origin was the cataclysm that broke up the crust of conventional opinion. It expressed and dramatized what many had obscurely felt. More than this: it legitimized with all the authority of science and without the taint of ulterior ideology, it became the receptacle of great hopes and fears.” (p. 452)

I enjoyed the book very much, though I won’t deny that there are sections that get a little deeper in the weeds in tracing the lineage of ideas regarding the fossils of mollusks than I would have liked. Dr. Himmelfarb’s writing is engaging.

I find the dissemination and reaction to Darwin and Darwinism fascinating. I often talk to my high school history students about how the 1860s are a watershed time period for the United States. The Civil War and the Constitutional changes of Reconstruction are the obvious reasons. Far less obvious, but extremely significant to the succeeding decades in US history is the impact of scientific thinking traced to the Darwinian revolution. Understanding the increased reliance of leaders in reform movements, education, government, politics, industry, agriculture, and you name it, on science and scientific thinking spawned by the Darwinian Revolution is pivotal to understanding the rest of our history. Appreciation to Dr. Himmelfarb for expanding my understanding.

[Karolina Omenzetter · Rating 5 out of 5]

a great man and a very ambitious book! Dr Himmelfarb contextualises Darwin's Origin of Species and Descent of Man brilliantly, as well as drawing upon Darwin's predecessors, friends and opponents and how they affected his views. I found the depiction of Darwin very human particularly as it described some of his neuroses around the stress of publishing such controversial volumes, and his relatively naive initiation into scientific discipline. Dr Himmelfarb's writing is very engaging but packed with thought provoking criticisms of Darwin's work which furthered my enjoyment of this book. a particularly interesting point that was made was the various interpretations of Darwinism to give shakey evidence to political/philosophical debates at the time, it made me wonder about how these views are still apparent in current discourse with the likes of Jordan Peterson and other vocal personalities of twitter. great book, well worth the read.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A HISTORICAL SURVEY OF DARWIN AND HIS IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH

Gertrude Himmelfarb (1922-2019) was an American historian. (She was also married to ‘neoconservative’ founder Irving Kristol.)

She wrote in the Introduction to this 1959 book, “The anomalies of intellectual creation jostle with the anomalies of interpretation. Why was it given to Darwin, less ambitious, less imaginative, and less learned than many of his colleagues, to discover the theory sought after by others so assiduously? How did it come about that one so limited intellectually and insensitive culturally should have devised a theory so massive in structure and sweeping in significance?... Was Darwin a great revolutionary, and, if so, what was the nature of his revolution?... Only the closest reconstruction of the facts can answer these questions. It is necessary to trace the origin and development of Darwin’s own views and to correlate them at each stage with the prevailing opinions; to determine the extent to which Darwin was influenced by his predecessors and contemporaries, and to the extent to which he and his contemporaries thought he was influenced by them; to show what Darwin intended his theory to mean, and what in fact it meant and implied.” (Pg. viii-ix)

She explains, “The final recourse of Victorian society for the maintenance of misfits and dullards was the church. Young men with no other discernible calling were graced with the highest calling of all… So it is not as absurd as might at first appear that [Darwin’s father] Dr. Darwin should have conceived the plan of making Charles a clergyman… He even found the idea rather attractive, on condition only that he would be a COUNTRY clergyman… He set himself … to read … standard works in theology, from which he emerged with the happy conviction that he … fully accepted the Anglican creed… For one short period he was not certain that he could give an honest, affirmative answer to the question in the ordination ritual: ‘Do you trust that you are inwardly moved by the Holy Spirit?’ But this was a transient doubt… Nor was it as ludicrous then … that he who was to be so strenuously attacked by the clergy should once have seriously undertaken to become a clergyman himself. At the time the proposal was both sensible and honorable.” (Pg. 32)

She recounts, “In the summer of 1831…[he] found waiting for him two letters… One was … explaining that he had been asked to recommend a naturalist for a scientific expedition… The second letter was from [John Steven] Henslow, who said that he had proposed Darwin as ‘the best qualified person I know…’ … Captain Fitzroy, Henslow added, was a young man who wanted a companion more than a mere collector… and this qualification … Darwin met.” (Pg. 53)

She reports, “Slavery… was too obtrusive a fact to be ignored. For a good part of the voyage it was an ever-present affront to Darwin, and his feelings about it were a constant source of exasperation to FitzRoy… to Darwin… he appeared as an unregenerated Tory, ready to defend slavery with all its abominations.” (Pg. 62)

After the voyage was over, Darwin published his ‘Journal of Researches’ … toward the end of this life he confessed that he was more delighted with the success of the Journal than with that of any of his other works… And none, not even the Origin, is more revealing as an exhibit of the workings of his mind.” (Pg. 81)

She says of Charles Lyell’s geological ideas, “Not only as a scientific theory but even as a philosophical doctrine, uniformitarianism failed to be entirely persuasive. It suffered from the same logical difficulty that was to plague Darwin and all later evolutionary thought---the confusion between naturalism gradualism, the assumption that the method of naturalism necessarily involved a theory of gradualism.” (Pg. 89-90)

She recounts, “Only after his return from the voyage, when he had discussed his findings with experts and had read the available literature, did Darwin begin to reflect more seriously on the problem of geographical distribution… Yet this discussion… was also provokingly confused in its conclusions. In part, the conclusion came from the inadequacy of his materials. Not knowing what to look for on the voyage, he had, as he later realized, let some of the most promising opportunities escape him.” (Pg. 115)

She states, “There is… no real continuity between the Beagle and the Origin. Between the two there intervened the idea. It was in the light of that idea that the experiences on the Beagle were re-ordered and re-interpreted by Darwin until they were ready to stand witness for the idea… And later generations, knowing of these events only through Darwin’s reconstruction of them, and hypnotized by history into believing that the antecedents of an event must be the cause of that event, have acquiesced in the myth that the Origin was the Beagle writ large.” (Pg. 123)

She notes, “That [Darwin’s] ill health should have had so decisive … an influence upon career has led to a good deal of speculation… His invalidism did have the effect, as so many have remarked, of protecting him from social and even professional distractions and isolating him with his work. The implication, however, that it was mere hypochondria … is one of the perversities of reasoning…” (Pg. 128-129)

She records, “Sooner or later, however, the question of ‘how’ had to be confronted. By September 1838 he was alternating between moods of satisfaction … and moods of dissatisfaction… Among the other books he had read aimlessly, ‘for amusement’… was Malthus’ ‘Essay on the Principle of Population.’ By this chance encounter, his theory was provided with a rationale and mechanics that distinguished it from other evolutionary theories… Malthus’ description of the ‘struggle for existence’ in human society immediately suggested to him that under the competitive conditions of animal and plant life, ‘favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed,’ the result being the formation of new species.” (Pg. 159)

She recounts the famous controversy involving Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. Thomas Henry Huxley, and Darwin: “Wilberforce’s attack infuriated Darwin’s friends as did no other single episode in the controversy… Darwin himself was more tolerant. He pronounced Wilberforce to be ‘uncommonly clever’ in finding so many conjectural expressions in the Origin and in making such ‘capital fun’ out of him and his grandfather.” (Pg. 275-276) Of the Huxley/Wilberforce confrontation, she states that Huxley said, “It there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a MAN… [who] plunges into scientific questions with which he had no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric…” She continues, “Bishops, however great the provocation, were not often treated so disrespectfully, and the excitement was tremendous. One lady fainted and had to be carried out, while undergraduates leaped from their seats and shouted.” (Pg. 290) She summarizes, “In fact, most of the clergy remained unmoved; the ladies… were repelled by Huxley’s impiety; while the undergraduates, having earlier hooted and the bores on both sides, were now aroused more by the contest of wit than by the contest of ideas.” (Pg. 292-293)

She points out, “Not only the persistence of imperfections but the persistence without change of any forms over a long period of time is difficulty to explain by natural selection… how can it also account for the persistence of the simple and low? How can it be that variants, often numerically small compared with the total population, are frequently found side by side, and over long periods, with the typical forms? Why have not the superior or higher forms supplanted the inferior or lower?” (Pg. 341)

Of the famous statement at the end of later editions of the Origin, ‘There is grandeur in this view of life… having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one…” she comments,
Although this teleological interpretation comes with the authority of the Origin itself, privately Darwin was in great doubt about it… Nor was he even certain, in his private exchanges with [Asa] Gray, that there was evidence of a larger, final design of beneficent providence in nature…” (Pg. 347-348)

She explains, “It was only in his autobiography that Darwin gave free expression to his religious opinions… [Darwin’s wife] Emma Darwin… Having succeeded in maintaining a modicum of discretion in his lifetime, she objected to having the floodgates of scandal opened after his death, and solemnly warned her son that unless he deleted some of the franker passage, her life would be made unendurably miserable.” (Pg. 383)

She observes, “Indeed, so solicitous of morality were the Victorian agnostics that they were even willing to make concessions to religion in the interests of public morality. They were willing to suspend their own disbelief in order to bolster up other people’s morals---not their own, for of their own they had no doubt… The most famous ‘apostate,’ of course, was [John Stuart] Mill, whose last essay conceded that a familiarity, even an imagined familiarity, with a morally perfect being was bound to be a more effective guide to morality than any merely rational ideal.” (Pg. 410-411)

She concludes, “The Origin was the cataclysm that broke up the crust of conventional opinion. It expressed and dramatized what many had obscurely felt. More than this: it legitimated what they felt… Those were already partial to the mode of thought it represented… often fastened upon it as the symbol and warrant of their belief… Similarly, those who had already committed themselves to the other side, finding naturalism uncongenial or unpersuasive, tended to look upon the Origin as the incarnation of all that was hateful and fearful… For most men, however, the Origin… did not revolutionize their beliefs so much as give public recognition to a revolution that had already occurred. It was a belief made manifest, revolution legitimized… But if it is important for later generations not to deny the fact of revolution because they cannot concede its truth or justice, it is no less important not to concede truth or justice merely because they cannot deny the fact of revolution.” (Pg. 452)

This is an interesting survey of the culture that surrounded Darwin and his work, and its later effects.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A most cogent, wryly amusing, and homely portrait of a late-to-the-party scientist who was dyspeptic, domestic, shy and prideful by turns, who had no idea his proposals would up-end the settled notions of biology, geology, cosmology and the task of scientific investigation. Himmelfarb, rather than declaring herself in a particular "camp," and leaping into the fray with passion and certainty, carefully and attractively lays out the temper of the times in which Darwin lived, the other scientific developments contemporaneous with him, cozy details about his home life (which was his favorite place to be), and extended excerpts from his drafts, notebooks and letters which reveal a rather careless if not sloppy handler of observations. Her development of the context of the British scientific establishment, the increasingly strained relationship between that establishment and the Church, she suggests that Darwin's meteoric rise to long-range influence over everything owes more to the readiness and eagerness of his culture to overthrow Eden than to the intrinsic value of his theories.

[Damon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent book and it has served as a reference for many researchers and scientists wishing to understand the life and times of Charles Darwin.

[Somya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Expertly written! I was reading this book at a particularly watery time in my life. And it made me fall in love with the idea of being a pirate. Pirates of the Carribean was out around the same time, so inevitably I fell in love with Johnny Depp and forced my family to buy the VHS of the movie. Those were much simpler times...