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DARWIN'S CENTURY -- EVOLUTION AND THE MEN WHO DISCOVERED IT |
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Chapter XII: Conclusion
I. Time: Cyclic and Historic In the course of three centuries ideas, like the disintegrating face of Hutton's planet, evolve, erode, and change. Sometimes they are gone in a night without anyone's quite knowing what became of them, or why they had possessed momentarily a kind of demonic power. Again they may last for ages protruding, gaunt, bare, and uncompromising, from the soft sward of later beliefs. Sometimes, in the clouds that pass over the formless landscape of time, they will seem to shift and catch new lights, become transmuted into something other than what they were, grow dull, or glisten with a kind of sunset color reflected from the human mind itself. Of such a nature is that vast monument to human thinking which is now called evolution. Something of its origins we have learned, a few of the many names that contributed to its substance have taken on a familiar appearance. The idea, the structure itself, however, looms ever vaster and more impenetrable. It is linked with the mysteries within the atom as it is also linked with that intangible, immaterial world of consciousness which no one has quite succeeded in identifying with the soft dust that flies up from a summer road. Evolution is an idea that has seemed to many to condemn man to the life of a beast and there are those who have ordered their days accordingly. Others have seen, in the long climb upward from the ooze, a law of progress, a reversal of the dour prophecies of an earlier Christianity which had viewed the human condition as one destined inevitably to worsen. The man of blood has had recourse to its arguments equally with the man of peace. In such circumstances we will do well to take a long second look at the history of this concept and at its moral implications. It will be recalled that Adam Sedgwick spoke of the advent of man as "breaking in upon any supposition of zoological continuity -- and utterly unaccounted for by what we have any right to call the Laws of Nature." [1] This is a typical progressionist remark from the early part of the nineteenth century. Compare it with the blithe and perhaps irresponsible gaiety of Huxley, going off to address a group of working men with the remark, "By next Friday they will all be convinced that they are monkeys." Or consider, coming down to our modern day, John Baillie's more measured observation: "The mark of modem unbelieving man is that he has felt astonishingly much at home in his earthly surroundings." [2] Between the first of these observations and the last a world has come and gone. It remains to ask, however, whether between the defiant supernaturalism of Sedgwick and the complacency of modern scientifically oriented man there may not lie other territories, other mysteries as great as those that intrigued Darwin long ago. To search out those last regions one must survey Darwin's century with care. II. The Pre-Darwinian Era The first half of the nineteenth century may be roughly characterized as morphological in biology- -- he morphology being primarily derived from French sources -- though paralleled to a degree in England by the somewhat inarticulate but magnificent anatomist John Hunter (1728-93). Great emphasis came to be placed upon the anatomical unities and connections between divergent forms. The work begun by John Ray and Linnaeus was extended to the most obscure portions of the globe, and the accumulated knowledge upon the world's faunas and floras had become tremendous. Though unity of biological type between great groups of animals had become evident, it was viewed by most thinkers as an immaterial, divinely ordained connection. While Germany and France had taken the lead in comparative biology, England had momentarily surpassed the Continental scholars in the field of stratigraphical geology. It may be that this latter episode was partly a result of the rise of industrialism in a circumscribed island area. At any rate, there met and merged in early nineteenth-century England a unique religious conservatism stemming from the reaction to the French Revolution, a recognized succession of faunas in geological time, and a similarly recognizable morphological resemblance, but not identity, between the faunas. Out of this mixture the natural theologians, such as Sedgwick and others of like views, erected the concept of progressionism which, though based upon natural science, is essentially a metaphysical system. "It can be shown," wrote Agassiz, who subscribed fully to this viewpoint, "that in the great plan of creation ... the very commencement, exhibits a certain tendency towards the end, betrays the issue toward which it is striving; and in the series of vertebrate animals, the constantly increasing similarity to man of the creatures that were successively called into existence, makes the final purpose obvious to ward which these successions are rising." [3] Progressionism is really a system of evolution without either bodily or geological continuity; it could be called, in fact, a theory of spiritual macro- utations. The rise of this romantic "evolutionism," so vigorously opposed by the Scientifically minded uniformitarians with predilections for observable, unchanging forces, led to the curious spectacle of scientific geology actually opposing the idea of organic change. On the other hand, progressionism was regarded approvingly by Richard Owen, Louis Agassiz, and others who came to detest the Darwinian viewpoint The uniformitarian, so long as he had no natural explanation for the changes in life patterns, was dangerously exposed, philosophically, if he admitted mysterious forces at work in life which he refused to recognize when he rejected catastrophist geology. Living nature, in progressionist hands, was the very opposite of that calm, undeviating world machine envisaged by Hutton as the quintessence of Newtonian world order. To admit change and emergence into the world in the miraculous fashion of progressionism [4] destroyed the reign of scientific law. Paleontology, from the time in 1801 when Cuvier announced to the world his discovery of twenty- three species of animals no longer in existence, offered just that threat to the scientific geologist. Without a natural explanation for change the dragons in the rocks were in reality intellectual dragons. They threatened to impose upon the rational Huttonian world order the unpredictable interposition of occult powers. Cuvier could indeed have been regarded in some quarters as justly deserving his satanic charnel house title and his impish halo of Pterodactyls. Another aspect of thought developing slowly throughout the first part of the century has to do with the nature of time, We have seen that the growing knowledge of geology, even in the case of the catastrophists, had slowly strengthened the willingness of the public to accept a greater antiquity for the earth. In the case of Lyell and his followers time still has a sense of the illimitable about it. It is cyclical and in some degree repetitive. One can see the attraction of this old view in Lyell's waverings and advocacy of non-progressionism. Time of this character may be monotonous but it is safe, sane, and familiar. Throughout eternity the same waters hurry to the sea, the same basic animal forms expand or contract their habitat. All things pass and come again. The Newtonian world view, the eternal and balanced machine of the heavens, is repeated upon earth. Even life, crowded and struggling, remains in a dynamic, oscillating balance as much as perturbed planetary orbits correct themselves without supernatural interference. "Carnivorous animals," once remarked John Hunter, "are only to be considered the correctors of quantity. There is an equilibrium kept up among the animals by themselves." The struggle for existence he regarded as a "natural government." [5] It should be noted that almost every eighteenth-century attempt to examine the struggle for existence ends upon this note of "equilibrium," "pruning," "policing," "natural government." Even Malthus's thesis is primarily a warning that man, too, cannot escape the limitation of numbers; perpetual progress is not possible, The observation of the creative aspect of this struggle waited upon the recognition of several interrelated clues. These clues are all really contained in one single basic proposition: historic as opposed to cyclic time. In the end it was not to be so much a demand for more time, as between catastrophists and uniformitarians, that introduced the true importance of the struggle for existence, but rather the unique character of the time which was beginning to emerge from astronomical and paleontological studies. It was time of enormous dimensions, true; in this men echoed the Greco-Roman past. For the first time, however, the historic ever-changing, irreversible, on-flowing continuum of events was being linked to galaxies and suns and worlds. Laplace had been content, toward the end of the eighteenth century, to propose his nebular hypothesis as to how the planets might have been formed. That this in its turn suggested long lapses of astronomical time there can be no doubt [6] Still, Laplace did not ask of the heavens the questions the nineteenth century was to ask; he did not debate the secular cooling of the earth or the rate at which the sun was consuming its own substance. In a way, by propounding a theory of the earth's origin, he was considering an historical event, but it was a remote and starry speculation. In Darwin's century, however, the unique and unreturning nature of the past began early to evince itself. The nature of energy began to be better grasped, with a consequent recognition of the importance of the second law of thermodynamics and the "heat death" which threatened potentially to chill the entire planetary system. In the rocks lay the evidences of a strange and unreturning fauna, rescued from oblivion by the arts of Cuvier. The gardens and paddocks of kings and nobles were revealing what curious, never-before-seen varieties, historic shapes in other words, could be tempted from the darkness of non-being by the selective hand of the breeder. Without anyone's being able to say just why, the struggle for existence which people had been examining for a century or more was suddenly seen by a few people almost simultaneously to be a creative mechanism. Basically -- and this reached great intensity after Darwin -- man was adjusting himself, not just to time in unlimited quantities, but rather to complete historicity, to the emergence of the endlessly new. His philosophy was to include, henceforth, cosmic as well as organic novelty. It is not enough to say that man had come into possession of time, or even of eternity. These he had possessed before in other cultures, but never with this particular conception of on-goingness. To see and to re-create the past, to observe how it has come to mold the present, one must possess the knowledge that all things are new under the sun and that they are flowing in the direction of time's arrow never to return upon their course-that time is noncyclic, unreturning, and creative. Instead of the "natural government" of the eighteenth century, the old principle of plenitude, of God's infinite creativeness, now led directly to a war of nature in which, through time, living creatures are jostled in or out of ex- istence, expand or contract at one another's expense. The infinite creativeness remained as given, but the carefully balanced equilibrium was the illusion of an unhistorical outlook. The dreadful calculation of Malthus -- that life tended to increase in geometric ratio against resources which at best could only be expanded on an arithmetic basis -- cast a frightening shadow over public optimism. In spite of Lyell's transitional treatment of the struggle for existence (that he saw ecological contraction and expansion, we know), it may well be that the full import of the new conception demanded time for its complete import to sink home. As I have previously emphasized, it was possible-in fact is in large measure demonstrable -- that Darwin and Wallace derived their applications of the Malthusian principle from Lyell, yet had recourse to Malthus as their inspiration. The paper in which Wallace first communicated his discovery bears, interestingly enough, the title "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type." In Lyell's Principles of Geology occurs the following, directed toward the French evolutionists: "... let a sufficient number of centuries elapse, to allow of important revolutions in climate, physical geography, and other circumstances, and the characters say they, of the descendants of common parents may deviate indefinitely from their original type." [7] Wallace's title approximates so closely the italicized portion of Lyell's sentence that we may reasonably suspect it was Lyell he was primarily consulting as he worked upon his paper. Yet by his own testimony it was Malthus that brought the matter to his mind. One is thus inclined to observe that something about the Malthusian mathematical approach exercised an appeal to the first discoverers of natural selection comparable to the effect it had when the same idea was given to the public. [8] Irrespective of whether their major inspiration came from Malthus or from Lyell, they seem to have been impelled toward the former as the most powerful source of authority. With his acceptance of the phrase "to depart indefinitely; Wallace may be said, in 1858, to have epitomized the new time and the new world that Darwin and he were to leave as their heritage to the next century. Time was no longer the medium through which oscillated a self-adjusting and eternal world machine under a "natural government." It was instead a vast chaotic Amazon pouring through unimaginable wildernesses its burden of "houses and bones and gardens, cooks and clocks." Just to make the change more emphatic, in that same year of 1859 the spectroscope was perfected. Even as the great scientific voyages had opened up the seas and continents, the long inviolable Empyrean heavens were now to be subjected to analysis. Until that instrument had been invented, astronomers might calculate from point to point the immeasurable distances of space, but the shining objects of their attention could be regarded only by dubious inference as being composed of the same matter as the earth. Ever since Newton's discovery of 1675 that the light of the sun is actually composed of a combination of colored rays which can be bent out of their course and separated by a lens, the solar spectrum, in principle, had been known. About 1815 Fraunhofer at Munich had succeeded in greatly improving the observational apparatus for examining the dark lines in the spectrum. The significance of Fraunhofer's lines was not cleared up until 1859 when Gustav Kirchhoff (1824-87) succeeded in establishing their relationship to heated metals here upon earth. Now, for the first time, it was possible to learn the composition of the outer universe, to dip a ladle into the roaring furnace of the sun and stars. Astrophysics had become a reality. "All these marvellous and unexpected phenomena which have flashed, as it were, into the human cognizance within the last seven or eight years," writes a contemporary observer, "go far to establish the truth of Laplace's hypothesis, that the whole visible material universe is an evolution of things, arising from the condensation of vast tracts of gaseous or vaporous matter scattered through the regions of space." [9] By 1863 it had been pretty well established through this new "sidereal chemistry" that the matter of the entire visible universe was largely identical with the chemical elements known from our own solar system. In the fury of plutonic fires and wandering gases man began to seek the possibility of piercing "that hitherto impenetrable veil which seems to separate what we term inorganic from what we term organic and vital." [10] That the public was vastly interested can be shown by the number of popular articles devoted to the spectroscope and to cosmic evolution. For a time the new cosmology rivaled the Darwinian controversy in interest, and there can be no doubt that it promoted and stimulated the willingness to accept Darwin. Stars and men and worlds emerged out of the interstellar vapor, flared briefly, and passed again into darkness. If the eternal stars transformed themselves, why should one quibble over the powers contained in a meadow mouse, or an ape who forgot to go back to his tree? Time was a different thing now. It was not even the old stable eternity of the stoics. It was, instead, irreversible and unreturning. As the life records in the rocks revealed, it was a loneliness, an on-going. Through the ruins of vanished eras one could trace the silver thread of genetic continuity winding on toward the always looming and unknown future. III. The Struggle of the Parts With the fall of progressionism the sure and predetermined character of the human adventure appeared to melt away. The progressionist had seen the earlier stages of earth life prophetically -- a great prologue whose sole purpose was to introduce man upon the scene, after which there would be no further alterations of life. [11] With the rise of natural selection and the philosophy of actual physical descent with modification, man becomes, along with all the other forms of life, "the child of chance." "The gist of Darwin's theory," wrote Ernst Haeckel, "is this simple idea: that the Struggle for Existence in Nature evolves new Species without design just as the Will of Man produces new Varieties in Cultivation with design." [12] All notion of preconceived Platonic ideal forms has vanished from this system. The fixed taxonomy of life is an illusion born of our limited experience. In reality every living thing is writhing from one shape into another in the way that we might witness the growth of a tropical forest in a speeded-up motion picture. Our long-assumed stability is only the illusion produced by the tempo at which we live. So complete was the triumph of the new philosophy that the struggle for existence, the "war of nature," was projected into the growth of the organism itself. Darwin's shadow dominates, in this respect, the rest of the century. Moreover, it provides an apt illustration of the way in which a successful theory may be carried to excess. The co-operative aspects of bodily organization, the vast intricacy of hormonic interplay, of cellular chemistry, remained to a considerable degree uninvestigated. Instead, "struggle" was the leading motif of the day. "It is a probable hypothesis," said Huxley in 1869, "that what the world is to organisms in general each organism is to the molecules of which it is composed. Multitudes of these, having diverse tendencies, are competing with one another for opportunity to exist and multiply; and the organism, as a whole, is as much the product of the molecules which are victorious as the Fauna, or Flora of a country is the product of the victorious organic beings in it." [13] Darwin commented, with what one cannot help suspecting was a private grin, "about natural selection amongst the molecules." He expressed admiration for Huxley's boldness -- always easy to do -- and then proceeded to add cautiously, "I cannot quite follow you." [14] The rage persisted, however. Wilhelm Roux, the distinguished German embryologist, developed a theory of internal struggle for nourishment between the parts of an organism. [15] Weismann went even further and extended natural selection to the smallest particles of the germ plasm. One could say in a somewhat figurative fashion that in a fertilized cell the very ancestors were struggling as to which might emerge once more into the light! "Each animal and plant," pondered Darwin, "may be compared to a bed of mould full of seeds, most of which soon germinate, some lie for a period dormant, whilst others perish." [16] It is not necessary to pursue this subject at length. It fascinated good men, produced some able research in embryology, and faded with the rise of a better understanding of the complexities of cell mechanics. It does, nevertheless, express something about the period. So grim was the struggle for existence conceived to be that a single improved bristle, an inch longer horn was thought of as individually decisive in survival. Part of this mistaken emphasis lay in the attention paid to somatic variations which are now known to be fluctuating and nonheritable. There can be no doubt that this utilitarian emphasis was in some degree misplaced. It diverted attention from other more imponderable mysteries, minimized the role of co-operation in animal life and, in its more absurd manifestations, left reason to wonder why, if the organism was nothing but a collection of struggling particles, it had ever managed to collect itself into a body in the first place. As we have observed in an earlier chapter, neither Darwin nor his immediate followers seem to have had any particular feeling for the internal stability and harmony of the organism. Their success with the concept of struggle in the exterior environment had led them to see everything through this set of spectacles. A whole generation of neo-Darwinians persisted in this point of view. [17] IV. Evolution and Human Culture Coincident with the development of the evolutionary philosophy has been the rise of anthropology as a science. Although of late years there has been a tendency for social anthropology to pursue its tasks without reference to the field of biology, this specialization is not entirely desirable without at least some knowledge of the relationship of these two subjects in the past. We are in a position to see, after our lengthy survey of the history of biological evolution, that almost every mistake and folly which was perpetrated in the creation of a satisfactory theory of organic evolution was duplicated or had its analogue in the social field. On the other hand, steps which were taken to extricate biological theory from just such difficulties have, in certain instances, been utilized with equal success in anthropology. In reality biological and anthropological thinking have influenced each other and have been part of the same intellectual climate for a long period of time. It has been man's curiosity about himself, extended to the origins of the world around him, that has led to the discovery of the evolutionary process. Although the Christian world had tended to take the Bible literally on Creation as a single act by divine Bat, it had, at the same time, never completely divorced itself from the ancient idea that simpler organisms are constantly arising by spontaneous generation. At the same time it had inherited from the Greek world of Aristotle a kind of taxonomic ladder, a sort of frozen evolution in the shape of the Scale of Being. [18] Since, before the rise of modem science, all three of these somewhat incompatible doctrines had persisted uncritically in the Western mind, the seeds of speculation lay ready to hand. One can note, for example, that Lamarck's evolution consists really in the utilization of spontaneous generation along with the unfreezing of the Scale of Being. When he came to man he made use of a widely held eighteenth-century social theory; namely, that man in a state of nature was in no way distinct from the existing apes; that we could see in the orang outang of the voyagers a member of our own species without language or other social proclivities, in short, a living "cultural" as well as physical fossil. Man's history, the French philosophes argued, is characterized by the ability to unfold the higher mental attributes in a state of society, to attain wisdom by degrees. He is capable of perfectibilite, of progress. [19] That there was a submerged element of biological thinking in some of the writing upon purely social progress can be judged from Condorcet's observation that "Organic perfectibility or deterioration amongst the various strains in the vegetable and animal kingdom can be regarded as one of the general laws of nature. This law also applies to the human race." [20] It has sometimes been ventured that it was the growth and popularization of the idea of social progress that led to the development of the idea of evolution. Without wishing to ignore this influence it can still be observed that both points of view seem to have arisen together, and that from the first, particularly in France, there is a considerable interplay of ideas between those whose major thinking lay in one field or the other. In any case only the extension of the earth's antiquity and increased knowledge of the paleontological past, with its horde of vanished animals, could remove a certain casualness from the earliest expression of evolutionary ideas. The conception only becomes important when the full depth and marvelous organic diversity of life become known. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the unilinear scale of nature, as we have earlier observed, placed man at the head of the animal kingdom. Beneath him there descended a series of grades or steps to the lowest infusoria. This chain was regarded as a single unbroken stair. The existence of this idea led to conceptions of various racial groups as occupying positions on this ladder intermediate between Western Caucasian man and the great apes. The social thinkers, like Condorcet, tended to think of barbarians as educable; in fact, there were those who, right down into the nineteenth century, thought it might be possible to teach the orang to speak. As slavery and imperialism extended, however, the notion of existing races as lying fixed, biologically, upon levels inferior to Western man persisted, and was in some cases extended as a convenient rationalization. Cultural levels were often confused with biological potentiality. So powerful was the influence of the idea of the living scale of life that surviving human "links" were still being sought for in the nineteenth century. In 1816 Cuvier broke with the conception of a single unilinear scale of life. He introduced in its place four great animal groups whose anatomical structure he regarded as impossible to correlate into a single ascending system of taxonomy, whether in terms of abstract unity of plan or in evolutionary terms. Karl von Baer (1792-1876) approached the problem through comparative embryology and demonstrated a little later that the egg of each of these separate groups undergoes a separate type of development showing no relationship to the developmental stages of the others. Neither Baer nor Cuvier was an evolutionist, but they were contributing heavily to the final triumph of the evolutionist cause. They were breaking away from a unilineal conception of organic relationship and enabling later workers to see the evolution of the Mollusca, for example, as being a separate branch of the tree of life related only in the most distant fashion, if at all, to the Vertebrates. They were not in the scale leading to man. The garden snail wandering in its little trail of slime over a leaf was not an ancestral vertebrate. Instead, it was following its own branching road of developments. It is at just this point that we can observe an interesting analogy between the morphological revolution in biology and the later reaction toward unilinear schemes of cultural development which took place in the twentieth century. Just as the early Darwinians had to see man's relationship to living apes as closer than it was, so the nineteenth-century social evolutionists had shown a tendency to take the varied nonliterate cultures of modem primitives and arrange them in a sort of phylogenetic sequence leading to advanced Western culture. There was little attempt to examine the actual functioning of these communities. They were seen primarily much as the great apes appeared to the biologists: living ancestral social forms, surviving into the present. Just as it had proved necessary for biologists to break away from the idea that existing apes are precisely similar to our Tertiary forerunners; just as it had been necessary to cease projecting upon unfamiliar racial types the features of existing gorillas and chimpanzees, so, similarly, it was necessary to break out of a particular habit of social thinking. Like the impact of Cuvier's reassessment of biological patterns in 1816, the questions raised by Westermarck in 1891 over the "origin" of given social institutions in terms of unilineal "advance" caused a mild flurry in English social anthropology. It began to be clear, and to be emphasized in twentieth-century anthropology, that "every culture in the world has had its own unique history and we can not therefore say that any culture observable in the present day world is an earlier form of any other." [21] Cultures contemporaneous in time have, like men, monkeys and apes, their own unique historical pathways. To recognize this fact is not to deny that men have a genuine morphological kinship to apes, nor that small isolated societies may not throw some general light upon human psychology under such conditions. This is a far cry, however, from the more rigid and ethnocentric extrapolations indulged in by both biologists and anthropologists in the Victorian past. There is still another interesting analogy between theoretical developments in the biological world and events in anthropology. It will be recalled that I have touched upon the subject of Darwin's primary interest: the modification of living forms under the selective influence of the environment I have been at some pains to point out that Darwin, by the very nature of his interests, was a student of the individual characteristics of animals and plants. He is concerned essentially with differences and their inheritance, with all that is unfixed, shifting, and subject to change. Magnificent as his grasp of this aspect of biology is, it is counterbalanced by a curious lack of interest in the nature of the organism itself. Perhaps this partly explains his indifference to his forerunners and their abstract ideas. Occasionally, when he is confronted by the problem of explaining a variation which demands simultaneous alterations in other parts in order to be successful, he faintly echoes Cuvier by referring to a "mysterious law of correlation." It is obvious, however, that Darwin is uncomfortable among these inner mysteries of the body and does not, of his own volition, enjoy pursuing them. We have already noted the tendency of some of his followers to attempt to project the war of nature directly into the body, to make the method which had explained so much on the "outside" account for the organization within. Pursued to its reductio ad absurdum every living creature would simply be reduced to a sack of struggling molecules in some manner creating order out of individual chaos. One may suspect that having committed himself to a principle of fortuity In the emergence and evolution of life, he was made uncomfortable by temperament when issues implying bodily organization and co-ordinated behavior beyond the range of his theory were brought to his attention. He was far too Intelligent to ignore them completely, but, as in the "mysterious law of correlation," he had a way of relegating such subjects to a brief phrase, or paragraph, and hastily returning to his favorite subject. It is thus very difficult to discover what he really thought on the subject of biological organization. It is quite conceivable that he thought very little about it, that he took the body "as given," and proceeded from there. Darwin had an excellent sense for the sort of investigations which offered the possibility of solution with the means at his command. There is no use blaming him for a shrewd empirical good sense in evading what were then problems insoluble or likely to prove metaphysical and abstract. Nevertheless, it is difficult to find in Darwin any really deep recognition of the life of the organism as a functioning whole which must be co-ordinated interiorly before it can function exteriorly. He was, as we have said, a separatist, a student of parts and their changes. He looked upon the organism as a cloud form altering under the winds of chance and it was the permutations and transmutations of its substance that interested him. The inner nature of the cloud, its stability as a cloud, even as it was drawn out, flattened, or compressed by the forces of time and circumstance, moved him but little. It is intriguing to find Huxley, on the other hand, fascinated by the stability of the great classes just before he surrendered to the Darwinian hypothesis. "Not only are all animals existing in the present creation organized according to one of these five plans; but paleontology tends to show that in the myriad of past ages of which the earth's crust contains the records, no other plan of animal life made its appearance on our planet. A marvellous fact and one which seems to present no small obstacle in the way of the notion of the possibility of fortuitous development of animal life." [22] Even later, in 1862, he expressed wonder "not that the changes of life ... have been so great, but that they have been so small." [28] One has the feeling with some of this early writing of Huxley's that his interests were rather different from Darwin's, and that his later conversion to the latter's theory was more of a change of sides than any marked change in the store of facts he had available. He was interested, it is apparent, in the stability of form, in what kept the great basic plans of organization so steadfast throughout whole eras and epochs. Later his long warfare on behalf of Darwin drew him aside from this quite justifiable field of speculation. In the domain of anthropology we may observe once more that after a period of pursuing the geographical diffusion of cultural traits and complexes over wide areas, after a time of conceiving cultures as things of "shreds and patches" made up of miscellaneous assemblages of traits derived from many sources, it began to become apparent that whatever the original derivation of these traits, they had been taken into a functioning society and reshaped by inner organizing forces. Just as Darwin had been partitive so these earlier studies in the social field had, to a considerable degree, concerned themselves with the picked bones of institutions and beliefs. The inner consistency, living society, had escaped attention. It was the day of the purely descriptive ethnographer just as, in post-Darwinian biology, several decades were consumed in the descriptive embroidery of evolution. It is not my intention to decry the value of these studies; it is merely to remark that in the end they were found, both in biology and social anthropology, to be inadequate to the problems presented. It was then, in the words of Ruth Benedict, that cultures began to loom like individual personalities "cast large upon the screen, given gigantic features and a long time span." To list or discuss the various views and contributions to this subject of such pioneers as Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Mead, Hallowell, Kluckhohn, and numerous others would go beyond the limitations of this book. What I wish to indicate here is simply that the holistic, organismic approach which finally emerged in biology when the intricacy of inner co- ordination and adjustment began to be realized has, once more, its analogue in the social field. Like organisms, societies ingest or reject materials which come to them. Often, like organisms, what is ingested is reworked in such a manner that when it reappears as a part of the social body it has been molded to fit a purpose other than what was envisaged in another time and place where the trait arose. Sometimes the psychological set or bent of a given society will long outlast its political independence or even its material technology. There is an inner cohesiveness which is a product of the social mind, just as in the body the persistence of a physical trait or an instinct is part of the co-ordinated behavior of an organism. With the rise of the human brain, however, and the emergence of societies in which social tradition constitutes a new form of heredity, another world is opening up for man -- a world he has possessed for only a few seconds in terms of the geological clock. It is important that his new powers and limitations should be properly assessed because only so can hope be entertained for his future. It must be remembered that in geological terms we are living perhaps at the very dawn of complex human society and this is most unfortunate because man, in coming to understand his genetic history, continues to look toward the past. This is the burden which science, and particularly evolutionary biology, has placed upon man's shoulders even as it has tried to free him from the shackles of superstition. Man is, in short, in danger of acquiring a feeling of inferiority about his past. It provides him with rationalizations for things undone and dreams defeated. How did this situation come about? "'That man is an animal is the great and special discovery of natural science in our generation; reported a contemporary of Darwin. [24] In that remark is epitomized the whole Darwinian concentration upon the past. It is natural, it is normal, it is the reaction to be expected of a world discovering the historic continuity of life for the first time. It is, however, a literal fixation upon the past. It accounts for our too great feeling of "at homeness" in a world where man, ever eager to transcend himself, should have other aspirations by reason of 'his very nature. He has been convinced of his rise from a late Tertiary anthropoid stock. Through neurological and psychological research he is conscious that the human brain is an imperfect instrument built up through long geological periods. Some of its levels of operation are more primitive and archaic than others. Our heads, modern man has learned, may contain weird and irrational shadows out of the subhuman past-shadows that under stress can sometimes elongate and fall darkly across the threshold of our rational lives. Man has lost the faith of the eighteenth century in the enlightening power of pure reason, for he has come to know that he is not a consistently reasoning animal. We have frightened ourselves with our own black nature and instead of thinking "We are men now, not beasts, and must live like men; we have eyed each other with wary suspicion and whispered in our hearts, "We will trust no one. Man is evil. Man is an animal. He has come from the dark wood and the caves." As Huxley said, it is easy to convince men that they are monkeys. We all know this in our hearts. The real effort lies in convincing us that we are men. Yet somewhere in the past a group of apes -- gross, brutal, violent-tempered, with a paucity of words -- started to act like men, and now they are men, but not far enough, not nearly far enough. There may be an animal limit within us but Darwin established no such limit. It is complacent to settle for material progress in machines while we stifle the spiritual aspirations for the "kingdom within" that all the world's great moral teachers have sought to instill into their followers. It was natural enough, in the eagerness to communicate a great scientific truth, that Darwin's followers, more dogmatically than Darwin, told and retold the tale of the past or tried to press across the barrier that still lay between cosmic and organic evolution. Haeckel, in a statement of 1877, contended that "the cell consists of matter called protoplasm, composed chiefly of carbon, with an admixture of hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur. These component parts, properly united, produce the soul and body of the animated world, and suitably nursed become man. With this single argument the mystery of the universe is explained, the Deity annulled and a new era of infinite knowledge ushered in." [25] This, it can readily be observed, is a very large order indeed. No reasonable scientist today would assume, even if he succeeded in creating simple life in a test tube, that the mystery of the universe was explained thereby. Haeckel's remark was dictated by anti-theological bias and a desire to settle man into the kind of "natural" world in which he now finds himself. As a recent student of evolution, the naturalist W. H. Dowdeswell, has remarked, "Studies centered exclusively on the past tend inevitably to obscure the present and future, thus fostering the idea that evolution has come to a comparative standstill at the present time or is proceeding too slowly to be detected." [28] From the moral and ethical standpoint, unless balanced by some consideration of the emergent aspects of the human psyche, these studies can lead in unenlightened hands to a certain complacent acquiescence in everything but the desire for more and more material progress in goods, com forts, and sensual enjoyment. Evolution, if it has taught us anything, has taught us that life is infinitely creative. Whether one accepts Henri Bergson's view of the process or not, one of the profoundest remarks he ever made was the statement that "the role of life is to insert some indetermination into matter." An advanced brain capable of multiple choices is represented on this planet only by man. He is a "reservoir of indetermination" containing infinite possibilities of good and evil. He is nature's greatest attempt to escape the blind subservience of the lower world to instinct and those evolutionary forces which, in all other forms of life, channel its various manifestations into constricted nooks and crannies of the environment. Wallace saw, and saw correctly, that with the rise of man the evolution of parts was to a marked degree outmoded, that mind was now the arbiter of human destiny. The Darwinians, however, were essentially biologists. They were accustomed to dealing with the lower animals, with instincts, with inherited habit, with the study of organisms responding to change rather than the observation of creatures controlling their own environment. They tended to confuse cultural behavior with the inherited behavior with which they were far more familiar. They could speak seriously of other races seeming "less human than our dogs and horses," but about the social attitudes which led to these revelatory statements they were remarkably unperceptive. The Mendelian developments of the early twentieth century intensified a severe trend toward a delimitation of human psychology in terms of instinct. [27] Much of what we would call acquired behavior patterns were labeled as inherited instincts by William James, Thorndike, and others. The triumphs of biology were influencing other fields in a manner resembling the triumphs of atomic physics today. Selfishness, acquisitiveness, opposition to women's rights were all at one time or another justified on the basis of instinct, of "human nature." To seek for the amelioration or removal of social ills such as war was to "oppose instinct." And to oppose instinct was, of course, to interfere with the evolutionary process and the inscrutable selective wisdom contained in the struggle for existence. In this attitude, in this unwillingness to interfere with "primeval nature," it is possible to perceive the greatest persistent blind spot in the thinking of the nineteenth century. Darwin himself is not guiltless in this respect, though there is no reason to blame him for the grosser philosophical sins of his followers. In making out his case for natural selection, and the fortuitous character of evolution as opposed to the metaphysical beliefs of the progressionists, Darwin incorporated into the Origin of Species a powerful expression of the utilitarian philosophy of his time. His emphasis lay to a very considerable degree upon selfish motivation, although he admitted that social animals would perpetuate adaptations which benefited the community. On the whole, however, he devoted little attention to the co-operative tendencies in life which later drew the attention of Prince Kropotkin. [28] It was, in actuality, part of that same curious indifference he showed to the co-operation manifested within the body itself. Yet this body we inhabit is composed of millions of selflessly toiling and co-operating cells. Cells have joined to individual cells in the long ages of evolutionary advance, have even sacrificed themselves to build that vaster individuality of which they can have no knowledge. The cell itself is, in turn, a laboratory where chemical processes are being carried on in an amazingly co-ordinated fashion. One generation, as Bergson somewhere remarks, bends lovingly over the cradle of the next. All of these thing;, imply other aspects of life than those to which the Darwinians devoted the greater part of their attention. Professor W. C. Allee expressed the more modern viewpoint succinctly when he said, not long ago. "The subsocial and social life of animals shows two major tendencies: one toward aggressiveness, which is best developed in man and his fellow vertebrates; the other toward unconscious, and in higher animals, toward conscious cooperation. With various associates I have long experimented upon both tendencies. Of these, the drive toward cooperation ... is the more elusive and the more important." [29] V. The Role of Indeterminism The blind spot we have dwelt upon in Darwinian thinking is not confined to a confused weighing of the relative aspects of co-operation and struggle in the long history of life. There is another phase of evolutionary thought which it is of the utmost importance to clarify. We have spoken of the brain of man as a sort of organ of indetermination. We have seen through Wallace its ability to escape from mechanical specialization, its creation of a freedom unknown to any other creature on the planet. Ironically enough, that freedom, that power of choice on the part of man, represents in a curious way the belated triumph of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck. [30] Here at last volition has taken its place in the world of nature. It was not perhaps quite the place these evolutionists had foreseen, but in the end its part in the cultural drama of man could not be gainsaid by their scientific successors. The mind of man, by indetermination, by the power of choice and cultural communication, by the great powers of thought, is on the verge of escape from the blind control of that deterministic world with which the Darwinists had unconsciously shackled man. The inborn characteristics laid upon him by the biological extremists have crumbled away. Man is many things -- he is protean, elusive, capable of great good and appalling evil. He is what he is -- a reservoir of indeterminism. He represents the genuine triumph of volition, life's near evasion of the forces that have molded it. In the West of our day only one anachronistic force threatens man with the ruin of that hope. It is his confusion of the word "progress" with the mechanical extensions which represent his triumph over the primeval wilderness of biological selection. This confusion represents, in away, a reversion. It is a failure to see that the triumph of the machine without an accompanying inner triumph represents an atavistic return to the competition and extermination represented in the old biological evolution of "parts." In the case of man the struggle is, of course, veiled and projected into his machines, but the enormous wealth now poured by modem governments into the development of implements of war reveals a kind of leviathan echo from the Age of Dinosaurs. Nor is this attitude confined to the exigencies of defense. It persists in the notion that something called gracious living is solely associated with high-powered automobiles and the social amenities available in the very best clubs. It is the twentieth-century version of the Victorian idea that men of simple cultures are "moral fossils." A few years ago, in a desert and out-of-the-way region of Mexico, the writer and a companion wandered lost and exhausted into the camp of a Mexican peon. This man, whose wife and newborn child were sheltered in a little hovel of sticks into which one could only creep on hands and knees, supplied our needs graciously. To our amazement he gently refused any payment, and walked with us to the edge of his barren lands in order to set us on the right path. There was a dignified simplicity about this man and his wife, in their little nest of sticks, that was a total antithesis to gracious living in the great land to the north. It demanded no mechanical extensions, no stewards with shining trays. We had drunk from a common vessel. We had bowed and spoken as graciously as on the steps of a great house. I had looked into his eyes and seen there that transcendence of self is not to be sought in the outer world or in mechanical extensions. These are merely another version of specialized evolution. They can be used for human benefit if one recognizes them for what they are, but they must never be confused with that other interior kingdom in which man is forever free to be better than what he knows himself to be. It is there that the progress of which he dreams is at last to be found. It is the thing that his great moral teachers have been telling him since man was man. This is his true world; the other, the mechanical world which tickles his fancy, may be useful to good men but it is not in itself good. It takes its color from the minds behind it and this man has not learned. When he does so he will have achieved his final escape from the world which Darwin saw and pictured. One last thing, however, should be said of Charles Darwin, the man who saw the wrinkled hide of a disintegrating planet, glyptodonts and men, all equally flowing down the direction of time's arrow: he was a master artist and he entered sympathetically into life. As a young man somewhere in the high-starred Andean night, or perhaps drinking alone at an island spring where wild birds who had never learned to fear man came down upon his shoulder, Charles Darwin saw a vision. It was one of the most tremendous insights a living being ever had. It combined the awful roar of Hutton's Scottish brook with a glimpse of Smith's frail ladder dangling into the abyss of vanished eras. None of his forerunners has left us such a message; none saw, in a similar manner, the whole vista of life with quite such sweeping vision. None, it may be added, spoke with the pity which infuses these lines: "If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow brethren in pain, disease, 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 melted together." [31] Darwin was twenty-eight when he jotted down this paragraph in his notebook. If he had never conceived of natural selection, if he had never written the Origin, it would still stand as a statement of almost clairvoyant perception. There are very few youths today who will pause, coming from a biology class, to finger a yellow flower or poke in friendly fashion at a sunning turtle on the edge of the campus pond, and who are capable of saying to themselves, "We are all one -- all melted together." It is for this, as much as for the difficult, concise reasoning of the Origin, that Darwin's shadow will run a long way forward into the future. It is his heritage from the parson- naturalists of England. _______________ Notes: 1. Adam Sedgwick, A Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge, 5th ed., London, 1850, p. xlv. Also Proceedings of the Geological Society of London, 1831, Vol. 1, p. 305. 2. Invitation to Pilgrimage, Oxford University Press, 1942 , p. 94. 3. Louis Agassiz, "A Period in the History of Our Planet," Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, 1843, Vol. 35, p. 5. 4. Care should be taken by the reader who consults the primary documents of this period to distinguish between true "progressionism" and the phrase "progressive-development theory," which is occasionally applied to genuine evolution, particularly the Lamarckian variety. 5. Essays and Observations, London, 1861, Vol. 1, pp. 46-47. 6. F. R. Moulton, "Influence of Astronomy on Science," Scientific Monthly, 1938, Vol. 67, p. 306. 7. Third ed., London, 1834, Vol. 2, p. 325. (Italics mine. L.E.) 8. It is perhaps worth noting, since the biological observations of Malthus are little commented upon, that he recognized, like so many others, the effects of selective breeding in altering the appearance of plants and animals, but regarded such alterations of form as occurring within admittedly ill-defined limits. 9. C. Pritchard, "Spectrum Analysis," The Contemporary Review, 1869, Vol. 11, p. 487. (Italics mine. L.E.) 10. Ibid., p. 490. 11. A few progressionists, such as Lord Brougham, were willing to entertain the possibility of a future development beyond man, but such Ideas are not characteristic of this group of thinkers as a whole. The strong theological emphasis of this school of thought inevitably tended to overshadow such suggestions. 12. The Evolution of Man, New York, 1896, Vol. 1, p. 950. 13. LLD, Vol. 3, p. 119. 14. Ibid. 15. Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus, Leipzig, 1881. 16. VAP, Vol. 2, p. 483. 17. See E. S. Russell, "Schopenhauer's Contribution to Biological Theory," in Science, Medicine and History, edited by E. A. Underwood. Oxford University Press, 1953, Vol. 2, pp. 205-6. 18. E. T. Brewster, Creation: A History of Non-Evolutionary Theories, Indianapolis, 1927, p. 81. 19. A. O. Lovejoy, "Monboddo and Rousseau," Modern Philology, 1932-33. Vol. 30, pp. 277-78. 20. Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, 1795, Noonday Press ed., New York, 1955. p. 199. 21. C. W. M. Hart. "Social Evolution and Modern Anthropology; Essays in Political Economy, edited by H. A. Innis, University of Toronto Press, n.d. p. 114. 22. "On Natural History as Knowledge, Discipline and Power" (1856), Scientific Memoirs of Thomas Huxley, 1898, Vol. 1, p. 306. (Italics mine. L.E.) 23. Anniversary Address, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, 1862, Vol. 18, p. 1. 24. William Graham, The Creed of Science, London, 1881, p. 161. 25. Cited by W. S. Lilley in the Fortnightly Review, 1886, Vol. 39, p. 35. 26. The Mechanism of Evolution, Heinemann, London, 1955, p. 1. 27. Merle Curti, "Human Nature in American Thought: Retreat from Reason in the Age of Science," Political Science Quarterly, 1953, Vol. 68, pp. 495-96. 28. Mutual Aid, 1902 (various editions). 29. "Biology" in What is Science? ed. by James R. Newman, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955, p. 243. 30. David Bidney, Theoretical Anthropology, Columbia University Press, p. 82. 31. LLD, Vol. 2, p. 6. Notebook of 1837.
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