PART 1
Wilson’s book on Darwin came out
in England in the first week of September. It won’t appear in America until
December, but it is easily obtainable online from bookstores in the UK by going
to www.abebooks.com.
My “reviews” of books are usually
not complete reviews. What I often do is focus on one issue that is important
to me and discuss how good a job the author did on that. In the case of the
historical Jesus, I look at how accurate was the author in describing ancient
Jewish culture (the answer most often is that the author presents a biased view
of Jewish culture to support his or her preconceived ideas about Jesus in
conflict with Judaism). In the case of the historical Charles Darwin, my main
concern is how honest the author is about Darwin’s racism and his commitment to
genocide. I will get to Wilson’s take on this below. But since the book is not
available here yet, I thought I would first give a more general account of its
contents. I should say that I am writing from the perspective of someone who
has published two books on Darwin’s racism and I know how much evidence there
is for this, which most authors, including Wilson, will not get into.
With the exception of one chapter
(on natural selection), Charles Darwin:
Victorian Mythmaker is three-quarters biography and one-quarter analysis of
certain key issues. If you are interested in Darwin’s life story, this book
gives as good an account as any. But if you are interested in those issues, the
discussions are somewhat faulty, perhaps due to lack of sufficient space. Either
they don’t go deep enough or they fail to present enough evidence (for points
that Wilson is absolutely right about) or they misrepresent some of the
evidence or, in an effort to be even-handed, they are not quite fair (or too
fair) to Darwin or to someone else.
I say this even though I agree
with many of Wilson’s points. He has some wonderful insights along the way. He
points out that Darwinists are the only scientists in the world who are
obsessed with God. Physicists do not use God in their explanations of the
universe, but they don’t go on and on about how they have banished God from the
universe. Darwinists are constantly dragging God into the subject by bragging
about how they have dragged God out of biology. They just cannot let go of
theology. It is bizarre. But Wilson is wrong to blame Darwin for this, as I
will explain. Wilson also rightly observes that Darwin was more a product of
his culture’s Zeitgeist than he
realized. His views were more the result of certain values than they were
self-generated.
When Wilson departs from
straightforward biography and gets into the issues, there are three that are
his main concern: 1) religion (how irreligious was Darwin and how much harm did
he do to religion?); 2) natural selection (is it true or false? did Darwin
prove or fudge his case? this is where Wilson makes some of his best points);
and 3) predecessors (was Darwin fair to the evolutionists who came before him
or did his ego get in the way?).
On the last question, Wilson is
right that Darwin took too much credit for himself, but he often fails to give
the evidence to make the point convincing. He notes that Darwin’s grandfather
Erasmus Darwin must have been a big influence on Charles, but he omits the
specific things that Charles took from Erasmus. Wilson correctly points out
what a big impact Robert Chambers’s Vestiges
of the Natural History of Creation (1844) had on evolutionary thought,
twelve years before On the Origin of
Species made its appearance, but he is unfair to Chambers when he says,
“Broadly … he scooped Darwin.” It was more than broadly. Chambers gave specific
evidence for evolution (the development theory) just as Darwin would: the
fossil record, embryos, rudimentary organs, the ancient age of the earth,
artificial selection, and more. In each case, Chambers argued that the
development hypothesis was a better explanation than independent creation
(creationism). Wilson claims that Darwin more than Chambers “taught the world
to see that nature is not in a fixed or still condition.” That is simply not
true. Chambers probably deserves more credit than Darwin. So does Erasmus
Darwin who argued that organisms were in a constant state of transition. But
Wilson is generally right that Charles Darwin’s ego did not let him give
adequate notice to others. Wilson unfortunately seems to follow suit at times.
Religion and natural selection
are Wilson’s biggest issues with Darwin. On religion, Wilson is not fair to him.
He represents Darwin as a secret atheist who promoted a worldview that
undermined belief in God, but could never quite come out and say it that way.
Wilson knows that Thomas Huxley is more to blame for this than Darwin, but
still he wants to put Darwin in the same boat. He will quote from letters that
Darwin did not believe in Christian doctrines (such as Christ is the son of
God), but that does not make Darwin a disbeliever in God. Throughout his life,
in letters and in publications, Darwin made it clear that ultimately he was too
confused (in “thick mud,” as he said) to settle on whether or not there was a
God who designed nature. If anything, he was inclined towards design, but in
the end, he adopted agnosticism, never atheism (as he explained in one letter).
At one point, Wilson admits that Darwin’s Origin
is “not essentially atheistic in texture,” but for most of his book he tries to
make the opposite case, and not successfully, I should add.
Wilson has a better case when he
contends that natural selection is not a proven theory. He contends that 1)
Darwin was wrong to link evolution to the struggle for survival, while ignoring
how much cooperation there is in nature (though here too Wilson misses the best
evidentiary case he could make; there is at least one letter where Darwin
condemns any cooperation, especially among humans, because it is opposed to the
principle of competition, and then there is the fact of how often he uses
‘competition’ in Origin,
demonstrating how heavily he relied on it), and 2) Darwin was equally wrong to
insist that change in nature always happens gradually because as modern
genetics now shows, nature does sometimes make leaps, which Darwin denied. I do
not know enough about the science of genes to comment on this last point. I can
only say that I wish Wilson had given evidence that Darwin ignored cases of
leaps that were known in his own time.
Wilson is also right to point out
that Darwin frequently relied on speculation to make his case for natural
selection. In my work, I have noted how often Darwin used such phrases as ‘we
may imagine’, ‘we can understand’, ‘I can see no great difficulty’, ‘we may
believe’ and the like, in Origin. At
most, he could prove in this way that something is conceivable or possible, but
this certainly does not prove probability. He used ‘I can see no difficulty’
when he speculated that whales might have developed from a race of aquatic
bears. Scientists mocking this claim forced him to remove it from later
editions, but he was not happy about doing it. What was so unscientific about
this claim is that Darwin made no attempt to compare the anatomy of a whale and
a bear. He just simply imagined their relationship.
Even if Wilson is right that
Darwin failed to prove or even make a credible case for natural selection, that
does not mean that all the arguments Wilson brings to bear are correct.
Sometimes Wilson can go overboard and hurt his own case. He argues that
artificial selection does not help to prove natural selection because natural
selection will have to produce changes that are long-lasting, if not permanent,
in order to account for the fairly steady species we see today, whereas
artificial selection does not produce lasting traits, making it “a poor model
for natural selection.” Adaptations have to last in order to create a new
species. What Wilson fails to see is that of course artificial selection
produces impermanent results. It relies on the whim of the breeder. If another
breeder takes over, or if nature takes over when a domesticated animal or plant
is returned to the wild, the first human breeder’s choice of traits is not
going to continue. Human breeders generally do not select for survival, which
presumably is what nature does. Humans select for some aesthetic choice or for
what is useful on their farms (such as short-legged sheep which will not be
able to jump over a fence). For nature, this is just pure whimsy and will not
last when that breeder is taken out of the picture. But if nature has steady
goals for an organism, then nature’s selections will be around for a while.
Wilson is so eager to prove that
natural selection failed early on to convince scientists that he misquotes from
a letter of Joseph Hooker, Darwin’s friend and supporter, to Darwin. He has
Hooker say that he was going to devote part of a speech to “the fact that
Darwin’s theory had failed.” That is not what Hooker said (and Wilson gives the
wrong reference for the letter, making it hard to find, but find it I did). What
Hooker actually said was that he wanted Darwin’s help to gather information on
how Origin was doing abroad, so that
he could “disprove the statement, that the Theory is ‘fast passing away’ [as
was claimed in one review of another book of Darwin’s].”
PART 2 (the shorter part)
The main thing that disappointed
me in Wilson’s book is how little attention he gives to Darwin’s attachment to
racism, colonialism, and the genocides carried out by western imperialism
(including that conducted in America). He gives a little attention to the first
and virtually none to the last two. An author can choose to focus on whatever
he wishes, but in this case, if you are out to bring down the false hero
worship of Darwin, as Wilson evidently is, why would you leave out Darwin’s
biggest scientific sins? It is puzzling that Wilson would completely miss that
Darwin presents genocide as if it were a matter of natural selection, when the
truth is that genocide is a case of humans artificially rearranging the world. Wilson
has nothing to say about this. That is astounding.
As for racism, though Wilson
comments a little on Darwin’s belief in the inferiority of darker-skinned races
and savages, his general remarks on this are a little all over the place. Very
early in the book, he notes Darwin’s racism (it is “beyond question”) and
immediately excuses it by saying that “I would be cautious about judging men
and women of the nineteenth century by the standards of the twenty-first.” Over
300 pages later, he throws such caution to the wind and proclaims, “It seems
fair, however, to say that Darwin was a direct and disastrous influence, not
only on Hitler, but on the whole mid-twentieth-century political mindset.” (Thirty
pages earlier he also blames eugenics on Darwin.) Then he flips back the other way just twenty
pages after this: “It would be unfair to saddle Darwin with all the blame for
the sorry history of eugenics, and for the habit of mind which produced not only
the eugenic movement but the tyrannies of the twentieth century.” So not all
the blame, but a considerable portion of it, which is going back on Wilson’s
earlier statement of not judging someone by later standards.
I would not deny that Darwin’s
outlook has a lot common with later horrors, but if this is so, it is because
he was influenced by colonialism and this same colonialism also had an impact
on twentieth century tyrannies. European colonialism, with all its horrors, is
the connecting link. The science of Darwin’s time was in the middle. It was not
leading the way. European imperial politics was creating a terrible inhumanity
and Darwin’s science was carried out in service of that politics. He was giving
imperialism support, but he was a follower more than a leader. The blame should
rightly belong to colonialism for influencing both Darwin and later
dictatorships.
Wilson overlooks another point,
which is the substance of my two books on Darwin. We do not have to judge
Darwin by later standards. There were plenty of people in his time, albeit a
minority, who objected to racism and its inhumane consequences. Some of them
were evolutionists but quite unlike Darwin’s brand. We forget in fact that
evolutionary theory was headed in a kinder and antiracist direction before
Charles Darwin came along. This is not a matter of judging Darwin in hindsight.
Contemporary standards were enunciated that differed sharply from the
predominant, but not exclusive, racism of the era. That no one listened to them,
and least of all Darwin who was very aware of a more humane approach to science
but shoved it aside, was not their fault, and it is no reason why we should not
listen now.
© 2017 Leon Zitzer
