Sunday, July 28, 2019

GIVING CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE


In a letter to his friend the botanist Joseph Hooker, Charles Darwin said he thought the theory of “the common descent of species” (i.e., the general theory of evolution) “is the more important point” as compared to his theory of natural selection. And the widespread belief in the theory of evolution “may be fairly attributed in large part to the ‘Origin.’”

Yes, Darwin’s book certainly deserves some of the credit, but not all the credit and I would not even give it the lion’s share of the credit. At the very least an equal share must go to Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). The book went through ten editions before Darwin’s Origin was published. (Though published anonymously, by 1847 most scientists were pretty sure Chambers was the author.) Not only was it enormously popular and turned on many people, including many budding scientists, to evolutionary theory (the development hypothesis, as it was then called), but we have suppressed its major accomplishment: It proved that the transmutation of species was the better explanation for the variety of life we see on this planet.

Before Darwin ever published a word on this, Chambers presented much of the same evidence that Darwin was already working on, but would not publish for another 15 years. Chambers saw that embryos, commonality of structures (such as the bones in a human hand and in a bat’s wing), artificial selection, and more made it more likely that species descended from other species than that each species was specially created. Evolution as an explanation of life had greater probability going for it.

Was Chambers as rigorous or methodical a thinker as Darwin? No. Could he have been clearer and more thorough? Yes. But these are not the issues. The questions are: Did Chambers do it, did he prove greater probability for the development hypothesis, and did he use the right evidence to make his proof compelling and correct? The answer is a resounding yes to all three of these questions. Yet he has never been given the credit he deserves.

Just to give one intriguing example of how unfair everyone has been to Chambers, in his follow-up book, Explanations (1846), Chambers spent some time explaining why John Stuart Mill’s ideas on logic were so important to development theory. It was correct procedure to formulate a hypothesis based on a little bit of data and then scan nature for more evidence that could be explained by the hypothesis. When Darwin’s book came out, Mill praised it as logically sound and friends of Darwin reported this to him. He was thrilled. He took it as another sign that he was on the right path. Everyone simply forgot that Chambers had been there a dozen years earlier.

Why this unjust shunning of Chambers? Part of it is undoubtedly that Darwin became an icon within his own lifetime and no one wanted to detract from that saintly status by dragging Chambers into it. But I think that there is a more profound reason. Chambers had something in common with other exponents of evolution, such as Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles), Constantine Rafinesque, Georg Gerland, and others. They were all more interested in the moral and spiritual consequences of the theory than in the cause. They understood evolutionary theory as giving an important boost to humanitarianism. It should teach us tolerance and love. It should teach us that all life is one and interconnected.

Most of Darwin’s supporters and Darwin himself were more interested in how evolution could be used to support Britain’s imperialism. One dominant species over all was a lesson Darwin was quick to draw. Chambers and others would stress that all God’s creatures, even the smallest and weakest, have a place in the sun—a deserved place in the scheme of things. Darwin did not see it that way. He was more into ranking organisms (“groups subordinate to groups” as he frequently says in Origin) and he had no problem with the extermination of groups, even Europeans exterminating native peoples.

So let’s remember why we erase people from history. It is not always because their accomplishments were somehow less. It is often because we are afraid of their greater insights into morality and the spirit of mankind. And maybe too their science was better than it was made out to be.

© 2019 Leon Zitzer


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