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Darwin as a RelucatantRevolutionary: AgainstReductionism in the History ofScienceTed Benton aa University of EssexPublished online: 18 Jan 2010.

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Darwin

Desmond and James Moore and Janet Browne that I found truly refreshing.

(Cassino University)

Endnotes 1. Charles Darwin: Vojag-tng, London: Jonathan Cape, 1995). 2. Histo9 and Philosophg of the Lifp Sciences 11 (1989): 89-93. 3. Pietro Corsi, Science and Religion: Baden Powell and the Anglican Debate (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Darwin as a Reluctant Revolutionary: Against Reductionism in the History of Science Ted Benton

My paperback copy of Desmond and Moore’s tour de force has a quote from Stephen Gould on the cover: ‘ [u]nquestionably the finest biogra- phy ever written about Darwin’. I can’t claim to have read them all, but I’m happy to accept Gould’s judgment. The book draws with immense and painstaking scholarship on all the burgeoning sources of informa- tion on Darwin’s life that are now available to us. In a way that is quite exceptional, this effort of scholarship disappears into an apparently effortless prose style which brings the events of Darwin’s life, and his inner turmoil vividly to life. As a resource for all future work on Darwin and his associates, this book will be a real landmark. Even in putting together my own criticisms I have covered my copy of their book with marginal notes, and drawn extensively on their scholarship!

Having made that clear, I want now to offer my reasons for sharply disagreeing with the Desmond/Moore approach to the understanding of scientific innovation, and to Darwin’s great scientific achievement, in particular. There is a view of the relation between scientific ideas and their wider social and political context which is implicit, and occasion- ally explicit in Darwin, and which is the source of the methodological protocols at work in the construction of its central narrative. This view, I think, has the effect of ‘flattening out’ Darwin’s achievement in such a way that it casts no shadow, or is so thoroughly camouflaged in the cul- tural processes of its time that it all but disappears from view. Or, to change the metaphor, it is as if a great building were to be reduced to the bricks and mortar out of which it was built, and the sweat of the labourers who built it. After listing some of the paradoxes of Darwin’s life and work, Desmond and Moore claim: ‘[ulnderstand Darwin’s scientific status, his social obligations, his Dissenting heritage, the poli-

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tical context, and the contradictions start to resolve themselves’ (xvii) . Against this, I want to argue that some of the contradictions to which they refer are real, and to resolve them is to risk distortion. At the same time, I think it can be shown that at least some of the contradictions which surface in their narrative are produced by a systematic conflict between the facts they unearth, on the one hand, and the interpretative frame and methodological procedures they impose upon them, on the other.

The introductory chapter tells us, repeatedly, what is different about this biography: ‘[olur Darwin sets out to be different - to pose the awk- ward questions ... to portray the scientific expert as a product of his time . . . ’ (xvi) , ‘ [w]e want to understand how his theories and strategies were embedded in a reforming Whig society’ (xvii) , ‘Ours is a defiantly social portrait . . . We see Darwin on the streets, sitting in with apes at the zoo, picking up pigeon lore in gin palaces, conniving with his hetero- dox dining circle, living a squire’s life, investing in factories, worrying about religion and confronting death. Viewed in this light, his fears and foibles become intelligible and his evolutionary achievements make sense’(xviii). So, Darwin’s scientific struggles are of a piece with the cultural and political struggles of early nineteenth century Britain in turmoil. To understand the latter is to be able to make sense of the former. Even further, not only is Darwin’s production of the concept of natural selection to be understood in terms of its social and cultural conditions, but its very topic, Darwin’s ‘object of knowledge’, also turns out to be those same social and cultural struggles:

‘Social Darwinism’ is often taken to be something extraneous, an ugly concretion added to the pure Darwinian corpus after the event, tamish- ing Darwin’s image. But his notebooks make plain that competition, free trade, imperialism, racial extermination, and sexual inequality were writ- ten into the equation from the start - ‘Darwinism’ was always intended to explain human society (xix).

As we move through the plot, the consequences of this ‘defiantly social’ approach become clearer. By 1838, when Darwin has already secretly committed himself to a materialist view of mental life, and to the trans- mutation of species, but is struggling with the question of the mechan- ism of organic change, the stage has been set for his reading of Malthus. Desmond and Moore have emphasised the presence of Malthusian enthusiasms in Darwin’s circle, especially through his conversations with Harriet Martineau, companion to his dissenting brother, Erasmus. Opposition to the New Poor Law was rife, and it was one of the prime targets of the Chartist movement. On their interpretation, Malthus

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offers Darwin the double benefit of solving the problem of evolutionary mechanism, and, simultaneously, reconciling his dangerously radical evolutionary ideas with sober bourgeois respectability. This interpret- ation, of course, depends on a rather strong identification of the Malthusian argument with Darwin’s own use of it: a conceptual homo- geneity between the two ‘discourses’:

Malthus calculated that, with the brakes off, humanity could double in a mere twenty-five years ... death, disease, wars and famine checked the population. Darwin saw that an idatical struggle took place throughout nature, and he realised that it could be turned into a truly creative force’ (265 - my italics).

Once this is established, then Darwin’s evolutionism can be assimilated to Malthusianism, ‘the Whig free-trader’s godsend’ (264) :

Darwin’s biological initiative matched advanced Whig social thinking. This is what made it compelling. At last he had a mechanism that was compatible with the competitive, free-trading ideals of the ultra-Whigs. The transmutation at the base of his theory would still be loathed by many. But the Malthusian superstructure struck an emotionally satisfying chord; an open struggle with no hand-outs to the losers was the Whig way, and no poor law commissioner could have bettered Darwin’s view (267).

But this ‘defiantly social’ version of the story is in deep tension with, if not outright contradiction to, other themes fully acknowledged else- where in the text. First, it is quite clear that Darwin, like Schoenberg, in a different context, was a ‘reluctant revolutionary’. His adoption of a materialist view of mental operations was dictated by the scientific requirement to identify a medium through which instincts and other psychological dispositions could be inherited, but it clearly scandalised him (xvi). His view of organic change through small-scale variations required him to abandon the powerful hold of the teleological view of perfectly adapted organisms. Central to the Desmond/Moore account of Darwin’s psychosomatic illnesses and his 20 year delay in publishing his break-through is a recognition of the enormous conceptual and hence moral and political gulf that was emerging between Darwin’s private thoughts and the established views of the circle of gentleman scientists and clerics to whom Darwin deferred. But if Darwin’s thought was so thoroughly embedded in the culture of its time, if Darwin was so much a product of his society, how could this gulf have opened up? Why did Darwin swim so painfully against the tide, especially, as we learn, since his newly won scientific views were increasingly associated with revolutionaries and insurgents whose politics were anathema to him? If, in the course of the formation of his view of organic change, he finally

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succeeded in reconciling his mechanism with ‘advanced Whig social thinking’, why did his inner tensions and fears persist another 20 years? If the Malthusian mechanism was so ‘emotionally satisfying', why are the notebooks and sketches of the theory studded with expressions of dread and deep disquiet about the view of nature to which he had been driven (see, for example, evidence cited on pages 448ff.)?

Finally, and, I think, most tellingly, Desmond and Moore fully recog- nise the depths of opposition to anthropocentric thought reached by Darwin in his notebooks of the late 1830s. Darwin recognises that his theory of organisms in process of adaptation to shifting conditions of life implies a radical relativisation of directional change: the tapeworm is no less ‘perfect’ in this sense than are humans themselves. This dis- places all talk of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ organisms, and undercuts any use of ‘evolution’ as the providential onward march of ‘progress’. It also, of course, undercuts all human arrogance - we, like other species, are the contingent outcome of a myriad of unknown environmental forces acting upon random variations occurring in the populations of our primate ancestors. In an utterly startling passage from the notebooks (also cited by Desmond and Moore), Darwin speculates on human/ animal kinship, and likens the anthropocentrism of his time with the ideology of race-inferiority:

Animals -whom we have made our slaves we do not like to consider our equals. - Do not slave-holders wish to make the black man other kind? . . . the soul by consent of all is superadded, animals not got it, not look for- ward if we choose to let conjecture run wild then animals our fellow brethren in pain, disease, death, & suffering & famine; our slaves in the most laborious work, our companion in our amusements. they may par- take, from our origin in one common ancestor we may be all netted together. I

Desmond and Moore quite rightly note that this ‘non-human orien- tation was a total departure from radical wisdom, let alone religious convention’ (232). Darwin’s thinking was radically opposed to any interpretation of nature as designed for or conforming to human pur- poses, but this had implications, too, for the practice of science. As Desmond and Moore note, Darwin was deeply impressed by a review of Comte’s work on the ‘positive philosophy’ at about this time. Like Comte, Darwin’s view of science was one which eschewed the reading into nature of prior religious or metaphysical prejudices - science was to be based exclusively on what could be derived from observation and experiment. In short, nature is the measure of the worth of a scientific theoiy, not conventional opinion or established ideology. We do not have t o take this positivist credo at face value (and I do not) to see that

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Darwin’s adoption of it gives the lie to Desmond and Moore’s ‘cultural assimilationist’ story. What is the case? Has Darwin produced a view of nature which is a ‘total departure’ from even the most radical extrem- ists of the time, or has he achieved an ‘emotionally satisfying’ recon- ciliation with Malthusian free-trading Whig social thought? Can both accounts be true? And, while we are on this point, why are Darwin’s notebooks and his private sketches so overwhelmingly devoted to obser- vations and speculations about about bees, earthworms, finches, fossil mammals, corals, geological strata and geographical distributions if, from the beginning, his concern was always ‘to explain human society’? Could it be that, banal as it seems, Darwin was, true to his non-anthro- pocentric view of both nature and science, actually trying to explain the origin of species?

The paradox, here, it seems to me, is that, true to their own method- ological protocols, Desmond and Moore offer us a thoroughly socio- cultural, and therefore thoroughly anthropocentric narrative of the emergence in mid-nineteenth century Britain of a radically non-anthro- pocentric view of living nature, and of the proper procedures for coming to know it. Their scholarship is such that Darwin’s non-anthro- pocentric vision surfaces from time to time in the telling of the narra- tive, only to be re-submerged under the waves of socio-cultural determinism. This should not be a surprise. Darwin was forever ‘for- getting’ his own rejection of hierarchy and progress in nature (most evidently in his Descent ofMan), and the cooption of his ‘evolutionism’ to almost every contradictory moral and political cause and interest from 1859 onwards needs little comment. That our own time should endorse anthropocentric readings of Darwin to the point that alterna- tives must seem as heretical as Darwin himself in 1838 is unsurprising. To most of my fellow historians and social scientists, apparent interest in worms, barnacles, ‘humble’ bees, and even extinct Llamas can only be made intelligible on the assumption that such beings have sonie sym- bolic or metaphoric reference to the human, or, perhaps, in the case of Darwin, because they provide the key to an explanatory understanding of our own origins and destiny. Nature as mirror to the human.

The much vaunted ‘linguistic turn’ in the human sciences and phil- osophy has both confirmed and intensified such anthropocentrism. For some, the insight that we have to use language to talk about things has been transformed into an injunction to talk interminably about language, and never about things. Part of the problem, here, it seems to me, is too much reading and discussing and not enough going out and doing or experiencing. What leaps out of every page of Darwin is his indomitable excitement and wonder at the diversity of life, the

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intricacies of each distinctive mode of life, the fabulously complex interdependencies revealed by minute, painstaking and indefatigable observation of living beings. He has the most vivid sense of the sheer power of the forces of nature (of which, of course, natural selection was one), and of the immensity of the challenge all this complexity- in-motion presented to human powers of comprehension. Perhaps to get at this dimension of Darwin’s intellectual work asks too much of a contemporary cohort of urban scholars, steeped in the anthropocen- tric presuppositions of both modern and post-modern ‘humanities’, and firmly located in a world of ‘tamed’ and acculturated ‘ex-nature’. Nature, as Anthony Giddens has recently reminded us, ‘no longer exists’.’ The paradox for Desmond and Moore, of course, is that their ‘reading in’ of the socio-cultural - splicing into the same paragraph some comment about Chartist agitation together with an extract from Darwin on Malthus - runs the risk of ‘reading out’ the very thing that makes it important for us to have good biographies of Darwin: the rea- son why he was more than a mere product of his time, but part of a process of transforming both it and our own.

When I first made contact with history and social studies of science, some thirty years ago, ‘externalism’ and ‘internalism’ were the labels under which rival approaches did battle with one another. The ‘textual analysts and historians of disembodied ideas’ lampooned by Desmond and Moore in their introduction are, I suppose, the ‘internalists’. But to take sides with the ‘externalists’ was to confront further options. What was the ‘outside’ of science, and by what means did it shape what went on within? Were we to focus on the social processes and power relations of the ‘scientific community’ itself, or on the connections of the profession of science with wider social, economic, political and cul- tural forces? And if the latter, which of the bewildering variety of social theories did we draw upon? Two things, in retrospect, seem to have been glaringly absent from the drift of these questions and the most common answers given to them. The first is that it was assumed by ‘externalists’ that the ‘outside’ of science was exclusively its social con- text. The thought that those things, mechanisms and processes, the understanding of which was the central object of science might also be active in shaping scientific thought about them was more-or-less absent (dispatched by the critique of ‘positivism’). The second absence was serious attention to the logical presupposition of there being a distinc- tion between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of science at all: this was that a distinction could be made between science and whatever lay outside it, and that some sort of boundary could be drawn around what went under the category ‘science’.

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The first absence persists, as what I have called ‘anthropocen- trism’ and I hope I’ve gone some way towards showing its paradoxical effects in Desmond and Moore’s remarkable biography. The second absence is, of course, connected, but it it has its own distinct con- sequences. We might call it ‘sociocultural reductionism’, or ‘assimila- tionism’. Some of the followers of ‘externalism’ sought to interpret scientific ideas as expressions of the dominant ideology, whilst others, impressed by the growing integration of scientific research into the R&D of big capitalist firms, proclaimed science as a ‘force of produc- tion’. In these post-modernist times, we are more likely to see science represented in terms of the play of free-floating cultural forms and ‘dis- courses’, or assimilated to the literary canon, available for analysis in the same terms as works of fiction. I have suggested that, for all the great richness and complexity of their analysis, Desmond and Moore remain attached to an ‘assimilatory’, or ‘reductionist’ methodology. Their narrative fails to give due recognition to the specificity and dis- tinctiveness of the particular intellectual project that we now identify with Darwin, and to the requirements imposed on the development of his thinking by the character of that project, the canons of interpre- tation of evidence and reasoning about it, and the stubborn facts (note, we are all post-positivists now: I say ‘stubborn facts’, not ‘raw sense data’!) of nature that he encountered in the course of his long struggle.

So, do I have an alternative to offer? Do I propose a return to the despised ‘history of intellectual ghosts’? I have left little space to sketch out what a non-reductive and non-anthropocentric study of science might look like, but I’ll do what I can.g The starting point must be to agree that science is a social practice (or, rather, a complex ‘family’ of them), and that scientific knowledge claims are, in consequence, rightly recognised to be social products - even ‘constructs’ as some would say. But the social world has its own inner complexity, its differ- entiated purposes and practices, each with its own specific mode of articulation and interdependence with the others. Just as the social practices are various, so are their products - builders produce build- ings, farmers produce food, composers produce music, politicians pro- duce ideology, and scientists as scientists produce science (of course, scientists may play the part of politicians, and in doing so often produce drivel). Science has in common with other social practices that it is con- ducted by human beings who also participate in other social practices, are physically embodied, and capable of actively intervening in the world, also of monitoring the consequences of doing so, beings who coordinate their activities and define their purposes through conven- tional sign systems including language.

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What distinguishes scientific practices from others is their nonnative commitment to understanding and explaining things, processes, events and so on which are recognised to exist and act independently of the social processes of coming to understand and explain them. This o n t e logical commitment of scientific activity (what Roy Bhaskar calls science’s ‘intransitive dimension’) ,4 together with the discursively negotiated purpose of understanding and explanation provides the rationale for epistemological and methodological constraints on the production, criticism and correction of scientific knowledge claims. These constraints are quite distinct from those of writing poetry, constructing novels, legitimating power and privilege, and designing chemical plants.

If we take together both what scientific activity shares and what dif- ferentiates it from other practices then we have a view of science which displaces both the externalist/internalist opposition, and the diverse reductionisms which have succeeded it. On this view science has its own dynamic of conceptual innovation, irreducible to ‘external’ forces, but produced by the peculiar mix of its ontological and normative com- mitments together with the specific problems posed for those commit- ments by the intentional and discursively redeemed interaction between them and the thought-independent things and processes which each science takes as its (intransitive) object. Other, adjacent social practices, too, have their own inner dynamics, and the problem for the historiography of any scientific practice is to adequately describe the ways in which these dynamics condition and interact with one another. There are several significant ways in which scientific practices may be articulated with other social practices. First, newly discovered properties or mechanisms in nature may be open to manipulation for some extraneous human social purpose, and so issue in a technology. Second, and more directly relevant to Darwin, if a scientific innovation involves the re-configuration of several adjacent sciences, and displaces scientific underpinnings for wider cultural processes of domination and legitimation, then it will itself become the object of an intense struggle for ideological re-appropriation.

However, these broader processes of use and struggle over scientific innovations are intelligible only on the prior assumption of an inner conceptual dynamic in science which establishes a distance between it and the prior discursive status quo: a distance whose existence and sig- nificance is jeopardised by reductive historical methodologies. SO, we need to understand how scientific innovations draw upon adjacent social and cultural practices, without ever being reducible to their sources. First, just because scientific thinkers are also participants in

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other social practices, and are located in broader social structures, scientific discourses will be marked by ideological intrusions and resist- ances to innovation (what Bachelard called ‘epistemological obstacles’). In the case of Darwin and his circle, these included the ideologically motivated ‘creationist’ resistance on the part of Lye11 to extending his uniformitarian and transformationist methodology in geology to the problem of the emergence of new species in the fossil record, and Darwin’s own resistance to abandoning the teleological/theological view of organic adaptedness derived from Paley.

But, if we, as I think we should, regard science as a species of intel- lectual production, the ‘raw materials’ or ‘resources’ it draws upon also often lie outside its boundaries. In Darwin’s case, such practices as quarrying and the expansion of trade together with the foreign travel it made possible made available new sources of evidence for interpreta- tion and explanation - the exposure of new fossil strata, observation of the geographical distribution of organisms, the effects of geographical isolation and so on. But also those exterior practices and their own cul- tural forms of self-understanding are also drawn upon as sources of key metaphors and analogies which then become critically modified and integrated in scientific theory as explanatory mechanisms. In Darwin’s case the study of organic changes induced in domestic breeds by selec- tive breeding is an indispensible resource for the formation of the concept of ‘natural selection’ by analogy. But the analogy is a very imperfect one, and as Gillian Beer notes,5 Darwin has real difficulty ridding his language of unwanted teleological connotations. For the same reason, Alfred Russel Wallace remained unhappy about the term.

Similar considerations apply to Darwin’s analogical reasoning from Malthus’ ‘law of population’. The Desmond/Moore ‘assimilationist’ argument depends on their identification of the Malthusian and Dar- winian notions of ‘struggle for existence’. I have argued against this at greater length elsewhere,6 and can give only a brief summary of the main points here. First, the discipline of political economy to which Malthus’ work belongs has its own ontology, methodology, conceptual structure, theoretical problems and articulations with external prac- tices such as govenment and politics. By the time he comes to read Malthus ‘for amusement’, Darwin is thoroughly immersed in the dis- cipline of ‘philosophic natural history’, he has drawn upon geology and paleontology, comparative anatomy, field observation of animal behaviour, notions of inheritance and variation from breeders of domesticated organisms, and observations and generalisations about the geographical distribution of species and varieties. He has become convinced that new species arise from pre-existing ones by some

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process of transmutation, as no other hypothesis makes sense of and integrates these diverse sources of evidence in a way consistent with basic canons of scientific, naturalistic thinking. His enquiry is now focussed on what mechanism in nature could explain the emergence/ adaptation of new organic forms consistent with those same canons, including his generalisation of Lyell’s uniformitarianism. His reading of Malthus is governed by the requirements of that very specific ‘prob lematic’, one utterly different from both Malthus’ own, and those of the advocates and opponents of poor law reform.

So, Darwin’s reading and appropriation of Malthus for his own explanatory purposes involves, first, reversing the direction of Malthus’ own analogy, to apply the ‘law of population’ back from the human to the animal, and, indeed, further, to include both animals and plants. In the process, Darwin emphasises the differences: in nature there can be no ‘voluntary restraint’ of reproductive activity, the encouragement of which was the central theme of the later editions and political uses of Malthus. Moreover, there cannot be, as in the human case, any artificial increase in the food supply. Therefore it is the positive checks to popu- lation which are operative ‘with manifold force’ in nature, in the absence of the ‘softening’ implied in the later Malthus’ emphasis on ‘preventative’ checks. This is quite crucial because it gives Darwin his sense of the sheer ruthless power of natural selection, without which the imaginative leap to his perception of it as a creative force would not have been possible. This leads to a further respect in which it is clear that the law of population is being used by Darwin to do something which would have been quite unintelligible to Malthus: over a succes- sion of generations differential death and reproduction rates would, for Darwin, bring about qualitative and adaptive changes in a popula- tion. By contrast, Malthus is concerned with the disciplining and moral education of those to whom the threat of poverty consequent upon profligate reproduction is applied. Further, Darwin’s ‘struggle for exist- ence’ is a phrase he uses in a ’large and metaphorical sense’ to refer even the ‘struggle’ of a plant at the edge of the desert against the drought. The moral and metaphysical loading of Malthus’ work on population, is therefore utterly foreign to, and conceptually incom- patible with Darwin’s very selective and transformative appropriation of it. Finally, and also linked to the ideological function of Malthus, is the causal connection Malthus supposes between population and food supply. Malthus’ critique of ‘utopianism’ depends entirely upon this as an unavoidable feature of the human predicamant. For Darwin, by contrast, all that is necessary is that populations are regularly ‘culled’ in a way that favours some inheritable variants against others. He repeat-

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edly uses the famous metaphor of nature’s surface as ‘a thousand wedges’ - indicating that selective pressures are of many different kinds, and operate at many different points in the life of the organism. Moreover, he emphasises our ignorance of these ‘wedges’, even in the human case. Darwin’s conceptual leap in the direction of what we can now recognise as the science of ecology takes him far from Malthus’ concern with the disciplinary role of the threat of poverty.

(University of Essex)

Endnotes 1 . Notebook B231-2, C. Darwin, Charles Danuin’s Notebooks 18362846, ed. P.H. Barrett ef

al. (Cambridge: British Museum (Natural History)/Cambridge University), 2289. 2. A. Giddens, Beyond LeJ and Right (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), 11. 3. The view of science which I sketch here is a critical synthesis of ideas drawn from the

French tradition of historical epistemology, most especially the earlier essays of Louis Althusser, together with the ‘critical realist’ approach to science pioneered by Roy Bhaskar, Rom Harre, Andrew Collier and others.

4. R. Bhaskar, A Realist Theory ofScience. (2nd ed.; Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1978). 5. G. Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Euolutiona?y Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth

Century Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983). 6. T. Benton, ‘Science, Ideology and Culture: Malthus and the %gin of Species’ in

D. Amigoni and J. Wallace, eds, Charks Darwin’s The % e n of Species: New Inter- disciplinary Essays (Manchester and New York Manchester University Press, 1995).

Transgressing boundaries James Moore and Adrian Desmond

We laughed nervously in August 1989 when a contract arrived from Michael Joseph and Penguin Books. Would a ‘defiantly social’ Darwin from the publishers of Satanic Vises attract a fatwa first from philos- ophers or fundamentalists? If we stuck out our necks about a ‘Devil’s Chaplain’, would we be professionally cut off - or worse?

We had already agreed on the kind of book we would write. It would be an accessible Darwin with academic credentials, a pacey read based on the best research. What Stephen Jay Gould had done for the life sciences, Eric Hobsbawm for social history, and Richard Holmes for literary biography could inspire an equal account of the most noted modern naturalist; and as our collaboration began, we also remem- bered the dated but dashing Apes, Angels, and Victorians (1955) by William Irvine, the Stanford professor of Victorian literature. This punchy portrait, the first to make extensive use of manuscripts (includ- ing the excised parts of Darwin’s autobiography, not published until 1958), first impressed us both as students. Though inadequate as a life,

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