Posted by John Flynn on December 02, 1999 at 10:07:53:
Darwin and the Gods
Concerning the understanding of the role of myth and metaphor in the communication of knowledge, curiosity about the case of Darwin was initially prompted by a strong impression that the idea of the evolution of living things had apparently general acceptance by the public, at least outside large parts of the United States, while the principle of natural selection remained generally misunderstood, or unknown. Put alongside the common cliché that we are ‘descended from the apes’ and the notion that Darwin was a man for whom ‘survival of the fittest’ – another neyed phrase – meant that the strong trample the weak by some ‘natural’ law, this interest only increased. A figurative illustration may sum up our perception of the problem: the idea that a distinctive animal like a giraffe got its long neck from the habit of stretching for food through countless generations.
Sulloway (1980:238) tells us that Darwin’s legacy was so extensive as to create, at times, its own invisibility, where educated people read about Darwinian ideas at first-hand and at nth hand, and this suggests a straightforward explanation of any distortion without accounting for its particular nature. If the notions described above are indeed commonplace, they remain untrue, but what kind of falsehood or error do they represent?
Burrow (1985:23, 27) points out that the terms “evolution” and “survival of the fittest” do not actually appear in early editions of The Origin of Species, where Darwin employs “mutability” and “the struggle for existence” in their stead. The term survival of the fittest was in fact coined by Herbert Spencer, while the ociated phrase nature red in tooth and claw actually preceded Darwin, it being the property of Tennyson. More importantly, it needs to be made clear that Darwin saw “fittest” in evolutionary terms as having to do with adaptation rather than aggression.
Apart from a single oblique reference (1985:227) The Origin of Species says nothing about human evolution, though the argument does carry the implication that we are part and parcel of natural history. It was not until 1871 and The Descent of Man that Darwin dealt directly with human origins, giving us an ancestry which included an ape-like creature.
Anyone who has taken the trouble to read what he actually wrote knows that if there is a problem it is not one of presentation, whereby highly technical information is accessible only to experts who ure a pive public of its significance. We know too that Darwin has been widely read in the past, so a discrepancy between substance and lasting appearance would be even more intriguing.
We would need to look for source of interpretation of this phenomenon that could transcend specific social contexts, such as the one where, for example, Social Darwinism was a product of the reception of scientific ideas by a world where laisser-faire was the dominant perspective in political economy. Social Darwinism was outlived by the science that unintentionally spawned it, a science whose lack of moral prescriptions must have created a helpful vacuum to be filled by the use of pseudo-biological notions to justify the social order.
We shall see that Darwin’s continuing ‘credibility’ among the uninitiated lies in his symbolic rather than in his literal meaning. However, his sturdy scientific reputation only adds force to the conviction that these two types of meaning are mutually dependent. What attracts one to discover the meaning of natural selection apart from exposure to myth and metaphor surrounding the figure of Darwin?
By going out of his way, so to speak, Darwin was a hero, and bona fide heroes make for the best hero myths (Sulloway 1980:446). In this case, as Miller (1992:159) states, the myth usually credits Darwin with the single-handed discovery of evolution (by natural selection), which thus relegates Alfred Russel Wallace to no more than a footnote. This is ironic, given that Miller tells us how in the sixth and final edition of The Origin of Species Darwin introduced a compromising codicil which showed him reverting to “his original belief in the Lamarckian hereditary effect of effort and experience” (1992:139). Furthermore, Miller also states that by the end of the nineteenth century, but before the advent of modern genetics, only Wallace and the German naturalist August Weismann, among important scientists, refused to budge from the principle of natural selection (1992:142). Indeed, Barnes (1974:110) claims that the only principle Darwin clung to unshakeably was that of uniformitarianism - the view that the geological processes that shape the earth are and always have been the same.
Storr (1973:37) states that all hero myths are similar because our psychological progress through life is in basic respects the same, no matter where and when we are born and Campbell has described the archetypal hero in detail in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1966). According to his view, symbolic rites of page and the theme of a perilous journey are typical in such stories. The dangerous journey itself has three common motifs: isolation, initiation and return. The initial call to adventure is usually precipitated by a “chance” cirstance – an accident waiting to happen – such as Darwin’s opportunity to sail on the Beagle. Upon his return home, however, the hero is faced by uncomprehending opposition to his message before it is eventually accepted. Opposition to Darwin took its time to arise simply because he took twenty years before publishing The Origin of Species in 1859 and was only forced into doing so by news of Wallace’s discovery.
The Beagle voyage is the extent to which the theme of the fantastic voyage fits so seamlessly with the facts of Darwin’s life. Yet, in their withdrawal and return, heroes have to bring back from their ordeals something extraordinary for the benefit of humanity. Now it is obvious that the return from the wilderness of a Christ or a Buddha means something qualitatively different from that of a Darwin. Darwin’s life and work arguably represent symbolically an existential fact described most metaphorically by the Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Thales when he said the earth is full of gods. This recognition that the world contains the most fantastic things, which yet have nothing to do with supernature, seems a key element of the appeal of heroes of intellectual history.
We have seen Sulloway (1980) describe Darwin’s legacy as being so extensive as to create its own invisibility but there remains the necessity of showing, by at least a representative number of examples, just how he could have achieved such a state of pervasiveness in the first place. For this we must look at the work to try and see what elements in it may have captured the imagination of its readers. Despite the Beagle he might have remained relatively unsung, historically, though still celebrated scientifically – as a naturalist – were it not for what the voyage prompted him to come up with later – much later – in the form of his fantastic explanation of the way the living world works, which he presented in a manner which complemented his symbolic role.
Miller (1992:97) writes that Darwin’s first significant image was “the image of an irregularly branching tree”. Darwin himself phrases it as “the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications” (1985:172). Whether or not this description of the history of life was chosen deliberately is less relevant at this point than what it echoes. Mircea Eliade (1961:39) writes in Images and Symbols that every inhabited region has what may be called a “Centre”, that is to say, a place that is sacred above all. For Eliade, what we have here is a “mythic geography” and, mentioning examples from China and Babylon, he states the following.
“These cities, temples or palaces, regarded as Centres of the World are all only replicas, repeating… the same archaic image – the Cosmic Mountain, the World Tree or the central Pillar which sustains the planes of the cosmos.” (1961:42)
Eliade continues by stating that the summit of the Cosmic Mountain is the point at which creation began and that “the creation of man, a replica of the cosmogony, took place similarly from a central point, in the Centre of the World”. He goes on to say that the most widely distributed variant of the symbolism of the Centre is the Cosmic Tree (1961:44). Eliade (1961:52) translates this piece of esoterica for today by observing that, to the degree that the ancient holy places lose their religious efficacy, people discover and apply “other geomantic, architectural or iconographic formulas which… represent the same symbolism of the Centre”.
Thus it was that when the Biblical Creation lost credibility the new account given by Darwin conveniently utilized an old symbol to convey its novel interpretation of the evidence of where we came from and what we are. Of the two types of creation myth, relating to the origins of the universe, on the one hand, and of humanity, on the other, the first is expressly absent from the Darwinian biological cosmos set out in The Origin, when he states that he has nothing to say on the origin of life itself (1985:234), while the second only developed with the emergence of the common notion that we are ‘descended from the apes’, which is technically false but metaphorically true.
Of course anyone can preach about a tree of life but it is in the technical details of Darwin’s version that he comes into his own. It is often been said that his willingness to handle obvious examples of difficulty facing his theory is an engaging feature of his approach. Yet we can turn this on its head by stating that it is precisely because he dealt convincingly with some astonishing features of the natural world, in expounding on natural selection, that he persuaded readers he understood the ‘gods’ of which the earth is full.
In dealing with the development of the eye (1985:217), the structural resemblance to muscle of electric organs in fishes (1985:222), the hive-bee making its hexagonal cells (1985:234) and the slave-making instinct of certain ants (1985:243), Darwin convinces us that, given enough time and the accentuation of characteristics through generations of survivors, these marvels will develop, at least as far as is mathematically possible.
In the case of the bees, as is well known, the cells’ shape means the greatest amount of honey is held with the least expenditure of wax. Darwin shows in this instance that, like everything else, reuringly enough, natural selection must obey the laws of mathematics and thus it has arrived here at a state of architectural perfection which cannot be surped.
However, just as one needs to be convinced of relativity through a consistent argument based on unprecedentedly acute observations of, and concentration on, physical phenomena, so it takes a Darwin to explain these things to us as being part of a process which is not in the least bit obvious or self-evident, for it is the unconscious nature of natural selection which really contravenes everyday, common-sensical, teleological thinking. Here we wish to introduce the historian William McNeill (1976:43-44) on the human attitude to the natural world within which natural selection occurs.
“It is a testimony to humanity’s animistic propensities that most textbooks still explain how fallowing allows the earth to restore fertility by having a rest. A moment’s thought will convince anyone that whatever processes a geological weathering and consequential chemical change occur in a single season would make no noticeable difference for the following year’s plant growth.”
He continues by writing that, to be sure, in the case of dry farming, soil kept in a bare fallow can store moisture that would otherwise be dispersed into the air by page of water from the soil through the roots and leafy parts of plants. This means that, in regions where deficient moisture limits crop yields, a year’s fallowing can increase fertility by letting subsoil moisture aculate. Elsewhere, however, where moisture is not the critical limit, the great advantage of fallowing is that it allows farmers to keep weeds at bay by interrupting their natural life cycle with the plough.
Now let us remind ourselves that Gellner (1974:180) describes the features of pre-scientific paradigms, of the ‘savage mind’, as generating a world which is ‘meaningful’, cosy and human, rather than cold and mechanical. In this light, Campbell (1991:313) quotes Seneca making an illustrative distinction between the worldviews of the Etruscans and the Romans through the example of their opposing interpretations of lightning. Whereas the Romans believed that lightning occurred when clouds collided, the Etruscans thought that clouds collided only in order that lightning be caused. For Campbell this moment marks the page from the ancient to the modern world.
It is important too to note that Flew et al (1984:226-27) describe mechanism as a scientific philosophy developed by Descartes which entailed the elimination of abstract qualities in favour of quantifiables in research and also meant the doing away with teleology (Aristotelian ‘final causes’ or purposes) in explanation. Darwin’s mutability of species eliminates abstract qualities in living things while he gets rid of teleology by showing that evolution has no goal.
For example, an attribute such as phototropism in plants is to be explained with reference to the molecular structure of the leaf, which enables it to respond by moving in the direction of the sunlight. By extension, the development of such an attribute is to be explained by natural selection at the level of the same structure. It is one of many characteristics developed through generations and transmitted (genetically, though Darwin knew nothing about modern genetics) in the course of the struggle for existence. Furthermore, Darwin clearly understands the type of mental leap required to digest his frame of reference.
“The mind cannot possibly grasp the full meaning of the term of a hundred million years; it cannot add up and perceive the full effects of many slight variations, aculated during an almost infinite number of generations.” (1985:453)
Thus, if one does not actually concentrate on the exposition of the theory and instead hears or reads of it at nth hand – or even watches David Attenborough’s habit of referring to peculiar plant adaptations as examples of ‘cleverness’ – is one not almost bound to ume that it means something like its Lamarckian opposite, and that a plant ‘deliberately’ turns its leaves in order to catch the sunlight?
More generally, what other method does Darwin use to get his message across? As already implied, in the way he writes about the natural world, inescapably yet conveniently employing certain animals to illustrate his insights, the evidence points to a straightforward answer. Let us return to the example of the slave-making ants and Darwin’s description of one of his experiments.
“I then dug up a small parcel of the pupae… and put them down… near the place of combat; they were eagerly seized, and carried off by the tyrants, who perhaps fancied that, after all, they had been victorious in their late combat.” (1985:245-46)
This short page gives us a flavour of the detail of Darwin’s style, which is perhaps best described as that of a fabulist. This is true not only of The Origin of Species of 1859 but also notably of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals of 1872. Let us take the dog, for instance. Whereas writing about animals – either the familiar or the monstrous (e.g. the giraffe!) – draws from an ancient metaphorical well, in this case dogs serve as particularly suitable examples for the exposition of what he has to say. See how the following example is explicit in tone, being even reminiscent of a typical cartoon scenario.
“All wolves, foxes, jackals, and species of the cat genus, when kept tame, are most eager to attack poultry, sheep and pigs; and this tendency has been found incurable in dogs which have been brought home as puppies from countries… where the savages do not keep those domestic animals. How rarely, on the other hand, do our civilized dogs… require to be taught not to attack poultry, sheep and pigs! No doubt they occasionally do… attack, and are then beaten; and if not cured, they are destroyed; so that habit, with some degree of selection, has probably concurred in civilizing by inheritance our dogs.” (1985:240-41)
It needs to be pointed out, however, that habit in this case is being taken to refer to the human practice of beating errant canines so as to influence the behaviour of individual creatures, without prejudice to their genetic inheritance.
In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, what Ridley (1994:207) calls “the pleasantly anecdotal style” continues, aided in this instance by numerous drawings and graphic illustrations. Take this example of the style.
“I will give one other instance of antithesis in expression. I formerly possessed a large dog, who, like every other dog, was much pleased to go out walking. He showed his pleasure by trotting gravely before me with high steps, head much raised, moderately ed ears, and tail carried aloft but not stiffly. Not far from my house a path branches off to the right, leading to the hot-house, which I used often to visit for a few moments, to look at my experimental plants. This was always a source of great disappointment to the dog, as he did not know whether I should continue my walk; and the instantaneous and complete change of expression which came over him, as soon as my body swerved in the least towards the path (and I sometimes tried this as an experiment) was laughable. His look of dejection was known to every member of the family, and was called his hot-house face.” (1994:221)
Fables have traditionally illustrated pieces of popular wisdom or morality through animal protagonists but, as we know, natural selection portrays the struggle for existence as amoral, and in this case it is not popular wisdom but his own that Darwin illustrates, sometimes quite proverbially, as in the following example from p.84 of his notebook ‘M’ (see Sulloway 1980:241).
“He who understands baboon would do more toward metaphysics than Locke.”
Was this the moment when science caught up with the metaphysics of Xenophanes of Colophon who in the sixth century BC said that if cattle and horses had hands, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses and cattle would draw them like cattle? In other words, the dumb animals would draw cartoons.
In his 1994 study of humour, Palmer includes a chapter entitled ‘Manners, Wit and the Reform of Language’, in which he refers in some detail to the seventeenth-century growth of emphasis on plain style whereby Bacon and Descartes rejected rhetoric “as a dead weight impeding scientific investigation” and Locke and Hobbes expressed hostility to the use of metaphor (Palmer 1994:134-35). The case of Darwin suggests as strongly as any other that there is more to this argument than just the ‘rational’ merits of dispionate precision.
We have thus argued that Darwin is widely known, often for the wrong reasons in terms of scientific fact, because he was a mythic hero who, largely through the medium of de facto fables, produced the widespread conviction that he understood how the earth happens to be full of ‘gods’. This understanding has itself become mythical, distorted by transient social values and, more profoundly, because it goes against common sense to those not exposed directly to the proof of the ‘miraculous’ powers of observation and argument he possessed.
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