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It\u2019s hard to pick up a magazine today without finding an article defending Darwin or Darwinism. Many of them are designed to prove that Darwin was not an opponent of religion, and that religion and science can live happily ever after, so long as the wicked stepmothers at the Discovery Institute are kept out of the picture. <\/p>\n
One of the most interesting and informative of these recent pieces is Gertrude Himmelfarb\u2019s (in TNR, December 12). Among many interesting points, Himmelfarb describes the influence of Thomas Malthus on Darwin and the development of his theory: <\/p>\n
Himmelfarb also points out that Darwin saw his own work not as proving the mindless rule of chance, but as a reconciliation of morphology and teleology. In his Autobiography <\/em> , Darwin stated, \u201cI deserve to be called a Theist,\u201d and Himmelfarb suggests that \u201che may have recalled an exchange he had had two years earlier with Asa Gray, the American botanist and evolutionist, who had congratulated him for restoring teleology to natural science, \u2018so that instead of Morphology versus Teleology, we shall have Morphology wedding to Teleology.\u2019 \u2018What you say about Teleology,\u2019 Darwin replied, pleases me especially, and I do not think any one else has ever noticed the point.\u201d <\/p>\n T.H. Huxley had made the same claim, challenging the Ernst Haeckel\u2019s \u201ccausal or mechanical\u201d interpretation of the Origin. Huxley argued that \u201cDarwin\u2019s great service to biology was \u2018the reconciliation of Teleology and Morphology,\u2019 the \u2018mutual interaction\u2019 of both within the \u2018wider Teleology\u2019 that was the \u2018most fundamental proposition of Evolution.\u2019\u201d Huxley appealed to William Paley (!), the \u201cacute champion of Teleology\u201d who, he said, \u201cproleptically accepted the modern doctrine of Evolution.\u201d Darwin\u2019s teleology was hardly benign: Wonderful forms evolve from simpler ones, but man arises \u201cfrom the war of nature, from famine and death.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s hard to pick up a magazine today without finding an article defending Darwin or Darwinism. Many of them are designed to prove that Darwin was not an opponent of religion, and that religion and science can live happily ever after, so long as the wicked stepmothers at the Discovery Institute are kept out of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"yoast_head":"\n
\u201cHalf a dozen years [before writing the Origin], [Darwin] had picked up \u2013 almost by change and \u2018for amusement, he later said \u2013 the book that inspired his theory, Malthus\u2019s Essay on the Principle of Population <\/em> . (Perhaps only Darwin would have thought to read it for amusement.) Malthus suggested to him the mechanism by which higher species emerged from lower ones. Just as the Malthusian struggle for existence, caused by the discrepancy between the means of subsistence that increased only arithmetically and the population that increased geometrically, led to the survival of the fittest in human society, so in animal and plant life, Darwin reasoned, a similar struggle led to the preservation of favorable variations and thus the formation of new species.\u201d Though Malthus\u2019 influence is widely recognized, Himmelfarb notes the \u201crarely observed oddity\u201d that in turning Malthus\u2019 theory into a theory of evolution, Darwin was turning Malthus inside out: \u201cHowever much breeders might try to cultivate specific desirable traits, [Malthus] pointed out, they soon reached a limit, so that the species itself remained fixed. And so it was in man. Indeed, Malthus\u2019s purpose in writing his essay was to confute the theories of perfectability current at the time. The struggle for existence in man, he regretfully concluded, led not to a better or happier mankind but to a mankind doomed to a life of misery and vice.\u201d <\/p>\n