by A. N. Wilson
Experts in any of the fields which he entered might find his prolix lucubrations to be slapdash, while academic logicians or metaphysicians might find his use of language to be too loose to be durable. If, however, you want to know what a thinking person in the mid- to late nineteenth century thought, then take a tour of Herbert Spencer’s mind. The very inconsistencies, and changes of mood, in his vast output are characteristic of his age. His early work seems to a later reader almost insane in its optimism – its belief that the Great Exhibition of 1851 represented a high point not only of free trade but of human achievement and human happiness. This was followed by a nervous breakdown, in which Spencer felt that his nonconformist childhood in Derby had been a hell. Very much like Mill, he had been brought up to believe in work, work, work. He could not shake off the habit, and absurdly worked himself into the ground in the second half of his life extolling the virtue of leisure; and, while leading a life of celibacy, advancing a theory of happiness based on passion. He was above all – and this was why he became a Victorian best-seller – a clever man who banished the theocentric view of life. He was, however, anti-materialist. Like Huxley, he was agnostic rather than atheist. In early life – during his days of hanging around with George Eliot before she became George Eliot – he was a worshipper of what he called the Unknown, and he believed there was something essentially mysterious and sacred about Life with a capital L. But he also believed that such metaphysical musings were reinforced by science and its study. As Søren Løvtrup’s tribute shows, Spencer’s biology was well informed. He always remained, however, a popular metaphysician-cum-higher journalist; science was not his primary interest. He was explaining the nineteenth century to itself, explaining how it had to come to terms with the scientific outlook while not losing its soul. Huxley, who came from a very similar provincial lower-middle-class background (both men had unsuccessful impoverished schoolteachers as fathers) read the proofs of Spencer’s First Principles (1862) and wrote to him: ‘It seems as if all the thoughts in what you have written were my own and yet I am conscious of the enormous difference your presentation of them makes in my intellectual state. One is thought in the state of hemp yarn and the other in the state of rope. Work away thou excellent rope maker and make us more rope to hold on against the devil and the parsons.’21
This is the key to Spencer’s importance, not only in Huxley’s inner world, but in that of all his Victorian contemporaries. Today his ashes rest in Highgate Cemetery, just opposite the gigantic memorial to Karl Marx, and a few yards from George Eliot. They were all in their way ardent warriors against the parsons: George Eliot, who in her incarnation as Mary Ann Evans had translated Ludwig Feuerbach and David Strauss, undermining the philosophical basis of Christianity and shaking the foundations of belief in the Bible; Marx, whose dialectical materialism took atheism for granted, and replaced the justice and providence of the Hebrew Scriptures with a vision equally prophetic, equally deterministic, that the victory of organized labour over capital would reorder human society; and Herbert Spencer, who believed in the ‘survival of the fittest’ even before Darwin had seen how aptly it described his own view of life.
The debate at Oxford, and the denunciation of The Origin of Species by a bishop (albeit a scientifically minded bishop), hardened, almost mythologized, the battle-lines. Darwin had not set out on his Humboldtian journey of being a great scientist solely in order to wage war on religion. Having Huxley as his champion, however, and Spencer as a friendly philosopher, now determined the direction in which his theory would take him. The assaults on The Origin of Species which worried him were scientific assaults on its veracity. With each revision of the book, through six editions, he discarded more and more of its central theory. To some extent, the assaults which were based upon its supposedly heretical content provided a screen for the book’s scientific errors. When, by the end of the century, ‘Darwinism’ had been all but put to sleep, and science had moved on, other reasons could be found for unbelief – especially in the pages of Spencer. Fascinatingly, when neo-Darwinism revived, from the mid-twentieth century onwards, it awoke with all its mid-Victorian anti-religious trappings. It is hard to think of any other branch of modern science – quantum theory, for example, or discoveries in electromagnetism, neuroscience or astronomy – whose proponents spend as much time talking about the errors of theology as of the truth of their own area of expertise.
We’ll come back to Spencer, but it is time to mention another figure in the story – one of the villains, if you take a partisan neo-Darwinian viewpoint. St George Jackson Mivart (1827–1900) was the son of a successful hotel-owner in London, who studied law at Lincoln’s Inn while also devoting himself to the study of biology. He was a student of Huxley’s and knew Owen, and through these distinguished mentors he managed to get a post as a teaching biologist at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School in Paddington. He knew Darwin slightly, but revered him deeply. He also knew Wallace. He was a convinced evolutionist and never wavered from this position. A convert to Roman Catholicism at the age of sixteen, he was eventually excommunicated from that Church by Cardinal Vaughan for his refusal to deny evolution.
Mivart had read The Origin of Species with enthusiasm when it was first published. Darwin, Huxley and friends, when Mivart became their enemy, denounced him as if he were some kind of mouthpiece for his Church, whereas the truth was that, however much he loved the Church of his adoption, he loved scientific truth more. One of his difficulties with Darwin’s mode of expression in The Origin, in fact, was his way of speaking as if natural selection was purposive; for Mivart, both as a scientist and as a Catholic, the process of nature (whether or not to be understood as set in motion by a divine creative inbreathing) was to be seen as just that, a process – and, in this sense, as impersonal.
It is easy to complain of one-sidedness in the views of many who oppose Darwinism in the interests of Orthodoxy; but not at all less patent is the intolerance and narrow-mindedness of some of those who advocate it, avowedly or covertly, in the interest of heterodoxy. This hastiness of rejection or acceptance, determined by ulterior consequences believed to attach to ‘Natural Selection’, is unfortunately in part to be accounted for by some expressions and a certain tone to be found in Mr Darwin’s writings. That his expressions, however, are not always to be construed literally is manifest. His frequent use metaphorically of the theistic expressions, ‘contrivance’, for example, and ‘purpose’ has elicited from the Duke of Argyll and others criticisms which fail to tell against their opponent, solely because such expressions are, in Mr Darwin’s writings, merely figurative – metaphors and nothing more.22
It may be hoped, then, that a similar looseness of expression will account for passages of a directly opposite tendency to that of his theistic metaphors.
Moreover, it must not be forgotten that he frequently uses that absolutely theological term ‘Creator’ and that he has retained in all the editions of his ‘Origin of Species’ an expression which has been much criticized: he speaks of ‘life with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms, or into one’. This is mentioned in justice to Mr Darwin only, and by no means because it is a position which this book [Mivart’s riposte to The Origin, consisting of a number of articles gathered in book form under the title On the Genesis of Species] is intended to support. For, from Mr Darwin’s usual mode of speaking, it appears that by such Divine action he means a supernatural intervention, whereas it is here contended that throughout the whole process of physical evolution – the first manifestation of life included – supernatural action is not to be looked for.
Christian writers, over the ages, have differed on the question of whether the age of miracles was restricted to the era of Christ, or whether miracles are still possible. Mivart was merely stating that to believe in a Creator is not a belief in One who intervenes in the created order when that order is in process. To this extent, the question of ‘creationism’ is irrelevant to the purely scien
tific question of how species evolve. It was this, Darwin’s specific theory of evolution by natural selection, which Mivart had come to doubt. He summarized his objections to The Origin of Species thus:
That Natural Selection is incompetent to account for the incipient stages of useful structures.
That it does not harmonize with the co-existence of closely similar structures of diverse origin.
That there are grounds for thinking that specific differences may be developed suddenly instead of gradually.
That the opinion that species have definite though very different limits to their variability is still tenable.
That certain fossil transitional forms are absent which might have been expected to be present.
That some facts of geographical distribution intensify other difficulties.
That the objection drawn from the physiological difference between ‘species’ and ‘races’ still exists unrefuted.
That there are many remarkable phenomena in organic forms upon which ‘Natural Selection’ throws no light whatever, but the explanations of which, if they could be attained, might throw some light upon specific origination.23
Consider the giraffe. Put simply, macro-mutationists think that there is not much future in being a giraffe if your neck does not grow as high as the nearest tree-foliage. Otherwise, you might have stayed like the short-necked oxen or antelopes who inhabit similar parts of southern Africa. For a macro-mutationist, a giraffe is a creature with a neck long enough to reach leaves on trees. For a Darwinian, a giraffe is the result of a long history of struggle in which a number of weak, short-necked would-be giraffes have been panting to reach those leaves, but without success. Darwin tried to answer this in the sixth edition of The Origin: ‘Those individuals which had some one part or several parts of their bodies rather more elongated than usual, would generally have survived. These will have been intercrossed and left offspring, either inheriting the same bodily peculiarities, or with a tendency to vary again, in the same manner; whilst individuals, less favoured in the same respects, will have been most liable to perish.’24
Mivart also asked, if natural selection is so potent, and if high browsing is so advantageous, why did not all the creatures in southern Africa develop long necks? Darwin’s answer to this conundrum is one of his least persuasive analogies. ‘The answer is not difficult,’ he wrote,
and can best be given by an illustration. In every meadow in England in which trees grow, we see the lower branches trimmed or planed to an exact level by the browsing of the horses or cattle; and what advantage would it be, for instance, to sheep, if kept there, to acquire slightly longer necks? In every district some one kind of animal would almost certainly be able to browse higher than the others; and it is almost equally certain that this one kind alone could have its neck elongated for this purpose, through natural selection and the effects of increased use. In S. Africa the competition for browsing on the higher branches of the acacias and other trees must be between giraffe and giraffe, and not with the other ungulate animals.25
There seem to be two flaws in this strange (almost surreal) illustration. One is that it would not be the sheep but the horses or cattle which had to grow longer necks in order to reach the trees (in which they had shown no interest anyway); and secondly, if the ‘nascent giraffe’ had a neck long enough to reach foliage, it would not need to ‘compete’ with other nascent giraffes in order to reach the tree. Either it was tall enough to reach the tree, or it wasn’t, and if it wasn’t, then it could not have existed. It could not have eaten. One is reminded of Darwin’s belief that the highly complex optic nerve ‘developed’ over time, and of the modern research which has demonstrated by computer that it takes ‘only’ half a million years or so for a haddock to develop an eye. There was another fish conundrum to which Mivart drew Darwin’s attention. The flatfish or Pleuronectidae have asymmetrical bodies, but their eyes are placed on the upper side of the head. During early youth, the eyes stand opposite to one another thereby making the body symmetrical. Mivart wrote that a sudden ‘spontaneous transformation in the position of the eyes is hardly conceivable’.26 But what if it were gradual? Then ‘how such transit of one eye a minute fraction of the journey towards the other side of the head could benefit the individual is indeed far from clear’.27
Darwin answered this objection in the most surprising way. He appealed to a Lamarckian ichthyologist called Malm, published in 1867. According to Malm’s theory, the young Pleuronectidae cannot retain a vertical position for long, owing to the excessive depth of their bodies, the small size of their lateral fins, and their having no swimbladder. Exhaustion therefore causes them to drop to the bottom of the ocean on one side, but while they lie there on the bed of the sea, they twist, like restless sleepers, so that the lower eye is looking upwards. ‘The forehead between the eyes consequently becomes, as could be plainly seen, temporarily contracted in breadth.’28 Darwin did not appear to notice that Malm, and Dr Albert Günther, ‘our great authority on fishes’, both advocated an essentially Lamarckian explanation for the positioning of the flatfish’s eye.
The truth was that Darwin was horribly discountenanced by Mivart’s objections to his theory. To Wallace, he wrote, ‘Mivart’s book is producing a great effect against Natural Selection, and more especially against me.’29
Moreover, Mivart was not the only scientist who appeared not merely to modify but to destroy the theory. William Thomson (later first Baron Kelvin of Largs, 1824–1907) was the child of a professor of mathematics in Belfast, who later moved to Glasgow. Thomson was a physicist of prodigious energy and brilliance, who, having studied at Glasgow, entered Peterhouse, Cambridge, and made his mark, not only academically (second wrangler, and a string of learned papers before he was twenty-one), but also a keen oarsman and co-founder of the Cambridge University Musical Society. He became Professor of Natural Philosophy in Glasgow at the age of twenty-two. In his first four years as professor he published no fewer than fifty papers, some of them in French. His great subject was the transformation of heat, and he developed a theory that you could date the age of the planet by assessing the length of time it had taken to cool from its initial boiling lava. (This research was carried out alongside his practical skills as an engineer and his pioneering interest in telegraph.) It was his experiments in thermodynamics, however, which convinced him that the earth was far younger than the time span needed for Darwinism to be true. A hundred million years, by Thomson’s calculation, was long enough for the whole story to be told, from its first fiery beginning to its end. Thomson was a great scientist, but his calculations were wildly wrong. In 1903 – four years before he died – it was discovered that radioactive elements constantly emit heat. A year later, Ernest Rutherford suggested that the ratio of the abundance of radioactive elements to their decay products provided a way to measure the ages of rocks and the minerals containing them. By 1911, Arthur Holmes was using uranium/lead measures to estimate the ages of rocks from the ancient Pre-Cambrian period, and calculating their age as 1,600 million years old. Isotopes were discovered in 1913, and in the 1930s the modern mass spectrometer was developed. It was now possible to see that the earth was at least 4,000 million years old, perhaps 5,000 million. Then, in 1956, the American physicist Clair Cameron Patterson (a man) compared the isotopes of the earth’s crust with five meteorites. On the basis of these calculations, he was able to work out that the earth is about 4,550 million years old. ‘All subsequent estimates of the age of the earth have tended to confirm Patterson’s conclusion.’30
Darwin did not know any of this, of course. For him, Thomson’s dating of the earth was ‘an odious spectre’: ‘Thomson’s views of the recent age of the world have been for some time one of my sorest troubles.’31 In fact, as we now realize, Darwin, in the first edition of The Origin, underestimated the age of the earth, by about 4,200 million years; but at least his underestimate gave time for natural selection to have occurred. Thomson’s mere 100 million was not enough. Da
rwin told his son George that this was the single most intractable point levelled against the theory. He implored George the Cambridge mathematician to make alternative calculations. George loyally obliged and proposed a modification of Thomson’s figures which might make the theory tenable. Darwin meanwhile racked his brains to see if he could somehow speed evolution up, or somehow force the facts to fit the theory. He had abandoned the scientific theory in favour of propaganda technique. Everyone mocks Edmund Gosse’s father for his pious belief that fossils had been placed in the rocks by God to test our faith, though they were really only as old as Archbishop Ussher had calculated. Darwin’s revision of The Origin of Species was worked through in a comparable state of mind, believing where he could not prove. In fact, there was a strange double-think going on. With one hand, he constantly revised The Origin, diluting the theory to the point where it made no sense, even by its own terms. On the other hand, he could not acknowledge that his original theory had turned into a convoluted version of Lamarckianism. The wider the dissent, the more doggedly he believed in ‘his’ theory (‘our’ theory when writing to Wallace) and the more resolutely he basked in Huxley’s histrionic public defences of it. The revisions of The Origin attracted small public notice. Only 311 people bought the fifth revision, for example, and sales for Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication were comparably low.
