Vol 25, no 3, October - The Linnean Society of London

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THE LINNEAN 2009 VOLUME 25(3)
means, a Cambridge graduate and, for five long years, had been the sailing companion
of the aristocratic FitzRoy. In short, Charles Darwin was ‘blue chip’ Establishment
yet he had begun asking those questions whose answers, whatever the final technical
details turned out to be, he knew full well had the potential to blast away the foundations
of that very society of which he was a member. Of course, having independent means
meant that he did not require either approval or patronage from anyone and yet, as a
human being, neither did he seek to attract opprobium. He took pains to distance both
himself and his nascent theory from any associations with the radical Left. The idea of
evolution, as distinct from its various postulated mechanisms, had been ‘in the air’ as
Lyell put it, for nearly a century. Unfortunately its proponents had been those very
maverick thinkers from whom Darwin wished to disassociate himself. One such
maverick was William Lawrence whose book Lectures on Physiology, Zoology and
the Natural History of Man (1822) had been denounced as blasphemous and associated
with the writngs of the ‘Infidel’ Tom Paine. It was refused copyright by the Lord
Chancellor and was, of course, pirated (Darwin had a copy) and became hugely popular.
Nevertheless it ruled out the possibility of ‘Evolution’ being judged dispassionately.
To make matters worse Lawrence had been inspired by the works of Darwin’s own
Grandfather, Erasmus, whose writings conveyed a suspicious scent of atheism and, as
for his erotic botany….. In addition, the infamous ‘Vestiges’ was to give Darwin pause.
Darwin thought of himself primarily, at least to start with, as a geologist and, on
his return from the Voyage much of his work was geological and he became closely
associated with his idol, Charles Lyell and with the London Geological Society with
its ‘official’ inductive or Baconian approach, a philosophy which Darwin claims to
have adopted in his work on evolution. This was in sharp constrast to his Grandfather,
Erasmus’ work in which, says Darwin ‘...the proportion of speculation being so large
to the facts given.’ (AB p.49). Darwin wanted his theory to be seen to arise de novo
from objective observations unsullied by presuppositions and speculation. It wasn’t
to be. Is it any wonder that he had his wife, Emma, place the 1844 Essay under lock
and key, avoided the word ‘evolution’ and made only passing reference to man’s descent
in the Origin? Darwin had become a reluctant subversive, a ‘Fifth Columnist’
masquerading as a respectable country gentleman. Whether this ‘mimicry’ was, in the
end, Batesian or Mullerian is, perhaps, an issue future historians may wish to debate.
However, whether he liked it or not Darwin’s theory was, as T.H. Huxley put it, to
become ‘a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism’. (Huxley’s review
of the Origin in Westminster Review NS 17 1860 pp.541-70. Quote p.541)
No one, including Charles Darwin, can totally divest themselves of the beliefs
which are part of their upbringing. One such belief was the doctrine of the fixity of
species and the trials and tribulations which Darwin underwent to dispose of it – ‘it is
like confessing a murder’– have been fully, if not over, documented. It seems, in
retrospect, that neither Darwin nor his biographers need have borne such a burden,
because Ron Amundsen has convincingly argued that the fixity of species, as an idea,
goes back only as far as Linnaeus, who used it as a taxonomic tool in his search for a
‘Natural Classification’. It never was, it seems, a Divine edict. However, it is fair to
speculate that, if Darwin had not begun with this apparently ‘Straw Man’, Evolution
and Natural Selection would have been still-born!