Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology

Neither Creation nor Evolution
more than the workings of properties of matter that did not fundamentally differ from
those forming crystals.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, spontaneous generation had become controversial,
and the advocates of autochthonous generation with regret admitted that today
the process appears not to be taking place, not of higher organisms and most likely
not even of single-celled organisms or of small, primitive entozoa – the common "suspects"
of spontaneous generation at the time. If small, primitive organisms were not
generated spontaneously, how could large ones, let alone entire communities of these?
Yet there seemed to be no imaginable way around abiogenesis; after all, even if today all
species are perpetuated by means of parental procreation, the origin of the first parents
must still be explained; moreover, at some moment in the past, life as such must have
originated from lifeless matter and, this admitted, the process could conceivably have
repeated itself at later stages and for higher forms of life. All that had been needed were
special circumstances. Whereas "transmutation" resorted to the imperfection of the geological
record and the length of geological time, "autochthonous generation" had recourse
to unusual conditions, such as those occurring in the wake of geological catastrophes.
The process might have temporarily operated vigorously following mass extinctions.
This one-and-only admissible option of autochthony, however far-fetched to later
generations of biologists, was nevertheless the one to which during the middle of the
nineteenth century a number of botanists, zoologists and palaeontologists was drawn – if
not driven.
Autochthonous generation had a bearing not just on the issue of origins but also on
problems of phyto- and zoogeography, which at the time, in the wake of the Humboldtian
turn towards geographic distribution (Rupke 2001), had gained widespread interest.
Botanists linked their discovery of well-defined realms of plant distribution with the
notion of multiple local origins that were "centres of creation" ("creation" here, for most
authors, did not mean "special creation" but "origin") or, less ambiguously, "centres of
appearance." Also, autochthony had fewer problems than Mosaic creationism explaining
the occurrence in widely separated regions of representatives of one and the same species.
For example, freshwater fish belonging to a single species but living in wholly unconnected
bodies of water presented a migrational problem to the notion of a single
centre of creation/dispersal but could be readily attributed to multiple spontaneous generations
triggered by identical conditions. Human racial variety across the globe, too, was
explained in terms of autochthonous generation. Such simultaneous multiple origins had
anti-creationist implications as they went against the stories of Paradise and Flood, adding
to the non-theological, scientific appearance of the theory.
In the course of the first half of the nineteenth century autochthonous generation
became the leading paradigm of organic origins in the German-speaking world. Following
the appearance of the Origin of Species, the theory of autochthony rapidly disappeared
and soon appeared forgotten. It is not explicitly identified in the secondary literature, not
even in the monographs on the history of the spontaneous generation debate by Farley
(1974), Fry (2000) and Strick (2000). Bowler, in his comprehensive history of the idea of
evolution, gives the theory short shrift, devoting no more than a single sentence to it.
Speaking about the period 1800-1859, he writes: "The idea of a series of spontaneous
Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology, Vol. 10 (2005)
145