Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology

146
Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology, Vol. 10 (2005)
Nicolaas A. Rupke
generations was retained by a few German naturalists but now was abandoned generally"
(Bowler 1984, 111). It would appear that this particular theory of the origin of species
has been erased from the map of nineteenth-century scientific thought. It has become so
unfamiliar that scholars reading the original literature fail to recognize the theory when
they encounter it and, in a number of instances, have misidentified it as a form of either
creationism or evolutionism (see below).
A contributory cause of misidentification may have been a misunderstanding of the
word "creation." At the time, it became invested with new meanings. It could still refer
to a miraculous act of God – a creatio ex nihilo, but increasingly scientists used the word
simply to mean "origin." To the advocates of autochthonous generation it was a synonym
for "spontaneous generation." Richard Owen (in)famously stated that to a midnineteenth
century zoologist "creation" meant nothing more than "a process he knows
not what" (Rupke 1994, 236), the vagueness of which definition was subsequently ridiculed
by Charles Darwin (1988, xvii-xviii). In the case of Owen and other Christian biologists,
use of the word "creation" helped soften the impact of the fact that they no
longer meant divine intervention but a natural process of evolution, however much they
interpreted that process as divinely ordained. Later process theologians, too, by introducing
the term "continuous creation," employed the word as a verbal fig leaf to cover the
embarrassment of their acceptance of an evolutionary world view. By contrast, to materialists
such as Carl Vogt and later Ernst Haeckel, using the word "creation" ("Schöpfung")
to denote a natural origin, represented a conscious act of appropriation of religious
vocabulary – a laying claim to this word in a secular scientific context and a disinvesting
it of any Christian meaning.
The main purpose of this paper is to establish that there indeed existed a third way in
mid-nineteenth century thinking about the origin of species, for which purpose I document
the views of some of its protagonists. The sources I use are all familiar and my
argument is based on a re-reading of these, not on new material. My approach is that of a
conventional history of ideas; yet the implications and results are not quite so conventional,
as indicated at the end, where I briefly reflect upon the historiographical significance
of the theory and on its post-Origin disappearance from the record.
The Advocates and their Explications
The post-Romantic years in the history of science (c. 1840-1859; some place the terminus
a quo five years earlier) saw a steep decline both of creationism with its connection to
church and clergy, and of Naturphilosophie with its predilection for mystical analogies and
correspondences. During these years, too, Darwin returned from his Beagle journey
around the world (1831-1836), developed his theory of natural selection with a "Notebook
on the Transmutation of Species" begun in 1837, an 1844 essay on natural selection
and in 1859 his magnum opus. Simultaneously, a number of mainly German naturalists
went public with their anti-creationist, anti-evolutionist and pro-autochtonist views.
From among them, I select the following three biologists/paleontologists for concise
close-ups of their stance on the question of the origin of species: the Halle and Buenos