Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology

Was there a Darwinian Revolution?
erence to the present. Interesting but a failure. Rather boring really. So interpretation is
essential.
What about the use of revolutions for interpretation? I do not see that necessarily
one implies that things are getting better because of revolutions. The Russian Revolution
of 1917 seems to me to be a clear counter example to this. Many (I am not one, except
when a student emails me when I am on vacation in Paris) think that the Information
Revolution has been altogether too much of a good thing.
Having said this, I do not at all see why we today should not look back with interest
on the things that we see as affecting us today. And evolution certainly does. Nor do I
see why we should not look back on things that we think true today. And I believe evolution
certainly is. Admittedly, we should look back also on the things we think wrong, if
only to see why we think them wrong and compare them to the things we think right.
But one can do this in the case of the Darwinian Revolution. Indeed, many of us do
precisely this. I have just published a book on the history of American Creationism (Ruse
2005).
So, all in all, I think Hodge’s worries are not well taken, and I am happy to remain a
prominent member of the evo-revo school. I invite young scholars to join us!
Was there a Darwinian Revolution?
How much credit does Charles Robert Darwin merit for the revolution that carries his
name? In one sense, no one can deny that he deserves some, a lot in fact. Before the
Origin of Species appeared in 1859, the idea of evolution was a minority position and in
many respects not very respectable. After the Origin, it became in many circles – middle
class and working class, religious and not -- the accepted position on origins. More than
this – with a defiant nod at Hodge – Darwin put forward the mechanism of natural selection,
and today this is generally accepted as the right mechanism. Darwin got it right
about causes.
But there is more to the question than this. Start with the period before Darwin. We
now know, thanks to the massive research of scholars, that there was a lot more acceptance
of evolutionary ideas than we realized. In Germany, as the above-mentioned Robert
J. Richards has shown, the Naturphilosophen were a lot more inclined to evolution
than we once thought. Even Goethe, towards the end of his long life, embraced the idea.
In France, the opinion used to be that Lamarck was something of an oddity, and that
Cuvier’s anti-evolutionism was the universal norm. Thanks to the Italian scholar Pietro
Corsi (1988, 2005), we now know that there was a whole group of evolutionists around
Lamarck. And this continued through the century. We know of Etienne Geoffroy Saint-
Hilaire who upset Cuvier around 1830 with his evolutionism, but he was not alone. And
there were others in other countries.
Britain too yields many evolutionists, starting with Charles Darwin’s own grandfather,
Erasmus. There was a tendency rather to dismiss Erasmus as a fat fool, who was a
bad poet and too much given to sexual pursuits. But now we realize that he had more
influence than we knew. For instance, his major work Zoonomia was translated into Ger-
Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology, Vol. 10 (2005)
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