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Table of contents
- Natural selection - Wikipedia
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- 3. THE PRINCIPLES OF DARWINISM
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Darwin, for instance, gave the greatest latitude to the nature of the variations which form the battleground of the struggle for existence and natural selection; and he made great allowances for other causal combinations also, which may come into account besides the indirect factors of transformism. He was Lamarckian to a very far-reaching extent. And he had no definite opinion about the origin and the most intimate nature of life in general.
These may seem to be defects but really are advantages of his theory. He left open the question which he could not answer, and, in fact, he may be said to be a good illustration of what Lessing says, that it is not the possession of truth but the searching after it that gives happiness to man. It is to Darwinism of the dogmatic kind, however, that our next discussions are to relate, for, thanks to its dogmatism, it has the advantage of allowing the very sharp formulation of a few causal factors, which a priori might be thought to be concerned in organic transformism, though we are bound to say that a really searching analysis of these factors ought to have led to their rejection from the very beginning.
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The logical structure of dogmatic Darwinism reveals two different parts, which have nothing at all to do with one another. We shall first study that part of it which is known under the title of natural selection, irrespective of the nature of the causes of primary differences, or, in other words, the nature of variability. It must be certain from the very beginning of analysis that natural selection, as defined here, can only eliminate what cannot survive, what cannot stand the environment in the broadest sense, but that natural selection never is able to create diversities.
It always acts negatively only, never positively. Or do we understand in the least why there are white bears in the Polar Regions if we are told that bears of other colours could not survive? In denying any real explanatory value to the concept of natural selection, I am far from denying the action of natural selection. On the contrary, natural selection, to some degree, is self-evident ; at least as far as it simply states that what is incompatible with permanent existence cannot exist permanently. It is another question, of course, whether in fact all eliminations among organic diversities are exclusively due to the action of natural selection in the proper Darwinian sense.
It has been pointed out already by several critics of Darwinism, and most clearly by Gustav Wolff, that there are many cases in which an advantage with regard to situation will greatly outweigh any advantage in organisation or physiology. In a railway accident, for instance, the passengers that survive are not those who have the strongest bones, but those who occupied the best seats; and the eliminating effect of epidemics is determined at least as much by localities, e. But, certainly, natural selection is a causa vera in many other cases.
Natural selection - Wikipedia
Natural selection has a certain important logical bearing on systematics, as a science of the future, which has scarcely ever been alluded to. Moreover, systematics is concerned not only with what has been eliminated by selection, but also with all that might have originated from the eliminated types. By such reasoning natural selection gains a very important aspect—but a logical aspect only. The second doctrine of dogmatic Darwinism states that all the given diversities among the organisms that natural selection has to work upon are offered to natural selection by continuous variation; that is, by variation as studied by means of statistics.
Now we know already that the effects of this sort of variation are not inherited. We might, however, put real mutations of very small extent in their place; we should then be employing a causa vera. Scientific theories are historical entities. Sometimes, but not always, the theory tends in popular parlance to be named after the author of these seminal documents, as is the case with Darwinism.
But like every historical entity, theories undergo change through time. Indeed a scientific theory might undergo such significant changes that the only point of continuing to name it after its source is to identify its lineage and ancestry. This is decidedly not the case with Darwinism. As Jean Gayon has put it:. Darwinism identifies a core set of concepts, principles and methodological maxims that were first articulated and defended by Charles Darwin and which continue to be identified with a certain approach to evolutionary questions.
We will then examine these same themes as they have been discussed by evolutionary biologists and philosophers of biology from the beginnings of the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis to the present. Charles Darwin was not, as we use the term today, a philosopher, though he was often so described during his lifetime.
Charles Darwin was born February 12, and died April 18, It was a time of radical changes in British culture, and his family background put him in the midst of those changes. His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a prosperous and highly respected physician living in Western England, south of Birmingham. He wrote a number of very popular works of natural history, some in verse, in which he defended views about progress that included evolutionary speculations about the upward progress of living things from primordial beginnings.
Erasmus Darwin was an early member of an informal group of free thinkers self-styled the Lunar Society, [ 3 ] that met regularly in Birmingham to discuss everything from the latest philosophical and scientific ideas to the latest advances in technology and industry. Looked upon with suspicion by High Church conservatives, they actively promoted in Great Britain the revolutionary philosophical, scientific and political ideas sweeping across Europe and the Americas. Most had spent considerable time absorbing Enlightenment ideas in Edinburgh, Scotland.
She sent her children to a day school operated by Unitarian minister Rev. George Case and this is where Charles began his education.
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Unfortunately, Susannah died in when Charles was only 8, and his father then transferred him to the Shrewsbury School, operated by Dr. During summers he helped his father on his rounds to his patients, and when only 16 his father sent him and his brother to Edinburgh for the best medical education Great Britain had to offer.
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The two brothers arrived in Edinburgh in October of Erasmus left after the first year, leaving his brother on his own during his second year at Edinburgh. Privately, Darwin early on decided he could not practice medicine. But his already serious inclination toward science was considerably strengthened at Edinburgh both by some fine scientific lectures in chemistry, geology and anatomy and by the mentoring of Dr. Robert Grant.
3. THE PRINCIPLES OF DARWINISM
But his primary gift to Charles was introducing him to marine invertebrate anatomy and the use of the microscope as a scientific tool and as an aid to dissecting extremely small creatures dredged out of the Firth of Forth. Darwin joined an Edinburgh scientific society, the Plinean society, of which Grant was a prominent member, and presented two lectures that reported discoveries he had made while working with Grant. When he finally broke the news of his distaste for medicine to his father, he enrolled to take a degree in Divinity at Christ College, Cambridge University, from which he graduated in January of As with the Shrewsbury School and Edinburgh, his official course of study had very little impact on him, but while in Cambridge he befriended two young men attempting to institute serious reforms in the natural science curriculum at Cambridge, Rev.
John Henslow, trained in botany and mineralogy, and Rev. Adam Sedgwick, a leading member of the rapidly expanding community of geologists. Henslow and his wife treated Darwin almost as a son, and through Henslow Darwin was introduced to the men whose ideas were currently being debated in geology and natural history, as well as to men whom we look back on as among the very first to take up the historical and philosophical foundations of science as a distinct discipline, Sir John Herschel and Rev. William Whewell. As he wrote in his autobiography:.
In the next section we will discuss the influence of the philosophical ideals of Herschel and Lyell on Darwin.
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Furthering his scientific training, Adam Sedgwick on two occasions took Darwin on extended geological tours of England and Wales. In addition Darwin and a cousin, William Darwin Fox, a year ahead of him at Cambridge, developed what began as an amateur passion for bug collecting into serious entomology. Fitzroy sought a gentleman companion who could also collect information on geology and natural history during a proposed circumnavigation of the globe. After resistance from his father had been overcome, Darwin was offered the post and accepted it. This vision influenced Darwin profoundly, as he freely admitted.
John F. Herschel was in Cape Town on a mission to do for the Southern Hemisphere what his father William had done for the Northern, namely to develop a comprehensive star map with the new powerful telescopes developed by his father and aunt. He sent Lyell a long letter filled with detailed constructive commentary. He clearly recognizes that Herschel is here providing a philosophical justification for the project upon which Darwin was secretly working. The first mention of the possibility of an evolutionary solution to this problem is in his Ornithological Notebooks , in a note written shortly after departing Cape Town.
The problem, and the methodological constraints, had been advocated by his geological hero, and now close friend, Charles Lyell; and they had been defended philosophically by his philosophical hero, Sir John Herschel. The theory can be set out as a series of causal elements that, working together, will produce the needed transformations. It will be noticed that there is no element of this theory that is incapable of empirical investigation—indeed by now the published confirmatory studies of this process would fill a small library.
One cannot say that every individual with favorable variation v will survive or will leave more offspring than individuals without it; one cannot say that no environment will ever support all of the offspring produced in a given generation, and thus that there must always be a competitive struggle.
These are things that tend to happen due to clearly articulated causes, and this allows us to make accurate predictions about trends , at the level of populations, but not to make absolute claims about what must happen in each and every case. Perhaps because of his use of the term selection, this core element of his theory apparently baffled nearly everyone.
Or is it, in its very nature, the antithesis of such a principle, as his old geology teacher Sedgwick believed? Could it possibly create species, or is it, by its nature, a negative force, eliminating what has already been created by other means? And, in a devastating review, Fleeming Jenkin happily accepted the principle of natural selection but challenged its power to modify an ancestral species into descendent species, and thus limited its scope to the production of varieties. A number of reviewers, even some sympathetic ones, questioned the possibility of extending the theory to account for the evolution of those characteristics that differentiate humans from their nearest relatives.
In either case, there was also serious disagreement on whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. There is a fundamental philosophical problem with the idea that a species can undergo a series of changes that will cause it to become one or more other species. To illustrate it, look carefully at the first question that Charles Lyell wishes to address in the second volume of the Principles of Geology :.
Lyell pretty clearly assumes that to allow for evolution is to deny the reality of species. Lyell , II. And Darwin seems to have become so. Permanence, as applied to species, is for Darwin a relative concept, and there are no fixed limits to variability within a species.