The History of Scientific ideas is, almost always, a history of conflict. In the struggle that ensues, a pre-existing idea is overthrown (with great dram at times), and the newly-fangled idea takes precedent. Needless to say, the said change can, at times, initiate what Thomas Kuhn refers to in his book titled The Structure of Scientific revolutions as a paradigm shift (scientific revolution). The new tradition (paradigm), by throwing overboard the old tradition of doing science, inaugurates an era of normal science that is underpinned by new presumptions, concepts and methodologies. If Copernicans theory of heliocentrism initiated such a change in the sixteenth century, then Darwins theory of natural selection played a similar role in the nineteenth century. Like copernicanism, the publication of Darwins Origin of Species in 1859 dealt a severe blow to theology and a number of pseudo-scientific presumptions. Up to 1859, creationism, natural theology, creationist idealistic morphology and other God-based explanatory models were considered as legitimate scientific theories. After the publication of the Origins, the situation, at least in England, changed drastically. Not only was it necessary to abandon the concept of species immutability and numerous acts of creation which Curviers theory of Catastrophism demanded to account for species diversity not only did it posit a time lapse since creation that was at variance with Genesis, thus heretical not only did it abandon Jehovah as the demiurge and all notions of divine providence as adequate explanations of species adaptation but worse, Darwin incorporated man into the animal kingdom by asserting that men descended from monkeys (an obvious distortion of Darwins theory). The impact of these ideas on the educated and uneducated alike was profound.
Darwins peers faulted his key concept of natural selection some excoriated his over reliance on natural selection his non-teleological view and reliance on chance to explain inherent design was harshly judged and the physicalistic basis of his theory was judged as tending towards irreligion, immorality and political radicalism. In all this, presumptions played an important role in shaping the response to Darwins book. In this essay, the writer will defend the thesis that the pre-existing social, religious and intellectual assumptions played a significant role in the rejection of Darwins theory of natural selection.
Before the 19th century most scientists and philosophers believed that the earth and the various species of plants and animals were each separately and specially created by God. This idea is traceable all the way back to Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), later Christian philosophers such as Saint Augustine (354- 430 A.D.), Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 A.D) among others, championed the idea, albeit with some modifications. Indeed, and up to the 19th century, the interest of some scholars (naturalist theologians) in biology was underpinned by the belief that since all life had been created by God, a detailed study of flora and fauna could reveal some aspects of the workings of Gods mind. John Ray argued just this point in 1691 in his books titled The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation. In 1802, William Paley made a similar argument in a work titled Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802). This is not to say that the concept of God as the theory of everything was never challenged. In the beginning of the 18th century, naturalists such as Jean Baptiste Lamark, Erasmus Darwin and Chambers begun to challenge the idea of special creation by suggesting a slow, gradual evolutionary process whereby all species descended from a common ancestor. What led to this
In the first half of the 19th century, an important shift occurred when the geological concept of catastrophism, championed by Georges Cuvier and William Smith, was challenged by the uniformitarianism of James Hutton in his Theory of Earth and Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology. Catastrophism was the idea that the earth had been the subject of intermittent cataclysms, such as the Noahs flood, that accounted for its geological features and that new flora and fauna were created after each event. By contrast, uniformitarians argued that the forces affecting the earth geology today could account for all the geological features of the earth if vast amount of time was permitted. Around this same time, naturalists were grappling with the phenomenon of physical and anatomical similarities that existed across species and that of fossils. For example, Georges De Buffon, speculated a century before Darwin in his 44-volume epic Histoire Naturelle that the observed physical similarities between humans and primates could be due to a common ancestry. Beyond this advances in geology, the theo-scientific world view had been undermined since Copernican by other thinkers (Emmanuel Kant, Dennis Diderot and David Hume, in Philosophy Laplace in Astronomy the German higher critics of the Bible, among others). Thus, physicalistic explanations of nature were increasingly becoming the norm.
Among the readers of Lyells Principles of Geology in the 1830s was a naturalist named Charles Darwin who was to make a major contribution on the questions of origins in another 26 years. Darwin was born to an aristocratic family in 1809. His student life at Cambridge was undistinguished except in one respect he had a passionate interest in natural history and in collecting birds, butterflies, beetles and even rocks. While a student he became a friend of Rev J.S. Henslow who encouraged him a long this line. In December 27, 1831 he took up a job as a naturalist in a navys survey ship, HMS Beagle, and sailed around the world for nearly 5 years. During this journey, Darwin spent a considerable amount of time surveying and collecting along a number of coasts. This experienced had a revolutionary impact on his idea about the origins of life.
Struck by the basic similarities and the slight differences that linked flora and fauna everywhere he went, Darwin would later sum up his views in 1859 in a work titled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. In this volume he argued that the world is not constant, but the product of a continuing process of evolution that all species have descended from common ancestors by a continuous process of branching that the process of evolution is gradual, and that the mechanism behind evolution is natural selection.
The historical narrative weaving these theories together was this. First, and as Malthus and Spencer had suggested, he argued that within each species, more offsprings are constantly reproduced than can be maintained by the environment. Second, the exponential rate of reproduction produces a constant struggle for survival. Third, individuals within species vary. Due to this variation, some organisms are better adapted to the environment and are able to reproduce at a faster rate than others. Fourth, the favorable variations are inheritable by the offspring of this species. Finally, and over a vast duration of time, the continuing natural selection of this advantage-conferring-variations lead to speciation.
As expected, the publication of the origin provoked a firestorm of criticisms from intellectuals and commoners alike. This fact is traceable to the fact that Europe, like I suggested elsewhere, was still very religious and heretical ideas were for a long time frowned at. Even then, the advances in the sciences from the Copernican revolution onwards had eroded much of the previous religiosity. Even Darwins own Christian beliefs, it must be acknowledged, were gradually swept away in this process. One has only to remember that Darwin was a trained theologian (received a B.A. Classics, Mathematicians and Theology) and that in his pre-Beagle era (prior to 1831), he was deeply religious and thoroughly orthodox. In contrast, the Darwin of 1859 was a closet atheist my emphasis. Similarly, another evidence of the subtle change in the religious environment in the west can be seen, as Mayr has noted, in the fact that Darwin developed his theory as early has 1838 (two years after the beagle voyage) but was literally afraid to publish his views, since the intellectual climate of England was hostile to evolutionary theories in general, by 1859, the situation had drastically changed. However, this may not be the only explanation.
Needless to say, attacks on Darwin, which took different forms, were driven by different concerns. As often happens, materialistic explanations of natural phenomenon that diminish the role of God from his supposed creation generally provoke a public outcry. Indeed, the paradigm shifting thrust of Darwins theory was its perceived attack on natural theology and corollary theories such as cosmic teleology, essentialism and finalism. This is what Bowen meant by his anguished outcry that Darwins theory is incompatible with the doctrine of final causes and a negation of design or purpose in the animate or organic world purpose. A different, though related, view was expressed by Goodwin, the president of Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, who wrote in the American Theological Review for May, 1860 Mr. does not expressly attack Christianity or Theism.
He scarcely notices them at all. But a theory of origins or ends that ignores Theism altogether, is as truly its enemy as one which attacks it openly in front, and must be treated by the friends of Theism accordingly. Other prominent scientists who dismissed Darwin for theological reasons include Hershel who referred to Darwins theory as the law of higgledy- piggledly. Sedgwick contended that, by repudiating final causes, Darwins theory indicated a demoralizing understanding on the part of its advocates. However, it was Dubois, who was responsible for summing up the dire implications of the theory. In a review of Huxleys (Darwins chief defender) book titled The Origin and Antiquity of Man Darwin, Huxley and Lyell, which appeared in the American quarterly Church Review and ecclesiastical Register in 1865, he had this to say Most of us, shrinking from the difficulties and dangers which beset the seeker after original answers to the question of this riddles the proper place of man in nature, are contented to ignore them altogether, or to smother the investigating spirit, under the feather-bed of respected and respectable tradition.
In other quarters, attacks on Darwin turned to ridicule. For instance, it was said that Darwin believed this because he himself looked like a monkey. But the revulsions was not restricted to the uneducated, A number of intellectuals were equally horrified at what Francis Bowen, who wrote a review of the book in a 1860 publication of North America Review, called Darwins view that the monkey is his brother, the horse his cousin, and the oyster his remote ancestor.
Yet, and to be honest, it has to be pointed out that the tenor of criticism labeled at Darwin was not entirely theological or out rightly dismissive. True, valid criticisms were made by a number of scientists. And scientific evidence bulked large in the discussion that ensued. However, it must be noted that since natural theology was still a part of biology, theological criticism of Darwin were in a sense, albeit restricted, scientific criticisms. Indeed, some writers have contended that scientific attacks on Darwin were merely the pretexts the real concerns were theological. Still, it must be acknowledged that Darwin could not supply a number of prerequisites that were necessary for a proper defense of his theory, namely he could not demonstrate the availability of an inexhaustible source of variation, demonstrate the significance of selective advantage even in cases of slight variation, show that there is no limit to the response of selection, and provide an explanation of how gradual variation could lead to macroevolution.
Among Darwins foremost critics, Lous Agassiz was the first to demand a demonstration of these prerequisites. In a 1860 review of Darwins book which appeared in America Journal of Science and Arts, he pointed out, correctly, that individual uniqueness alone could not account for speciation (macroevolution) called attention to the absence of intermediate forms in the geological records which should act as links between closely related species (what scientist later famed as the missing link), noted that the sudden explosive appearance of some species in the geological record is incompatible with the theory of gradualism, and predicted that the theory will suffer the same fate as the evolutionary theories of DeMaillet, Oken and Lamark. Further, he noted that Darwins theory was non-teleological could not account for the underlying plan that could be seen everywhere. Agassiz critism are not unique, Darwin it was suggested, replaced finalistic factors in the ordering of the world with chance. Similar objections were raised by Darwins contemporaries. In truth, it was pointed out that Darwins gradualism was unable to explain the origin of entirely new organs, structures, physiological capacities and behavior patterns. For instance, and like I hinted above, they also wondered how a blind, chancy, non-teleological mechanism search as natural selection could account for the origination of irreducibly complex organs to use a modern day creationists phrase search as the eye.
In his book titled criticisms On The Origins of Species that appeared in 1864, Huxley gave a summary to Kollikers objection, noting that Kolliker believed that there were no known intermediate species and that known organism, has ever progressed from its current status to that of a new species hence natural selection cannot account for species diversity and that Darwins famed struggle of existence is a fantastical hypothesis. Other critics argued that natural selection cannot account for variation in asexually reproducing animals and that pangenesis (the theory Darwin relied on to explain embryogenesis) could not account for the source of variations that are selected for.
To philosophers, Darwins major short coming lay in his method. It must be remembered that the principles and the methodology underpinning Darwins theory were new historical narrative, was a new method in biology. Accordingly, his critics insisted that his work was speculative, hypothetical, inferential, and premature. To be sure, even some of Darwins contemporaries admitted that the theory was based entirely on inductive reasoning. However, what stiffened the back of these critics was the fact that Darwin offered little in terms of proofs. In fact, the only proofs Darwin could offer were analogies with artificial selection. But as Darwins defenders admitted, no animal breeder had ever succeeded in producing a new, reproductively isolated species by selectionAnd the most exotic breeds of dogs were called pathological by Kolliker who pointed out correctly that they would never be able to survive in nature. In a memorable criticism by Fleeming Jenkins, the writer begun by pointing out that that two distinct kinds of possible variations exist in nature and must be considered separately. He called them common variation and sport (or rare) variation. Of the former, he insisted that since natural selection would soon exhaust the available reservoir of such variation. No specie can vary beyond this limit. Of the latter, he argued that due to the blending of traits during breeding, its highly improbably that the rare sport variations result in speciation.
Further, students of diversity raised a number of observational objections to Darwins theory. On the basis of the survival of the fittest individuals, one would expect complete continuity in nature they argued. However, a casual observation of nature revealed nothing but discontinuities between populations Species are individually separated by bridgeless gaps intermediates species, like I pointed earlier, are non-existent. In the end, they questioned how the sterility barrier between populations could possibly have evolved by gradual process such as natural selection. The problem was even more acute in higher categories. Higher taxa like fish and mammals, or birds and cephalopods are far distinct from each other, the skeptics argued, to permit explanation of their origin from a common ancestor by the process of natural selection.
In addition, some argued that the term selection was ambiguous. Here it must be acknowledged that Darwin himself was not that happy with the term selection, a number of his defenders disliked it, and Darwin opponents ridiculed and excoriated it. Limoges, a critic of Darwin, pointed out quite correctly that there was considerable doubt about the nature of natural selection. Is it an agent, a process, or the result of a process The major weakness of the term, it was pointed out, is that it implies a force which consciously select. Darwins statement that Natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good was cited, in some quarters, as proof the fact that he had imbued nature with qualities that it does not posses.
Interestingly, even the prevailing politics of the times inspired criticism of Darwin. The situation was particularly striking in France. Haunted by the 1789-1799 French Revolution Louis Napoleon III, leader of the second empire, the French Bourgeoisie, The Catholic church (which was closely allied to the state) and prominent French intellectuals saw in every unbiblical doctrine, a call to revolution and a return to the guillotine (rein). The perceived connection between Darwins irreligious doctrines was not helped by the fact that Leftist radicals in Europe such as Karl Marx incorporated the theory, soon after its publication, in their ideology. In light of this, some historians have argued that the slow uptake of Darwinism in France was probably due to the fact that his theory was seen as a prop to dangerous political notions. In short, the Catholic Church and the French middle class were all opposed to the so-called kindred spirits of Darwinism religious skepticism, rationalism, materialism, atheism, progressionism.
E
lsewhere (in America and England), capitalists hailed the theory as a sanctification of laissez faire capitalism, survival for the fittest was fronted as a justification of military or economic dominance, the idea of inheritance of variation was additional evidence of the inevitability of human inequality even the idea of gradual change was taken up as a model of society according to this interpretation, radical social progress that political revolutionaries were demanding all over the western world was impossible since long periods of time, like Herr Darwin had demonstrated, was needed progress society. Predictably, the opponents of these theorists extended their attacks to Darwins socially destructive theory.
In conclusion, it has to be acknowledged that Darwins theory of natural selection, well or ill interpreted, had a profoundly unsettling influence on the religious, political, and scientific thought in the period following its publication. The hostile response it provoked was, as I have shown, traceable to the fact that it demanded a total rejection of a formidable array of ancient prejudices, a priori philosophies and institutional dictates. In short, a rejection of Darwin was, in actual fact, a defense of the of the status quo ante.
Darwins peers faulted his key concept of natural selection some excoriated his over reliance on natural selection his non-teleological view and reliance on chance to explain inherent design was harshly judged and the physicalistic basis of his theory was judged as tending towards irreligion, immorality and political radicalism. In all this, presumptions played an important role in shaping the response to Darwins book. In this essay, the writer will defend the thesis that the pre-existing social, religious and intellectual assumptions played a significant role in the rejection of Darwins theory of natural selection.
Before the 19th century most scientists and philosophers believed that the earth and the various species of plants and animals were each separately and specially created by God. This idea is traceable all the way back to Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), later Christian philosophers such as Saint Augustine (354- 430 A.D.), Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 A.D) among others, championed the idea, albeit with some modifications. Indeed, and up to the 19th century, the interest of some scholars (naturalist theologians) in biology was underpinned by the belief that since all life had been created by God, a detailed study of flora and fauna could reveal some aspects of the workings of Gods mind. John Ray argued just this point in 1691 in his books titled The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation. In 1802, William Paley made a similar argument in a work titled Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802). This is not to say that the concept of God as the theory of everything was never challenged. In the beginning of the 18th century, naturalists such as Jean Baptiste Lamark, Erasmus Darwin and Chambers begun to challenge the idea of special creation by suggesting a slow, gradual evolutionary process whereby all species descended from a common ancestor. What led to this
In the first half of the 19th century, an important shift occurred when the geological concept of catastrophism, championed by Georges Cuvier and William Smith, was challenged by the uniformitarianism of James Hutton in his Theory of Earth and Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology. Catastrophism was the idea that the earth had been the subject of intermittent cataclysms, such as the Noahs flood, that accounted for its geological features and that new flora and fauna were created after each event. By contrast, uniformitarians argued that the forces affecting the earth geology today could account for all the geological features of the earth if vast amount of time was permitted. Around this same time, naturalists were grappling with the phenomenon of physical and anatomical similarities that existed across species and that of fossils. For example, Georges De Buffon, speculated a century before Darwin in his 44-volume epic Histoire Naturelle that the observed physical similarities between humans and primates could be due to a common ancestry. Beyond this advances in geology, the theo-scientific world view had been undermined since Copernican by other thinkers (Emmanuel Kant, Dennis Diderot and David Hume, in Philosophy Laplace in Astronomy the German higher critics of the Bible, among others). Thus, physicalistic explanations of nature were increasingly becoming the norm.
Among the readers of Lyells Principles of Geology in the 1830s was a naturalist named Charles Darwin who was to make a major contribution on the questions of origins in another 26 years. Darwin was born to an aristocratic family in 1809. His student life at Cambridge was undistinguished except in one respect he had a passionate interest in natural history and in collecting birds, butterflies, beetles and even rocks. While a student he became a friend of Rev J.S. Henslow who encouraged him a long this line. In December 27, 1831 he took up a job as a naturalist in a navys survey ship, HMS Beagle, and sailed around the world for nearly 5 years. During this journey, Darwin spent a considerable amount of time surveying and collecting along a number of coasts. This experienced had a revolutionary impact on his idea about the origins of life.
Struck by the basic similarities and the slight differences that linked flora and fauna everywhere he went, Darwin would later sum up his views in 1859 in a work titled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. In this volume he argued that the world is not constant, but the product of a continuing process of evolution that all species have descended from common ancestors by a continuous process of branching that the process of evolution is gradual, and that the mechanism behind evolution is natural selection.
The historical narrative weaving these theories together was this. First, and as Malthus and Spencer had suggested, he argued that within each species, more offsprings are constantly reproduced than can be maintained by the environment. Second, the exponential rate of reproduction produces a constant struggle for survival. Third, individuals within species vary. Due to this variation, some organisms are better adapted to the environment and are able to reproduce at a faster rate than others. Fourth, the favorable variations are inheritable by the offspring of this species. Finally, and over a vast duration of time, the continuing natural selection of this advantage-conferring-variations lead to speciation.
As expected, the publication of the origin provoked a firestorm of criticisms from intellectuals and commoners alike. This fact is traceable to the fact that Europe, like I suggested elsewhere, was still very religious and heretical ideas were for a long time frowned at. Even then, the advances in the sciences from the Copernican revolution onwards had eroded much of the previous religiosity. Even Darwins own Christian beliefs, it must be acknowledged, were gradually swept away in this process. One has only to remember that Darwin was a trained theologian (received a B.A. Classics, Mathematicians and Theology) and that in his pre-Beagle era (prior to 1831), he was deeply religious and thoroughly orthodox. In contrast, the Darwin of 1859 was a closet atheist my emphasis. Similarly, another evidence of the subtle change in the religious environment in the west can be seen, as Mayr has noted, in the fact that Darwin developed his theory as early has 1838 (two years after the beagle voyage) but was literally afraid to publish his views, since the intellectual climate of England was hostile to evolutionary theories in general, by 1859, the situation had drastically changed. However, this may not be the only explanation.
Needless to say, attacks on Darwin, which took different forms, were driven by different concerns. As often happens, materialistic explanations of natural phenomenon that diminish the role of God from his supposed creation generally provoke a public outcry. Indeed, the paradigm shifting thrust of Darwins theory was its perceived attack on natural theology and corollary theories such as cosmic teleology, essentialism and finalism. This is what Bowen meant by his anguished outcry that Darwins theory is incompatible with the doctrine of final causes and a negation of design or purpose in the animate or organic world purpose. A different, though related, view was expressed by Goodwin, the president of Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, who wrote in the American Theological Review for May, 1860 Mr. does not expressly attack Christianity or Theism.
He scarcely notices them at all. But a theory of origins or ends that ignores Theism altogether, is as truly its enemy as one which attacks it openly in front, and must be treated by the friends of Theism accordingly. Other prominent scientists who dismissed Darwin for theological reasons include Hershel who referred to Darwins theory as the law of higgledy- piggledly. Sedgwick contended that, by repudiating final causes, Darwins theory indicated a demoralizing understanding on the part of its advocates. However, it was Dubois, who was responsible for summing up the dire implications of the theory. In a review of Huxleys (Darwins chief defender) book titled The Origin and Antiquity of Man Darwin, Huxley and Lyell, which appeared in the American quarterly Church Review and ecclesiastical Register in 1865, he had this to say Most of us, shrinking from the difficulties and dangers which beset the seeker after original answers to the question of this riddles the proper place of man in nature, are contented to ignore them altogether, or to smother the investigating spirit, under the feather-bed of respected and respectable tradition.
In other quarters, attacks on Darwin turned to ridicule. For instance, it was said that Darwin believed this because he himself looked like a monkey. But the revulsions was not restricted to the uneducated, A number of intellectuals were equally horrified at what Francis Bowen, who wrote a review of the book in a 1860 publication of North America Review, called Darwins view that the monkey is his brother, the horse his cousin, and the oyster his remote ancestor.
Yet, and to be honest, it has to be pointed out that the tenor of criticism labeled at Darwin was not entirely theological or out rightly dismissive. True, valid criticisms were made by a number of scientists. And scientific evidence bulked large in the discussion that ensued. However, it must be noted that since natural theology was still a part of biology, theological criticism of Darwin were in a sense, albeit restricted, scientific criticisms. Indeed, some writers have contended that scientific attacks on Darwin were merely the pretexts the real concerns were theological. Still, it must be acknowledged that Darwin could not supply a number of prerequisites that were necessary for a proper defense of his theory, namely he could not demonstrate the availability of an inexhaustible source of variation, demonstrate the significance of selective advantage even in cases of slight variation, show that there is no limit to the response of selection, and provide an explanation of how gradual variation could lead to macroevolution.
Among Darwins foremost critics, Lous Agassiz was the first to demand a demonstration of these prerequisites. In a 1860 review of Darwins book which appeared in America Journal of Science and Arts, he pointed out, correctly, that individual uniqueness alone could not account for speciation (macroevolution) called attention to the absence of intermediate forms in the geological records which should act as links between closely related species (what scientist later famed as the missing link), noted that the sudden explosive appearance of some species in the geological record is incompatible with the theory of gradualism, and predicted that the theory will suffer the same fate as the evolutionary theories of DeMaillet, Oken and Lamark. Further, he noted that Darwins theory was non-teleological could not account for the underlying plan that could be seen everywhere. Agassiz critism are not unique, Darwin it was suggested, replaced finalistic factors in the ordering of the world with chance. Similar objections were raised by Darwins contemporaries. In truth, it was pointed out that Darwins gradualism was unable to explain the origin of entirely new organs, structures, physiological capacities and behavior patterns. For instance, and like I hinted above, they also wondered how a blind, chancy, non-teleological mechanism search as natural selection could account for the origination of irreducibly complex organs to use a modern day creationists phrase search as the eye.
In his book titled criticisms On The Origins of Species that appeared in 1864, Huxley gave a summary to Kollikers objection, noting that Kolliker believed that there were no known intermediate species and that known organism, has ever progressed from its current status to that of a new species hence natural selection cannot account for species diversity and that Darwins famed struggle of existence is a fantastical hypothesis. Other critics argued that natural selection cannot account for variation in asexually reproducing animals and that pangenesis (the theory Darwin relied on to explain embryogenesis) could not account for the source of variations that are selected for.
To philosophers, Darwins major short coming lay in his method. It must be remembered that the principles and the methodology underpinning Darwins theory were new historical narrative, was a new method in biology. Accordingly, his critics insisted that his work was speculative, hypothetical, inferential, and premature. To be sure, even some of Darwins contemporaries admitted that the theory was based entirely on inductive reasoning. However, what stiffened the back of these critics was the fact that Darwin offered little in terms of proofs. In fact, the only proofs Darwin could offer were analogies with artificial selection. But as Darwins defenders admitted, no animal breeder had ever succeeded in producing a new, reproductively isolated species by selectionAnd the most exotic breeds of dogs were called pathological by Kolliker who pointed out correctly that they would never be able to survive in nature. In a memorable criticism by Fleeming Jenkins, the writer begun by pointing out that that two distinct kinds of possible variations exist in nature and must be considered separately. He called them common variation and sport (or rare) variation. Of the former, he insisted that since natural selection would soon exhaust the available reservoir of such variation. No specie can vary beyond this limit. Of the latter, he argued that due to the blending of traits during breeding, its highly improbably that the rare sport variations result in speciation.
Further, students of diversity raised a number of observational objections to Darwins theory. On the basis of the survival of the fittest individuals, one would expect complete continuity in nature they argued. However, a casual observation of nature revealed nothing but discontinuities between populations Species are individually separated by bridgeless gaps intermediates species, like I pointed earlier, are non-existent. In the end, they questioned how the sterility barrier between populations could possibly have evolved by gradual process such as natural selection. The problem was even more acute in higher categories. Higher taxa like fish and mammals, or birds and cephalopods are far distinct from each other, the skeptics argued, to permit explanation of their origin from a common ancestor by the process of natural selection.
In addition, some argued that the term selection was ambiguous. Here it must be acknowledged that Darwin himself was not that happy with the term selection, a number of his defenders disliked it, and Darwin opponents ridiculed and excoriated it. Limoges, a critic of Darwin, pointed out quite correctly that there was considerable doubt about the nature of natural selection. Is it an agent, a process, or the result of a process The major weakness of the term, it was pointed out, is that it implies a force which consciously select. Darwins statement that Natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good was cited, in some quarters, as proof the fact that he had imbued nature with qualities that it does not posses.
Interestingly, even the prevailing politics of the times inspired criticism of Darwin. The situation was particularly striking in France. Haunted by the 1789-1799 French Revolution Louis Napoleon III, leader of the second empire, the French Bourgeoisie, The Catholic church (which was closely allied to the state) and prominent French intellectuals saw in every unbiblical doctrine, a call to revolution and a return to the guillotine (rein). The perceived connection between Darwins irreligious doctrines was not helped by the fact that Leftist radicals in Europe such as Karl Marx incorporated the theory, soon after its publication, in their ideology. In light of this, some historians have argued that the slow uptake of Darwinism in France was probably due to the fact that his theory was seen as a prop to dangerous political notions. In short, the Catholic Church and the French middle class were all opposed to the so-called kindred spirits of Darwinism religious skepticism, rationalism, materialism, atheism, progressionism.
E
lsewhere (in America and England), capitalists hailed the theory as a sanctification of laissez faire capitalism, survival for the fittest was fronted as a justification of military or economic dominance, the idea of inheritance of variation was additional evidence of the inevitability of human inequality even the idea of gradual change was taken up as a model of society according to this interpretation, radical social progress that political revolutionaries were demanding all over the western world was impossible since long periods of time, like Herr Darwin had demonstrated, was needed progress society. Predictably, the opponents of these theorists extended their attacks to Darwins socially destructive theory.
In conclusion, it has to be acknowledged that Darwins theory of natural selection, well or ill interpreted, had a profoundly unsettling influence on the religious, political, and scientific thought in the period following its publication. The hostile response it provoked was, as I have shown, traceable to the fact that it demanded a total rejection of a formidable array of ancient prejudices, a priori philosophies and institutional dictates. In short, a rejection of Darwin was, in actual fact, a defense of the of the status quo ante.
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