Abstract
We argue that Charles Darwin’s methodological commitments in the Origin of Species which appeal to vera causa, uniformitarianism, gradualism, actualism, and extrapolationism constitute a conceptual nexus founded on an ontological commitment to a fully constituted world, that is, a homogeneous world unchanging over time, with the past and the present conceived as identical (the “steady-state view”). Ultimately, this ontology prevented Darwin from successfully completing the intellectual transition to full and modern evolutionism. In addition, because a steady-state world is best investigated through empirico-inductivism, this approach condemned Darwin to integrating too many facts that could not be explained under his so-called all-encompassing theory of evolution. Confronted with this ill-integrated pluralism, the reader of the Origin is left with an array of competing evolutionary pictures and theories.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The indirect intellectual road between Newton and Darwin has already been considered in Chap. 1 of this book.
- 3.
Reijer Hooykaas explains the ontological component of the simplicity argument in the following way: “[T] he principle of economy of causes (or that of the simplicity of explanation): no more different causes should be assumed than is strictly necessary for explanation (or: explanatory systems should be as simple as possible). As soon as such a principle is transformed into the thesis that Nature is economic and simple… it has acquired an ontological instead of a purely methodological character.” See Hooykaas (1975), quote on p. 356 footnote #206.
- 4.
Paolo Rossi’s book was originally published in Italian in 1997 and translated in English in 2001 under The Birth of Modern Science (Oxford: Blackwell). I have used the French edition of 1999. For Newton, see Chap. 17.
- 5.
Nature’s isomorphism or homogeneity was even extended to attractive forces in the Queries of Newton ’s Opticks: universal gravitation for planetary systems and attractive/repulsive forces for atomic particles. This allowed Newton to insist again that the world is simple. And, we would add, a simple world is more easily knowable than a complex one.
- 6.
Quote extracted from Laudan (1981: 68).
- 7.
There is no need to repeat here what has already been said in Chap. 2 of this book about the strategic retreats in effect during eighteenth and nineteenth centuries designed to accommodate the discovery of deep geological times in order to save the notion of a fully constituted world or steady-state view.
- 8.
What naturally comes to mind here is Newton ’s famous adage concerning the unclear nature of gravity, “Hypotheses non fingo” (I frame no hypotheses), found in the General Scholium of the Principia (1713).
- 9.
The following analysis is largely based on Smith (2002).
- 10.
For a concise review of the methodologies discussed here, see Rachel Laudan (1987: 10–14).
- 11.
Enumerative induction: an induction by enumeration of all the instances to which it applies—if one observes 100 swans and all of them are white, one can then formulate a generalization of the kind “all swans are white.”
- 12.
Eliminative induction: an induction through the listing of all possible hypotheses about a specific issue followed by their gradual elimination under inspection of new evidence until only one remains.
- 13.
In an otherwise excellent work, the philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard was only too happy to somewhat unfairly scorn eighteenth-century empiricism and inductivism in the name of rationalism, thus overlooking the significance of the intellectual trend that accompanied the “age of empiricism.” See the 2002 English translation of his book originally published in French in 1938: The Formation of the Scientific Mind (Manchester: Clinamen Press), Chap. 3.
- 14.
See our “Sketch of an Intellectual Grid” in Chap. 1.
- 15.
It is recognized here that the label “Scientific Revolution ” as a historiographical category may require some qualifications. These are provided in Chap. 1.
- 16.
For a confrontation between the mathematical and the experimental traditions, see Kuhn (1977).
- 17.
- 18.
Thomas Reid noted Newton ’s infatuation with nature’s simplicity, which he criticized. Reid replied that Newton’s theories seem simple in retrospect only and were actually complex enough to match nature’s complexities. See Laudan (1981: 91).
- 19.
For a compact overview of this issue, including additional references, see Delisle (2017a).
- 20.
See Whewell’s letter in Todhunter, I. (1876), William Whewell, D.D. Master of Trinity College Cambridge (London: Macmillan), Vol. 2, pp. 433–434. A part of this letter is reproduced in Hull (1989: 30).
- 21.
Whewell explains the epistemological nature and implications of a consilience of inductions as follows: “But the evidence in favour of our induction is of a much higher and more forcible character when it enables us to explain and determine cases of a kind different from those which were contemplated in the formation of our hypothesis. The instances in which this has occurred, indeed, impress us with a conviction that the truth of our hypothesis is certain” [italics original]. See Whewell, W . (1840), The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences Founded Upon Their History, Vol. 2 (London: J.W. Parker), p. 230.
- 22.
- 23.
I shall not try here to weigh their respective influence on Darwin’s intellectual development between the 1830s and the 1860s. Among Darwin scholars, this has been debated by David Hull , Michael Ruse , and Jonathan Hodge .
- 24.
A number of Darwin’s contemporaries criticized him either for not being inductive enough or for not having considered enough new facts, sometimes simultaneously. See Ellegard (1990[1958]: 174–197).
- 25.
I am grateful to Sydney Vickers for having helped me see more clearly the implications that come with Darwin’s strengths as, in her words, a “strong collector.” Her work has led me to concur that Darwin was simply overwhelmed by his own talent. Mrs. Vickers conducted an Independent Study under my supervision in the Spring 2018 under the title “Another View of Darwin” in which she compares the traditional view of Darwin presented in my Darwin course and the alternative view that emerges from my recent work.
- 26.
The reader will be spared citations of the exact pages of the Origin of Species as these have been provided in the previous chapters of this book.
- 27.
See also footnote #65 on p. 90 of Wilson (1974).
- 28.
- 29.
For his claim of a vera causa to be valid , Darwin had to convincingly show that breeders are actually able to modify forms across the species’ barrier. However, this he could not do, as recognized by many scholars of the time, including Adam Sedgwick (1860: 334–335), William Whewell (in Todhunter 1876, Vol. 2, pp. 433–434), and Thomas Henry Huxley (1896: 6).
- 30.
See also David Hull (2009: 178) who writes about Herschel : “Two centuries later Herschel repeated Bacon’s praise of induction in science, but then went on to remind the reader that ‘the successful process of scientific enquiry demands continually the alternative use of both the inductive and deductive method’. In the study of nature, ‘we must not, therefore, be scrupulous as to how we reach to a knowledge of such general facts: provided only we verify them carefully when once detected’”[italics original].
- 31.
A possible strategic or rhetorical retreat toward a rationalist vera causa may be found in the following statement of 1868 (Darwin, Vol. 1, pp. 8–9): “In scientific investigations it is permitted to invent any hypothesis, and if it explains various large and independent classes of facts it rises to the rank of a well-grounded theory. The undulations of the ether and even its existence are hypothetical, yet every one now admits the undulatory theory of light. The principle of natural selection may be looked at as a mere hypothesis, but rendered in some degree probable by what we positively know of the variability of organic beings in state of nature,—by what we positively know of the struggle for existence, and the consequent almost inevitable preservation of favourable variations ,—and from the analogical formation of domestic races. Now this hypothesis may be tested,—and this seems to me the only fair and legitimate manner of considering the whole question,—by trying whether it explains several large and independent classes of facts; such as the geological succession of organic beings, their distribution in past and present times, and their mutual affinities and homologies . If the principle of natural selection does explain these and other large bodies of facts, it ought to be received” [my emphasis]. Jonathan Hodge (2000) and David Hull (2009) hold that this retreat is more rhetorical than anything else, since they argue that Darwin consistently maintains that his theory was cast within the empirico-inductive tradition. For his part, Michael Ruse (2000) argues that from the start Darwin wanted to comply with Herschel’s empirical vera causa and Whewell’s rationalist vera causa, requiring him to make a simple strategic retreat, stressing the rationalist part of his argument rather than its empiricist one.
- 32.
Herschel (1831: 149) writes: “If the analogy of two phenomena be very close and striking, while, at the same time, the cause of one is very obvious, it becomes scarcely possible to refuse to admit the action of an analogous cause in the other, though not so obvious in itself.”
- 33.
Even Charles Lyell went through a partial retreat from his early and nearly integral uniformitarian or steady-state view in biology between the 1850s and early 1870s. See Gould (1987: 167–173). Darwin and Lyell therefore offered two different ways of preserving uniformitarianism as defined in this book, to which two more should be added with the views of T.H. Huxley and R. Owen . On Huxley and Owen, see Chaps. 2 and 7 of this book. In a real sense, Huxley also modified his uniformitarian view between the 1850s and the 1870s, giving it more evolutionary motion through the recognition of the pattern-process of specialization at lower taxonomic levels. See Ruse (1979: 220–221) and Bowler (1996: 263–267, 331–335). Taken collectively, Lyell, Darwin, Huxley, and Owen represent four different ways of transitioning between a static worldview and a truly modern evolutionary worldview , among a long list of other scholars.
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Delisle, R.G. (2019). Methodologies for a World Fully Revealed. In: Charles Darwin's Incomplete Revolution. Evolutionary Biology – New Perspectives on Its Development, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17203-9_8
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