Hisary of Bape Teas, Vol 18, No 6, pp 927-93, 1994 ‘Pergamon 0191-6599 (80 E08 se ee eas 9659/9690 + 000, REVIEWS CHARLES DARWIN, A NEW BIOGRAPHY RJ, Hatupay* Darwin, Adrian Desmond and James Moore, (London: Michael Joseph, 1991), xxi + 808 pp., £20.00 H.B. Students of natural history in general and of evolutionary ideas in particular ‘were already indebted to ourtwo authors well before the publication of their new and exciting biography of Darwin, a biography published in London in over eight hundred pages by Michael Joseph in 1991. Between them, over the last twenty years or so, publishing separately, Desmond and Moore have made substantial and enduring contributions to the debate about dinosaurs and their ‘extinction, o the relation between morphology, medicine and reform in London, to mid-Victorian palacontology, to the implications of man’s close genetic relationship with chimpanzees and also, finally, to the complex and changing nature of the relation between Darwinism and Victorian theological belie. Nowadays, partly as a result of their own scholarship and argument, only the most one-eyed of fundamentalists see an automatic and necessary conflict between evolutionary science and religion, and only the most pig-headed of commentators would refuse to recognise what is the most obvious common methodological premise of our two authors, namely, that modern evolutionary thought has both a social basis and a necessary and unavoidable political dimension. Indeed, our authors claim that previous biographies of Darwin have been such dry and bloodless affairs just because of their neglect ofthis social and political dimension. Their treatment of Darwin's materialism is a good example of their own methodology at work. As Ernest Mayr has pointed out in One Long Argument, one looks in vain in Darwin for the severe notion of Hobbes and Newton that all significant phenomena are explicable by ‘matter in motion’; nor by any stretch of the imagination is there anything in Darwin resembling Marx's historical ‘materialism, a materialism first formulated in 1845. Yet we all know that Darwin referred to himself as a materialist and that, full of apprehension, he even invented a stragegy for the public avoidance of an admission of ‘how far Ibelieve in materialism’. We also know, without any doubt at all, that the status of consciousness as a biological category and the relationship between mental and physical phenomena was uppermost in his mind whilst working on his Transmutation Notebooks. Indeed, we can go even further since it was precisely Darwin’s concern with this philosophic problem which drew him into *Department of Politics & International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, CVS 7AL, UK, 907m8 Reviews admiration for the positivism of August Comte and which also led him to appropriate theories of language from Benjamin Smart, And while it may be very misleading to pin Darwin down and then to label him a ‘materialist’ rout court, particularly since he appears not to have been a reductionist, his materialist way of handling mental phenomena is undoubtedly a crucial part of hisevolutionary philosophy. Also, his equation of mental activity with brain states was right in the tradition of the secular and atheist teachers of phrenology and medicine, teachers that Darwin was very familiar with. Desmond and Moore understand this materialist tradition very well, and they both appreciate the fact that Victorian materialism was popularly associated with both radicalism and atheism, unlike the materialism of Hobbes. This free-thinking and dissenting trace on the brain’s physiology was common amongst the phrenologists and anti-clericals of Darwin's youth. For Darwin, then, it was almost acommonplace that mind and consciousness were physiological or mechanical spin-ofis from prior brain activity. is no wonder, then, that Darwin, in a hard nused analogy, suggested that the brain secreted thought like the liver secreted bile, This does not complete the whole of the story about materialism, however, and ‘our authors are very careful to establish the precise navure of Darwin’sattraction to Comte and to all explanation in terms of universal physical laws. Quite rightly, they emphasise the influence of Lyell and Herschell and Whewell in these ‘matters, Ihey are also very careful to explain the commitments of the Darwinian party in general and to Tyndall's endeavour in particular to prove that mind and brain were identical. In fact, Desmond and Moore portray the Darwinian party, “Darwin's New Model Army” as they cheerfully call it, to be broadly positivist, but certainly not explicitly atheist or crudely materialist. Even so, there seems little doubt in our authors’ minds that after the filling of the Transmutation Notebooks, Darwin did not invoke supernatural agencies to explain natural phenomena. Indeed, as.a so called ‘materialist’, Darwin seems to have been most concerned to establish a connection between consciousness in all of its manifestations and the physical structure of the brain, He once remarked, ‘By materialism, I mean merely the intimate connection of kind of thought with form of brain-like kind of attraction with nature of element”. Quite rightly, ourauthors refuse to get sucked into a semantic debate as to whether Darwin is best labelled a ‘philosophic realist’ rather than a ‘materialist’, but they have done a great deal 0 show that Darwin's ‘materialism’, if that is what we have ta call it, iserncial 10 understanding the whole of Darwin's enterprise; and in the popular mind atleast, Darwinism and materialism were synonymous, and our authors have decisively chown thie popular equation to be substantially correct. Our authors do just as ‘well, ifnot better, will the ‘populational’ character of Darwin’s thinking and with the whole vexed question of the influence of Malthus and population theory. It is commonplace, of course, that Darwin's perspective involved a shift of emphasis from the study of specific types, with fixed and rigid essences, to the study of specific shifting populations. By Darwin’s own admission, Malthus, that forbidding Anglican clergyman, had a theory of population which was crucially important in making it possible to formulate the idea of natural selection. It is also entirely possible, though real evidence is hard to come by, that his reading of Malthus in September-October 1838, prompted the view tat tere might well be 8 process in nature analogous to the breeder's processes of artificial selection. History of Furopean IdeasReviews 929 Needless to say, as every historian of ideas knows, Darwin quickly saw that a ‘geometrical rate of increase in population would exercise a ‘wedging’ effect. And his third Transmutation Notebook recorded the view that ‘One may say there isa force like a hundred thousand wedges trying (to) force every kind of adaptive structure into the gaps in the economy of nature, or rather forming gaps by thrusting out weaker ones’. All of this, perhaps. is quite well known. What our authors do, however, is to add the social and political dimension, They show the immense topicality of Malthus. They explain why and how he cast such a dark shadow over English radicalism, They also explain why that umbrella organisation known as Chartism, which Marx and Engels took to be the first proletarian party, was so hostile to Malthusian teaching and to its very many Victorian prophets. ‘The general conclusion they arrive at, always bearing in mind the social and ical dimension, is that no one conveyed the ‘warring’ of species so well as Malthus. And, more tothe pein, no one before had 90 dramatically suggested that competition or ‘warring’ applied not just to species, but also to individuals within the same species. As Desmond and Moore write: “The face of nature was uo longer siniling, it scowld ata gladiatorial arena, strewn with the corpses ofthe losers’. Malthusian argument and Darwinian science, then, made competition the absolute norm, competition alone guaranteeing the progress of life and the operation of a low wage and high profit capitalist sociery. While some readers might well object to making Malthusian dogma such a perfect fit with the ideology of capitalism, a fit encouraged by Marx and Engels themselves in their response to Malthus, our authors have no difticulty in showing that the biological initiative deriving from Malthus did indeed make a comforting fit with Whig social thinking. This was thinking which championed competitive and free trading ideals and which diminished the status of arguments for co-operative endeavour. Between them, one might say, Darwin and Malthus killed off Paley's ‘happy nature’. And Darwin’s famous abstract of his theory, which was sent to ‘Asa Gray in September 1857, isabsolutely saturated with ‘populational’ thinking and with the idea of a universal struggle to survive. Somewhere here, of course, are the roots of what we now call ‘Social Darwinism’. an ideology paradoxically ‘enough not listed in the book’s index, even though it is discussed on page xxi. However, even so, Desmond and Moore fully appreciate that Darwin's nature sanctioned no privilege whilst throwing everything into competition, a doctrine well suited to the meritocrats of new wealth and to those oligarchs of competitive endeavour who, as good Victorians, avidly took out membership of learned and scientific societies Now that we have mentioned ‘Social Darwinism’ we should not, therefore, run away with the idea that Darwin had a simple and unambiguous concept of struggle. As ie well known, in the Origin of Species, Darwin distinguished between what might be called “dog eat dog’, or intra-species struggle, and inter- species struggle or competition, such as a plant amongst other plants struggling for life in a desert, It has also been suggested that Darwin's very strongemphasis ‘on differential reproductive capacity, an emphasis absolutely confirmed by the doctrines of Malthus and his followers, can be seen metaphorically as involving the idea of struggle to produce more fertile offspring. None of these distinctions about kinds of struggle is lost on Desmond and Moore, very far from it. They Volume 18. No. 6. November 1994930 Reviews fully appreciate that the reading and interpretation of Malthus gave Darwin a new and crucial insight into the struggle from existence amongst individuals of the same species. Indeed, in my view, the sections of the biography dealing with competition and strugele in the Malthustan sense are amongst the very best in the book, particularly when our authors relate this to Darwin's own personal concern about family inbreeding and about the four first cousin marriages between the Darwin and Wedgewood families. Having handled Darwin’s materialism and Malthusianism so well, our authors can also hardly be faulted in their treatment of Darwin and Tamarck. They recognise that the French evolutionist was more influential than many admit, even though Darwin completely repudiated Lamarck’s suggestion that arganieme could achinur tranemtations throngh the exercise of will power In doing so, Darwin also rejected what many later biologists in England adopted, namely, the idea that Lamarckism offered a more plastic conception of adaptive change than could Darwinism itzelf. And Darwin's own theory of pangenesis,of course, which was based on the idea that each bodily cell budded off a representative part of itself, these bits or ‘gemmules’ then gathering in the reproductive organs, could well yield a Lamarckist type doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The environment, so the Lamarkist inference runs, acting on the bodies of the parent organism, could generate some acquired characters capable of modifying the pangenes, modifications which could then be transmitted to offspring. All of this has been well explained by David Oldroyd, and it is, perhaps, a little surprising that our authors did not make more of his approach in considering Darwin's theory of heredity, particularly since two of Oldroyd's major works appear in the book's bibliography. Nor do our authors pay much attention to Darwin's ‘habit’ theory, a theory developed most in his second Norebook. This ran along essentially Lamarckian lines, holding that repeating actions might become habitual and then in turn become instinctive. This had led many commentators, most notably Oldroyd again, to suggest that Darwinian and Lamarckiam doctrine, which became so antithetical in the later decades of the century, in the hands of Herbert Spencer and August Weismann, was less antithetical in Darwin's own time. The extent of later dogmatism was revealed in the unsmiling work of Weismann who cut off the tails of mice for twenty-two successive generations to see whether a tail-less ‘mouse would result. As a sarcastic critic has observed, he might just as well have studied the inheritance of a wooden-leg, Lamarck’s thesis was not that all modifications were transmitted; it was that only those were transmissable which the organism had developed as a result ofits adaptive needs. The loss ofa tail by amputation in Weismann’s laboratory could hardly be designated an adaptive need of the mouse. But, whether this is so or not, itis plain that Darwinism and Lamarckism were not so antithetical in Darwin's own lifetime, particularly when he had formulated his pangenesis theory of heredity. Having dealt so effectively with the broad intellectual movements influencing Darwin, our authors are also excellent in portraying Darwin's personal and. family concerns. They vividly convey all the horrors of Darwin's hydropathic ‘eures’, most notably the onc undertaken in Dr James Gully's water cure establishment in Malvern. They consider as well the very serious effects that History of European IdeasReviews 931 daughter Annie's death had on her father. Darwin's wife Emma is also given a fair share of consideration and Darwin's relationships with Alfred Russel Wallace. with Huxley and with Hooker are sensitively presented and imaginably reconstructed. I particularly enjoyed the treatment of Darwin in Edinburgh, the “Northern Athens’, where he had been sent to study medicine. Many Whig doors in Edinburgh were open to Darwin due to local contacts, but the exciting and cosmopolitan nature of the town is very well portrayed. Desmond and Moore, for instance, report that in 1826, John James Audubon was in town, dressed like a backwoodsman, signing up subscribers for the Birds of America. The actual medical training Charles Darwin was to receive was prestigious, but he had no stomach for human anatomy and for dissection in particular, and our authors ‘correctly report that thie etrong dislike of dissection was comething that Darwin was to regret later in life. Allin all, then, our authors make the most oftheir subject matter, and nothing of real significance is cither neglected or ignored. Indeed, the book is a work of genuine joint scholarship and the methodological injunction to relate to the social ‘and political context is sensible and effective, even though, as common sense indicates, it is more effective in explaining some issues rather than others. How does Charles Darwin emerge from this biography then? He emerges as a curious and very diligent intellectual giant; a man of immense speculative intellectual energy who, single-handed, established the formula that all adoptive evolutionary change is due to the directing force of natural selection acting on favourable, heritable variations. No greater intellectual synthesis has yet been attained in the natural sciences, and over one hundred and thirty years of unsuccessful refutations have only resulted in an immense strengthening of Darwin’s theory. Desmond and Moore deserve the highest praise for explaining and exploring the make-up of Darwin's immense achievement. And it will bea very long time, if ever, before their biography is bettered in any significant way. 1 hope it continues to draw all of the readers it deserves. RJ. Halliday University of Warwick Volume 18, No. 6, November 1994