Darwin’s Revolution in Thought – Stephen J.

Gould

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb8QKrwQ180&t=850s

The video quality is very poor, sorry about that, but the message of this video is interesting and
important, and really it is a lecture so really only the audio matters. Enjoy!

Luckily, it’s very easy for American’s to remember Charles Darwin’s dates because he had the
good fortune (at least in terms of our memories) to be born on the very same day as Abraham
Lincoln (Feb 12, 1809 – I mean the very same day, not just the same day). He [Darwin] was 50
years old when he published the origin of species in 1859, and that nice coincidence of the 50th
birthday celebration and the publication of the great book pretty much sets up the tempo of
Darwinian celebrations. So, 1909 was the centenary of his birth, and the 50th anniversary of the
origin, and 1959, which was a time of great Darwin celebrations, was the 100th anniversary of the
Origin of Species, and as you are separating - I think they called sesquicentennial - the 150 th
anniversary of his birth. I used to collect stamps, that’s how you learn what the 50, 150, 200, etc.,
are called.

Now there were some wonderful parties in _1959_ – that was a great time of celebration, they
were held all over the world. The biggest one in the United States was held in Chicago, and I
think the only rain that fell on that particular parade in 1959 was a wonderful address delivered
by the American geneticist H. J. Muller and entitled “__100 years without Darwin are
enough__.” That’s an interesting speech if you read it because he’s not talking about what you
might think - that is, one can talk a lot about the lack of acceptance of evolution itself in
American popular culture (the issue of _Creationism___ ) – and Muller mentioned that, but that
wasn’t the main thing he was talking about. What he wanted to talk about was the _lack of
understaing___________________ of what Darwin’s theory actually entailed - not only among
people who were perfectly comfortable with the notion that evolution had obviously and
factually occurred, but even among people who called themselves ___darwinians________, and
that puzzled him; that a theory _______________so widely accepted_____ and honoured should
be _________________badly understood___ and he wanted to know why.

Now look, evolution has become generally known. Let me make the same distinction Darwin
made all the time in his writing. Darwin very keenly pointed out again and again that he had tried
to do two quite distinctly separate things in his writings about this subject. First was simply to
convince the world _______that evolution had occured_____________ ; that is, the
documentation of the fact of evolution. And in that he was abundantly successful. Darwin lies in
Westminster Abbey for his success in having demonstrated to the thinking world that evolution
had occurred. We’ll come back to that at the very end. Secondly, Darwin said he was also trying
to ________proposed a mechanism on how____________ evolution worked. And he came up
with the theory, the theory of Natural Selection. And these are quite different things. That is, one

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can be fully satisfied that evolution occurred and not like natural selection as mechanism or
_______________not understand natural selection _____ as a mechanism. So, I want to point
out that I am talking about the second part today – Charles Darwin’s revolution in thought –
look, it’s revolutionary enough just to find out that evolution happened – but I want to focus on
the other part, that is, the revolutionary implications of Darwin’s own theory for how evolution
works, namely the theory of Natural Selection. And I’ll tell you where I’m going: I basically
want to propose that the reason why it hasn’t been well-understood is not that it’s particularly
difficult, but really that it’s ______philosophically so radical______________ that even though
it’s easy in a sense to understand, we don’t want to, so we’ve managed to avoid it.

Now, when faced with Muller’s dilemma, namely, here’s a theory that’s well-accepted by the
scientific community, it’s 100 years old, why don’t people grasp it or understand it very well?
The first think you might think is a hypothesis, and it would be perfectly reasonable – maybe
____natural selection is very difficult________________ ? That would be my first-pass guess, if
faced with that problem. Here’s a theory that’s been around for 100 years, it’s been accepted by
virtually all professionals, yet it’s not widely represented correctly, why don’t people [get it?]
Maybe it’s very hard… That can’t be true. The theory of Natural Selection is ___easy____ . So,
the obvious explanation of ‘maybe it’s very hard’ can’t be right. The theory of natural selection
is really pretty simple, at least in terms of its bare-bones mechanics. I don’t want to give a lecture
of the content of natural selection but while I’m on the topic let me just express to you how
simple it is – I can run it by you in a couple minutes – that can’t be the reason why it’s poorly
understood. Basically, and it’s just the bare-bone mechanics, the implications are rich and varied
and difficult – but as the bare-bones mechanics of the theory, it’s simplicity itself. [There are] the
three facts that no one can deny in a simple, almost syllogistic, inference and this is how it’s
usually presented pedagogically. First fact: most organisms produce more offspring than can
possibly survive. That’s clearly true and Darwin goes to great lengths to show that. Fact #2, all
organisms vary in a species – just look around the room, that’s folk wisdom, that’s obvious. Fact
#3, because you need it, for a genealogically based theory – that at least some of that
____variation is inheritated________________ . And that’s also folk wisdom. Sure, Darwin
didn’t know the mechanism; the world didn’t until the ____mandylion
rediscovery________________ , but you don’t need to know the mechanism, you just need to
know that there is a principle of inheritance, and that’s folk wisdom. We know that tall parents
tend to have tall kids, short parents [have] short kids, Black parents [have] Black children, White
parents [have] White children – we know it as the principle of inheritance, even if we don’t know
how it works. Take those three facts - overproduction, variation, and inheritance of some of that
variation, and natural selection follows as an almost syllogistic inference. If all organisms
produce more offspring than can possibly survive, on average - as a statistical phenomenon, not
every time - on average those organisms that fortuitously are better adapted to changing local
environments will tend to survive better and produce more offspring, and the average of the
population will shift in their direction. To cite a somewhat caricatured example, but it’s not
grossly off: You have a population of elephants in Russia. The ice is advancing, there’s variation

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in the amount of hair on elephants, [and] elephants that are a little more hairy on average will do
better [in that environment]. The hairiest one might still fall down a crevasse and die, but as a
statistical statement, on average, they will do better in surviving and reproduction, and 100
generations down the line, you’ll have a woolly mammoth.

That’s what natural selection is; it’s a principle of adaptation to changing local environments, it's
not hard. So why then do we have this odd phenomenon that 100 years - and it's just as true
today as when Muller said in 1959 - that now closer 200 years after the promulgation of the
theory, natural selection is still so ______poorly understood______________ ? I would propose
to you it is the basis of this talk but the reason must be, in a sense, that it is philosophically so
radical it stands against so many of the traditional social hopes and psychological biases about
culture that we really just don't want to face them, and therefore I’ve tried to put a different kind
of spin on natural selection, such that we can read it more in the light of those biases which
makes it something other than what Darwin intended, something that almost distorts it into its
opposite.

The way in which I will structure this talk, as it's worked for me in the past, will be a first a
statement or a paradox and then _____3 riddles_______________ which I'll attempt to resolve.
They’re three riddles about Darwin's life and in the resolution of each of the riddles we can
understand one of the radical features of Darwin's theory. The first paradox I want to discuss is
how can I call Darwin a revolutionary thinker if in the old tradition of his biography he wasn't a
very smart guy at all. I wanted to dispense with that quickly, and then I'll take up these three
riddles in sequence. My first one is going to be who was the ___naturalist_________ on board
HMS Beagle? And the answer obviously is not Darwin, or I wouldn't be posing the question.
And I don't think I'm getting more radical than I wish to be - I'm not going to tell you Darwin
wasn't on the ship for five years, he was, but he wasn't the official naturalist and in there lies a
fascinating story which reflects and illustrates one of the radical features of the theory. Secondly,
why did ___Darwin_______ not use the word ______evolution______? That's what we call the
process today, but he never describes it as such and there's an interesting reason for that. Thirdly,
why having developed the theory of natural selection 1838, being fully aware of its very large
implications, and being certainly ambitious enough to want credit for it, why did Darwin ___wait
21 years______ to publish it? Why this delay? It's an old question in Darwinian historiography
and I think in the resolution, of the best ____3 riddles________, we can illustrate best the
______________3 most radical characteristics____________ - philosophically radical
characteristics - of the theory of natural selection.

Before I do that though, I do want to dismiss an old Darwin legend that some of you may hear
because it won't do me any good to argue that Darwin was philosophically radical if he was
philosophically inept or unthinking. There is an old tradition in the historiography of the
biographizing of Darwin that makes him out to be different from the other geniuses in the history
of science – __Copernicus__________ , _______Galileo_____ , Newton, Einstein, they’re all

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geniuses, whatever that means. Darwin was just supposed to be a bumbling naturalist, not
particularly smart, doggedly patient to be sure, he just happened to be in the right place at the
right time, and if that characterization is correct, it’s no-good talking about his philosophical
radicalism if he had no philosophical astuteness.

Okay, the three riddles of Darwin’s life. First riddle: Who was the naturalist on board the HMS
Beagle? Obviously, it wasn’t Darwin otherwise it wouldn't be a riddle. He was there, he was
there, but he did not come on board as the official ship’s naturalist and therein lies a very
interesting story that was only pieced together about 20 years ago by various historians. The
official ship’s ___naturalist_________ on the Beagle was a man named McCormick, who was
the physician and surgeon on the ship and that was entirely conventional on naval cruises at the
time; the ___surgeon_________ would also serve as the _______naturalist____. So, if Darwin
was not the official naturalist, what was he doing on board? And to understand that we have to
probe the most interesting, troublesome and mercurial personality: the captain of the Beagle,
Robert Fitzroy. He was certainly a most fascinating man. He was a __wealthy__________ man,
an _______aristocratic_____ man by naval convention. He was allowed to take, at his own
expense, as supernumerary passengers any other people he could fit on the Beagle. And other
people with similar ambitions had done the same thing; the admiralty would not fund enough
scientists from Fitzroy’s point of view. So, he decided he would take along extra passengers. At
his own expense he took an artist, he took a couple other people with scientific skills, but that's
not why Darwin went. Darwin was not at that time in any sense a ___trained scientist_________.
He was a passionate amateur naturalist, but indeed he was not a trained naturalist, so he couldn't
have been brought on board merely as the best person - I can say best man, they didn’t have
women on ships, that's not sexist, but what is sexist is not letting women on the ships, that's
another issue – he [Darwin] certainly was ____not ________ the best man available for a
___supplementary naturalist____ on board the Beagle. So what was he doing there? And that
comes to the second and rather more interesting, complex reasons for Fitzroy's decision. You
have to understand something about the naval practice at the time which, in our psychologically
more enlightened century seems so problematical, that is the ______psychological______ toll on
___long voyages________, particularly on aristocratic captains who by social convention could
have no contact - except to give ships orders - with anyone on board. ____Fitzroy________
would __dine__________ alone. No one was close to his social rank, no one was fit to eat with
him; unless he brought someone, else he would be alone all the time at sea, and sometimes
periods at sea would run for months and months. If he encountered another ship at sea he could
dine with the other captain, when he's in port he could dine with the local aristocracy, but while
on the ship he was ___absolutely alone______________. And the psychological toll was great
and that was well understood. In fact, the previous captain of the Beagle _____had killed himself
at sea under similar circumstances. This was a well-recognized issue and many captains brought
along __other passengers__ as more or less ________as social companions_____ to combat this
extreme danger, the effects of loneliness. And Fitzroy had more particular reasons, and I think
quite accurate ones, for being worried; he greatly feared, and I think he was entirely correct,

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what he perceived as a strain of serious mental illness in his family, which undoubtedly would be
so recognized today as bipolar manic depression. His uncle Viscount Castlereagh, whom he
resembled so strongly, his maternal uncle, was a very enigmatic and interesting man whose
exploits go so far as suppressing the Irish peasant revolt in 1798 (for which many of us might not
approve of him), to essentially allowing the United States to get off easy in the War of 1812,
which just between you and me, we lost; it was Castlereagh who allowed us to have a face
saving treaty at the end, whereby we could keep all our territories. One of Britain's great
statesman and diplomats, he [Castlereagh] had committed suicide by slitting his throat during
one of his periods of manic depression just a few years before. Fitzroy felt that he was very much
like Castlereagh, subject to similar fits of depression so that is why Darwin went, as
_________Fitzroy social companion______________.

He was certainly well qualified by the proper criterion of social class. Darwin's father was a very
wealthy and respected ___physician_____________, his grandfather had been Erasmus Darwin,
one of the great intellects and writers and physicians of the Birmingham circle; he was certainly
qualified, and the fact that he knew some natural history certainly didn't hurt. Fitzroy was going
to take a social companion anyway, so why not get someone also competent in natural history at
the same time since he was trying to beef up the Beagle’s scientific metal. Alright, interesting
story, but why does it have any relevance to this issue?

Darwin sailed as Fitzroy social companion - that meant he ate every meal with Fitzroy alone, he
was Fitzroy’s only social contact for five years. Now, understand what kind of man Fitzroy was:
he was enormously mercurial, subject to fits of rage, always possibly going over that edge into a
bout of depression, which everyone wished so fervently to prevent. It took someone of Darwin's
enormous geniality and understanding . . . the two seem to get along reasonably well. Now what
would Darwin - I cannot help but think, it's the fly on the wall fantasy, _____what were they
talking about_______? You know, wouldn't you have liked to be a fly on the wall when Franklin
and Jefferson discussed liberty, when Lenin and Trotsky discussed revolution? I certainly would
have liked to be a fly on the wall when Darwin and Fitzroy had their dinner. So, we don't know
what they talked about and what I'm going to tell you now is conjectural, but I think very
plausible. Now what are they talking about? Maybe they agreed on everything and it wouldn’t be
a big issue, but they didn’t. __Fitzroy____________ had two central notions to his worldview
that could not have been more opposite to Darwin’s belief. And they were the two great issues
that divide people to this day: politics and religion. In politics, Fitzroy was an ardent Tory, a
__Conservative_____________, and Darwin an equally committed Whig
__liberal____________ (in his terms, 19th century terms). They virtually came to blow on the
most contentious issue of all: ___slavery___________. Fitzroy was a great supporter of the
benevolence of slavery. Darwin, in fact, was almost a __abolitionist________ . He married into
the Wedgewood family who had been leaders of the British abolitionist movement. Nothing was
a stronger belief in his own world views - you cannot find more moving passages ______against
the slave trade_________________ [than in Darwin’s work].

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Now the other place where they differed, or at least came to differ later, was religion. We don't
know much about Darwin's religious views at that time, but we do know about Fitzroy’s. He
really had an edifice on the subject of religion. He was a ____very firm supporter_______ of that
most distinctively English brand of arguments about the consonance of theology and Natural
History, namely the so-called ___argument from design_____________ as embodying William
Paley's book. Natural theology is a particularly English form of argument that goes back to
Boyle in the 17th century and through Paley in 1802, and pretty much ends with Darwin and
Darwin's generation, but the particular argument of natural theology to review it for you is that
not only God's ___existence_____________ but also his benevolence, his omniscience, and his
_____intelligence_____________ can be illustrated from the nature of the works of the creation.
In particular, from two aspects of natural history, namely the ___good design of organism______
and the __harmony of ecosystems_____. The good design of organisms and the harmony of
ecosystems must mean that a benevolent God, a benevolent all-knowing and omniscient God,
created them. You’ve read Paley’s famous metaphor of the watch: if I'm walking across a heath
and I kicked my foot against a stone, and I look at it, I won't know who made the stone because
it's disordered and I can't make an inference about the nature of the maker or the origin of this
thing, but if I kicked my foot against a watch, and I pick it up and look at it and understand how
it works, I know there has to be a watchmaker. Organisms are better designed than watches so
there has to be a benevolent creating God. That's the so-called Argument from Design.

Now here's the point of this long story, pardon me for spitting it out, because it is the most
central radicalism of Darwin - the most radical feature the theory of natural selection is the way
in which as its central postulate it undermines the most radical possible way the argument from
design. That's in a sense what is constructed to do. Now I don't know that Darwin did this
explicitly on purpose to confute Fitzroy, but I have this view – it’s the fly on the wall fantasy
again – there’s Darwin, he’s beginning to doubt religious views, beginning to get some ideas
about evolution, eating with Fitzroy every day, frustrated as hell about ___slavery________ and
other issues and things he can't confute him on, and every day Fitzroy is at him – “Darwin did
you see that lizard? Did you see how beautifully adapted it was? Doesn’t that _____prove___ of
an all-knowing God who made it just that way 'cause it's so beautifully adapted?” Day after day
for five years the Argument from Design, the Argument from Design, unable to confute
undoubtedly… Wouldn't that drive you to think about constructing an opposite theory? I mean if
you were Darwin, if you were someone with that brilliance… You know there's a famous story
about Fitzroy – true – that he appeared his demented state, late in life at the famous Oxford
meeting where Huxley debated Wilberforce (or didn't, that story is also often mis-told) carrying a
Bible above his head saying “The book! The book!” and _____cursing himself________ for
having been an _______unwitting agent_____ of Darwin's apostasy (loss of faith). Now I think
that all that Fitzroy was thinking is that he'd been an unwitting agent since he brought Darwin to
all these places where he got these terrible ideas. But you see, I think Fitzroy was right in a
deeper way that he never understood. I think he was the unwitting agent in a much more direct

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way by hammering Darwin day after day with Argument From Design, Argument From Design
– that's the fundamental observation of Natural History, that is the most central postulate about
the nature of the natural world out there.

Let's look at it in the abstract - when I tell you, suppose that I am right, that Darwin in some
psychology explicit or implicit sense is trying to refute the Argument from Design. How do you
go about it? Well, I can imagine two ways. One thing you might do, and it would be pretty
radical but it’s not what Darwin did, and it's not the most radical argument, it would be pretty
radical… You could say hey, there's a lot of ___good design in ___ in nature but you know there
is a lot of __bad design____ in nature also. Some things are badly designed, some things are
horribly cruel by human standards - like the Achaemenid wasp that paralyzes the caterpillar, lays
the egg inside the living tissue of the caterpillar, when they hatch they eat the caterpillar from
inside, who is still alive although paralyzed, saving the heart and nervous system for last so the
caterpillar doesn't rot … not very nice by human standards and you might, you might infer from
that, that if you wish to say that God's nature and attributes and existence can all be inferred from
the argument from design, then maybe if nature is so cruel and so messy… Maybe that's not the
kind of God you want, maybe you ought to be making that argument? And that ___would pretty
radical argument________, but that's not the one Darwin made.

In fact, Darwin accepted the possibility – said yes, there's some cruelty and some messiness but
____for the most part____________, organisms are ______well designed____, and ecosystems
are harmonious. Now we come to the more radical argument, the one that Darwin did take as the
central postulate of the theory of natural selection, and that is you say “Ah, Paley, you’re
absolutely right, your observations are correct! Organisms are well designed, and ecosystems are
harmonious, but guess what? That doesn't illustrate the existence and benevolence of an
explicitly creating deity.” In fact, just the opposite. Although those are true observations they
arise instead as _____side consequences_________. There is no principle explicitly producing
them at all. They arise as side consequences, in fact, (and here is the ultimate, almost cruel irony
with respect to Paley) they arise as side consequences ____of the only thing that is really
happening______in nature. A thing, which if you wish to imbue it with moral meaning, which
you should not, (a point that I'll get back to at the end) would seem to make a mockery of the
whole argument for design. The only thing that’s really happening in nature is that organisms are
striving for personal ____reproductive sucess_______________. That's all. They are out for
themselves. They are not doing it in any __conscious_______ sense, but that's all natural
selection is about. The organisms that are more successful and reproduction pass, in modern
parlance, more of their genes into future generations. That's all there is. There is no principle of
the good of the species, there's no ____principle of excellence of design _________________
explicitly so made, there's no principle of the _______harmony of ecosystems . These all arise as
side consequences of the only thing that is really happening out there in nature, which is of
opposite import to what we thought Paley’s God was teaching us. And the only thing that is
really happening out there is organisms are struggling for individual reproductive success for

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themselves and that is absolutely all. Now that's really a radical argument - that is Darwin's
argument. And that's something we haven't wanted _____make peace with__ - that natural
selection so rigidly ____naturalist________, so ________purposeless____, it's only about
organisms struggling for themselves for personal reproductive success, it leads only to _local
adaptation________, not to any form of predictable ___progress___, and that's all there is to it.

Where did Darwin get this? Where did it come from? To some of you I'm sure you realize that it
sounds very much like another theory you know about, and this is an interesting point. That is,
where Darwin got [his ideas] is very close to _____Adam smith’s economics______________,
and we now know that in 1838 when Darwin developed the principle of natural selection, that's
what he was doing for the few weeks before he got this great insight after reading all of this. That
is, he was studying the work of the Scottish economist through the work of Douglas Stewart on
the life of Adam Smith. That is, Adam Smith's arguments _________transfered to
nature____________. That is the beauty of it. Think about it: we want a well-ordered economy.
Now you might think the best way to get a well-ordered economy that will turn the greatest good
for the greatest number is to _____get all rge smart folks__________________ who know a lot
about_economics____________, give them power, sit them around a table and let them figure
out how to do it, and then pass laws explicitly for that arrangement. But that's the equivalent of
Paley’s god. If you want good organization and harmony just let an all-knowing god make it
explicitly; let the economists who know it best just ____make the laws__________. But Adam
Smith's argument is wonderfully paradoxical. He says no, that may seem right but in fact you
want to do something looks like the __opposite________. What you want to do is let individuals
struggle for __perosnal profit_________ and you don't trammel them in any way, that's laissez-
faire, you just let them be. Let them struggle for personal profit and that's all. There is no higher
principle. If you do that without any trammels (controls or restrictions) then the ones who do it
well will drive out the others, the ones are doing well will balance each other, and end up
____indirectly_____________ with the _______well-functioning economy_______ by letting
people struggle for personal profit. And then Smith introduces that wonderful metaphor, one of
the great lines English language, that you get that order and harmony he says through the action
of an invisible hand; that there is no directing hand, the Paley’s god, it is the invisible hand. The
only thing that’s happening is you're letting individuals struggle for personal profit and out of
that indirectly comes the __maximally order economy_________. Darwin's argument is the
same, transferred to nature. Truly you can't take it with you, so personal profit is not the natural
analog but reproductive success is. So, in nature all you have are organisms struggling for
individual reproductive success, that is for their own benefits and passing more of their genetic
material onto future generations. And that is all. That is all Darwinism is about, and it seems
cruel and it seems heartless and it seems counter to our hopes we haven't liked it. There ends
the first riddle.

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For the second, why does Darwin not use the word of _____evolution______? The main reason
is the word evolution, though not a common one in the English language at the time, had a
definite meaning primarily in poetry and metaphor, and it meant ____progress_______;
evolution means unfolding. Literally, evolution is an unfolding of a kind of
____preordained__________ or ___prearranged___________ sequence, and Darwin's theory is
non-progressivist, that's what's unique about, that's why he doesn't use the word. That in a line
is the resolution of the second riddle. If there's one thing we __we desperately want evolution to
be______, it's a principle that predicts progress, or that sees progressive complexification as a
property of evolution through time because it's only that way that we can justify our eventual
appearance and our hegemony over this earth as somehow implicit in the workings of
evolutionary theory. We don't want to believe the converse, which I think is true, that we are just
an ___accidental______, little late-arising ____twig_____ on this enormously arborescent
_______bush_______ of life, which if you could replant from seed would probably never yield
anything like us again, that I think is correct - but we don't want to see that we wish to view
evolution as inherently and predictably progressive so the origin of something like us, that we
occupy but a milli microsecond of cosmic time, is reasonable and predictable. That's what we
want. Darwin doesn't use the word evolution because it meant progress, and his theory almost
uniquely among 19th century evolutionary theories, was non progressivist.

As I said before, Darwin's theory is about local adaptation. It is about _adaptation______ to

changing __local environments_______. The hairy elephant in Russia is a better elephant for that
environment, but it's not a better an elephant in any cosmic or general sense – and that's all
natural selection can do for you. It can adapt you to changing local environments. Environments
change on a random vector through time; you're __not____ going to extract from a process that
merely adapts to changing local environments any overarching principle of ____progress_____.
And Darwin was well aware – look, this is a complex subject that I don’t have time for, and at
the time he was an eminent Victorian and he managed to smuggle a kind of argument about
progress back in under another guise, but he was very clear in his recognition that the bare bones
mechanics of the theory of Natural Selection yields no principle of progress. And in that is
perhaps it’s greatest radicalism, with respect to pop culture's perception of what evolution must
be and mean. And there is much documentation of this in Darwin; he wrote a little marginal note
in one of his books once, “never say higher or lower in referring to organisms.” He had a
correspondence late in his life with a man whose office I now occupy – the Harvard
paleontologist at the time – Alpheus Hyatt. Now Hyatt was a convinced progressionist who
thought that there was a principal of ___progess________ pervading ______evolution_______.
Darwin wrote to him, finally, his last line: “After long reflection, I cannot avoid the conclusion
that no inherent tendency to progressive development exists.” I can't get clearer than that.

So why do we call the process evolution? And that's an interesting story too. The main answer is
Herbert Spencer, the great Victorian polymath of nearly everything. Herbert Spencer, whose
writings were so influential in Darwin's age, did have an explicitly progressivist theory not only

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of biological change, but of every kind of change whether it was cosmological, economic,
artistic, human cultural – they were all inherently __progressive________, and therefore he
called it evolution because ___knew what the word meant______. Now since most 19th century
thinkers wouldn't accept Darwin’s radicalism any more than we would today, they were very
comfortable with Spencer's notion that you already use a word that means inherent in progress
because that is how they wanted to see evolution: as a ____process______ that predicted an
____inherant form of progress_______. Eventually Darwin gave up late in his life, I think in his
last book on worms he finally uses the word ‘evolution’, especially since everybody else was,
but he initially didn't want to because his theory was nonprogressive. And therein lies his other,
in many ways in terms of pop culture, misconception, his greatest radicalism.

We’ll now look at my second set of slides which, some of you who have heard me talk before
will have seen at least some of these. These are a series of sites primarily from advertising and
pop culture, illustrating our misidentification of evolution, our mis-equation I should say, of
evolution with a notion of inherent progress. It doesn't mean that. And yet the only icon we
know, the only picture we know of evolution, is the ladder of ascent from ape to human or from
single celled creature up. Look I'm not saying that this is literally what we believe; this is a
caricature that's why it's funny, that's why cartoonists and advertisers use it, but it's only a
caricature of what we really do believe, that there is a more general predictable form, right? We
wouldn't understand it as the primary icon of evolution if it weren’t in fact a caricature of our
____actual beliefs_____________, namely that there is, at least in a broad sense, a
_______progressivist predictability____________ to increasing complexification and evolution.
These come primarily from cartooning and advertising. My friend Mike Peters, who does Mother
Goose and Grimm and who started at the Dayton Daily News as their editorial cartoonist, once
put it to me very well in saying: “If you want to really understand what pop culture takes as its
primary picture of any phenomenon you look to our work, because as you're going through your
newspaper you can give one-tenth of a second's attention to any drawing that you see, and unless
it is the canonical drawing, the one that everybody understands, you'll pass it by,” and that's why
we have to use the drawing that people understand.

So here is evolution in popular culture, and I know no more dramatic example of our continuing
confusion of evolution with __progress____, and therefore as Muller put it, our inability really to
grasp the essence of Darwin's argument. There are several subseries here - this is the ‘American
Regionalism’ subseries. ‘California’ version: the evolution of surf trunks through history. As
anyone who is sensitive to regional accents will know, I'm a New Yorker, and the next one is my
version. This is the ‘Anywhere in America where scientific creationism is rampant’ version;
here's a gentleman holding a sign saying, “Earth is only 10,000 years old”, standing in his proper
place in the sequence. Next is the American cultures series. First, we have high culture. The ones
I’ve selected – I have an enormous collection of these things – I've selected for tonight a sub
series that just shows the ape to human part of the things, but I thought I'd show you one that
shows the whole thing from amoebae up here to white male in a business suit down there,

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thereby folding another kind of bias into the diagram. I don't want you to think I’m some elitist,
only making fun of pop culture, this kind of icon does not appear in professional publications as
often but sometimes it does. This is from the best available textbook on human evolution,
Campbell’s ‘Humankind Emerging’ and what do we see? The March of Evolution from the
chimp in the trees, he’s not our ancestor but our cousin, up the conventional sequence.
Australopithecus shown as stoop shouldered even though we've known since the 1920s they
walked as erect as we do, up the conventional sequence. And let me mention another kind of
rather more pernicious bias embedded in here which is ____unconscious____. I'm sure if I
pointed this out to the artist that person will want to get every copy of this back, deep-six them
all and start over again – but do notice the progressive lightning of skin and the racist tradition
and that's not because there’s less hair, there's actually a __a lightening of skin_______. We do
this so unconsciously we don't even see the _____racist context___ out of which it came. How
many of you noticed the first slide I showed had the same lightening of skin in the surf trunks? I
showed that slide for two years before I noticed it. That's how unconscious we are, and by the
way quite apart from its moral perniciousness, it doesn't even make any sense in anyway no
matter what your views on race are, all human races are equally old. It doesn't make any logical
sense to put that kind of variety with any one race whatever one you choose.

OK so that's that. Now what is Darwin, in theory, about? As I said, these are my last couple of
slides, it is about _____adaptation to changing local environments______. That's all it's about,
the principle of natural selection. Every naturalist has their favorite example, and I will give you
mine. This looks for all the world like a fish, right? It’s got fins, waves the fins, but it's not a fish.
In fact, it is a brood pouch for eggs of a clam, a freshwater mussel (unionid mussel) called
lampsilis. Now why should a clam evolve a brood pouch, that looks like a decoy fish, on its rear
end? As soon as you understand the breeding cycle of these clams it becomes clear. These clams,
uniquely among the clams, have larvae which must become parasitic on the gills of a fish if
they're going to survive. So, a real fish comes down to eat or to investigate, the mother clam
shoots the larvae at the actual fish and some of them attach to the gills and begin their free ride
into the next generation. And that's a wonderfully exquisite, remarkable adaptation of the clam. It
just fills you with awe and marvel, but it doesn't make a better clam in any cosmic sense, right?
This clam isn't better than a __a scallop________, it's not better than a quahog, it's not better than
an ___oster___, it is just a clam with an exquisite adaptation to its own immediate state. That's
what Darwinian theory is about. Fine, that's the second riddle.

And the third riddle, much shorter than the others. Darwin’s delay. Why did Darwin, having
developed the theory of natural selection in 1838, and being fully aware of what he had and how
important it was, and being young and ambitious and wanting credit for it why, does he delay
until 1859 before publishing? It is pretty clear it wasn't out of diffidence; I mean he knew he had
it, he was pretty sure he was right; he left his wife strict instructions that should he die before
writing the Origin of Species, that alone among his unpublished works she should publish the
preliminary sketches of 1840 to 1844 in which he developed the Theory of Natural Selection and

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he wanted it out. So why did he delay? I think one has to say, and I'm not saying anything at all
original here, anyone would say this, Darwin was obviously ___afraid____. It must have been
fear that was motivating him not to publish and therefore one must ask _____fear of what_____?
Now the obvious answer would be, but it's wrong, fear of exposing his belief in evolution which
is supposed to have been the great heresy of 19th century science. If you know anything about the
history of evolution you immediately realize that cannot be true. I used to say in lectures like this
that evolution was the most common heresy in the 19th century, but that's not right. It wasn’t even
a heresy. The most you can say is that evolution was the most common unorthodoxy of early 19th
century science. You did not get in trouble by ___confessing belief ___ in evolutionary change. I
suspect somewhere close to a majority of the great biologists of Europe accepted some form of
___evolutionary_____ argument. If you go to France in the first decade of the 19th century, of the
three great zoologists there, Jaffois (spelling?), Lamarck, and Cuvier – it is only Cuvier that is
anti-evolution; Jaffois and Lamarck are both evolutionists, Richard Owens was an evolutionist in
his own way, one of Darwin's teachers, Edmond Grant, was an evolutionist… No, one did not
get in trouble for exposing a belief in ___evolution____, particularly a nice, friendly, positively
spun belief that evolution means predictably progressive change up the ladder of progress to
human beings. In some spiritual sense, moreover, as many 19th century evolutionary theorists
said it, so it cannot have been fear of evolution.

But Darwin was afraid, and what was he afraid of? The answer seems to be – this is something
that's been studied quite a lot in the last 20 years – he was afraid, in short, (in a way this sums up
what I've been saying) of the radical philosophical implications of the ___principle of natural
selection_____, of his own take on evolution, of his own theory about how evolution occurred,
not of evolution itself.

Now, when Darwin wrote about this to himself privately in his notebooks what he said is very
interesting, and I think it captures the main point. What he said is that he was afraid to expose his
belief in ___materialism___. And by that I don't mean the usual vernacular sense today of love
of BMWs or Armani suits or anything like that. I mean the philosophical position that contrary to
the deep tradition of dualism, in which you have material stuff or matter, and mental stuff or
spirit, constituting the universe (dualism) in which the spirit stuff being of God (at least initially)
is the higher of the two forms, instead materialism claims that there is only matter and that all
those things we consider spirited imbue with divine, this to that, are really just manifestations of
properties of matter arranged in complex ways, and what we call the __mind_____ is a product
of the material substrate of the _neurology____. And that's a radical notion in 19th century terms
for which one could get in considerable trouble. And I’d just like to read you a couple of
Darwin's own statements about it. Here is a marvelous one where he in a sense is expressing his
intellectual joy at his apostasies’, his love of the deity and effective organization (in other words,
is it really true that the love of God is just the result of the way the neural substrate of the brain is
organized?) “Oh, you materialist! [he is talking to himself] Why is thought being a secretion of
brain more wonderful than gravity is a property of matter? It is only our arrogance and our

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admiration of ourselves.” That is a brilliant statement. And here's another one where he's very
explicit, tells himself, don't admit your materialism! He says, “To avoid stating how far I believe
in materialism, say only that emotions, instincts, degrees of talent, which are hereditary, are so
because brain of child resembles parent stalk.” In other words, don't just say that children often
like parents because it's a principal inheritance, don't say it's because there's a material substrate
that we’re inheriting… no, just, leave it alone. That really does run contrary to the greatest
western philosophical tradition of dualism – the separate realm of spirit, and spirit higher than
mind. And so, in short, if you want to summarize the three, it's the naturalism and the
purposelessness of the Adam Smith analogy for the first riddle, it's the non-progression of the
second riddle, it’s the materialism and the other forms of philosophical radicalism of the third
riddle. And it's interesting because if you look at what's common to non-Darwinian evolutionary
theories, through most of times and in 1859, it's their unwillingness to accept these
philosophically radical postulates, which deprive the universe of intrinsic friendly, furry meaning
in human terms. There are other theories, theories like neo-Lamarckism, which states that
organisms respond creatively to felt needs and convey their own desires into changing form, or
the theory of Orthogenesis, which says that there's inherent progressive, predicted tendencies in
evolution, or the theory of Vitalism which says that life has that ‘special something’ distinct from
non-life which drives it forward. I mean all of these in a sense have in common their desire to
escape from Darwin's implications.

But I would like to end this, and I have a few minutes of tape I want play as an actual end, by
asking why we do react so negatively to these messages of Darwin's actually the actual theory? I
will admit that those messages give us a cold bath with respect to certain hopes that nature might
be warm and furry, but why should nature be warm and furry with respect to our hopes? After all
nature existed for 4 ½ billion years before we got here, nature didn't know we were coming and
frankly doesn't give a damn about us, and why should she? I mean, it's an odd notion that this
world, having been here for so long, should have a moral and implied moral construction that
matches our sense of how we ought to be living our lives. Why should it? And therefore, you
might as well take the cold bath, which will get us away from that false argument. It is not only a
false argument, it is a passive and dangerous argument because it tells us we shouldn't engage in
moral struggle to figure out the meaning of our lives, from the humanistic traditions we should,
but then somehow passively we should learn to read nature, and if we read nature right, we will
figure it all out, we will know how we ought to live. It doesn't work that way and yet there is no
doubt there's a deep tradition of humanism which has been profoundly unhappy with or
suspicious of Darwin and Darwinism, and I don't really understand why that should be so. I just
want to read you one poem, this is Thomas Hardy, one of his many anti-Darwin poems, this is
‘Natures Questioning’, with the objects of nature are despairing at Darwin's new world. Hardy
says:

When I look forth at dawning, pool,

Field, flock and lonely tree,

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 All seem to look at me
Like chastened children sitting silent in a school;

And on them stirs, in lipping's mere

As if once clear in call,
But now scarce breathed at all –
‘We wonder, ever wondered, why we find us here!’

And in Darwinism there really is no answer to why this worm is here rather than that one that
didn't make it, and that's fine. And yet we are not willing, apparently, to accept that we,
particularly human beings, are here for no cosmic reason, that we have no special status, but to
me that's immensely liberating! It's not the job of science to define the ____meaning of life_____
- we can't do that, that's not what enterprise of science is about. That is the task of
____religion___ and ______philosophy_____ and the humanistic enterprises. Therefore, the
humanists should welcome that cold bath which highlights their own task. I don't understand it,
is the B minor mass any less beautiful if we decide that the box genius resides in some ineffable
arrangement of the neurons of his brain? Is the beauty of nature any less-so because it's
unplanned? No, I don't really understand it.

I'd like to end with a comment on science and religion, relative and relevant to this issue of how
we should be viewing nature. There is an ocean of wisdom in the Old Testament – I think the
Old Testament means something quite different from it as I will take it, but I think it's a
legitimate reading for our lives today – and that is that if it is wisdom that we seek, and it should
be, what is wisdom? It's a combination of knowledge, which is what science can supply, and
moral understanding, which science cannot supply. Science can supply factual material that will
help us in our struggle to reach moral decisions, but moral truth is not what science can go after.
I want to tell you a story about Darwin's death. Darwin died 1891 and he wished to be buried in
the churchyard of his little town down where he spent most of his adult life, but the opinion and
politicking of his influential scientific friends prevailed, and a spot was secured for him in
Westminster Abbey where he lies literally at the feet of Isaac Newton. You can visit him there if
you're ever in London. And when he died, and for his burial a funeral anthem was written by the
organist of Westminster Abbey, a man named Bridge. I had known about this for a long time, but
I had never heard it, I didn't even know that the music existed. A few years ago, a colleague of
mine unearthed the score of this funeral anthem that was written for Darwin's death, and I'm a
choral singer among my other sins, so I actually persuaded my choral conductor to record this. I
want to play this funeral anthem, and the reason why I want to do that is that, to me, it is so
wonderfully symbolic – Darwin, the great atheistic or at least materialistic man of science, buried
in the seat of the Anglican church in Westminster Abbey, the two traditions coming together.
Sung by the Boston Cecilia and marred only by the presence of yours truly in the bassist section,
thank you.

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