INTRODUCTION

In a lecture to the philosophical Royce Club of Harvard in 1917, William Morton Wheeler jovially referred to Lamarckism as “the ninth mortal sin.” Wheeler (1865–1937) was by then the world's leading figure in myrmecology (the study of ants), and there was a serious comment underlying his remark; something about his practice of myrmecology had placed him outside the orthodoxy of biology. A sketch of his career hints at why this might be so. Wheeler had formalized an early interest in natural history when he went to Chicago to study embryology under C. O. Whitman. Moving to Texas some time later, he became intrigued by the local ant fauna and returned to his earlier natural-historical passions. The fascination with myrmecology lasted for the remaining forty or so years of his life, to the virtual exclusion of all other types of animal – humans excepted. Most of this time (1908–37) was spent at Harvard. A romantic natural historian at heart, Wheeler was uncomfortably lodged with the applied biologists in the graduate school; by preference he mixed with Cambridge's philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists, along with the zoologists in the Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Ants had long been a riddle to evolutionists like Wheeler; though individually simple, their group behavior was extremely complex, embracing activities that were variously interpreted as fungus farming, aphid farming, slave making, mutual feeding, brood nursing, nest building, caste creation, and warfare, not to mention their manifold ecological relationships with other species, both within and without the nest.

The intellectual landscape of Darwinism for the last 150 years bears a certain resemblance to Germany during the Thirty Years' War. Sects and churches, preachers and dissenters, holy warriors and theocrats vie with each other for the hearts of the faithful and the minds of the unconverted, all too often leaving scorched earth behind.

Such an extravagant metaphor is not much of an overstatement. Accusations of heresy – and equally shameful, imputations of orthodoxy – have been thrown around in the history of evolutionary biology, from within and outside the community of scientists, with reckless abandon. Nor are these terms metaphorical: they are the ones that biologists have used themselves in defense of friends and denigration of foes. Antagonists on all sides of debates about evolutionary biology have wielded the language of holy warriors, declaring crusades to expunge heretics from the domains of biological science. Locutions such as these have become organizing tropes for biologists since the time of Darwin. Yet this aspect of the history of evolutionary theory has – rather surprisingly, in light of the inordinate attention given to evolution's entanglements with religion – usually been ignored.

Why is evolutionary biology so rife with the terms and emotions of organized Western religion? Numerous factors have played a role.

The standard history of evolutionary biology – the history I myself was writing some two or more decades ago – runs something like this: In the Origin of Species, published in 1859, Charles Darwin tried to do two things. First, he wanted to establish the fact of evolution. Second, he proposed a mechanism for evolution – natural selection brought on by a struggle for existence. Darwin was successful in his first aim. Very soon after the publication of his book, most of the educated world – scientists and laypeople – was converted to evolutionism. It became the accepted way of thinking about life's origins, including our own. Darwin was unsuccessful in his second aim. Almost no one took up natural selection as a working cause of evolutionary change – rather, a host of alternatives were preferred, including Lamarckism (the inheritance of acquired characteristics), saltationism (evolution by jumps), orthogenesis (lines of development that take on their own momentum), and others. The triumph of selection as a mechanism had to wait until the twentieth century. It was only then that biologists made the required major advances in our understanding of the mechanisms of heredity and developed the science now known as “genetics.”

Just before Ernst Haeckel's death in 1919, historians began piling on the faggots for a splendid auto-da-fé. Though more people prior to the Great War learned of Darwin's theory through his efforts than through any other source, including Darwin himself, Haeckel has been accused of not preaching orthodox Darwinian doctrine. In 1916, E. S. Russell judged Haeckel's principal theoretical work, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, as “representative not so much of Darwinian as of pre-Darwinian thought.” Both Stephen Jay Gould and Peter Bowler endorse this evaluation, seeing as an index of Haeckel's heterodox deviation his use of the biogenetic law that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Michael Ruse, without much analysis, simply proclaims that “Haeckel and friends were not true Darwinians.” These historians locate the problem in Haeckel's inclinations toward Naturphilosophie and in his adoption of the kind of Romantic attitudes characterizing the earlier biology of Goethe. These charges of heresy assume, of course, that Darwin's own theory harbors no taint of Romanticism and that it consequently remains innocent of the doctrine of recapitulation. I think both assumptions quite mistaken, and have so argued. But against the charge of heresy, one can bring a more direct and authoritative voice – Darwin himself.

In 1863, Haeckel made bold to send Darwin his recently published two-volume monograph on radiolarians – one-celled aquatic animals that secrete a skeleton of silica. The first volume examined in minute detail the biology of these creatures and argued that Darwin's theory made their relationships comprehensible.

Such expressions as “orthodox Darwinian” and “unorthodox theorist” don't usually require definition. For each scientist in a conversation understands clearly what “orthodox Darwinian” means. At the same time, it is obvious that the understanding of “orthodox Darwinian” changes with time and depends on context. Darwinian evolutionary theory became commonplace among biologists, a part of the basic canon of life sciences. The main disputes were about whether Darwinian biology was the best one, whose position was the most orthodox, and whose positions were heretical. Undoubtedly, at certain periods what would have been considered orthodox among American geneticists would have been perceived as heretical among French experts, and vice versa. This chapter deals with the history of Russian evolutionary biology from 1930s to the 1980s. We will attempt to show how in Russian biology the very idea of what being an orthodox evolutionist meant and what being a heretic meant was modified in different contexts.

In our study, we use the life and work of one entomologist as a case study. Georgii Shaposhnikov (1915–1997) was a taxonomist of plant lice (Aphidoidea), a group of insects with a peculiar life cycle and biology. His experiments producing rapid speciation in aphids were widely discussed by major players in the field of evolutionary biology, as the experiments seemed to fit well into many theoretical frameworks. At various times, these experiments were used as arguments to support quite different evolutionary mechanisms.

The relationship between Darwin's theory of evolution and religion has been, to say the least, a controversial topic ever since the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. Interestingly enough, evolutionary biologists have had and continue to have quite different views about this relationship. The questions that I want to address in this paper are: (1) what views about the proper relationship between science and religion can we find among contemporary evolutionary biologists? and (2) how should we assess these views? – more specifically, which one (if any) is the most reasonable one to adopt? In relation to these issues, I shall also ask (3) what would count as Darwinian heresy on this matter?

Two radically different perspectives on these issues can be found among evolutionary biologists. On the one hand, we have Darwinians, such as Stephen Jay Gould, who hold that religion and evolutionary biology (or, more broadly speaking, science) are logically distinct and fully separate domains with different subject matters, methods, and aims. On the other, we have those such as Edward O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins, who think that science in general, and especially biology, severely undermines traditional religion and that science, to some extent, can even replace religion. Let us first look at these views in more detail and then assess them critically. Let us also ask whether there is any other way of understanding the relationship between science (and, in particular, evolutionary biology) and religion.

It's been a long time now since I borrowed the phrase “the eclipse of Darwinism” from Julian Huxley's 1942 survey Evolution: The Modern Synthesis for the title of my own book on the non-Darwinian evolutionary theories that proliferated around 1900. But even at the time, I was conscious of a problem with Huxley's use of the term “eclipse” to denote the state of Darwinism during the period before the emergence of the genetical theory of natural selection. An eclipse is a temporary diminution of brightness, implying that Darwinism had gained considerable influence in science during the period following the publication of the Origin of Species, before being overtaken by a temporary wave of opposition at the turn of the century. Yet all the work that historians have done on the origins of evolutionism seems to suggest that the theory of natural selection encountered massive opposition from the start, and that Darwin had succeeded in popularizing the basic idea of evolution even though few scientists (or anyone else, for that matter) thought that his explanation of its workings was adequate. Even Julian's grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley, popularly known as “Darwin's bulldog,” turns out on closer inspection to have been lukewarm in his support for the selection theory and inclined to look for alternatives, such as saltationism.

Why, then, did Julian Huxley use a phrase that implied that Darwinism had been popular? One simple answer is that he was exploiting an ambiguity permitted by the changing meaning of the term “Darwinism.”

Evolutionary biologists, especially in the United States, seem to be engaged in a perpetual war with religion. On the face of it, this is unsurprising: over two-thirds of the American population belong to religious congregations; nearly half describe themselves as born again into evangelical Christian faiths that depend on revelation and the doctrine of justification by faith; and a sizeable and vocal proportion of these consider the teaching of Darwinian evolutionary biology to be anathema. All U.S. (and to a lesser extent, British) evolutionists must therefore choose sides in an ongoing cultural and political conflict. But the public evangelists for evolution, by and large, do more than defend the validity of their science; they also carry the war into the enemy's camp, aiming not only to safeguard their own work but also to vitiate the very underpinnings of religion.

It is generally seen as unfortunate when scientists let their religious or other metaphysical beliefs inform their science; the philosopher of evolution Michael Ruse, for example, speaks disapprovingly in his Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction? of “cultural values built right into [Julian Huxley's] science” and of “cultural-value infiltration” into the work of the architects of the Modern Synthesis and current evolutionary biologists – including the late Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Richard Lewontin, and E. O. Wilson – as though evolutionary biology subscribed at least as much as any other science to the “metavalue … of the internal culture of science itself, namely, that of keeping science distinct from culture and hence nonepistemic-value-free.”

Some years after writing his famous essay On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin noted that his primary goals had been to overthrow “the dogma of separate creations” and to establish natural selection as the primary, through far from exclusive, mechanism of change. Regarding the relative importance of these twin goals, he left no doubt. “Personally, of course, I care much about Natural Selection,” he confided to an American correspondent; “but that seems to me utterly unimportant, compared to the question of Creation or Modification.” Well into the twentieth century naturalists continued to debate the merits of natural selection, but since the early 1870s they have been describing the theory of common descent as an “ascertained fact.” The ultimate Darwinian heresy was thus the denial of common descent.

Despite the frequent claims of anti-evolutionists to the contrary, during the first quarter of the twentieth century about the only biologist of repute who rejected organic evolution was Albert Fleischmann (1862–1942), a respectable but relatively obscure German zoologist who taught for decades at the University of Erlangen in Bavaria. In 1901 he published a scientific critique of organic evolution, Die Descendenztheorie, in which he dismissed not only natural selection but also the notion of common descent. This gave him a unique reputation among biologists. As Vernon L. Kellogg noted in 1907, Fleischmann seemed to be “the only biologist of recognized position … who publicly declared a disbelief in the theory of descent.”

INTRODUCTION

The five long letters in this chapter are from Catherine Eckersall to her eldest daughter, Harriet Malthus, wife of Malthus. Catherine Eckersall wrote the letters while on a two-month holiday to the Lake District in the summer of 1825 with a large family party. As the first letter indicates, Malthus and his wife and their two surviving children (Emily and Henry) were then about to return from a holiday in Europe, following the death of their third child, Lucy, on 3 May 1825, aged 17. The letters refer to specific days and months, but not the year. However, the year (1825) is evident from the (indirect) references to the death of Lucy.

Although the letters contribute only slightly to our knowledge of Malthus himself, they are a valuable source of information about the characters and activities of his relatives, and provide an interesting insight into the lives and attitudes of an upper-middle-class English family in the 1820s.

Catherine Eckersall (1755–1837), née Wathen, was a first cousin of Malthus – a daughter of a sister of Malthus' father. She was said to be very handsome and was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. In 1774 she married John Eckersall (1748-1837), who was a first cousin to her (son of a sister of her mother). As Catherine Eckersall's mother and John Eckersall's mother were sisters of Malthus' father, they were both first cousins to Malthus.

INTRODUCTION

These three items are found in different locations amongst the Malthus manuscripts, but are brought together here because of their broadly similar themes. The first is an untitled essay or lecture on Charles I, beginning with the phrase: ‘Charles the first to be considered as more unfortunate than criminal’.

An examination paper entitled ‘Questions in Modern History’ set by Malthus in 1808 for his students at the East India College shows that Malthus lectured on Charles I. The paper (now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford) contains four questions (out of 24) on Charles I. The following question specifically concerns the subject matter of this essay: ‘12. What was the great fault in the character of Charles I, from which his misfortunes seemed chiefly to arise? And what may be considered as the most criminal period of his public conduct?’

However, the rather declamatory style of this essay – ‘How low! How abject did our countrymen bow before the throne of the 8th Henry’ – and its florid language – ‘man blushes not to bend the knee to Despotism’ – suggest that it might have been written, not as a lecture to students, but as a submission in a school or university essay competition. If the thoughts contained in the essay were Malthus' genuine views – and not merely contrived debating points – they provide an interesting insight into his political opinions at the time.