Books: Luck or Cunning?
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Samuel Butler >> Luck or Cunning?
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Here, again, it is not use and disuse which Mr. Darwin declares
himself to have undervalued, but spontaneous variations. The
sentence just given is one of the most confusing I ever read even in
the works of Mr Darwin. It is the essence of his theory that the
"numerous successive, slight, favourable variations," above referred
to, should be fortuitous, accidental, spontaneous; it is evident,
moreover, that they are intended in this passage to be accidental or
spontaneous, although neither of these words is employed, inasmuch
as use and disuse and the action of the conditions of existence,
whether direct or indirect, are mentioned specially as separate
causes which purvey only the minor part of the variations from among
which nature selects. The words "that is, in relation to adaptive
forms" should be omitted, as surplusage that draws the reader's
attention from the point at issue; the sentence really amounts to
this--that modification has been effected CHIEFLY THROUGH SELECTION
in the ordinary course of nature FROM AMONG SPONTANEOUS VARIATIONS,
AIDED IN AN UNIMPORTANT MANNER BY VARIATIONS WHICH QUa US ARE
SPONTANEOUS. Nevertheless, though these spontaneous variations are
still so trifling in effect that they only aid spontaneous
variations in an unimportant manner, in his earlier editions Mr.
Darwin thought them still less important than he does now.
This comes of tinkering. We do not know whether we are on our heads
or our heels. We catch ourselves repeating "important,"
"unimportant," "unimportant," "important," like the King when
addressing the jury in "Alice in Wonderland;" and yet this is the
book of which Mr. Grant Allen {163a} says that it is "one of the
greatest, and most learned, the most lucid, the most logical, the
most crushing, the most conclusive, that the world has ever seen.
Step by step, and principle by principle, it proved every point in
its progress triumphantly before it went on to the next. So vast an
array of facts so thoroughly in hand had never before been mustered
and marshalled in favour of any biological theory." The book and
the eulogy are well mated.
I see that in the paragraph following on the one just quoted, Mr.
Allen says, that "to the world at large Darwinism and evolution
became at once synonymous terms." Certainly it was no fault of Mr.
Darwin's if they did not, but I will add more on this head
presently; for the moment, returning to Mr. Darwin, it is hardly
credible, but it is nevertheless true, that Mr Darwin begins the
paragraph next following on the one on which I have just reflected
so severely, with the words, "It can hardly be supposed that a false
theory would explain in so satisfactory a manner as does the theory
of natural selection, the several large classes of facts above
specified." If Mr. Darwin found the large classes of facts
"satisfactorily" explained by the survival of the luckiest
irrespectively of the cunning which enabled them to turn their luck
to account, he must have been easily satisfied. Perhaps he was in
the same frame of mind as when he said {164a} that "even an
imperfect answer would be satisfactory," but surely this is being
thankful for small mercies.
On the following page Mr. Darwin says:- "Although I am fully" (why
"fully"?) "convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume
under the form of an abstract, I by no means expect to convince
experienced naturalists," &c. I have not quoted the whole of Mr.
Darwin's sentence, but it implies that any experienced naturalist
who remained unconvinced was an old-fashioned, prejudiced person. I
confess that this is what I rather feel about the experienced
naturalists who differ in only too great numbers from myself, but I
did not expect to find so much of the old Adam remaining in Mr.
Darwin; I did not expect to find him support me in the belief that
naturalists are made of much the same stuff as other people, and, if
they are wise, will look upon new theories with distrust until they
find them becoming generally accepted. I am not sure that Mr.
Darwin is not just a little bit flippant here.
Sometimes I ask myself whether it is possible that, not being
convinced, I may be an experienced naturalist after all; at other
times, when I read Mr. Darwin's works and those of his eulogists, I
wonder whether there is not some other Mr. Darwin, some other
"Origin of Species," some other Professors Huxley, Tyndal, and Ray
Lankester, and whether in each case some malicious fiend has not
palmed off a counterfeit upon me that differs toto caelo from the
original. I felt exactly the same when I read Goethe's "Wilhelm
Meister"; I could not believe my eyes, which nevertheless told me
that the dull diseased trash I was so toilsomely reading was a work
which was commonly held to be one of the great literary masterpieces
of the world. It seemed to me that there must be some other Goethe
and some other Wilhelm Meister. Indeed I find myself so
depressingly out of harmony with the prevailing not opinion only,
but spirit--if, indeed, the Huxleys, Tyndals, Miss Buckleys, Ray
Lankesters, and Romaneses express the prevailing spirit as
accurately as they appear to do--that at times I find it difficult
to believe I am not the victim of hallucination; nevertheless I know
that either every canon, whether of criticism or honourable conduct,
which I have learned to respect is an impudent swindle, suitable for
the cloister only, and having no force or application in the outside
world; or else that Mr. Darwin and his supporters are misleading the
public to the full as much as the theologians of whom they speak at
times so disapprovingly. They sin, moreover, with incomparably less
excuse. Right as they doubtless are in much, and much as we
doubtless owe them (so we owe much also to the theologians, and they
also are right in much), they are giving way to a temper which
cannot be indulged with impunity. I know the great power of
academicism; I know how instinctively academicism everywhere must
range itself on Mr. Darwin's side, and how askance it must look on
those who write as I do; but I know also that there is a power
before which even academicism must bow, and to this power I look not
unhopefully for support.
As regards Mr. Spencer's contention that Mr. Darwin leaned more
towards function as he grew older, I do not doubt that at the end of
his life Mr. Darwin believed modification to be mainly due to
function, but the passage quoted on page 62 written in 1839, coupled
with the concluding paragraph of the "Origin of Species" written in
1859, and allowed to stand during seventeen years of revision,
though so much else was altered--these passages, when their dates
and surroundings are considered, suggest strongly that Mr. Darwin
thought during all the forty years or so thus covered exactly as his
grandfather and Lamarck had done, and indeed as all sensible people
since Buffon wrote have done if they have accepted evolution at all.
Then why should he not have said so? What object could he have in
writing an elaborate work to support a theory which he knew all the
time to be untenable? The impropriety of such a course, unless the
work was, like Buffon's, transparently ironical, could only be
matched by its fatuousness, or indeed by the folly of one who should
assign action so motiveless to any one out of a lunatic asylum.
This sounds well, but unfortunately we cannot forget that when Mr.
Darwin wrote the "Origin of Species" he claimed to be the originator
of the theory of descent with modification generally; that he did
this without one word of reference either to Buffon or Erasmus
Darwin until the first six thousand copies of his book had been
sold, and then with as meagre, inadequate notice as can be well
conceived. Lamarck was just named in the first editions of the
"Origin of Species," but only to be told that Mr. Darwin had not got
anything to give him, and he must go away; the author of the
"Vestiges of Creation" was also just mentioned, but only in a
sentence full of such gross misrepresentation that Mr. Darwin did
not venture to stand by it, and expunged it in later editions, as
usual, without calling attention to what he had done. It would have
been in the highest degree imprudent, not to say impossible, for one
so conscientious as Mr. Darwin to have taken the line he took in
respect of descent with modification generally, if he were not
provided with some ostensibly distinctive feature, in virtue of
which, if people said anything, he might claim to have advanced
something different, and widely different, from the theory of
evolution propounded by his illustrious predecessors; a distinctive
theory of some sort, therefore, had got to be looked for--and if
people look in this spirit they can generally find.
I imagine that Mr. Darwin, casting about for a substantial
difference, and being unable to find one, committed the Gladstonian
blunder of mistaking an unsubstantial for a substantial one. It was
doubtless because he suspected it that he never took us fully into
his confidence, nor in all probability allowed even to himself how
deeply he distrusted it. Much, however, as he disliked the
accumulation of accidental variations, he disliked not claiming the
theory of descent with modification still more; and if he was to
claim this, accidental his variations had got to be. Accidental
they accordingly were, but in as obscure and perfunctory a fashion
as Mr. Darwin could make them consistently with their being to hand
as accidental variations should later developments make this
convenient. Under these circumstances it was hardly to be expected
that Mr. Darwin should help the reader to follow the workings of his
mind--nor, again, that a book the writer of which was hampered as I
have supposed should prove clear and easy reading.
The attitude of Mr. Darwin's mind, whatever it may have been in
regard to the theory of descent with modification generally, goes so
far to explain his attitude in respect to the theory of natural
selection (which, it cannot be too often repeated, is only one of
the conditions of existence advanced as the main means of
modification by the earlier evolutionists), that it is worth while
to settle the question once for all whether Mr. Darwin did or did
not believe himself justified in claiming the theory of descent as
an original discovery of his own. This will be a task of some
little length, and may perhaps try the reader's patience, as it
assuredly tried mine; if, however, he will read the two following
chapters, he will probably be able to make up his mind upon much
that will otherwise, if he thinks about it at all, continue to
puzzle him.
CHAPTER XIII--Darwin's Claim to Descent with Modification
Mr. Allen, in his "Charles Darwin," {168a} says that "in the public
mind Mr. Darwin is commonly regarded as the discoverer and founder
of the evolution hypothesis," and on p. 177 he says that to most men
Darwinism and evolution mean one and the same thing. Mr. Allen
declares misconception on this matter to be "so extremely general"
as to be "almost universal;" this is more true than creditable to
Mr. Darwin.
Mr. Allen says {168b} that though Mr. Darwin gained "far wider
general acceptance" for both the doctrine of descent in general, and
for that of the descent of man from a simious or semi-simious
ancestor in particular, "he laid no sort of claim to originality or
proprietorship in either theory." This is not the case. No one can
claim a theory more frequently and more effectually than Mr. Darwin
claimed descent with modification, nor, as I have already said, is
it likely that the misconception of which Mr. Allen complains would
be general, if he had not so claimed it. The "Origin of Species"
begins:-
"When on board H.M.S. Beagle, as naturalist, I was much struck with
certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South
America, and in the geological relation of the present to the past
inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me to throw
some light on the origin of species--that mystery of mysteries, as
it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers. On my
return home it occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps
be made out on this question by patiently accumulating and
reflecting upon all sorts of facts which could possibly have any
bearing on it. After five years' work I allowed myself to speculate
upon the subject, and drew up some short notes; these I enlarged in
1844 {169a} into a sketch of the conclusions which then seemed to me
probable. From that period to the present day I have steadily
pursued the same object. I hope I may be excused these personal
details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming
to a decision."
This is bland, but peremptory. Mr. Darwin implies that the mere
asking of the question how species has come about opened up a field
into which speculation itself had hardly yet ventured to intrude.
It was the mystery of mysteries; one of our greatest philosophers
had said so; not one little feeble ray of light had ever yet been
thrown upon it. Mr. Darwin knew all this, and was appalled at the
greatness of the task that lay before him; still, after he had
pondered on what he had seen in South America, it really did occur
to him, that if he was very very patient, and went on reflecting for
years and years longer, upon all sorts of facts, good, bad, and
indifferent, which could possibly have any bearing on the subject--
and what fact might not possibly have some bearing?--well,
something, as against the nothing that had been made out hitherto,
might by some faint far-away possibility be one day dimly seem. It
was only what he had seen in South America that made all this occur
to him. He had never seen anything about descent with modification
in any book, nor heard any one talk about it as having been put
forward by other people; if he had, he would, of course, have been
the first to say so; he was not as other philosophers are; so the
mountain went on for years and years gestating, but still there was
no labour.
"My work," continues Mr. Darwin, "is now nearly finished; but as it
will take me two or three years to complete it, and as my health is
far from strong, I have been urged to publish this abstract. I have
been more especially induced to do this, as Mr. Wallace, who is now
studying the natural history of the Malay Archipelago, has arrived
at almost exactly the same general conclusions that I have on the
origin of species." Mr. Darwin was naturally anxious to forestall
Mr. Wallace, and hurried up with his book. What reader, on finding
descent with modification to be its most prominent feature, could
doubt--especially if new to the subject, as the greater number of
Mr. Darwin's readers in 1859 were--that this same descent with
modification was the theory which Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace had
jointly hit upon, and which Mr. Darwin was so anxious to show that
he had not been hasty in adopting? When Mr. Darwin went on to say
that his abstract would be very imperfect, and that he could not
give references and authorities for his several statements, we did
not suppose that such an apology could be meant to cover silence
concerning writers who during their whole lives, or nearly so, had
borne the burden and heat of the day in respect of descent with
modification in its most extended application. "I much regret,"
says Mr. Darwin, "that want of space prevents my having the
satisfaction of acknowledging the generous assistance I have
received from very many naturalists, some of them personally unknown
to me." This is like what the Royal Academicians say when they do
not intend to hang our pictures; they can, however, generally find
space for a picture if they want to hang it, and we assume with
safety that there are no master-works by painters of the very
highest rank for which no space has been available. Want of space
will, indeed, prevent my quoting from more than one other paragraph
of Mr. Darwin's introduction; this paragraph, however, should alone
suffice to show how inaccurate Mr. Allen is in saying that Mr.
Darwin "laid no sort of claim to originality or proprietorship" in
the theory of descent with modification, and this is the point with
which we are immediately concerned. Mr. Darwin says:-
"In considering the origin of species, it is quite conceivable that
a naturalist, reflecting on the mutual affinities of organic beings,
on their embryological relations, their geographical distribution,
geological succession, and other such facts, might come to the
conclusion that each species had not been independently created, but
had descended like varieties from other species."
It will be observed that not only is no hint given here that descent
with modification was a theory which, though unknown to the general
public, had been occupying the attention of biologists for a hundred
years and more, but it is distinctly implied that this was not the
case. When Mr. Darwin said it was "conceivable that a naturalist
might" arrive at the theory of descent, straightforward readers took
him to mean that though this was conceivable, it had never, to Mr.
Darwin's knowledge, been done. If we had a notion that we had
already vaguely heard of the theory that men and the lower animals
were descended from common ancestors, we must have been wrong; it
was not this that we had heard of, but something else, which, though
doubtless a little like it, was all wrong, whereas this was
obviously going to be all right.
To follow the rest of the paragraph with the closeness that it
merits would be a task at once so long and so unpleasant that I will
omit further reference to any part of it except the last sentence.
That sentence runs:-
"In the case of the mistletoe, which draws its nourishment from
certain trees, which has seeds that must be transported by certain
birds, and which has flowers with separate sexes absolutely
requiring the agency of certain insects to bring pollen from one
flower to the other, it is equally preposterous to account for the
structure of this parasite, with its relations to several distinct
organic beings, by the effects of the external conditions, or of
habit, or of the volition of the plant itself."
Doubtless it would be preposterous to refer the structure of either
woodpecker or mistletoe to the single agency of any one of these
three causes; but neither Lamarck nor any other writer on evolution
has, so far as I know, even contemplated this; the early
evolutionists supposed organic modification to depend on the action
and interaction of all three, and I venture to think that this will
ere long be considered as, to say the least of it, not more
preposterous than the assigning of the largely preponderating share
in the production of such highly and variously correlated organisms
as the mistletoe and woodpecker mainly to luck pure and simple, as
is done by Mr. Charles Darwin's theory.
It will be observed that in the paragraph last quoted from, Mr.
Darwin, more suo, is careful not to commit himself. All he has said
is, that it would be preposterous to do something the
preposterousness of which cannot be reasonably disputed; the
impression, however, is none the less effectually conveyed, that
some one of the three assigned agencies, taken singly, was the only
cause of modification ever yet proposed, if, indeed, any writer had
even gone so far as this. We knew we did not know much about the
matter ourselves, and that Mr. Darwin was a naturalist of long and
high standing; we naturally, therefore, credited him with the same
good faith as a writer that we knew in ourselves as readers; it
never so much as crossed our minds to suppose that the head which he
was holding up all dripping before our eyes as that of a fool, was
not that of a fool who had actually lived and written, but only of a
figure of straw which had been dipped in a bucket of red paint.
Naturally enough we concluded, since Mr. Darwin seemed to say so,
that if his predecessors had nothing better to say for themselves
than this, it would not be worth while to trouble about them
further; especially as we did not know who they were, nor what they
had written, and Mr. Darwin did not tell us. It would be better and
less trouble to take the goods with which it was plain Mr. Darwin
was going to provide us, and ask no questions. We have seen that
even tolerably obvious conclusions were rather slow in occurring to
poor simple-minded Mr. Darwin, and may be sure that it never once
occurred to him that the British public would be likely to argue
thus; he had no intention of playing the scientific confidence trick
upon us. I dare say not, but unfortunately the result has closely
resembled the one that would have ensued if Mr. Darwin had had such
an intention.
The claim to originality made so distinctly in the opening sentences
of the" Origin of Species" is repeated in a letter to Professor
Haeckel, written October 8, 1864, and giving an account of the
development of his belief in descent with modification. This
letter, part of which is quoted by Mr. Allen, {173a} is given on p.
134 of the English translation of Professor Haeckel's "History of
Creation," {173b} and runs as follows:-
"In South America three classes of facts were brought strongly
before my mind. Firstly, the manner in which closely allied species
replace species in going southward. Secondly, the close affinity of
the species inhabiting the islands near South America to those
proper to the continent. This struck me profoundly, especially the
difference of the species in the adjoining islets in the Galapagos
Archipelago. Thirdly, the relation of the living Edentata and
Rodentia to the extinct species. I shall never forget my
astonishment when I dug out a gigantic piece of armour like that of
the living armadillo.
"Reflecting on these facts, and collecting analogous ones, it seemed
to me probable that allied species were descended from a common
ancestor. But during several years I could not conceive how each
form could have been modified so as to become admirably adapted to
its place in nature. I began, therefore, to study domesticated
animals and cultivated plants, and after a time perceived that man's
power of selecting and breeding from certain individuals was the
most powerful of all means in the production of new races. Having
attended to the habits of animals and their relations to the
surrounding conditions, I was able to realise the severe struggle
for existence to which all organisms are subjected, and my
geological observations had allowed me to appreciate to a certain
extent the duration of past geological periods. Therefore, when I
happened to read Malthus on population, the idea of natural
selection flashed on me. Of all minor points, the last which I
appreciated was the importance and cause of the principle of
divergence."
This is all very naive, and accords perfectly with the introductory
paragraphs of the "Origin of Species;" it gives us the same picture
of a solitary thinker, a poor, lonely, friendless student of nature,
who had never so much as heard of Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, or
Lamarck. Unfortunately, however, we cannot forget the description
of the influences which, according to Mr. Grant Allen, did in
reality surround Mr. Darwin's youth, and certainly they are more
what we should have expected than those suggested rather than
expressly stated by Mr. Darwin. "Everywhere around him," says Mr.
Allen, {174a} "in his childhood and youth these great but formless"
(why "formless"?) "evolutionary ideas were brewing and fermenting.
The scientific society of his elders and of the contemporaries among
whom he grew up was permeated with the leaven of Laplace and
Lamarck, of Hutton and of Herschel. Inquiry was especially
everywhere rife as to the origin and nature of specific distinctions
among plants and animals. Those who believed in the doctrine of
Buffon and of the 'Zoonomia,' and those who disbelieved in it,
alike, were profoundly interested and agitated in soul by the far-
reaching implications of that fundamental problem. On every side
evolutionism, in its crude form." (I suppose Mr. Allen could not
help saying "in its crude form," but descent with modification in
1809 meant, to all intents and purposes, and was understood to mean,
what it means now, or ought to mean, to most people.) "The
universal stir," says Mr. Allen on the following page, "and deep
prying into evolutionary questions which everywhere existed among
scientific men in his early days was naturally communicated to a lad
born of a scientific family and inheriting directly in blood and
bone the biological tastes and tendencies of Erasmus Darwin."
I confess to thinking that Mr. Allen's account of the influences
which surrounded Mr. Darwin's youth, if tainted with
picturesqueness, is still substantially correct. On an earlier page
he had written:- "It is impossible to take up any scientific memoirs
or treatises of the first half of our own century without seeing at
a glance how every mind of high original scientific importance was
permeated and disturbed by the fundamental questions aroused, but
not fully answered, by Buffon, Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin. In
Lyell's letters, and in Agassiz's lectures, in the 'Botanic Journal'
and in the 'Philosophical Transactions,' in treatises on Madeira
beetles and the Australian flora, we find everywhere the thoughts of
men profoundly influenced in a thousand directions by this universal
evolutionary solvent and leaven.
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