The Act of Creation (16 page)

two antagonistic forces
acting on the planets,
guided him in the right direction. A single force, as previously assumed
-- the divine Prime Mover and its allied hierarchy of angels -- would
never produce elliptic orbits and periodic changes of speed. These could
only be the result of some dynamic tug of war going on in the sky --
as indeed there is. The concept of two antagonistic forces provided
rules for a new game in which elliptic orbits and velocities depending
on solar distance had their legitimate place.
He made many mistakes during that wild flight of thought; but 'as if by
miracle' -- as he himself remarked -- the mistakes cancelled out. It looks
as if at times his conscious critical faculties had been anaesthetized by
the creative impulse, by the impatience to get to grips with the physical
forces in the solar system. The problem of the planetary orbits had been
hopelessly bogged down in its purely geometrical frame of reference,
and when he realized that he could not get it unstuck he tore it out of
that frame and removed it into the field of physics. That there were
inconsistencies and impurities in his method did not matter to him in
the heat of the moment, hoping that somehow they would right themselves
later on -- as they did. This inspired cheating -- or, rather, borrowing
on credit -- is a characteristic and recurrent feature in the history of
science. The latest example is sub-atomic physics, which may be said to
live on credit -- in the pious hope that one day its inner contradictions
and paradoxes will somehow resolve themselves.
Kepler's determination of the orbit of Mars became the unifying link
between the two formerly separate realms of physics and astronomy. His
was the first serious attempt at explaining the mechanism of the solar
system in terms of physical forces; and once the example was set,
physics and cosmology could never again be divorced.
3. Darwin and Natural Selection
Charles Darwin is perhaps the most outstanding illustration of
the thesis that 'creative originality' does not mean creating or
originating a system of ideas out of nothing but rather out of the
combination of well-established patterns of thought -- by a process
of cross-fertilization, as it were. With a pinch of salt it could be
said that Darwin's essential achievement was to combine the evolutionary
philosophy of Anaximander, who taught that man's ancestor was an aquatic
animal and that the earth and its inhabitants were descended from
the same Prime Material, with the philosophy of Empedocles who taught
the survival of the fittest among the random aggregations of organic
forms. Aristotle the naturalist believed that nature fashions organs in
the order of their necessity, whereas Aristotle the Platonist asserted
that the species are immutable and denied the continuity between homo
sapiens and the animal kingdom.
From this point onward two basic metaphysical doctrines of opposite
nature can be more or less clearly discerned throughout the history
of European thought; one might call them -- provided the words are
not taken too literally--the 'descending' and 'ascending' views of
the universe. The former is represented by Plato, the Neoplatonists,
and by the fundamentalist trend in Christianity from the Fathers to
the Victorians; it postulates an absolute act of creation, followed
by a
descent
(Plato's cave, the Fall), followed by a static,
immutable, deep-freeze state of affairs, a marking of time until
the Last Judgement. The
ascending
or evolutionary doctrine,
which had flourished during the heroic age of Greek science and was
still partially upheld by Epicureans such as Lucretius, went into a
long period of hibernation, but awoke with renewed vigour at the dawn
of the Scientific Revolution. Tycho, Kepler, Galileo, destroyed the
dogma of immutability; Newton in his
Optics
declared that nature
was 'delighted with transmutations'; and from there onward through
Leibniz, de Maillet, Locke to Kant (to mention only a few), the idea
of a growing 'Tree of Nature', on which the species branched out from
a common root, gained increasing support among the leading spirits.
The conflict between the two doctrines came to a head a century before the
Darwin scandal -- in the great controversy between Linnaeus and Buffon,
who were both born in the same year, 1707. Carl von Linné's
published works amount to a hundred and eighty volumes; the Comte de
Buffon's
Histoire Naturelle
had forty-four quarto volumes, and
took fifty years to publish. Linné, who laid down the laws for
defining genera and species, and whose system of classification survives
to this day, started as a believer in immutability; but later in life
he admitted that new species may arise as 'daughters of Time'. Buffon
attacked not only Linnaeus's classification, but the principles underlying
it; he denied the existence of rigid boundaries between one species and
another, between vegetable and animal, between animal and man: species
arose, transformed themselves, and became extinct according to climatic
and other changes in nature. Judged by the form and organization of its
body, he wrote, 'the orangutang would approach nearer to man than to
any other animal'. A century later Darwin admitted that 'whole pages
[in Buffon] are laughably like mine'.
By the end of the eighteenth century the cumulative evidence from
'the general facts in the affinities, embryology, rudimentary organs,
geological history, and geographical distribution of organic beings'
(Darwin to Asa Gray) [10] led to the simultaneous appearance of
evolutionary theories in a number of European countries. 'It is a rather
singular instance,' he remarked elsewhere, 'of the manner in which similar
views arise at about the same time, that Goethe in Germany, Dr. [Erasmus]
Darwin in England and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in France . . . came to
the same conclusion on the origin of the species, in the years 1794-95'
[11] -- that is, fifteen years before Charles Darwin was born.
The second great public controversy between evolutionists and
anti-evolutionists originated in the fateful years 2 and 3 --
according to the calendar of the French Revolution -- when the three
main protagonists in the drama were all given chairs at the University
of Paris by the Revolutionary Government. They were Lamarck, Cuvier,
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. The climax came in 1830, when Geoffroy, the
evolutionist, and Cuvier, who denied evolution, confronted each other
in public debate before the French Academy of Sciences. Cuvier won the
debate -- and rightly so because Geoffroy had tried to demonstrate a
good cause by a badly chosen example -- but the outcome mattered less
than the debate itself, which Goethe declared to be an event far more
memorable than the French Revolution. This was a quarter of a century
before Darwin submitted his first paper on evolution to the Royal society.
A further scandal broke in 1844 -- still fifteen years before the
publication of
The Origin of Species
-- when Robert Chambers
published anonymously his
Vestiges of Creation
, an impassionate
if dilettantic plea for the evolutionary doctrine. Its impact may
be gathered from a scene in Disraeli's
Tancred
, in which the
heroine sings the book's praises: 'You know, all is development. The
principle is perpetually going on. First, there was nothing, then there
was something; then -- I forget the next -- I think there were shells,
then fishes; then we came -- let me see -- did we come next? Never mind
that; we came at last. And at the next change there will be something very
superior to us -- something with wings. Ah! that's it: we were fishes,
and I believe we shall be crows. But you must read it . . . it is all
proved. . . . You understad, it is all science; it is not like those
books in which one says one thing and another the contrary, and both
may be wrong. Everything is proved . . . '
The passage has that particular flavour which we have come to
associate with the Darwinian controversy. Even Tancred's rejoinder to
the enthusiastic lady: 'I do not believe I ever was a fish,' has the
familiar ring of music-hall jokes about 'my grandpa was an ape'. And yet,
I repeat, all this excitement predates the publication of Darwin's first
paper by more than ten years.
Thus Darwin originated neither the idea nor the controversy about
evolution, and in his early years was fully aware of this. When he decided
to write a book on the subject, he jotted down several versions of an
apologetic disclaimer of originality for the preface of the future work:

State broadly [that there is] scarcely any novelty in my theory
. . . The whole object of the book is its proof, its extension, its
adaptation to classification and affinities between species.
Seeing what von Buch (Humboldt), G. H. Hilaire [sic] and Lamarck have
written I pretend to no originality of idea (though I arrived at them
quite independently and have read them since). The line of proof
and reducing facts to law [is the] only merit, if merit there be,
in following work. [12]

The remark that he had arrived at his idea independently from his
predecessors should not perhaps be taken at face value, for Darwin's
own notebooks are conclusive proof that he had certainly read Lamarck,
the greatest among his precursors, and a number of other works on
evolution, before he arrived at formulating his own theory. Even so,
the intended apology never found its way into the book which it was
meant to preface. In his early notebooks, not intended for publication,
Darwin paid grateful tribute to Lamarck as a source of inspiration,
'endowed with the prophetic spirit in science, the highest endowment
of lofty genius'. Later on he called Lamarck's work 'veritable rubbish'
which did the cause 'great harm' -- and insisted that he had got 'not a
fact or idea' from Lamarck. [13] In this respect he resembled Copernicus
and Galileo who also excelled in denying credit where credit was due,
and other great men who, at the beginning of their career, gratefully
acknowledged indebtedness to their spiritual forbears, but later on
quietly forgot or denied them. In some cases, of which Galileo is a
striking example, the motive was an overwhelming vanity; in others, a
subtler form of self-deception seemed to operate. Once one embraces an
idea and lives with it day and night, one can no longer bear the thought
that she, the idea, has formerly belonged to someone else; to possess her
completely and be possessed by her, one must extinguish her past. That
seems to have been Darwin's case; for, throughout the decisive ten years
in which the battle was fought, he behaved like a jealous husband about
his theory; but once the battle was won he relented and gave others
their due -- including Lamarck, whose ghost was never to be exorcized
from the edifice that Darwin built.
On his own account, Darwin became an evolutionist after his voyage on
the Beagle, which ended in 1836, when he was twenty-seven; but
The
Origin of Species
was only published twenty-three years later. It
opens with the statement:

When on board H.M.S. Beagle as naturalist, I was much struck with
certain facts in the distribution of the organic beings inhabiting
South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the
past inhabitants of that continent. These facts, as will be seen in
the latter chapters of this volume, seemed to throw some light on the
origin of species -- that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called
by one of our great philosophers.
After my return to England it appeared to me that . . . by collecting
all facts which bore in any way on the variation of animals and plants
under domestication and nature, some light might perhaps be thrown on
the whole subject. My first notebook was opened in July 1837. I worked
on true Baconian principles and without any theory, collected facts
on a wholesale scale . . . After five years' work I allowed myself to
speculate on the subject and drew up some short notes.

As Darwin's own notebooks show, the last two sentences in this account
again should not be taken at face value -- they are pious lip-service
to thefashionable image of the scientist collecting facts 'with an
unprejudiced mind', without permitting himself, God forbid, to speculate
on them. In reality, as the notebooks show, shortly after his return
from the voyage (and not 'five years later'), Darwin became committed
to the evolutionary theory -- and then set out to collect facts to prove
it. A month after publication of
The Origin
, in December 1859, he
admitted this -- apparently forgetting what he had said in the Preface --
in a letter eloquently defending the procedure of 'inventing a theory
and seeing how many classes of facts the theory would explain'. [14]
In another letter he remarks that 'no one could be a good observer unless
he was an active theorizer'; and again: 'How odd it is that anyone should
not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to
be of any service.' [15] I am stressing this point because scientists
adhering to the positivist tradition take a perverse pride in seeing
themselves in the role of rag-pickers in the dustbin of 'empirical data'
-- unaware that even the art of rag-picking is guided by intuition.
How, then, did Darwin become an evolutionist? The answer is in
the notebooks for 1837-8, written after his return. The five years
spent on the Beagle had taught him a wealth of lessons about living
and extinct species, and about the gradual shading of one species
into another. While the voyage lasted he did not draw any conscious
conclusions from this; much later he wrote that although 'vague doubts
occasionally flitted' across his mind, he still believed, while on the
voyage, in the doctrine of the immutability of all species. [16] Yet
the rich experiences of those five years must have sunk in, together
with the 'vague doubts'. When, on his return, he read Lamarck and other
standard works on evolution, the seeds began to germinate, the accumulated
facts began to whirl through his head, then arrange themselves into a
meaningful pattern. The notebooks start with the drawing of analogies
between individuals and whole species: