Bold fl ights of a speculative mind

Bold flights of a speculative mind
                                                 Andrew Bell

    “Until Mr. Darwin can overcome the strong evidence that undoubtedly exists adverse to
    his views, he cannot hope to carry conviction to the minds of those even disposed to
    accept the bold flights of a speculative mind. To those, on the other hand, who would
    require testimony of the strongest possible kind to substantiate views so utterly opposed
    to their conception of man’s mental and moral attributes, and the responsibilities which
    the possession of them necessarily entails, Mr. Darwin’s array of facts must appear quite
    inadequate, and his reasoning from them inconclusive, if not altogether false.”

              Reviews and Notices of Books. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.
                                                        Concluding Notice. Lancet 1871; 1: 510.

Charles Darwin’s work from the outset was subject to comment and criticism from
many quarters. I hope here to illustrate his struggle for acceptance as shown by
reference to The Lancet. Self-consciously “a journal avowedly medical in character”, it
was, nonetheless, a lively forum for contestants in the darwinian debates.
  Darwin’s guts had failed him as a medical student at the University of Edinburgh,
and so it was to Christ’s College, Cambridge, that this idling second son of a
Shrewsbury physician was coerced in preparation for a lucrative Anglican curacy.
He obtained his BA in 1831 and edged ever closer towards ordination. Thankfully,
his Cambridge connections secured for him a 5-year voyage as a gentleman
companion to a suicidal naval captain during which he conceived, in the words of

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the philosopher Daniel C Dennett, “the single most important idea to occur to a
      human mind”: the origin of species by the mechanism of natural selection. Natural
      law replaced divine edict, chance replaced design, competition replaced harmony.
      To his Oxbridge patrons, this was “filthy…physiology”, little more than the “baseless
      vapourings of scientific credulity” and it was not until 1877, almost 20 years after
      the publication of On the Origin of Species and 40 since he had taken his oath of
      matriculation, that, he was “tardily and with some misgiving” awarded an honorary
      doctorate by his alma mater.
        In 1909, Cambridge hosted a 3-day jamboree to celebrate the Darwin Centenary and
      to atone for the perceived neglect of “her distinguished son”. The formal reception at
      the Fitzwilliam Museum captivated The Lancet’s eyewitness: over 200 delegates
      dressed in “brilliant military and diplomatic uniforms and academic robes” attended
      “from countries so far distant the one from the other as Japan and Chile”. It was a
      “gorgeous pageant”, a prelude to 3 days of garden parties—well attended despite the
      “threatening weather” of an English midsummer—eulogies, lectures, college tours,
      and a climactic banquet where a toast to the “Memory of Darwin” was proposed by the
      Conservative leader of the opposition, Arthur J Balfour; it illustrated just “how firmly
      the great Darwin is seated on his lofty pedestal”, his “theory of Natural Selection…still
      the most valuable weapon with which the problems of biology can be attacked”. The
      celebration was a “curious and striking reminder” of how “as in so many instances,
      that which was heresy is now orthodoxy”, a view with which an editorial in The Lancet
      earlier in the year had concurred. The “storm and stress” had, wrote the journal,
      subsided: “Here and there Darwinism is still spoken of as an irreligious imagining
      but nowhere now is it laughed at as an amusing folly.”
        Darwin, without doubt the “most striking figure in the realm of science during the
      nineteenth century”, had, at the opening of the next century, triumphed. Or had he?
      Historian of science Peter J Bowler has drawn attention to the contemporary
      proliferation, indeed domination, of explicitly non-darwinian ideas about evolution
      at the turn of the century. Taking his cue from a retrospective remark made by
      Julian Huxley—“the eclipse of Darwinism”—Bowler has argued that Darwin
      “succeeded in converting the world to evolutionism not because he had the theory of
      natural selection, but despite the fact that most of his fellow biologists had major
      reservations about it”. The darwinian image of haphazard, branching evolution was
      rejected outright in favour of more orderly processes, predetermined lineal trends of
      development that were seen to be a more benign form of evolution.
        That this crisis was greatly underestimated at the time is evident from an editorial in
      The Lancet on the Cambridge Centenary: the “meeting emphasised the fact that the few
      who seem to claim that Darwinism has been superseded are either themselves
      misunderstood or are not fully acquainted with what Darwin really taught”. For the
      journal, “the unanimity with which the importance of Darwin’s teaching was
      appreciated” was the most remarkable feature of the festivities. However, the biographies

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of those who had come to Cambridge to praise Darwin show that many actually wished
to bury him.
  Among those who, to “applause and laughter”, rose to pay tribute was the
cytoembryologist Oscar Hertwig, director of the Anatomical and Biological
Institute, Berlin, Germany, who went on to publish The Origin of Organisms—a
Refutation of Darwin’s Theory of Chance. From the USA, where a translation of
Eberhart Dennert’s At the Deathbed of Darwinism was a bestseller and a vocal school
of neo-lamarckism flourished, the vertebrate palaeontologist Henry Fairfield
Osborn expounded a profoundly un-darwinian mode of evolution called
orthogenesis, which was regular and non-adaptive. Although quick to give his
theory of phagocytosis a darwinian interpretation, the Russian immunologist Elie
Metchnikoff rewrote his scientific biography with keen hindsight to appear
consistently close to darwinism and, as director of the Pasteur Institute, worked in
France, a country largely isolated from mainstream evolutionary theory and deeply
hostile in particular to darwinism. Edwin Ray Lankester, the bellicose former
Jodrell Professor of Zoology at University College, London, and director of the
natural history department at the British Museum, represented “the naturalists of
the Empire” at Cambridge and spoke eloquently of natural selection as “whole,
sound, and convincing”. His “father in science” Thomas Henry Huxley, however,
thought him a maverick. Ray Lankester’s research programme—the construction
of phylogenies via the study of form—was, to the cautious Darwin, highly
speculative. As Bowler argues, late-victorian evolutionary morphologists, led by
Ray Lankester, “forgot the central message of the Origin and continued with only a
slightly modified version of what they had been doing before the Darwinian
stimulus came along”.
  Darwinism then, was both explicitly and covertly under seige. Whether it had, as
The Lancet judged, “prevailed”, whether it was winning its own struggle for existence
among several competing theories of evolution, is open to question. Indeed,
The Lancet was hardly averse to publishing “all the assaults” itself. Among the most
remarkable was a polemic published in 1886 entitled “The Darwinian ‘Working
Hypothesis of Evolution’ Examined Physiologically”. Although Darwin had died only
4 years earlier, the author, Thomas Wharton Jones, was uncompromising: “This
formula of evolution by ‘natural selection, by survival of the fittest in the struggle for
existence’, is no explanation, but merely a form of words without any basis in fact.”
Common descent, as illustrated by the “flappers of seals, [and] the paddles of whales”
was a “mere conceit, a conclusion without premise…and must therefore be
unconditionally and absolutely rejected”. On he thundered, adding as a postscript a
defence of William Ewart Gladstone’s recent attempt “to vindicate the inspired
authority of Genesis”. Gladstone had been ousted from office for the third time and,
to add to his woes, had been savaged by the “Bulldog” Huxley. Wharton Jones saw
nothing in “Mr Huxley’s reply” that proved the “validity” of darwinism, which “still

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remains unverified and unverifiable”. Darwinism unleashed a civil war, incivilly
      fought, within British science: once lecturer in comparative physiology at Charing
      Cross Hospital, London, Wharton Jones was Huxley’s beloved “old master”.
        Thomas Wakley, the irreverent founder of The Lancet, left no record of his opinion
      of Darwin’s “melancholy explanations”. On medical advice, he had relinquished
      control of the journal in 1852. By 1860, pulmonary tuberculosis weakened him
      further and he was dead within 2 years. The Lancet published no review of Darwin’s
      magnum opus, its attention drawn instead to the publication of a “curious and
      interesting manuscript”: like On the Origin of Species, it was long-delayed, rushed into
      print, and contained a blasphemous account of the origins of life. The surgeon-icon
      John Hunter was headline news in 1859. Not only had a published manuscript of his
      Observations and Reflections on Geology suddenly, startlingly, appeared in the
      bookstores, his body had been recovered during the clearance of the vaults of
      St Martin-in-the-Fields and reinterred in Westminster Abbey with “befitting
      solemnity”. Hunter was impious as well as impetuous, his heretical views, with the
      guillotine scything through the Parisian ancien régime, too controversial for georgian
      England and his work was suppressed. On publication of On the Origin of Species, the
      Royal College of Surgeons, custodian of Hunter’s collection and papers, attempted to
      cash in: “Does not the natural gradation of animals from one to another, lead to the
      original species?” asked Hunter in one “valuable and unlooked-for” insight.
        Darwin’s own delay in publishing is much documented. “I hate controversy”, he
      wrote, “chiefly perhaps because I do it badly.” He shored himself up the Kent village
      of Downe, only 13 miles from central London but at his time of writing the “extreme
      verge of the world” and, having “confessed” his “murder” sat in silent agitation. His
      body was “crushed with agony” and covered in “fiery Boils”; as he contemplated
      being labelled an atheist, it was “like living in Hell”. There had been fearful, and well-
      publicised, precedents. The radical regency physiologist William Lawrence ridiculed
      the “metaphysical chimeras” of conservative philosophy: life was a material function
      of organisation. Lawrence was branded a republican, his career lay in ruins. So he
      retracted and sued for peace. Wakley, with whom Lawrence co-founded The Lancet,
      felt “intense repugnance” as he witnessed a man who was once an ally rise to preside
      over the feckless “self elect” at the Royal College of Surgeons whom he had once
      helped savage.
        As the editor of The Lancet, Wakley had helped nurture a coalition of utopian
      socialists and free-thinking democrats who, as the historian Adrian Desmond has so
      graphically described, imported their progressive politics and transmutationist
      morphology from revolutionary France, finding common ground in deriding the
      natural theology of the “Church and State bigots” and promoting the naturalistic red
      biology of de Blainville, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Lamarck. The zoophytologist
      Robert Edmond Grant was, to his Parisian mentors “le premier entre tous les savants”;
      to Wakley he was “bold and fearless” and “endowed with extraordinary mental

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powers” and hyped his brand of progressive biology whenever he could, publishing
a course of his lectures on comparative anatomy in 1833–34. “A slight inspection of
the organic relicts deposited in the crust of the globe”, Grant wrote, “shows that the
forms of species…have been constantly changing, and that the organic kingdoms,
like the surface they inhabit, have been gradually developed from a simpler state to
their present condition.” The English language had nothing to compare with such
radical sentiments and Wakley proclaimed it as a “source of national exultation”.
Within a decade, however, the politically intransigent Grant had been excluded from
the Zoological Society, had ceased publishing, and was living in “a slum of the worst
description”. He was, according to Wakley—who, in 1853, secured for him a life
annuity of £50 to supplement his meagre professorial stipend—the “most unrewarded
man in the profession”. Among those who had turned their backs on Grant was
Charles Darwin who, as a student in Edinburgh, foraged in rock-pools with the first
transmutationist he ever met.
  As a secularist, Wakley would have winced at the laissez-faire utilitarianism of
darwinism yet applauded the sly demotion of a “super-human mind”. A caustic
rhetorician, Wakley had much in common with the arch-baiter of theologians, the
intimidating, pugnacious Thomas Huxley. Huxley was intent on wrenching science
from the prissy divines; he was no immediate convert to darwinian selection because
he was uninterested in details. Any viable mechanism would do. For Huxley and his
X-Clubbers, darwinism was a convenient symbol of scientific independence: the only
way forward was a technocratic society with the science professionals at the helm.
After Wakley died, however, The Lancet was uneasy about this polarising agent
provocateur. The autocratic superintendent of the natural history collections at the
British Museum, Richard Owen, odd, insecure but “with brains enough to fill
two hats” and a royal favourite, was singled out by Huxley as an appropriate enemy to
lend cohesion to the darwinian movement. The hippocampus controversy, ignited by
the theist Owen, who identified certain anatomical differences between the brains of
human beings and apes, festered, much to the disgust of the journal. “We observe
with regret”, it tutted in 1862, that Huxley has “repeated his attack” on Owen “by
falling back upon the usual arts of the controversialist, and importing passionate
rhetoric…We can recommend Professor HUXLEY to try to imitate in these
discussions the calm and philosophical tone of the man he assails. The fling and the
sneer, however, smart, will only recoil upon himself.”
  The Lancet’s sympathy for Owen was short-lived. Having spent his entire career tip-
toeing between competing ideologies—between metropolitan transcendentalists
and Oxbridge Paleyites—to broaden his institutional base, Owen was viewed as less
of a judicious eclectic than as simply evasive, his obtuse theses “see-sawing between
law and law” and expressed as “verbal hocus pocus”.
  Within a year, the former colossus who had christened the dinosaur was “old
school”, his “light…in some quarters waning”. It was now the “daring” Huxley, who

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was waxing stronger and stronger, striding with a “certain sour serenity…like a
      marksman who can hit a swallow flying, although the sky be full of birds with every
      wing” and “ready to derive GOD-like man from the gorilla, or from the Prince of
      Darkness himself, if [he] thought it would be true science”. The journal, promoting a
      series of lectures delivered by Huxley at Owen’s former power base at the Royal
      College of Surgeons, sensed a sea change: “this idol has met with its iconoclast”.
         Throughout the 1860s, Huxley’s “young Turks”—the undergraduate Ray Lankester
      and liberal Anglican anatomists William Henry Flower and George Rolleston—were
      willing combatants in his campaign to “extinguish theologians”. Pity the reverent
      philosopher Alexander Alison who in 1863 wrote to The Lancet to promote his own
      theory of evolution: “I shall be glad to hear the opinions of any of your numerous
      readers on the subject”. Ray Lankester was brought into service: “I have no wish to
      enter into a controversy with Mr. Alison as to the tenability of the theory with which
      he has enlightened the world; indeed I fancy it would be no easy matter for anyone to
      do so, since it is not clear what that theory is.” Ray Lankester concluded that although
      it “may be long before Mr. Darwin’s theory can be established to the world as the
      great principle of nature, but meanwhile it is the duty of the student of science to
      quietly pursue his task of investigation, and wait until, by the accumulation of facts,
      the truth shall be placed beyond doubt.” At Oxford, in 1868, Rolleston—Linacre
      Professor and simian morphologist—was congratulated by the journal for his
      “courage and directness” for “standing in the divinity schools of his own High
      Church and Tory University…to treat with open contempt the conceited ignorance of
      Mr. DISRAELI’s attack on DARWIN in the interests of ‘the angels’”. And Flower, a
      veteran of the Crimean War now billeted at the Royal College of Surgeons, warned
      that contemporary biologists “have troublous time in store for them”. The “odium
      theologicum, which has retired with its effete artillery from before the rifled cannon
      and floating batteries of astronomical and geological science, is now expending its
      force on ‘Darwinism’.”
         Flower’s warning was prescient. In 1871, Darwin explicitly addressed the emotive
      origin of Homo sapiens in The Descent of Man: it was, according to The Lancet’s
      reviewer, “the book of the season…[and] many seasons beyond the present”. However,
      the “wisdom of one age is often the folly of the next, and many will, no doubt, be
      ready to prophesy that the wisdom of the Darwinians of this day will be regarded as
      folly by the philosophers of the next era”. The thesis contained a crucial weak link:
      “we possess psychical attributes of far higher nature, to which our instincts are
      subordinated…[Darwin] has still to show that moral sentiments…exist in animals,
      even in the highest; and the difficulty of conceiving of an animal acquiring an abstract
      idea is, to our minds, at present insuperable. But with this [the] theory of the descent
      of man from the ape must stand or fall.”
         The histrionics caused by On the Origin of Species had long since passed, and a cut-
      price second edition of The Descent of Man went into print in 1874. A “painful

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shudder” shot through the body medical: in The Lancet provincial practitioners joined
forces with metropolitan physicians, Quakers, parsonists, and aspirant Scottish
academics of Kirk-sanctioned medical chairs, to condemn this “repulsive” theory of
man’s “savage ancestry”. A Lancet correspondent recollected that “such a confession
of faith was regarded as desertion meriting social ostracism, the punishment being
often specially directed against the fairer members of a deserter’s household, who
were made to feel that it was little short of criminal to be related to men professing a
belief in the pithecoid ancestry of man”. The Descent of Man was a “rubicon” over
which only those immune to “signal discomfiture” spanned.
  During the 1870s, the journal lost confidence. Once again, Huxley was throwing
his weight around, challenging darwinian foes old and new: “his method of
procedure”, according to a comment by The Lancet, “strikes us as not unlike that of
the peripatetic athlete...[who] commences to clear a ring by swinging around a heavily
knotted rope, a blow from which looks as if it might hurt.” “What necessity”, lamented
the journal, “is there for our scientific men manifesting such a bellicose spirit? Their
readers have a lively time of it, no doubt; for these intellectual encounters always
possess more piquancy when there is a soupçon of personality added to the
arguments. Still, we do not think that it imparts dignity to the combatants.”
  The Unitarian physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter (a casual member of
Huxley’s circle who, as editor of the British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review,
had given Darwin qualified support) sought third-way mediation and gained plaudits
from The Lancet. Carpenter was “devout and reverential…and while he will accompany
DARWIN and HUXLEY…he refuses to shut his eyes, as they do, to the mysterious
world beyond—a world in which the meta-physician peers wistfully, and which the
theologian claims to penetrate by the chart of revelation.”
  The purposeless struggle inherent in darwinian selection was considered
abhorrent and attempts were made to dilute its significance. Even the parson-
bashing Huxley, in an 1877 article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, while noting that
evolution was a “historical fact”, admitted, “what causes brought it about is another
matter”. Darwin himself had doubts as to the efficacy of natural selection and often
lapsed into the progressionist rhetoric of the theologian; his sixth and final edition
of On the Origin of Species was riddled with caveats as the criticisms mounted. The
“great merit” of Darwin’s “hypothesis”, claimed a reviewer in The Lancet, is that “we
have not only no better, but apparently no other capable” of explaining the diversity
of life. Darwinian evolution had been deftly spun and shifted from the radical fringe
to the mainstream by subtle pruning. Before Darwin, evolution was inadmissible
because there was no known viable mechanism. By 1880, evolution was an
acknowledged fact, yet Darwin’s cut-throat mechanism of natural selection was
considered flawed and undesirable by most educated people. They had not suddenly
become atheists or even agnostics. A compromise had been fashioned that allowed
scientists who still wished to believe that the universe was a progressive, purposeful

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system with a moral purpose to live side by side with those liberal clergymen who
      were prepared to accept that evolution was God’s way of allowing His creation to
      unfold.
        Darwin’s death in 1882 was accompanied by a debate on science and scepticism
      and on the true nature of the religious beliefs of the lapsed evangelist now buried in
      the “mausoleum of English worthies”. The Lancet, “liberal, tolerant, and sincerely
      reverential” was, to the correspondent “Veritas”, an ideal medium in which to deplore
      “the writings of a sceptical and negative tendency”: it has “gradually come to be
      supposed that faith in God, the responsibility of man, and the immortality of the
      human soul are conceptions of an uncultivated and bygone age…no longer tenable
      when viewed in the light of our modern science…The Bible is ridiculed…[and]
      rejected as silly…and the higher moral attributes of man are pronounced visceral in
      their nature and physical in their origin.”
        An astonished “Vectis” responded: “Would he wish to roll back this development to
      the age when witchcraft…prevailed?” Having read Darwin’s obituary in The Times,
      Vectis referred to “the great and noble man now laid low…have not anathemas loud
      and deep been hurled against his work from the pulpit?”. The Lancet itself steered a
      middle course: “We cannot altogether blame the investigator of natural facts because
      he declines the proffered aid of what he deems a fiction to help him out of a difficulty.”
      However, “life is a mystery, and…the Science of Nature is—so far as that science has
      yet been explored—incapable of explaining it”. So “why not lay aside the affectation
      of unbelief?” It is, after all, “mischievous and misleading to say that Science
      antagonises Religion…No single fact in Science is inconsistent with, or opposed to,
      the hypothesis of inspired or derived vitality, or the work of a Creator.”
        Even darwinism “gave a solid scientific basis for belief in the existence of God in
      the universe and a soul in man”; and, as for Charles Robert Darwin, he was
      emphatically “not an Atheist, a Materialist, or an Unbeliever”. The Lancet was surely
      presumptive. Darwin’s privately held religious beliefs have been the subject of much
      conjecture: although he saw no reason that a man could not be “an ardent Theist and
      Evolutionist”, Darwin was unquestionably disillusioned with and privately hostile to
      Christianity—a “damnable doctrine”—and, crucially, felt that the question of God’s
      existence was “beyond the scope of man’s intellect”, including his own.
        Despite its earlier association with political dissidence, lamarckism provided
      spiritual and intellectual comfort for those who appealed for a more humane,
      purposeful form of evolution. A viable hypothesis of heredity proving elusive, even
      Darwin allowed lamarckian use-inheritance to supplement the actions of natural
      selection. However, during the 1890s, a purified, and polarising, neo-darwinism
      emerged that tended to “be more darwinian than Darwin”: with his theory of the
      continuity of the germ plasm, the German cytobiologist August Weismann declared
      lamarckism invalid and incited a shift towards rigid biosocial hereditarianism.
      Natural selection, according to the physiologist J Berry Haycraft, was “a fact, every bit

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of it, and no mere theoretical fancy…How far [he urged] may this law be applied?”
Haycraft’s Darwinism and race progress, published in The Lancet in 1894, was among
the earliest calls for eugenics policies in Britain. Fatal diseases, he argued, were
“friends to humanity” as they eradicated the “foolish” and the “feeble”; modern
preventive medicine, “good hygienic conditions, education, and [the] kindly
treatment” advanced by “social faddists” were a “danger to society” by permitting the
unfit to survive and reproduce. As editor of The Lancet, the “cultivated littérateur” Sir
Squire Sprigge (whose second wife was a member of the Eugenics Society) permitted
the debate to simmer inconclusively—“the more data the better”—until his death in
1937. Although Darwin had expressed his own unease at the possiblity of racial
decline resulting from disastrous social practices, he would have abhorred such
legislative interference that was attempted and, in some cases, imposed by “social
darwinists” across a spectrum of political hues.
  Lurking among the delegates at the Darwin Centenary were the “stalwart
mendelians”, William Bateson and Hugo deVries—having seen off lamarkism, the
new school of genetics was also explicitly hostile to the gradualism implied by
orthodox darwinian selectionism, suggesting instead a greater role for discontinuous
character variations as inferred from the pea plant experiments of the “Silesian
priest” Gregor Mendel. When Ray Lankester publicly humbled the mendelian
experiments as they “did not call into question [Darwin’s] theory”, he did so tactfully
but prophetically. A reconciliation, seemingly impossible in 1909, was effected during
the 1930s and 1940s when the modern-synthetic version gathered momentum and
allowed darwinism to emerge triumphant after episodes of apprehension, conditional
acceptance, hostility, appropriation, and neglect…at least as illustrated in the pages of
The Lancet.
Lancet 2008; 372: S57–67

Acknowledgments
I thank Wellcome Research Professor John V Pickstone for his continued support and encouragement.

Further reading
See online for webappendix.
Bowler PJ. The non-Darwinian revolution: reinterpretion of a historical myth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1992.
Desmond A. Huxley. London: Penguin, 1998.
Desmond A. The politics of evolution. Morphology, medicine, and reform in radical London. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Desmond A, Moore J. Darwin. London: Michael Joseph, 1991.
Rupke NA. Richard Owen. Victorian naturalist. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994.

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