CHAPTER SIX

Darwin’s choice

Nicolaas Rupke

To many of us, “ideology,” especially in the combination “science and ideology,” has a negative connotation and is used in a pejorative sense. With respect to “biology and ideology” in particular, we immediately think of historical examples when totalitarian governments coerced biologists to adopt theories that served party political purposes. Notorious among these is the Stalinist imposition of Lysenkoism, the theory of Trofim D. Lysenko, who dictated to Soviet agriculture his socialist /Marxist belief in the heritability of acquired characteristics, in opposition to the

theory of Mendelian genetics.

Yet the interrelations between biology and ideology are more pervasive and subtle than is indicated by such showpieces of ideological infamy as Lysenkoism. Over the past few decades, historians of science have begun arguing that all biology—the coerced and the free, the bad and good, the false and the true, the current and the historical—is and was embedded in sociopolitical ideology. Biology, at some level, is ideology, in the sense that its key concepts have grown out of and have been applied to the system of ideas that structures civil society. This particularly holds true for Darwinism with its notion of natural selection—it has been maintained—and publications have come on the market with titles such as Darwinismus und/als Ideologie (2001).1

Ever since Robert M. Young’s teachings and writings at Cambridge during the late 1960s and early 1970s, we have come to think of Darwinism as

shaped by a Malthusian common context of biological and social theory. Darwin’s evolutionism, Young explained, was irreducibly anthropomorphic, social, political, and ideological.2 Others, not least Adrian Desmond, James Moore, and Janet Browne have fleshed out Young’s work and turned his common context, which was defined primarily in terms of ideas, into a more embodied sociopolitical one, extensively taking account of place, time, institutions, career, family, vested interests, rivalries, strategies, and more.3 An inventory of much of this contextualist work, for the most part dealing with Britain, was presented in the collected volume Victorian Science in Context (1997).4 Further studies, by David N. Livingstone, Ronald L. Numbers, and others, expanded the geographical scope of this work to include other parts of the English-speaking world, delineating spaces of science, religion, and politics in which Darwinism was reconstituted to suit the local or regional needs of different constituencies.5

As Moore observes, biography has proved a powerful contextualizing tool. In several new, substantive biographical studies of both Darwin and his followers, evolutionary biology has been dissected down to the bare bones of its varied ideologies, showing how basic notions in biological science were molded by the cultural, ideological, and socioeconomic forces that shape the rest of the world in which the biologists lived.6 This contextualist work represented a fundamental revision of the mostly essentialist Darwin hagiography, spawned by the 1959 centenary celebrations, and has had a deconstructionist or, in a later fashion to enter the history of science, a constructivist, effect on our perception of Darwinism.7 In other words, we see Darwin’s theory as constitutively affected by social conditions and, what’s more, we understand the literature on Darwin, too, as reflecting to a significant extent the worlds of its authors, each with a distinct set of concerns and interests.

Yet to many historians of the generation that founded the field of the history of science after World War II, as well as to many practicing biologists and traditional philosophers, this “biology as an ideological construct” approach is little more than an arrogant solipsism that misses a crucial point. As one of the stellar members of that generation, Charles C. Gillispie, comments in a recent retrospective on the history of his subject, it is a truism that science is a cultural and social product—that it is created. No one ever doubted this. Yet not all products of human creativity are the same. Scientific ones differ from those in the creative arts—painting, writing, and music—such as Hamlet, the Mona Lisa, and the Mass in B Minor,

in that these would not exist if Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, and Johann Sebastian Bach had never lived. Such contingency does not apply to science. Newtonian physics would have come into existence also without Newton, and Darwinian evolution without Darwin, Gillispie maintains.

If Newton had . . . died in infancy, the planets would still move subject to the inverse square law of gravity. Although no one else would have written the Principia, it could be argued convincingly that others would then or soon have written down everything in it that really mattered to later physics. Much the same is true of nearly all the great contributions to modern science. For scientists find their problems but also problems find their scientists, and usually not only one of them. Evidence is the frequent occurrence of simultaneous socalled discovery of many an important phenomenon, often attended by disputes over who had it first. It is all very well to say that convergent social forces are the explanation of simultaneous discovery, but pace social constructionists, they do have to converge on something out there in nature.8

Thus if Darwin had missed his boat, had not sailed around the world on board HMS Beagle (Figure 6.1), and consequently the Origin of Species had never been written, this would not have made a fundamental difference to the progress of the life sciences. A theory of evolution similar to Darwin’s inevitably had emerged— or so Gillispie’s line of argument leads us to believe. After all, is there not the famous instance of Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), who simultaneously came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection? For all the contextual factors that go into the making of science, the facts of nature to which it pertains remain unaffected and, in the end, scientific theories converge on those facts. Whatever ideological influences may swirl around scientific theories or temporarily disfigure them, sooner or later, truth will be out.

By and large, practicing biologists agree. None other than “the Darwin of the twentieth century,” Ernst Mayr (1904–2005), has insisted that Darwinism was not an ideology; on the contrary, it represented an “antiideology” that for the first time in history attributed the origin of species to natural causes: “The adoption of evolution by natural selection necessitated a complete ideological upheaval. The ‘hand of God’ was replaced by the working of natural processes.”9 This insistence on the objective, realist nature of Darwinian evolution—in its original formulation and yet more in its twentieth-century reformulated shape of the evolutionary synthesis—gained

FIGURE 6.1  “Beagle laid ashore.” If Darwin had been shipwrecked and the Origin of Species never been written, would a theory of evolution similar to Darwin’s still have emerged? (From Philip Parker King and Robert Fitzroy, eds., Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle [London: Henry Colburn, 1839], vol. 2, opposite p. 336.)

additional importance in the context of legal action in several states of the USA to obtain equal time for the teaching in public schools of creation to that for evolution. Following a 1961 Supreme Court ruling that public schools are not the place for religious doctrine, the fundamentalists have emphasized that creationism is a science. Moreover, they have argued that evolution is a religion. As a result, the question about the ideological status of Darwinism has taken on more than academic significance. Michael Ruse, in an attempt at even-handedness that has brought his Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction? (1999) many accolades, allows that the theory of evolution has a dimension of religious ideology; yet he simultaneously stresses that Darwinian theory has a content of scientific validity that has increased over time (see Ruse, Chapter 10, this volume).10

A possible objection to Ruse’s argument is that creationist biology, too, has produced valid science that during “the reign of creationism,” which in Germany lasted until the end of the eighteenth century and in the Englishspeaking world until the middle of the nineteenth, showed a pattern of increase. Bearing witness to this are the successive contributions to botany, zoology, and paleontology by such creationist giants as Carl Linnaeus,

Georges Cuvier, and Louis Agassiz. The Darwinian way of coping with this problem has been to anoint a variety of creationist biologists as “forerunners” of evolution; they had tried but not fully succeeded in throwing off the shackles of religious dogma. A good example was Linnaeus, who in his younger years expressed the belief that species are created. However, having wrestled with the restrictive impositions of Genesis 1, toward the end of his life he conjectured that God’s work of creation had gone no further than the ancestral form of each genus or even just of each order, and that natural diversification within the limits of these original types had produced today’s many species. Draw a straight line from early to late Linnaeus, extrapolate this line and you arrive at Darwin—at least according to the conventional Darwin literature.11

Crucial to this discussion is the point made by Gillispie and others that the great contributions to modern science, including Darwinism, converged (and continue to converge) on “something out there in nature.” That factual something is not contingent. The path Darwin walked was not a matter of choice but followed a course that was predetermined by the objective truth about the origin of species. An alternative road, trending in a different direction, was non-existent—even an impossibility. Right from the start, in 1859, Darwin himself insisted that the only available choice was between his theory and the non-scientific, religious doctrine of special creation. A scientific alternative to Darwinian evolution did not exist— or so many people continue to believe.

The purpose of this chapter is to argue that this view is a myth— one that goes back to Darwin himself and to the Origin of Species. I argue that: (1) long before Darwin, a naturalistic theory of the origin of species existed; (2) this theory represented a scientific alternative to Darwinism; (3) Darwin refused to engage with it for reasons of strategy; (4) his own theory produced a fork in the road of the development of the biology of origins; and (5) the Darwinian choice, in addition to the good it did to the life sciences, also caused damage as a result of scientific shortcomings that were integral to Darwin’s positions. In other words, if Darwin had not boarded HMS Beagle and the Origin of Species had never been written, today’s evolutionary biology could well have looked different, possibly fundamentally so. This does not imply that Darwinism is wrong, but does indicate that it is partial in the double sense of being incomplete and biased, being related to the author as much as to the subject matter. Putting it differently, I support the contention that Darwinian biology bears the hallmark of an ideology.

Here I restrict myself to documenting that a scientific alternative did exist. The question of what might have happened if the Origin of Species had never been published, I leave, apart from a single suggestion, to another publication.12

A contemporary alternative to Darwinism

Traditionally, in the classical literature from Aristotle to Lucretius, there had been the following four theories of the origin of species (plus subsidiary combinations of these): species are eternal, species are created, species originate spontaneously, and species have evolved. By the time the Origin of Species appeared, and within mainstream scientific thought, only the first of these four was no longer seriously considered. Species eternalism had all but vanished; one of its last few representatives was the military surgeon and philosopher Heinrich Czolbe, who in the mid-1850s was uncompromisingly taken to task for his views by, among others, Berlin’s founder of medical pathology, Rudolf Virchow.13 The second view— creationism—by contrast, continued to flourish, especially among AngloAmerican biologists and paleontologists, famous among whom were Oxford’s William Buckland, Cambridge’s Adam Sedgwick, and Harvard’s above-mentioned Agassiz. To be sure, they departed from the literalist interpretation of creation and Flood, known today as young-earth creationism, and instead envisaged repeated special creations in the course of a long geological history (see Topham, Chapter 4, this volume). The fourth view of the origin of species—evolution or rather the transmutation of species—found few adherents and remained marginal until Darwin was forced out of his evolutionary closet and published his magnum opus.

Wiped from the slate of our collective memory since shortly after 1859– the year the Origin of Species was published—is the fact that during the immediately preceding seven or so decades the majority of the great minds of what we now call the earth, life, and biomedical sciences, especially in the German-speaking world, believed neither in creation nor evolution but in autogenesis—the spontaneous origin of species, or Urzeugung. Following non-creationist speculations about species from the middle of the eighteenth century, especially by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, this theory was modernized during the period 1790–1860 and refitted to become the cutting edge of scientific thought about the origin of life and species during the first half of the nineteenth century.

The theory of autogenesis stated that species have originated, not by miraculous, special creation but by the spontaneous aggregation of their specific “germs” (see Roe, Chapter 2, this volume). The reader might be excused for objecting that the theory of spontaneous generation has not been quite so forgotten as here maintained. Do we not have—and one may well ask—a substantial body of secondary literature on the seventeenthto nineteenth-century controversy over the spontaneous origin of “entozoa” (worms such as flukes living parasitically inside other animals) and “infusoria” (microscopic aquatic creatures), which controversy was settled to the satisfaction of most biologists by Louis Pasteur’s classic experiments that appeared to disprove the phenomenon?14 Is this story not well and widely known? However, two theories of spontaneous generation existed that, although related and in some publications interwoven, were distinct. One of these was the familiar theory about the contested observation that today, under our very eyes, primitive forms of life spontaneously originate from lifeless matter.

Yet spontaneous generation also had a second meaning. It could refer to the past origin of species, when the very first specimens of any fixed form of life, low or high, including humans, must have come into exis- tence—itwaspostulated—bynon-parentalgeneration.Plants,animals,and humans had come into existence not by miraculous, special creation but by the natural generation of one, two, or many of the very first individual representatives. Various explanations were put forward as to why in taxonomically higher organisms the original spontaneous generation of its members had not continued but been suppressed to be superseded by a process of sexual reproduction in perpetuating the species.

Obviously, the first of these two theories could have a bearing on the second, but it was perfectly possible for biologists not to believe in the spontaneous generation of primitive life at present and still fully endorse the theory of the generatio spontanea of species in the past, and quite a few of them did.15 If simple organisms originate spontaneously today, this enhances the likelihood that more advanced species came into being long ago in a similar way; but it is also imaginable that the origin of each permanent form of life had been unique to certain moments in geological history, because only at those moments, temporarily, the right conditions for the original aggregation of their germs or seeds had occurred.

About a dozen different terms were used to describe spontaneous generation (for example, generatio spontanea, primigenia, cosmica, primitiva, originaria, automatica, aequivoca, heterogenea, Urzeugung, Urerzeugung,

autogene Zeugung, autogenesis). These terms were not always used synonymously and could have somewhat different meanings but, apart from generatio heterogenea, they all indicated a form of abiogenesis; in order to avoid confusing the two theories of spontaneous generation, I shall refer to the second one by using the synonym “autogenesis” or “autogeny” (and the related words “autogenist” and “autogenous”). It is this theory that has not been entered into the annals of the history of biology. Yet autogenesis gained widespread popularity through the period that ranged from the late eighteenth century to not long after the appearance of the Origin of Species, becoming an integral and organizing concept in several scientific fields: (1) the physiology of generation; (2) the paleontology of extinction and origins/renewal; (3) the geography of plant and animal distribution; and (4) anthropogeography. To a lesser extent, autogenesis was also discussed in the context of other subjects, for example the new discipline of physiological chemistry.

Let us briefly look at the place of autogenesis in each of these four fields of scientific theory and practice.

Autogenesis in biomedical physiology

First and foremost, the notion of autogenesis was part of what we would call the biomedical physiology, especially the study of generation, regeneration, and nutrition. More specifically, it was intimately connected with the theory of epigenesis (the notion that organisms develop from undifferentiated germ material) as opposed to the “nested boxes” view of “preformation” (the notion that organisms exist preformed in the germ material). After all, if the germ from which an individual member of a species grows is not a babushka doll containing in microscopical form all future individuals, but more simply is composed of a set of elemental substances from which the embryo develops afresh, it becomes possible to conceive of the very first such development—the incipient stage of non-parental origin of the first individual(s) of a species—as a process of aggregation of just the right elemental mixture under just the right physical conditions.

A central figure in the development of these speculations was the Göttingen professor of medicine Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), who as a leader of epigenetic thinking was also one of the early naturalists cautiously to express the likelihood of the autogenous generation of

species. This he did as early as 1791, in a footnote to the fourth edition of his Handbuch der Naturgeschichte (1791); also later, in his Beyträge zur Naturgeschichte (1806).16 One of Blumenbach’s many students, Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus (1776–1837), the first person to introduce the term and the subject of biology as a separate discipline in Germany, in his main work Biologie, oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur (1802–22), substantially expanded upon autogenesis, combining a defense of the spontaneous origin of primitive organisms today with that of higher forms of life in the past and adding to that, as did Blumenbach, a belief in the variability of species as a further, subsidiary mechanism of the origin of new forms. Given the “analogy” of the spontaneous origin of simple life forms, we may assume “that also the original forms of mammals and birds once were generated in the same way that today for the most part only zoophytes [invertebrates such as sponges] are still formed.”17 This assumption is justified, Treviranus added, even if today spontaneous generation no longer takes place; but it does. “We can therefore no longer doubt that the very principle that is active in producing a microscopic world of plants and animals in infusions of putrified substances should also be capable of generating larger and more complex organisms.”18

Others in biomedical physiology followed suit and treated the theory of the autogenous generation of species as integral to the physiology of generation and related phenomena. Urzeugung or Urerzeugung became a major topic, ranking substantial entries in the new encyclopedias and encyclopedic series of the period.19 No less a figure than the Königsberg physiologist Karl Friedrich Burdach (1776–1847) advocated autogenesis, and he counted some of the greatest names of biomedical physiology and anthropology among his pupils, such as Karl Ernst von Baer and Martin Heinrich Rathke. In his physiological and anthropological works Burdach explicitly combined, as did Blumenbach and Treviranus, the autogenous generation of species with a certain modification through external conditions working on innate variability; yet he objected to the transformation of major forms into one another.20

Other leading lights such as Berlin physiologist Johannes Müller, in his

Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen (1844), and Virchow, in a major discussion of “Alter und neuer Vitalismus,” used concepts and language of autogenesis in discussing the origin of species. Müller, however, indicated that the origin of species lay outside human experience and would better be dealt with by philosophy than physiology.21

Autogenesis in Cuvierian paleontology

Autogenesis was readily integrated into the new geology of the time, which recognized the extinction of many species in the course of earth history as well as the repeated origin de novo of new organic “worlds.” Also in this field Blumenbach was leading with early speculations about repeated extinctions of old “worlds” and the appearance of new ones. Continuing to use the language of a “creator,” he changed the meaning of “creation” from a miraculous event to a natural process. Following a geological revolution, nature had created new species that differed from the ones that had been wiped out because altered physico-chemical conditions made the Bildungstrieb—the morphogenetic force—deviate from its previous direction. Blumenbach stated

that the morphogenetic force after the changes that such a total revolution is likely to have caused in the material substratum had to take a direction in generating new species that more or less deviated from the previous. . . . As a result, with these transformations creative nature no doubt also reproduced in part creatures of a similar type to those of the previous world, but in the overwhelming majority of cases was forced to substitute forms that were adapted to the new order of things.22

At the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the start of Blumenbach’s legendary career as a Göttingen University teacher, his pupil K. E. A. von Hoff, by then himself a famous geologist in Gotha, saluted his mentor for having solved the problem of the origin of species.23 Autogenous generation was readily brought to bear on a geological past marked by repeated “revolutions,” accompanied by extinctions and new beginnings. In addition to a cautious Blumenbach, there was among the early advocates of autogenesis the outspoken Jean-Claude de Lamétherie (1743–1814). Taking his cue from the new epigenesis, he regarded generation as a process of true crystallization [une véritable cristallisation].24 Following the general crystallization of rocks from the primeval waters, the generative germs of sea creatures had “crystallized” from dead matter and, after the gradual subsidence of the ocean waters and emergence of mountains peaks, so had the “germs” of land creatures.25

Given that the origin of species was a process of crystallization under specific physico-chemical conditions, or at least an analogous process, the same species could have originated multiply, in different parts of the

globe. Yet new species had originated also as a result of organic variability; for example, as a result of hybridization. “The number of original species has therefore been truly far fewer than commonly believed.”26

Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), a central figure in the (re)construction of a lengthy and repeatedly interrupted history of the earth and of life, seems to have stuck to a tradition of creationism, although he substituted repeated creations throughout geological time for the literalist, one-off event of young-earth creationism. Yet many Cuvierians and a majority of those who further developed the picture of “punctuated” earth history adhered to the theory of autogenesis. They assumed that, following a Cuvierian catastrophe, special environmental conditions may have existed that favored the spontaneous aggregation of germs and the autogenous origin of life and species in repopulating the earth. Among the influential names to work with this notion were Germany’s leading geologist Leopold von Buch (1774–1853) and leading paleontologist Heinrich Georg Bronn (1800–62), as well as the prominent popularizer Hermann Burmeister (1807–92) or the notorious materialist Carl Vogt (1817–95)—the last two engaged at the time in left-wing, revolutionary causes. As Burmeister wrote:

If we don’t want to resort to miracles and incomprehensibilities, we have to attribute the origin of the first organic creatures on earth to the free, creative power of matter itself and deduce the reasons why this generative capacity today no longer continues in higher organisms, from general laws of nature that ordain only the necessary, not the superfluous. . . . If nature could create at some time a human couple, then she could generate also several of them, she even had to, if she wanted to know the existence of her creation for ever secured.27

In the course of the period 1790–1860 the notion of autogenesis was increasingly complemented by that of heterogenesis, a notion that included the belief that major life forms, especially taxonomically higher ones, do not immediately originate from inorganic matter but via intermediate organic stages. This process of descent of a higher from a lower form of life was not visualized, however, as a gradual transformation/transmutation of one species into another, but as a spontaneously generated leap taking place in the germ material of a particular individual. To help visualize this process of saltatory “evolution,” the analogy was used of Generationswechsel [alternation of generations] or, what the British comparative anatomist and paleontologist Richard Owen (1804–92) called “metagenesis.” A typical instance of metagenetic change is found in fluke worms. Their Generationswechsel

FIGURE 6.2  “Paleontological chart.” Edward Hitchcock’s early diagram of the distribution of life through geological time gave visual expression to the third theory of the origin of species. Characteristic are the following features: life originated from inorganic matter (the “trees of life” have roots of rock), plants and animals commenced separately (two “trees of life,” not just one), all major plant and animal taxa began nearly simultaneously (even flowering plants and vertebrates go back to the earliest period), the major forms of life advanced as much convergently as divergently (depicted as shrubs of life, not a single, branching tree of life), and the development of life and species is teleological, culminating for the animal world in “Man” and for the plant world in “Palms.” Yet “Man” is the highest form of life, wearing a kingly crown, whereas palms display a diadem of lower, ducal rank. Hitchcock believed that an origin of species by natural law need not be contrary to religious belief if such law be seen as divinely sustained. In places, he also used creationist language. (From Edward Hitchcock, Elementary Geology, 8th ed. [New York: Mark H. Newman, 1847].)

consists of a succession of three distinct forms—infusorial, worm-like, and tadpole-like—connecting the egg and the mature fluke-worm. One might imagine that under particular circumstances the cycle could be broken, and the separate stages go on reproducing. In this way wholly new genera or even orders might originate.28 Taken together, the following pattern of life through time was envisaged (Figure 6.2): life from lifeless matter (the roots of life are rocks), the independent origin of plants and animals (each kingdom forms a separate “tree of life”), the multiple independent origins of major groups of plant and animal life (“shrubs” rather than “trees”), a certain consecutive and parallel development of life forms through time (shrub branches), and also occasional reemergences of life forms after extinctions (at the lower boundaries of geological periods/systems).

Autogenesis in Humboldtian biogeography

Like geology, Humboldtian physical geography was one of the cuttingedge fields of early nineteenth-century science. Probably more than any other field, biogeography adopted autogenous generation as a central organizing concept. Species were not just Linnean taxonomic entities but Humboldtian members of geographical communities. Plants in particular came to be thought of as species with a special area of distribution, vertically from low to high altitude in mountainous regions, and horizontally/latitudinally from equator to pole across the globe. Such provinces of distribution were interpreted as “centres of creation,” meaning that the species that characterized a particular province had come into existence locally as a result of autogenous generation. In biogeography, autogenous generation equaled autochthonous (or aboriginal) generation.

In this context, distribution statistics and maps showing provinces of distribution took on special significance, and many were published during the first half of the nineteenth century. A particularly exciting discovery was that identical plant species occur in widely separated provinces of distribution, for example the Maldives and Finnmark. Such instances, in which migration/transport from one area to the other appears all but impossible, indicated that the same species can originate spontaneously in more than one location. That being so, the origin of a species in a single area may have happened by the autogenous generation of many individuals at the same time, increasing the chances of survival—a possibility referred to in the above Burmeister quotation.

Thus, within the context of biogeography far-reaching implications of the theory of autogenesis were discussed. Can one species have more than a single origin? And, related to this, does a species originate as a single individual/as a single pair, or as many? Looking still further: if there have been Cuvierian catastrophes, must the repopulating of the world be seen as a rather sudden spontaneous generation of whole ecological communities? Or should one follow Charles Lyell, abandon the catastrophist view, and consider extinction as well as autogenous generation as a gradual process of the coming and going of single species? And should one follow Edward Forbes, adding a geological dimension of gradual change over time to provinces of distribution?

An entire generation of famous Humboldtian biogeographers subscribed to the theory of autogenesis, among them Franz Meyen (1804–40), Alphonse de Candolle (1806–93), Ludwig Schmarda (1819–1908), and, until well after Darwin’s Origin of Species, August Grisebach (1814–79). Like many subscribers to the theory of autogenesis, Candolle contended that the origin of species lay beyond our range of observation; but biogeography showed that most plant species had originated in the region where they occur, even though opinions diverged over whether or not new forms had come into existence as a single individual/pair or as many individuals. Species had not migrated across the globe. The facts taught us

to regard each endemic species as aboriginal to the country where today it exists, and the more dispersed species (sporadic) either as transported by accident from one country to another during the time of their existence or as original to several countries at once.

On the latter point, authors are divided. Some presume that each plant species comes from a single individual (or a single couple when it concerns dimorphic plants); others admit that from the beginning species must have had a considerable number of individuals, closely together or widely separated from each other across the surface of the earth.29

Autogenesis in anthropogeography

Most dramatically, Romantic anthropology adopted autogenous generation as a central concept. Nearly to a man, its star representatives in the German-speaking world believed in the spontaneous origin of Homo sapiens. Among them were Burdach and the polymath and Dresden profes-

sor of obstetrics Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869). Also, the great Berlin anatomist and physiologist Karl Asmund Rudolphi thought of humans as aboriginals/autochthons. As in biogeography generally, in anthropogeography the phenomenon of provinces of distribution of human varieties was attributed to autochthonous origins and autogenous generation. Human races were autochthons, and polygeny (the notion that human races do not have a common origin—monogeny—but separate ones) was allied to autogenesis, well before it became part of the theory of evolution. Admittedly, more than in the case of plant and animal species, “monogeny” versus “polygeny” was controversial when applied to humans. Blumenbach famously argued for a unitary origin of mankind and J. C. Prichard, in his

Researches into the Physical History of Man, followed suit by identifying a single “centre of creation” for humans. Burdach sided with Blumenbach in attributing to humans a single origin, putting the issue as follows:

Because every region of our planet has generated those plants and animals that reflect each region’s characteristics, and because the different human races, as far as our knowledge reaches back into antiquity, always have had the same characteristics that still today sets them apart from each other, it has been maintained that they were different from the start and came out of the hands of creating nature in different regions. . . . Human beings are not bound to their native soil like animals and plants, and the various human races can hold their own everywhere on earth far from their homeland, and are therefore not the products of distinct climates.30

Equally great names stood on the other side of the issue. Rudolphi argued that human races are true “aborigines” whose historical distribution is not a result of migrations but due to separate origins in situ.31 A similar view was championed by Carus, who pleaded ignorance about the origin of species and of the human species in particular—suggesting that primordial origins lie outside the range of our observational possibili- ties—but who then specified nevertheless how humans must have come into existence, summing up the various ways in which this could not have happened. Humans had neither originated as told in the Bible nor had they evolved from apes. Specifically, Homo sapiens had not made its first appearance in adult form on land, as a single individual or a single pair, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; nor had it originated as some evolutionists speculated by the transformation of monkeys into men. The human species—he asserted—had its origins in primordial vesicles that had

developed in enormous numbers in water under mild and stable climatic conditions:

We may not think of the origin of humans as occasioned by a sudden appearance of one or more finished organisms; . . . we may think of a condition of the earth when, at a time of quite enormous generative activity, higher, even the highest, epitelluric organisms also arose from . . . primordial vesicles. In this case we should not think of their development in a dry but rather in a wet environment; and once one has clearly grasped this, then, . . . it should not be thought that this development took place only once or twice, but in enormously large numbers; . . . it may not be thought that this development was reached under the influence of anything other than . . . a mild climate. . . . Finally, however, and primarily, it should not be thought that human beings originated when an animal (an ape, for example) was elevated in his development to become a human.32

Thus human autogenesis could and would have taken place in different regions of the globe, and Carus was an advocate of polygeny, combining it with the explicit contention that the different races are unequal with respect to their intellectual abilities. In a famous Denkschrift [commemorative publication] of 1849 on the occasion of the centenary of Goethe’s birth, Carus produced a map of the world on which he plotted the climatic zone that had produced the highest forms of life—unsurprisingly, this included his own part of the world—and zones that had given rise to lower levels of humanity.33

By no means all autogenists were species fixists. Several added the creative potential of organic variability to the autogenous origin of life and of a number of original types. Blumenbach did so in a modest way, for instance to explain the origin of human varieties. Others went much further. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Robert Chambers, anonymous author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, can be seen as autogenists who combined the spontaneous origin of basic organic forms with extreme species variability and change. In other words, we can think of Lamarck, Geoffroy, and others as advocates of autogenesis who went out on a variability limb, rather than as protoDarwinists. Others, too, postulated the autogenous origin of life and of a variety of original forms, but added species variability and descent via major changes due to inner tendencies. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) advocated this generatio in utero heterogeneo [generation in the uterus of a different kind], whereby the egg of a new

species originates in the uterus of a related but different species, not under the open sky on the bank of a river, in a pond, etc. Thus Homo sapiens could have spontaneously originated in the womb of an ape and yet not have evolved from apes. Owen came to defend this position, accepting that humans are descended from animals; this would explain why a major gap exists between apes and humans.34

Autogenists in context

The theory of autogenesis enjoyed its largest following in Germany; but in France, also, it had representatives.35 In the German literature, the British authors Lyell and Forbes were cited in the context of autogenesis, but although they are likely to have sympathized with the theory, they stopped short of explicitly expressing support.36 Bronn and Vogt cited Lyell.37 In the second volume of his Principles of Geology (1832), Lyell had famously criticized Lamarck’s theory of transmutation, upheld the constancy of species, and speculated that, on the basis of a gradual, uniform rate of extinction matched by an equally gradual origin of new species, in a region the size of Europe, only once every 8,000 years or more would a mammal disappear and emerge, making it a difficult process to authenticate.38 Lyell did not specifically state that he believed in a natural origin of species but later admitted that he left this to be inferred. Bronn, for one, did infer just that and attributed to Lyell the view that species past, present, and future had been/were being/would be originated by primordial generation (Urerzeugung), in a slow and imperceptible process of change of the world’s fauna. Moreover, autogenesis theory was familiar to British scientists either directly through Continental literature or via Ray Society translations into English, such as Meyen’s outspokenly autogenist and autochthonist

Outlines of the Geography of Plants (1846) and the more bizarrely holisticvitalistic Elements of Physiophilosophy (1847) by Lorenz Oken.

Both Joseph Dalton Hooker and Thomas Henry Huxley, before they joined the Darwinian cause in the wake of the appearance of the Origin of Species, expressed doubts about species variability. Huxley, in his notoriously scathing review of Vestiges, strenuously opposed “transmutation” as well as divine guidance and intervention. Hooker, in a review of Candolle’s Géographie botanique raisonnée, expressed agreement with Huxley but at the same time prevaricated on whether multiple creations or creation by transmutation had taken place.39 It is likely that in the cases of Hooker

and Huxley, as in the German instances of pre-Origin scientists, the combination of anti–miraculous creation and antitransmutation went hand in hand with an open-mindedness regarding the possibility of autochthonous generation.40

Yet it cannot be overlooked that autogenesis was first and foremost a German theory of the origin of species, just as natural selection was British in origin. Some decades ago now, John C. Greene observed:

It is a curious fact that all, or nearly, all, of the men who propounded some idea of natural selection in the first half of the nineteenth century were British. Given the international character of science, it seems strange that nature should divulge one of her profoundest secrets only to inhabitants of Great Britain. Yet she did. The fact seems explicable only by assuming that British political economy, based on the idea of the survival of the fittest in the marketplace, and the British competitive ethos generally predisposed Britons to think in terms of competitive struggle in theorizing about plants and animals as well as man.41

Greene’s line of thought, linking evolution by natural selection to British national context, could, mutatis mutandis, equally be taken in the case of autogeny. Why should this theory have been primarily German? What in German culture predisposed biologists to develop the theory of a spontaneous origin of species and think in terms of autochthony? The spread of German naturalistic thought to Britain and France may well have been inhibited by the prevalence there of creationist belief, yet the question remains: why did autogenesis grow from German roots? Not just Darwinism, also Blumenbachian spontaneous generation, calls for the sort of analysis that Greene, Young, and a younger generation of Darwin scholars have carried out for evolution by natural selection.42 Also, the theory of autogenesis will have been intrinsically ideological, its German ascendancy being most likely attributable to, among other things, a pervasive and deeply seated Germanic belief in environmental determinism.

Writing autogenesis out of the historical record

To sum up, a major tradition of non-creationist, naturalistic opinion on the origin of species existed by the time the Origin of Species was published, belying the essentialist contention, referred to above, that Darwinism was the first and only scientific theory that attributed the origin of species to

non-miraculous, natural causes. Today, the pre-Darwinian paradigm of autogenesis has been forgotten. How can such forgetting have come about? The answer is that the theory was written out of the historical record by a memory culture that developed as part of the self-constituting of Darwinism as a cause. To many, the memory culture of Marxism may serve as “type specimen,” but a Darwinian variety also came into existence that equally constructed a self-reconfirming perspective on the past. A collective memory formed, the content of which was determined by a process of sorting what seemed of interest from what seemed not, the former being highlighted and the latter, in some instances, being deleted and forgotten.

“Forgetting” is a particularly relevant aspect in the context of the present chapter, as this is what Darwin initiated with respect to the theory of autogenesis. His Origin of Species completely ignored the theory, even to the extent that Darwin belittled the problem of the origin of life to which he devoted no more than a few lines (see next section). Darwin’s ridicule of the belief in an instantaneous origin of species was directed against the creationists, not the autochthonists, even though his words could, with all due reservations, just as well have applied to them:

These authors seem no more startled at a miraculous act of creation than at an ordinary birth. But do they really believe that at innumerable periods in the earth’s history certain elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues? Do they believe that at each supposed act of creation one individual or many were produced? Were all the infinitely numerous kinds of animals and plants created as eggs or seed, or as full grown? and in the case of mammals, were they created bearing the false marks of nourishment from their mother’s womb?43

Following the early success of his book, Darwin added to it “An Historical Sketch” (prefixed to the third edition of the Origin of Species and, in an expanded form, to the fourth and later editions). Supposedly recording “the progress of opinion on the origin of species,” the sketch omitted mention of the autogenist theory. Darwin failed to act like a “pure” scientist weighing the factual evidence and discussing the available theoretical options, but engaged in special pleading, selectively anointing forerunners and opponents. Thus he created a self-affirming historical framework for telling his story and arguing his case, the main line of persuasion being that there existed no scientific alternative to his theory because the choice was one of natural origins by means of evolution versus miraculous

origins by creation. The latter was not science; it represented a religious doctrine.

Until recently [that is, until the Origin of Species] the great majority of naturalists believed that species were immutable productions, and had been separately created. This view has been ably maintained by many authors. Some few naturalists, on the other hand, have believed that species undergo modification, and that the existing forms of life are the descendants by true generation of pre-existing forms.44

Darwin let those “few naturalists” have a share in his success by naming them forerunners of evolution; moreover, he appropriated several great names from the recent past of biology and geology by representing them as his precursors—even though these people had been autogenists of one kind or another. With this historical sketch Darwin retouched the map of “the progress of opinion on the origin of species,” blotting out what was at the time the most commonly represented naturalistic theory. His omission was critically commented upon by, among others, the Heidelberg paleontologist Bronn, who translated the Origin of Species into German.45 Another former autogenist who converted to Darwinism, the Utrecht zoologist Pieter Harting, in the introduction to his 1862 zoology textbook, like Bronn drew attention to autogenesis, discussing at length the pros and cons of this option before continuing with a plea on behalf of Darwinian evolution.46 Darwin himself, however, stuck to his strategy of avoidance and did not discuss the theory of autogenesis, defending as late as the sixth edition (1876) of the Origin of Species his oversimplified scheme of creation versus evolution.

As a record of a former state of things, I have retained in the foregoing paragraphs, and elsewhere, several sentences which imply that naturalists believe in the separate creation of each species; and I have been much censured for having thus expressed myself. But undoubtedly this was the general belief when the first edition of the present work appeared.47

This view, we have seen, was a distortion; yet it proved effective. By ignoring “the origin of life” Darwin circumnavigated a dispute with formidable, highly regarded representatives of the earth and life sciences (see next section).

The efficacy of the historical sketch as a template for later histories is apparent from the fact that the theory of autogenesis to this day has remained a largely forgotten chapter in the development of evolutionary biology. Scholars have contracted a blind spot that makes those who read the original sources fail to see the theory of autogenesis. Time and again they have reclassified autogenists as “forerunners of Darwin”48 or simply “forgotten” them. Darwin’s self-alignment with selected predecessors was approvingly repeated 100 years later on the occasion of the centenary of the Origin of Species. The great biologists and their scientific contributions from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were interpreted as foreshadowing the coming of the Messiah of organic evolution—an approach that received its almost hymnic rendition in Bentley Glass’s preface to the classic Forerunners of Darwin: 1745–1859:

By the middle of the eighteenth century, theories of evolution were being heatedly debated. As the evidence in favor of organic evolution grew, the struggle between two seeming alternatives, the one, Divine Plan and Providence in an Original Creation and the other, a godless mechanism of chance and of blind cause and effect, became not so much a debate that divided scientists and philosophers into two camps as a cleavage in the heart of each individual man. Thus, as the individual often resolves an implacable conflict by repressing it into the subconscious, so human thought in the first half of the nineteenth century stubbornly and blindly repressed the implications of the growing evidence in regard to the origin of species, including his own. Darwin was the outburst of those repressed conclusions, the victory of that submerged scientific conviction. His was the magnificent synthesis of evidence, all known before, and of theory, adumbrated in every postulate by his forerunners—a synthesis so compelling in honesty and comprehensiveness that it forced such men as Thomas Henry Huxley to say: How stupid not to have realized that before!49

A further advantage of “forgetting” was that this made it easier for autogenists and especially the outspoken critics of species transformation among them to convert to Darwinism. It provided shelter for those who changed their minds and decided to join Darwin. They did not object when their earlier antitransformist views were not held up against them, when their public pronouncements in favor of the spontaneous origin of species were quietly passed over, and when they were praised for having helped along the cause of Darwinism before the appearance of the Origin

of Species. Among the beneficiaries were Hooker and Huxley. A remarkable case was Vogt, an instant convert to Darwinism who previously had passionately argued for autogenesis and against both creation and evolution, but who later claimed not to have known what to think about the origin of species before Darwin’s book.50

It is well known that Darwin admired Lyell and was deeply influenced by his Principles of Geology. A parallel can be drawn between Darwin’s historical introduction and the historical chapters with which Lyell opened his Principles of Geology. On the occasion of the Lyell Centenary Celebrations of 1975, Roy Porter discussed Lyell’s introduction to the Principles, arguing that it functioned less to provide a historical background than to formulate a polemic in support of his philosophy of geology. The introduction made uniformitarianism seem the inevitable outcome of the progress of enlightened thought and civilization. Lyell “forged a masterly propaganda history,” showing that religion, philosophy, and anthropomorphic narrow-mindedness “had caused geology to miscarry.”51 The study of the earth needed to be freed from catastrophes and providential miracles. Civilized and progressive minds were reaching the stage of appreciating the uniformity and continuity of nature’s economy. “He made uniformitarianism seem natural and inevitable, by assimilating it within a conjectural evolution of the human mind. Lyell offered uniformitarianism not just as a methodology. It was unchallengeable because it was integral to the evolutionary epistemology of the human race.”52

Lyell’s historical introduction showed considerable historiographical sophistication.53 Darwin’s does not. In fact, it is a poorly constructed and rather haphazard enumeration of selected predecessors. Yet the two introductions are alike in that they had similar purposes. Darwin, like Lyell, created a dichotomy of religious obscurantism versus scientific enlightenment, which in his case equaled creation versus evolution. In telling the story of “the progress of opinion on the origin of species,” he offered less a record of fact than a self-serving polemic that obscured the scientific alternative to his theory. This was, on the one hand, just an all too commonly used presentation strategy to promote one’s own theory; yet on the other hand, Darwin’s historiography expressed an essentialist ideology that substituted, with his own truth claims, those made by orthodox religion. To Darwin as to Lyell, as well as to many other Victorian scientists, the scientific study of nature took over from theology as arbiter of absolute truth about the history of the earth and of life. Also, with respect to this quasireligious characteristic, Darwinism showed its ideological leopard’s spots.

What if . . . ?

Once again, if the Origin of Species had never been written, would that have made a difference to the state of today’s evolutionary biology? Ironically, true Darwinians say it wouldn’t, because all Darwin did was walk the straight and narrow path of scientific truth, and, if he hadn’t led us there, someone else would. After all, was Wallace not waiting in the wings with an identical theory of the origin of species, ready to take Darwin’s place if for one reason or another the great prophet of evolution had failed? I argue to the contrary that the biology of origins today would have looked different, possibly fundamentally so. A scientific alternative to Darwinism existed, and it is imaginable that, if this had prevailed in the form of a Bronnian and Owenian program of multiple autogenous origins combined with directional evolution, its characteristic premises might have led to breakthroughs and opened up avenues toward an unfamiliar constellation of theories and practices. The successes and institutional power of these new directions would have been effective self-affirmations. “Darwinism” in the form of Wallace’s theory would not have happened. Leaving aside the differences between Darwin and Wallace in their understandings of natural selection—the one focusing on divergence, the other on adaptation—Wallace would never have managed to get natural selection established without Darwin. In Moore’s words: “We have every reason to believe that Owen would have upped his own profile, moved to a wider centre-stage, and trumped any move Wallace might have made to usurp him.”54

So in what ways would the non-Darwinian Owenian program have been different? Let me restrict myself here to a single yet major example of a topic that Darwin ignored but that was high on the autogenists’ research agenda, namely the origin of life. A significant feature of autogenous generation was that it made no distinction between the origin of life and the origin of species. The two issues were conflated to form a single scientific question. Darwinism—I contend—set back research into the origin of life by many decades and may well be a principal cause of the embarrassing fact that, until the present day, we have not solved this fundamental problem of organic origins. We neither know how life began nor have we succeeded in reproducing in the laboratory the processes that during primeval times led— one assumes—to abiogenesis.

It is a widely known and often cited fact that Darwin did not include the problem of the origin of life in his magnum opus on the origin of species.

Toward the very end of the book he inserted a couple offhand remarks that seemed more to dismiss than seriously address the question. Darwin wrote: “I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed,” and further he referred to life “having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one.”55

A long-held view is that Darwin avoided the issue because “[t]his enabled him to work out a theory of descent without bogging down in unanswerable questions.”56 To put it another way: it allowed him to make natural selection seem more efficacious than it otherwise would because natural selection has no obvious grip on the transition from lifeless matter to primitive life (even though more recently attempts have been made to apply natural selection to stages of the primordial abiogenesis process, famously by the Glasgow organic chemist Alexander Graham CairnsSmith).57

Here I have shown that there was more to Darwin’s avoidance of the origin of life than the fact that his proposed mode of evolution would fare better without it. His ignoring the issue, unprofessional as this may have been given its fundamental significance, proved tactically clever in that by so doing Darwin averted a confrontation with representatives of the then leading theory of the origin of species—for the most part men who he was anxious to get on his side. In order to succeed, Darwin could ill afford alienating the many powerful and prestigious representatives of the theory of autogenesis. Among its outspoken advocates was an élite group of Continental earth and life scientists; its sympathizers included several eminent men from Darwin’s own circle, such as Lyell, Forbes, and J. D. Hooker. Darwin evaded a direct challenge of these men’s views, reducing the question of the origin of species to two possible positions: evolution or creation, the one characterized by “impartiality” and the other by a “load of prejudice.”58 Given that the autogenists were not creationists and in fact were severely criticized by creationist colleagues, Darwin’s staging of a common creationist enemy facilitated the crossing over by autogenists to the Darwinian camp.

The origin of life was removed from the Darwinian research agenda, even more so after the Bathybius debacle, when Huxley, Haeckel, and many other eager converts to Darwinism misidentified albuminous coagulates in ocean floor samples from the Challenger expedition as incipient life.59 It was to no avail that Owen insisted “[t]hat the doctrines of the generatio spontanea and of the transmutation of species are intimately

connected. Who believes in the one, ought to take the other for granted.”60 The origin of life was dropped as a central concern of the biology of origins, not to be taken up again until approximately a century later in the wake of the work of the American chemist and biologist Stanley Miller. Had the alternative route been followed, it is imaginable that by now the fundamental problem of the origin of life would be solved.

One might counter by arguing that the very tools for creating life in the laboratory, as currently attempted with the promise of success by, for example, the American geneticist J. Craig Ventner and his group,61 did not exist until the late-twentieth century and that therefore the science of reproducing life could not have developed any faster than it has. Ever since the work by Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg (1795–1876) on foraminifera and radiolaria we have known that even the smallest forms of microbial life are highly complex; and it would appear that we require the technological capabilities of today’s genetic engineering to reproduce such microbes in the laboratory. Yet what the autogenists attempted did not necessarily presuppose the instrumental and theoretical know-how of today’s molecular biology. They were interested in retracing the historical steps that nature took in creating life, and their aim may well have been accomplished with the time-excluding or at least time-reducing techniques that physiological chemistry set-ups from the early part of the nineteenth century onward possessed. It was entirely possible to produce a range of conditions of temperature, pressure, humidity, composition of inorganic and organic molecules, electrical discharges, etc. that— one assumes— conditioned the emergence of simple life on earth. The fact that we have not yet succeeded in reproducing these historical stages is due—I re- peat—to the limitations of the Darwinian program that for many decades discouraged turning the problem of the origin of life into a major interdisciplinary and international research endeavor.

If the alternative to Darwinism had prevailed and managed to trace nature’s steps in creating life, today we would be celebrating the accomplishments of the non-Darwinian life sciences as proof that these represented the one and only highway of scientific progress and objective reality. That hypothetical biological world would have been considered the best of all possible ones, just as at present many of us can conceive of no better world than the Darwinian one we have come to inhabit. Let us, in conclusion, remind ourselves of the 1932 address to the Prussian Academy of Sciences by Erwin Schrödinger, Nobel laureate and one of the founders of quantum physics, when he discussed the question “Ist die Naturwissenschaft

milieubedingt?” [Is science conditioned by context?]. Stressing the importance of Gesamtkultur [collective culture] for our scientific orientation and the sort of questions we ask, he stated:

Rarely will a thought more powerfully have influenced the direction of our interests in almost all areas of science and life as has the concept of evolution, and that in its general form as well as in the particular way expressed by Charles Darwin. . . . Just think of how much this thought has taken possession of us, so that we can no longer think without it and hardly notice when we apply it as a matter of course to everything.62

This chapter makes a case for the non-inevitability of Darwin’s theory and, by so doing, endeavors to remove from Darwinism its protective armor of essentialist claims. The contention by Bob Young, John Greene, Jim Moore, and others, as well as Schrödinger all those years ago, is thus reinforced, namely that sociopolitical concepts, values—ideologies—and material conditions were and are constitutive of Darwin’s theory, and vice versa.