Biography

In part 1 it was demonstrated that Gertrude Himmelfarb’s Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution is the book Darwinists love to hate. In order to understand why a rather detailed examination is required. Of course, this is a big biography and an exhaustive account cannot be given here, but a summary investigation will make the source of the Darwinist’s discomfort obvious.

Darwin is divided into six “books”: 1) “Pre-history of the Hero;” 2) “Emergence of the Hero;” 3) “Emergence of the Theory;” 4) “Reception of the Origin;” 5) “Analysis of the Theory;” and 6) “Darwinism.” The first four books are an interesting read and provide a valuable backdrop to the treatment that follows, but Himmelfarb is weakest on Darwin’s early years. She completely passes over Darwin’s Edinburgh period where he joined the Plinian Society in November of 1826 and attended all but one of the ensuing 19 meetings until April of 1827. According to Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist, this was young Charles’ introduction to “seditious science.” While this is crucial in understanding the development of Darwin’s theory, it will not be gleaned from this book.

Also, Himmelfarb believes that Darwin was uninterested in and ill-equipped to appreciate the philosophical implications of his theory. Probably a better suggestion is that Darwin wasn’t so much disinterested in philosophy as he was just a bad philosopher, or at least a very superficial one. She as much as admits Darwin’s anemic reading in the field: “What little reading he did in philosophy was parochial in the extreme. . . . It is difficult to take seriously a discussion that had, as its most frequently cited moralist and philosopher, the historian William Lecky” (p. 375).¹ When Darwin appended a list of moral philosophers he had relied upon in preparing his Descent, philosophers he “assured” his readers that they would be familiar with, Himmelfarb notes that 26 were British “and that [they] are today, quite as assuredly, entirely unknown.”

Nevertheless, what Himmelfarb misses in the early years she more than makes up for in the last two books devoted to an analysis of the theory and the ideological ism that it would turn into. Here in these two sections more than anywhere else reside the sources of anger, revilement, and consternation for the Darwinists.

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Benjamin Wiker’s   The Darwin Myth  was first available on Amazon.com on June 2; my book on natural selection’s co-discoverer Alfred Russel Wallace, titled Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution, first appeared on Amazon on February 16. My aim in pointing this out is only to say that had Dr. Wiker been well ahead of me instead of a little behind, I might have saved perhaps one-third of the 114 references in my work. In other words, in order to give Wallace some historical context it was absolutely essential to at least give a general assessment of Charles Darwin, the man who utterly eclipsed the younger naturalist.  How did Darwin develop his theory? What did it contribute? How are we to assess the man (Darwin) in relation to his theory (evolution)? How was Darwin’s theory unique and different from all others?  How do answers to these questions impact the current evolutionary debate today?  I tackled these same questions in my own work but found that they had to be answered from multiple sources (from several contemporary biographies and from primary resources available in Darwin’s published notebooks, his Autobiography [used with extreme caution!], and others). Search after search yielded no one-volume source that handled Darwin with the frank perspicacity that biology’s paterfamilias deserved.  With Wiker’s new book it has finally arrived!

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I am pleased to say that an audio version (MP3) of my play ‘Lincoln and Darwin — Live for One Night Only!’ is now on-line at ‘The Sci-Phi Show’, courtesy of Jason Rennie, the Sydneyside philosophical broadcaster. Here it is, just in time for Lincoln and Darwin’s 200th birthday (tomorrow). The play runs to 85 minutes and is premised on Lincoln and Darwin coming on one of today’s TV chat shows to talk about has happened since they died.  Each then is given the option of staying in 2009 or returning to the 19th century. One decides to stay and the other goes.  The play was originally staged in Liverpool in September 2008 as part of the annual meeting of the British Read More ›

This week marks the publication of the Darwin book that has so far received the most advance publicity in the UK, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore (Allen Lane). Desmond and Moore, both together and separately, have written some of the best histories of the Victorian life sciences, including a best-selling biography of Darwin. You can get a sense of the book from this excerpt currently featured in Prospect Magazine. 

Desmond and Moore always wade very deep in the archives but also with an eye to what might attract today’s reader about their subject. Not surprisingly, then, this is a book that documents the link between Darwin’s more general doctrine of common descent and his belief that all humans descend from a common ancestor and hence are members of the same species. A lot of stress is placed on Darwin’s revulsion at the brutality of slavery that he saw while voyaging on the Beagle, and the fact that it was common among the natural historians of his day to believe in several species of ‘man’. The reader can easily get the impression that this was some kind of triumph of evidence over prejudice. However, this impression would be very misleading. Read More ›

The Vatican apparently seeks to understand biological evolution, as long as speakers do not address the issue of origins whether advocates of Intelligent Design, Creationists, or Evolutionists. That appears to a priori exclude the foundational issue of causation. It also appears to assume that papers on “biological evolution” do not have any unstated assumptions on mechanisms or causes. It will be interesting to see the papers and results from this conference. See following articles and Dembski’s previous post: The Pope Circling Around ID:
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“Intelligent design” not science: Vatican evolution congress to exclude creationism, intelligent design

Speakers invited to attend a Vatican-sponsored congress on the evolution debate will not include proponents of creationism and intelligent design, organizers said.

The Pontifical Council for Culture, Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University and the University of Notre Dame in Indiana are organizing an international conference in Rome March 3-7 2009 as one of a series of events marking the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species.” Read More ›

Imagine if you will a rather pathetic little boy oppressed by a domineering father and overshadowed by older sisters assuming maternal roles that directed his every move.  Under such conditions it’s not surprising that certain survival strategies would be employed by the boy to establish his place in the family pecking order.  Thus it was, according to biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore, that a young Charles Darwin stole his father’s peaches and plums only to “discover” them later in heroic fashion and would invent “deliberate falsehoods” in order to gain attention.  In school he would regale classmates with stories of fantastic birds and remarkable flowers, flowers he could change into different colors.  “Once,” write Desmond and Moore, “he invented an elaborate story designed to show how fond he was of telling the truth.  It was a boy’s way of manipulating the world” (1).  But what happened when the boy, whose insatiable need for attention never waned, became a man.  How might he then manipulate the world?  This question, which few have dared to even pose, has been asked and answered in a provocative new book by former BBC writer/producer, Roy Davies titled, The Darwin Conspiracy: Origins of a Scientific Crime, just released by Goldensquare Books (http://darwin-conspiracy.co.uk/). 

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While cleric Michael Heller disparages Intelligent Design, Chuck Colson observes: “John Scotus Eriugena is considered perhaps the first proponent of “intelligent design.” See: Learning from the Irish, Chuck Colson

“Observe the forms and beauties of sensible things,” he wrote, “and comprehend the Word of God in them. If you do so, the truth will reveal to you in all such things only He who made them.” . . .

See Colson’s full “Breakpoint” 3/17/2008
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Another Darwin Biography

Ecclesiastes tells us, “Of making books there is no end,” and nowhere is that a greater truism than in the ever growing corpus of Darwiniana.  At present writing OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), the world’s largest bibliographic database, lists 14,129 books and articles with occurrences of Darwin, Darwinism, or Darwinian in the title.  That’s enough to confirm the second half of that verse, namely, that “much study is wearisome to the flesh.”  Fortunately, there are at present only two outstanding biographies of the man many consider the most influential scientist of all time.  The first is Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (1991).  Still frequently cited in the literature, Desmond and Moore’s 800-page biography has been overshadowed more recently by the completion of Janet Browne’s even more corpulent 2 volume prize-winning biography Charles Darwin: Voyaging (1995) and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (2003).  But the sheer massiveness of both endeavors (Browne’s effort totals nearly 1,200 pages in all) means that few but the most obsessive investigators will venture to traverse that terra incognita.  A book of more modest and accessible proportions seemed overdue.  Then I saw it – a   comparatively slim biography resting humbly on the shelves of Barnes & Nobles’ science section (it really belonged in the philosophy section but we’re coming to that).  It was David Quammen’s The Reluctant Mr. Darwin recently published in 2006.  Excluding the notes, bibliography, and index the total narrative comes to a mere 253 pages, and at $14.95 its price was destined to welcome rather than frighten readers away.  I said to myself: “Here is a book people are likely to actually read!”  I bought it and read it in a weekend. I’m glad I did, but not for reasons one might expect.
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