Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
was because Darwin had “loaded” himself “with an unnecessary difficulty
in adopting
Natura non facit saltum
[nature makes no leaps] so unreservedly,”
and Huxley expresses the concern that “continual physical conditions”—
types, in other words—“are of so little moment” in the topic as to make it
seem impossible that “variation should occur at all.”
8
Without some stabil-
ity of form, this was to say, the mechanism of natural selection would have
nothing upon which to operate.
Huxley's commitment to saltation was rooted both in his extensive
knowledge of paleontology, which could not be easily reconciled to the kind
of uniformitarianism presupposed by Darwin's theory, and in the morpho-
logical doctrines just mentioned. His typological interests reflect the intel-
lectual debt he owed to the developmental morphology of Karl Ernst Von
Baer and, to a lesser extent, George Cuvier. He had first brought Von Baer's
work to the attention of English scientists with his translation of a key por-
tion of the Estonian embryologist's work. Von Baer's science was attractive
for a variety of reasons, but more generally because his work represented
science on a purely naturalistic basis. This had been one of the attractions
of Darwin's thesis as well, but because he believed that Von Baer's work had
a stronger empirical basis, it had the same enduring presence in Huxley's
thinking as it did in the anti-Darwinian science of Louis Agassiz.
9
In practi-
cal terms, this preference drew Huxley into an area of scientific thought
more similar to the science of the old guard, that of Owen and Agassiz,
who were favorite objects of his attacks.
10
Although he formally rejected the
idealized concepts of type and the implicit sense of design that were associ-
ated with the Platonized
Naturphilosophen
of the older generation and of the
hated Richard Owen in particular, he was never fully able to escape its spell.
The literary romanticism he had imbibed in his youth continued to color
those notions of biological order he would advance in adult life.
11
These reservations are also reflected in how Huxley's understanding of
the nature of scientific verification differed from that of Darwin. As a scien-
tist who regarded himself as a descendent of the British empiricists, he was
more strongly predisposed than was Darwin, whose philosophy of science
is regarded by Mario di Gregorio as a forerunner to that of the pragmatists,
to demand more exacting verification for scientific claims.
12
This is not to
say that Darwin's own criteria for evaluating scientific hypotheses were all
that different from Huxley's, but there seems to have been some important
disagreement about the extent to which exact experimental proofs were
required before one could assent to natural selection as the
vera causa
of spe-
cies differentiation. This no doubt was accentuated, especially after 1869,
