Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
immediately added:—“when I speak of transition I do not in the least
mean to say that one species turned into a second to develop thereafter
into a third. What I mean is, that the characters of the second are inter-
mediate between those of the others. It is as if I were to say that such and
such a cathedral, Canterbury, for example, is a transition between York
Minster and Westminster Abbey. No one would imagine, on hearing the
word transition, that a transmutation of these buildings actually took
place from one into another.”
34
When asked by Hahn why he so frequently addressed evolution in his public
lectures but never as an instructor, Huxley explained that, “Here in my teach-
ing lectures . . . I have time to put the facts before a trained audience. In my
public lectures I am obliged to pass rapidly over the facts, and I put forward
my personal convictions. And it is for this that people come to hear me.”
35
Biological evolution undoubtedly was one of these personal convictions,
but since he did not accept the mechanism that Darwin had proposed,
why would a self-professed scientific Puritan like Huxley so forcefully push
evolution in public? Its relationship to the
other
evolution of evolutionism
explains this. Biological evolution had begun to lead a double life. Because
the biological doctrine of evolution provided the scientific authority upon
which his vision of social evolution stood, it was necessary to promulgate
both evolutions for the rising middle class, upon which he was staking the
future of science. These consumers needed a worldview in which to frame
science as much as they needed to understand its substance. Their curios-
ity about evolution created an opportunity for Huxley's exposition of an
analogous ideology.
Were we to sift out the essence of this social evolutionary tale, it would
be fair to say that it is a version of the positivist story, a narrative about the
unyielding expansion of scientific naturalism in history. But in Huxley's
hands this story had become evolutionism—a Darwinian narrative tied up
with the story of science itself. Within this narrative, the absolute rule of
naturalism, certified now by the apparent triumph of evolutionary biology,
also signaled a similar naturalistic hegemony that was overtaking historical
understanding more generally.
This is the decisive symbolic move that sets evolutionism off from
its Enlightenment and positivist antecedents. Formerly, the unbounded
authority that was claimed for science in the governance of human affairs
stood upon assertions about the universal applicability of its methods and
its metaphysical reserve. This was mere philosophical scientism, a powerful
discourse to be sure, and one frequently enlisted by Huxley himself. But
