Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
with evolutionism, scientism was now tied up with evolutionary fact, and
this meant that biological science itself had become the ground of a scien-
tistic myth.
e
volutionaRy
m
etaPhoR
anD
e
volutionaRy
m
yth
We will return to Huxley's rhetorical career in a moment, but in preparing
to look more closely at how evolutionism retains traditional religious mean-
ings while seeming to advance scientific ones, we may first wish to consider
the theory of metaphor which I believe best accounts for such mythical
transformations. In rhetorical Darwinism, as I pointed out in chapter 1, evo-
lutionary science becomes a “living” narrative, as Mircea Eliade describes
myth, that “supplies models for human behavior and, by that very fact, gives
meaning and value to life.”
36
In emphasizing the rhetorical side of this narra-
tive, our concern is to understand how these mythical meanings and values
help to create the kind of public or social knowledge that sustains the pro-
fessional interests of scientists.
Evolutionism achieves such potency by conflating the cultural being of
science (
nomos
) with that of nature (
cosmos
), and the language mechanism
that sustains this is metaphor, or more specifically metaphor's potential for
transparency
, its ability to render invisible the verbal mediation (the meta-
phorical “vehicle,” to use I. A. Richards' terminology) through which the
“tenor” of culture is conceptualized in natural terms. This is to say that
evolution becomes myth when various terms representing biological evolu-
tion are also applied to the realm of culture. Such ties become transparent
(and thus fully mythical) when users become unable to recognize that what
the language evolutionary biology has abandoned is its scientific meaning.
When evolutionary terms express social knowledge, they take on more tra-
ditional historical meanings that could have no scientific grounding, yet
because the language expressing these meanings seems to have a natural
basis in biology, it serves to conflate evolutionism with evolution.
To say that Huxley mythologized evolutionary concepts is not to say
that these ideas were not also scientific. In fact, it was precisely because
evolutionary constructs had gained scientific standing that he could trans-
form them into mythical symbols. Living myths must reference a viable
understanding of nature, and for this reason the one Huxley was fashion-
ing was dependent upon the truth value of evolutionary science. The flip
side of this, which will undoubtedly trouble some readers, is the inherent
ambiguity of motivation that necessarily arises from this consideration. If
