Scientism Scientized - Rhetorical Darwinism - page 217

through which Western religion has looked upon supernatural reality—God
as “Father” and “Lord,” nature as “creation,” human beings as “fallen,” and
the like—are validated by the premise of revelation, the supposition of the
faithful that the canonical texts which ratify these metaphors represent
the divine breaking in upon profane experience. Being habituated to the
notion of revelation as the dynamic principle of Western mythologizing,
we are less likely to recognize the same sort of symbolism emanating from
a scientific culture that professes metaphysical neutrality. However, it is not
a particular kind of authority structure that turns metaphor into myth; any
kind of authority may work. Scientific cultures merely rely upon the truth
value of scientific discovery to justify suspending the “as if” tension that
otherwise enables us to recognize metaphor as such.
s cience ' s P lace in n atuRe
To illustrate how evolutionism achieves this transparency, I would like to
examine the metaphors of “place” that appear in key sections of Huxley's
influential 1863 topic, Man's Place in Nature . This volume is significant in
the history of evolutionary thought because, in tandem with Lyell's Geologi-
cal Evidences of the Antiquity of Man , which was published the same year, it
was an important first effort to explore the human implications of Darwin's
thesis—even though, in typical form for its author, it gives natural selection
only the slightest attention. Although intended for general audiences, it is
unmistakably also a scientific treatment, a fairly technical one, in fact, that
compiles detailed evidences for human evolution from zoology, ethnology,
paleontology, and embryology. Customarily we would not go looking for
mythical symbolism in a topic that details how the close-fitting polygonal
bones in the human carpus compare with measurements of Neanderthal
frontal sinuses and the thickness of the bone at its parietal protuberance.
But it is precisely the authoritative cover provided by the volume's scientific
purposes that gives its author the freedom to step out of science into a mythi-
cal modality. No one comes to such messages expecting to find myth, and so
the reader is unlikely to notice that its scientific content sometimes serves as
a symbolic window inviting them to look out upon a scientistic landscape.
This mythical aspect coincides with another extra-scientific goal. Man's
Place in Nature also played a part in Huxley's ongoing chess match with the
scientific old guard. In the opinion of James Paradis, it was the endpoint
of Huxley's campaign to “transform the theoretical basis of British biol-
ogy from the speculative tradition of the nature-philosophers and from the