Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
its “profound practical and philosophical implications for humanity.” Quot-
ing the philosopher J. Collins, the authors explain that “there are no living
sciences, human attitudes or institutional powers that remain unaffected by
the ideas . . . catalytically released by Darwin's topic.”
14
For this reason, the authors add that to “understand why Darwin's
work was so important, we must first place his theory within the context
of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western philosophy.” But the reader
will soon discover that the authors' reason for setting Darwin's work in
history is to sustain the notion that it launched a new epoch that would
forever divide us from the past. Darwin's work did not just upset the bio-
logical preconceptions of the Victorian world; it overturned a view of the
“material world as rigid, static and innately flawed” that stretched back
into classical antiquity. One legitimate reason for delving into this deep
past is the need to explain the philosophical and theological ideas that
shaped biological thinking before Darwin. The reader learns, accordingly,
how the classical notion of “ideal types” and the Christian doctrine of
creation “
necessarily
implied stability; things that were divine and perfect
should not change.”
15
But Levine and Miller's exposition clearly exceeds
this instructional purpose. They are not content merely to show why bio-
logical thinking had previously given presumption to the notion of fixed
species. They go out of their way, as they close their opening section, to
remind us that these preconceptions were also responsible for some of the
notorious evils of the premodern world.
This view of a divinely ordered and stable world governed not only the
natural world but social systems as well. Just as the human race had domin-
ion over creation, kings ruled over humanity by “divine right.” The rigid
system of upper and lower social classes was thus seen as an extension of
the immutable world order represented by the Great Chain of Being. Talk
of change was immoral; such change was unthinkable, whether in the
human social order or the natural world.
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As this paragraph transitions into the authors' discussion of Darwin's
career, we notice that the term “change” has shifted its meaning. What had
a plain scientific sense in the chapter's first sentence, where the authors
explain that a “theory of evolution is nothing more (or less) than a theory of
biological change,” has taken flight as metaphor. In strict scientific terms,
the “change” mediated by natural selection could never denote (except as an
article of faith) what we mean to say when we demand that people “change”
their ways. The theory of evolution accounts for what must happen once the
