Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
patterns of natural causation are recognized; it does not account for what
we think
ought
to happen in human choice-making.
Levine and Miller seem to have slipped into verbal equivocation. They
have done so, I would surmise, because the creative impulse that has taken
over their exposition is a mythical one. If the same entrenched ideas about
stability that were responsible for science's failure to address the question of
origins also accounted for the rigidity and injustice of the social world, then
the story of evolution
is
the story of progress, and Darwin is history's savior.
They have suggested to their readers that the dynamics of change that sci-
ence has demonstrated in the biological world are vitally the same as those
accounting for the rise of democracy.
When Levine and Miller turn next to their narrative on the life and dis-
coveries of Charles Darwin, they adopt the device, quite familiar in roman-
tic fiction, of setting their hero within but also in opposition to a fallen
world. They begin by reminding us that Darwin “was born and raised in
a privileged family within a society growing uncomfortable with the rigid
status quo.” The world was struggling to set itself free from the oppression
of “stability,” and this made Darwin, as one more thoroughly trapped in
it than others, the most unlikely of heroes. All the world was struggling
against this Goliath, but there was no one who could slay it. By the time
he was born, “the merchant class created by the Industrial Revolution was
not satisfied with the hereditary social structure and struggled to change it,
while philosophers searched for a new world view that could accommodate
the emerging competitive social order.” Science was likewise busily attack-
ing the old “static, divinely ordered world” on every front “except biology.”
17
With the stage thus set, the reader knows where this story is headed, but
a vital tension in its dramatic form holds our attention. The world awaited
the decisive blow that would bring down the dragon of stability, and Dar-
win, the candidate tapped for this role, seemed to have no promise of suc-
cess. But this only magnifies the grandeur of the triumph to come. It has
already been determined that the scientific adventure that is about to unfold
in the next ten pages will be about something bigger than biology. This is
because Levine and Miller have ordered these historical elements into a
literary form that invites their interpretation as metaphors of progress. The
assortment of signs from geology and natural history that were beginning to
point toward evolution, Darwin's gradual conversion to transmutation dur-
ing his journey aboard the HMS
Beagle
, and his eventual piecing together of
the theory of natural selection, may still do much to explain how the idea of
evolution took hold, but the social drama in which they have been set gives
