Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
at the moment of his death,” Bronowski tells us, this is also “what Galileo
did, against his own will.” Because it is nature that speaks through science,
the church could not silence it by destroying Galileo. His death only meant
that a new scientific messiah would be reborn in Northern Europe. “Galileo
died, still a prisoner in his house, in 1642. On Christmas Day of the same
year, in England, Isaac Newton was born.”
59
Galileo's folly, no less than that
of his biblical counterpart, could not frustrate purposes that were rooted in
evolutionary history.
The trajectory of this redemptive growth leads in Bronowski's final epi-
sode to a vision of the coming kingdom, in this case the “scientific civili-
zation” for which the “long childhood” of evolution has been inexorably
preparing us. Although the narrator expresses misgivings about the West's
“retreat” from science, its triumph is assured because science is “nature's
unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder
than the reflex.” Ultimately, science has a transcendent or perhaps imma-
nent basis. Nature is history's Great Experimenter who assures us that
“knowledge is our destiny,” that “self-knowledge, at last bringing together the
experience of the arts and the explanations of science, waits ahead of us.”
60
t
he
m
imetic
e
volution
of
e
volutionism
What brought us to this examination of the literary form that shapes sci-
entific communication was an effort to understand a persistent thematic
identification between science and nature, especially in historical represen-
tations depicting science as the human incarnation of natural evolution. I
do not doubt that those who advance this identity may also have personal
motives, or spiritual ones as Ruse has surmised, but for the main part I
mean to argue for a public and thus rhetorical explanation—that evolution-
ism is most crucially an outgrowth of the scientific culture's patronage inter-
ests. Evolutionism is a symbolic construction that is uniquely able to enlarge
the authority of science and thus its claim on public sponsorship. Argu-
mentatively speaking, this is because evolutionism entails much of what
is advanced by such ideologies as scientism and naturalism, but it brings
two other rhetorical advantages to the table as well: first, the appearance
of being backed by technical authority that it achieves by drawing upon
the language of evolutionary science, even to the point of claiming to be
science; and second, the unique persuasive qualities it gains by imitating a
literary form already imbued with spiritual meaning.
