Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
In the body of this topic, I intend to examine these features longitudi-
nally, which is to say by showing why the path of science's historical devel-
opment as a professional avocation has necessitated their emergence. The
scientific identity now tied up with evolutionism began to take shape in
the seventeenth century by latching on to a set of explicitly religious ideas,
and I intend to follow the process of development which gradually trans-
formed its supporting narrative into one that, by the end of the nineteenth
century, had linked the scientific ethos to the doctrines of evolutionary
science. My rationale for taking this approach is my belief that, because
evolutionism bears the rhetorical marks of these founding discourses from
the seventeenth century, it can best be understood by tracing its cultural
development. The best way to understand evolutionism, in other words,
is by understanding its own evolution, by recognizing that it is a symbolic
phenomenon that descends from the vital and explicitly religious rhetoric
that first formed the scientific identity.
This is not a new idea. Examinations of early modern science by his-
torians and sociologists have consistently revealed its close alliances with
religion.
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In my interpretation, this relationship developed because the
scientific ethos could only be fashioned from cultural materials then avail-
able—the established
nomos-cosmos
identity of Christianity. The scientific
role began as an extension of the church's role as God's instrument for
restoring a fallen world. As I turn in the next chapters to the Baconian
rhetoric that first articulated this idea, we will begin to see in outline the
narrative that once sustained this identity and also how it anticipates the
secular scientific romance I have just sketched.
With cultural no less than with biological notions of evolution, it should
be assumed that ancestry is vitally determinative. In the realm of evolution-
ary biology, though I am mindful of Stephen Jay Gould's well-known reser-
vations on this count, form and function are consistently related through
adaptation. If a function persists down through the ages, even as dramatic
alterations occur in a species' morphology and natural habitat, we can be
fairly certain that the form that originally sustained its life will remain rec-
ognizable as well. Although one can only speculate, for instance, about the
objects that our Miocene ancestors manipulated once they had acquired the
incomparable manual dexterity that we inherit from them, we can be fairly
certain that the tasks they put their hands to must have resembled our own.
It is an analogous argument that I am making about evolutionism. Because
the religious functions of a Baconian science-creation identity enabled early
