Biology Reference
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modern science to fit into a social environment dominated by Christian-
ity, the science-evolution identity that I have described so far should be
expected to manifest similar narrative forms and to perform similar func-
tions in science's descendent social environment.
Such elements persist in the more Lamarckian way that cultures evolve
because the process of descent with modification that shapes cultures occurs
through a creative process of imitation or mimesis. In outlining this general
principle as it arose out of his own work as an ethnographer, Clifford Geertz
also provides a compact summation of my own rationale.
Human societies never create out of whole cloth but merely choose cer-
tain combinations from a repertory of ideas anteriorly available to them.
Stock themes are endlessly arranged and rearranged into different pat-
terns: variant expressions of an underlying ideational structure which it
should be possible, given enough ingenuity, to reconstitute.
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The “ideational structure” that I hope to reconstitute here is a narrative
form that found its most poignant early expression in Francis Bacon's
religious arguments for science. It has persisted through various stages of
secularization leading up to the advent of evolutionism—most vividly and
decisively in the rhetorical career of Thomas Henry Huxley. From the time
of Bacon roughly until that of Huxley two hundred years later, science had
gained its position in the public consciousness by claiming to be a second
priesthood. As evolutionism gave rise to a seemingly secular ethos, a new
narrative (but one preserving science's priestly status) persisted as an adap-
tation of the older Baconian one. Although the evolutionary linkages that
account for this transformation have largely fallen out of view, a little bit of
rhetorical paleontology can quickly recover them.
If cultures never create out of whole cloth, we can be certain that this
developmental process did not begin with Bacon. Indeed, it is evident that
when the Viscount St. Alban related the scientific role to the historical mis-
sion of the church by portraying the godly natural philosopher as a priest
mediating the contents of a second revelation to the world, he was reiterat-
ing what the church fathers had suggested more than a millennium before.
But Bacon's imitation was also a vital adaptation occurring within a fast-
changing social environment, and it is for this reason that this study begins
with him. Bacon's “two topics” trope reconstructed the natural theology
tradition to fit the views of the Protestant world that was rising to power
during the reign of James I and which would gain even greater ascendancy
soon after his death.
