A History of Evolution
Carroll Lane Fenton's "A History of Evolution" traces the idea of biological transformation from its first stirrings in ancient Greece through the triumphs of Darwinian science in the early twentieth century, framing the story as one of recurring conflict between free inquiry and dogmatic authority. Fenton opens with the Ionian philosophers—Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Xenophanes—who first sought natural rather than mythical explanations for life's origins, then moves to Empedocles, whose fanciful account of randomly assembled body parts anticipates natural selection, and to Aristotle, whose systematic observations and hierarchical "chain of being" made him antiquity's most consequential naturalist despite his rejection of chance variation in favor of teleological purpose. The Epicurean and Lucretian tradition offered a rival mechanistic worldview, but Fenton shows Rome producing no naturalists of Greek caliber, leaving the field to decline as classical learning passed under the control of the Christian church. The book then examines how church authorities shaped the evolution idea for over a millennium. Augustine and later Aquinas surprisingly favored naturalistic, non-literal readings of Genesis, treating "days" of creation as vast ages and crediting matter with inherent developmental powers—an early quasi-evolutionary theology that later dogmatists abandoned. Fenton details the intervening flourishing of Arabic science (Avicenna, Avempace, Abubacer), its suppression by the Church Provincial Council of Paris in 1209, and the intellectual stagnation of the medieval period, when obedience to authority displaced independent observation. He credits Giordano Bruno with reviving Aristotelian and Arabic ideas and challenging biblical chronology, and surveys the rise of universities, Harvey's discovery of circulation, and the growth of experimental method. A central section addresses the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophers—Bacon, Leibniz, and Kant—who, despite not being naturalists themselves, established two pillars of modern evolutionary thought: that evolution consists of accumulated individual variation, and that natural causation, not divine interference, governs living systems. Fenton juxtaposes this serious current against a comic strain of "speculative writers" like Claude Duret, who peddled fantastical creatures such as tree-borne fish-birds to a credulous public that paradoxically rejected species change while believing in centaurs. The narrative then turns to the great naturalists: Linnaeus, who devised binomial nomenclature but remained committed to fixity of species with minor concessions; Buffon, whose views vacillated dramatically between special creationism and radical evolutionism under pressure from church and scientific orthodoxy, though he anticipated the struggle for existence and environmental modification of species; Erasmus Darwin, who proposed common descent from a single ancestral "filament," vast time-spans for evolution, and organismal self-modification; and Lamarck, portrayed sympathetically as an impoverished, blind visionary whose theory of inherited use-and-disuse and branching "evolutionary tree" was suppressed by the powerful anti-evolutionist Cuvier, though defended publicly by Geoffroy St.-Hilaire. Fenton also treats Goethe's doctrine of "unity of type" and Treviranus's mechanistic biology, noting that both added comparatively little new substance to the evolutionary theory despite their broader scientific contributions. The book's central figure is Charles Darwin, whom Fenton deliberately de-mythologizes: not a singular genius but a patient, fact-devoted researcher who synthesized two millennia of prior speculation into a rigorously evidenced theory. Fenton recounts Darwin's voyage on the Beagle, his slow accumulation of evidence, his 1859 publication of "On the Origin of Species," and the fierce international controversy that followed, including French publishers' refusal to print it and Thomas Henry Huxley's role as the theory's public champion ("Bulldog of Evolution") among London's working classes. He lays out the theory's three pillars—constant variation, the Malthusian struggle for existence (illustrated vividly through oyster reproduction statistics), and natural selection—while also tracking how Darwin's own confidence in natural selection's sufficiency eroded over subsequent decades, leading him to increasingly accommodate Lamarckian use-and-disuse and environmental causation. The final chapters bring the story into Fenton's contemporary moment. He surveys the post-Darwinian elaborators (Wallace, Weismann, Haeckel, Spencer, Cope, Huxley) and critiques the era's overreach in sexual-selection and protective-coloration explanations. He then presents Hugo de Vries's mutation theory—discovered through buttercup-breeding experiments—as a necessary complement to natural selection, arguing that discontinuous "sport" variations arising from internal reproductive-cell changes, rather than gradual continuous variation alone, account for new species; Fenton illustrates this with his own paleontological research on fossil sea urchins and lamp-shells. He closes by describing the rise of genetics as the modern experimental extension of evolutionary study and affirms, against lingering religious and popular skepticism, that evolution's factual reality is settled among scientists, with only its precise mechanisms remaining under active investigation—paleontologists, anatomists, embryologists, and geneticists all converging on the same unresolved question of how, not whether, life has transformed itself across geological time.
By Carroll Lane Fenton · First published 1922 · Genre: History of Science, Natural History, Scientific Non-fiction · 6 chapters
Contents
- Evolution Among the Greeks
- From the Christian Fathers to Kant
- Evolution and the Speculators
- Evolution and the Great Naturalists
- Darwin and the Triumph of Evolution
- The Post-Darwinians: Devries and the Mutation Theory