Evolution

Evolution by Grant Allen (1896)

Grant Allen's essay opens by mocking the popular, superficial notion of "evolution" as a fashionable catchword that most people believe was invented by Mr. Darwin and reduced to a system by Mr. Herbert Spencer, and that holds humanity descended from tailed men who were an improved edition of the gorilla. Allen dismisses this as a parody of the real doctrine: Darwin did not invent evolution any more than George Stephenson invented the steam-engine; there is no missing link in the popular sense, and humans have at most a remote fiftieth cousinship with the West African gorilla. He explains that the drawing-room public conflates evolution with Darwin's "Origin of Species," which actually addressed only the origin of species among plants and animals, taking for granted the origin of suns, planets, the earth, and life itself. Long before Darwin, evolution was already established science: Kant and Laplace had worked out the development of suns and earths from star-clouds; Lyell had worked out the evolution of the earth's surface; Lamarck had worked out the descent of plants and animals from a common ancestor; Herbert Spencer had worked out the growth of mind from its simplest beginnings. Allen traces evolutionary thought back to Lucretius, "the only original poet in the Latin language," whose Epicurean vision of atoms fortuitously concurring into an ordered universe was a bold but purely speculative fancy, not grounded in observed fact. Real evolutionary science, Allen argues, began in the eighteenth century with Kant, Laplace, Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin, whom he calls the true founders, with Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer as the "Joshuas" who led the movement into fuller acceptance. He then expounds the nebular theory of Kant and Laplace: the universe began as a vast, tenuous nebula, a "haze of fluid light," which condensed under gravitation into suns and stars, generating light and heat through atomic impact. He describes how the matter now composing the sun and planets once extended to the orbit of Neptune, slowly contracting over perhaps a hundred million years or more, leaving behind concentric rings that hardened into Jupiter, Saturn, the Earth, and Venus, with subsidiary rings forming satellites such as Saturn's moons or Earth's moon. He notes this "crude nebular hypothesis" has since been challenged by observations of comets and the sun's surface but still serves as a useful popular vehicle for the core idea: that celestial bodies arose through gradual natural law rather than sudden manufacture. Turning to geology, Allen credits Lyell's school with applying the same gradualist principle to the earth's crust: a red-hot planetary mass cooling into a solid shell, aqueous vapor condensing into oceans that settled into basins resembling the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian seas, crustal wrinkling producing early mountains and continents, and the ongoing sculpting action of rain, weathering, waves, rivers, ice, and sediment building the landscape we now observe — all through causes still operating today rather than sudden cataclysms. He then moves to organic evolution, crediting Buffon as the first to hint, cautiously, given the dangers of offending the Sorbonne under Louis Quinze, that animals might vary indefinitely into new forms, though he phrased it as mere speculation to avoid persecution. Erasmus Darwin, "the grandfather of his grandson," is credited with openly developing Buffon's hint in Lichfield, proposing that life began in minute marine forms and that man's breeding of pigeons and rabbits into varied shapes showed how nature, given longer time, could produce all vertebrate variety from one ancestor — an idea mocked by his contemporaries even as they admired his poems "The Temple of Nature" and "The Botanic Garden," including the lines on "poor Eliza." Lamarck, writing at the start of the nineteenth century, is described as a thoroughgoing evolutionist who held that species and varieties differ only in degree and that organisms result from law rather than miracle, but who attributed change to direct action of circumstances, intercrossing, and the animals' own efforts — as with the giraffe's neck stretched by reaching, the monkey's thumb shaped by grasping, and the serpent's shape from wriggling — rather than to natural selection, which Allen identifies as Charles Darwin's distinctive contribution. Allen quotes Herbert Spencer's earlier "development hypothesis" essay, written seven years before the "Origin of Species," to show that Spencer had already articulated the core Darwinian ideas of adaptive modification under new conditions. He lists numerous "Darwinians before Darwin," including Buffon, Lamarck, Goethe, Oken, Bates, Wallace, Lecoq, Von Baer, Robert Chambers, Matthew, and Herbert Spencer, arguing no single man discovers anything alone, comparing Darwin's role to Luther's in the Reformation or Robespierre's in the French Revolution. He credits Darwin specifically with natural selection — the notion that favorable variations persist and unfavorable ones perish in the struggle for life — as what converted the scientific world fully to evolutionism. The essay then extends evolution to psychology, attributing to Herbert Spencer and his followers the account of mind building up from simple sense and feeling into the complex nervous systems and brains of a Newton, a Shakespeare, or a Mendelssohn, with sense-organs like the eye and ear developing by gradual steps from primitive light- and sound-sensitive spots, as in the jelly-fish, up to civilized human faculties. Finally, Allen surveys evolution in sociology, crediting Tylor and Lubbock among others with tracing savage man's gradual acquisition of fire, stone tools, pottery, gesture and oral language, domesticated animals, agriculture, metallurgy, family structures, dwellings, clothing, political organization, writing systems, and technology — from dug-out canoes to the "Great Eastern," from boomerangs to the "Woolwich infant," culminating in modern engines, telephones, and cables. He closes by naming the many contributors across astronomy (Kant, Laplace, the Herschels), geology (Hutton, Lyell, the Geikies), biology (Buffon, Lamarck, the Darwins, Huxley, Spencer), psychology (Spencer, Romanes, Sully, Ribot), and sociology (Spencer, Tylor, Lubbock, De Mortillet), while asserting that the unifying word "evolution" and its systematic philosophical framework belong to one man alone: Herbert Spencer, author of the "System of Synthetic Philosophy," whom Allen calls the true architect of the entire evolutionary edifice, though few among the public who use the word realize this.

By Grant Allen · First published 1896 · Genre: Science, Philosophy, History · 6,889 words

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Everybody nowadays talks about evolution. Like electricity, the cholera germ, woman's rights, the great mining boom, and the Eastern Question, it is 'in the air. ' It pervades society everywhere with its subtle essence; it infects small-talk with its familiar catchwords and its slang phrases; it even permeates that last stronghold of rampant Philistinism, the third leader in the penny papers. Everybody believes he knows all about it, and discusses it as glibly in his everyday conversation as he discusses the points of racehorses he has never seen, the charms of peeresses he has never spoken to, and the demerits of authors he has never read. Everybody is aware, in a dim and nebulous semi-conscious fashion, that it was all invented by the late Mr. Darwin, and reduced to a system by Mr. Herbert Spencer -- don't you know? -- and a lot more of those scientific fellows.

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science · evolution · natural selection · biology · Darwinism · philosophy · humanity · species · adaptation · environment · genetics · theory

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