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How Texts are Read:
Looking at the Introductions to the Origin of Species

Michael Ruse

What is the Valentine Collection?

The Valentine Collection is not something that exists “out there,” independently – the Collection that exists when there’s no one around in the library – unchanging for all eternity, just like Pythagoras’s theorem or the thinking of Mitt Romney. In the obvious sense, things will be added and orders changed and descriptions changed. In the less obvious but more interesting sense, the Collection will change according to the way that we – scholars – approach it. As evolutionists, why should we be surprised!

For a start, we will come with more and more knowledge about the material and topics covered both by the collection and by the other collections at the American Philosophical Society, and this will direct and redirect our use of the works. Take for instance a very important topic, namely the significance of natural selection as a mechanism in the decades after the Origin was published. This is something that has been much discussed in recent years, so we now are not starting with a blank sheet, as we might have been when I started into Darwin Studies some forty-plus years ago.

A student today using the collection will now be looking at some of the books that have not been central to the discussion thus far, trying to see for instance if there are pockets of inquiry that did use selection despite the general disdain. This will involve the Collection itself – the editions, the books that do and do not make selection central, the different places that Darwin’s works are published (and if, for example, some works come in and out of fashion), the introductions (as I shall be showing later in this piece) – as well as other materials at the APS, complementing the Collection. Note that no scholar will see the complementary materials as in any way threatening or downgrading the Collection. The very contrary is true. It is by embedding the Valentine Collection in the whole that its real value can shine.

For a second, technology has made and will continue to make a difference. When I first became interested in Darwin, if you wanted to do detailed study of the printed thinking of Darwin, you simply had to go to a library with major holdings. Now of course, thanks to my fellow contributor John van Whye, the whole of the printed Darwin material is a keypad touch away and there is no need to travel beyond one’s office. Combine this with the fact that today, if you want a rare book (not to be confused with expensive book), instead of hoping desperately that interlibrary loans will come up with something, you simply go to ABE Book Exchange, and the volume is in your mailbox within a week for a very few dollars. This means that you don’t need the Collection for these and related ends. This is a challenge to think of ways in which one can use the Collection, not an argument for redundancy.

Third, culture changes and the questions and problems change with it. Shortly after I started working on Darwin, in the 1970s, it became clear to me and others that the Creationism challenge was rising and was very threatening to science education. Along with evolution, the biblical literalists wanted Genesis taught in classrooms. I am glad to say that this challenge was beaten back, not once but several times. I was proud to serve as an expert witness on the history and philosophy of science in Arkansas in 1981. The ACLU wanted my expertise in fighting a “balanced treatment” law – if you teach the one, you must balance it by teaching the other – and in the end we were successful in overturning the law.

But things have changed. The Creationists, and their more user-friendly offspring, the Intelligent Design Theorists, have now started arguing that evolution leads to gross immorality, specifically that there is a straight line from the writings and thinking of Charles Darwin to the writings and thinking of Adolf Hitler. A scholar today who is fighting this biblical literalism movement will therefore be using the Collection to see if this line can indeed be found, or if it is (as people like Robert J. Richards maintain) completely fictitious. Forty years ago, no one would have dreamed of this use or its necessity. Again we are going to be using the Collection itself – the various translations for instance and their prefaces – as well as the other rich holdings of the APS.

The point I am making is that the Collection therefore does not just exist, sitting splendidly on the shelves of the American Philosophical Society. It is defined by the use that we want to make of it. (As one sympathetic in respects to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, this intermingling of the objective and the subjective comes as no surprise to me. The surprise would be were it otherwise.) This being so, I want to turn to a use that the Collection has for me. The Collection lets me ask questions and find answers that would be difficult if not impossible without a Collection of this kind.

Teaching the history of science

Thanks to my engagement with the Creationists, I have a long-standing interest in science education, at all levels but particularly at the high-school level and the undergrad, college level. In other words, I have an interest in science education just at the time when, for the student, science is becoming science, and not just nature study, and before the student has made commitments to science as a profession and begun serious specialization.

There are of course lots of questions and suggestions about how best to approach this very important area of learning, and I don’t pretend to know or be able to talk about all of them. But one thing that does come up – and here of course I can and should get engaged – relates to the role of history and philosophy of science in such teaching and learning. Scientists often pride themselves on never reading anything more than ten years old – Watson and Crick? Never heard of ‘em! – but obviously in the teaching of science, that is neither possible nor desirable. How can you teach physics without some mention of Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo and Newton? How can you teach chemistry without Lavoisier? How can you teach biology without Darwin and Mendel – and Watson and Crick!

But then the question comes up about how one should teach such history – whether in actual science courses or in humanities courses that are intended to complement science courses. There are debates, believe me very bitter and oft-recurring debates, about the content of such courses. Should one teach completely or primarily from secondary sources? Or should one teach – in part, mainly, completely – from original sources? There are purists who feel, very strongly, that one should use the original texts pretty much all of the time. Students should be exposed to the real thing. In philosophy, you would never give a course in ancient philosophy without making students read some of Plato’s dialogues – the Euthyphro for instance, perhaps even the Republic – why then should you do science and its history without reading Galileo’s Dialogues, and perhaps the Darwin-Wallace papers, and Mendel’s paper, and the 1953 Watson and Crick paper. (Perhaps if you are lucky, some Freud too. Say what you like about the ideas, he is a terrific read.)

Now, I must confess, that as I get older, I am drawn more and more to the original sources. But I have a feeling – even I have been sensitized by the critical theory that overwhelmed English departments – that reading an original is not quite such an easy and straightforward thing as is often supposed. “Just the facts, ma’am, just the facts.” The trouble is: What are just the facts? I have long had a suspicion that when it comes to the texts, a lot of the time we are reading out just what we have just read in! The primarily and secondary source distinction is nothing like as black and white as many people readily assume that it is. A primary source can be thoroughly secondary!

Julian Huxley on the “Origin”

How to test this hunch? Enter the Valentine Collection! I had the thought – I won’t dignify it by calling it a hypothesis – that if one looked at different editions of the Origin (not just Darwin’s but the many, many reprintings of the work) and in particular looked at the introductions that are often (today pretty much inevitably) added to the reprints, one might learn an awful lot about how people approach and interpret the Origin. In other words, one might get a handle on how the Origin is being read, and (more importantly) being presented to students. Do the intros tell us something and is that something the way that a student might be expected to read the Origin? And would that something differ from teacher to teacher and from age to age? And why?

So I tried a little test. I looked for a biologist or more generally a Darwinian who I knew (independently) had strong views about evolution, and I wondered if they had written an introduction to the Origin. I needed someone who was probably going to be comfortable with writing in the popular sphere and I didn’t want anyone too recent because I wanted to be certain about knowing what they really thought. Julian Huxley was the obvious choice. The grandson of Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, in the first part of the twentieth century Julian Huxley was in his own right an important figure in evolutionary circles – much involved in the ways in which Mendelian genetics was being blended into evolutionary thought, and very much capable of writing for the more general public.

Expectedly, he had in fact written an introduction to the Origin – New American Library, Mentor Books, 1958 [VAL 575.8 D25o.na 1958] -- and very revealing it was too. For a start, he chose to reprint the sixth edition rather than the first edition. By the time he brought out his edition, the history of science was fairly well established as a discipline and scholars were being trained to look at original versions first and not to assume that later version were necessarily better. The Origin itself was more and more being reprinted in the first edition. Huxley, as a scientist, automatically assumed that the sixth edition had to be better in some sense. You don’t have to be a Popperian to think that that is the way that science works. Always getting better. Obviously then you must reprint the sixth rather than the first edition. (In 1964, Harvard University Press published a facsimile of the first edition, with an incredibly self-promoting introduction by the well-known biologist and Harvard faculty member, Ernst Mayr. No doubt his colleagues, in Harvard’s path-breaking history of science department, had taught him something about editions.) [VAL 575.8 D25o.hf 1964]

For a second, Julian Huxley’s introduction is tremendously British oriented. Any historian of evolutionary biology will tell you that, by about 1930, the Americans had entered the scene in a major way. (There were others too – Germans and Russians and more, but let us leave these.) There was Ronald Fisher and J. B. S. Haldane in Britain, but very much there was Sewall Wright and then Theodosius Dobzhansky in America. And there were significant differences of interpretation, with the Brits being über-selectionists and the Americans liking genetic drift. One is reminded of the old joke about two cultures divided by a common language. You would never guess this from Huxley’s introduction, for all that the work had been published in America!

And for a third, and this is really important, Huxley brought Darwin to bear in support of his own progressivist, humanist vision of the world. Famously, some would say notoriously, Huxley saw the evolutionary process going from monad to man (as they used to say), and he used this as the backbone of what he called his “religion without revelation.” It was his secular world picture, making humans the pinnacle of creation, and justifying moral action. Humans are good and hence we ought to cherish them and if possible improve them. (Huxley was a eugenicist, but he was not much into biological improvement. Rather he thought culture could do the trick. He was much impressed by the big government works of the the 1930s, aimed in a Keynesian way to get us out of the Depression. He wrote a book on the Tennessee Valley Authority.)

Now I am not saying that there is no progress in Darwin. I think there is and there is more in the later editions than the earlier editions. But it is not the dominant theme of the book, and Darwin would have been horrified if it had been suggested that the intent of the Origin was to promote a form of secular humanism. (I am not sure that T H Huxley would have felt quite so badly.) But that is what Julian Huxley’s edition is all about – like it or lump it. The reader is given a very distinct – some would say idiosyncratic – reading of the Origin. Of course, you don’t have to go along with everything that Julian Huxley suggests. But my sense is that both student and teacher might be inclined to go that way. It is a bit like original sin. Adam’s sin is not our sin, and our sin is not Adam’s. But because of Adam’s sin, all humans after him are tainted – we are inclined to sin. I am not sure that believing in progress is a taint, but you know what I mean.

The Everyman editions

After this dipping of my toe into the waters, as it were, I decided to see if I could get a more systematic answer to some questions – specifically, about how, in the last century, biologists regarded evolution in general and natural selection in particular. Everyman’s Library – the series of cheap classics first published in 1906 by Joseph Dent in London – gave me my handle. Right through the twentieth century, the series was in every middle-class home, the source of prizes on leaving school (I still have my copy of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers), and the mark and font of learning for the aspiring scholar or intellectual. Naturally, the Origin of Species had made its way into Everyman, and to my delight I found that it had been updated on a regular basis, with no less than four introductions.

Arthur Keith, 1928

The introductions, all written by Fellows of the Royal Society and with status in their various fields of biology, make fascinating reading. The first, in 1928, of the sixth edition, has an introduction by the eminent anatomist and student of human prehistory, Sir Arthur Keith. [VAL 575.8 D25o.6 1928] He was not just a leader in what today we would call “paleoanthropology” but an avid Darwinian, who spent his retirement living in Darwin’s house at Downe (thanks to its having being donated to the Royal College of Surgeons). The author naturally enough is bubbling over with enthusiasm for the Origin, putting Darwin up in the pantheon of great Englishmen with Shakespeare. The chief virtue of the work is that it convinces us of evolution, but Sir Arthur is strong on the virtues of natural selection. What we do not really get, however, is much direct evidence of how selection might be functioning in nature. Remember he is writing just before the great population geneticists – Fisher, Haldane, Wright – were about to show the ways in which Darwinian selection and Mendelian genes can be brought together in one integration or “synthesis” (as they liked to call it). Everything is very much at the informal, go-and-look-in-your-own-backyard-and-see-if-I’m-not-telling-the-truth sort of level.

William R. Thompson, 1958

The next introduction appeared in 1958, and was written by the Canadian entomologist William R. Thompson. [VAL 575.8 D25o.e 1958] (Although Canadian, Thompson spent time as a young man in America, Italy, and France, and then worked for many years in England.) As Thompson himself admitted, he was a rather strange choice. One wonders what on earth the editors of Everyman had in mind when they chose him. He was unremittingly hostile throughout both to Darwin and to the ideas expressed in the Origin! Although this is nothing to the scorn heaped on Thomas Henry Huxley – scorn, one suspects, that would have been welcomed by its object, who would have repaid double-fold.

There is virtually nothing to be said in the Origin’s favor.

I do not contest the fact that the advent of the evolutionary idea, due mainly to the Origin, greatly stimulated biological research. But it appears to me that owing precisely to the nature of this stimulus, a great deal of this research was directed into unprofitable channels or pursuit of will-o’-the-wisps.

It is hard, candidly, to tell if Thompson is even an evolutionist, and natural selection gets billing as one of the worst ideas of all time. There is certainly no surprise that the British “Evolution Protest Movement” reprinted the introduction in 1967, as New Challenging Introduction to the Origin of Species. The suspicion, based mainly on other writings, is that Thompson probably was an evolutionist, but very much one of the God-guiding type. It is clear from the introduction that Thompson was particularly worried at the essential randomness of the Darwinian evolutionary process – variations are random and selection is opportunistic. Everything is contingent.

We know full well why Thompson wrote as he did. He was deeply religious, and – more than that – an ardent Aristotelian/Thomist. He had even gone so far as to take a doctoral degree in Catholic philosophy. He believed in Aristotelian types and could not see how one moves naturally from one form to another. His thinking, like another Aristotelian D’Arcy W. Thompson (no relative), was focused essentially on form and not on function, and it was not just that Darwinism was irrelevant to him, but that (as quoted above), with the emphasis on adaptation, was simply obfuscating. It took one from the important issues.

Above all, as Thompson made clear in his introduction, the Origin put science against religion. It put science against a deeply conservative reading of religion. (There is no surprise therefore, that an even-greater hate object than Darwin was the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose work in the 1950s was attempting to reconcile evolution with Catholicism, a project that brought scorn both from conventional scientists as well as from the authorities of his own Church.)

Does this then mean that Thompson was an odd-ball and not really representative of his time? Well, yes and no. Yes, because he was publishing just the year before the hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Origin, which led to a great out pouring of support not just for evolution but also for Darwinism. Finally, the evolutionists felt that they had a working paradigm. In this respect, Thompson was Canute against the tide. No, because as we know only too well, the Creationist movement was about to spring forth. 1961 was the year of the publication of the founding text of the movement, Genesis Flood, by bible scholar John T. Whitcomb and hydraulic engineer Henry H. Morris. It is true that these people were Protestant evangelicals and Thompson was coming from Thomism, but as America today shows only too well (for instance over issues like abortion), Protestant extremists feel far more brotherhood with Catholic extremists than with fellow Christians in the middle. So in a sense, Thompson was a harbinger of what was to come.

L. Harrison Matthews, 1972

The third introduction was by British zoologist L. Harrison Matthews. Appearing in 1972, it too was with a reprint of the sixth edition. [VAL 575.8 D25o.m3 1972] It is certainly better than the Thompson introduction – one suspects that the relatively short period between the two introductions was a function of much criticism of the Thompson introduction – but taken overall it is hardly a major endorsement of Darwin and his work. It is not so much that Matthews is against Darwin, but that he is against giving Darwin any credit! There is a long quotation from Patrick Matthew who wrote a book on naval timber in 1831 and had a very clear anticipation of natural selection. Basically everything that Darwin had to say was to be found there or elsewhere. Why then did Darwin have such success and why is his book still popular today? Thank Thomas Henry Huxley for that. He pushed Darwin’s ideas as part of his own agenda – a kind of materialist, agnostic view of society. In a way, this was all a bit of a pity because Darwin’s inadequate thinking on heredity if anything blocked significant advance on these issues. Better had everyone stayed silent.

Again one asks why. Why would a serious biologist be so contemptuous of Darwin and his work? Looking at Matthews’s biography – very much a naturalist and lover of animals, someone who worked at and for the London Zoo for many years – one senses a kind of robust contempt for the academic biologist. Remember, by about 1970, evolution was now a full academic subject with trained researchers, experimentalists and field workers. Matthew makes somewhat condescending reference to some of the most valued work, specifically the studies of industrial melanism, but only to point out that although this certainly involves change it is not significant change, that is change involving new species.

In other words, one rather hears the voice of someone who has been passed by. And who therefore responds: “What’s all the fuss?” Those of us who take biology seriously have known these things all along. Matthew therefore is a sign of the time. A marker that the old ways are going or already gone. I have a personal anecdote to add to this. In 1981, just before I was to appear in the Arkansas trial, I was traveling in England. The ACLU knew that the Creationists had got hold of Thompson’s introduction which was, to use a phrase, manna in the wilderness. They had also found Matthews’s review and were pleased with it too. They wondered if it would be possible to do some damage control. Could I phone Matthews (who was now in retirement) and challenge him on his introduction?

I did so and had the most peculiar conversation, where it was clear that Matthews had no idea that anyone might take his introduction in a negative manner! He was certainly not denying evolution in general or Darwinism in particular. He thought highly of both of them. Had he mentioned predecessors? Well, he supposed he had, but surely everyone knew about these! Perhaps Matthews was being disingenuous or backtracking, but my honest conviction was that I was dealing with someone who had taken the opportunity to settle a few old scores – I think the name of Julian Huxley passed along the wires – and no one was to think it meant anything much about Darwin! (Julian Huxley would fit the scenario. Not only was he an ardent Darwinian but he had worked at the Zoo a decade or more before Matthews and had left under somewhat of a cloud – more precisely, he got the sack ostensibly for neglecting his duties and more truly for trying to impose modern biology on the organization – and so an opportunity to put in the boot would have not gone unused.)

Richard Dawkins, 2003

Fourth and finally, we have the last of the introductions. This is a 2003 production, of the first edition of the Origin, also including the Voyage of the Beagle, written by Richard Dawkins. [VAL 575.8 D25o.d32 2003] Expectedly we are in a new world. We are looking at one of the greatest of theories by one of the greatest of thinkers. Without Darwin and the Origin, our knowledge would be deeply impoverished. “We can now see that, to a remarkable extent, Darwin got it right.” Moreover, the credit is to Darwin (with some thrown in for Alfred Russel Wallace). It is doubtful that people like Patrick Matthew even knew what the whole thing was about, at least not until Darwin published. Nor should we think that Darwin was cowardly in not publishing until Wallace spurred him. Perhaps he was just a perfectionist!

Why print the first edition and not one of the later ones? Because the first edition often gets things right and later editions are less satisfactory because Darwin is there answering criticisms that we now know are mistaken. A parallel example occurs in the two editions of Darwin’s book on humans, The Descent of Man. In the first edition Darwin sees clearly (what Fisher was later to grasp) that equal sex ratios follow from the workings of natural selection to the advantage of the individual and not the group. At the group level it might make more sense to have say 90% female to only 10% male, but at the individual level if males are rare then it is in the mother’s interests to produce males over females. Unfortunately in the second edition, Darwin lost the courage of his convictions and left the problem as unsolved. Better to go with the first statement of the ideas!

Of course Darwin did not get everything right – there is the problem of inheritance, something about which incidentally Darwin had some remarkably close insights – but the point is that he left a foundation on which others could build. His work is not so much lost as incorporated. And with respect to other things, like the age of the earth (something that the physicists ignorant of the heating effects of radioactive decay made way too short) Darwin has been “triumphantly vindicated.”

To conclude. Many think that Darwin was but one leg of the nineteenth- century’s big three: Marx, Freud, Darwin. Don’t you believe it! Darwinism holds throughout the universe, whereas the others are at most time-bound thinkers of our planet, interesting only to the anthropologists of any alien species that come visiting. Our Darwin, their Darwin, everybody’s Darwin, is to be revered in “immortal memory.”

A job started not finished

And that note is surely a good point on which to end this little discussion. Today, the scientific community nigh worships the memory of Charles Robert Darwin, and his theory of the Origin marches triumphantly forward. Richard Dawkins’s introduction is a glass into how the world feels now, as were the earlier introductions glasses into how the world felt then. And thanks to the Valentine Collection we can take my short inquiries as the beginning of our quest. In my case, to look at the many, many more introductions, fleshing out how the Origin has been received and viewed through its 150 year lifetime. In the case of others, well, let us leave it to them! The task is unending only in the sense that, in scholarship, as in the world of organisms, evolution and change and advance are the order of the day, rather than stasis and complacency and the lack of imagination. Let us be glad for what we have but let us not rest. Let us continue to make full use of James Valentine’s magnificent gift.