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Darwinism and the Argument from Design: Suggestions for a Reevaluation

PETER J. BOWLER

University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba

Considering the amount which has been writ ten on the clash between Darwinism and religion, one could be forgiven for assuming that the basic outlines of the debate are well understood. Works such as Charles C. Gillispie's Genesis and Geology 1 have highlighted the theological preoccu- pations o f the pre-Darwinian British naturalists, and a host of books and articles have recounted how the theory of natural selection undermined the earlier commitment to the belief that nature was designed by God. As a result, every history of science undergraduate knows that William Paley's Natural Theology of 1802 established the claim that the adaptat ion of each species to its environment indicated that it was designed by a benev. olent Creator, an approach developed ad nauseam in the Bridgewater Trea-

tises of the 1830's. Darwin read Paley while he was at Cambridge and was impressed with the universal significance of adaptat ion, but his theory of natural selection provided a completely mechanistic alternative to design as an explanation of the phenomenon. After the Origin o f Species appear-

ed, naturalists such as the American botanist Asa Gray rushed to the defense of design and tried, unsuccessfully in the end, to adapt the basic idea of evolution to their belief in a benevolent Creator. This pat tern has been described over and over again in most accounts of the Darwinian debate, from John C. Greene's The Death o f Adam through to more modern accounts, such as those of Robert Young and David L. Hull. 2

1. Charles C. GiUispie, Genesis and Geology: A Study in the Relations of Scientific Thought, Natural Theology, and Social Opinion in Great Britain, 1790-1850 (rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1959). See also Waiter F. Cannon, "The Problem of Miracles in the 1830s," Viet. Stud., 4 (1960), 5-32.

2. John C. Greene, The Death of Adam: Evolution and lts Impact on Western Thought (Ames, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1959), chap. 9. Robert M. Young, "Darwin's Metaphor: Does Nature Select? " The Monist, 55 (1971), 442-503. David L. Hull, Darwin and His Critics: The Reception of Darwin's Theory of Evolution by the Scientific Community (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 55-66. Asa Gray's original arguments are collected together in his Darwiniana: Essays and Reviews pertaining to Darwinism (New York, 1876: rpt. ed. A. Hunter Dupree, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963).

Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring 1977). pp. 29-43. Copyright © 1977 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland.

PETER J. BOWLER

Only Loren Eiseley's Darwin's Century made any mention of an alternative transcendental or idealist concept of design, based on the overall pat tern of creation rather than the adaptat ion of individual species to their environment. 3 Eiseley does not explore this point in detail, yet his hint that the spirit o f nineteenth-century transcendental biology (usually associated with the German Naturphilosophen and Geoffroy Saint Hilaire) could be adapted to the argument from design points the way toward a serious inadequacy in the traditional picture outlined above. Discussions centered solely on the argument from designed adaptat ion are quite accurate as far as they go, but they miss a whole area o f nineteenth-century thought about the relationship between God and nature. The potential significance of this alternative is evident in Mary P. Winsor's recent study of inverte- brate taxonomy, and I have tried to use it in my own account of the origins of progressionism. 4 Several of the papers read to the 1975 History of Science Society convention in Atlanta also showed an increased aware- ness of this point, s Now at last we are beginning to realize that Darwinism destroyed much more than Paley's concept of designed adaptation. After a considerable struggle, it also supplanted the whole idealist movement in biology - a movement which had come to play a significant role in British natural theology. If we are to understand the kind of world into which Darwinism emerged and the atti tudes of those who resented its uncompro- mising naturalism, we must take into account the total i ty o f the system by which God and nature were supposed to be connected via the argument from design.

Several reasons can be given to explain why the inadequacy of the old approach has only slowly been recognized. The various steps seemed to fit together so neatly that it would be difficult at first to believe that the resulting picture was seriously inadequate. It must also be admitted that as far as the origins of Darwinism itself are concerned, the picture is quite complete: Darwin did read Paley and then go on to develop a natural explanation of adaptat ion without paying any attention to the idealist movement. Writers such as Robert Young, whose main concern is to link

3. Loren Eiseley, Darwin's Century: Evolution and the Men who Discovered It (New York: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 94-97. Gillispie makes a brief reference to Owen's idealist argument (Genesis and Geology, pp. 204-205) although the title of his chapter indicates that his main interest is the argument from designed adaptation: "How Useful Is Thy Dwelling Place."

4. Mary P. Winser, Starfish, Jellyfish, and the Order of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). Peter J. Bowler. Fossils and Progress: Paleontology and the Idea of Progressive Evolution in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Science History Publications, 1976).

5. I am thinking, for instance, of the papers by Dov Ospovat and Muriel Blaisdell.

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Darwinism and the Argument from Design

Darwinism with the utilitarian social philosophy, will naturally tend to ignore the idealist movement in biology. At the same time, the vision of evolution exclusively as an idea challenging design which characterizes even the more recent of Jolm Greene's writings leads inevitably to a lack of interest in the complexities of the design argument and a neglect of the concept of a designed organic progression. 6 One is also led to suspect that the convenience of Asa Gray as an example of a theistic evolutionist - especially for American historians - has tended to obscure the complexity of the design issue. We know from Alvar Elleg~rd's survey of the Dar- winian debate in the periodical press that the idea of designed evolution was very popular in the decade after 1860. 7 But this is so murky and confusing a topic that most historians have been glad to deal with only a single example of the movement. It is not until after one begins to read beyond Gray into the other supporters of designed evolution that one becomes aware of the fact that his exclusive concern with designed adaptation is not typical of the general approach to the issue. It was no accident that Gray tried to adapt natural selection itself to the argument from design: most other natural theologians rejected selection altogether and thus were not necessarily limited to a consideration of adaptation as the only possible sign of the Creator's power. We shall see below that several other writers did indeed go beyond the question of adaptation to suggest that the overall pattern of creation revealed artifical regularities that were equally indicative of design. Darwinism may have originated as an explicit reaction against the belief in designed adaptation, but its basic philosophy was equally damaging to the idealist version of design and prompted an appropriate reaction from many naturalists.

The purpose of this article is to outline the role of the idealist argument from design in both the pre- and post-Darwinian situations, but first we must clarify the difference between this and the approach of the Paley school. Paley's argument from design was essentially utilitarian: it stressed the usefulness of each character as it contributed to the adaptation of the species to its environment. Each example of adaptation in each species could be treated separately as an illustration of the Creator's benevolence. But as Thomas McPherson's analysis points out, the discovery of the pur-

6. John C. Greene, "The Kuhnian Paradigm and the Darwinian Revolution in Na- tural History," in Perspectives in the History o f Science and Technology ed. Duane H. D. Roller (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), pp. 3 - 2 5 ; "Reflections on the Progress of Darwin Studies," J. Hist. Biol., 8 (1975), 243-273 .

7. Alvar Elleg-~rd, Darwin and the General Reader." The Reception o f Darwin's Theory o f Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 1859-1872 (GiSteburg: Acta Universitatis Gothenburgensis, 195 8); see especially pp. 272 273.

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PETER J. BOWLER

pose behind each structure is not the only way of pursuing the search for evidence of design. 8 One can also see design in the order or unity of nature, for instance, in the supposedly harmonious relationships which some naturalists saw when they linked together the various species to form a taxonomic system. This approach depends on the unity and harmony of the whole of nature, not on the utility of its individual parts. A similar argument can be derived from the physical sciences, as in Kepler's convic- tion that the solar system was created according to a rational, mathemat- ical pattern. It is well known that the search for an underlying unity of type among living things inspired schools of transcendental biology in early nineteenth-century Germany and France. But less is known about the spread of this movement to the English-speaking world, and in particular, little has been done to bring out the fact that idealism could be adapted to our native tradition of natural theology. Without abandoning the belief that the diversity of adaptation among individual forms illus- trated the Creator's benevolence, one could still insist that the underlying unity of type served just as strongly as evidence of His rationality.

The most explicit support for an idealist version of design came from the pen of Richard Owen. In his On the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton of 1848, Owen developed a transcendental approach to comparative anatomy, and in the following year he applied this to natural theology in his On the Nature of Limbs. Although he was fully aware of the adaptation of the limbs to different purposes in the various species, what really interested Owen was the fact that in every case the limb was built on the same skeletal plan.

The satisfaction felt by the rightly constituted mind must ever be great in recognizing the fitness of parts for their appropriate functions; but when this fitness is gained, as in the great toe of the foot of man and the ostrich, by a structure which at the same time betokens harmonious concord with a common type, the precient operation of the One Cause of all organization becomes strikingly manifested to our limited intelli- gence. 9

Owen concluded that the "higher law or generalization from which these harmonies flow" was not the "principle of final adaptation," because in many cases the efficiency of adaptation actually seemed to be sacrificed to

8. Thomas McPherson, The Argument from Design (London: MacMillan, 1972). 9. Richard Owen, On the Nature o f Limbs: A Discourse Delivered on Friday,

February 9, at an Evening Meeting o f the Royal Institution o f Great Britain (London, 1849), p. 38.

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maintain the coherence of the overall plan. 1° There are only two re- maining possibilities, because if "we reject the idea that these correspon- dences are manifestations of some archetypical exemplar on which it has pleased the Creator to frame certain of his living creatures, there remains only the alternative that the organic atoms have concurred fortuitously to produce such harmony. ' ' l l The mind, said Owen, recoils in horror from this last "Epicurean slough of despond" - the pattern is too obvious, too artificial for it to be explained by chance, and the only satisfactory alternative is the theological interpretation of the archetype theory. In conclusion, Owen suggested that the progressive development of life through the history of the earth represented the gradual unfolding of the more advanced modifications of the archetype. 12 It thus became possible for the naturalist to understand the logic behind the whole plan of Creation.

Owen complained that German naturalists would understand his idealism far more easily than their British counterparts, 13 and certainly when we compare On the Nature of Limbs with the Bridgewater Treatises of the previous decade, the contrast is obvious. The great length of the Treatises derived from the fact that the utilitarian version of design which they expounded depended for its effect on the accumulation of as many examples of individual adaptation as possible. One of them - that of Sir Charles Bell - contains an explicit denial that there is any underlying unity in organic nature that could serve as alternative evidence of design. ~4 Yet others contradict this and show that the possibility of an alternative to the utilitarian argument was at least dimly recognized. Peter Mark Roger's "Treatise," for instance, mentions the unity of type in the context of design in a manner that almost seems to anticipate Owen. ~ s It could perhaps be said that in such instances the idealist argument was simply a second line of defense that the utilitarians could fall back on to explain structures, such as the male nipples, that were obviously present because of symmetry rather than utility.' 6 But it is clear that idealism played no such secondary role as far as Owen himself was concerned, and there are

10. Ibid., p. 39. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., p. 89. 13. Ibid., pp. 1-2. 14. Sir Charles Bell, The Hand: Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as Evincing

Design (London, 1837), pp. 164-184. 15. Peter Mark Roget, Animal and Vegetable Physiology, considered with Refe-

rence to Natural Theology 2 vols. (London, 1834) I, 480-481. 16. This point was raised by Michael Ruse in response to a shortened version of the

present paper read to the meeting of the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science in Quebec City, June 1976.

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PETER J. BOWLER

other cases of which the same can be said. Take, for instance, the circular or quinary system of classification proposed by William Sharp MacLeay, in

which species were supposed to fall naturally into circular arrangements of five to give a genus, the genera then forming orders and so on according to the same regular pat ternJ 7 This was an approach quite different from Owen's, yet it also depended on an artificiality of natural arrangements

that would be quite inexplicable in any utilitarian scheme. Similarly,

Edward Forbes's strange theory of "polarity" in the rate of production of new species was inspired by idealism, tracing out an abstract pattern that unfolded both forward and backward in t imeJ 8 Such ideas were not accepted as readily as Owen's archetype theory, but nor were they totally outside the mainstream of nineteenth-century biology. The young T. H.

Huxley, for instance, had considerable respect for both Forbes and MacLeay, as well as showing an interest in developing a more practical version of the archetype theory) 9 Huxley also translated a number of German biological works while the Ray Society translated a highly spec- ulative piece of Naturphilosophie by Lorenz Oken under the title Elements

o f Physico-Philosophy in 1847. 20 Thus, far from being isolated by his respect for German thought and idealism in general, Owen seems to have fitted into a much wider movement. More clearly than anyone else, how-

ever, he showed how the concept of an abstract plan of creation could be

17. MacLeay's system was first proposed in his Horae Entomologicae of 1819-1821. The most accessible contemporary discussion of it is that in Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation referred to below in n. 25.

18. Edward Forbes's, "On the Manifestation of Polarity in the Distribution of Or- ganic Beings in Time" Notices Proc. Roy. Inst., 1 (1851-1854), 428-433. See also Forbes's presidential address, Quart. J. Geol. Soc. Lond., 10 (1854), xxii-lxxi. For a brief description of his theory, see Walter F. Cannon, "The Uniformitarian- Catastrophist Debate," 1sis, 51 (1960), 51 -53.

19. Concerning Forbes and MacLeay, see Leonard Huxley, The Life and Letters of Thomas Huxley 3 vols. (London, 1908) I, 54-55, 132-138, and 169. On the archetype theory, see, for instance, Huxley, "On the Common Plan of Animal Forms," Notices Proc. Roy. lnst., 1 (1851-1854), 444-446. I am not, of course, trying to claim that Huxley himself was an idealist, but the fact that he respected known idealists and tried to make a realistic use of the archetype concept illustrates that such ideas were certainly taken seriously at the time.

20. Arthur Henfrey and Thomas Henry Huxley, Scientific Memoirs, Selected from the Transactions of Foreign Academies of Science and Foreign Journals. Natural History (London, 1853; rpt. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1966); see especially Huxley's translations from Karl Ernst yon Baer, pp. 186-238. Lorenz Oken, Ele- ments of Physico-Philosophy (London, 1847). Note also the translation of H. C. Oersted's The Soul in Nature (London, 1852), which, although devoted mainly to the physical sciences, mentions the idealist concept of organic species; see pp. 24-25.

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built into the system of natural theology as an alternative to the utilitarian view of design.

Evidence of a growing interest in the idealist concept of design can also

be seen very clearly in the attempts that were made to interpret the fossil record as the progressive unfolding of a rationally structured plan of cre-

ation. Again a continental influence is apparent: in the early 1840's En- glish translations appeared of papers by Louis Agassiz arguing that the

history of vertebrate life represents a coherent pattern of development leading toward the ultimate perfection of the human form. 21 After Agas-

siz moved to America, such views were expounded directly in English in books such as the Principles o f Zoology of 1846. The same idea was mentioned by Hugh Miller in his The OM Red Sandstone of 1841 and then

described more explicitly in his posthumously published Testimony o f the

Rocks 22 Miller was particularly interested in Agassiz's use of the recapitu-

lation theory - the belief that both embryological development and the overall progression of life follow the same basic plan. Although Miller was

also attracted by the native British tradition of the utilitarian argument from design, his references to the recapitulation theory make sense only

within the context of idealism. Of course, Agassiz and Miller both retained the traditional belief that new forms of life were miraculously created. Yet

the first popular exposition of a transmutation theory - Robert Chambers' anonymously published Vestiges o f the Natural History o f Creation of 1844 - was founded not on Darwinian principles but on a logical exten- sion of the idealists' belief in a pattern of creation. 23 Chambers argued

that the pattern unfolded not through a series of miracles but through a mysterious law of development programed into the universe at the beginning, the recapitulation theory again playing an important role.24 In the

21. Louis Agassiz, "On the Succession and Development of Organized Beings at the Surface of the Terrestrial Globe; Being a Discourse Delivered at the Inauguration of the Academy of Neuchatel," Edinburgh New Phil. J., 33 (1842), 388-399.

22. Hugh Miller, The Old Red Sandstone, or New Walks hz an old Field (Edinburgh, 1841), pp. 241-243. See also The Testimony of the Rocks, or Geology in Its Bearing on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed (Edinburgh, 1870 ed.), pp. 190-197, Here Miller quotes from both Agassiz and Owen.

23. On the differences between the theories of Chambers and Darwin, see M. J. S. Hodge, "The Universal Gestation of Nature: Chambers' Vestiges and Explanations," J. Hist. Biol., 5 (1972), 127-152. For a more detailed account of my own interpretation of the developments mentioned in this paragraph, see Fossils and Progress, chap. 3.

24. Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (London, 1844; rpt. with an intro, by Sir Gavin de Beer, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1969), pp. 206-213. Chambers quotes from Charles Babbage's The Ninth Bridgewater Trea- tise: A Fragment (London, 1837), which first proposed that a series of apparent

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PETER J. BOWLER

first edition at least, the artificial pattern of development was identified with MacLeay's circular system of classification. 2 s It is significant that the few writers who were prepared to accept Chambers' viewpoint were also those who were attracted to the idealist version of design. Owen certainly did not join in the chorus of opposition to Vestiges, and the conclusion of On the Nature o f Limbs openly suggested that the successively higher modifications of the vertebrate archetype had been developed through natural law. 26 In addition, Baden Powell's Essays on the Spirit o f the Inductive Philosophy argued that transmutation itself was not incompat- ible with natural theology. Powell joined Owen in criticizing the narrow application of the utilitarian argument from design and the simple-minded belief in miracles. Arguing that natural law was itself the best illustration of the Creator's power, he went on to insist that "symmetry and beauty are results o f mind of at least as high an order as mechanical efficiency," quoting with approval the concluding passages of On the Nature of. Limbs. 27

The evidence outlined all too briefly in the paragraphs above is at least enough to suggest that Owen was not alone in his desire to establish an idealist argument from design, and that by 1859 this new approach ranked as a significant addition to the utilitarian movement in Britain. Thus when the Origin o f Species appeared, it challenged a rather more complex system of natural theology than has normally been recognized by historians. Of course, the theory of natural selection was intended specifically to replace the idea of designed adaptation; all of the naturalists who defended design realized this and tried to circumvent it. At least one - Asa Gray -- concentrated exclusively on this issue. But Darwinism also challenged the idealist version of design, and in this case it provoked a rather more con- structive response. For Darwin, the unity of type was merely an inevitable consequence of the fact that related species are descended from a common ancestor, and his view of the evolutionary process inevitably rejected the

miracles could represent the unfolding of a divine plan through a kind of higher law which periodically interfered with the normal operations of nature.

25. Chambers, Vestiges, pp. 236-276. The description of MacLeay's system was eventually abandoned in later editions.

26. See Owen, On the Nature o f Limbs, p. 89. Owen had been asked to write a critique of Vestiges, but instead he sent the author a not uncomplimentary letter: see the Rev. Richard Owen, Life of Richard Owen 2 vols. (London, 1894) I, 249-251. On Owen's general attitude toward transmutation, see Roy M. MacLeod, "Evolution- ism and Richard Owen," Isis, 56 (1965), 259-280.

27. Baden Powell, Essays on the Spirit o f the Inductive Philosophy, the Unit), o f Worlds and the Philosophy of Creation (London, 1855), pp. 135 and 448-449 .

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claim that it was built around a coherent plan aimed at the production of a particular form such as man. Curiously, Darwin referred to On the Nature of Limbs to show that the unity of type could not be accounted for on purely utilitarian grounds, without mentioning that his theory made equal nonsense out of Owen's own explanation. 2 a In fact, Owen himself seems to have abandoned his original position by this time, recognizing on the basis of his paleontological studies that divergence and specialization not unity are the key factors in the history of life. 29 Although he objected violently to natural selection and built his later theory of "derivation" around the idea of designed evolution, he no longer tried to argue that the element of design could be demonstrated by the naturalist. 3 o

But other writers who favored the theistic approach to evolutionism were not so pessimistic. For the most part they realized that Owen's original version of the idealist argument was dead, but they did their best to search out new lines of evidence to back up their belief that nature was designed in more than the merely utilitarian sense so obviously threatened by Darwin. However much Gray might wish to believe that the Creator controlled the process of adaptation, this could no longer be proven once Darwin had shown the possibility of constructing an alternative explanation. But perhaps new versions of the idealist argument would reveal evidence of design that was not so easily undermined. It must be admitted that some of the new formulations were in fact of little more value than the original ones, although one line of evidence was suggested that ultima- tely created a great deal of difficulty for the Darwinians. But even where the logical value of the new arguments was slight, they must have had some psychological value to those who wished to defend the old world view, and thus they may have helped to sustain it for a short while. They are certainly cf interest to the historian, since they give him an insight into the complexity of the final stages of natural theology.

This desire to move beyond a merely utilitarian approach is evident in the Duke of Argyll's The Reign of Law of 1868. Not that Argyll wished to abandon adaptation as a sign of God's benevolence altogether: he rejected the Darwinian explanation of rudimentary organs and implied that

28. Charles Darwin, On the Origin o f Species by Means o f Natural Selection, or the Preservation o f Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London, 1859), p. 435.

29. See Richard Owen, Palaeontology, or a Systematic Study o f Extinct Animals and Their Geological Relations (Edinburgh, 1860), p. 406, where Owen mentions Darwin's theory and points out that his own studies have increasingly emphasized the importance of specialization.

30. Owen, On the Anatomy o f the Vertebrates 3 vols. (London, 1866-1868) Ill, 805-809.

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PETER J. BOWLER

they were structure being prepared for use in some future era that the

Creator could foresee. 3 ~ But he also proposed at least two alternatives to

utilitarian design. One of these was a simple revival of Owen's original argument based on the unity of the vertebrate type. 32 Although such an approach was no longer valid within a completely evolutionary framework, Argyll refused to accept that one class could evolve from another within the type. 33 Each must have had a separate - although somehow law-gov-

erned - origin, and the fundamental unity between such distinct groups could thus still serve as evidence that nature as a whole was designed

according to a rational pattern. Argyll also developed a second alternative to the utilitarian argument, although this was not really an idealist concept of design in the tradition of those discussed above, because it stressed the

beauty of individual species rather than the overall pattern which linked them. Natural selection was a purely utilitarian force, so that Darwin himself had admitted that his theory would be undermined if it could be shown that organs have been produced with no survival value. So much the

worse for Darwin, claimed Argyll, because it was manifestly impossible to account for the coloring of birds, for instance, on such grounds. 34 The

hummingbirds especially show a degree of beauty in their coloring that could have no relevance to their survival or even to the attraction between the sexes - it could only be the result of a process designed by the Creator

to produce variety of color for its own sake. Darwin, of course, found this argument totally incomprehensible. He could not understand Argyll's concept of absolute beauty and quite reasonably felt that his own theory of

sexual selection provided a plausible basis for explaining this phenomenon.3 s But Argyll's books were popular and went through numerous edi-

31. George Douglas Campbell, Duke of Argyll, The Reign of Law (London, 1867). p. 213. This particular idea was discussed more thorougly in Argyll's private corre- spondence; see his letters to Sir William Flower reproduced in the Dowager Duchess of Argyll, ed., George Douglas Campbell, Eighth Duke of Argyll, K.G., K.T. {1823-1900): Autobiography and Memoirs 2 vols. (London, 1906) II, 483.

32. Argyll, The Reign of Law, pp. 33-35 and 205-209. 33. 1bid., pp. 282-283. See also Argyll's Organic Evolution Cross-Examined

(London, 1898), pp. 120-121. Argyll suggests that the similarity of classes within the type, because it cannot be due to community of descent, must result from a more fundamental unity within the forces of nature. Presumably, he must have thought that these forces were designed to produce the classes by separate acts of spontane- ous generation, although this is never explicity stated.

34. Argyll, TheReign of Law, pp. 233 248. 35. See, for instance, Darwin's letter to Charles Lyell, June 1, 1867, in Francis

Darwin, ed., The L~tb and Letters of Charles Darwin, 3 vols. (London, 1887), lII, 65.

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tions.36 To the public, his arguments probably seemed much more plausi-

ble than they do to us today, and their effect in helping to sustain the system of natural theology against the Darwinian at tack should not be ignored.

A somewhat more positive answer to the challenge was proposed by St. George Jackson Mivart in his The Genesis o f Species of 1871. This book was the kingpin of a protracted effort to demonstrate the insufficiency of natural selection as an explanation of evolution, driven home with such effect that Darwin eventually broke off all contact with Mivart in the belief that he had acted unethically. 37 Like Argyll, Mivart would not abandon the utilitarian argument from design altogether, arguing that natural selection could not account for the early stages in the evolution of a complex organ such as the eye, when the structure would have been too imperfect to have been of any survival value. 38 He believed that the ap- pearance o f such new structures was determined by the Creator, and his most effective suggestion was to incorporate this belief into what was in essence a reformulat ion of the idealist argument from design. Realizing that Owen's original approach based on the overall unity of the vertebrate type was no longer valid within a completely evolutionary world view, he looked instead for more restricted relationships between the groups which might reveal a degree of artificiality that could only be explained by the assumption that life was predesigned to develop along certain lines. He pointed out that on the basis of natural selection, it would only be by a rare coincidence that forms with no close evolutionary connection could develop similar organs. But far from being rare, anatomical evidence suggested that this was quite a common phenomenon. Mivart noted that even

the Darwinists themselves believed the various orders of placental mam-

mals to have evolved separately from a number of distinct marsupial groups.39 The same appeared to be the case for the evolution of the birds

36. By 1868 there was already a fifth edition of The Reign ofl.aw with replies to some of the Darwinists' objections.

37. On the dispute between Darwin and Mivart, see Jacob W. Gruber, A Conscience in Conflict: The Life of St. George Jackson Mivart (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), and Peter J. Vorzimmer, Charles Darwin: The Years of Controversy'. The "'Origin of Species" and Its Critics, 1859-1882 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1970), pp. 225-251.

38. St. George Jackson Mivart, On The Genesis of Species, 2nd ed. (London, 1871), pp. 26-70.

39. Ibid., pp. 76-81. Mivart refers to T. H. Huxley's unpublished Hunterian Lec- tures for 1866. Although the marsupials are no longer regarded as direct relics of a stage in the evolution of the placentals, modern paleontologists still believe that the mammals are polytypic, that is, that several separate evolutionary lines may have

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PETER J. BOWLER

from the reptiles. Natural selection could not explain why a number of distinct groups should move together in a parallel direction - this implied some predisposition of life to develop in a certain way. The effect could be observed in an even more striking manner in the similarity between the eyes, and to a lesser extent the organs of hearing, of the vertebrates and cephalopods. 4° That members of two distinct phyla should develop similar organs was inconceivable if natural selection were the only driving force of evolution. For Mivart, the only possible explanation of this was that life had been supernaturally predesigned to evolve in certain ways, and thus the artificiality of the natural relationships gave direct evidence of design.

Mivart's suggestion was an interesting one, because if trends could indeed be found within the evolutionary process that were not susceptible to naturalistic explanation, the argument from design would certainly seem more plausible. But the examples he used were not very convincing: there was little fossil evidence for major evolutionary steps such as the appear- ance of the classes, and in any case the Darwinists were prepared to accept that under similar conditions separate evolutionary lines might advance in the same direction. The new approach to design was taken a step further by the noted physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter in his article "The Argument from Design in the Organic World," first published in 1884. Although he still tried to defend the utilitarian interpretation, Carpenter also developed what he recognized as a "completely different line of argument" based on the existence of regularities within the evolutionary process. To explain this phenomenon, he suggested that variation was not random, but occurred in predesigned orderly sequences "allowing definite lines of advance. ''4 ~ Some of his examples were of little more value than Mivart's: Carpenter too believed that the classes could not have evolved from one another naturally, because changes of such magnitude would have to be carefully coordinated or they would upset the animals' organization.42 But his most detailed illustration seemed to provide a rather more convincing line of evidence, derived from his own researches into the

acquired the features characteristic of the class. For a recent comment, see George Gaylord Simpson, "Mesozoic Mammals Revisited," in D. M. Kermack and K. A. Kermack, Early Mammals, supplement I to ZooL J. Linn. Soc., 50 (1971), 192-193.

40. Mivart, Genesis o f Species, pp. 84-87. 41. William Benjamin Carpenter, "The Argument from Design in the Organic

World," reprinted from the Modern Review of 1884 in Carpenter, Nature and Man: Essays, Scientific and Philosophical, with an Introductory Memoir by J. Erstline Carpenter (New York, 1889), p. 445.

42. Ibid.

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Foraminifera, a group of simple marine animals whose shells form the substance o f many rocks. By comparing the various ancient and modern forms of shell, he felt that he was able to construct a hypothetical pedigree for the group, whereby the simplest spiral structure had evolved into a complex cyclical form. The pattern of development was extremely regular, and he concluded: "Now it seems to be impossible not to recognize the fact, that the evolution of this type has taken place along a def ini te course;

every stage being one of progress, and each being (so to speak) a prepara- tion for the next. ' '4 a Natural selection could not explain such a regularity of growth, especially because all the various forms still exist today - if each stage represented an increase in "fitness" the earlier ones ought to have disappeared. 44 The phenomenon could only be explained by assuming that evolution was supernaturally directed along certain lines - in such cases the argument for natural selection "leaves untouched the evidence of design in the original scheme of organized creation. ' '4 s

Although Asa Gray's purely utilitarian defense of design may have been more familiar to American readers, Argyll, Mivart, and Carpenter were known as the leading theistic evolutionists in Britain. We can thus assume that their use of the modified idealist version of design represented a significant factor in the debate on that side of the Atlantic. Gray's utilitar- ianism was not, however, a uniquely American characteristic; one of the few versions of theistic evolutionism to dispense almost completely with the utilitarian view of nature was also proposed by an American: Edward Drinker Cope. In an early paper entitled "On the Origin o f Genera," Cope insisted that only the most superficial features of each species were adap- tive - the fundamental nature of the generic forms was fixed by characters that were o f no use whatsoever. The basic course of evolution followed an abstract pattern conceived directly by the Creator, an idea that seems to resemble Chambers' view except for the fact that Cope was aware of the branching nature of evolutionary development. 46 Admittedly, Cope did not expand on the theological implications of his system, and soon he began to develop a neo-Lamarckian mechanism which not only reintro- duced utility but also provided a natural explanation of how adaptations

43. Ibid., p. 454. Carpenter's italics. 44. Ibid., p. 458. 45. Ibid., p. 463. 46. Edward Drinker Cope, "On the Origin of Genera," Proc. Acad. Nat. Sci. Phila.,

20 (1868), 242-300; see pp. 243-244 and 269. This article is reprinted along with Cope's increasingly more Lamarckian writings in his The Origin o f the Fittest: Essays in Evolution (New York, 1887). For an analysis of Cope's changing ideas, see my "Edward Drinker Cope and the Changing Structure of Evolutionary Theory" to appear in 1sis.

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evolved. But his work does illustrate the fact that on both sides of the Atlantic naturalists were prepared to question the completely utilitarian vision of nature implied by Darwinism and to use the suspected regularities of development as evidence for design. If the idealism of Owen and Agassiz played a significant role in the pre-Darwinian era, these modified versions of the same attitude were also important in the Darwinian debate itself.

Clearly, in claiming that idealism may have strengthened the anti- Darwinian position, I am not implying that it had anything more than a temporary effect in stemming the tide of naturalism in the late nineteenth century. Cope's move toward neo-Lamarckism indicates that even those naturalists who remained opposed to Darwinism could not escape the general trend toward the severing of the traditional connection between theology and science. The last decades of the century saw an almost complete collapse of the argument from design as it had once been understood. This is confirmed by the fate of what had perhaps been the most prom- ising line of investigation proposed by the idealists: the suggestion by Mivart and Carpenter that there might be regular patterns of development to be seen in the fossil record. Around 1900 many paleontologists had in fact become convinced that the record contained unnaturally linear trends, a phenomenon that was called "orthogenesis." Julian Huxley pointed out that it was not until well into the twentieth century that the majority came to accept that such trends were in fact susceptible to a Darwinian explanation.47 Yet orthogenesis was not used as evidence for design. Car- penter's claim that such an effect indicated a supernaturally predesigned pattern of development was not followed up, because even when it was admitted that the trends were nonadaptive, explanations were sought which did not contain an obvious element of mysticism. 48 Naturalists were simply unwilling to use the new evidence in the way that Carpenter had suggested, as an indication of design.

The importance of this study of the idealist view of design thus cannot derive from its ability to resist the growing tide of naturalism, because it succumbed along with the utilitarian version. At best, it may have pro- longed the death throes of natural theology for a few years. What we do gain from such a study is a deeper insight into the nature of the pre-

47. Julian Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, 2nd ed. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1963), pp. 504-516.

48. On this point, see the account o f these theories in Vernon L. Kellogg, Dar- winism Today: A Discussion o f Present Day Scientific Criticism o f the Darwinian Selection Theories, together with a Brief Account o f the Principal Other Proposed Auxiliary and Alternative Theories o f Species Forming (New York, 1908), pp. 2 7 7 - 2 8 9 .

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Darwinian viewpoint. We can see that the early nineteenth-century naturalists' fascination with design was not concerned solely with the adaptations that Darwin himself set out to explain, but had a broader foundation that contained elements totally alien to Darwinism. Via Chambers' theory, idealism actually played a role in promoting the concept of "natural" development, thus paradoxically paving the way for the introduction of the philosophy that supplanted it. The use of idealist arguments by those who tried to retain the idea of designed evolution shows us that even in the last days of natural theology the utilitarian viewpoint was not seen as the only foundation on which to rest the traditional connection between God and nature.

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