cphil_evolve1
THE PROBLEM OF EVOLUTION
by Ray Shelton
I. INTRODUCTION
The problem of evolution is a subdivision of the problem of change and the problem of the one and the many, which has been dealt with previously. The word “evolution” is from the Latin e (“out”) and volvere (“to roll”), and the concept has been defined in many ways in the history of philosophy. In general the concept of evolution has been taken to mean development, growth, progress, variation, transformation. But since the middle of nineteenth century the meaning of the word “evolution” has been determined by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
II. HISTORY
The ancient Greek philosopher Anaximander (610-547 B.C.) held that the things of the world gain their determinate nature out of the “boundless” indeterminacy or apeiron into which they will return at last. This concept of the “boundless” indeterminacy was the key to his explanation of change. The “boundless” indeterminacy is eternal and uncreated, but is characterized by eternal motion and restlessness. The things of the world is formed by a separation of opposite qualities, such as hot and cold, from out of the “boundless”. The destruction of anything, as it goes out of being, satisfies the principle of justice. “And from what source of things arise to that they return of necessity when they are destroyed; for they suffer the punishment and make reparation to one another for their injustice according to the order of time.” Anaximander believed that life had its origin in moisture, that all animal forms evolve, and the ancestry of man led back to the fish.
Heraclitus (533-475 B.C.) held that all things are fire, because it represents change and movement; all things change. Some have interpreted this statement “all things change” to mean that he held that only change is real; but a careful examination of his statements shows that he held that reality is permanent as well as changing. Since the only permanent thing is change, the permanent is in change and change is in the permanent. This principle or Reason (logos) is the One in the Many; unity in diversity. This One is the permanent and the basis of change in the many, in diversity and difference. Reality is both one and many, permanence and change.
Change takes place by means of opposites; all opposites, such as night and day, good and evil, birth and death, and all other opposites produce change. The tension of opposites in the physical world produces the upward and downward ways between fire and earth. In physical things fire is the basic element that becomes all things. Earth liquefies into sea, sea into storm clouds, vapor and fire. This upward and downward ways is used by Heraclitus to explain day and night. The change of things with their upward and downward ways takes place in a vast cycle of time of 360 generations, known as the world year; taking a generation as 30 years, this cycle of time brings things back to their original condition in 10,800 ordinary years.
The Greek philosopher Empedocles (c.490-430 B.C.) of Sicily, studying Parmenides‘ arguments, was convinced that qualitiative differences could not originate from one being. He held that its coming into being and going out of being is impossible. Changes of genesis and destruction are explained as a process of mixture and separation. The elements of the mixture are earth, air, fire and water. All qualitative change are produced by the mixture of these four elements. The characteristics of the elements causes some combinations to be more likely than others. The motive power of the process of mixture and separation is caused by the cosmic principles of attraction and repulsion. The two forces of love and strife act through a succession of four phases: (a) the element are in a perfect mixture due to the attractive power of love; (b) stife enters, and partial separation of the elements take place; (c) stife is dominant, and the elements are completely separated; (d) love enters and the uniting of the mixture takes place, and leading to the first phase again. Life is possible in the second and fourth phases, and is explained as a result of chance and evolutionary processes. Empedocles used the principle of evolution not only to explain life, but to explain the myths about monsters, centaurs, gorgons, etc. Organs and parts of bodies grow up separately in the strife-filled phase, fusing together on contact, thus producing all varieties of strange mis-matching. Those forms whose parts are happily placed are able to survive. Empedocles went to considerable length in describing the formation of the solar system, the origin of life on this planet, and being particularly interested in medicine, he studied the details of biology and the process of sensation.
The atomist Democritus (460-370 B.C.), a follower Leucippus, held that all things consists of many (pluralism) indivisible things called atoms (Greek: a, “not”, and tomos, “cutable”, hence “not able to cut”). Each atom is absolutely homogenous, indivisible and immutable, just like the One of Parmenides. They are separate by empty space or void which Parmenides denied. Change is the movement of these atoms in this void, that is, a change of position; the atoms unaffect the void or each other, except to collide. These atoms always have been in motion and thus do not need anything to move them. Atoms have shape; the irregular shaped atoms when they collided become entangled with one another and group of atoms are formed. The observed characteristics in the world depend upon the the combination and separation of the atoms. Change of qualities, then, is due to the redistribution of atoms in space. Like bodies, souls are composed of atoms which are more mobile, because of rounder, smother shape. Even the gods are composed of atoms which are even finer and more mobile.
Through collisions of the atoms, vortices are set up out of which the worlds are generated. There are worlds in the process of formation and worlds in the process of dissolution. Just as worlds are generated through collisions of atoms, so worlds may be destroyed by collision with larger worlds. Life developed out of primeval slime, and is related to warmth and fire. Indeed, the atoms of fire and souls are similar in nature being smaller and more spherical than atoms of other things. Democritus believed that thought is a kind of motion, and so is capable causing motion in other things. He held that consciousness is a function of soul atoms which are diffused throughout our bodies, and which are inhale and exhale. A slight loss in their number causes sleep and a more radical loss occurs in fainting, and a total loss in death. Perception and sensation is a physical process, and occurs through the impact of images or eidola upon our sense organs, the images being something like detached outline of the objects we perceive.
Since personal immortality is not possible in this philosophy, there are no moral absolutes with eternal consequences; the value theory of Democritus is hedonistic. The end of all human actions is the seeking of enjoyment or pleasure, and the advoidance of pain. Accordingly the way to determine good or evil, useful and harmful, is in terms of the pleasure or pain involved. But not all pleasures are equally good; the pleasures of mind are more enduring and good than the pleasures of sense. Moderation is the appropriate means to arrive at general well-being and cheerfulness, a state of untroubled pleasure known as ataraxia.
The Epicureans (Epicurus and Lucretius) followed Democritus, adding to his scheme of atoms the power to swerve of the individual atoms. Lucretius explained the origin of the world from the chaos of swerving atoms which produced its own order. Living forms developed out of vegatation into animal forms, and at last into the form of man. The law of survival determined what species continue to exist, and which species have perish.
Plato (428-348 B.C.) modified Parmenides dualism of Being and Non-Being making it a dualism of Being and Becoming, giving Being primacy while placing Becoming in an inferior amd subordinate role. Being is the realm of immutable logical essences (Ideas or Forms), while the realm of change, synonymous with generation and decay, has a inferior status somewhere between Being and Non-Being. In the Sophist Plato seems to deny the concept of Non-Being. The dualism of Being and Becoming is not an absolute separation between Being and Becoming; in the Sophist Being participates in Becoming, the Ideas are the Forms of material things.
To this metaphysical dualism there corresponds the epistemological dualism of knowledge and opinion. Opinion comes from the realm of change through the senses and knowledge comes from the realm of the unchanging Ideas through the mind.
In the Timaeus the category of Being is represented by an eternal God in communion with the universal forms. The category of Becoming is represented by the World-Soul, a self-moving initiator of change having world as its internal environment, and interpreted according to organic principles. Plato also mentions a demiurge with the function of bridging the gap between the unchanging World of Ideas and Forms and the changing world of Becoming.
The system of Plato seems antithetical to the idea of evolution, yet Plato refers to great cycles of time involving death and rebirth, at least of cultures. But he apparently viewed the process as devolving, not evolving, in its current cycle.
Plato’s student Aristotle (348-322 B.C.) proposed a different solution to the problem of change. He replaced Plato’s dualism of Being and Becoming with a dualism of potentiality and actuality, interpreting change as the transition from potentiality to actuality; for example, an acorn is potentially an oak and an oak is the actualization of the acorn. He recognize three basic types of change:
a. alternation or change of quality,
b. growth and diminution or change of quantity,
c. locomotion or change of position.
He analyzed the cause of change or causation into
a. efficient cause which produces locomotion,
b. final cause which produces growth,
c. material cause and
d. formal cause which produces alternation.
For example, in the making of a statue the efficient cause would be found in the blows of the chisel upon marble block, the final cause would be the reason why the sculptor was making the statue, the material cause would be the marble out which the statue was made, and the formal cause would be the form or shape which being imposed on the block of marble. Aristotle identifies matter with potentiality and form with actuality. All four causes are to be found in all that is, although in natural objects the final and formal causes coincide, since it is the final cause of the acorn to become an oak, and this is also the form to be actualized.
Aristotle believed that there has always been change and that there must be an eternal cause of change, that is, the first cause and prime mover. This first mover is the mover of a whole series of moved movers but itself is unmoved. It causes all motion without itself being moved. This unmoved mover is God. Thus Aristotle believed that he had proved the existence of God. This argument from change along with others was fully developed in Aristotle’s Metaphysics.
Although Aristotle held to a great chain of being from pure matter (potentiality) to pure form (actuality), he did not express this as development in time from one species to another. The potentiality-actuality contrast allowed him to develop a dynamic view of reality, but he limited it within rather narrow limits. He was able to express dynamically the the way an acorn is potentially an oak, but he did not extend it to how an entire species might develop from a potentiality. In fact he viewed species as fixed and immutable. And furthermore, potentiality was limited to the three basic types of change: “alteration”, or change of quality, “growth and diminution”, and “locomotion”, or change of place. There is no place for evolution or development within these three basic types of change.
For the Graeco-Roman school of philosophy, Stoicism, (founded in 108 B.C. in Athens by Zeno of Citium), things do not happen in time; time is a dimension of things. The eternal course of the universe is, by the nature of things, cyclical, not progressive or regressive. Each cycle is called a periodos [period], or magnus annus [great year], and every periodos begins with the logos, or the creative fire, passing through the creation and organization of the four elements (earth, water, air, and fire), and ends with a conflagration, a return to the fire to begin again. Every periodos is identical in all details with every other one; there is an eternal recurrence of all things. Time being what it is and the logos spermatickos, or life-giving word, containing its own purposes and powers, these changes are autonomous, not stimulated or bounded from without, since space, like time, is only a dimension of body. This means that all change is immanent in God and unchanging in its laws.
Plotinus (A.D. 205-270) attempted to explain by emanations how out of the immutable One the many and changing could have arisen. These emanations are logial rather than temporal; they are neither evolutions nor devolutions, but timeless. The first emanation from the One is the Nous or Intelligence and corresponds to Plato’s realm of the Ideas or Forms. The One is differentiated into the many of the Ideas or Forms. The second emanation from the One is the Psyche or Soul; it is divided into higher and lower, the first standing nearer the Nous, looking up to it, being in no immediate contact with the material world and the latter, looking down, is the real soul of the material world, Hyle or matter, the third emanation from the One. This is the realm of change, forever oscillating between Being and Non-Being. According to Plotinus, individual souls proceed from the second level of emanation and are contained in it. Unlike the Divine Intellect of the first level of emanation, these souls are unable to grasp the immutable and timeless truth all at once, in an instantaneous act, but only gradually, step by step, by the laborious process of reasoning. Change and sucession thus are the mere result of Soul’s inability to grasp everything at once. This Greek doctrine of the two realms, the immutable realm of perfection and the changing realm of imperfection, and the corresponding doctrine timeless divine vision, contrasted to man’s temporal and, therefore fragmentary, knowledge, came to dominate medieval theology and philosophy, Christian, Jewish, and Islamic. This philosophy is called Neoplatonism.
Augustine (A.D. 354-430) interpreted the Neoplatonic doctrine of the timeless vision as the determinism of all things and theologically as the predistination of the elect. Nearly all medieval theologians accepted determinism as the logical consequence of this timeless divine vision that sees the totality of successive events in one act, totum simul. Not only Augustine, but Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) accepted this determinism based on divine omniscience. This created the difficult problem of reconciling determinism with human free will, which the Protestant Reformers, especially John Calvin (1509-1564), attempted to solve by simply denying free will in the doctrine of original sin and man’s sinful nature.
Augustine rejected the Neoplatonic theory of emanations and held to the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo (“out of nothing”) at the moment chosen by God. The world and time thus had a definite beginning. But what God wills to create is determined by what God’s knowledge has determined to be good. God’s intellect is the primary motive to create. From Neoplatonism he also derived his conception of God as timeless. The One is unchanging, therefore, timeless. God is not only eternal, having no beginning nor end, but He is without time, no past nor future, but just an eternal “now”. In this eternal “Now”, God sees all the past, present, future of the world that He will and has created. According to Augustine eternity is motionless, no succession; everything is present at once; there is no past nor future. Time was created by God out of nothing, ex nihilo. It is not an independent principle nor a being, the Receptacle, nor non-Being, the void.
The medieval Schoolman, following Augustine and opposing Aristotle, believed that time had a beginning. Between eternity, the Res Tota Simul, and time is the Aevum, or everlastingness, of heavenly bodies and of angels. But Aristotle’s view of species as fixed and immutable was accepted. And they accepted his view that potentiality was limited to the three basic types of change: “alteration”, or change of quality, “growth and diminution”, and “locomotion”, or change of place, and that there is no place for evolution or development within these three basic types of change.
B. MODERN THEORIES
As modern science began with a revolt in astronomy against Aristotelian-Ptolemaic view of the universe by Copernicus and Kepler, and against Aristotelian physics by Galileo and Isaac Newton, in the nineteenth century modern science continued this revolt against Aristotle in biology and geology.
The science of geology in the modern sense began in the closing years of the eighteenth century. The Swiss geologist, de Saussure (1740-1799) seems to be the first to have used the term in 1779. Although geology is young as a science, it is old as an art and as part of philosophy, the earliest philosophers speculated upon geological subjects. Geology is broad in scope and instead of being a single science, it is a group of closely related sciences, such as mineralogy (the study of minerals), petrology (the study of the origins and characteristics of rocks), volcanology (the study of volcanoes), seismology (study of earthquakes), paleontology (the study of fossil organisms), and structural geology (the study of folded and faulted rocks). For convenience the whole field of geology may be divided into two separate branches: physical geology which studies the earth’s present structure, and historical geology which studies the earth’s history. Some of these branches of geology are fairly “exact” sciences, based on mathematical principles and physical laws. Others are based to a considerable degree upon speculative concepts and contain many unanswered problems. The problem of the formation of mountains is an example of one of these many difficult problems in geology. Many hypotheses all theoretical have been proposed to explain mountain building but no one hypothesis has been adequate to solve all the problems. De Saussure was the first to make a detailed study of the Swiss Alps. The results of his work were published in four volumes between 1779 and 1796. After extensive field studies in which he crossed the whole range of the Alps fourteen times and made sixteen other traverses from the plains flanking the Alps to their central axis, Saussure finally regarded the origin of the Alps as due either
(1) to the folding of layers of that were originally horizontal, or
(2) to some force acting upward from below.
He believed that the first hypothesis was the more probable. As to the ultimate cause of the origin of the Alps, he hesitated to use the much overused “subterranean fires.” In his conclusion he stated that he could devise no general theory that could adequately account for the origin of the Alps, and that further studies and observations would be needed.
Soon after 1800 many hypotheses and theories began to appear to explain the mechanism involved in the origin of the mountains. Thus Historical Geology was born. The study of successive rock layers, called stratigraphy, was carried on everywhere rock layers were exposed. Among the many hypotheses that have been put forth since 1800 to explain world-wide mechanisms of mountain building, the following are most important.
a. The contraction theory, which postulates a shrinking earth with crustal shortening.
b. The geosynclinal theory, which states that the highest mountains occur where thickest sediment have been deposited.
c. The theory of isostasy, which attempts to explain an apparent tendency for crustal equilibrium in various segments of the earth’s crust by the formation of mountains.
d. The theory of continental drift, which considers that all continents, once “fitted” together in one great land mass that is postulated to have broken apart and “drifted” on a plastic substratum to their present continental positions. As the position of the continents shifted, the friction and resistance to movement on the substratum might conceivably result in the formation of belts of folded mountains.
e. The Island-arc (or mountain-arc or structural-arc) theory, which postulates that mountain rise through successive periods (or pulses) of growth from a continental shelf or various other type border areas to form either a single or double island arcs, in some cases further evolving into active mountain arcs, and finally to inactive, mature, or old folded mountain ranges.
f. The convection theory, which is based on the supposed transfer of heat with the earth by moving currents. The currents are considered typically to move upward under continental masses and downward beneath ocean basins. According to proponents of this theory, the currents drag segments of the crustal material downward in some boundary regions between continents and ocean basins, resulting in folds and distorted strata and negative gravity zones. The light crustal material may eventually arise isostatically to elevate the folded strata into mountains.
g. The phase-change or polymorphism theory, which postulates that deep within the earth crystalline solids undergoes changes in their atomic or molecular arrangements to become heavier or lighter, as the case may be, depending upon conditions of temperature and pressure. If the change is to denser material, the resulting molecules will occupy less space, consequently allowing for depression; if the change is less dense, or lighter material, expansion will occur, contributing to the uplift of the mountain masses.
The first three of the above theories were developed during the latter half of nineteenth century, and the others have been proposed and developed in the twentieth century.
In 1785 the Scottish physician turned geologist James Hutton (1726-1797) presented his “uniformitarian” theory. All during the eighteenth century there had been speculation about the meaning of fossils and about the origin of the earth. In 1780 the German mineralogist, Abraham G. Werner, proposed the hypothesis that the earth was originally engulfed in an ocean, which subsided leaving behind various formations, minerals, and fossils. This was called a “catastrophist” or “neptunist” theory, and it had many followers because it agreed with the Biblical story of the flood. Hutton caused a sensation when he proposed his theory to account for these phenomena by the uniform operation of the same natural forces over immensely long periods of time. He stated his Laws of Uniform Change as applied to the formation of rocks that the origin of rocks long ago can be understood in terms of processes now going on; that is, the processes stratification, embedding of fossils, and various degrees of cementation in the past can be observed presently in the sediments of rivers and seas, and in sands piled up by winds. This theory was called “uniformitarianism” and was not generally accepted in his day, partially because it implied that that the earth would have to be very old for the processes to alter the surface of the earth significantly by the gradual processes of change now at work. These changes are not uniform in the sense of the same rate, but uniform in that they are extraordinarly slow and are constant over long periods of time. For example, it is estimated that the Grand Canyon, which is as much as 6000 feet deep, was cut by the Colorado River at the rate of about one foot per 3000 years; and the Himalaya Mountains may have been elevated at the rate of one foot per 500 years.
In 1795 Hutton published his major work Theory of the Earth in which he proposed seriously and systematically modern uniformitarianism as theory for earth history. Hutton took it for granted that the earth had never experienced castastrophes except perhaps on a strictly local scale. He assumed that the Scottish Highlands to have been uplifted at an extraordinarily slow rate, measured in millimeters per millenia and millions of years. He probably inferred it from contemporary experience and concluded it as an universal principle.
As we have said above, Hutton’s views were not generally accepted, but it did interest some, including Charles Lyell (1797-1875), a lawyer turned geologist. Lyell published three volumes entitled Principles of Geology (1830-1833). He opposed the catastrophic view of earth history, and successfully advanced Hutton’s theory of uniformitarianism. He set up a geological time scale, in which the time for any and every geological event is multiplied by million of years. He guessed at the date of many events, including the date of Ice Age. Previously Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), a geologist, a catastrophist, and an outstanding scholar, had presented evidence that a great ice sheet had covered Northern Europe and Northern North America. So Lyell preceeded to date that Ice Age at about 1,000,000 years B.C. He considered its formation a “recent” event caused by the falling snow flakes, descending over long periods of time. Later it was shown that Lyell’s original estimate of the date of Ice Age was wrong. It was found that certain “geological clocks” could be used to estimate the date of the Ice Age. One such geological clock is the Niagara Falls, which is receding from Lake Ontario, a lake that was formed at the end of Ice Age. There between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario is a crystaline structure, an escarpment underlaid by soft limestone. At the Niagara Falls on the Niagara River the crystaline formation has been cut and is eroding and receding from Lake Ontario toward Lake Erie at a measurable rate. Lyell measure the lineal distance of the Falls from its original position on Lake Ontario. He interviewed inhabitants of the area regarding the rate of erosion. They said that the rate of erosion was about 3 feet per year on the average. This did not fit with Lyell’s time scale; it indicated that his time scale was in error by 988,000 years out of 1,000,000 years. Lyell therefore assumed that the inhabitants must have been exaggerating, and he set the rate of erosion at 1 foot per year, not 3. After further calculations Lyell announced that the Ice Age ended at 35,000 B.C. and not at his previous estimate of 1,000,000 B.C. It is now recognized that both of Lyell’s distance estimates were too low. The Nigara Falls is retreating at a rate of 5 feet per year, and this is merely the current rate. The ancient rates may probabily be higher in the decades following the end of ice build up.
Hutton’s views attained limited acceptance during his lifetime, but they became respectable only when they were reworked, refined, and republished by Lyell 36 years later. Lyell’s geology formed the background for the biological theories of Charles Darwin; Darwin later wrote, “I feel as if my books came half out of Sir Charles Lyell’s brain.” The uniformitarian time-revolution disposed of one the major objections to the evolutionary theory, that is, there is not enough time for evolution to take place. But Lyell was no evolutionist. He could not find in the fossils sufficient evidence for the transformation and progression of species, that is, one species growing out another. And this has remained the main obstacle to the acceptance of theory of evolution. This dogma of the fixity of the species goes back to Aristotle and modern biological evidence seems to support it. No examples of such a change of species is found in the fossil record or in the biological data; the evidence, notably the sterility of animal hybrids, show the opposite.
Not all of Darwin’s thinking was based on Lyell; his thinking and writings show a greater dependence on and a development of the Lamarkian principle of transmutation of species. The French biologist Gene Chevalier de Lamarck (1744-1829) maintained that various species of plants and animals have had a common ancestry, and the present differences between them can be explained by certain law of development later called the inheritance of acquired characteristics. He proposed that the conditions of environment control and govern changes in the nature of plants and animals. Characteristics thus acquired and developed are transferred to the offspring by some vague mechanism, which he believed and called “pan-genesis.” Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) had a botanical garden in which he had experimented in plant breeding and inbreeding. He was searching for an explanation of the process and proposed ideas similar to those of Lamarck; these ideas were a significant factor in the heritage of Charles Darwin.
The British biologist, Charles Darwin (1809-1882), was born in Shrewsbury, England, and was educated at Edinburgh and Cambridge University, graduating in 1831. In December of that year Darwin began his five-year voyage on the ship “Beagle.” On this surveying trip which covered both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans Darwin had the position of naturalist. His theory of evolution was developed from the data collected on this voyage and, after his return to London in 1836, it was suggested to him by reading in October, 1838, of An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society by Thomas Malthus (1766-1834). Darwin lived in London for six years, where he became acquainted with leading scientists of the day, Sir Charles Lyell, Sir Joseph Hooker, and Thomas Henry Huxley. In 1838 he received from Alfred R. Wallace (1823-1912) an essay that was virtually an abstract of his own theory. He then set to work in earnest, and his great work on the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life appeared on November 24, 1859. From 1842 Darwin lived in Down, a secluded village in Kent, where he conducted researches and wrote the works for which he is famous, until his death in 1882. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, close to the grave of Isaac Newton.
Darwin attempted to establish beyond any reasonable doubt that all living things, including man, have developed from a few extremely simple forms, perhaps from one form, by a gradual process of descent with modifications. Furthermore, he developed a theory of natural selection, supporting it with a large body of evidence, to account for this process and particularly to explain the “transmutation of Species” and the origin of adaptations. The following are main outline of his theory of natural selection.
a. Mutable Species. The species of living beings are mutable: species come into existence, change, and not infrequently perish altogether.
b. Overproduction. Organic beings increase at such a rate that the progeny of any single pair would crowd the earth were their multiplication not checked.
c. Struggle for Existence. But the multiplication is checked by the competitive efforts of other beings to survive and reproduce, both within and beyond the species in question. Such competition constitutes a struggle for existence on the part of every species.
d. Variation. All organic beings tend to vary in all their parts, organs, and functions of life. They have a tendency to pass on these variations by inheritance.
e. Natural Selection. These conditions, taken together, provide the principle of natural selection, to the effect that favorable variations, and those possessing them, survive, while unfavorable variations and those possessing them, are eliminated. These conditions also explain how new species come into existence.
Thus Darwin held that the origin and history of man, like that of all other animals, are explained by this hypothesis.
The 1500 copies of The Origin of Species sold out on the first day of its publication and made its author immediately famous. Many were dismayed, a reaction not limited to clergymen and theologians; they were shocked at the refutation of Genesis. Some of sharpest minds of the age, and some of the least orthodox, joined in the dismay. George Bernard Shaw wrote that “If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live.” Carl Ernst von Baer (1792-1876), who was a pioneer in modern embryology, refused to believe in a theory that made man “a product of matter” and debased them to the level of animals. Adam Sedgwick, the Professor of Geology at Cambridge, declared that the acceptance of Darwinism would “sink the human race into lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell of its history.” The question was raised, “Were any moral values possible in a Darwinian world?” The implication of Darwin’s theory that man is no unique child of God, not endowed with an immortal soul, but rather the offspring of the amoeba by way of other animals, was disturbing; so was the view of all life as an amoral struggle, “nature red in tooth and claw,” filled with pain and death, the sacrifice of countless individuals to the species. And so also was the implication that the universe is nothing but chance and luck.
Though Darwin made some attempt to appease the religious in his book, he was not a religious man, and steadily grew less so. In his Autobiography (in the undeleted version) he explains how he rejected Christianity in about 1840; later he also dropped the “theism” that appears in the last two pages of his book. Darwin apparently shared the position popularized by his vigorous proponent Thomas H. Huxley (1825-1895) as “agnosticism.” Huxley coined the term “agnostic” to express his position of suspended belief; he insisted that one should not believe beyond the evidence of the senses and since no satisfactory evidence concerning the nature of the universe is available, one should not be dogmatic, but an agnostic, “one who does not know.” The term has usually been applied to the suspension of belief with respect to God. Huxley believed that all living forms constituted mechanical systems in such a fashion that consciousness is epiphenomenal. It is the effect of bodily processes and the cause of nothing. This mechanistic materialism was a complete rejection of Biblical creationism. The acrimony with which the war between science and religion soon began to be waged was due to the belligerence and arrogance of Huxley, as well as to the stubbornness of his most famous adversary, the Bishop “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce. Huxley and Wilberforce met in a debate in 1860 on which occasion a famous exchange of insults took place, the clergyman observing that he would rather not claim a monkey for an ancestor and Huxley retorting that he rather be descended from an honest ape, than from the one though endowed with brains refused to use them! Not all the foes of Dawinism were clergymen, its foes included many nonclergymen, scientists among them. But not all clergymen rejected Darwinism and some began to find it agreeable to theism. The Roman Catholics were more inclined to accept, or at least to tolerate, Darwinism because they were freer from Biblical literalism. These clergymen and theologians accepted the view that evolution is merely the instrument which God used to create the universe, or the mode of His activity in bringing about the events of creation. They argued that whether God did so or not is a question of fact to be decided by evidence, and the evidence seems to show that evolution was the way God created it.
Darwin, who was early quite pious, was led away from Biblical Christianity by the geology of Lyell; then the hypothesis of natural selection destroyed in his mind the classical arguments for existence of God, the arguments from the evidences of design and purpose in organisms. Originally, in the concluding paragraphs of his Origins Darwin points toward a theism that was quite widely accepted; he argues that it is not less wonderful, but more so, that God choose to plant the seeds of all life in a few simple forms of life instead of creating each species separately. But Darwin abandoned this position, as a study of his letters and later published writings show. There was too much chance and too much evil in the biological world that he saw to permit him to believe in a benevolent plan. “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would designedly created Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the bodies of catapillars, or that cats would play with mice.” This was the old Problem of Evil that destroyed Darwin’s faith, along with muddle and untidiness in the evolutionary picture which went far to discredit the concept of orderly design and plan. Darwin was not, like Huxley, a deliberately irreligious man; he was driven to unbelief in a “beneficent and omnipotent God” by the biological facts upon which the theory of evolution focused.
Later the thought occurred to Darwin that the mind of man itself is the product of evolution, thus merely the tool of survival. This idea has jolted others. The result is to dethrone the mind or intellect as a separate principle, making it merely a factor in evolutionary adaptation. But this not only destroyed theology, but biology and all other sciences, as having higher validity; everything would have become just a weapon in the struggle for survival. This confusing speculation of Darwin has also occurred to others; all has been thrown in confusion by this new “knowledge.” But being unwilling to dogmatic, Darwin called himself an “agnostic.” He did not consider himelf an atheist, even though many of those who have accepted the philosophy of evolution have called themselves by that name.
Darwin was careful to disavow any supposed ethical implications of his theories. The widespread view of the “Social Darwinist,” that those who are best adapted to survive ought to survive, is no part of what Darwin himself sought to prove. The famous slogan “the survival of the fittest” is not Darwin’s, but was coined by Herbert Spencer. Darwin was very careful to observe the limits of his hypothesis. He did not profess to explain the origins of life itself; nor did he claim to know the precise cause of those variations which determine different organic species in the first place. And he rejected the implication which some sought to draw from his theory, that is, that “higher” species are most perfectly adapted to their environment than the “lower” ones. It remained for his contemporary, Herbert Spenser, to draw out the philosophical implications of the evolutionary theory. In his hands, Spencer transformed evolution into a grand synthesis of human knowledge, complete with a cosmology, an ethics, and a politics.
The English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was the first modern thinker to see the philosophical significance of evolution in a comprehensive way, and to attempt a synthesis of scientific knowledge. The French mathematician and astronomer Pierre Simon Laplace (1749-1827) at the beginning of the nineteenth century had proposed the nebular hypothesis according which the heavenly bodies have developed into their present condition from primitive gases; this is evolution in astronomy. The English geologist Charles Lyell (1797-1875) in the 1830s had shown that by assuming the earth to have been in existence a sufficient length of time, all the various characteristic that are present in the earth can be accounted for as the result of processes still in operation that could be still observed (uniformitarianism); this is evolution in geology. The French biologist Gene Chevalier de Lamarck (1744-1829) maintained that various species of plants and animals have had a common ancestry, and the present differences between them can be explained by certain law of development (inheritance of acquired characteristics); this is biological evolution. Lamarck’s views were usually rejected during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, but Herbert Spencer accepted most of them. The pioneer in modern embryology Carl Ernst von Baer (1792-1876) had shown that the embryo passes from a vague state of homogeneity to the differentiation of the various organs at birth — a process that Spencer saw was analogous to the development of the different species. Comparing the results of these different sciences, Spencer believed that it was possible to arrive at a definition of evolution that would be applied universally, — to the development of stars and planets, earth’s crust, plants and animals, the human mind and human society in all aspects including government, economics, art, language, religion, and morality.
When Charles Darwin published in 1859 his Origin of Species, Spencer was emboldened in 1860 to announce his scheme for a Synthetic Philosophy of evolution, in which the conception was applied to all of the sciences. He coined the phrase “the survival of the fittest” to describe the working of the principle of natural selection. From 1860 to 1893 he kept continuously at this project, writing separate volumes on metaphysics, biology, sociology, and ethics. He revised his Principles of Psychology, already published in 1855, and incorporated it into the series of works on evolution. Although some years passed before Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy won some recognition, it finally became famous, and during his last years his works were widely read, and he was regarded by some as the world’s greatest philosopher.
Spencer’s father, a schoolmaster, and his uncle, a clergyman, gave him an excellent elementary education and secondary education, largely by private instruction. He showed slight interest and aptitude in languages, some skill in drawing and sculpture, and a decided ability in mathematics and the natural sciences. He refused to go to a university, which he thought would be waste of time; he probably was right since the curriculum in those days consisted chiefly of classical languages and neglected the natural sciences for which he had most talent. As a young man he supported himself by successful but not highly remunerative work of engineering and journalism. From 1860 to 1893 he devoted himself to the elaboration of his Synthetic Philosophy. During these early years he subsisted meagerly upon his savings, small legacies from relatives, a gift from American admirers, and subscriptions for his books contributed in advance by well-wishers. Gradually the sale of his books increased, and he ended his life in comfortable circumstances. He never married, his means be insufficient until he was passed the age when marriage seemed desirable. From 1855 he suffered from ill-health. He ended his days as a somewhat eccentric old bachelor, whom his intimates understood and respected.
Following the empiricism of Hamilton and J. S. Mill, Spencer regarded science as a discovery of the laws of regularities in phenomena, each science working a circumscribed area and representing a partial unity. Philosophy differs from the sciences in terms of its scope, its principles being universally applicable; it goal is a total unification of knowledge. From this standpoint the principle of evolution is philosophical, and Spencer proceeded to make this principle the focus of his comprehensive Synthetic Philosophy. Evolution is thus expressible as a principle of increasing complexity; and Spencer identified “more complex” with “higher.” Intelligence emerges from the increasing complexity as do sympathy and sociality, these latter characteristics calling forth the state. Spencer acknowledge his indebtedness to Carl Ernst von Baer (1792-1876), who was a pioneer in modern embryology, from whom Spencer derived the conception of progressive change from homogeneity to heterogeneity. It became a central thesis of Spencer’s theory of evolution that in general the homogeneous was unstable and that a trend to heterogeneity is characteristic of evolution in all its phases, whether it is a characteristic of individual organism or groups of organism, of the earth, the solar system, or the entire cosmos.
Spencer in working out the implication of this principle soon realized that it could not stand alone, but must be recognized as incidental to a more fundamental process which he calls “integration of matter and the concomitant dissipation of motion.” In accordance to the law of gravity diffused matter tends to become more consolidated; at same time, energy or motion, whether sensible or insensible, which the matter contains, tends to become more and more uniformly diffused. Next Spencer distinguished between simple and compound evolution. Simple evolution is uncomplicated integration of matter and dissipation of motion which has just been described. Compound evolution covers the vast multitude of cases in which the primary redistribution of matter and motion is accomplished by secondary redistributions. While the whole is consolidating, it is also differentiating into parts in each of which the double process of integration and dissipation continues with some degree of independence. Thus the change is from a less coherent to a more coherent structure as well as from a more homogeneous to a less homogeneous or more heterogeneous state. Thus, in Spencer’s own words,
“Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, heterogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.”
(H. Spencer, First Principles, [New York, 1885], p.396)
Spencer presents this, not just as a definition of evolution, but as statement of what is constantly happening in nature; this was a statement of the “law” of evolution. Spencer saw this as a “natural law”, a rule for expecting events that was arrived by the empirical, inductive method. Having arrived at this law of evolution inductively, Spencer goes on to state as an inference the persistence of matter and motion, or, as it is called today, the law of conservation of matter and energy. Spencer used these principles to explain, not only the origin of solar system, the geological evolution of the earth, the development of plants and animals, but also of the production of life and consciousness, and every thing that characterize animals and human beings, regarded either as individuals or as societies. Spencer maintained that what are known subjectively as states of consciousness are objectively states of motion.
This explanation of all phenomena, biological, psychological, and sociological, is paralleled in the system of the German biologist turned philosopher Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834-1919). He was born at Potsdam, educated at Wurzburg, Berlin, and Vienna, and taught at Jena. Haeckel accepted Darwinian evolution as the key to philosophic truth. His philosophy was naturalistic, monistic, and pantheistic; he was a lifelong admirer of Spinoza (1632-1677) and Goethe (1749-1832). He derived everything from the “law of substance” which embraces the persistence of both matter and force. To account for the appearance of life and consciousness in the later stages of evolution, he attributed a primitive rudimentary vitality and mentality to the constituent atoms. On the lowest inorganic levels of evolution Haeckel filled the gaps with entities he called monera and gastrae. The former is a primitive, protoplasmic organisms which he regarded as coming from inorganic matter by spontaneous generation. The latter filled the gap between single-celled protozoa and multicelluar metazoa. Though these hypotheses are now rejected, they were held for a period of time and influenced embryological research for nearly half a century.
Haeckel believed that all matter, and the aether, possessed a low-grade will and sensibility. This hylozoistic (from the Greek, hyle [matter] and zoe [life], “matter is alive”) and panpsychistic (from the Greek, pan [all} and psyche [soul], “everything has a soul”) hypothesis supported his naturalistic interpretation of reality, allowing him to view human consciousness as a function of man’s bio-organism, facilitated by the presence of a central nervous system. To this world-view Haeckel gave the name “monism”; he was particularly opposed to theological dualism and sought to destroy the dualist antithesis of God and the world, where God was understood to be a personal, extra-mundane and transcendent being. He held that monistic philosophy destroys the three central dogmas of a dualistic system: the personality of God, the immortality of the soul, and the freedom of the will. Although pantheism is compatible with a monistic system, Haeckel quotes approvingly of Schopenhauer’s remark, “Pantheism is only a polite form of atheism.” And his monism was atheistic.
But Haeckel did not reject all religion; in fact, he put forth a monistic religion and ethics. His admiration for Spinoza and Goethe and his belief that mankind’s ethical aspirations needed some support led him to advocate a monistic religion.
“The ethical craving of our emotion is satisfied by monism no less than the logical demand for causality on the part of religion.” He had great respect for the ethical values of primitive Christianity and felt that Christianity had been so influential in social and political movements of civilized history that “we must appeal as much as possible to its existing institutions in the establishment of our monistic religion.”
(The Riddle of the Universe, p. 336).
He maintained that he sought a rational reformation, rather than a revolution, in religion. His criticisms, however, particularly of Roman Catholicism, appear revolutionary. In ethics Haeckel wanted to give rational support to the true, the good, and the beautiful, and he preferred that trinity instead of the Christian Trinity. Truth is to be found in the study of nature by means of critical observation and thinking, instead of revelation and faith. The good is to be found in charity, toleration, compassion, and assistance, and these are not original to Christianity. Haeckel maintained that Christian ethics was marred by too much altrusim, and denunciation of egoism, while the monistic ethics lays equal emphasis on both, and finds perfect virtue in a just balance between love of self and love of one’s neighbor. The beautiful is to be found in the natural world, and that Christianity was in error in preaching the valuelessness of this-worldly things, with a view that this life was only a preparation for eternity. Hence the beautiful was of little importance. Haeckel was especially interested in art forms in nature and believed that the microscope had newly aroused our aesthetic sense.
Although Haeckel was especially opposed to theological dualism, he was very careful to distinguish his monism from both materialistic and idealistic monisms. Haeckel interpreted materialism as holding that atoms are “dead,” and moving only by external forces. In opposition he maintained that both matter and aether possess sensation and will in lowest grade. They experience a dislike for strain, and struggle against it, and have a liking for “condensation” for which they strive. Haeckel denied the existence of empty space and of forces acting at a distance. Those parts of space not occupied by ponderable atoms are filled with aether; and forces act either by immediate contact or through the mediation of the aether. On the other hand, Haeckel rejected the idealist attempt to regard the world as immaterial or nonnatural. He held that infinitely extended matter and sensitive and thinking spirit, or energy, are two fundamental attributes of the all-embracing universal substance. Every living cell has psychic functions, and multicellular organisms has as their psychic functions the totality of psychic properties of their parts. Although Haeckel insisted that his view of substance was Spinoza-like rather than materialistic, many of his views are similar to those of nineteenth century materialism. His confidence that “consciousness, thought, speculation” are “function of the ganglionic cells of the cortex of the brain,” his “hard” determinism, his mechanism, his complete rejection of the supernatural, and his enthusiasm for science all led his contemporaries to consider him a materialist.
The English biologist and philosopher C. Lloyd Morgan (1852-1936), who was born in London and studied under T. H. Huxley, believed that everything emerges from an original space-time matrix, including matter itself. He held that evolution occurs at all levels of natural history, not continuously but by discontinuity, in which “emergents” abruptly appear, moving from lower to higher forms of life. God is not an emergent, but directs the course of evolution, expressing His purpose in the entire course of events.
Another English philosopher Samuel Alexander (1859-1938) also held that space-time is the ultimate matrix from which everything else has evolved. He was a brilliant interpreter not only of the New Realism but of a new naturalistic metaphysic called Emergent Evolution. He presented his complete system in his Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Glasgow between 1916 and 1918 and published as Space, Time and Deity in 1920. According to Alexander, the primordial reality, from which all things have evolved, and of which they still consist, is Space-Time. He was influenced by the relativity theories of Einstein, and Bergson’s doctrine of duration, real time. He re-interpreted its significance, asserting that nothing exists in the world that is not both spatial and temporal: “space is full of time and time is full space.” Time is not the fourth dimension of space; it has only one dimension, but this dimension is its own, and every instant within the infinite course of time occupies the whole space; while every point in space endures throughout infinite time. Nothing in the universe is at absolute rest: everything is in movement of some kind within Space-Time. In this constant movement new qualities emerge that cannot be reduced to existing qualities. Beginning with the idea that a thing is a complexus of motion, Alexander identified space-time as pure motion, and views space-time as the source and origin of all existing things. But motion is one among a number of properties of space-time. These properties he called the categories. The primordial properties of space-time will also characterize whatever emerges from space-time. Besides motion his categories are substance, quantity, number, existence, universality, relation, and order. Alexander took the process of emergent evolution as his basic metaphysical principle. Where the ancient philosophers and modern classical physical sciences took matter and motion as the original stuff, after Minkowski, Einstein, Lorentz, and others, it became indivisible space-time, instead of space and time. Thus nature begins as a four-dimensional matrix in which it is the moving principle. Materiality, the secondary qualities, life, mentality are all emergent modifications of proto-space-time. Alexander thought of the deity as the next highest level to be emerged out of a given level. Thus for things on the level of life, mind is deity, but for beings possessing minds there is a nisus [“a striving”] toward ever higher levels or an urge toward a still higher quality. To such beings that dimly felt quality is deity. The quality next above any given level is deity to the beings on that level; thus on level of a dog, man is deity. For men deity has not yet emerged, but there is a nisus toward its emergence. God is either the entire space-time universe striving to the next emergent or the characteristic of transcendent which the next emergent has to what exists. From the standpoint of the dog, man is a deity. From the standpoint of all existence the new emergent is deity. Since evolution is unending, the quality of deity remains in a sense always transcendent.
For the French philosopher Henri Louis Bergson (1859-1941), philosophy must form itself according what is given in experience. In experience we are given reason and intuition. Reason tends toward the static view of things and intuition toward fluidity and change. When one seeks to grasp the world through reason instead of intuition, one falsifies it. The paradoxes of Zeno resulted from interpreting the fluidity of time by the static categories of reason. This is the “spatializing time.” To a certain extent one must spatialize time if one is attempt to grasp the nature of things. But our reason allows us to approximate but never reach the nature of its object. The act of reason, creating the concept of being, creates the concept of nothingness. These are extremes and are both false ideas. In fact the idea of Nothing is dissatisfaction with what is. The way to avoid finally such false problems is to learn to grasp the object by intuitive awareness in which we somehow identify with the object itself. The mode of expression natural to reason is the concept; the mode natural to intuition is the metaphor.
Bergson believed that change is more real than permanence, and time must be taken more seriously and not regarded as an appearance. The dynamic and static aspects of experience are paralleled by similar aspects of the world. The world in its temporal aspect is fluid, dynamic and continuous. In its spatial aspect the world is static and discontinuous. Bergson identified the temporal aspect of things with the spirit; and the spatial aspect of things with the material aspect, with effete spirit. He illustrated the difference using the simile of a fountain. The water shooting forth is spirit; the water falling back is matter.
Since God is spirit, this means that God works in things to make them go. God is the force, the Elan Vital, which makes things go. This means that God is the process of evolution. Evolution is a creative process, going on in time, not predetermined in advance, neither by an omnipotent and omniscient Creator, nor by matter governed by mechanical laws. Evolution works out its course spontaneously under the guidance of the vital impulse or vital impetus. Thus evolution has purpose and adventuring. One of the goals of evolution, Bergson states, was freedom. But each achievement fell back into mechanism until the creation of man when, through heightened complexity, and mechanism cancelling out mechanism, the breakthrough into freedom was achieved.
The view of time consistent with this view of freedom is that the future is open, and is being decided moment by moment. According to Bergson, time is qualitiative change. Were the details of the temporal process already settled, time could accelerate toward instantaneity. But these details are not settled, and time moves at its own pace. The future is not in existence, and both God and man create the alternatives and then acts upon them; this insures freedom. The past continues to exist, internal in the present. In man it exists as memory. Bergson compares the situation to a rolling snowball in which it present state contains all its earlier states.