How to Seem to Skin a Darwinist while Being Skinned by One

Todd Zywicki's smear of PZ Myers (via Crooked Timber) works according to a familiar logic:

1. Describe Darwinism
2. Efface the Historical Record
3. Show Countless Millions Starving
4. Or Possibly Oppressed
5. Or Certainly Dead
6. Blame Darwinism
7. Shoot Darwinists
8. Drink Punch
9. Eat Pie
10. Dance
11. Dance
12. Dance

So only items one through six actually obtain, but this sad display of smearing Myers' because he misunderstood Scott Adams' confounding post about the credibility gap of both the evolutionarily inclined and the intelligent design crowd irks.  Myers rightly points out that said gap only exists among those who belong to the ID crowd.  Only if you are a non-scientist who believes an ideologically charged issue should be decided by people unqualified to speak to its validity will you believe evolutionary thinkers as credible as ID advocates.  Predictably, the one blinkered by ideology attempts to prove his opponents are too, and so Adams assails Myers for being unable to empathiz . . . understand ID "arguments" and Zywicki (for reasons all his own) calls him a Lysenkoist. 

What we have here is a misunderstood notion of what caused past atrocities maliciously applied to present day politics.  We have people calling on the wisdom and authority of non-specialists to explain subtle distinctions lost on some of the finest minds of our time.  (Watching Gould and Dawkins disagree is almost as entertaining as a pissing contest involving streams of actual urine falling on your actual face.)  And when someone with the requisite qualifications responds . . . we hear the tired cry of elitism from minds which favor comforting lassitude.  As Adams' ignorance attests, assumption and opprobrium are more effortless than thought. 

Which brings me to a related conversation my stalwart stalking-horse, John Emerson, brought about.  All I can say is that I'm thankful my conversation with Doug Johnson avoids the shallow gunplay of anti-intellectual brouhahas.  The core issue is similar: a misrepresentation of the historical stature of Darwinian theory is used to condemn contemporary Darwinian theory.  Just as Lysenko's ideological application of Lamarckian theory . . .

Here is my measured and intellectually honest response to Doug's measured and intellectually honest query:

First, and most importantly, the reason not to link Darwin to the eugenics movement (outside of familial relations) is simply that up until "The Modern Synthesis," Darwinism wasn't the dominant evolutionary theory; in fact, there were many competing evolutionary theories--some of which, like Lamarckism, were antithetical to Darwinian theory, shunning core ideas like "natural selection." The reason we look back, after the Modern Synthesis (established in the '30s and '40s) and think there's a relationship between Darwinian theory and eugenics is because, in the end, a variation of Darwinian theory turned out to be correct. had Lamarck been correct, we'd probably all intuit a connection between acquired characteristics and eugenics (and think that because some people cannot acquire benefitial characteristics, they should be put down). Let me put it this way:

Vernon Kellogg, writing about the decline of Darwinian thought among evolutionists in Darwinism Today (1908), sought to inform his readers about "the various new theories of species-forming with whose names, such as heterogenesis, orthogenesis, metakinesis, geographic isolation, biologic isolation, organic selection, or orthoplasty, [they] occasionally meet in [their] general reading." At the time, then, that eugenics movement picked up steam in the US, Darwinism was on the wane and all those other variations of evolutionary thought were on the ascent.

To put it another way: Herbert Spencer, the most popular philosopher of the day, was a Lamarckian, not a Darwinian, and yet his name's normally tossed out there as one of the founders of Social Darwinism. This may sound like I'm nit-picking about the names of evolutionary theory, but I'm not: the imagined historical connection of, say, scientific racism or eugenics in 1908 to (pun intended) Darwinism today, in 2005, is constantly evoked. The argument, never stated, is that the current form of Darwinian thought ought to be distrusted now because of the deleterious effects it had on society then.

Only it didn't. To really see which evolutionary ideas were "the dangerous ones," we'd have to look back at which variation of evolutionary theory a particular proponent of eugenics believed in. But that introduces another problem. I said above that Spencer, the man who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest," was a Lamarckian. But he always claimed to be a Darwinian, despite the fact that if you look at what he wrote and the way evolution worked--progressively, as in his infamous phrase, "from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous"--you'll see nothing but an explanation of Lamarckian ideas. And this is Spencer, the single most influential philosopher of the period. There's a reason Stephen Jay Gould called this time "a decade of maximal agnosticism and diversity in evolutionary theories."

Why then do we associate eugenics and the like with Darwinian thought?  As Peter Bowler wrote in The Non-Darwinian Revolution: "the pre-Darwinian history of evolutionism is manipulated to show that earlier naturalists were really groping their way toward Darwinism." Like all Whig histories, this one "distorts the past by picking out a main line of development whose inevitable end product will be the triumph of those telling the story. Any event that does not fit into the scheme is either ignored or distorted so that it does fit." "This," Bowler concludes, "is exactly the pattern followed by the scientific community to create the conventional image of the Darwinian Revolution."

How do you know this, Mr. Self-Citation Man?  Simple:

I recently (thanks to Scott McLemee, who sent them) began looking into the history of the “Little Blue Book” series, since it published both London’s work in pamphlet form, as well as primers on “The Survival of the Fittest” and the like.  What’s significant about these isn’t their materiality per se, but the relation of their materiality to their distribution; understanding the relation of these two aspects is critical to understanding 1) how people were learning what they knew about evolutionary theory and 2) how widespread these ideas were.  I haven’t been able to track down publication data for them yet--haven’t had time to really look, actually--but it will be one factor in which aspects of evolutionary theory I really ought to address.  Reading oodles of contemporary newspapers and magazines, both local and country-wide, has already narrowed the field immensely.  As my new stalker, John Emerson, will attest, I’m currently writing a little about this elsewhere.

On this same front, I don’t know where I’d be without my copy of Hackett’s 70 Years of Bestsellers.  I know there’s an updated edition, but they’re not going to sell any more copies of The Jungle in 1904 than they already have.  The relation of what, in literary circles, typically passes for “a popular novel” doesn’t correspond in the least to which novels were actually popular.  To return to Sinclair, every essay I’ve read about The Jungle discusses how popular and influential it was, the suggestion being that it dominated the literary marketplace and was the book everyone talked about and read...well, it wasn’t.  Influential, yes, but it barely outsold Margaret Deland’s The Awakening of Helena Ritchie and wasn’t in spitting distance of Winston Churchill’s Coniston. Now, this doesn’t take into consideration lending libraries, ubiquitous pirate copies, &c.  But it does indicate the need to inject some Moretti-esque empirical data into our scholarship.

 

Comments

[Simstim]

Playing DA here, but couldn't the earlier role of Darwinism in evolutionary thought (and its public profile) have helped create a discursive space in which the eugenicists, etc. could hold their particular versions of evolution relatively painlessly, i.e. it's an indirect influence.