Super-Adequate Structural Homologies, or The Ornithorynchus Shuffle

Frank Sulloway titles his recent review of James Secord's Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation with brazen inaccuracy: "He Almost Scooped Darwin."  In his response to my contribution to the Theory's Empire event, Sean McCann criticized the distinction I had made between Althusserian interpellation and Foucauldian discourse:

[A]t some level the Althusserian account of the interpellation of the subject and the Foucauldian account (in Archaelogy) of its disappearance are in conflict.  But the conflict isn’t really that deep, is it? What the two accounts share, of course, is a sense that autonomous personhood is wholly the illusory creation of larger, limiting structures...In other words, would it really be wrong for a latterday American academic to recognize an affinity here?

As I noted in my response, Sean's right to say that with sufficient conceptual distance the Althusserian account of social determination resembles Foucault's.  Much is lost in the acquisition of that distance.  (And by much, I mean "the premises.")  Granted, McCann's operating in the tradition of the New Historicist, Benn Michaels Brigade.  The NHBMB values structural homologies, and McCann's analysis pointed to the possibility of a structural homology between Althusserian and Foucauldian thought which would've belied the historical and personal animus between these two pillars of French post-structuralist thinking. 

I spent an unhealthy amount of time thinking about the Althusser/Foucault homology and I still don't know where I stand on it.  But it's keyed me into the appearance of homologies of this ignore-the-premise-focus-on-the-conclusion sort.  Hence my problem with Sulloway's title and the argument sitting pretty beneath it.  To claim even titularly that Chambers' nearly scooped Darwin is to fundamentally misunderstand the significance of the theory of natural selection.  Such a claim entails a cult of personality based first around the anonymous author (later revealed to be Chambers) of the Vestiges and later around Darwin (after the publication of the Origin).  If Sulloway's argument held the water I think drowns it, this cult of personality would have to be founded on the principle that the public adored anyone who said "Things Change!" 

Because "Things Change!" is the extent of the connection between the intellectual content of Chambers' Vestiges and that of Darwin's Origin.  (Don't take my word for it.  Read the Vestiges yourself.)  The most significant difference between Chambers and Darwin concerns the mechanism of evolution:

Darwin had natural selection.  Chambers had monstrous birth.

He discusses the power of monstrous birth in Chapter 14 of the Vestiges.  He first grants that the natural laws of reproduction demand that a mother of a given species give birth to a child of the same species.  But what if man in his inability to be everywhere all the time has missed the occasional monstrous birth?  Is it possible that every once in a while a goose gives birth to a mouse?  According to Chambers, who cites as proof the work of Charles Babbage, we cannot disprove that no geese has ever given birth to a mouse. 

Babbage posited that what one person infers to be a natural law may be the result of an inadequate but effectively infinite set of evidence.  Chambers sat his readers behind Babbage’s "calculating machine" as it ticks 1, 2, 3, 4, all the way to 100,000,000. Reasoning inductively, he argued, a rational person would assume 100,000,0001 would follow 100,000,000. Instead, the calculating machine ticks 100,010,002. The only conclusion, according to Babbage, is that

the law that each number presented by the engine is greater by unity than the preceding number, which law the observer had deduced from an induction of a hundred million instances, was not the true law that regulated its action, and that the occurrence of the number 100,010,002 at the 100,000,002^nd term was as necessary a consequence of the original adjustment, and might have been as fully foreknown at the commencement, as was the regular succession of any one of the intermediate numbers to its immediate antecedent.

Chambers analogized the inability to deduce the engine’s actual programming by induction without a calculation of daunting complexity with the sheer expanse of time within which the natural laws of reproduction have worked. And if one can no more deduce the absoluteness of these laws than the engine’s original programming, it is possible that, at some divinely predetermined time, a goose gave birth to a rat. Chambers noted the occasional retrogression of one species into another, as when the heart of a human fetus "goes no farther than the three-chambered form, so that it is the heart of a reptile."

If the heart of a human fetus can retrogress via an "under-adequacy" into that of a reptile, why should it be beyond the bounds of reason "to imagine an access of favourable conditions to reverse the phenomenon," which is only to say

it is no great boldness to surmise that a super-adequacy in the measure of this under-adequacy (and the one thing seems as natural an occurrence as the other) would suffice in a goose to give its progeny the body of a rat, and produce the ornithorynchus [duck-billed platypus], or might give the progeny of an ornithorynchus the mouth and feet of a true rodent, and thus complete at two stages the passages from the aves [birds] to mammalia. (emphasis mine)

Chambers has naturalized the idea of monstrous births via his appeal to Babbage; now it is as natural for a goose to give birth to a mouse as a gander.  But that's not all.  According to this logic, birds can "evolve" into mammals in "two stages."  (Granted, there's a real logical problem with Chambers logic: if one goose gives birth to one mouse, with whom with that mouse reproduce?  A goose?  But monstrous births are rare by Chambers' own admission, so the likelihood of two geese giving birth to one male and one female mouse is extremely slim.)  The problems with Sulloway's claim should be obvious now:

He pits Chambers' two monstrous births against the imperceptible variations of billions of organisms reproducing over billions and billions of years.  To put it another way:

2 vs. 1,000,000,000^{1,000,000,000}

That said, Sulloway isn't wrong to argue for the significance of Chambers' book.  It did compel a number of people to think about the laws of heredity and it was (and remained) more popular than the Origin until 1901.  What Sulloway doesn't mention is that in Chambers' scheme these monstrous births are the product of divine fiat, a fact which may account for its popularity.  Furthermore, Sulloway never mentions the person responsible for priming the well Chambers would later pump so successfully: Erasmus Darwin.

Such is the danger of acquiring any level of abstraction in which all but the grossest of distinctions are leveled.  I don't think Sean's proposition abstracts itself into imprecision in the same manner.  Still, I do believe this danger lurks behind the quick construction of any structural homology. 

Thus concludes today's lesson.  If you're still reading, congratulations!  You may be a future reader of my dissertation!

Comments

[Adam Roberts]

This is really fascinating, Mr Non-Capo. I've not read the Sulloway book, but of course you're right to flag up that Darwin's contribution was the mechanism of natural selection, rather than the root idea that organisms change from generation to generation -- that idea is far older than Chambers, older even than the Chevalier de Lamarck. That's common sense; any farmer who selectively breeds, as homo sapiens has been doing since farming was invented, knows that organisms change over generations. The real question is how; and the really amazing thing is that Darwin was able to identify how without possessing an understanding of genetics.

But isn't the point about Chambers' contribution more that he established the deep-time background without which natural selection wouldn't have had time to operate? Darwin couldn't have written The Origin of Species if he'd assumed the world was made in 4004 BC atfer all.

Your thesis sounds really fascinating, and I for one am looking forward to reading it, should I ever get the chance. Does Chambers use the phrase 'monstrous' to describe new births, by the way? (excuse my ignorance) That's a word with an interesting pedigree.

Oh, and Althusser and Foucault are on about rather different things, I'd say.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Adam, Sulloway wrote the article, Secord the book; that might not've been clear, esp. since the essay in question can only be read by subscribers. (If only you knew one, and could send him an email, the article could be yours!)

I think you point to how Darwin could discover the mechanism without an understanding of genetics: he knew about selective breeding. And he counted on everyone else knowing the same; thus, the Origin opens with a discussion of the accepted truth of selective breeding, then moves to the discussion of the implications of the fact that organisms change over generations. It's a brilliant rhetorical stroke.

I think the more customary source for the theory of "deep time"--a phrase, oddly enough, not coined by an evolutionary biologist but a journalist, John McPhee, in Annals of the Former World--is Lyell's The Principles of Geology. Darwin's early contributions to the geological sciences all extend from Lyell's uniformitarianism. (David Dobb's unfortunately titled but incredibly well-written and informative Reef Madness is an excellent intro. to this discussion.) As for reading my dissertation, the more the merrier! (Actually, I slipped a paragraph from it--the one on Babbage--into the middle there, so you've actually already started.)

[Sean McCann]

Aceph, I don't think my remark depended on structural homology necessarily (and I don't think it's quite fair to attribute a methodology to me on the assumption that I'm operating in a new historicist vein). I'm quite willing to accept your argument that Althusser and Foucault were quite opposed to each other, and more than willing to recognize that this antagonism, in the context of postwar French intellectual life, had political significance--especially re the CP. And I wouldn't even deny that a significant difference exists that's evident in their understandings of subject formation and appropriate politics among other things.

What I did mean to say is that, as you note, some arguments up close seem significant that at a distance look like the narcissism of small differences. For all their differences, F and A probably had more in common with each other than either did with, say, Habermas--perhaps a reflection of the fact that, despite their different attitudes, each shared a fascination with the way structuralism appeared to promise the end to the human subject. In that context, I think it's no surprise that American intellectuals (who by and large have no feeling about the CP at all) could care less about the differences that mattered to F and A.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Sean, I didn't mean that as an attack on your position or person. Your point got me thinking, and then thinking some more, and then a little more. And as I'm sure you know, I didn't mean the categorization of your work as new historicist as an insult: it describes my own as well, and that's in large part the reason I think about structural homologies for lengths of time most would consider unhealthy. All of which is only to say that if I did have an assumption about your methods, it's only because I really respect Gumshoe America and consider what I took to be its foundational homology to be strikingly brilliant. The same thing applies to New Deal Modernism, and is the reason I contracted to work with Szalay.

In other words, my perpetual glibness--glibidity?--notwithstanding, I don't want you to think my calling you a new historicist was anything other than the compliment I intended it to be. You've me thinking about what constitutes a valid vs. an invalid dismissal of the issues important to people, and that's a healthy conversation to be having with yourself when knee-deep in a dissertation. What I fear--daily without end--is that I'll be attracted to an homology that illegitimately whitewashes significant differences between positions. Hence the airing of these anxieties.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

"You've me thinking"? I won't edit it. That's a perfectly legitimate use of a contraction.