One aspect of Darwin’s thirteenth chapter that we did not get to discuss at length today is the distinction Darwin makes between what cannot be known and what is hidden. In particular, I am struck by the declaration Darwin makes on page 368 and 369, that “community of descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking,” rather than “some unknown plan of creation, or the enunciation of general propositions, and the mere putting together and separating objects more or less alike.” This distinction between the unknown and the hidden is one which Darwin’s approaches more subtly than some of his other statements within this chapter. However, in pursuing this line of argument, Darwin is establishing a compelling counter-argument to those naturalists who “think that something more is meant by the Natural System [and who] believe that it reveals the plan of the creator” (363). This “ordinary view” can provide us no real answers, for we cannot know a higher (perhaps divine) plan of creation. Darwin agrees with these naturalists that “something more is included in our classification, than mere resemblances,” however, this something more is not an unknown (and unknowable) plan of creation, but rather the propinquity of descent, “the bond—hidden as it is by the various degrees of modification” but which is “partially revealed to us by our classifications” (368).
If we read Darwin’s language closely, keeping in our minds his distinction between what cannot be known and what is merely hidden, the dynamic of seeing and knowing takes a place at the forefront of Darwin’s distinction between the ordinary view of some naturalists in approaching classification and Darwin’s view (albeit the correct view) that classification is based on the principle of modification by distinction. To Darwin, this “hidden bond of connexion which naturalists have sought under the term of the Natural System” is, by degrees of discovery, classification, and re-classification, slowly fleshing out “how the several members of each class are connected together by the most complex and radiating lines of affinities” (379-80). This complexity becomes apparent from a close comparison of species, classes, varieties, etc. and only further supports the theory, his theory, that all living things have “descended from one ancient but unseen parent, and consequently have inherited something in common” (362).
It is clear from the language which Darwin employs that he believes that some naturalists, especially those who strive to use and define the natural system as evidence of a plan of creation, have been caught in this inextricable web of affinities. They seek answers from the natural system that will, by their nature, remain unknown because of their inability to be known. He states, “We shall never, probably, disentangle the inextricable web of affinities between the members of any one class; but when we have a distinct object in view, and do not look to some unknown plan of creation, we may hope to make sure but slow progress” (380). The “distinct object in view” is to define and refine classifications through the lens of the natural system as a community of descent. Only through this approach can we explain the baffling and astonishing characteristics of the natural world, for Darwin remarks, “Nothing can be plainer than that wings are formed for flight, yet in how many insects do we see wings so reduced in size as to be utterly incapable of flight, and not rarely lying under wing-cases, firmly soldered together!” (394).
Employing a few of Darwin’s favorite words—some of the most beautiful and wonderful examples of the hidden nature of life, connected by chains of affinities, is the embryo, the smallest and earliest form of life. We look at the embryo and it is remarkably simple, yet it “reveals the structure of its progenitor…[and] It will reveal this community of descent, however much the structure of the adult may have been modified and obscured” (393). The infinite modifications which species have undergone and the assurance that species will forever be in a state of change and modification, only obscures the origins of an ancient shared progenitor. What is remarkable about Darwin’s argument, and the language he employs in chapter thirteen in particular, is that life is both infinitely simple and infinitely complex. He admits the web of life is inextricable, and that naturalists will in all probability be unable to ever completely define all the relationships and connections between the many species on this planet. However, in looking at the embryo, we are struck by common characteristics of all species, extinct, now living, or not yet born. This simple relationship lays at our feet, and it is through the pursuit of now hidden bonds that we can come to understand the origins of species.
--Steph
I’ve noticed that many of us have been following similar threads in our fascination with Darwin’s defamiliarizing rhetoric—such as attention to his curious syntactical choices, unusual mini-narratives, and key word repetitions—in our posts as well as in class. I’m not sure how much of anything new I’ll be able to add to the discussion at this point, then, as we’ve been both diverse and thorough in this venture already, but I’ll throw a few more (potentially troubling or complicating) things out there about Darwin’s language, as well as Darwin’s reflections on that language. I’d like to point to a passage in the final chapter that we didn’t have the chance to discuss earlier today, in which Darwin notes that “analogy may be a deceitful guide” (422). Analogy, of course, is a tool that Darwin employs constantly, and to the reader’s benefit. However, it’s also as much about necessity as it is about being rhetorical, because without his many analogies, Darwin’s readers may be left with no real means by which to “comprehend” natural events so far beyond the cognitive limits of the human mind, as he designates them. Analogy thus serves to reduce this comprehensive gap. Yet here, at the very end of the book, Darwin steps back for a moment and questions that tool he has been relying on steadfastly all along. I should say that I’m building in simile and metaphor under the heading of analogy here, as well, though no doubt there are also particularities at work in Darwin’s recourse to certain figures of speech at different moments. I think, however, that his doubt about the possibility of rhetorical “deceit”—not only perpetrated by text upon reader, but words themselves upon their own thinker/writer—is relevant to each of them.
In this passage, Darwin notes that it can be all too easy to extend an analogy; as a way of simplifying and working through a problem, it’s language that can become all too accessible; the analogy-maker is tempted to get caught up in a kind of repetition compulsion (to use Freudian terms, for there is a singular pleasure there). Darwin’s embryo analogy, should he carry it further, would have him embrace one common progenitor for all species without sound evidence apart from resemblance (the embryo’s physical likeness to other species and to an imagined chain of ancestors throughout its developing stages) and it is resemblance, after all, which he panned earlier in the chapter for being the exclusive basis of many naturalists’ false judgments about species. It is resemblance that is also the foundation of judgment by analogy. But then Darwin continues (“nevertheless all living things have much in common”), seemingly dismissing the just-admitted danger of the “deceitful guide” and saying that “therefore I should infer from analogy…some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed” (422). The disjunction here, and the ignorance of a possible overreaching almost immediately after admitting that analogy allows for the intrusion of various falsehoods, is startling to me.
It isn’t only that Darwin uses analogy as a tool to persuade and clarify; analogy, he knows, may also be “using” him. It constructs spaces for imaginative liberties that might otherwise not be taken (and this goes against those other coveted principles of slowness, in nature and in human judgment, that I examined in my last post). In class today, Allison also brought up Darwin’s idea that “rudimentary organs may be compared with the letters in a word, still retained in the spelling, but become useless in the pronunciation” (398). I think we were all quite taken by the potency and eloquence of Darwin's rhetoric here, but of course, that statement too, is an analogy. Since argument by analogy is generally considered a weak form of reasoning, Darwin doesn't apparently utilize it often to demonstrate a proof of his theories (the instance above of his turning to analogy in order to "infer" a fact is more unusual), but rather to provide his reader with something more easily mentally “graspable,” and capable of visualization, thus enhancing that evidence he has already provided.
One question to ask, then, is how comparisons made for clarification’s sake--like the rudimentary organs/no-longer-pronounced letters analogy--can have side effects of potentially obscuring? I think that Darwin does not want us to forget that, as fitting and illuminating as the juxtaposition is, the adaptation of language and the adaptation of species are also fundamentally different.
I want to think here about Darwin’s ongoing use of imagination which, in Chapter XIII as well as earlier chapters, sanctions the exercise of that faculty only in service of Darwin’s own theories.First, though, I should admit that I’m not sure where to draw the line for what counts as imagination and what doesn’t.It would be possible to look only at passages in which Darwin uses the term “imagination,” but then there all those other instances in which imagination is implied or seems to play at least a supporting role.For example, when Darwin writes about people who attribute animals’ characteristics to “some unknown plan of creation” (369) or, earlier, when he observes that “unless it be specified whether order in time or space, or what else is meant by the plan of the Creator, it seems to me that nothing is thus added to our knowledge” (363).Darwin doesn’t criticize this approach for being imaginative (and here I’m still thinking about his suggestion that readers let reason conquer imagination, in Ch. 6) but rather for beginning to imagine too soon.On 369, the problem with the “plan” is that it’s “unknown,” while on 363 it’s that “nothing is added to our knowledge.”The naturalists get us past this stage of the unknown, and then Darwin swoops in, as it were, to reveal the rest of the “plan”—another plan, one without a Creator—in a final imaginative leap.
Back to the naturalists.How does imagination work here, especially if we’re to consider their work as the impetus for “add[ing] to our knowledge”?Ch XIII is devoted to explaining how they do things—lengthy descriptions of the logic behind the classifications of species within genera, families, etc., with many examples of species I’ve never heard of and so didn’t find terribly helpful.(I wonder if Darwin’s readers would recognize more of these examples?)Darwin’s naturalists are like detectives.Their selection of evidence is obscure to outsiders: “It might have been thought (and was in ancient times thought) that those parts of the structure which determined the habits of life…would be of very high importance in classification.Nothing can be more false” (364).Lesson One: Don’t begin in the obvious place.The general rule is to start with characteristics that don’t relate to the habits of life (364), but even then there’s no guarantee of consistency.Darwin writes, “a classification founded on any single character, however important that may be, has always failed” (366).I am not familiar with the specifics of the detective story genre, but it does seem that this reversal of common-sense logichints at a detective-like sensibility, finding clues in the least likely of places (the geological record won’t supply them!).
Is this imagination or intuition?Perhaps the difference is that one is more informed by fact but, as with the discussion of the Creator’s plan, the difference seems to be in the degree.Intuition fills in the gaps after we’ve taken the facts as far as we can.Darwin recognizes the imagination / intuition at work here, and gives it a name: “all true classification is genealogical; that community of descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking” (369).So all along the naturalists have been intuitively groping toward this principle of genealogical classification.Darwin’s narrative is the naturalists’ detective work on a larger scale, placing him squarely in the realm of imagination according to my model thus far.And in a number of ways he even demolishes the naturalists’ work (their terminology at least), presenting us finally with a sort of utopian vision, asking the reader to imagine that “every form which has ever lived on this earth were suddenly to reappear”(378).He dismisses the possibility of grouping the forms, writing that “all would blend together by steps as fine as those between the finest existing varieties, nevertheless a natural classification, or at least a natural arrangement, would be possible” (378, emphasis mine).And here, I can’t help but imagine Darwin’s diagram expanding, emerging from the page and revealing its million/billion branches and forms, the “tree of Life” uprooting itself from the page” to confirm the theories of the Sherlock Holmes of naturalists!
In Darwin’s “Racapitulation and Conclusion,” Darwin illustrates his awareness of the immense consequences his theory will have. Beginning on page 422, Darwin enumerates the various branches of science that will benefit or change as a result of his theory. “When the views entertained in this volume…are generally admitted, we can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history” (422). Of course, we know that Darwin’s prediction was absolutely correct, and present scientific work is still effected, and often organized, by his theories. This amazing statement begins Darwin’s final thrust, in which he predicts the changes that will occur as a result of his book and finally addresses what may be called the “spiritual” aspect of his theory. The concluding pages are deeply impressive and somewhat surprising. One of the rhetorically interesting aspects of Darwin’s closing pages is his extraordinarily confident tone. Throughout the book, as we have noted in class, Darwin maintained a modest, humble tone and intentionally cultivated an inquiring (yet expert) authorial persona. But as Darwin builds his argument, he becomes more critical of his possible detractors and more confident in his theory and its implications. By the conclusion, Darwin’s harsh, condescending tone in his criticisms of creationists’ has become thinly veiled. Once again, Darwin addresses the possible “difficulties” readers may have with his theory, but he repeatedly expresses an assured belief that the supportive facts and evidence far outweighs the possible trouble.
As Darwin moves towards the closure of his theory, he begins to address the more abstract characteristics of belief. In an effort to diminish the spiritual importance of the creationist view, and to once again bolster his theory, Darwin claims abstracted aspects of belief for himself: “When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled”(426). This statement foreshadows the extraordinary final paragraph, in which Darwin moves to supplant the grandeur of the creation of individual species by God to the grandeur of his theory:
"Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved" (427)
Darwin evokes a sort of spiritual wonder here, a move I didn’t necessarilly expect. However, in my opinion, it is rhetorically effective and genuinely fascinating. This passage reminded me of some of the theories of ideology and belief I have been reading for another class this semester. One of the significant themes running through these theories of belief is the necessity of something sublime, or some “fantasy-support” behind ideologies, whether they are rational or even “believable” in the conventional sense. Slavoj Zizek, in particular, emphasizes the irrational nature of belief. Reading Darwin’s final passage in this context can illuminate what could otherwise be viewed as a troubling or problematic turn in Darwin’s prose and tone. Perhaps Darwin was aware of the importance of that “something more” people often attach to belief, and felt that by pointing out the elegant, beautful, and maybe miraculous nature of what he describes, he would enable more people to be persuaded to his point of view. I am not dismissing the possibility that Darwin actually believed, personally, what he states in his concluding paragraphs. The authentic belief and the use of it as a rhetorical device are not mutually exclusive. In fact, believing that Darwin was himself moved by the abstract beauty of the natural system he describes makes his final statement all the more effective.
(I couldn’t help but wonder, when I read this final paragraph, what Alex would think of the word “beautiful” in the closing line of the book- I am anticipating some interesting discussion today in class.)
We’ve talked some about the problem of God and agency in Darwin’s text, as well as his engagement with religious notions of “creation.” I’m interested in the ways that some of these issues are expressed in the close of Darwin’s text.
The conclusion of Origin of Species moves to summarize the entirety of the text, but also to offer a set of implications. What interests me about Darwin’s close is that it constitutes a final look back—both narratively and biologically. Darwin begins his works with a discussion of “variation”—and complexity, and diversity— and ends with the contention of a single origin: “Analogy would lead me… to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype…probably all the organic being which have ever lived on this earth have descended from one primordial form, into which life was first breathed” (442). Presented as a natural progression of his theory of human change, Darwin ends with the beginning.
Before anything else, this makes me wonder how Darwin envisioned his own writing. In the most patent of ways, this sort of trajectory—from the “end” (or the present) to the beginning—makes Origin of Species seem like a consciously constructed “anti-Bible” (which isn’t particularly shocking, considering Darwin’s problematization of religious thought). He explicitly conceives of the scientific belief in the “miracle” of creation (and he used this term as least twice in his conclusion, on pages 421 and 425) as absurd and obscuring scientific progress. While he comes out against a creationist narrative of organic change, he also presents his own writing as an alternative—and biblical— truth. That is, while he sets out to debunk one “Answer,” he offers another “Answer”; we know that Darwin was setting out to answer THE question (the “mystery of myseries” [11]), which already invites us to understand Darwin as taking his own text quite seriously in producing a “master narrative” of life. The conclusion is strewn with language of his own “enlightening” of various fields of study: “light is thrown” on geology, psychology, and natural history (424-5). In what is to me a reference to the Bible’s “let there be light,” Darwin imagines himself—perhaps accurately!—as a God- figure in that he sheds light on the obscured. He also suggests, in his final words on potential change, that “we can take a prophetic glance into futurity” (426). This scientist-as-prophet language affords a certain kind of “sacredness” (and power) to science as key to comprehending the universe.
If Origin of Species presents as an anti-Bible, it also is an anti-narrative, in the sense that it logically inverts a lineal timeline. What this reading brings to light is the parallel that Darwin makes between biological change and narrative change. Last week, I discussed what I read as a linking of organism change and scientific narrative development through the rhetoric of “perfection” or “imperfection.” Even though one was construed as failing, it seemed to me that Darwin was saying that they both move in the same direction—towards complexity. This close, however, makes me re-think some things. I imagined Darwin to be arguing for a common course of “becoming” or transforming between scientific progress and life’s progress, and that both tell a similar story. In general, I’ve understood Darwin as allowing for an analogous relationship between these two spheres (even the number and quality of editions of Origin of Species seem like a gesture towards narrative evolution and natural selection as directed by himself, the scientist). And I think this is going on, at some level. However, this conclusion, and his decision to end his “story” with the beginning, posits scientific narratives of change (like Darwin’s), in contrast to organic change, as always moving backwards. That is, science, for Darwin, is a story that always begins at the end, from effect to cause. Darwin’s impulses towards the anti-Bible and anti-narrative are linked to propose alternate ways of knowing and learning.
In Darwin’s Ch. 6, “Difficulties on Theory,” in the section in which he addresses “the origin and transitions of organic beings with peculiar habits and structure,” he invokes Audubon and his observations of the frigate bird, which was the enemy of the brown pelican/savior figure in the bird allegory I set up in my pelican presentation.It is interesting to me that he invokes Audubon here in the middle of a parodying an evangelist sermon, and not just Audubon, but his observation of this particular bird.
Darwin regularly maintains a calm tone and a clinical methodology; for instance, several pages before this invocation of Audubon, Darwin informs us, “I will now give two or three instances of diversified and of changed habits in the individuals of the same species” (168).Here Darwin performs his usual calm observation and description.Yet, as he proceeds through these anomalous varieties, he becomes more and more excited.For instance, he describes a woodpecker in La Plata which, though every bit a woodpecker in voice, color and form, does not climb trees: “and on the plains of La Plata, where not a tree grows, there is a woodpecker, which in every essential part of its organization, even its colouring, in the harsh tone of its voice, and undulatory flight, told me plainly of its close blood-relationship to our common species; yet it is a woodpecker which never climbs a tree!” (169).I think I can count on one hand the number of times Darwin makes this kind of an exclamation in this text, and breaking the sentence into so many short clauses increases the pace of the sentence such that we can feel his excitement building.He proceeds from here into a catalogue of anomalous water-bird behavior, finally erupting into a repetition of “He who believes…” (170), taking on the tone of an evangelist preacher.
We have noted in the past that Darwin tends to repeat himself, though we’ve debated about whether that works against or in service of his argument.Regardless, the purpose of his repetitions seems to have been at the very least elusive.Here, it seems pretty clear to me that Darwin is mocking: “He who believes that each being has been created as we now see it, must occasionally have felt surprise…,” “He who believes in separate and innumerable acts of creation will say…,” “He who believes in the struggle for existence and in the principle of natural selection will acknowledge…” (170).Darwin’s readers could almost see him at the pulpit shouting down to his congregation, or, for those of us here at Indiana University, we can easily imagine him outside of Woodburn Hall yelling at us. But, oddly, I think, the last one who believes something believes against the other two, because he believes in natural selection.This person also engages his mind by acknowledging, rather than simply feeling or saying.
Between the first two of these “He who believes” Darwin invokes Audubon, it seems to me, as some kind of prophet or witness or visionary, though I’m not sure where to take that.Darwin mock-preaches that surely those who think each species has been created as-is must feel surprise when they find those species have parts that do not seem appropriate for their behavior.Here, Darwin’s command of capitalization lapses, when he asks, “What can be plainer than that the webbed feet of ducks and geese are formed for swimming? yet there are upland geese with webbed feet which rarely or never go near the water; and no one except Audubon has seen the frigate-bird, which has all its four toes webbed, alight on the surface of the sea” (170).Comparing this to a similar construction in which he asks about woodpeckers, “Can a more striking instance of adaptation be given than that of a woodpecker for climbing trees and for seizing insects in the chinks of the bark? Yet in North America…” (169), shows Darwin capitalizing “yet” following a question in a less heated moment.Leading into his Audubon invocation, his lowercase “yet” following a completed question suggests to me a loss of precision due to, perhaps, his getting caught up in the excitement of mock-sermonizing (of course, I’d need to look at other editions to make sure this isn’t just a copying error).So what can we make of this invocation of Audubon witnessing the only alighting of a frigate pelican on the sea, the only alighting of something like a Satan-figure, in the midst of mocking evangelist preachers?
This is partially an exploration of the questions about Darwin’s relationship to time—and to the duration of the process of natural selection—that Lindsey poses in her recent post, especially “how does the idea of linear time more generally affect/frame Darwin's arguments?”
Darwin is forever warning his readers against “quickness.” In Chapter VI, for instance, he advises us to “pause before being too positive even in this case,” this case being our prior assumption that the “fly flapper” of the giraffe does not serve a crucial purpose in the animal’s well-being, and thus has not been honed over long years by natural selection (178). However, it is important to note that Darwin himself pauses, or at least takes his time, in coming to this point. He raises the question at the very beginning of the chapter, as that of an imagined potential objector, taking on the objector’s own voice in asking why we would believe that natural selection is responsible for “organs of such wonderful structure” (as the eye) along with “organs of trifling importance” (159). However, he does not return to the question of the “fly flapper” until much further into the chapter; through his own formal delay, he conveys himself as contemplator who ruminates necessarily at great length before making any assertions, exactly what he encourages his readers to do throughout. I’d like to suggest, ultimately, that Darwin’s favoring of “slowness” is operating on multiple levels and multiple subjects, form and content being tightly intertwined: for one, Darwin’s scientific method happens over a great duration of time (considering this book is only an “abstract”), for another, his prose style has a carefully plodding quality, and ultimately, natural selection is itself a slow process (as Darwin slowly presents it to be).
While Nature itself may “never take a leap, but must advance by the shortest and slowest steps,” so, too, in Darwin’s view, must human beings who pursue their own ever-evolving understanding of Nature (178). When Darwin tells us that Nature cannot “take a leap,” he may just as well be outlining the need for the scientist, or even the scientific reader, to constantly “pause,” as he goes on to ask of us on that same page. So, too, Darwin could be outlining not only a scientific ‘coming-to-knowledge’, but a temporal methodology for his narrative. His sentence structure enforces the idea of a cool and steady calculation, the work of a writer who—unlike Audubon—takes his time, always paces himself. Consider the length of many of Darwin’s sentences, their sense of cautious and purposeful motion, and his rare usage of the exclamation point. I haven’t counted to be sure, but I think that a comparison of Audubon’s writing would display a much greater use of exclamation, and a willingness to convey “excitability.” Darwin, however, due maybe to the controversy of the theory he is presenting (for Audubon, there was never so much at stake) can’t afford the risk of getting too excited, and looking like he has simply “run away” from the objective position of scientist (Not that he doesn’t manage to convey his passion for his work in other ways, as in, for instance, his frequent praises of beautiful forms in nature).
Darwin instead constructs his text in a natural-selection like fashion, constantly honing in new sentences those sentences that have come before; you find him always qualifying previous statements in order to lead to greater clarity on the most particular points (even those that may seem to the lay reader as unimportant, at first, as the tail of a giraffe) just as nature further produces modifications in species. In fact, Darwin’s sentences often utilize modifiers of modifiers, which serve to put forth contentious ideas as tentatively and modestly as possible. My personal favorite, which I’ll give as an example, is from Chapter IV: “From these several considerations…I am strongly inclined to suspect that, both in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, an occasional intercross with a distinct individual is a law of nature” (98). While “law of nature” is strong wording, it is downplayed by the word “occasional,” rather than just “intercross” alone, and becomes even more diluted by the introductory phrase “I am strongly inclined to suspect that.” It isn’t good enough for Darwin that his cautious, slow, reflective nature be conveyed by the word “suspect” here, which he chooses to say instead of “believe,” or by the even stronger wording, which would be removing the “I” from the picture entirely and just saying “An occasional intercross is a law of nature.” Rather, even Darwin’s “suspect” has to be modified: he doesn’t suspect; he is “inclined to suspect” (strongly, though, to give him some credit). What I find so fascinating about Darwin’s language is how it often becomes an amalgam of the confidently assertive and the carefully tiptoeing—few writers, I think, could manage to do both at once.
Even though Darwin is pushed, to some extent, into writing in this seemingly modest way, by the gravity of his subject matter, he also is aware that slowness in general is not something that the people of his own increasingly fast-paced modern world are predisposed to appreciate. Consider the chapter on natural selection, where he states, “That natural selection will always act with extreme slowness, I fully admit” (103). The fact that Darwin feels he has to “fully admit” this fact was rather humorous to me, because I read it as having the air of providing an apology for nature, and so, too, perhaps, for the scientist. Something like: ‘I’m sorry that it may not be as dynamic as what you have been hoping for, but patience, as they always say, is a virtue, and just because it’s slow—unlike the Biblical God who creates the world in seven days, and species in only a couple—doesn’t mean it isn’t just as powerful.’ After Darwin’s initial “confession” of Nature’s slowness, he goes on, then, to repeat the word “slow” or “slowly” five times in the course of the following page (105). It is as if his audience’s recognition of the slowness of natural selection must also necessarily dawn on them slowly, and only with mass repetition at that. Darwin’s chorus of “slow, slow, slow” resonates for me, with Thoreau’s “simplify, simplify, simplify,” which is also, in a sense, an imperative to slow down modern life. While I don’t think that Darwin would say Nature is simple (he prefers to talk about its “complexity” and “intricacy”), it does simplify, since even without consciousness, its adaptations (yes, including the tail of the giraffe) make life simpler, though never simple, for individual species.
Darwin further “justifies” the slowness of natural selection to his readers in the following paragraph:
“Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do much by his powers of artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the coadaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may be effected in the long course of time by nature’s power of selection” (104).
Again, Darwin is making concessions of a sort here: Yes, Nature may be slow, but you can expect it to be all the more powerful than those creations that humans have demonstrated themselves to be capable of making quickly. “Beauty and infinite complexity” are here promised as rewards for taking one’s time (a gradual unfolding) and this is also Darwin’s gift to the reader at this stage in his own long project. After all, he introduces himself, as well as his research, in the Introduction to Origin of Species, as one who has been “patiently accumulating and reflecting” and “steadily [pursuing] the same object” (12). He ends his first paragraph with an appeal to his own timeliness: his desire “to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision,” just as he hopes, too, that the readers of Origin—like him, like Nature itself—will not be “hasty” either, in forming an assessment or dismissing his theories offhandedly.
*This post stops short of discussing the telescope comparison, which would probably open up my questions about Imagination and Reason (and the use of analogy) in interesting ways, but perhaps we'll get to this passage in class, since Natalie also brings it up in her post.
I'm interested in Darwin's use of the term “perfect” in describing the structures and species that result from natural selection in Chapter VI, “Difficulties on Theory.” The ideal of perfection is of course jarring in the context of a work whose overall tendency is present nature in a state of constant flux. So , what does perfection mean in this context? This first comes up on page 166 of this chapter. Darwin traces the possible evolution of the flying squirrel, arguing that “by the accumulated effects of this process of natural selection, a perfect so-called flying squirrel [is] produced.” Here, the flying-squirrel in its then-current state is described as perfect, but the term, interestingly, is followed up by another-- “so-called”--that suggest to the reader the uncertainty and anthropocentrism of this classification. The second mention occurs on the next page, in which Darwin attempts to explain how birds might have acquired their “perfect power of flight” (167). Here, flight evolves out of a skill at falling: intermediate species leap and parachute until the relevant membranes enable them to fly. When flight occurs, it is designated “perfect.” But that doesn't seem to be because it's the best of all possible flights. It's more likely perfect in the sense that we (Darwin, the reader then and now) can recognize it as flight. The same goes for the “perfect...flying squirrel.” In a nature that always changing its demands on a species, perfection is emphatically located in the human mind, in the present moment or geological age.
Similarly, we find “imperfection” in the less complex optic nerves of crustaceans, which have at their lower ends “an imperfect vitreous substance” (172). The imperfection is not necessarily related to whether the crustacean is sufficiently well-adapted to thrive in its environment, but rather to how well it conforms to a human conception of what an eye ought to be. The “imperfect vitreous substance” here is offered as an intermediate step between species—the imperfect is a stop-gap measure that enables Darwin and the reader to make that imaginative leap to understand the “imperfect explanation” offered in this chapter (172). And again, the explanation is imperfect not because it necessarily fails to conform to Nature's requirements, but because it fails to conform to man's.
There are two glaring problems when it comes to formulating a perfect explanation, both of which Darwin acknowledges. The first would be the gaps in the geological record: the information just isn't available to us. The second problem is that, even if the information were available (in earlier chapters, Darwin asserts, it has been), the reader would have no interest in reading, say, an exhaustive catalog of species over millenia. So the imperfection here implicates the reader, and the reader, as we've suggested in class discussions, wants a story, and perhaps knows no other way to communicate.
I'm quibbling with Darwin a bit when I characterize this move as imaginative leap. Despite the fact that he admonishes readers to let “reason...conquer...imagination” at the bottom of 172, Darwin does seem to be presenting us with an imaginative activity: inviting the reader to follow him through an imperfect exercise in which he sets up a series of inferior eye-formations, suggesting that we might theorize how the gradual process of natural selection could fill the gaps between these different structures. But he limits the reach of imagination (or whatever faculty he's drawing on) from the beginning, stating that “how a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated” (171). What faculty is he appealing to in his conclusion of this portion of the argument, though? He writes, apropos of the various facts and suggestions assembled, “I can see no very great difficulty...in believing that natural selection has converted the simple apparatus of the optic nerve...” etc. (172). There is a semblance of reason here, but the language seems equally suggestive of faith. So, does the imaginative leap land us in the realm of reason, or faith (or both or neither)?
Hey all, I wrote this at home and then saw Alex's post. Looks like we wrote about similar things :). Oh well! In Chapter 6, Darwin really brings out the big, contentious guns of his theory, even as he is dealing with others’ arguments against it, and his own conceptual difficulties and possibilities for refutation. What is most interesting to me in this chapter, and indeed as a continuation of what went on previously, is Darwin’s attempts to dispel essential assumptions about the centrality and legitimacy of humans and more specifically, human perceptions of time, cause and effect, and significance in the universe. This is evidenced by the many uses words of referring to human ‘imagination’ and visual forms of observation, creatures ‘as we [humans] see them’ in the world around us, but also in a few larger thematic areas: that of human perception dealing with and surrounding the idea of a divine ‘Creator,’ of causality, and finally, concerning perfection or meaning. I’m just going to deal with human perception of a divine Creator in this blog post, though I’d love to talk about the other areas in class and have specific passages underlined that address the other areas.
Quite obviously, if this is Darwin’s chapter that addresses rival theories or disbelief in his own, then of course it’s no surprise that he should speak to those readers that discount his theory because of their belief in a biblical, Creator-based ideology. He deals with this particular opposition through several different methods. At first, he caters to emotion and a sense of personal accuracy, when he suggests that “he who believes that each being has been created as we now see it, must occasionally have felt surprise when he has met with an animal having habits and structure not at all in agreement.” Come now, he seems to say, every human being has felt, when marveling at the wondrous creation around us, that some habits and structures of animals seem to not fit a ‘purpose’ or ‘plan’ of a Creator, and we can’t understand why they look the way they do and yet their actions defy their appearance, or vice versa. The appeal to human bewilderment, a humble and Creator-friendly feeling (not haughty), opens a space to insert reason where ideology and a throwing up of the hands to a higher power has previously taken hold. Then, he takes a sort of quicker and cheaper shot, when he suggests that a Creationist attributing one creature replacing another to the will and pleasure of a divine Creator, instead of to the process of Natural Selection, is just “restating the fact in dignified language.” But his most interesting strategy is the one he employs when discussing the structure of the eye and its man-made counterpart, the telescope. This time, I think he hits the mark because he uses the language and structures of feeling propagated by the ideology he seeks to dispel. If we agree that the telescope and the eye are essentially similar structures, Darwin says, and we’re unsure of how the eye formed, but are certain that the telescope was created and modified to its current advanced state through “long-continued efforts of the human intellect,” then it is possible to see that some kind of comparable process formed the ‘perfect’ organ of the eye as we know it today. Here’s where Darwin pulls out a huge surprise: “But may not this inference be presumptuous? Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man?” and later, “may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?” Here, in the service of producing a certain guilty, humble affect in his readers that ascribe to a divine Creator, Darwin throws aside his own language of trying to work out the correct emphasis of natural selection that will not seem like an agent or in terms of contingent human perspective, to instead employ his opposition’s sense that God is greater than man, and that man’s powers of perception and intellect, though they create marvelous inventions, come up woefully short. This at first seems to go against his entire project, since it implies that the works of creation, in the latter quote, are indeed a Creator’s, and far above the puny works of humans and beyond human comprehension. But far from doing that it produces the desired affect: “How could we possibly think we’ve done anything spectacular with the telescope or anything else, in light of God’s genius, which we can never grasp or begin to understand?” at the same time that it makes possible the condition for Natural Selection’s process of forming the eye, which clearly goes against the ‘rules’ of the ideology in question as it dethrones both any Creator but also the human perception of one, even as it characterizes that perception in terms of and inferior to Godlike perception! Again, it’s amazing how Darwin, through careful use of language, can maintain and reinforce the affect produced and structured by the opposing ideology, and use it to his own argument, even as his logic refutes that ideology.
In the sixth chapter of The Origin of Species, Darwin tries to anticipate and dispel objections to his theory of evolution through natural selection. Darwins “Difficulties on Theory,” include the apparent absence of transitional varieties or species and “organs of extreme perfection,” such as the eye, which seems too complex to have arisen via the small, gradual steps of natural selection. His difficulties do not explicitly include religious and philosophical problems, but these problems are barely below the surface, everywhere threatening to break through, and several changes in Darwin’s writing style may reflect both his own awareness of these problems and his inability or unwillingness to confront them, even in a chapter that is explicitly about difficulties on theory.
In explaining why few transitional varieties are found in nature, Darwin points out that “the very process of natural selection constantly tends, as has been so often remarked, to exterminate the parent-forms and the intermediate links” (211). Similarly, in “Natural Selection,” Darwin wrote that “each new variety or species, during the progress of its formation, will generally press hardest on its nearest kindred, and tend to exterminate them” (155). It is seldom the physical environment itself which destroys an individual or species, but rather the extreme competition for resources among creatures that have similar roles. An individual feels the greatest competition from members of its own variety or species, a variety feels the greatest competition from members related varieties, and a species feels the greatest competition from any species that fills a similar environmental niche in terms of habit and diet. This picture of how species are formed (and constantly, endlessly reformed) is a far cry from loving thy neighbor. Though “eat or be eaten” may be familiar to Darwin’s audience from an economic perspective, it’s hard to accept as a larger, natural agent.
Equally subversive are Darwin’s repeated assertions that “natural selection cannot possibly produce any modifications in any one species exclusively for the good of another species” (228). This idea stands in contrast to the belief that “many structures have been created for beauty in the eyes of man, or for mere variety” (227). In the Christian tradition, animals exist for man and under man’s dominion; an animal’s purpose is to serve or be used by man. Darwin’s theory posits that, though man can profit from animals, natural selection forms animals to be suitable for their own purposes, their own survival.
Finally, Darwin’s Nature is imperfect: “Natural selection will not necessarily produce absolute perfection; nor, as far as we can judge by our limited faculties, can absolute perfection be everywhere found” (233). Through the natural selection process, a part or organ can be improved more and more, but only so long as improvement of the part provides an increased survival advantage to the individual. Far from being perfect, parts will be good enough, an idea which runs counter to Christian depictions of an omniscient Creator who perfectly designs each distinct species.
Darwin does not give any direct commentary on how his theory conflicts with these religious and philosophical ideas, but some odd shifts in his writing style indicate that he is aware of these issues. There are three explicit references to the Creator in this chapter, compared to zero references in the “Natural Selection” chapter. Two of these references are questions: “have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man?” (219); and “may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?” (219). Both of these questions posit that there is a Creator connected to the process of natural selection—the former question even seems to suggest that natural selection is the intellectual power of God. But despite these references to the Creator, there seems to be no room for anything but a Deist Creator in Darwin’s theory. Darwin’s third reference to the Creator makes this clear: “He who believes in separate and innumerable acts of creation will say, that in these cases it has pleased the Creator to cause a being of one type to take the place of one of another type; but this seems to me only restating the fact in dignified language” (219). Darwin is claiming that this invocation of the Creator is not a real explanation of mechanism at all, only a reiteration of a fact with the word “Creator” attached to it. If Darwin ascribes the transformation of species to the Creator at all, he believes the Creator’s mechanism is natural selection, a process which, like Newton’s clock, needs no one to set it.
In addition to Darwin’s references to the Creator, Darwin also mentions “the differences between the races of man” (227) an oblique reference which nonetheless creates more potential debate, more “difficulties on theory.” Darwin is careful not to venture too far into this dangerous territory, but it is surprising that he includes a reference to the races of man at all since this is not important to Darwin’s argument in the chapter. As the chapter closes, the reader is not treated to descriptions of infinite beauty and complexity as in the “Natural Selection” chapter. Rather, the reader is told that “Unity of Type” is secondary to and enforced by “Conditions of Existence” (233). “Unity of Type” carries with it ideas of both internality (species preformed, stable, and perfect) and other-worldliness, whereas “Conditions of Existence” are external spatial and historical facts that shape a species until they “come to be tolerably well-defined objects” (210). Again, there is no necessary place for the Creator Darwin has referenced earlier.
As Darwin vigorously defends natural selection on scientific grounds, he simultaneously introduces many of the philosophical and religious objections his readers are likely to have without actually confronting them. Each species pushes hardest on its nearest kin, animals are not made for man’s use, and creatures are often imperfect; as if these suggestions are not revolutionary enough by themselves, Darwin’s references to the Creator and to the human races invite the reader to think about all these issues in relation to God and to man. Unlike the scientific difficulties which Darwin discusses and counters at length, the philosophical and religious “Difficulties on Theory” inherent in natural selection are present but unanswered.
Roughly a third of the way into the sixth chapter of On the Origin of Species, Darwin asserts the following: “I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale” (169). To the right of this passage I scribbled the following: “I think that I would pay to see such a movie.” Sheer sophomorism. One is surprised that I was able to refrain from adding a doodle of the proposed beast. And yet. And yet, as I was reviewing my marginalia and (as is my wont) erasing the snide and flip remarks, I found myself pausing over this particular comment. In some small way it seemed to crystallize my growing sense that there is something to be said on the subject of Darwin and the fantastic.
As was noted in Thursday’s class, Darwin is not a writer who stays along the shores of the known. No, he plays amidst the gaps of our knowledge, plumbs the depths of our ignorance, and, quite occasionally, splashes us with the hypothetical. Often these hypotheticals are quite grand. “[I]f the Malay Archipelago were converted into land, the tropical parts of the Indian Ocean would form a large and perfectly enclosed basin” (271), he supposes at one point, shifting endless mounds of dirt and water with the nib of his pen. Even more fascinating to me, however, are the hypothetical scenarios that stretch the bounds of the possible.
I am a particular fan of Darwin’s idea that “It would suffice to keep up the full number of a tree, which lived on average for a thousand years, if a single seed were produced once in a thousand years, supposing that the seed were never destroyed, and could be ensured to germinate in a fitting place” (68). Darwin introduces this hypothetical tree for a number of reasons. First of all, it is meant to reinforce, by means of exaggeration, his point that “the average number of any animal or plant depends only indirectly on the number of its eggs or seeds” (68), and depends far more directly upon the ability of those eggs or seeds to survive destruction. In this way the supposed tree also helps to reinforce just how competitive and violent nature must be—if a single seed could suffice to keep up the full number of a tree, then the fact that trees produce a huge number of seeds testifies to the difficulty of ensuring said seeds’ survival. I would also like to argue, however, that this imagined tree performs a less obvious function. Namely, it defamiliarizes the shorter-living, seed-spewing trees that are so common to us all. We take for granted that trees produce a great number of seeds, but as Darwin demonstrates, if nature was a little less competitive than it is, our world would play host to a very different type of tree.
If we were going to grant this “story” of the one-seeded tree a genre, we would no doubt place it in the category of fantasy or science fiction. (Two genres that often endeavor to defamiliarize the world, to employ the fantastic in an attempt to make the reader reflect upon the unbelievable nature of the everyday.) That said, what interests me here is not that Darwin would anticipate the techniques of science fiction or modern fantasy in some way. What interests me is how such fantastical images function within the context of this specific book.
To my mind, the idea of a tree that lives a thousand years and delivers only one seed in that time is less fantastical than many of the facts that Darwin offers in other parts of his book. It is at least as easy for me to believe in this mystical tree as it is for me to believe that the organs that once allowed Annelids to breathe now allow insects to fly. It is easier for me to believe in the tree than to believe that water really turned vast stone formations into sediment. How great an artist Darwin must be to make nature seem infinitely stranger than anything that he himself could invent!
And he is an artist. For when I set down his book the world I see seems richer and stranger in much the same way that it does when I set down a great novel. On the Origin of Species defamilarizes the world as a whole. When I set it down and look outside I see an ancient cliff where once I saw pebbles; I hear avian battle cries where once I heard the singing of innocents. His vision of the world is so new and compelling that, even now, a full 150 years after his book’s publication, it allows me to re-envision my surroundings.
The ability to see what others couldn’t, to make leaps that others dare not? Sheer creativity. The ability to help one’s audience gain these very same insights and make these very same leaps? Sheer artistry.
