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.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteDalia, I think I saw a little bit of what you’re pointing to with Darwin’s ambivalence/anxiety(?) about authorship here. I agree that in “Mutual affinities” he seems to say that taxonomy is an “open system,” arguing that “from the varying descendants of each species trying to occupy as many and as different places as possible in the economy of nature, there is a constant tendency in their characters to diverge” (362). The confusion I had here was when he concludes by saying much of our fear about his theory may be in imagining a power “analogous” to human reason, but somehow not superior to it. There is no “grand creator” insomuch that these creatures are not objects acted upon, but rather subjects which change in a way which is beneficial to the self. It is only similar to human reason in that it comes from a drive which man has appropriated into reason; a desire for survival. In a way I think he is saying that natural selection has no author, other than the beings themselves, and thus can dismiss his anticipated religious/naturalist debunkers (“what else is meant by the plan of the Creator, it seems to me that nothing is thus added to our knowledge”[363]).
ReplyDeleteWhat I myself found most compelling in connection to this was a metaphor he uses toward the middle of this chapter. Darwin, perhaps speaking to some of the trends in comparative linguistics, a field just turning to discovering and taxonomizing Indo-European and its descendants, argues that a languages are the best analogue to what naturalists should consider most important to classification.
A descriptivist to the last, Darwin claims that languages are genealogical, ever shifting, and give birth in the same way that the natural system encourages varieties to be born. I personally appreciated the gesture that seems to regard the classification of languages and dialects and similarly arbitrary to “species” and “variation.” He even makes his argument geographical, recapitulating some of his language in “variation in nature,” by positing that some languages, “(owing to the spreading and subsequent isolation and states of civilisation [sic] of the several races, descended from a common race), had altered much” (371). This also gestures towards some of the aforementioned anxiety regarding religious authorities discrediting his work. Almost obstinately he takes on the story of the Tower of Babel, the crucial Biblical dividing point for both the races of man and their languages.
Because I am most interested in the rhetoric of Darwin and his contemporaries, I was rather pleased with Darwin to see this metaphor-about-language enacted. He does not differ greatly from his contemporaries, however, in his own ambivalence toward metaphor. In his conclusion, one of the great victories Darwin sees for his theories seems to be in turning “terms used by naturalists of affinity, relationship, community of type, paternity, morphology…” into terms which will “cease to be metaphorical” (423) in light of his new schema of concrete and ancestral relationships between species over time. This is the unifying paradox of 19th century rhetoricians of science (the penultimate chapter has convinced me that Darwin is one such disciplinary border-crosser, though chiefly a scientist)—there must be a way to express complex truths in a way that is concrete and empirical. Language is the only thing left standing in the way.
Damn the limitations of human language--Darwin is both helplessly entranced and trapped by language, which moves under his hands as species transitions into one another. I like Dalia's metaphor of the anti-Bible. Note, though, that Darwin uses the passive voice: "light is thrown." His scientist-God is not the maker of what he observes; he is not even its observer. If the hidden principle of evolution is dragged into the light of scientific inquiry, what remains hidden to the end is the scientist who did the dragging, invisible, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
ReplyDelete