The Enigma of Evolution and the Challenge of Chance

By Denise Carrington-Smith

Evolution. It is not a question of if, but a question of how. Commonly accepted, Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection leaves unanswered some fundamental questions.

How did life originate?

How did the DNA code originate?

How did multi-cellular life originate?

How did sex originate?

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Storixus Media and Publishing
• Release date: Sep 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9780648364023

Denise Carrington-Smith

Denise Carrington-Smith received her Ph.D. from James Cook University in the History of Ideas relating to theories of human evolution. Prior to that she was Principal of the Victorian College of Classical Homœopathy and also served as President of the Australian Federation of Homœopaths. Aside from her work with Natural Therapies, specializing in homœopathy , herbalism, and Bach Flower Remedies, Denise is also qualified as a psychologist and a hypnotherapist. She is now retired and focus' on writing.

Book preview

The greatest obstacle to the progress of science

is not ignorance;

it is the illusion of knowledge.

David J. Boorstein

Part I

ANTICIPATION

Before 1850

Thoughts on Evolution before Darwin

Chapter 1

Turning the Universe Upside Down

Ajourney through time takes no time at all – one only has to think! A journey through thought takes far longer, for the same reason. One has to think!

I have never questioned the fact of evolution. However, when I took up the study of archæology (which I did in my retirement) I started to question Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. As I was to find, I was not alone in accepting that, while a process such as natural selection could account for variation within species, it could not be considered the sole and sufficient cause of all evolution of life on this Earth.

This book is based on the research I undertook in the course of completing both my Master’s and my Doctor’s degrees. For the first, I researched pathologies found in fossil remains to learn what I could about ancient people, such as the Neanderthals, and even Homo erectus. I came to the conclusion that, in many ways, they were not so very different from us. This led me to ponder why, in so much of the literature, there appears to be an underlying assumption that, while human beings (homo sapiens) are ‘wise’, all our forebears were decidedly stupid! Some accounts portrayed ancient ‘humans’ as exhibiting far less common sense than the animals.

Some of the material included in this book was omitted from my thesis, either because my original exceeded the word limit (which it definitely did!) or because the material was deemed too controversial. My supervisors supported me where they could, but did not agree with all the conclusions to which I came.

It is often said that the best place to start is at the beginning and, where the West is concerned, that is very definitely with the Greeks. This is true in relation to art, philosophy and politics. The influence of the Middle East came later, during and after the time of the Romans, following the spread of Christianity and, later, Islam, as the Moors pushed north into Europe via Spain. It is with the resurgence of Greek thinking that we are concerned here, with the rediscovery of the philosophical works of Plato and Aristotle during the Enlightenment. Plato’s concept of God and Aristotle’s concept of ‘The Great Chain of Being’, with humans at the top, infiltrated and underpinned Christian thinking for centuries and, in many cases, continues to do so to this day. For this reason, it will seem very familiar. The concepts are simple and easy to understand, so please do not be put off by the appearance of these two names in this opening chapter. Without understanding their contribution, it is impossible to understand the later debate which, at times, became quite controversial and even bitter.

As I researched the literature on evolutionary thought in Europe, from the time of the Ancient Greeks until the dawning of the Age of Science in the eighteenth century, one book, The Great Chain of Being, by Arthur Lovejoy (1936), was referenced so frequently that it became clear that the knowledge acquired by Professor Lovejoy in this field was so extensive that it was generally accepted by later writers. I was happy to do the same. As I moved forward in time, the literature became more extensive until it had expanded to such a degree that it would be impossible for one person to read and evaluate it all, at least within the time-frame allowed for the completion of a thesis. I make no pretense that this book covers all that has been written on the subject of evolution, especially post Darwin, but, again, certain books were repeatedly referenced and it was clear that these were the seminal volumes which provided the basis for the opinions which permeated this field of thought. It was upon these I concentrated, but, of course, I was more than happy to include lesser known works when they made material contributions, often by putting forward an opposing idea.

While Eastern philosophers had embraced the concept of æons of time, of ages succeeding ages, of universes being created and dissolved, of universal change and evolution, Western thought had for hundreds of years been encased in the more limiting Judaic tradition. This held that the world had been created but a few thousand years ago and that it had taken but six days for its Creator to complete His Creation. Apart from the destruction caused by the Flood, the world today was very much as it had been at the time of Adam and Eve. No new living forms had been created and, some people maintained, none had been lost.

The imperfection of Man, his potential for improvement in this world, with the possibility of perfection in the next, was accepted Church doctrine during the first millennium A.D. The Earth was assumed to be flat, the Sun, Moon and stars occupied the heavenly sphere, which was assumed to be a ‘sphere’ because of the rotatory motion of the Sun and Moon around the Earth.

It was the rediscovery of the works of the ancient Greek philosophers, particularly Plato, Socrates and Aristotle, but also of Ptolemy, which revolutionized Western thought during the second millennium, resulting in the questioning of previously accepted religious and secular thought and ushering in the Ages of Enlightenment, Reason and Science.

That the Earth was but a small speck in the cosmos had been accepted in earlier times. The Greek astronomer, Ptolemy, had spoken of the Earth as a mere dot in comparison with the heavens (Lovejoy 1936/1964: 100):

It has been shown that the distance between the center of the earth and the summit of the sphere of Saturn is a journey of about eight thousand seven hundred years of 365 days, assuming that one walks forty leagues a day (i.e. the distance in round numbers is 125 million miles) … And if the earth is thus no bigger than a point relatively to the sphere of the fixed stars, what must be the ratio of the human species to the created universe as a whole?

As the philosophies of the ancient Greeks, especially Plato, filtered their way through the thoughts of philosophically minded Europeans, it was inevitable that comparisons would be made between the teachings of the ancient Greeks and those of the ancient Jews. Some attempted to merge the two positions, others saw the differences as irreconcilable. Initially, the Church was not much disturbed by the ponderings of the few, but as these ponderings became more widespread, attempts were made to suppress them, at least in part, as Galileo and Copernicus discovered to their cost. Nevertheless, alternative Greek thought gradually percolated through the upper levels of European society.

The ‘Goodness’ of Plato

The Jews believed in a very personal concept of God. Not only was he very intimately concerned with the affairs of the Jewish people, he exhibited some very human characteristics. For example, he was a ‘jealous’ God, who wreaked vengeance on his enemies and those of ‘His People’ – the Jews. Plato’s concept of God was quite different. God was complete, perfect, self-sufficient, in need of nothing, not even praise or worship, from humans who could add nothing to his ever-present completeness – ‘Goodness’. No Earthly creature was self-sufficient. All were in need of sustenance, of companionship. Being incomplete, they were imperfect, not ‘Good’. This did not mean that humans, or any other parts of Creation, were ‘evil’, merely not ‘perfect’, not complete. This concept of the completeness of God was to play a large part in shaping the philosophical and religious thought of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

If God was ‘complete’ and ‘perfect’, what need had he of Creation? Plato hypothesized that God, being ‘Good’, had no envy. Therefore, He could not deny existence to anything capable of being created and had, therefore, ‘allowed’ creation to take place, Self-Sufficing Perfection becoming Self-Sufficing Fecundity. While nothing incomplete was beautiful, and no part of creation was complete in itself, taken together, creation was ‘Good’, i.e. perfect, complete and beautiful. From this concept came the thought that if any creature were to disappear from the Earth, i.e. become extinct, the world would be less than complete, less than perfect. Since the completeness of the Earth mirrored the completeness of God, such a notion was incompatible with the perfection of God (Mayr 1982).

Plato had envisaged a God complete in itself, yet which had caused (or allowed) to be created the entire Universe, not seeing these two concepts as being in any way irreconcilable. From Plato’s concept of plenitude (everything that could be, was) came Aristotle’s concept of continuity. Aristotle argued that there was no true boundary between organic and inorganic, between plants and animals, or between different types of animals. Some marine forms attached themselves to rocks, as plants were attached to the Earth, and died if separated therefrom; bats were mammals, yet flew like birds. Otters and seals were mammals as much at home in the water as fish, while some fish flew through the air, if only for short distances. Apes were neither true quadrupeds nor true bipeds.

Aristotle acknowledged the possibility of classification while upholding the possibility of continuity. It was these two distinct concepts which were to prove so troublesome to naturalists in the 18th and 19th centuries. Aristotle did not himself arrange creatures in a single Chain of Being, but he did suggest an arrangement based on the ‘powers of soul’ possessed by the various organisms, the rational soul of Man being the most superior. Each higher order possessed all the powers of those below it, with an additional differentiating one of its own.

While agreeing with Ptolemy regarding the comparative size of the Earth, Bacon ‘Westernized’ Plato’s philosophy by maintaining that, as Man had been made to serve God, so the world had been made to serve Man, without whom the world would be without aim or purpose.

According to Lovejoy, this attitude was portrayed by many 19th and 20th century writers as if it were the attitude of Europeans throughout the Middle Ages and into modern times, instead of being a minority view. The Mediæval view of the Universe was not that the Earth took the centre, i.e. the most important, place. In fact, it was quite the reverse. The Earth was placed in the most lowly position, as far removed as possible from the heavenly spheres, the abode of God and His angels. The actual centre of the Universe was Hell, with Earth, in its sub-lunary position, scarcely any more elevated. The sub-lunar sphere was corruptible; the heavenly spheres beyond the Moon were perfect, complete, incorruptible. Earth was described as the worst, lowest, most lifeless part of the universe, the bottom of the house (Lovejoy p. 102).

Aristotle based his system on pairs of opposites: hot/cold, moist/dry. These ‘essences’ manifested, in various proportions, in earth, air, fire and water, all of which had their natural ‘place’. The place of Earth was the centre, which, as stated above, was held to be the worst, most lowly place. The Sun, being hot, had the greatest tendency to rise and was thus placed in the heavens, not merely physically, but in essence. Placing the Earth in the heavens, in an equal place with the Sun, elevated it from its humble (sub-lunar) position to a celestial one, and it was this elevation which was the cause of the opposition by the Church to the Copernican system.

Aristotle’s Chain of Being extended from God, down through the Heavens and its angels, to Man, then to the animals, plants and the Earth itself. This was compatible with the Christian belief that humans held a unique position; they were the only creatures which partook of two natures, being half spiritual and half material. The animals had no souls and the angels had no bodies. The human position, while an important link in this chain, was nevertheless a lowly one. Humans were the lowest beings who could aspire to enter the heavenly regions, but only by great effort, having led a pure life, and even then not without the Saviour’s Grace.

The people of the Middle Ages believed that the Heavens were filled with spiritual, angelic beings, far outnumbering souls on Earth. Although there were some differences between the spiritual cosmologies of the Eastern and Western branches of the Christian Church, and between them and the spiritual cosmology of Islam, all were based on Judaic philosophy and found their way into European thought via tradition, not the direct teaching of the Bible. One tradition postulated seven heavens inhabited by the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Virtues, Principalities, Powers and Dominions, the first two of these being the realms of the archangels and angels. (Archangels are lower than angels, giving them the ability, on rare occasions, to communicate with humans, something which the angels cannot do.) Another tradition was slightly different: archangels, angels, Seraphim, Cherubim, Principalities, Dominions and Powers. Another combined the two, raising the number of Heavens from seven to nine, which some held to be the more ‘complete’ number. The Devil was formerly an angel. Like Adam, Lucifer committed the sin of Pride, which came before his Fall, as it did before Adam’s. Pride, therefore, was the initial, pre-eminent, most deadly sin. Today, pride is usually seen as a cold, aloof emotion. Then it was seen to possess passion, a passionate belief that one’s own views were right to the extent of wishing to impose these views on others.

Aliens?

The Copernican Revolution, far from reducing the stature of the Earth from the centre of the Universe to an insignificant speck in the Heavens, had, in fact, elevated it from its lowly sub-lunar position into the Heavens, where it circled with the other celestial spheres, as one of them. The atheist, or materialist, who removed not only God from His heaven, but all the angelic beings as well, did not demote human beings from a spiritual state to a lower one, but rather elevated them to the position of the most intelligent beings in the Universe.

Of course, there could be other forms of life on other planets. This was a possibility earnestly debated then and the debate continues to this day. The incredible amount of life on this planet, from the most simple to the most complex, made it statistically unlikely that there was no life anywhere else in the Universe. Indeed, some saw it as inconceivable that the power of God had been exhausted in the production of so insignificant and wretched a being as Mankind (Lovejoy p. 115). An hypothetical connection between humans and apes was readily accepted. Natives of Africa and South East Asia considered the chimpanzee and the orang-utan to be degenerate humans, this view being adopted by early European explorers. Later writers, such as Huxley and Darwin, were to consider humans as advanced apes. This reversal had serious philosophical implications. The Chain of Being was seen as descending from God. Humans had fallen from a state of Grace. To suggest that humans were improved apes was to suggest that the original creation had been less than perfect, an heretical view unacceptable to the Church.

Fascinating as this problem is to modern astrobiologists and astronomers, it was of even greater interest to Mediæval philosophers. If there were beings on other planets, were they perfect, or had they also suffered a ‘fall’? If ‘fallen’, had they also been saved by Christ? Had Jesus incarnated on other planets? Had he suffered and died many times over? Which was worse: to believe that we humans were the only ‘fallen’ people in the Universe, or to believe that Christ must suffer again and again, because he could not leave a single ‘fallen’ person unsaved?

An hypothetical connection between humans and apes was readily accepted. Natives of Africa and South East Asia considered the chimpanzee and the orang-utan to be degenerate humans, this view being adopted by early European explorers. Later writers, such as Huxley and Darwin, were to consider humans as advanced apes. This reversal had serious philosophical implications. The Chain of Being was seen as descending from God. Humans had fallen from a state of Grace. To suggest that humans were improved apes was to suggest that the original creation had been less than perfect, an heretical view unacceptable to the Church.

There was far more at stake than a scientific debate as to whether the Universe was formed suddenly or over a period of time. ‘Creationists’ held their views, not merely because of the book of Genesis, but because of a belief in the ‘Goodness’ of God. Fossil finds showing that other forms had existed in the past which were not alive now, and forms alive now that had not existed in the past, were difficult to explain within the concept of ‘Goodness’. It started to be suggested that all forms had been conceptualized by God from the very beginning, but that they took shape over a period of time, changing gradually from one shape to another, rather as does a baby en route to becoming an adult.

The concept of a continuous Chain of Being, descending from God down to the lowest of his creations was seen by some to imply that every creature that could be created had been created A creature existed in every niche in which it was possible for a creature to exist. Nevertheless, it did seem that there was space available for more creations and during the Middle Ages it was credible to suggest that these lived in parts of the Earth as yet unexplored. As European exploration expanded, new creatures were indeed discovered. Some, like the kangaroo and the duck-billed platypus, were quite unusual and did seem to fill another niche. By the nineteenth century, it became clear that the number of creatures yet unsighted must be diminishing. Only a favoured few could travel the world with the intention of finding new species, but anybody could scour their own countryside for undescribed species. The 19th century was the heyday of the amateur naturalist. Birds, beetles, butterflies, fish, plants, to say nothing of rocks and fossils, were sought, watched, caught, collected and mounted by the amateur naturalist. Museums, zoological gardens and conservatories all sprang into being and were heavily patronized.

Charles Darwin’s early interest in entomology was part of this culture. Professional naturalists were swamped with specimens from at home and abroad, as Darwin was to find out on his return from his voyage on the Beagle, when the museums were reluctant to accept his boxes because they were so inundated with specimens.

It was not only in relation to animals that reports of extraordinary new finds were received in Europe. Reports arrived of giants, after the discovery of an outsized footprint in Patagonia (the name of the country itself means ‘big foot’), and the legend of the Yeti/Abominable Snowman lingered on well into the 20th century, and even into the 21st. Apes were generally unknown to Europeans before the era of exploration and the discovery of the orang-utan provided a much needed link between monkeys and humans, particularly in view of the natives’ claims that they were, in fact, degenerate humans. Reports came in from Africa of more ‘orangs’, later known as chimpanzees and gorillas, also believed by their local human neighbours to be degenerate humans. While the gorillas were ‘giants’, the chimpanzees were ‘pygmies’. Lo and behold! ‘Pygmy’ humans were also found in Africa. Pieces of the Divine puzzle were gradually falling into place!

Early contact with the black races of Africa had left nothing but favourable impressions (Fernádez-Armesta 2004). African kings were depicted in European literature as being as rich and powerful as any European monarch. Seeing the black Africans as connecting links with the apes, which had degenerated from them, was in no way derogatory. The size of the smallest African people, being closer to that of the chimpanzees, merely illustrated the completeness of God’s creation in which no gap that could possibly be filled had been left vacant. It did, indeed, take all sorts to make a world.

Natura non facit saltum

The dictum Natura non facit saltum (Nature makes no leaps) was the fundamental premise of the Great Chain of Being. From the point of view of classification, everything graded into or overlapped with something else, so that all were interlinked. There was a steady upward gradient from the simplest form of life to the most complex, from the lowest to the highest – Man! Upon this one point there seemed to be no dispute. There was dispute, however, as to whether or not humans had souls – the majority opinion was that they did. Did animals have souls? The majority (Christian) opinion was they did not, but there were some who considered that all living things had souls. And what about plants? Were they not living too? During the 19th century, there was a growing movement, with its roots in Germany, to consider all living things as having some form of consciousness, however small. This was a resurgence of the old Celtic belief and it experienced another revival in the 1960s and 1970s, with the publication of books such as Supernature by Lyall Watson (1973). Talking to the trees, to the plants in your garden, became quite fashionable. The dominant position had always been that humans were in some way different from all other forms of life. Whether that difference was that humans alone had souls and would continue to live in another form and in another place after death, was, and still is, a matter of debate.

Also debated was whether there had been but one creation of life, which remained virtually unchanged, or whether there had been one act of creation from which the forms living today had evolved. Had there been continual creations? Why would God expend all His creative force in one almighty Act and then do nothing?

The debate continues to this day.

Chapter 2

The Birth of Evolutionary Theory

It must not be thought that just because the new cosmology gradually became generally accepted that it became universally accepted. We learn very early in our lives that, contrary to what appears to be so obvious, the Sun does not circle the Earth but the Earth circles the Sun. We learn to accept that, contrary to what also appears to be so obvious, the Earth is not stationary but is hurtling through space at an incredible speed, even when there does not seem to us to be so much as a breath of air moving on our skin.

These were not concepts readily accepted. It took time for them to become the majority belief. Even into the second half of the twentieth century, the Flat Earth Society remained in existence. The advent of satellites and the images they beamed back to Earth saw its final demise.

The time we are about to consider, when the concept of evolution began to be discussed in European scientific circles, falls midway between the time of Copernicus and the present day. Having re-organized their thinking about the Heavens (space), scientists were about to re-organize their thinking about time, the time the Earth had been in existence, the time when life first came into being on this planet – and how? The Old Testament account, accepted not only by the Christian majority in Europe at that time, but also by Jews and Muslims, taught that organic life first came into being in the form of vegetation on the third day of Creation – the same day that dry land was separated from the sea. The Sun and the Moon (two great lights) were created on the fourth day, moving creatures, both in the waters and in the air, on the fifth day, earth-bound creatures, including humans on the sixth. The biblical account, therefore, allowed some difference in time between the origin of plants and animals, but not evolution of one life form from another.

The first murmurings within the scientific community on the subject of evolution did not appear until the middle of the eighteenth century. They were to precipitate an argument every bit as bitter and profound as had the teachings of Copernicus, for science would require a change in philosophical thinking which ran counter to prevalent religious thinking. The battle was originally little more than a skirmish but erupted into a full scale war. While the battle of the ‘Heavens’ (space and its occupants, the stars) would seem to have been won, the battle in regard to life on Earth is still far from over. The increasing number of Muslims migrating into Europe and other Western countries, such as America and Australia, bringing with them their Islamic belief in the account of Creation as related in the Old Testament, is resulting in an increase in the percentage of people rejecting the concept of evolution in Western countries (Dawkins 2009).

The gentleman scientist of the eighteenth century was in a fortunate position. The invention of the printing press had made information more readily available than ever before and gentlemen's libraries were lined with books on diverse subjects to stimulate the minds and interests of their readers, yet the number was not yet so large that the task of absorbing all relevant knowledge on any one subject was nigh impossible. The educated amateur gentleman scientist, or natural philosopher as he was then known, was versed in mathematics, the emerging sciences of physics and chemistry, as well as astronomy, and was likely well versed in botany and zoology as well. All fields were open to his enquiring mind and, being financially independent, he could follow his interests along whichever path he chose.

Another invention, that of the microscope, had revealed new worlds to the human eye. Cells had been recognized for the first time, but their structure was as yet unknown. Quite how the coming together of cells from the male and female parent of any species, be it plant or animal, produced an offspring after its own kind was becoming more of a mystery, not less, as scientists sought to understand the mechanism of reproduction.

Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759)

Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis

The first natural philosopher to propose a scientific (albeit brief) theory of evolution was the Frenchman, Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis. Not a strong child, being spoilt by his mother has been suggested as the reason why, in adult life, he found it difficult to accept criticism, but many a person, spoilt or not, finds criticism difficult to accept when it is perceived to be unjustified. If Maupertuis was convinced that he was right, and his critics wrong, perhaps that was because he was!

As a young man, he spent time travelling, as was to be expected, and also enrolled for two years’ service in the army, also to be expected. Military service in peacetime was not onerous. With a military uniform and the title of Captain, he was able to mix freely in society, while at the same time continuing his study of mathematics, which was his first and most enduring discipline.

In 1728, the year that Newton died, Maupertuis had visited London where he had learned of, and accepted, Newton’s laws of gravitation, which he introduced into France on his return. In his Introduction to his translation of Maupertuis’ Venus Physique, Simone Boas cited a letter written by Voltaire giving a light-hearted summary of the differences in thought at that time between France and England. These included that the French attributed the tides to pressure from the Moon, while the English (following Newton) attributed them to the attraction of the Moon; in Paris the Earth was thought to be the shape of a melon while in London it was thought to be squashed at the poles. This helps us to understand, at least to some extent, how new ideas, which we now take for granted, had to battle for acceptance. Maupertuis did accept Newtonian physics, and tried to promote it on his return to Paris, but was considered by some to be a ’traitor’.

In 1736 Maupertuis became part of a team that set out to prove that the Earth was not a perfect sphere. While another team took measurements from near the equator in Peru, Maupertuis led an expedition to Lapland, which was as close to the North Pole as was then feasible, to take comparative measurements. His team spent a year in the Arctic, during which time his health appears to have been quite good. On his return, these measurements, combined with those of the team from Peru, were able to show that the Earth was indeed slightly flattened at its pole.

Today we may admire the mathematical and physical effort which was necessary to produce this result, but consider it of nothing more than passing interest, but, at that time, the finding had important philosophical implications.

It had been a shock to the collective Western system to take the Earth from its lowly sub-lunar position and place it in the Heavens. Some were still finding it impossible to accept that the Earth was not flat, but was a sphere, like other heavenly bodies. It had been difficult to accept that the Earth moved through the heavens, that it circled the Sun. Two things remained constant: the Moon circled the Earth and the Sun, Moon and other heavenly bodies were perfect spheres. Now it was being shown that the Earth was not a perfect sphere. It was squashed!

Unlike the Copernican revolution which had shattered the collective peace of the Western mind, the finding of Maupertuis and his colleagues caused barely a ripple among the general population, because so few people had access to their work and it was little known, except among the close scientific community and, of course, the mariners who relied on accurate latitudinal and longitudinal measurements.

His findings were controversial, not least because they were inspired by Newtonian physics, and his fellow Frenchmen were determined not to accept a shape for the Earth which had been conceived by an Englishman (Maupertuis 1752/1966: xvii). That the Earth was not a perfect sphere was one more nail in the coffin of Plato’s ‘Goodness’, of the concept of the perfection of God and of all his creation (except humans). Philosophical idealism was giving way to humanistic practicality. For the first time, people were openly questioning the validity of parts of the Bible, mostly the Old Testament, although as the reproductive process became more fully understood, the fundamental principle of Christianity, that of the Virgin Birth, was also increasingly questioned.

Although at one time close friends, Maupertuis and Voltaire had a falling out of opinion and their relationship became increasing acrimonious. This may have influenced Maupertuis’ decision in 1740 to move to Berlin, at the invitation of Frederick the Great, to re-organize the Berlin Academy of Sciences, of which he was to be President for fourteen years (1742-1756).

Glass (1955) referred to Maupertuis as ‘a forgotten genius’, although it was not Maupertuis’ astronomical work to which Glass was referring, but his early proposal of a theory of evolution, which encapsulated in its simplicity the basics, not only of the theories which later became known as Darwinian Natural Selection, but also of Mendelian genetics. In his work, Essai de cosmologie, published in 1750, Maupertuis said (Glass 1955: 103):

May we not say that, in the fortuitous combination of the productions of Nature, since only those creatures could survive in whose organization a certain degree of adaptation was present, there is nothing extraordinary in the fact that such adaptation is actually found in all those species which now exist? Chance, one might say, turned out a vast number of individuals; a small proportion of these were organized in such a manner that the animals’ organs could satisfy their needs. A much greater number showed neither adaptation nor order; these last have all perished … Thus the species which we see today are but a small part of all those that a blind destiny has produced. (Emphasis added by Glass 1955).

And again, a year later in Systems of Nature, Maupertuis wrote (Glass et al. 1959: 77):

Could one not explain by that means [mutation] how from two individuals alone the multiplication of the most dissimilar species could have followed? They could have owed their first origination only to certain fortuitous productions, in which the elementary particles failed to retain the order they possessed in the father and mother animals; each degree of error would have produced a new species; and by reason of repeated deviations would have arrived at the infinite diversity of animals that we see today. (Emphasis added by Glass et al. 1959).

Maupertuis made no specific mention of the factor of time, which was to play such an important part in the development of the theories of both Lamarck and Darwin. However, he clearly suggested that repeated chance or random change (deviation/mutation) had led to the development of the millions of species we know today by a process of the elimination of the least ‘fit’ or, as Herbert Spencer was famously to say the survival of the fittest. His claim that destiny was blind was in stark contrast with the accepted belief, not only in France but throughout the then known world, that creation was the work of God.

The term ‘evolution’ was not then used to refer to the birth of species or genera, but to that of individuals. How did the individual, human or animal, unfold (evolve) in the womb? Contemporary thinking favoured ‘preformation’, the idea that either the mother or the father carried within their reproductive organs a minute form which was to unfold and expand through its embryonic stage until it was capable of sustaining its individual life at birth. The minute form was not believed to be a miniature of the adult form that simply grew. Rather they thought of the miniature form as a bud which gradually unfolded (evolved) into a form sufficiently mature for the new life to be able to sustain itself outside the womb (or egg, in the case of oviparous creatures). The changing form and shape of embryos was well known. Many observations were being made, at the expense of unfortunate female animals, of the state of the uterus, its condition and contents at varying times after mating, in an attempt to ascertain the very earliest time at which it could be said that a new life form had begun to ‘evolve’.

At that time it was much debated whether it was the female who provided the miniature form which would grow into the infant, the male ejaculate merely providing nourishment (ovism) or whether it was the male spermatozoon which provided the miniature, the female form providing the nourishment (animalculism). Maupertuis not only held that both parents contributed, but that they contributed equally. Offspring clearly bore resemblances to both parents. While the resemblance to the one furnishing the ‘miniature’ was understandable, resemblance to the other parent was harder to explain. It was suggested that the ‘nutrition’ supplied by the other parent was the source of such resemblance. Maupertuis rejected this concept on the grounds that, if nutritive material could so influence the growing embryo that it would bear a resemblance to the nutrient source, why did the human infant not resemble the fruit, vegetables and other nutritive substances eaten by the mother during her pregnancy?

The concept that semen may have a purely nutritive purpose, or may serve merely to stimulate the female ‘form’ into growth, was not as outlandish as it may at first appear. Geneticists today are aware of thelytokous. Species of animals exist in which males are either totally absent or are very rare and genetically non-functional. Many are simply all-female species, although whether the fact that they are not an interbreeding population precludes them from being described as a ‘species’ at all is a debatable point (White 1973a). The small freshwater fish, Poecilioa formosa, from south Texas and northern Mexico, is genetically all-female, but its eggs need to be activated by the sperm of a male from a closely related species, either P. latpinna or P. shenops, before they will begin to develop (White p. 154). With the spider beetle, Ptinus mobilis, the situation is slightly different; development of the egg in this all-female species does not proceed beyond first metaphase until the egg is penetrated by a sperm from the related bisexual species, P. clavipes (White p. 155). In neither case is there any genetic contribution from the male.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, when Maupertuis was undertaking his work, the microscope had revealed the presence of what were claimed to be ‘animalcules’ in the male semen. Did the female ‘semen’ produce anything similar? Graaff believed that he had discovered the female egg, but what Graaff had seen was the Graaffian follicle where eggs develop. At times, Maupertuis suggested that the female discharged a multitude of eggs, possibly as many as the male ‘animalcules’, but they were so small that they had yet to be seen, even under magnification. He even suggested that these might emanate from the lining of the womb. However, at other times he spoke of the ‘egg’ in the singular. For example, in The Earthly Venus (1752: 9) he wrote:

Fallopius found two tubes whose floating extremities, in the abdomen, have a kind of fringe which may reach over the ovary, retrieve the egg, and then propel it to the uterus into which these tubes open.

It seemed logical that, no matter how many eggs the female produced, usually only one would grow in the womb, although twin, or even triple, births were, of course, known. What was not known was where or how the egg interacted with the spermatozoa and whether one or numerous spermatozoa were involved in the production of the fœtus. Maupertuis believed that the egg and the ‘animalcules’ each contained particles responsible for the formation of parts of the body but did not know whether one, several, or many spermatozoa were involved.

Using the principle of ‘attraction’ (gravitation) as propounded by Newton, Maupertuis believed that each of these particles would gravitate towards, and join with, their most closely related particle, so that all the body part particles would form a whole, which would then take on embryonic form. Once two related particles had combined, any other particle which might have been suitable for that role would have no place and would be discarded.

Particles from either parent had equal chance of forming any particular part of the embryo. The child would thus resemble both parents in some degree, although the proportion of representation would vary, some children resembling one parent much more than the other. If the process worked perfectly, a ‘perfect child’ would result. If some particle was missing, or became damaged, a child deformed by deficiency would be born. If some particle in excess of that required somehow managed to attach itself, then extra body parts would result, even to the extent of producing conjoined twins, infants with two heads or with one head and two bodies.

In 1745, an albino Negro had been brought to Paris. Maupertuis learned that albinoism occurred sporadically among Negroes. Indeed, in Senegal there were whole families of Negroes who were ‘white’ and there were known to be albino ‘Indians’ in Panama (Glass 1955: 106). It seemed to Maupertuis that the potential for this to occur must be contained within the hereditary particles, albeit present in less quantity than normal particles.

He reasoned that something similar happened with polydactyly (the presence of a sixth digit on one or more hand or foot). Maupertuis studied the history of a family from Berlin who exhibited this trait. It was apparent that this condition could be passed on by either the male or the female, that it was an inherited characteristic rather than a congenital deformity.

Study of a second family, named Kelleia, gave similar results as far as male/female transmission was concerned, but the appearance of the trait seemed to have been more frequent.

While certain facts, such as the transmissibility of features to the offspring by both parents, seemed to Maupertuis to be beyond dispute, he remained uncertain of the precise process of reproduction. Maupertuis made it clear to his readers that he was not writing for the purpose of giving answers to problems, rather to point them out, to share his thoughts in the hope of inspiring others to ponder the same problems and, hopefully, make further contributions to scientific thought on this fascinating topic.

Fig 2.1

Fig 2.1: Polydactily in the Ruhe family shown in black:black squares = males; diamonds = females; circles = sex unknown (Glass 1955: 106)

More than a century before Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, all the basic principles of heredity, monstrosities/sports, those which were one-off deformities against those which were variations subject to inheritance, adaptability and survivability, were the subject of scientific investigation. Until Glass rediscovered Maupertuis in the 1950s, his work remained virtually unknown. Even now, it receives scant attention and little has been translated into English. It will be argued throughout this book that there was a concerted attempt by many prominent writers on the subject of (human) evolution to downplay the role of anyone whose work might be seen to detract from the uniqueness and greatness of Darwin’s contribution.

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788)

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

Count Buffon was the pre-eminent naturalist of the 18th century, being 'Keeper' of the prestigious Jardin du Rois in Paris. He wrote extensively, his works appearing intermittently, but regularly, as a series of more than forty ‘volumes’ between 1749 and 1804, some of which were quite short, but together they comprised a sizeable amount of work. In 1781, Buffon’s work was translated into English by William Smellie. In 1834 this appeared as a two volume work under the title Natural History, General and Particular, including the History and Theory of the Earth, a General History of Man, published by the Chambers family of Edinburgh.

Buffon believed the Earth to be very old and to be but a small planet in an immense Universe. These are concepts with which we have grown up but which were quite revolutionary in the second half of the eighteenth century when he was writing, at least as far as the concept of the immensity of time past was concerned. No doubt remembering Copernicus and Galileo, Buffon took care not to antagonize the Church and, amazingly, lived a long and successful life - unpersecuted.

Buffon believed that the Earth, and the other planets, had been formed from a portion of the Sun, which had become detached. This hot vaporous mass had gradually cooled, becoming first molten and then solid rock. The Moon, Buffon believed, had in turn been formed from a portion of the Earth, probably torn from the region of the Pacific Ocean by some unknown force, possibly that of a passing comet or other heavenly body.

By now, hopefully, you will be mentally taking yourself back in time and appreciating quite how revolutionary were his ideas, formed in a society in which people were raised with a literal belief in the account of Creation as given in Genesis, as well as of the Flood and Noah’s Ark. Again, as with Maupertuis, it must be remembered that little of Buffon’s work would have become known among the general populace but it made a lasting impression among the intelligentsia. In England, as we shall shortly see, Erasmus Darwin was thinking in a similar manner (and mentions Buffon’s work in his own writing) but it was not until 1834 that Buffon’s work became available to the people of Britain in their own language.

The science of geology was in its infancy but at that time there was an acceptance, at least among natural philosophers, that there had been changes upon the surface of the Earth as it was formed, although the amount of time involved was not generally thought to be extensive, at least by today’s standards. In this, again, Buffon and Erasmus Darwin were in the forefront of thinking. Some philosophers thought that water, particularly after the Flood, had been the main instrument in the shaping of the Earth’s surface. The people adhering to this school of thought were referred to as ‘Neptunists’ (and they included Erasmus Darwin). The ‘Neptunists’ believed that the Earth had once been completely covered with water, much of which had subsequently disappeared, partly through evaporation but mostly by being engulfed in great chasms within the Earth. Buffon belonged to the opposing school of thought, being a ‘Vulcanist’. They were called after Vulcan, the God of Fire. That the Earth’s centre was hot, molten, was evident from the lava thrown up by erupting volcanoes, as well as by the bubbling water found at hot springs. Buffon allowed that many of the superficial features of the Earth were due to the action of volcanoes, earthquakes and erosion by wind, weather and water, he attributed much of the irregularity of the Earth’s crust to the cooling, and therefore ‘shrinking’, of the Earth itself. Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes may make abrupt changes, but erosion by wind and weather would take time. As with the work of Maupertuis, expanses of time, far greater than that ‘allowed’ by biblical history, were being invoked.

Buffon estimated that the solid matter of which the Earth was comprised weighed some four times that of the matter of the Sun, great changes having taken place as the Earth cooled and solidified. However, what most impressed Buffon was the formation of sedimentary rock, which had been laid down under water over considerable periods of time, but which was now elevated above sea level, in some cases to a great height. He realized that the Biblical account of the deluge was totally inadequate to account for these formations and instead proposed that the account in Genesis referred not to ‘days’ of twenty-four hours duration but rather ‘Days’ as in ‘Ages’. The Biblical deluge occurred in the last, seventh Age, after the creation of Man.

Buffon claimed that the land beneath the sea was the same as the land above it – composed of mountains, hills, valleys, even ‘rivers’, as underwater currents flowed more rapidly in the vicinity of hills and valleys. He claimed that the same factors that operated to wear down rocks in one place and to cause sediment to accumulate in another, operated under the sea as well as on dry land. While waves were a superficial phenomenon caused by the operation of the wind, the tides were caused by the Moon, whose effects would be felt throughout the ocean, no matter its depth. Great volumes of water were constantly being dragged across the bottom of the ocean, wearing down hills and mountains, depositing sediment, etc.

Buffon was aware that the climate of some parts of the world appeared to have changed. He attributed this to the movement of land across the surface of the globe. Over immense amounts of time, as rock was worn away in one place and sediment deposited in another, land masses would gradually have ‘moved’ into warmer or cooler climates.

Buffon’s theory of the history of the Earth was one of change over immense periods of time, but of change that was always occurring in conformity with the basic principles of physics, including gravity, which was the new and dominant concept of the time, thanks (in France) to Buffon’s older contemporary, Maupertuis.

Linnæus’ scheme for the classification of all living things, published between 1735 and 1774, while Buffon was a young man, was to have profound consequences for European thought. It became necessary for the serious naturalist to label all plants and animals, however large or small, within the Linnæan binomial system of classification. General acceptance of nomenclature within the community of naturalists was essential if naturalists were to understand each other’s writings, yet the task of classification was fraught with difficulties and caused much controversy, none more so than which plants and animals were varieties and which were distinct species.

Initially, Buffon thought that all living things graded themselves imperceptibly, making classification difficult, but he changed his mind. He came to recognize species as definite entities, the ability to interbreed being the defining attribute, although he also realized that this definition could never be anything but a ‘working definition’, due to the difficulty in establishing the breeding potential of all creatures.

Buffon used a system of argument and counter argument, which left the reader to decide which point of view to accept and the author free from any accusation of promoting heresy. For example, Buffon suggested that the horse and the donkey might be regarded as a single family having a common origin. The same logic would suggest that humans and apes had a common origin and that all animals may have descended from a single animal, but Buffon went on to say: But no! Certain from revelation that all animals have participated equally in the grace of direct creation (Lovejoy 1959: 98). His first suggestion was a clear pronunciation of evolutionary theory, more thoroughly enunciated and more widely known than the brief ponderings of Maupertuis. It was the point of view taken by his younger colleague, Lamarck, whose work will be discussed shortly. However, there was one condition which Buffon considered must be accommodated before evolution could be accepted as a fact, that condition being the production of a new species by direct descent.

Like many others, Buffon was intrigued by mules, not only those produced by the mating of the horse and the ass but those of other animals, such as the dog and the wolf, the term ‘mule’ being applied to species crosses, whether they were fertile or not. Some animals from different species could mate and reproduce, resulting in a healthy animal that could live many years but which was not itself able to reproduce. Buffon carried out his own experiments and studied reports of cross-breedings in an attempt to ascertain whether it was possible to produce fertile offspring from different species. He had no success (Buffon 1781/1834, vol.1: 28-36).

Dogs were able to vary so much, yet still constituted one species (vol.1: p. 357). This observation led Buffon to conclude that variation within species, no matter how great, was not sufficient for the formation of new species. Lovejoy (p. 99) questioned why Buffon should consider the sterility of hybrids proof of separate descent and quoted Buffon’s claim that it would need to be assumed that:

… two animals, male and female, had not only so far departed from their original type as to belong no longer to the same species … that is to say, to be no longer able to reproduce by mating with those animals which they formerly resembled – but had also both diverged to exactly the same degree, and to just that degree necessary to make it possible for them to produce only by mating with one another.

Lovejoy went on to say: The logic of this is to me, I confess, a trifle obscure; but it is evident that Buffon conceived that the evolution from a given species of a new species infertile with the first could come about only through a highly improbable conjunction of circumstances. Unlike Lovejoy, I find Buffon’s logic quite compelling. For a new species to come into existence, the evolved specimen must be unable (not merely unwilling) to breed with its own parent, or any other member of its parents’ species. Furthermore, to continue as a new species, it must find a mate which has evolved in a manner similar to itself, also unable to breed with other members of its parents’ species.

It was as if Buffon wanted to believe in evolution, but his study of hybrid animals and their sterility stopped him fitting the facts to the theory.

Buffon followed Maupertuis in rejecting ‘preformation’, believing that reproduction was the result of the coming together of particles from the male and the female. He suggested that in infancy and childhood these particles were used for nutrition and growth. When growth had been completed there were surplus particles, which could then be used for reproduction (Buffon 1781/1834, vol.1: 186):

There exists, therefore, a living matter, universally distributed through all animal and vegetable substances, which serves alike for their nutrition, their growth and their reproduction … reproduction takes place only through the same matter’s becoming superabundant in the body of the animal or plant. Each part of the body then sends off the organic molecules which it cannot admit. Each of these particles is absolutely analogous to the part by which it is thrown off, since it was destined for the nourishment of that part. Then, when all the molecules sent off by all the parts of the body unite, they necessarily form a small body similar to the first, since each molecule is similar to the part from which it comes … these two seminal fluids are extracts from all parts of the body; and a mixture of them is all that is necessary for the formation of a certain number of males and females.

There is a clear similarity between Buffon’s ideas and those of Charles Darwin when the latter enunciated his theory of pangenesis (1868), although it is not suggested that Darwin was aware of this similarity of thought.

James Hutton (1726-1797)

James Hutton

James Hutton was little known in his life time and his work may well now be forgotten were it not for one of his colleagues, John Playfair, who took it upon himself, not merely to republish Hutton’s work after his death, but to append an ‘explanation’ which was longer, and a lot more readable, than the original work. It was this work which inspired Charles Lyell (see below) who, in turn, inspired Charles Darwin.

A recluse, whose writings were little known outside his immediate circle, James Hutton was a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 1795, he published a two volume work entitled Theory of the Earth, a small edition of no more than 500 copies. It made difficult reading. The book has never been reprinted and only a few of the original copies survive. In 1802, five years after Hutton’s death, Playfair published an abridged version (140 pages) of Hutton’s work, together with ‘Explanatory Notes and Additions’, which ran to 385 pages, a facsimile reproduction of which was published in 1956. The facsimile reproduction of Hutton’s book also contained facsimile reproductions of three papers presented by Hutton to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1785, 1788 and 1794.

A subsequent edition also included a facsimile presentation of the Abstract presented by Hutton to the Society in March and April 1785, summarizing his first paper and a biography of Hutton written by Playfair.

Hutton was much interested in coal and other similar natural products such as bitumen and petroleum. He maintained that all were of vegetable origin, although some of his colleagues argued that some grades of coal and oil were mineral based. It was one thing to accept that the bones and shells of sea creatures had become deposited on the sea floor, been compressed into chalk, then raised from beneath the sea to form chalk hills, it was quite another to explain how vegetable matter had become compressed beneath rock and transformed into coal or oil. Clearly the vegetable matter must have grown above ground at one time. Hutton envisaged cycles of land being raised above the surface of the sea, bearing vegetation, then becoming compressed again beneath it. At the minimum he postulated three such cycles, but believed there were probably far more. By extension, he believed that these cycles would continue into the future. Hutton was formulating his theories at approximately the same time as Buffon but it is unlikely that he was aware of Buffon’s work, which did not become available in Scotland until 1834, when it was translated into English and published in Edinburgh by the Chambers Publishing House.

It was not only coal which took Hutton’s interest. He was fascinated with the origin of veins of metals and minerals which were ‘injected’ into the rocks of other formations. The ‘Neptunists’ claimed that these veins were the result of matter which had been held in solution during the Universal Flood which had covered the Earth before any land rose above sea level. As the Earth dried out, these minerals, which had been held in solution, gradually dried out to provide the minerals and metals mined today. Hutton argued that many of these substances were not water soluble. Furthermore, there was no known solvent which could carry all of the known metals and minerals. They could never have been held in solution.

Like Buffon, Hutton was a ‘Vulcanist’. He did not deny that water had played an important part in the erosion of land, but he denied that it had played any part in its formation. He argued that organic matter on the sea floor was subject to immense pressure, as also was any non-organic matter beneath the sea. This pressure would cause the temperature to be raised. While it was true that coal, heated to combustion temperature on the surface of the Earth, would burn and turn to ash, in the absence of air such combustion would not be possible. There was no way of knowing at that time exactly what would be the result of heat being applied, under pressure, to matter, but Hutton postulated that it was this which formed metals, minerals and substances such as coal and oil.

In the same way that air and water circulated under the influence of temperature differentiation, so, Hutton believed, did the substance of the Earth. The movement would be far slower, but it would happen. In some places the heat would cause the surface of the Earth above it to ‘bulge’. In this way, great land masses would be raised above sea level. This raising of great masses to the surface of the Earth would cause fractures, which would allow molten matter to run as fluids into other structures, forming the metal and mineral veins in which Hutton was so interested. This expansion and fracturing would also explain the tilting of layers of sedimentary rock, which must have been laid down horizontally. Hutton did not rely on volcanoes and earthquakes alone to account for the formation of land, although he did acknowledge that they had a role. Hutton was not prepared to speculate on time, simply stating that, in comparison with human life, it was eternal.

In 1774, Hutton visited the salt mines in Cheshire, accompanied by ‘his friend Mr. Watt, of Birmingham’ (Playfair 1802/1970: 151). This ‘Mr. Watt’ was presumably the engineer, James Watt, who was also a friend of Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s famous grandfather. Erasmus Darwin recorded conducting an experiment with Dr. Hutton of Edinburgh in the early 1770s (King-Hele 1963). Darwin had studied medicine for two years in Edinburgh and he may have made Hutton’s acquaintance at that time or his participation in this experiment may be explained by their mutual acquaintance with James Watt, who was also from Scotland.

The experiment was related to Erasmus Darwin’s theory that as air rose, it expanded, because there was less pressure at a higher altitude. The same amount of heat was now