1.1 The Darwin Debate
Last modified 07/04/2008
| The Darwin debate is forever subject to a kind of 'slippage' in its terms of discourse as discussion shifts gear between rejection of the very existence of evolution and the claims, given the facts of evolution, for its dynamic, mechanism, or explanation. Sometimes the failure of the proposed mechanism to explain is taken as grounds for rejecting evolution, or else the evidence of evolution is taken as given, and, quite properly, the demand is made for a new explanation of the mechanism. We should note that the real success of Darwin in the wake of the publication of his Origin was one of publicity for the evidence of evolution. Slowly gestating over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the idea of 'evolution', often called 'transformation', was clearly in the air, indeed decisively accepted and championed in many quarters, and in fact the 'bestseller' syndrome had already happened before, as the idea reached the threshold of public awareness in the immediately antecedent wave of publicity seen in Chambers' Vestiges. The latter work demonstrated the dilemma, falsely resolved we should think by Darwin, of inchoate and less than professionally scientific intuitions with a cow-catcher full of disparate notions seizing on the idea of evolution as a fact of nature. We might dismiss Chambers only to rediscover that his ear lay to the ground with respect to the implications of the generation of embryologists, whose findings preempted easy resolution of the debate over transformation. Huxley is a good example of the way these considerations had, perhaps, delayed the sudden 'gestalt' of evolution as fact that animated Darwin's crystallization destined to finally reach a larger public, but one cast in the secondary promotion of natural selection as the defining explanatory framework for the mechanism. Clearly influenced by these earlier efforts, Huxley switched 'gestalts' as he saw that the answer was evolution, whatever the case with the embryologists, but not necessarily, as he warned Darwin, natural selection. | ||
|
|
||
|
|
||