Much of the controversy over evolution predates the work of Darwin and it was Darwin’s achievement to create an almost packaged formulation of the gestating ideas of evolution, one that the public was prepared to accept. The real founder of evolutionary science was Lamarck whose more cogently intelligible, but still inchoate perspective never survived the radical associations of evolution in the wake of the French Revolution.  Accounts of the history of biology tend to put the central focus on Darwin, even to the point of suggesting indirectly that the idea of evolution was his achievement. But in fact all of the main ideas, even that of natural selection, preceded Darwin, and the real source of the new biology was in the period of the Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century, a period replete with a host of innovations in all fields. As we shall see there is an irony to this fact, and we will discover a different side to the idea of evolution in the development of evolutionism itself. 

In fact, the birth of conceptions of evolution was a rebirth and we see the emergence of the first inchoate forms of evolutionary thought in the ancient Greeks at the time of the birth of philosophy itself among the Pre-Socratics.   

It is significant that the idea of evolution appeared in concert with the era of the French and Industrial Revolutions. After the groundwork of figures such as Linnaeus and Buffon we find the foundations of evolutionary though in Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin, the ancestor of Charles Darwin, first formulating explicitly the idea of transmutation or development. To see the inherent ideological character lurking in the idea of evolution, we can look at the birth of the idea under the specter of Jacobinism in the wake of the generation of revolution. Significantly the work of Erasmus Darwin was braided with notions of progressive social change and his participation in the work of the famous Lunar Society at the dawn of industrial production hardly seems accidental in retrospect. The impact of the idea of progress was built into the take-off of new forms of social production. Herbert Spencer quite understandably continued this vein of thinking, but the confusion over social and biological evolution began to make its appearance, and this inability to keep the two straight has persisted to this day. The question is insidious for it persists even as Darwinists try to correct it, or offer disclaimers that they are exempt from these fallacies. But it is the clumsiness of the application of the idea of evolution that is at fault, and Darwin is by no means exempt. 

And then suddenly the period of reaction set in created by the turmoil of the revolutionary generation. It is interesting to compare Erasmus Darwin and Adam Smith in this regard. They share the brief moment of the birth of classic liberal thought, before the tide of revolution completely recast the terms of discourse. A new progressive philosophy of economics enjoyed a brief period of radical notoriety, followed almost within a decade by its ideological rendition as a more conservative liberal ideology. We hardly think of Adam Smith as a radical thinker! We need not agree with the views of Karl Marx to see that by the year 1848 the idea of what constituted radical thinking had undergone a change indeed, and that his depiction of the triumph of a new type of economic civilization, with its attendant ideologies.

The period of the Restoration indirectly conditioned the confusions over evolution, and the association of the idea with revolution made the idea highly controversial, even politicized. The dilemma over slow and fast evolution arises here. The very idea of progress or revolution was subject to concerted attacks by the forces of reaction, and this seems almost to have delayed the acceptance of evolutionary thought for a full generation. In fact, it was in many ways Lamarck who first formulated a theory of evolution, and yet by the end of his life he was almost a forgotten figure. In the background the new biology of the embryologists, such as Von Baer and Geoffrey St. Hilaire, was creating the foundation for a new conception of evolutionary development.

Then came the famous Vestiges of Creation by Robert Chambers whose immensely popular but anonymous bestseller paved the way for the work of Darwin twenty years later. In this context we have a better sense of how Darwin managed to succeed where these earlier figures had failed, and the conservatizing of evolution was one of the keys to his success. We can thus see that Darwin’s theory was successful as an unconscious reaction to this political background, and the attempt to fix the idea in association with a triumph of liberalism in its classical version made for an easy passage at the right time. This association of the issues with ideology and the development of modern politics would seem to be irrelevant to the question of science. And yet it can help us to uncover the chronic confusion of cultural and biological evolution that has always been a notable feature of Darwinian thinking.

The explosive generation of industrialization, emergent liberalism, and revolution is the hidden context of Darwin’s theory. Darwin’s social position and genealogy, scion of the family of Wedgewoods so prominent at the birth of the industrial revolution in England, colors his thinking, and his strategy proved to be brilliant in the way he packaged his theory and timed its publication. In fact, the curious phenomenon of the delay in the presentation of a theory that was essentially tabled in the 1840’s has many different aspects. It was sudden appearance of the famous Ternate letter of Alfred Wallace that forced the issue and drove Darwin to make public the nexus of ideas that he had long kept private, even from many of his friends and colleagues.  

 Evolution: History Of An Idea is also the title of a useful history by Peter Bowler.