An essay from Descent Of Man Revisited:

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.

A First Eonic Observation The idea of evolution shows, not a birth, but a rebirth in the period of the Enlightenment. Appearing among the Greeks and Indians during the Axial period, it suffered eclipse, as did science itself, in the medieval period. We will soon discover that the idea of evolution itself undergoes a distinct process of its own evolution, and this is not Darwinian.  Evolution: Genesis and Revelations, With Readings from Empedocles to Wilson, C. Leon Harris, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981.
The Case of the Missing Centuries As we examine world history we notice the strangely non-random character of the evolution of evolution, and then of science itself. There are really two Scientific Revolutions, one in the era of the classical Greeks, a birth that proves stillborn, then another in the seventeenth century. As we will discover, this is no accident. 

There is something almost mysterious in the creative career of the Enlightenment, especially in the last half of the eighteenth century. The period, which should include the Romantic reaction, and much else, creates a sort of great divide in which a whole new culture comes into being. We see the Industrial Revolution, and the birth of modern capitalism, the triumph of liberalism in the era of the French and American Revolutions, a cascade of technical innovations, and the crystallization of the secular society struggling to be born since the equally seminal period of the Protestant Reformation. We have a tendency to produce univalent descriptions of this rich and many-sided period of bursting change. But its multifaceted character shows something far more complex, a constellation of dialectical contradictions. For example the Romantic movement tends to be filtered out of our sense of the historical inevitability of the Enlightenment breakthroughs, narrowly defined in terms of a reductionist program.  We often fail to see the real cultural evolution of conflicting oppositions. And in this context we find the strange phenomenon and timing of the classic era of German philosophy beginning with the figure of Kant. As we proceed to examine the question or non-random evolution we will find that this period is itself one key to the overall periodization of world history in terms of its historical evolution.

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.

But the idea of evolution was in the air, always with the built in ambiguity between social and biological development. One of the transparent influences on Darwin’s thinking can be seen in the work of Herbert Spencer whose views on cultural evolution produced the classic phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, beginning the career of ‘traveling concepts’ between evolutionary and cultural categories of development. The crystallizing classical liberalism was a natural companion of Darwinian theory, and the still more vexacious Social Darwinism arising in the wake of Darwin’s work springs from this incestuous constellation of mismatched conceptual themes claiming the title of evolution. The work of Herbert Spencer, now a very dated figure, is often made to take the blame for the Social Darwinist implications of evolutionary ideology, but these deflections of the essence of the problem away from Darwin tend to make us fail to see the ideological core of Darwin’s theory.

The point should be clear from the direct influence of Malthus on Darwin’s formulation of his theory. Malthus was the founder of the science of demography, but he was also a highly contentious conservative figure, one of the most blatant in his propensity to use theory for social legitimation. The polarized and acrimonious debate over Malthus’ work went on for an entire generation, and in many ways prefigured the more complex and subtle Darwin debate, still colored with underground strains of class struggle, revolution, and the reform bill. It is easy to lose sight of a simple fact: the mechanism adopted by Darwin under the influence of Malthusian thinking is open to severe challenge on its own terms. The struggle of populations, and the incidence of natural disasters or sudden population fluctuations, is seldom seen as a very weak candidate for an evolutionary theory. It constitutes one of the first examples of the tendency to conceal the crisis of observation that stalks all claims of evolution. The scale and duration of deep time are an unknown. It is therefore a temptation for a theorist to cast about for what he can observe as a clue to what he cannot. But it is very doubtful if what we mean by evolution is really caused by anything like a Malthusian scenario. Certainly the factor of natural selection is a given, but there is no inherent reason to assume that this generates the emergence of complex forms that we see in the fossil record.