Part II -- Chapter Four

From Descartes to Darwin:
Evolution and the Elaboration of Myth

In what follows I wish to reflect (mainly) not on evolutionary events themselves, as facts of recent human biology and culture -- these questions I save for extended discussions in Chapter Five -- but on the science which has equipped us to study such matters. Science, too, has its evolutionary trajectory with its diverse substructures of accreted meanings, reconstituted at the time of the research as invisible constraints. Clearly I am not talking about what is traditionally considered to be the researcher's 'approach', or 'method'. I am not qualified to evaluate, or even discuss, these areas of legitimate concern. I have in mind, rather, the more fundamental assumptions of science, the ones which are generally left out when procedures are described and 'findings' are reported. These elements of accepted 'belief' are deeply rooted in the consciousness of researchers, though they attract little attention to themselves and are rarely articulated.

Nevertheless, they give the investigative effort its particular focus. They constitute what might be called the 'ideological' perspective of inquiry. These primitive elements of meaning underlie the culture at large and are not normally considered open to review. Their hold on the collective imagination is comparable only to the influence 'religion' has on wide sectors of the human population, which should not surprise us. They spring from the same source.

Nowhere, perhaps, is the power and tenacity of myth better exemplified than in the seemingly unquestioned popular acceptance of quasi-scientific 'progress' regardless of its consequences to human community and congeniality. David Noble, who sees technology and the religions of the West as merely variant expressions of a single problem of ancient origin -- i.e. the loss of divinity⁽¹⁾ -- cites the reversal of perspective exhibited in the late writings of utopian socialist Edward Bellamy, who

...in a brilliant chapter of his masterwork Equality... sought to explain why the most dramatic advances in technological development had not only failed to better the lives of most people but had actually contributed to their misery...⁽²⁾

Noble goes on to quote Bellamy himself who, writing in 1897, was at a loss to understand the uncritical popular acceptance of technological innovation despite its disastrous consequences:

This craze for more and more and ever greater and wider inventions for economic purposes, coupled with apparent complete indifference as to whether mankind derived any ultimate benefit from them or not, can only be understood by regarding it as one of those strange epidemics of insane excitement which have been known to affect whole populations at certain periods, especially of the middle ages. Rational explanation it has none.⁽³⁾

If a 'rational explanation' is to come forward, now or at some time in the future, it will be discovered, I believe, in the confluence of elements which comprises the peculiar mythology of the times in which we live, a cultural matter one would presume. But one needs to add immediately that all cultural meaning is rooted in the biology of the organism. We discover primitive levels of 'meaning' -- 'bad' as well as 'good' (in the moral judgment of evolution) -- in the earliest as in late stages of biological process. Myth is the shaping element in the mundane movements of the most primitive organism. But we discover that advanced human culture, including science itself, or what Paul Goodman (in a moment of animist inspiration) called the 'wandering dialogue with nature', is the expression of certain of the same elements of meaning, differently (and more complexly) constellated. Whatever their 'nature' in the particular case, culture and biology appear linked at their source.

This proposition is not novel. It may, for all I know, have wide recognition in the private ruminations of theorists, though we find it rarely observed in practice. Certainly few social scientists -- in the nineteenth century there were outstanding exceptions (William James, for one, whose work we have cited elsewhere) -- appear willing to trace the twin 'objects' of their interest -- the culture and behavior of the humman being -- back to their beginnings in life process. Meanwhile, scientists themselves -- the tireless 'subjects' of the empirical effort -- would not dream of seeing their own work, their rigorous probing of the secrets of nature (and varied progress through its labyrinths), as the highly elaborated yet nonetheless clear representation of biological primitives, the amplification of shared myth. In the following pages we shall consider the practice of the modern evolutionary sciences as the expression of myth first and foremost. I will ask the reader to consider, for this one time, the subject of the traditional empirical effort as the object of inquiry.

Movement and motivation...

The capacity of the organism to alter the configuration of its body constituents (in accordance with perceived needs) is, of course, the more general (and older) property of animal behavior, a property we share with plants. Whereas mobility, that is, the ability of the living being to disrupt its state of relative repose, to 'uproot' itself and to move the entirety of its body from one physical setting to another, is the newer and more specialized adaptation. The latter function is, of course, pursuant to the former and each is separately informed (and extensively articulated) through myth and its foundational structures in the common biology. (Part Two -- Chapter Five will take up, among other matters, the elaboration of these primitive elements of meaning in the animated consciousness itself.)

But we approach a significant aggravating element in centuries of epistemological twists and turns. The thinking of science and philosophy has long been befuddled by a state of affairs which was taken for granted in eons past. That is, a direct connection appears to exist between change and autonomously manipulated meaning in the experience of living organisms. Change is internally motivated. Living entities possess the means to alter, at will, their physical relation to the world outside.

The discovery of 'instinct'...

When the above-delineated property of the living organism was half-heartedly acknowledged -- we approach, incredibly, the nineteenth century -- this 'new perception' of the world was not accommodated within the body of the existing sciences (as one might, in hindsight, have reasonably supposed it would be). Though Darwin spoke freely (and interestingly) of the 'movements' of animals and plants, the long-delayed recognition (in science generally) of the animate character of living systems led to the creation of entirely new areas of inquiry with their own distinctive methodologies and idiosyncracies. Ethology, for example, emerged as a special area of scientific investigation, one which was presumed to be distinct from the rest of 'biology' and its subdivisions.

The new science sought to establish a 'safe distance' between the primary object of its attention, i.e. the actions of 'animals', which it came to view largely as a set of 'instinctive responses', and the conduct of the biological entities we call 'humans', who were supposed, in large measure, to be possessed of reason and the capacity for independent deliberation.

Thus, even though the living organism came finally to be recognized as an 'animated system' of sorts (albeit one divested of the all-important defining property of consciousness or 'soul'), the focus of inquiry remained exclusive. The actions of humans were regarded in isolation, as they are to this day. Sociology, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and related academic disciplines and sub-groupings of disciplines, made their respective appearances (alongside the ancient discipline of 'history'), all devoted to the observation of behaviors which purport to be uniquely human... though these have, as a matter of ordinary observation, extensive overlap with the observed behaviors of 'lower' life-forms. These new areas of popular and scientific focus served to maintain and widen the disconnection of human biology and social organization from the rest of nature. And, as a lucky consequence of these assumptions, the non-human organism, though recognized as possessing a crude capacity to move in direct response to external stimulus, was denied the capacity for intelligent action. The present chapter hopes to trace the historical development of at least one dimension of this complex issue.

The problem of the 'body'...

Science has progressed, in the Christian era, on a somewhat uneven course of development in which voluntary movement in nature has been the principal object of theological and philosophical denial while the physical matrix of motivated action -- the body of the organism, the body of nature -- has been a continuing source of difficulty and consternation. First rejected altogether, then progressively accepted as a subject/object of investigation, the body of the living entity has remained the troublesome barrier to both ordinary understanding and scientific observation. (I have picked up strands of this historical development in previous chapters and will continue to do so as the narrative continues.)

The uncomplicated Pagan acceptance of corporeality, as the locus of all experience (and spirituality), had a deeply disturbing effect upon the composure of medieval Christianity. An objective of the latter, we may remind ourselves, had been not just to conceive the physical world as something apart from the 'Divine' but to place all meaning and motivation, indeed the creative process itself, outside its natural province in the living universe.

In dividing and selectively derogating nature, in its general constituency and specific representations, Eastern and Middle Eastern precursors to Christianity -- I have in mind Greek epistemologies in addition to the obvious Jewish influences -- had already prepared a milieu which was receptive to the sweeping denial of the flesh which came, eventually, to characterize the outlook of mature Christianity. This denial was manifest in numerous forms which, though all too familiar, continue to strike us as rather bizarre in their various presentations. Among these were (1) the use of torture and flagellation as punishment for alleged infractions of established doctrine; (2) the punishment of the 'flesh', as the wicked instrument of natural discourse, through the deliberate production of physical discomfort: the use of 'hairshirts' and the like; (3) the extensive shrouding of this fleshy instrument of discourse in both life and death; (4) charnel houses and other quasi-ritual settings and methods designed to rid, more quickly and more efficiently, the human anatomy of its hated visceral components (in that conceptually problematic period immediately following death) while preserving the departed individual's skeletal remains, that relatively enduring and, to earlier Pagan perceptions at least, extremely significant transitional linkage to the afterlife and to the divine⁽⁴⁾; and, in that same vein, (5) the general fascination with (and seeming glorification of) the natural process of physical decay, a preoccupation revealed, as one example among many, in the interesting late medieval concept of the momento mori and its often explicit graphic representations⁽⁵⁾.

The re-discovery of nature...

But the climate of inquiry began to change early in the 16^th century. There can be little question that the increased receptivity of European science to the study of material nature was due directly to the European voyages of 'discovery'. These encounters with new continents, the America tropics in particular, drew positive attention to the astonishing diversity of nature in general (while weakening the authority of the document which had been, hitherto, the sole basis for scientific reckoning and explanation: i.e. the Christian Bible and its self-serving taxonomies). Dramatic differences were suddenly revealed between the flora and fauna of the landscape familiar to Eurasians and that of the extraordinary world which opened at the horizon of traditional knowledge, observation, and experience. An effect of the this rich new exposure seems to have been to shift the frame of philosophical reference from the domain of the metaphysical to the 'concrete reality' of living nature.

As a further byproduct of this developing change in the consciousness of Europeans, the parameters of human and animal existence were extensively reviewed and ultimately re-structured in the scientific imagination. The human body and much else in material nature came, for the first time in the modern period, under the lens of 'objective' scrutiny. Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) felt encouraged to undertake the study of human anatomy at the University of Padua (amidst a storm of clerical protest to be sure); while in England, only decades later, the English physician William Harvey (1578-1657) disclosed his seminal findings pertaining to the circulation of the blood, probably the first scientific consideration of living structure in motion.

And finally, Carolus Linnaeus (1708-1778), speaking from the relatively liberated milieu of Dutch academia, proceeded to articulate a view of nature which, though scrupulously analytic on the surface, managed nevertheless to be strikingly inclusive in ways rarely mentioned by commentators. The system of classification, which the Swedish taxonomist put forward, appears to have been inspired by a 'traditional' notion (of ancient if obscure origin) that the diverse organisms of living nature are formally allied through shared features⁽⁶⁾, a concept which reverberates, even today, with radical practical and philosophical implications.

Early humans probably saw the natural world as an extension of the self. But it was the romantics, in modern times, who would attempt to revive this perception. The romantics hoped to see the world as it was constructed by 'primitive peoples' (about whom European exploration of the Americas had brought much to light). The latter saw 'nature', the romantics fervently believed, as a system of shared relationships. Indeed, the knowledge of cultural 'primitives' is often of this strictly relational sort and probably points to a common ancestral state of mind. We learn that indigenous people of Mexico and South America continue to group plants -- those which are useful as well as those which (interestingly) are not -- according to perceived similarities.⁽⁷⁾

In Europe, much common knowledge of this 'primitive' type was wiped out, it appears, in the progressive onslaught of civilization on the cultural landscape. Nonetheless, there is evidence that some of the old sense of things had survived, underground so to speak. Bits and pieces of this ancient wisdom managed to surface from time to time, gaining exposure and increased visibility (seemingly paradoxically) with the growing literacy of the European population, a surprising change in the collective perception facilitated by the late medieval invention of the printing press, with its remarkable capacity to duplicate the graphic image, and finally by the invention of movable type which made possible the printing of books. Illustrated 'herbals', and other publications which drew on traditional knowledge of the characteristics of plants -- in particular their medicinal properties -- appeared, not in Latin primarily as was the custom in the printing of scientific tracts, but in the European vernaculars. These booklets were widely disseminated and read. They helped put together, for ordinary mortals, a picture of the world which contrasted in certain obvious respects with that revealed both in the academy and in biblical teaching. The interesting result was that an alternative way of viewing nature, one based not on physical differences between living organisms but on characteristics they seemed to share, began (in the late seventeenth century) to infiltrate the intellectual world of Europeans.

In other words, by the time Carolus Linnaeus published his Systema Naturae (1735) -- which was really just the beginning of the life work of this remarkable individual -- the world was already prepared for an understanding of life which was radically different from that presented in scripture (and implied, by metaphoric extension, in the objective universe of René Descartes). The major achievement of Linnaeus was to bring order to this vast sense of things, to find direction and focus for much of this practical and intuited knowledge. In his approach, common features of organisms, classified by general type (or 'species'), comprised the basis for groupings into yet larger categories of genus and family. (He may have been directly inspired, as I have indicated, by the classificatory system of the Northern European Sami who were able to recognize and identify by name individual reindeer in herds of thousands.)

For Linnaeus these minimal features comprised the most ordinary characteristics of the living organism: leaf shape, for example, and the number of pistils and stamens in the flowers of the plant. In line with a direction taken in previous chapters, it may be useful to call these features not distinctive (in the sense in which the Slavic Formalists used the term) but rather assimilative. The word assimilative best explores the mythic function of these elements of identity. In the imagination of the generation which followed Linnaeus, a certain conclusion was inevitable: these shared features (to which Goethe, as a young scientist, was powerfully attracted) reflected process in nature, past and ongoing.

Linnaeus' method was simplicity itself, easy to grasp and apply. He initiated a program of astounding scope which turned out, however, to be remarkably democratic in the way it was implemented. Professional and amateur collectors world-wide were enlisted in a project, the objective of which was nothing less than to identify, and assign to appropriate categories, all the earth's plant types. Samples arrived at Linnaeus' house from every part of the known globe. He spent the remainder of his days examining this rich collection of materials and assigning names to individual types (or 'species')⁽⁸⁾, writing, all the while, in both Swedish and Latin.

But most important for the future course of science: the observed features, and evidence of apparent similarities between disparate groups of organisms, seemed to imply common ancestry, or kinship in descent. To Darwin, who had the advantage of a hundred years of hindsight, the principal implication of 'Systema Naturae' was obvious:

Such expressions as that famous one of Linnaeus, and which we often meet with in a more or less concealed form⁽⁹⁾, that the characters do not make the genus, but that the genus gives the characters, seem to imply that something more is included in our classification, than mere resemblance. I believe that something more is included; and that propinquity of descent [emphasis added], -- the only known cause of the similarity of organic beings⁽¹⁰⁾, -- is the bond, hidden as it is by various degrees of modification, which is partially revealed to us by our classifications (Origin of Species).

Darwin went so far as to state that

...all true classification is genealogical; that community of descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking [emphasis added: the reference here to Linnaeus and his followers seems clear], and not some unknown plan of creation, or the enunciation of general propositions, and the mere putting together and separating of objects more or less alike (ibid.).

It is perhaps not surprising that the notion of evolutionary change spread across Europe only slightly behind the news of the new taxonomy itself. Regardless of Lynnaeus' personal thoughts on the subject -- he is considered, by some, to have rejected the principle of evolution altogether⁽¹¹⁾ -- to many thoughtful readers of his work, the idea of life as evolving process was a perfectly natural inference. The very names of the categories this former cobbler's apprentice⁽¹²⁾ put forward -- genus, family -- implied change, perhaps. of a distinctly evolutionary kind. To say that two 'species', clearly differentiated in many of their surface characteristics, were of the same 'family' (or 'genus') was to imply derivation, and divergence, from some set of common forebears (not the fixed similarities and relationships a specialist might note in the 'passive' world of minerals or rocks.) This, at least, was the liberal sense in which his imaginative younger contemporaries viewed his work, though Linnaeus himself may have 'played it safe', or remained ambivalent, on the actual question of evolutionary process.

It goes without saying. To the Christian faithful among his enthusiastic adherents, the classifications of Linaeus were wonderful evidence of Divine Intent. But there was an effect which was incalculably more harmful: to this day the achievement of Linnaeus -- indeed much of the production of the nature external to the master himself -- is viewed through the eyes of René Descartes whose towering presence continues to dominate the world of science and the intellect.

Cogito ergo sum...

We do not easily acknowledge the unity of 'body' and 'mind', so in thrall are we to the contrary notion, the idea that 'mental activity', as manifest especially in our ability to 'reason' (and thus exhibit 'preference' for one avenue of 'experience', or action, over others), exists independently of the body. Antonio Damasio (whose work I cited and discussed in an earlier chapter) is, of course, right. A Cartesian 'disembodiment' shapes not just the philosophical musings of academia but informs most popular constructions of 'reality'. It is common to think of the 'mind' as 'software' and the body as 'hardware' (Damasio, p. 248). Damasio finds it interesting, and paradoxical, that "...cognitive scientists who believe they can investigate the mind without recourse to neurobiology would not consider themselves dualists" (p. 250). This 'dualism', this assumed two-part division in our fundamental understanding of the world, is so fixed in the human imagination that one naturally wonders about its ultimate sources...

The division of body and mind certainly did not originate with Descartes. Nor did he invent its influential companion notion: the proposition that 'mind' and 'body' exist in a relation of 'cause' and 'effect'! I have suggested that the insight for which Descartes became principally known -- that the mind is the maker of the body (and not the other way around) -- was really a refurbishing of the traditional notion that a singular 'consciousness' was the creative agent in the building of the universe. Whether one calls this a single 'divinity' or some multiplicity of spiritual entities working in combination; or whether one imagines the creative entity, vaguely, as a kind of 'force', or 'great spirit' or (even more vaguely) as a 'collective consciousness' of some unspecified kind, may seem at first to be a question of taste. The details of the particular version, when we lay them all out for examination, are distinctive for the culture in question (if always problematic in their meaning). Descartes, in observance of the requirements of the age, brought the principle in question from the collective domain of traditional myth (and cosmogony) down to the level of the supposedly 'rational' human being, seeming, in this way, to preserve a kind of connection between the values of the 'new', as articulated by the secular philosophy of the European Renaissance (with its emerging emphasis on the so-called 'individual'), and the 'old', as represented mainly in the residual authority of the Catholic Church.

With respect to its influence on the enlightened population of seventeenth century Europe, certain implications and extensions of Descartes' version of this ancient precept must be noted. First, cognition was the chief reality. What really mattered was not what was but what was thought. Secondly, in Descartes the focus moved to the 'individual', as represented in the 'first person singular' of the famous epigram, though this move was deceptive. The creative ego of the European Renaissance had its mythic residence not in what the present-day observer would call the 'individual proper' but in the State. The State, in its power and singularity, was the 'first person' of the collective discourse. But finally, Descartes' principle gave support to the idea that the material world -- the whole of 'nature' if you will -- was the mere product of the mind, a mere artifact (as in the Judaeo-Christian frame of reference). Nature itself did not think.

The Cartesian division provided the philosophical background for much poetry and art of the seventeenth century, in England and elsewhere. It asserted itself, additionally, in certain important philosophical trends in the centuries which followed. It was manifest in what is often called 'philosophical idealism', and gave usually a reactionary bias to such systems of thought. Descartes' important distinction was implicit in Kant's notion of 'noumena' and 'phenomena' and in the philosophies of 'transcendentalism' which came to prominence in the mid-to-late nineteenth century (particularly in America), though the latter moved, at times, to the political 'left' in attempting to reconcile these two domains within specific programs of social reform.

These elaborations of the 'Cartesian logic' were most damaging to the fledgling sciences of the Renaissance. Their practical effect was to sever material reality, or 'nature', from any involvement in its own creation. The sense of a basic separation, in the representation of the agents of cause, on the one hand, and their principal ramifications on the other, would have an enormously distracting influence on inquiry. The cleavage was manifest in a persistent inability to imagine life as autonomously evolving structure, as fundamentally self-directed and self-directing. In Descartes' perception, a disembodied consciousness continued to be the sole motivating factor in the construction of the universe. All else was effect, mere artifact, as in the medieval Christian construction of nature. The wider philosophical and cultural outcome of Descartes' thinking was the rationalization of the meta-physical at the expense of the physical and the individual (temporal ruler in this case) at the expense of the collective.

Despite the surface secularism of his language, Descartes managed, en route, to give sanction to the traditional Judaeo-Christian notion that the task of creation was now finished. The diverse objects of nature, including 'man himself', were serially constructed at the time of Creation and remained now connected only by reason of their common supernatural origin, nothing else. Descartes' thinking thus gave support to the Enlightenment heresy that the Creator was an artisan, a Divine Clockmaker who put the universe together, started it up like a big machine, then walked away. In keeping with this idea the world existed to be studied not as process but as result.

Clearly, the Renaissance view missed the inner properties of 'nature' (as the romantics would insist), the striving of the organism to adapt, its participation in bringing about, in a Lamarckian sense if you will, the extensive modification of its own body. Descartes' model for the construction of the universe assumed a mere collection of parts, previously activated or, at most, pre-programmed for action. The living universe of the Cartesian imagination lacked the essential ingredients of a dynamic natural structure. In the Cartesian view of nature, 'movement' was mere 'inertia'.

Waiting to be 'discovered'...

Nevertheless, in this age of conquest, which ensued as a consequence of the European 'discovery' of the 'New World', the philosophical notion of a universe without will (and the capacity for purposeful action) happened, as luck would have it, to satisfy a set of eminently practical needs: the needs of politically aggrandizing elements in public life. The emerging nation state was inspired, or at least reassured, by the proposition that nature consisted of objects lacking the capacity to experience, to know, to act. The world -- the world which (in a practical sense) lay outside the physical boundaries of Britain and continental Europe -- was seen as an essentially passive structure waiting to be investigated, waiting to be exploited. The acquiescence of living nature thus became the principal excuse for intervention by the state. The state, like Newton's physical universe, abhored a vacuum.

Thus, imperial power found its existential affirmation (and principal sanction) in the Cartesian postulate. The presumed condition of passivity, in the reality external to the state, created both the need and moral justification for an assault on nature. Herewith began the period of European exploration (a restatement, in the grand setting of Global politics, of the mythic principles and strategy which had accomplished, long ago, the subjugation of the female in the social life of the human community).

The State gathered to itself all the power denied nature, the power to intervene in the world, to pursue its particular goals without opposition. Descartes' separation of 'mind' and 'body' -- which is to be grasped as a metaphooric representation of imperial agency and nature respectively -- was to realize its principal purpose not in the realm of scientific inquiry but in its service to political hegemony. One should not minimize the extensive mischief and confusion Descartes' ideas would create in the areas of science and academic philosophy. Nevertheless, his most immediate and certainly most lasting bequest was to centralized power.

Besides, Descartes gave his imprimatur to the Christian belief that the diverse products of nature were separate in their origin. In this he served the wider reactionary interests of the Counter-Reformation which opposed the erosion of class divisions (and authority) in the social and religious life of the continent. Happily, one mythic precept discovered its complement in another. Entrenched interests found comfort in the understanding that though the world was divided from the very beginning, political power was not. (Descartes lived well. Authority was grateful⁽¹³⁾.)

The romantic synthesis...

Thus it fell, in the second half of the eighteenth century, to a motley assortment of English and European artists, philosophers, poets, scientists to undertake the task of re-integrating, on the Pagan model, the human perception and understanding of experience. A central presupposition of European Romantic thought seems to have been that the phenomenon we think of as consummated nature was not just an external effect; it embodied its own set of ultimate causes. Moreover, in the Romantic view natural process entailed a melding of the tangible and the intangible, the 'metaphysical' and the 'concrete'. The Christian separation of the two was no longer considered reasonable (or even imaginable) as a philosophical premise. The notion of an invisible and externally positioned 'maker' was accordingly replaced by the concept of an autonomously directed creative energy. Deism gave way to pan-theism in which the locus of the creative spirit was the natural object itself. The young romantics subscribed to the belief that 'intention' and 'purpose' were widely distributed, revealed throughout nature.

'Pantheism' was the late eighteenth century version of an 'animism' which the romantics believed was exemplified in the relation of the cultural 'primitive' to nature. In furtherance, it seems, of the desire to re-visit an intuited earlier time, the time of the animist 'covenant with nature', the romantic sensibility would come to see the whole of the material world as invested with 'consciousness' and 'soul', capable of willful interactions of one sort or another with itself and with human beings.

Consider the folk-tales, written and eagerly collected by romantic poets and philosophers (the brothers Grimm for example), in which the natural landscape emerges as an active element in the narrative structure. In this perception of the world the varied forces and 'objects' of nature -- conscious entities all of them -- were so intermingled and mutually interactive that the boundaries of the categories assumed conventionally to keep them apart were significantly obscured. Many modern languages continue to exhibit the semantic-grammatical feature animate/inanimate to designate, respectively, those entities which possess and those which are deprived of 'soul'.

In Germany, barely two decades following the tenth printing of Systema Naturae (which contained the first exhaustive classification of animals), the young poet and scientist Johann Wolfgang Goethe can be found deeply immersed in the study of plant morphology and in the search for the structure he called the 'Urpflanze'. And only a little later, Erasmus Darwin, approaching the final decade of his life, sought to give shape, in verse, to the very taxonomic categories Linnaeus had created (The Botanical Garden [1889-1891]). And then, a few years before his death, this paternal grandfather of Charles Darwin published his remarkable Zoonomia (1794-1796) which was, in fact, nothing less than a romantic 'theory of evolution', one that preceded his grandson's articulation of the principle of natural selection by some fifty years!

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, thirty years before Wallace and Darwin first made their revolutionary ideas known to the public, a principle of evolution was practically demonstrated in the work of the famous German philologist and folklorist Jakob Grimm who showed that the diverse languages of Europe -- not all but certainly most of them -- were derived in their significant features from common ancestral structures⁽¹⁴⁾.

My point in all this is that the intellectual world of the late eighteenth century, building on ancient lore, the work of the herbalists, the classificatory system of Linnaeus (which drew explicit attention to likeness among co-existing organisms and, by implication, to likeness in descent), and other influences too complex to enumerate⁽¹⁵⁾, had begun to free itself from the rigid biblical (and Cartesian) notion of nature as somehow complete, as consisting of a certain array of 'finished objects'. The world was prepared to accept a more flexible model of the natural environment, one which was more accommodating of the principle of change (and in which creative energy was better distributed one might add). In Germany this trend culminated in an enterprise made up mostly of poets, philosophers, ethnographers and historians, a movement called 'Sturm und Drang'.

This nationally diverse group of individuals, from which the natural sciences of the nineteenth century would draw their initial inspiration, looked with disdain on the 'mind' as the organ of so-called 'reason' and discovered the 'body', the locus not of 'rational process' but of animal emotion. What the rigid classicism of the seventeenth century had rejected, the new Romanticism would celebrate with a vengeance. Certainly the most important consequence of the new 'romantic understanding' was a shift of emphasis away from the 'mind' and the faculty of 'reason' (a topic which continues to confound philosophers). Romanticism would bring, instead, depth of understanding to a material world which had been degraded since the Middle Ages, initially by the Church then by the philosophy of the Renaissance. Life became increasingly understood as a corporeal reality. Descartes' popular epigram experienced herewith a chiastic transformation. Of primary interest to the new 'romantic' generation was not so much what the organism thought but what it was. This was perhaps the lasting legacy of the new age to science.

In the new romantic view the external production of nature amounted to much more than a mere assemblage of isolated parts. It opened, in its essential compass and focus, upon an intersection of the material world with the strictly relational dimensions of plant and animal existence. Nature was the expression of the concrete object in living association with its temporal and spatial affiliations. And the shaping element, which underlies most significant movement and being in nature, was now the animated will, the composite expression of collective and individual preference. Intent was seen to inform all action by living organisms (and action by non-living entities as well, as in the 'animist' construction of the world); while much, which is perceived and experienced as physical change, was regarded as the expression of emotion, the creative language of nature and sole means by which intentional process in nature is made externally evident.

Life finds its history...

Despite the Cartesian emphasis, which his work was given in the 18^th century, the Linnaean systems of taxonomy must be considered a significant link between the exclusive world of the European Renaissance, in which the material reality of nature was distinct from its creation, and the pervasively accommodating spirit of the romantics who sought to bring the 'mind' into association with the 'body' (by way of the emotions) and the 'body' into the act of creation by way of the imagination. Perceiving levels of meaning, which may not be immediately apparent to us today, the Romantics did not turn against the work of the world-renowned botanist as they had against Renaissance thinking in general.

On the contrary, they were mesmerized by what, to them, was its principal philosophical implication: i.e., the concept of a kinship which extended laterally throughout the seas and forests of the earth, throughout its mountains and river valleys, swamps and deserts. In the work of Linnaeus the Romantics glimpsed a possibility which he himself had perhaps intuited but never given form to directly. This was the possibility that the structures, which appear to connect the flora and fauna of the earth, are the surface evidence of a definite chronology: life forms have an historical dimension in which motivated action, the reflection of the conscious will, is incarnate, physically manifest. To the Romantic sensibility, 'consciousness' (or 'spirit') was not something separate from the material world, something existing outside nature. 'Consciousness' (or 'spirit' or 'soul') resided in nature itself.

A blending of categories...

To the romantic sensibility of the late eighteenth century the physical reality of nature strove to be one with relationship (as William James might have said), one with metaphor. And life is seen to emerge at the intersection of intentional movement and corporeality. For particularly stunning examples of this romantic blending of categories, where the 'body' seems to emerge as the single encompassing 'reality', read the verses of English poet William Blake. In the hallucinatory insights of this painter-poet there is no 'supreme consciousness' which is able to transcend, or even grasp, the nature of the physical world:

"Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?"

The answer to this most provocative of all questions is, it goes without saying, none.

Im Anfang war die...

Thus the problem which tormented Faust, in the opening scenes of Goethe's verse narrative (penned, it is assumed, when the poet was in his twenties), was not some abstruse question of metaphysics. To be sure, Faust wanted to know nature's deepest connections ("..was die Welt im innersten zusammenhält"), but these were, first and foremost, the manifold physical connections which inhere in nature. These connections comprised the essence of reality; they were not something philosophically separable from it.

Faust expressed impatience, moreover, with the notion that creation was finished, unalterable. Alone in his study, searching for support for his intuited position on these fundamental questions, Faust leafed through a Greek edition of the New Testament ("...mich drängt's, den Grundtext aufzuschlagen"). (Faust's solitude was only apparent. Mephistopheles, in the form of a black dog, had followed him into his house from outside.)

But how odd it is that this skeptic and apparent scientist -- Faust was not only a philosopher but also heir to the secret alchemical traditions of Europe and Asia -- should peer into the pages of the Bible for answers to his questions. Science and philosophy -- the twin cornerstones of the Age of Reason -- had already failed him, it appears.

Faust comes immediately upon the first verse of the Gospel According to John which he sets out to translate ("...in mein geliebtes Deutsch zu übertragen"): 'Im Anfang was das...' Faust hesitates. ("Hier stock' ich schon! Wer hilft mir weiter fort?") But he finally completes the familiar opening verse: "Im Anfang war das Wort"--in the beginning was the word.

Going well beyond mere translation, Faust rejects the Greek of the original text out of hand: the lexical form in question--logos--clearly strikes him as far too confining, too static. Moreover, it evokes a sense of finality which Faust finds fatal in a statement pertaining to life and creation. The 'word'? The concept was not only divisive but tended to fix the character and meaning of creation for all time. This was as intolerable to the fictional Faust as to his counterparts in the real world of the late eighteenth century who viewed nature as process. He casts about for a suitable replacement. Trying first this, then that⁽¹⁶⁾, Faust settles eventually on the word 'Tat' (meaning 'act'): 'Im Anfang was die Tat'. The principle, which reveals life and creation in its essential workings, was willful action, the deed!⁽¹⁷⁾

This was a remarkable insight for the mid-seventies of the eighteenth century. At the 'very beginning' of life on earth we find not a 'creating entity' of some 'pure' and 'unearthly' spiritual kind but the corporeal reality itself in movement. Remarkably, Antonio Damasio, who may or may not have had Goethe's words in mind, gives Faust's epistemological conclusion an explicitly neurological frame of reference: he suspects that

..the knowledge that organisms acquired from touching an object, from seeing a landscape, from hearing a voice, or from moving in space along a given trajectory was represented by reference to the body in action (p. 232).

Faust's words have been frequently torn from their historical setting in the intellectual milieu of the eighteenth century and viewed as an anticipation of the entrepreneurial spirit of a later age. This is to misunderstand the original message. (To interpret this scene, composed in the heyday of European mercantilism, in terms of the individualist spirit of 19^th and 20^th century capitalism is to argue from the foundation of an anachronism. What Faust became, in the social context of the 'robber barons', was not the meaning it had for its author in 1774-75.)

In this simple revision of 'holy scripture', Faust rejected what had been official credo for both established religion and the 'enlightened' philosophy of the Renaissance, the idea that everything on earth and in the skies above was the product of a singular moment in time, that creation was finished, a fait accomplis; that living organisms, as we see them around us in the world today, have exactly the same physical form which they possessed at the time of creation; that life, in its present rich detail and essential diversity, reflects the inventive ingenuity of some ancient 'consciousness', as does the earth itself and its familiar surface features, its rivers, rolling seas, mountains, rocks, minerals, soils.

It is sometimes assumed that Faust returns here to the meaning expressed in the opening line of the Pentateuch ("In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" [Genesis 1.1]), but it is difficult to see how this construction can be defended. In actual fact, Faust removes God altogether from the act of 'creation' and, in so doing, anticipates the evolutionary science of the next century. In Faust's version of the text we find (in the beginning) not 'God the Creator' but rather the 'act' of creation itself (die Tat) and, by implication, the enabling structure or the 'body'. This is language which incorporates the 'will', transports it from the lofty reaches of heavenly power 'down' to nature itself.⁽¹⁸⁾

Progress impeded...

The Romantics, poised on the shoulders of Linnaeus and a selective reading of the science of the late Renaissance, were able, for a while, to look beyond the mythic obstructions of their own time and discern the outline of a continent which was as new to the human imagination, and intellect, as the landscape of the Americas had been to the 'conquistadores' of the sixteenth century. It certainly should have been possible, now at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to bring the study of evolution significantly forward as a new discipline, one that strove to blend physiology, anatomy, psychology, and the other areas of biology which were becoming known to the sciences of the day. But unfortunately this expectation confronted serious social and political obstacles. Conditions had arisen which would impede, for a protracted period of time, all definite movement in this promising direction.

From the end of the eighteenth century on, many practitioners of the biological sciences became themselves engaged in an effort to expunge from their work any suggestion of a 'romantic synthesis'. While the concept of the living organism as a fundamentally acting entity found a degree of grudging acceptance, science would soon resist, with all its might and growing prestige, the romantic and profoundly heretical corollary of this proposition: namely that movement (and natural process) was internally directed. To the present day any hint of this heretical perspective in the practice of science is castigated and summarily dismissed as Lamarckian nonsense and worse⁽¹⁹⁾. In the new perspective meaning, or intent, reposes in the study of nature, not in nature itself, i.e. in the subject as opposed to the object of the empirical undertaking.

Another look at the matter of 'behavior'...

As noted in our chapter on language, the word 'behavior' appeared, at a precipitous moment, as a crucial 'isogloss'⁽²⁰⁾ on the landscape of the modern sciences. (See Part I -- Chapter II for discussion of the role this word plays in the mytho-cultural objectification of experience.) The lexical harbinger of a new 'objective' approach to the understanding of life systems, this seemingly ordinary English noun functioned to urge upon the public imagination a particular sense of the biological entity's ongoing 'relation to the world', one which, ignoring internal process, addressed the surface properties of the relationship alone.

Biologist and writer Charles Darwin came to intellectual maturity in the waning moments of the romantic 'revolution' in the arts and sciences. It is thus not surprising to discover that the language he employed in his voluminous scientific narrations significantly straddled the old and the new set of dispensations. He never fully adopted the word 'behavior', and the perspective it seemed to afford, although the word does make an occasional appearance in his late writings with reference to human conduct specifically. In the writings which mark his long professional career Darwin exhibited a clear preference for words such as 'movement', 'action' and, associated often with these, the word 'habit', which Darwin saw as basic to much (but not all) animal 'behavior'. Although 'habit' and 'behavior' occupy distinct fields in the lexicon of scientific narration and are thus not in any sense interchangeable (and were not in Darwin's day), the distribution of the two words in Darwin's opus is a surprisingly good indicator of his position vis-a-vis the mytho-historical transition in question.

The word 'behaviour' is shunned altogether in Origin of Species, while the word 'habit' occurs in one-hundred-and-sixty-two locations, often seemingly in its stead. In the Notebooks the word 'habit' occurs one-hundred-and-sixty times, while the word 'behaviour' occurs only once. (The word 'behaviour' does make modest progress in Darwin's later writings. There are five occurrences of this word in Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals; but here, too, occurrences of the word 'habit' prevail by a significant margin. See Barrett Concordances.)

What is the basis for our comparison of two lexical items which, though substantially congruent in certain important respects are nonetheless so different in texture and meaning? Why did Darwin use the one form and avoid the other? What elements of meaning did the one provide which the other lacked?

As information preliminary to the discussion of these questions, let me provide a brief outline of the respective histories of the two words. 'Habit' is an adoption of medieval French habit (or abit) which is, in turn, an adaptation of Latin habitus (from the verb habere meaning to have). We find that English habit is notably extensive in its meaning owing, perhaps, to its original sources. It encompasses three broad areas: (1) dress or attire (i.e. external appearance); (2) bearing or deportment (i.e. external actions); and (3) mental constitution or disposition, a clear reflection of internal process. In Modern French, habit has been narrowed to the first of these meanings while other senses of the word are encompassed, in that language, by habitude. Havour, on the other hand, the form from which 'behaviour' would evolve in English, is an adaptation from French avoir (also meaning to have) and became affiliated, in Middle English, to the verb to have (which had, of course, common Germanic sources). Thus the English words behavior and habit--the former a curious hybrid with a rather tortuous derivation, the latter an outright borrowing--do share roots in Medieval French (and in Latin indirectly) and have a presumed substructure of common meaning. It becomes thus a matter of historical consistency and interest, when all is said and done, that the two forms end up competing, as it were, for the same mytho-conceptual terrain.

A heuristic comparison...

He put his cigarette out in what was left of his mashed potatoes, a behavior which his dinner companions found irritating.

He put his cigarette out in what was left of his mashed potatoes, a habit which his dinner companions found irritating.

Pushed to the foreground, in the second version (of what we may assume is the 'same event'), is the fact that the particular conduct has occurred previously and that the 'dinner companions' on this particular evening are possibly acquaintances, associates perhaps or even friends (in single quotes). Note that the effect of the word habit on the structure of the sentence is far-reaching. With its evocation of a relatively complex cluster of semantic images the word has the capacity to force many of the other elements of the discourse into a particular alignment. (Thus with Darwin we shall discover.) The narrative setting, in particular the point of vantage which we as readers are encouraged to assume, is specially constituted in the second version of the event. The word 'habit' forces us to see the action from the perspective of a certain relationship between the offending individual and his dinner companions, one which is obligatory perhaps. The word 'habit' explores, and seeks to illuminate, the history of this relationship. Moreover, it gives that history a tangible quality, a demonstrably physical character.

The word 'habit' seems not to separate the 'appearance' of an object from its 'behavior', a fact which is most intriguing. The word 'habit' denotes the entire exterior being of an organism, the sum total of its external character, and thus encompasses its capacity to move. Recall that in the human sphere a 'habit' may refer as appropriately to the 'clothing', or 'dress', of an individual, conceived as an outer covering of some kind (structurally analogous to the external character, or physical features, of a non-human organism or plant), as to his/her propensity to 'behave' in a certain way. 'Habit' is the embodiment of action (a fact Darwin seems to have taken to heart). 'Habit' is 'behavior' fleshed out.

Moreover, 'habit' goes out of its way to present the action as willful (as Darwin was also aware). Underlying the structure of the 'habit', as a conceptual element intrinsic to the cluster of images the word evokes, is the clear notion of 'intent'. The word seems not to separate 'movement' from 'motivation'.

That is, to possess a certain 'habit of mind' is to be predisposed to think in a certain way. And to be wont to think in a certain way is, in a real if somewhat oblique sense, to want to think in that way, though the two words I have just used are, of course, etymologically unrelated. Far from being suppressed, the 'will' is active in expressions of 'habit'. Just beneath the surface suggestions of humdrum repetition lies the faint but clearly audible implication that the action undertaken is 'preferred', even voluntary. (In the beginning at least. Given the position of die-hard Darwinians vis-a-vis Lamarck, and the issue of internal process in particular, it may not surprise the modern reader to discover that the master himself was troubled by this implication.⁽²¹⁾ The fact that Darwin continued to use the word habit may reveal something about his own position vis-a-vis the notion of motivated change in biological process.) The individual, in the second version of the two constructs given above, comes across, for this reason alone, as possibly more offensive. Nevertheless, the picture we form--of both action and re-action--is relatively more subdued. For here the conduct itself fails to strike the man's dinner companions as exceptional. It is, after all, a replay of all-too familiar material.

The first version, by contrast, strips the episode in question of its natural context. For all anybody knows, those assembled on this particular evening may well have come together for the first time--and the event which transpired here may well have been unique. The word 'behavior' fails to probe much beneath an implication of 'surface deportment', or what is called 'conduct'. (To be sure, 'behavior' in itself is perhaps not judgmental in the sense in which 'conduct' is judgmental, a conceptual circumstance which may seem odd considering the origins of the word 'behavior' in social propriety.)

Moreover, 'behavior' has little or nothing to say about the corporeality of the action in question--its physical make-up (which is, in the final appraisal, its sole residue in the material world). Nor does it seek to address its meaning or genesis in the particular moment. Nor does it say anything about the manner of its representation. 'Behavior' is little more than a profile of the 'action' itself, an abstract web of connections in which the participants--the material objects of the physical world--tend to vanish from the visual field. In the 'behavior' of an organism we see 'movement' but little motivation. We see 'action' to be sure. But the deliberately acting body disappears from the screen of the individual and collective imagination. By reason of the exclusive restriction, which the word 'behavior' imposes on the discursive imagination, process is short-circuited, closed to perception.

It may have suited Darwin's purpose to obscure the division between the two areas of inquiry which interested him most: botany and zoology. Moreover, it appears to have been as acceptable, within the narrative conventions of the science of Darwin's day, to speak of the habits of plants as of the habits of animals⁽²²⁾. In fact, Darwin used the revealing phrase, 'movements and habits of [climbing] plants', in the title of a major article which appeared mid-way in his career. Had Darwin adopted the word 'behaviour' (on this and other occasions), a word which was already in use by Thomas Huxley and others, he might, in effect, have endorsed the anti-Lamarckian position of the neo-Darwinians who would eventually reject, as a matter of fundamental principle, any role at all for 'intent', or manifestations of the 'will', in evolutionary process. Darwin found himself positioned, here as in many other instances of personal and theoretical conflict, on the horns of a dilemma. I shall revisit this topic in association with a discussion of Darwin's famous delay, the fifteen years, or so, during which the principle of Natural Selection lay buried, unpublished, amongst his voluminous notes.

Darwin and the social climate of the day...

In England and on the Continent the industrial revolution was taking its ghastly toll in the dislocation of wide sectors of the human population. Peasants, who had previously known a stability, of sorts, in the feudal dispensations of rural culture, now suffered the severe consequences of unemployment or were made in other ways to feel useless. Thousands lost their homes along with their piddling farm jobs and related occupations. The production of essential commodities was transferred from the home to the alienating environment of huge factories which, for purposes of distribution and the exploitation of labor, became clustered in adjacency to large population centers. Cities such as London--social conditions in England were, by far, the worst in the industrialized world--and Berlin, to a lesser extent, became the trash bins for an excess humanity which had no value except as cheap labor to be exploited by industry, or as ready market prospects for the producers of food and other commodities (upon which the new city-dweller had become, first culturally, in the usual pattern, but now physically dependent). It goes without saying that popular dissatisfaction and unrest, under these most adverse of imaginable living conditions, was immense. Hostility to wealth and power was great and, in fact, threatened to spiral out of control as the century progressed.

Thus, from the perspective of established political and economic interests the early nineteenth century was hardly the time to advance a theory of 'man and nature' the essence of which was the inevitability of motivated change. (While Darwin worked in leisure at his country estate over his beloved barnacles, Karl Marx, tormented by bad health, family crisis and the deaths of his children, labored on in the British Museum [located, significantly, amidst the social squalor of London] to put together the other great nineteenth century philosophical monument to change: Das Kapital.)

Theology contributes...

But the threat to the status quo came, surprisingly, not just from these first stirrings in the evolutionary sciences. Christianity had harbored, since its beginnings, the belief, founded in early patriarchal myth, that God, in a rage over the disobedience and iniquity of man, had killed off most living things and had initiated, starting almost from scratch, a new episode in the life of the earth: the biblical 'flood' and its aftermath, as reported in the earnest narratives of Moses. To some, this provided support, of a kind, for the notion that the earth had experienced major upheavals, not just once but on various other occasions in its long history; and that these had been sometimes catastrophic in scale.

Moreover, the burgeoning science of geology was uncovering evidence (especially in France) that organisms, which were quite different from those to be observed in the world of today, had, at various times, populated the surface of the earth, its land, seas, mountains, rivers. Many in science at that time did not draw from these new findings the inference that seems obvious to us today: that an evolutionary process was at work in nature and nature's creatures. They assumed rather that numerous 'extinctions' had taken place among the earth's 'original' fauna (and flora). Massive die-offs had occurred that were due, it was argued, to an entire series of catastrophic events brought down upon the earth, and its life systems, by a vengeful Creator. The Biblical 'Flood' had been merely one (and perhaps only the most recent) example!

In other words, evolution, as a science of biological change, had to face opposition, on the one hand, from the tattered remnants of religious myth and, on the other, from the dubious science of 'catastrophism' to which religion, itself in the throes of great doubt, had helped to give birth. (These episodes in science had given the topic of 'extinctions' a bad name, with the result that the conditions, which mark the progress of a community of organisms toward its ultimate demise, remain insufficiently studied to this day. As suggested in a previous chapter, the study of evolution in nature has meant, by and large, compiling a record of its outstanding 'successes', with little attention to the role short-term 'success' plays in the ultimate 'failure' and collapse of large populations of organisms.)

But more significantly, science had to recognize (and accommodate) the prevailing economic and political interests of the day for whom the very whisper of change (whether emanating from the religious imagination or the findings of science) was potentially incendiary. Given this complex juxtaposition of opposed intellectual, religious, and socio-political interests it is no wonder that progress, in the understanding of evolution, faltered for a protracted period of time.

Darwin dithers...

In fact, nearly a century would pass between the first inkling, in the minds of persons of science (and others), that organisms as types undergo significant modifications, over certain indeterminate stretches of time, and the disclosure of the principle of Natural Selection, the mechanism that sought to explain such changes. Darwin himself participated in the postponement of the resolution to this question (which seems now to have been so much in the air as to have been inevitable in its final appearance). He had already prepared--by 1844 for sure, but there were versions before this--an outline of the principle of Natural Selection, but it had remained unpublished. He turned instead to tangential concerns, spent eight years studying barnacles, for example, an expenditure of his precious time and energy which he appeared later to resent. (Darwin suffered from a chronic disease which afflicted him, since his visit to the American tropics, and drained his energy.) A consequence of this procrastination was that the single insight, which would extensively re-organize the natural sciences, and ensure Darwin's ranking among the luminaries of Western Civilization, was 'in process' for at least fifteen years before finally emerging to the light!

Darwin's delay has been attributed variously to the climate of scientific opinion, which was suspicious of evolution for the reasons stated above. It has been argued additionally that the publication (and popularity) of theories involving grandiose cosmological principles had given the study of evolution a questionable aura.⁽²³⁾ Many in science shrank from the popular notion, promoted in the writings of Lamarck and others, that life-forms, under the influence of metaphysical forces of one kind and another, progressed up the scala naturae, or great 'chain of being', toward ever increasing physical perfection.

More personally, it has been suggested that Darwin had taken the experience of Erasmus Darwin to heart. Darwin's grandfather had become known, in the circles of science, as something of an eccentric following the publication of his fanciful Zoonomia in 1794-96. It has been suggested that his grandson was determined not to expose himself to the same mild ridicule, hence his extreme caution and almost fanatical devotion to the basic principles of empirical method⁽²⁴⁾. I would propose, however, that there were other, perhaps more fundamental, matters that remained unresolved in Darwin's mind and about which he felt some degree of unease. It may be useful to pursue these questions a bit further. For they are with us yet and continue to bedevil inquiry.

Recall that Darwin, when the long-awaited Origin of Species appeared in 1858, preceded his introduction to the immediate matter at hand--Natural Selection--with a lengthy discussion of the human domestication of plants and animals for their (presumably) desirable characteristics. In Darwin's overall scheme, nearly twenty years in gestation, the deliberate creation of new and 'improved' varieties of plants, through the agency of human intervention, would serve as the perfect analogy for what transpires in 'nature'. But there were not so subtle problems, in this use of the artifactual process as an analogy for the other, which must surely have caused him to hesitate. How far might the instructive analogy be taken? Perhaps nature itself knew some guiding energy, or force, which played the same role in selection as that performed by the human being in plant and animal breeding. (Such thoughts led others back into religion, but Darwin was led repeatedly into Lamarckian speculations about the influence of the 'will' and the inheritance of habituated actions, ideas which were founded, at least, upon principles that could eventually be falsified.)

It was unfortunate, for Darwin and for the later reception of his ideas, that the relation of the horticulturalist to his plants, the gardener to his garden, the vintner to his vines (or, for that matter, the 'shepherd' to his 'flock'), was deeply imbued with certain elements of patriarchal myth,⁽²⁵⁾ in particular the notion that a divine entity presides over the goings and comings of living creatures. This connection with traditional metaphor entailed the considerable risk that the materialist basis of Darwin's new theory--its principal value in his own estimation (and ultimately in the judgment of history)--would be significantly undermined. Moreover, there was the danger, despite his best effort to forestall such an eventuality, that his work would be received with the same dubious praise that had greeted previous advances in the sciences, that the theory of Natural Selection--the epitome of elegance in its exclusive appeal to the forces of nature--was itself evidence of divine intent!

And, in actual fact, the position of theology on the question of evolution changed dramatically in the latter half of the century, perhaps as a consequence of Darwin's clever strategy. (The analogy provided Darwin's opponents with important amunition. Despite thousands of years of plant and animal breeding the world had not yet witnessed the creation of an entirely new 'species'. This apparent fact gave the conservatives no small support in the ensuing debate over evolution.) In the increasingly liberal disposition of the Christian establishment, evolutionary process, and with it Natural Selection, was ultimately accepted and came to be considered by sophisticated believers as compatible with the Biblical account of creation, though the latter, to the immense consternation of religious conservatives, was now increasingly regarded as metaphor, not the literal narration of an omniscent deity!

In any case Darwin, unsure about the wider consequences of his theory, 'dithered', as some have put it, and would no doubt have put off the publication of Origins even longer, had Wallace not forced his hand. There can be no question that a significant source of his uncertainty was the role that a guiding 'consciousness' played in selection.

Darwin expressed reluctance to appeal to such notions, even in their most rudimentary forms. The frequently noted 'Lamarckian spin', which Darwin appears to give biological process (in passages too numerous to quote but which the reader will discover scattered amongst his late writings), is due more to the author's romantic (if rather vague) understanding of the word 'will' than to any specific notions about mechanisms involved in the evolutionary transmission of features. The mere mention of 'will', or of 'consciousness' (or of 'intent'), seems to bring Lamarck and 'vitalist strivings' to the minds of modern interpreters of Darwin's writings, regardless of how impeccably the case for Natural Selection may be otherwise stated. Descartes' 'error', the strict separation of the mind from the body (and consciousness from nature), is evident in evolutionary science from the beginning, in the musings and interpretations of others if not in the writings of Darwin himself.

Darwin's ambivalence on the question of whether animals, other than humans, know 'feelings', is nowhere better illustrated than in the final sentence of Chapter Three ("Struggle for Existence") in Origin of Species:

When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply (emphasis added).

Note that creatures who possess no capacity to 'feel' are nevertheless 'happy'.

Energy from within...

Darwin was clearly of two minds on these important issues. He did not subscribe to the rigid Cartesian precept that nature operates in an entirely mechanical or oblivious fashion. Although the notion of deliberate action, by the individual non-human organism, caused him some discomfort, Darwin's numerous brief references to the 'will' suggest that he held this property of cognition to be a decisive factor in the shaping of 'habits'. And where the 'will', if we may define the word briefly as the capacity to act upon 'preference', is indicated, there is to be found also 'consciousness' of some complex (if rudimentary) kind.

Nevertheless, in his zeal to oppose the idea he regarded as most offensive to science--that nature is the achievement of a singular 'mind'--Darwin came distressingly close to eliminating consciousness altogether from the construction of the system on which selection was presumed to operate. Indeed, many converts to Darwin's theory, influenced more by the 'philosophical center' of his argument (and less by its often contradictory 'fringes'), came ultimately to accept the proposition that Descartes was right all along; that nature was, in fact, essentially 'mindless'. (Except, of course, for the human being, always the anomaly in nature!)

Darwin's equivocation and deeply felt ambivalence on the question of 'consciousness', and its proper relation to (and bearing on) natural selection, may have contributed to the revival of a certain kind of thinking that had been pushed to the side, for a time (in the imagination of intellectuals at least), by the larger romantic vision of an animated material reality, one fully possessed of 'consciousness' (or 'soul'). But this apparent 'reversion', in Darwin's thinking, to a classical precept of the Renaissance (i.e. the notion of a nature that, if not entirely mindless in the strict Cartesian sense was, at least, helpless in that it was subject to the action of forces it was essentially powerless to influence) now served a startlingly different purpose which we shall attempt to elucidate in the paragraphs which follow.

Darwin was torn between his basic good sense and honesty, which served him admirably in his scientific observations, and the mythic precepts of a cultural apparatus which he more or less affirmed despite misgivings, i.e. the social and political arrangements of Victorian England which had allowed his intellectual capacities to develop and mature, an opportunity which came to few. (Darwin, like Descartes before him, belonged to a particularly indulged social class. The leisure and independence, which allowed him to pursue his interests without the need to seek gainful employment [in his autobiography he freely acknowledged the special advantages which inevitably accrue to members of his class], derived from his own family fortune and that of his wife, Emma, with whom he shared a famous grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood, English potter and founder of the ceramics factory which still carries his name.)

The study of evolutionary process brought the two sides of Darwin's disposition into conflict. The principle of 'selection', which was evident in the essential workings of nature, appeared unfortunately to operate on a nature which, to Darwin's acute powers of observation, was nothing, if not the expression of energy surging from within. (The problem, as Darwin must surely have perceived it, and as we shall expand upon it in due course, was not too little display of 'will', in nature, but too much.)

Working from the perspective of the romantic tradition which placed great weight on the integrated reality of nature, the dependence of the latter on inherent properties of 'will' would have been self-evident to Darwin (as it had been, at the end of the eighteenth century, to the controversial Lamarck). Yet, as the scion of a pampered social class, whose very existence depended on the quiescence (and fragmentation) of the impoverished masses in England, Darwin was inclined to deny any natural expression of energy (and dreaded autonomy). Especially when this was collectively manifest, revealed in deliberated actions by the group.

Thus a rough outline takes shape of some issues which (likely) occupied Darwin during the period of the famous 'delay'. What to do, namely, with this package of components which were seemingly undeniable in evolutionary process yet had managed, so thoroughly, to frustrate scientific as well as common understanding: 'consciousness', 'intent', and the expression of the 'will' (to use the precise words Darwin summoned to characterize this area of persistent difficulty to him and others). If successfully liberated from the realm of the supernatural, where they appear to have had the single purpose of rationalizing unevenness in the distribution of power among humans; if allowed, instead, to find a self-regulated arrangement in the immediate connections of the living environment and its manifold dispensations, it should be obvious that these properties of the living structure posed a problem to the vested interests of the day which depended, for their own survival if for no other practical reason, on the myth of simple cause and locus of control (a topic I have touched upon previously and shall address more fully in the following chapter).

Assembling a suitable response...

The issues which loomed as paramount for Darwin (and for the materialist science of the early nineteenth century) can be considered in three parts: (1) the content, or meaning, of the 'conscious force', or 'impulse', or expression of 'will' as we observe this in nature and upon which selection can be assumed to operate; (2) the real distribution of these properties in living nature; and (3) the 'style' (and speed) of the changes which flow therefrom.

The latter consideration was especially important: existing conditions in the human world, with their potential to erupt at any time in violence, seemed to require an understanding of evolutionary process in which the mitigating and restraining effect of 'time' was an important factor. A view of nature predicated upon violent and unforeseen change would tend to countenance corresponding upheavals in the realm of human relations. The rejection, by science, of 'catastrophism' followed mainly from such apprehension, unstated at the time but nevertheless deeply felt. Social disruption was apt to ensue from the 'wrong' kind of thinking about nature. The last thing the world needed were re-enactments of the American and French Revolutions! Thus all parts of the issue, which Darwin struggled with, raised questions of political strategy which were veiled in assorted mythic assumptions (which were themselves hidden, we have discovered and shall endeavor to amplify in a following chapter, behind complex biological metaphor).

It may be astonishing to modern readers that Natural Selection, now sometimes considered so powerful a principle in evolutionary development that it appears to stand virtually alone, seems not, in Darwin's own view, to have been fully adequate to replace the 'missing creator'. Having separated divine providence (and singular cause) from the story of creation, Darwin felt the clear need for a guiding principle of some meta-theoretical kind which could fulfill the same functional purpose without danger either to the existing social order or the assumptions of the new materialist science.

The miracle of Malthus...

He had found this quite early, he said, in the views of Thomas Robert Malthus. He confessed, in his 'Autobiography', that the principle of Natural Selection came to him simultaneously with the reading of something 'on population' by this Scottish clergyman turned economist. (The piece Darwin refers to was Malthus' early "Essay on the Principle of Population," first published in 1798, eleven years before Darwin was born, but revised in later years.)

Fifteen months after I had begun my systematic enquiry [that is in 1838], I happened to read for amusement [emphasis added] Malthus on population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on, from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed... (The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809-1882, ed. N. Barlow. London: Collins, 1958).

Note, by the way, Darwin's close attention to dates. Even in later years he remained troubled by the issue of 'priority' which had been raised when Wallace sent him, in the early summer of 1858, his remarkable paper "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Infinitely from the Original Type." This modest essay, which nevertheless anticipated to the letter Darwin's own views on Natural Selection, arrived as a bombshell in the latter's household and precipitated an uncharacteristic flurry of activity, with Charles Lyell and others (but not his friend Thomas Huxley intriguingly) maneuvering behind the scenes in Darwin's behalf, all of which resulted in the famous joint appearance of Wallace and Darwin before the Linnaean Society of London on July 1 1858.

It is somewhat surprising to discover that Darwin read Malthus (who had been already dead for a few years) for the first time in 1838. Malthus had been well-known in intellectual circles for some time. The latter's thoughts on population clearly impinged on Darwin's special interests and had been given wide circulation; so it is puzzling that Darwin would place his discovery of this seminal material relatively late in the progress of his own thoughts about evolution and then acknowledge this contribution in such an off-hand manner. Moreover, he seems inclined, at the outset, to minimize Malthus' importance to the development of his own thought -- he was reading Malthus "for amusement," he tells us.

Moreover, he goes out of his way to remind us that he was already "prepared," through his "long-continued" study of plants and animals, to appreciate the "struggle for existence" which went on in nature. As the affair with Wallace would demonstrate twenty years later, and as he himself would reveal, Darwin was by no means above concerns about who was first and how the future would deal with this vexing question of priority. Though self-effacing in his outward manner, Darwin was as adept in the various nuances of political maneuvering as many scientists today. To be 'prioritized' was, for Darwin, the most dreaded of possible contingencies. He used exactly this word to describe the threat posed by Wallace.

In any case, Darwin found in Malthus what he was looking for: the mythic structure (allow me to anticipate the drift of the following discussion) which would explain his theory and thus compensate, within the new ontogenetic framework of Natural Selection, for the missing 'hand of the creator'. Note that in Darwin's mind the principle of Natural Selection, itself one of the most powerful tools know to science, appeared to need a larger explanatory context! Though the need for a meta-theoretical precept may seem initially puzzling, it becomes immediately understandable when one recalls that Darwin was under pressure not just from the data but from the socio-political exigencies of the time. Human community, which the twin myths of freedom and democracy threatened to rouse to political consciousness and action, needed above all else to be restrained; and Darwin discovered the appropriate over-arching solution in the 'struggle for existence'. It was Malthus' claim, let us remember, that a population of organisms increases in a geometric proportion while its riches, its available foodstuffs and other necessary materials of subsistence, expand only arithmetically. Poverty and disease, the apparent causes of most human misery, are the natural result of this growing discrepancy between resources and human numbers!

To Darwin, the peculiar attractiveness of the Malthusian 'struggle' lay in the fact that it provided a drastically limiting context for individually motivated action. It introduced mythically appropriate constraints on the expression of the 'will'. In the mythic 'struggle', as Malthus had imagined it, the adversaries were well defined: the energies of the individual were directed, for the most part, against other individuals. This was the crucial factor. (Meanwhile, one must continue to keep the important fact in mind that the overriding consequence of this focus on the 'individual' was a weakening of the collective.)

There was reason, on the surface, for the fastidious Darwin to downplay the role the Malthusian 'struggle' had played in the evolution of his own theory. In their avowed purpose the Scottish clergyman's ideas had been nakedly political: their primary meaning had been that nothing much could be done to improve the lot of the impoverished masses. Malthus seemed bent on demonstrating that evil was inherent in nature, that the human social condition was kind-of like 'original sin'. But more to the point, his theory of population expansion and its attendant horrors was an apologetics for industrial mercantilism-cum-capitalism. (Its effect was widespread. In the US, and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, the musings of Malthus continue to rationalize public policy, though few note the connection.) The gentlemanly Darwin, though not inclined to draw political (or social) inferences from the workings of nature, could hardly have been unaware of the crude agenda of Malthus' effort in this direction and of the powerful effect these ideas would have in association with natural selection.

Had he possessed the stomach to inquire into the reality of the life of the poor, Darwin's own times would have afforded ample demonstration of the principles at work in evolutionary process as he envisioned it. It would have been easy for him to provide striking examples of Natural Selection at work in the human population of England. It was widely believed, after all, that the poor were 'mentally defective' and that a causal relation existed between the two natural (if deplorable) human conditions. Was not poverty the result of 'low' intelligence? Was not the misery of the poor an unfortunate manifestation of 'natural selection' in progress?

To the Christian devout, as to the emerging 'evolutionary biologist', poverty was a sign of individual failure, evidence (no doubt) of disapproval by God and/or 'nature'. Such 'Calvinist' conclusions, rarely hinted at in Darwin's own writings, were nevertheless quickly drawn by others who were less intelligent (and less constrained by good taste). (The social implications of natural selection became the stock-in-trade of evolutionary theory in its crudest forms. They persist today in popular notions about poverty, intelligence, and race -- the legacy of Darwin as much as of Malthus.)

As luck would have it there was no need for Darwin to do much with the 'Malthusian connection' on his own. By the time Origin was being prepared for publication the ideas of Malthus had become mainstream among conservative English intellectuals. The finicky Darwin was thus spared the need to elaborate, on his own, the apparent connection between Natural Selection and the brutal 'struggle for existence' in the lives of contemporary humans. In the intellectual climate of post-Malthusian England, the painful social construction of 'natural selection' could be left to others.⁽²⁶⁾

The contemporary 'socialist' perspective...

In Germany the negative reaction of scientists to the ideas of Darwin (and his delayed acceptance there) had to do with the fact that all theories of evolution were regarded as contaminated by 'Naturphilosophie', which was correctly considered, in liberal intellectual circles at least, to be the trashy production of political reaction. (And, indeed, this late romantic and watered-down idealization of nature must be considered a philosophical precursor to Nazi theories of race.) Biologist Rudolf Virchow and others in the German scientific community, many of whom considered themselves to be modern socialists in the Marxian mold, may have been turned off not so much by the principle of Natural Selection itself, as a general proposition about the nature of biological change, but by what they considered specifically reactionary in Darwin's presentation. They may have been 'wrong' for the 'right' reasons.

Defeating the collective...

The budding science of evolution had no difficulty extricating the 'will' from its traditional locus (at the center of 'divine creation') and re-imagining it as a distributed phenomenon. This was the enduring legacy of European romanticism and the myth of 'democratic autonomy'. But how to bring the 'will' under control, how to restrict the field of its operation lest it serve as the basis for the re-assembly of community? It was Darwin's invaluable service to the modern culture of exploitation that he immensely refined this potentially troublesome aspect of evolutionary theory. Under Darwin's guidance the energy and will of the individual came to be seen as engaged in a struggle to defeat the collective. Darwin's principal accomplishment was to bring the expression of the 'will' into alignment with the mythic requirements of the age:

...as more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life. It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdom... (Origin, p .)

Note that to identify the principal adversaries of the Malthusian 'struggle' (and to bring them into the juxtaposition proper to the mythology of his class) Darwin uses the ambiguous (and softening) preposition 'with', although the context conveys the clear meaning of 'against'. This reflects, perhaps, Darwin's feelings of doubt and insecurity with respect to the idea that the relationship between the individual and the 'other' was necessarily competitive and hostile. This was hardly a trivial question in Darwin's mind. Here we see the clash between his basic good sense, as a scientist and observer of nature, and his reading of the mythology of his time: an overarching structure in which the heroic individual, in free contest with (read against) his environment, is seen to 'triumph', or 'win out', over the assortment of hostile forces which make up the totality of nature.

The myth of 'separation', and the process by which the individual becomes isolated from the whole, was not, of course, original in the thinking of nineteenth century science (or even the science of the Renaissance) but merely newly affirmed by it, as it was not original in the Judaeo-Christian tradition but merely affirmed by it. One of the oldest of the mythic precepts which mark human biological-cultural 'progress', it can be traced, in the ancestral stock, all the way back to sexual reproduction and the original separation of the sexes. But using this presumed biological point of 'origin' merely as a spring-board, let us jump forward quite a bit. In the consciousness of emerging hominids, the myth of 'separation', rooted as it was in biology, had a strong association with the male of the species and may have affirmed certain adaptive responses in which the male was possibly the initiator, not the least of which was the abandonment of the forest and the seeming 'separation' of human community from external 'nature', the pain of which has been secondary in human experience only to the separation of the individual from human community itself.⁽²⁷⁾

Herbert Spencer and the myth of freedom...

The myth of separation had lingered, lo these many years, in varied service to concentrated power (and to state imperialism eventually) where its function, in its positive endorsement, was largely pernicious, i.e. to undermine communal solidarity with the environment external to the human being. But this strikingly 'positive spin' was given new force by nineteenth

century science which sensed its potentially useful relation to the myth of 'freedom', emerging at this time, and the concept of the 'entrepreneur' who goes forth into the wide world essentially unhampered by the restraints of community. Herbert Spencer, from whom Darwin would borrow the unfortunate phrase 'survival of the fittest', gave this late-nineteenth century image explicit form. The individual, he asserted with a confidence which transcends a century and a half of human speculation about the nature of society, gains freedom through its differentiation from the group⁽²⁸⁾.

These fragments of myth were much in the air at the time, much on the minds of the early apologists for entrepreneurial capitalism, so it is perhaps not surprising that Darwin, too, gave in to their pressures. They tended, in fact, to overwhelm much that was truly insightful, even 'original', in his thinking and led him to certain oddities of judgment that have detracted substantially from the quality of his work. They provided also the inspiration for much of the nonsense that would characterize later work in the evolutionary sciences.

Animal emotion--useful and useless...

Among the suggestions which would lead others astray was the construction Darwin placed on the concept 'useful' in evolutionary adaptation. As stated above, his narrow definition of this notion proceeded from the simple and necessarily adversarial relationship of the individual to the rest of nature. This was, in Darwin's mind, the conceptual residue of the transfer of 'consciousness' from the realm of the supernatural (and the singularity of an 'original' Divine creation) to the level of the individual organism where volition (as required by the new version of the myth) would be highly focused. Here the element of 'creation' was manifest in a striving, importantly single-minded, for 'reproductive advantage'. The attendant images were familiar, as I shall attempt to demonstrate in the following pages, but their constellation was new.

Owing to this struggle, variations, however slight... if they be in any degree profitable to the individuals of a species [emphasis added]... will tend to the preservation of such individuals, and will generally be inherited by the offspring. The offspring, also, will thus have a better chance of surviving, for, of the many individuals of any species which are periodically born, but a small number can survive. I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful [emphasis added], is preserved, by the term Natural Selection, in order to make its relation to man's power of selection (Origin).

What was considered 'useful' in Darwin's judgment was narrowly determined by the degree of reproductive advantage it gave the individual over other individuals of the same (or different) species. This posed an obvious theoretical difficulty: it seemed to leave out whole categories of 'habits' and 'experience' (or what is called 'behavior' in the newer version of the prevailing mythology) which had persisted because they were serviceable to the larger community of organisms (or the population as a whole), not just the isolated individual. (That Darwin was well aware of this problem is attested elsewhere in his writings.) He found himself thus in a bind between the demands of science, with its need to generalize on the basis of the apparent facts of the case, and the extensive power of myth. An interesting consequence of this contradiction was that Darwin himself, in the decades which followed the initial publication of Origin of Species, became somewhat less convinced of the power of Natural Selection to explain evolutionary change. He had allowed nineteenth century myth to hamstring his own theory. Let me briefly review a question which preoccupied Darwin in his later years and is directly relevant to the matter at hand.

Darwin deeply appreciated the qualities of domestic dogs (as of other animals) and was most attentive to their 'habits'. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1883) Darwin records, from personal experience and memory, a action familiar to dog-lovers everywhere:

When a dog approaches a strange dog or man in a savage or hostile frame of mind he walks upright and very stiffly; his head is slightly raised, or not much lowered; the tail is held erect and quite rigid; the hairs bristle, especially along the neck and back; the pricked ears are directed forward, and the eyes have a fixed stare... These actions... follow from the dog's intention to attack his enemy, and are thus to a large extent intelligible. As he prepares to spring with a savage growl on his enemy, the canine teeth are uncovered... (p. 51-52).

Plate IIa
Click on snapshot for larger image (42 kb)

Note the body posture, the raised hair along the neck and back, the fixed stare and exposed teeth, all beautifully illustrated in the drawing (reproduced here as Plate IIa) which Darwin includes with his text. These mechanisms have expressive utility and are 'useful' to the animal because they prepare 'him' for the 'attack'. These actions presumably enhance 'his' prospects for survival (and 'his' subsequent reproductive success). Now consider the contrasting demeanor, equally familiar to those who, like Darwin, have carefully observed the actions of dogs:

...the dog suddenly discovers that the man he is approaching, is not a stranger, but his master... instantaneously his whole bearing is reversed. Instead of walking upright, the body sinks downwards or even crouches, and is thrown into flexuous movements; his tail, instead of being held stiff and upright, is lowered and wagged from side to side; his hair instantly becomes smooth; his ears are depressed and drawn backwards, but not closely to the head; and his lips hang loosely. From the drawing back of the ears, the eyelids become elongated, and the eyes no longer appear round and staring... Not one of the above movements, so clearly expressive of affection, are of the least direct service to the animal [emphasis added] (p. 52).⁽²⁹⁾

Plate IIb
Click on snapshot for larger image (42 kb)

In Darwin's opinion certain 'states of mind' have led to habitual actions which are of 'service' to the organism: thus the fierce bearing of the animal, described in the first of the two passages quoted above, has turned out to be 'useful' to the dog in that it has prepared him to fight successfully, thus lengthening 'his' life; this multiplies, in turn, opportunities for sexual contact with females, whereas the submissive action, outlined in the second (immediately foregoing) description, was not helpful in this decisive sense (being merely 'expressive').

The external display of 'weakness'--what else is it to be called in the context of the macho 'struggle for existence'--is clearly not to be imagined as strengthening the individual's prospects for survival (so must have gone the thinking of Darwin and others who followed in the wake of his influence); this 'behavior' should have been eliminated, it would have been reasonable to suppose, by Natural Selection... but, as elementary observation appears to indicate, it was not.

Lest the reader conclude that Darwin's observations have induced a state of momentary confusion, let me quickly say that the distinction he makes is central, not just to the immediate thesis of the particular book but to his approach generally. Darwin was at a loss to explain the persistence of actions which run counter to what he regarded as the principal impetus in evolutionary change (namely the will to defeat, or subdue, significant elements in an adjacent reality). This made it necessary for him to posit an over-arching binary structure in the means by which the organism expresses its emotional state: an eminently 'useful' action, such as the dog's 'attack' on a stranger (and the body posture that helped to 'prepare' him for this task), had its entirely reflexive counterpart--a more or less involuntary response to an 'opposite' set of conditions--an action which served, however, no adaptive purpose:

Certain states of the mind lead... to certain habitual movements which were primarily, or may still be, of service; and we shall find that when a directly opposite state of mind is induced, there is a strong and involuntary tendency to the performance of movements of a directly opposite nature, though they have never been of any service.⁽³⁰⁾

How close Darwin has come to delineating the mythic 'binaries', and their corresponding systems of preference (and derogation), which have shaped Western 'civilization' and the institutions of patriarchy! Note the language he calls upon to characterize the aggressive (i.e. 'useful') posture of the animal: 'upright', 'raised head', 'stiff', 'rigid', 'erect', 'forward', 'fixed', 'open' (as noticed in the round eyes of the animal and the 'exposure' of the teeth). Darwin could as easily be describing the virtues of the mid-nineteenth century Victorian society in which he lived (and which he largely affirmed in his writings). By contrast, the attributes of the dog's actions which are 'useless' to evolution happen, wonder of wonders, to comprise a listing of the despised qualities of that same culture: the body sinks downward, the animal crouches, the tail shows flexibility (or what Darwin calls 'flexuous movement'), ears are depressed and drawn backwards, the hairs of the back are smooth (as opposed to 'bristling' and having an 'irregular surface profile', qualities his patriarchal culture affirms and associates invariably with the male), eyes exhibit partial closure and, to my perception the most remarkable of all his careful attentions to detail, the lips are seemingly pendulous: they appear to hang loosely⁽³¹⁾.

The accuracy of Darwin's observations is certainly not in question. His ability to find words to describe the posture of an animal, and to characterize its external actions, is unsurpassed, not just in the discourse of science but in English letters generally. I do not suggest that Darwin was exactly aware of this fact; but his acute observations demonstrate that 'myth' is not the peculiar property of human 'culture' but is deeply rooted in animal biology. Though obvious, perhaps, it is somehow still surprising to find the essential constituents of the human experience so clearly delineated in the expressive demeanor of animals other than humans!

But what Darwin failed to notice, certainly at a level of conscious understanding, was the peculiar alignment with value which these mythic elements had acquired in the evolution of his own particular approach to nature. He seems to have been largely unaware of how this elaborate sub-surface structure, which contained affirmed and derogated images in strict opposition, had influenced the direction of his own thought!

In the grip of Myth...

The suggestion that the emotions of the animal are fundamentally paired is an interesting proposition in itself which others, since Darwin, have found intriguing and deserving of exploration⁽³²⁾. (It appears to be central to Damasio's understanding of 'reason' and its necessary sub-stratum in the 'lower' biology of the advanced organism.) But this is not the question that is uppermost in our mind at the present moment. Of more immediate relevance is the fact that Darwin assigns decisive value to the one pole of the binary opposition while minimizing, indeed denying, any possible evolutionary contribution of the other; in his thinking the benign side of the equation is merely the reflex of the decisive and all-important 'aggressive' end of the continuum! This functional division, with its disproportionate assignment of weight (in the way Natural Selection is assumed to work itself out), has had an extraordinary acceptance by science with extraordinary consequences for the mythology which science cultivates, cherishes, and serves. Why the immense appeal of this clearly erroneous part of Darwin's message?

Note that, in the above quoted material, Darwin makes no mention of 'communication' as a possibly 'useful' function upon which selection can be presumed to operate. (Nor does 'communication' come up in the immediate context of the quoted passages, though Darwin touches upon this question briefly in the closing chapter of his book.) In his attempt to account for the submissive posture of the dog Darwin skips over a fact which must have been as obvious to him as it is to us today: that the action in question is a means the animal employs to signal an unwillingness to fight, a desire to avoid precisely the outcome the Englishman (following Malthus) regarded as decisive in evolutionary process. In fact, it is quite apparent that both 'behaviors'--the aggressive as well as the submissive--have served principally to avert conflict, the one through a kind of intimidation or 'bluffing' (which may actually 'fail', bringing the two animals into a fracas), the other through clear demonstration of a willingness to submit.

It is indeed rare, when two dogs approach each other in the seemingly 'aggressive' way (raised hair on the back etc.), that the outcome is an actual battle for 'survival'. In the great majority of cases--Darwin was surely as familiar with the facts as you and I--the dogs will not engage in physical contest. Either one will run off with its tail between its legs (especially if it is smaller, or of equal size, and finds itself upon the turf that the former regards as its own); or the two will circle each other for a time, stopping only momentarily to inspect each other's rear ends, a seemingly necessary early step in the resolution of tension (as our cousins the Bonobos well know). The potential discord is, more often than not, resolved in the assumption, by both animals simultaneously, of a posture which is akin to the mode of expression Darwin describes as 'useless': i.e. the animals face each other in a semi-crouching position, with front quarters lowered but rear ends high in the air (tails wagging, at first hesitantly, then vigorously), the obvious preparation not for a fight but for play (in which both 'submission' and the 'fight' are ritually and reciprocally enacted). That the postures thus assumed, the one seemingly 'aggressive' and the other its expressive 'opposite', have been preserved side-by-side in large populations of dogs (and other animals as well), is evidence of their social utility and the efficacy of communication in adaptive process. (Dogs possess other means to communicate a willingness to submit. My good friend Lucy, a beagle, who, in her long life, has never been struck, will roll over on her back upon the mere extension of a human hand, legs in the air, front paws limp, an exhibition of a state of helplessness--I lie here, poor weak thing, as if dead--which is unambiguous, in the meaning it conveys, though obviously faked.)

The basis of selection...

But to talk about 'communication' is to entertain the possibility that selection operates at the level of the social unit, perhaps even primarily at such a level. Jumping back (and, at the same time, ahead) for a moment, let me say that Antonio Damasio is probably unusual among 'hard scientists' in his recognition that organisms operate

...in collectives of like beings; the mind, and the behavior of individuals belonging to such collectives and operating in specific cultural and physical environments are not shaped merely by... activity- driven circuitries..., and even less are they shaped by genes alone. To understand in a satisfactory manner the brain that fabricates... mind and behavior, it is necessary to take into account its social and cultural context (p. 260).⁽³³⁾

To accept the community of organisms, or even the population as a whole, as a unit upon which selection may be presumed to operate, is to begin to understand, even within the traditional assumptions of genetic theory, the widespread existence of characteristics which have no obvious self-replicating 'purpose': homosexuality, for example, in human society, which can have no immediate reproductive consequences yet appears to have consistent value to the larger community (and has, for this reason, 'survived'). The contribution of male homosexuals and lesbians to the sciences and the arts is highly disproportionate to their numbers in the population and would, if the world of science were reasonable, provide scientists with an inkling of the special value of individually 'non-replicating' elements to human society as a whole. Clearly, populations which have preserved this particular genetic predisposition (in individuals) have had an 'advantage' over others which did not.

The varied sexual activities of the bonobos, our closest cousins in the world of primates, pairs males and males, females and females, juveniles and adults, even adults and infants. Most of these unions have no prospects for so-called 'reproduction' and are believed, by the anthropologists who study these interesting animals, to have the primary 'purpose' (to adopt the teleological perspective which is usual in the evolutionary sciences) of mitigating social tension and thus avoiding conflict. Among bonobos the sexual act serves 'reproduction' only indirectly, i.e. through the survival of the population which preserves these inherently social 'behaviors'. (See De Waal and Lanting.) Or as Evelyn Fox Keller has suggested:

For sexually reproducing organisms, fitness is in general, not an individual property but a composite of the entire interbreeding population, including, but certainly not determined by, genic, genotypic, and mating pair contributions. To the extent that the advent of sex undermines the reproductive autonomy of the individual organism, it simultaneously undermines the possibility of locating the causal efficacy of evolutionary change in individual properties. At least part of the 'causal engine' of natural selection must be seen as distributed throughout the entire population of interbreeding organisms (p. 142).

The Malthusian notion of the 'individual against all', which tends to see the energies of individuals as highly focused (and has itself become a self-replicating precept in the mythology of modern human society), was inspired, after all, by a particular culture in the throes of extreme social crisis. If one replaces this concept with a striving by the individual to 'accommodate' its environment (within, of course, the framework of the collective interest), then the immense diversity of experience--some of which is directed toward sexual pairing and the production of off-spring (though much is clearly not)--which typically characterizes the behavior of advanced organisms as community tends to be become self-explanatory.

Needless to say, the metaphor of accommodation is regarded as an abomination in the thinking which accompanies the real concentrations of social and economic power we see and otherwise experience around us: for it works against the accepted hype. It tends to mitigate the trauma to the individual engendered through his/her isolation. It is exactly the wrong message. It tends to repair damage to community, to heal its fissures; and this at the essential, if most dangerous,⁽³⁴⁾ level of myth!

As always, what Darwin places at the center of his theory he partially disclaims at the periphery:

With strictly social animals, natural selection sometimes acts on the individual, through the preservation of variations which are beneficial to the community. A community which includes a large number of well-endowed individuals increases in number, and is victorious over other less favoured ones; even although each separate member gains no advantage over the others of the same community [emphasis added] (The Descent of Man).

These remarks notwithstanding, at the center of Darwin's understanding (of the 'habits' of animals) is the idea that community is a mere consequence of 'individual reproduction'. This line of thinking (mocked in the familiar aphorism that 'a chicken is the means an egg employs to make another egg') has been carried much further in recent decades by Richard Dawkins who has argued that natural selection operates at the level of the individual gene which goes about the business of reproducing itself without regard for the welfare of the organism in which it is packaged (The Selfish Gene, Oxford, 1976). The structure of the gene is obviously complex (as are relationships among genes). There may be no theoretical end to the search for the 'smallest unit' on which selection can be presumed to operate, if that is our quest. On the other hand, there may be no basis for the question itself. The opposite extreme, in the thinking of biologists, is the 'Gaia Hypothesis' (proposed by Margulis and Lovelock) in which the biosphere is considered to b