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The Loss of Rational Design

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 April 2017

Extract

Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species on November 24, 1859. Whatever hurdle the theory of natural selection faced in its struggle for acceptance, its impact on human self-images was almost immediate. Well before Darwin had the chance of applying the principle of natural selection to human origins—in his Descent of Man (1871)—his contemporaries quickly and rashly drew the inference to man's descent from the ape. Satirical magazines like Punch delighted in depicting Darwin with his imposing head on an apish body. At the Oxford meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (June 1860), Bishop Wilberforce asked T. H. Huxley triumphantly whether he traced his ancestry to the ape on his grandfather's or grandmother's side. A wave of evolutionary texts swept over Europe (L. Biichner, E. Haeckel, T. H. Huxley, J. B. Lamarck, C. Lyell, F. Rolle, E. Tyler and K. Vogt). Written in English, French and German, they all had a common focus: the place of humans in a Darwinian world, including religion and morality.

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Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2005

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References

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18 Darwin, Origin (op. cit. note 8), 458. The evolutionist, materialist explanation was fiercely resisted in some quarters. But the literature of the period from 1859 to 1871 also testifies to numerous cases of instant conversion to the Darwinian cause. In order of national impact, Darwinism had its greatest effect in England and Germany, its least in France. And some of the most advanced men of science, like E. Haeckel and T. H. Huxley, lent their intellectual support to the evolutionary theory. This observation throws some welcomed doubt on Max Planck's oftenquoted comment that a revolutionary idea gains acceptance in science not because of the conviction but the death of its critics. See Planck, Max, ‘Ursprung und Auswirkung wissenschaftlicher Ideen’, in Vorträge und Erinnerungen, (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1965), 275Google Scholar. This is as little true of the early reception of Darwinism as it is of the early reception of the Special theory of relativity.

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29 op. cit. note 9, Ch. 2.