The development of Darwin's theory : natural history, natural theology, and natural selection, 1838-1859 / Dov Ospovat.

  • Dov Ospovat
Date:
1995, ©1981
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: The development of Darwin's theory : natural history, natural theology, and natural selection, 1838-1859 / Dov Ospovat. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Notes to pp. 5-9 proposed to speak. On professionalism, with specific reference to Darwin, see Herbert, Place of Man, Part 2, pp. 157-8; and Susan F. Cannon, Science in Culture, pp. 137-65. 11 Milne Edwards has fared slightly better than the others in this respect. See Limoges, Sélection Naturelle, pp. 135-6, and Darwin, Milne-Edwards et le Principe de Divergence. 12 The relation of the political-economic thought of the early nineteenth century to Darwin's science has been explored in numerous works. See especially the studies on Darwin and Malthus cited in Chapter 3, n. 3. 1. Darwin and the biology of the 1830s 1 In the biological literature of the mid-nineteenth century, teleologist means one who seeks to explain the phenomena of organic nature solely by reference to final causes. As will become clear in the following discussion, antiteleologists believed in a created, purposeful universe. Their rejection of teleology was similar to the rejection of teleological explanations in physics in the seventeenth century, when also the purposiveness of the whole was rarely disputed. For examples of mid-nineteenth-century usage see [William B. Carpenter], Physiology an Inductive Science, p. 340; William B. Carpenter, Principles of General and Comparative Physiology, p. 561: The Teleologist (who rests satisfied with the evident object of this adaptation as a sufficient reason for its occurrence) . . . ; Richard Owen, On the Nature of Limbs, pp. 10, 84. 2 Origin, p. 201. 3 Georges, Cuvier, Le Regne Animal, 1:16-17. 4 Ibid., p. 6. 5 Toby Appel, The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate and the Structure of Nine¬ teenth Century French Zoology, esp. pp. 109-25. Given the actual arguments and practice of Cuvier and other teleologists, it is difficult to accept Russell's view that, following Kant, they used teleology as merely a regulative principle. E. S. Russell, Form and Function, p. 35. 6 Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Philosophie Anatomique, i:xxv-xxviii; and Principes de Philosophie Zoologique, pp. 3, 51. 7 Geoffroy, Philosophie Zoologique, pp. 63-6; Russell, Form and Function, pp. 74-8. 8 William Buckland, Lecture, pp. 104-5 ; William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences, 3:444-78; Charles Bell, The Hand, pp. 41, 153-62, 280. g Before 1830 there were of course many biologists who were not committed to the strictly teleological approach (Geoffroy, Lamarck, most of the German morphologists), but in the 1830s there was a conscious movement against teleological explanation, especially in Britain, where it had been most insisted on. For the situation in France before (as well as after 1830, see Appel, The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate; see also Pietro Corsi, The Importance of French Transformist Ideas for the Second Volume of Lyell's Principles of Geology. 10 Appel, The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate, has given some attention to this 238