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

  • Ospovat, Dov.
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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    The development of Darwin's theory purpose in the place of a physical cause, Whewell had written.®® Were biologists to follow Whewell's advice and adhere to the method of final causes, as practiced by Cuvier, their science, Carpenter said, would be limited to the discovery of facts, while general laws would be lost from view: The philosophic Physiologist, who is not deterred by the clamour of bigotry and prejudice, will follow precisely the same course [as the physical philosopher]. The adaptation which he discovers in particu¬ lar instances may well serve both to awaken his curiosity, and to lead him to suspect a pre-existing Design. But he will obtain a much more elevated view of the nature of Creative power, if he carry his enquiries further. He must disregard for a time, as in physical philosophy, the immediate purposes of the adaptations which he witnesses; and must consider these adaptations as themselves but the results or ends of the general laws for which he should search.®'' Carpenter's statement of the method of physiological research expresses well the views of those biologists who were dissatisfied with the method of final causes. With few exceptions, if any, they believed that there was purpose in nature and that structure was admirably adapted to function. They did not hesitate to cite adaptation as a proof of design or to explain particular structural modifications in functional terms. But they denied that function alone accounts for structure, and they held that the physiologist was not to rest content with the discovery of purposes. His goal should be rather to find the general laws that governed both structure and its adaptation to function.^® In the first edition of his Principles of General and Comparative Physiology, Carpenter extended his criticism to the teleologists' approach to the question of organic succession. During the 1830s and 1840s most British geologists, and the older biologists, such as Charles Bell, offered a teleological explanation of the appearance of new species. Central to this explanation was the principle of adaptation, which stated that every organism is perfectly adapted to the situation that it occupies in the economy of nature. As new environmental conditions have arisen during the history of the earth, new species, specially suited for these conditions, have been created by some unknown means. According to this view, the succession of organisms on earth is wholly dependent on the development of the earth itself. This teleological interpretation of the history of life is most clearly displayed in Charles Lyell's 14