Naturalists From England

"The Bible says that God made the world in six days. Great Uncle Charles thinks it took longer: but we need not worry about it, for it is equally wonderful either way."

"When we ask Mr. Darwin about the evolution of the battery of the electric eel, or about the evolution of the eye of the cuttlefish, or of the eye or ear of a human being, matters that his theory without much hesitation ought to explain, he hastily takes refuge under a confession of ignorance, replying that " it is impossible to conceive by what steps these wondrous organs have been produced." And when we ask him for the missing links he sends us, not, as Lyell does, to central Africa, but to "undiscovered [and undiscoverable] fossiliferous strata below the Silurian." And when we ask him a little more specifically about the origin of the species, and how four or five primeval forms or original germs could have developed into all the various forms of life that have existed and that now exist, he replies, "Our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound." And yet we hear on every hand that the hypotheses of naturalism are established!"

"The metaphysical doctrine of 'permanent essences' drew empirical support from the success of Aristotle's zoological theory of fixed species, which was its most convincing application to our actual experience of the world. [...][T]he doctrine of fixed organic species simply exemplified, in the special sphere of biology, the permanent character of all 'rationally intelligible' entities. Conversely, Darwin demonstrated that Aristotle's most favored examples failed to support... the metaphysical assumption on which orthodox Greek natural philosophy had been based. Species were not... permanent entities; the earlier 'typological' or 'essentialist' approach to taxonomy inherited from Aristotle misrepresented the long-term history of living things. [...]However irrelevant the empirical details of Darwin's work may be to general philosophy, the abstract form of his explanatory schema has a much broader significance. So, when Darwin and his successors showed that the whole zoological concepts of 'species' must be reanalysed in populational terms, their demonstration knocked away [a] prop from the traditional metaphysical debate."

"Darwin discarded once and for all the last vestiges of Aristotelian thought concerning the evolution of living beings. A teleological explanation would no longer do. The evolution of life on Earth would no longer unfold according to a "grand design"; nor would it tend to a final cause. On the contrary, it developed at the whim of random mutations and was driven by natural selection."

"M. de Vogüé finds the necessity for war, according to his views, well expressed by the two great writers, Joseph de Maistre and Darwin, whose statements he likes so much that he quotes them again:[...] "I hold with Darwin that violent struggle is a law of nature which overrules all other laws""

"Exhilarated by his 'discovery', Darwin jotted down these sentences: 'Origin of man now proven. Metaphysics must flourish. Anyone who understood the baboon would do more for metaphysics than Locke did." Darwinian metaphysics placed all wickedness, all cruelty, all evil at its origins, in the bestial. Carrying this thought to extreme consequences which are certainly not Christian, Darwin placed the Devil at the origin, he made man a redeemed demon. "The origin of our kind," he wrote, "is the cause of our evil passions! The Devil in the form of a Baboon is our grandfather." This doctrine was cultivated and developed by Darwin's cousin, the great statistician Francis Galton. [...] «The sense of original sin» he wrote in 1865 «would not demonstrate, according to my theory, that man has fallen from a superior condition, but rather that he is rapidly recovering from an inferior one»."

"A few years ago I set out to canvass the literature on Charles Darwin. I thought it would be a manageable task, but I soon realized what a naïve idea this was. I do not know how many books have been written about him, but there seem to be thousands, and each year more appear. Why are there so many? Part of the answer is, of course, that he was a tremendously important figure in the history of human thought. But as I read the books - or, at least, as many of them as I could - it gradually dawned on me that all this attention is also due to Darwin’s personal qualities. He was an immensely likeable man, modest and humane, with a personality that continues to draw people to him even today.… Darwin’s strong feelings about slavery are expressed in many of his writings […]. His comments there are among the most moving in abolitionist literature. But it was his feelings about animals that impressed his contemporaries most vividly. Numerous anecdotes show him remonstrating with cab-drivers who whipped their horses too smartly, solicitously caring for his own animals and forbidding the discussion of vivisection in his home. At the height of his fame he wrote an article for a popular magazine condemning the infamous leg-hold trap in terms that would not seem out of place in an animal-rights magazine today."

"I often find myself going back to Darwin's saying about the duration of a man's friendships being one of the best measures of his worth."

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change."

"In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment."

"A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there."

"How I wish I had not expressed my theory of evolution as I have done."

"I was a young man with unformed ideas. I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time over everything, and to my astonishment, the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion of them."

"Since the dawn of history the negro has owned the continent of Africa - rich beyond the dream of poet's fancy, crunching acres of diamonds beneath his bare black feet. Yet he never picked one up from the dust until a white man showed to him its glittering light. His land swarmed with powerful and docile animals, yet he never dreamed a harness, cart, or sled. A hunter by necessity, he never made an axe, spear, or arrowhead worth preserving beyond the moment of its use. He lived as an ox, content to graze for an hour. In a land of stone and timber he never sawed a foot of lumber, carved a block, or built a house save of broken sticks and mud. With league on league of ocean strand and miles of inland seas, for four thousand years he watched their surface ripple under the wind, heard the thunder of the surf on his beach, the howl of the storm over his head, gazed on the dim blue horizon calling him to worlds that lie beyond, and yet he never dreamed a sail!"

"There may be more truth in the adventurous pangenesis of Darwin — whom Tyndall calls a "soaring speculator" — than in the cautious, line-bound hypothesis of the latter; who, in common with other thinkers of his class, surrounds his imagination "by the firm frontiers of reason." The theory of a microscopic germ which contains in itself "a world of minor germs," soars in one sense at least into the infinite. It oversteps the world of matter and begins unconsciously busying itself in the world of spirit. If we accept Darwin's theory of the development of species, we find that his starting point is placed in front of an open door. We are at liberty with him, to either remain within, or cross the threshold, beyond which lies the limitless and the incomprehensible, or rather the Unutterable."

"Trained in a less severe school than that of geometry and physics, his reasonings are almost always loose and inconclusive. His generalizations seem to have been reached before he had obtained the materials upon which he rests them: His facts, though frequently new and interesting, are often little more than conjectures; and the grand phenomena of the world of life, […] instinct, and reason, which other minds have woven into noble and elevating truths, have thus become in Mr. Darwin's hands the basis of a dangerous and degrading speculation."

"As an example of the process of natural selection, Mr. Darwin tells us that "in North America, the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely- opened mouth, thus catching, almost like a whale, insects in the water;" and he adds, "even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better-adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered by natural selection more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale"!"

"The two subjects which moved my father perhaps more deeply than any others were cruelty to animals and slavery. His detestation of both was intense, and his indignation was overpowering in case of any levity or want of feeling on these matters."

"Charles Darwin had a big idea, arguably the most powerful idea ever. And like all the best ideas it is beguilingly simple."

"We wish to render the now almost forgotten Hegel what is due to him as the forerunner of Darwin. Mendelssohn, in a dispute with Lessing, called Spinoza a "dead dog." Just as dead appears now Hegel, who in his time, in the words of his biographer Haym, achieved in the world of letters a position analogous to that of Napoleon I. in the political. Spinoza has long since undergone resurrection from the state of a "dead dog," and so will Hegel, too, find his merits acknowledged by future generations."

"Here was scientific method. Here was ruthless logic. Here were exhilarating conclusions arrived at inductively, through solid research. To make his case, Darwin had drawn from practically every branch of the living sciences, had assimilated hundreds of disparate facts, in the process creating a coherent and intellectually satisfying account of life on earth."

"A seeker after Truth cannot afford to indulge in generalisation.Darwin for the greater part of his book Origin of the Species [sic] has simply massed fact upon fact without any theorising, and only towards the end has formulated his conclusion which, because of the sheer weight of testimony behind it, becomes almost irresistible. Yes, I have criticised even Darwin's generalisation as being unwarranted."

"It's his last book. He wrote in in 1881, the year before he died, and usually, we expect that in old age, just before death, a great scientist will write a pontificating philosophical treatise on the nature of reality. And Darwin... wrote a book on worms. [...] He was interested in worms because they were... a metaphor for his larger worldview. The worms that slowly churn the topsoil of England... that work literally beneath our feet, that we never notice, that we think are insignificant because they're so small and lowly, are in fact producing the very soil that is the basis of agriculture. And therefore Darwin uses it as a metaphor for the importance of apparently tiny things when you extend them over long periods of time. And that's what evolution is, the extension of small change (to Darwin) over vast periods of time. So the worms become a metaphor for evolution and for the whole process of temporal change, a very fascinating book."

"There cannot be a doubt that the method of inquiry which Mr. Darwin has adopted is not only rigorously in accordance with the canons of scientific logic, but that it is the only adequate method. Critics exclusively trained in classics or in mathematics, who have never determined a scientific fact in their lives by induction from experiment or observation, prate learnedly about Mr. Darwin's method, which is not inductive enough, not Baconian enough, forsooth, for them. But even if practical acquaintance with the process of scientific investigation is denied them, they may learn, by the perusal of Mr. Mill's admirable chapter "On the Deductive Method," that there are multitudes of scientific inquiries in which the method of pure induction helps the investigator but a very little way."

"None have fought better, and none have been more fortunate than Charles Darwin. He found a great truth, trodden underfoot, reviled by bigots, and ridiculed by all the world; he lived long enough to see it, chiefly by his own efforts, irrefragably established in science, inseparably incorporated with the common thoughts of men, and only hated and feared by those who would revile, but dare not. What shall a man desire more than this?"

"So far as biology is concerned, the publication of the 'Origin of Species,' for the first time, put the doctrine of evolution, in its application to living things, upon a sound scientific foundation. It became an instrument of investigation, and in no hands did it prove more brilliantly profitable than in those of Darwin himself. His publications on the effects of domestication in plants and animals, on the influence of cross-fertilisation, on flowers as organs for effecting such fertilisation, on insectivorous plants, on the motions of plants, pointed out the routes of exploration which have since been followed by hosts of inquirers, to the great profit of science."

"Throughout the long battle for the acceptance of his views, Darwin was plagued continually by his inability to compress the scale of nature to demonstrate a transformation of species to his critics. Had he known it, an example was at hand which would have provided him with the proof he needed. The case was an exceedingly rare one, in which a major evolutionary change occurred in the brief interval of fifty years. The animal which underwent the transformation was a member of the insect world, the humble Peppered Moth, found in abundance throughout England."

"Darwin gave us a theory of why living things have the traits they have, not just their bodily traits but the basic mindsets and motives that drive their behavior. A hundred and fifty years after the Origin of Species was published, the theory of natural selection has been amply verified in the lab and field, and has been augmented with ideas from new fields of science and mathematics to yield a coherent understanding of the living world. These fields include genetics, which explains the replicators that make natural selection possible, and game theory, which illuminates the fates of goal-seeking agents in a world that contains other goal-seeking agents."

"Thomas Hobbes and Charles Darwin were nice men whose names became nasty adjectives. No one wants to live in a world that is Hobbesian or Darwinian (not to mention Malthusian, Machiavellian, or Orwellian). The two men were immortalized in the lexicon for their cynical synopses of life in a state of nature, Darwin for “survival of the fittest” (a phrase he used but did not coin), Hobbes for “the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Yet both men gave us insights about violence that are deeper, subtler, and ultimately more humane than their eponymous adjectives imply. Today any understanding of human violence must begin with their analyses."

"Perhaps we need to reclaim the narrative power of Darwin — casting his net wide, observing, asking, tying disparate elements together, and searching for the bigger picture in the smallest details."

"Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle. One does, of course, have to put up with the clumsy English style of argument. Despite all shortcomings, it is here that, for the first time, ‘teleology’ in natural science is not only dealt a mortal blow but its rational meaning is empirically explained."

"Given the fact that Darwin got the fundamental fact of genetics wrong, it is absolutely amazing how much he got right."

"When Charles Darwin entered the world 200 years ago … all men were men and brothers because all were descended from Adam. By the time Darwin had reached adulthood, however, opinions around him were growing more equivocal. … By the mid-19th century, many influential voices denied that the enslaved African was a brother, and it was broadly taken for granted that as a man, he was of an inferior sort to his white master. … Evolutionary thinking enabled [Darwin] to rescue the idea of human unity, taking it over from a religion that no longer provided it with adequate support, and put the idea of common descent on a rational foundation."

"Darwin's theory is an ingenious and plausible speculation, to which future physiologists will look back with the kind of admiration we bestow on the atoms of Lucretius, or the crystal spheres of Eudoxus, containing like these some faint half-truths, marking at once the ignorance of the age and the ability of the philosopher. ...A plausible theory should not be accepted while unproven; and if the arguments of this essay be admitted, Darwin's theory of the origin of species is not only without sufficient support from evidence, but is proved false by a cumulative proof."

"I love fools' experiments. I am always making them."

"After a time the minute colourless particles which are imbedded in the flowing protoplasm are drawn towards and unite with the aggregated masses; so that the protoplasm on the walls being now rendered quite transparent is no longer visible, though some is still present, and still flows, as may be inferred from the occasional transport of particles in the cell-sap."

"Worms seize leaves and other objects, not only to serve as food, but for plugging up the mouths of their burrows; and this is one of their strongest instincts."

"These [calciferous] glands (see Fig. 1), judging from their size and from their rich supply of blood-vessels, must be of much importance to the animal. But almost as many theories have been advanced on their use as there have been observers."

"But some degree of intelligence appears, as we shall see in the next chapter, to be exhibited in this work,—a result which has surprised me more than anything else in regard to worms."

"It may be presumed that all animals which feed on various substances possess the sense of taste, and this is certainly the case with worms."

"When the pots containing two worms which had remained quite indifferent to the sound of the piano, were placed on this instrument, and the note C in the bass clef was struck, both instantly retreated into their burrows."

"The comparison here implied between the actions of one of the higher animals and of one so low in the scale as an earth-worm, may appear far-fetched; for we thus attribute to the worm attention and some mental power, nevertheless I can see no reason to doubt the justice of the comparison."

"When a worm is suddenly illuminated and dashes like a rabbit into its burrow—to use the expression employed by a friend—we are at first led to look at the action as a reflex one."

"As it is certain that worms swallow many little stones, independently of those swallowed while excavating their burrows, it is probable that they serve, like mill-stones, to triturate their food."

"Every morning during certain seasons of the year, the thrushes and blackbirds on all the lawns throughout the country draw out of their holes an astonishing number of worms; and this they could not do, unless they lay close to the surface."

"M. Perrier found that their exposure to the dry air of a room for only a single night was fatal to them. On the other hand he kept several large worms alive for nearly four months, completely submerged in water."

"Earth-worms abound in England in many different stations. Their castings may be seen in extraordinary numbers on commons and chalk-downs, so as almost to cover the whole surface, where the soil is poor and the grass short and thin."

"He remarks that "considering their weakness and their size, the work they are represented to have accomplished is stupendous." Here we have an instance of that inability to sum up the effects of a continually recurrent cause, which has often retarded the progress of science, as formerly in the case of geology, and more recently in that of the principle of evolution."

"In the year 1837, a short paper was read by me before the Geological Society of London, "On the Formation of Mould," in which it was shown that small fragments of burnt marl, cinders, &c., which had been thickly strewed over the surface of several meadows, were found after a few years lying at the depth of some inches beneath the turf, but still forming a layer."

"As I was led to keep in my study during many months worms in pots filled with earth, I became interested in them, and wished to learn how far they acted consciously, and how much mental power they displayed."