Internalism and Laws of Form 329
Consider Darwin's two principal apostasies from Owen's point of view. First,
Darwin reconfigured the abstract archetype as a material ancestor, thus converting
Platonism to materialism. Darwin wrote his challenge right in the margin of his
personal copy of Owen's Nature of Limbs (quoted in Ospovat, 1981, p. 146): "I
look at Owen's archetypes as more than ideal, as a real representation as far as the
most consummate skill and loftiest generalization can represent the parent form of
the Vertebrata."
Second, and even more disturbingly, Darwin inverted Owen's system, and the
entire formalist program, by explaining the archetype in functional terms as a
congeries of past adaptations materially inherited by descendants. Darwin
practically mocked Owen's formalism in the crucial paragraph on p. 206 that I
cited to introduce this chapter (pp. 251-257). For Darwin used the jargon of the
formalist-functionalist dichotomy—unity of type vs. conditions of existence—and
then sank the formalist pole (along with Owen's most precious concept of the
archetype) into the alien functionalist sea of natural selection. In an important
sense, Owen vs. Darwin on evolution replays Geoffroy vs. Cuvier on morphology.
Others appreciated this reincarnation of formalism vs. functionalism, and
cheered from the sidelines or within the fray. St. George Mivart, regarded by
Darwin as his most cogent critic (see pp. 1218-1224), construed Owen's formalism
as a proper evolutionary exit from Darwin's bankrupt’s natural selection:
Owen... spread abroad in England the perception that a deep significance
underlies the structure of animals—a significance for which no stress or
strain and no influence of heredity, and certainly no mere practical utility,
can account. The temporary overclouding of this perception through the
retrograde influence of Darwin's hypothesis of "natural selection" is now
slowly but surely beginning to pass away ... Homologies for which neither
heredity nor utility will account reveal themselves in the limbs of
chelonians, birds, beasts, and most notably in those of man (from an 1893
statement by Mivart quoted in Owen, 1894, vol. 2, pp. 94-95).From the other side, Asa Gray understood Darwin's central contribution as the
proper reintroduction of purpose, or functionalism, into biology. In 1874, Gray
wrote to Nature (quoted in Ospovat, 1981, p. 148) that Darwin had done great
service for biology by "bringing back to it teleology; so that, instead of
morphology vs. teleology, we shall have morphology wedded to teleology"—in
other words, functionalist hegemony by proper criteria of primacy and relative
frequency. Darwin certainly appreciated the argument, for he wrote back to Gray:
"What you say about teleology pleases me especially."
In his usual perceptive manner, Russell (1916, p. 78) wrote: "The problem as
Geoffroy and Cuvier understood it was not an evolutionary one. But the problem
exists unchanged for the evolutionist, and evolution theory is essentially an attempt
to solve it in one direction or the other." So the problem appeared to Owen and
Darwin; and so it remains for us today.