30 Michael Ruse
progressivist sentiments at its heart. Darwin made the idea of evolution serious.
Thanks to him, the idea was not just plausible but, for most folks, absolutely
compelling. The way he tied everything together in a consilience was definitive
— back then and now. Darwin did this in theOrigin. The same is true of
natural selection. Darwin may have borrowed from others but it was he who made
something of it all. Any fool can take pigments and paint a picture of flowers. It
took Van Gogh to paint the sunflowers. It took Darwin to write theOrigin.
This now takes us to the time after theOrigin. Darwin put together the idea
of evolution and made it compelling, and it was because of him (together with his
various supporters) that people were converted to the idea of evolution. However,
after theOrigin, it is well known that natural selection was a flop. No one took it
up, and it languished until the 1930s, when the population geneticists like Ronald
A. Fisher [1930] in Britain and Sewall Wright [1931; 1932] in America melded
Darwinian selection with Mendelian genetics to make the new theory, so called
neo-Darwinism or the synthetic theory of evolution. Hence in major respects, a
critic might complain that, even if you grant that there was a revolution, it was
not very Darwinian. Indeed the one historian (Peter Bowler) has gone so far as to
write a book with the title,The non-Darwinian Revolution!
There is truth in this charge, if one is concentrating less on the fact of evolution
and more on the mechanism of natural selection. Scientists generally did not pick
it up and use it. There was not a new field of selection studies. Partly, this
non-development was scientific. There were perceived problems with selection.
Without a good theory of heredity, no one could see how the effects of selection
could be long lasting [Vorzimmer, 1970]. Also the age of the earth was a problem.
Not knowing about radio-active decay and its warming effects, physicists thought
that the earth is much younger than it really is, and it seemed that a leisurely
process like selection would never get the job done in time [Burchfield, 1975].
Partly, there were other factors for the non-development, some in science and
some outside. Someone like Huxley was never really that interested in adaptation
and design, so for him selection was not really needed anyway [Desmond, 1994;
1997]. Evolution was what he needed. Outside science, the religious were happy to
accept evolution, but they still wanted a bit of guidance to get organisms, especially
humans. So they were into directed mutations and so forth, and eschewed the full
implications of the blind, cruel process of selection.
However, this is only half the story. Even if we take into account the scien-
tific problems with natural selection, there was something really odd going on.
Notwithstanding the great enthusiasm for evolution as such, the years after the
Origin, measured by the standards of mature professional science, were generally
speaking an absolute disaster for evolutionary studies. It was not so much that
people did not like selection and looked for other causes — although some did —
but that people were really not that interested in causes at all. They truly were
not that interested in evolution as a tool of science. What they sought, and found,
was a basis for a kind of secular humanism, a Christianity substitute that could be
used as the ideology of the new society that they were determined to build [Ruse,