Charles Darwin 311996; 2005].
People like Thomas Henry Huxley were determined to reform Victorian Britain,
as were others in America after the Civil War. They worked long and hard (and
successfully) at transforming and upgrading primary, secondary and tertiary edu-
cation, the military, the civil service, the medical profession, and more. They saw
the established church as a major ally of those whom they were fighting — the
aristocrats, the landed gentry, and others with vested interests in opposing change.
Hence, they sought their own secular equivalent and in a progressivist popular evo-
lutionism they found it. They did not want a tool of research, but they did want
something that could give a moral message. And again, in Social Darwinism they
found it. (This is why one should be wary of assuming that all Social Darwinians
subscribed to a simple theory oflaissez faire. In fact, like the Christians they were
trying to replace, Social Darwinians subscribed to moral views of many different
kinds, and there were strong internal disagreements. See [Ruse, 2000; 2005].)
It is true that there was some professional evolutionary work, but it tended to
the decidedly second-rate — phylogeny tracing — and it was increasingly out of
touch with reality. And it tended to be brushed aside as Huxley, the Saint Paul
of the Darwinism movement (an analogy drawn by his contemporaries), preached
the gospel of popular Darwinism non-stop — at working men’s clubs, in the news-
papers, as the president of numerous societies, and so forth. Evolution became a
Christianity substitute, a secular religion, to promote the kind of society that Hux-
ley and his chums wanted to create. There was no wonder that Herbert Spencer,
who was right into this sort of thing, was more influential than Darwin. There
was no wonder that Darwin — a man who had genuinely hoped to see a science of
evolution studies with natural selection at its core — realized that it was better
to have half a cake rather than none at all. And so he went along with the flow.
After all, he did believe in most of the ideology anyway. As noted, there was much
more about progress in later editions of theOrigin, and theDescentthroughout
adopts a relaxed, user-friendly style. Darwin may not have identified explicitly
with Social Darwinism and the related beliefs, but as we have seen he was no foe
of the movement.
So, in a way, the critic is right. If you are talking about pure science, in this
sense the late nineteenth century saw only a very limited Darwinian Revolution.
But, putting things in long-term context, let us never forget that — whether or
not his contemporaries got enthused about natural selection — Darwin did get it
right! Natural selection is the main cause of evolutionary change. It took seventy-
five years for this to become apparent, but then it did and it has stayed that way.
So, if you are prepared to use the present as a guide to the past, so long as you
do not gloss over how history took time to develop, there is no reason to deny
Darwin’s role in the Darwinian Revolution. And much good reason to think that
the revolution is appropriately named.
Finally, let us ask about the nature of the revolution, meaning more about what
kind of revolution it really was. Was there a change of paradigms in the sense
described by Thomas Kuhn in hisThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions?Was