The revival of Darwinism

Jim Secord, Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project, University of Cambridge, explains how perception of Darwin has evolved.

Jim Secord

Director of Darwin Correspondence Project

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Jim Secord

Director of Darwin Correspondence Project

02 Jul 2021

Key Points

Although Darwin was an eminent scientist in his day, his ideas fell out of favour following his death. Their significance, however, was rediscovered throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
Darwin was not a Christian; however, he did not consider his theory of natural selection as opposed to the concept of God.
Darwin’s writings on religious issues were often thoughtful and nuanced. This ambiguity has led many to misinterpret him, especially concerning the common misconception of his atheism.
Darwin avidly engaged in correspondence with various scientists and thinkers from around the world. His numerous letters are particularly telling of his character.

The revival of Darwinism

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Darwin was, of course, very famous for the Victorians. Yet, in the decades after his death, and particularly in the early 20th century, his reputation and the number of references to him begin to decline. There’s a big celebration, in fact, here at Christ’s College of the centennial of his birth in 1909. At that time, people talked about being at Darwin’s deathbed or Darwin somehow being irrelevant.

It was only in the late 1920s and 1930s that Darwin’s reputation begins to pick up. There are two reasons for this. One, the Victorians start to be revived and seen as significant figures. The other reason, however, is quite detailed. Darwin’s theory had undergone what many people called an eclipse in the life sciences, particularly in evolutionary biology. People thought that he had introduced a scientific way of thinking about evolution. Yet, they didn’t necessarily accept that natural selection was the right mechanism. Darwin became like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and many authors of his time. He was simply seen as someone who helped put evolution on the map.

However, in the 1920s and 1930s, new work combined Mendelian genetics with a statistical view of populations of animals and other works in natural history and classification. All of these ideas were combined in a new view, which suggested that natural selection was, in fact, probably even more important than Darwin expected.

Darwin’s modern influence

For Darwin, natural selection was the main but not the only mechanism by which new species came into being. This idea became central to evolutionary biology. Known as the modern synthesis, it posited that those most well adapted to their circumstances were more likely to survive and reproduce. They then become the basis for new species.

From the 1930s, this framework provides the basis for a considerable revival of Darwin’s reputation. Indeed, by 1959 Darwin’s reputation is incredibly high. That year, there’s even a musical about Darwin’s life in Chicago. So it’s quite extraordinary how Darwin moves from this position of just one of many Victorians who had talked about evolution to someone much more than that. He becomes the singular founder who discovered the key to the crucial problem for identifying how evolution takes place.

One area where we can see Darwin’s thinking as particularly important and powerful is in medicine. This is especially true as we face the prospect of creating a vaccine against a virus year after year. In this regard, we think the virus is evolving through the process of natural selection and changing so that it’s better adapted to resist the vaccines to which we expose it. To overcome that process, we have to prepare new vaccines capable of fighting the new resistance that a particular virus has developed.

Indeed, these kinds of issues are fundamental for the way epidemiologists think about the problems they deal with. Darwinian natural selection is fundamental and significant in this respect.

Darwin and Creationism

Photo by Philip Talmage

Another area where we often think about Darwinian issues is around religious and ethical questions. Here, I think it’s important to realise what a subtle and often ambiguous thinker Darwin is. He’s somebody who we can use in many important ways to help us think through these questions. I’m involved with editing Charles Darwin’s letters, and I was very struck that in a recent auction, the most expensive Darwin letter ever, sold for over $100,000. This letter purportedly proved Darwin was an atheist. However, in reality, it proves nothing of the sort.

In this letter, Darwin’s writing to somebody who’s asked him about his religious beliefs. Basically, he says that he’s just not sure. He is clearly not a believer in Jesus and not a Christian. He’s very clear about that. However, he admits that we’re in no better position to understand who and what God is than a dog is to understand the mind of Isaac Newton.

In that sense, Darwin was very modest about these kinds of questions. Furthermore, he doesn’t see the principle of natural selection as ruling out a belief in religion. He encourages religious friends to believe that natural selection is the law that God has introduced to make possible the diversity of life. He doesn’t think that God produces individual interventions by creating a new mollusk or a particular walrus species. Instead, he suggests that God works through principles and underlying laws.

This is really important to understand. So even the highest things that Darwin can imagine – including the human mind – he thinks have come about through this law that God has put forward. Whatever kind of law it is, it’s something that we can only understand scientifically through its effects. Understanding things through laws for him is a much more powerful way of understanding how the world works than trying to imagine what he would think of as a rather anthropomorphic notion of God.

A misunderstood thinker

It’s important to realise that Darwin isn’t somebody who just takes a simple mathematical principle and applies it to natural selection. Instead, he’s somebody who thinks in a much broader, deeper and richer sort of way. So his writings on religious questions are often ambiguous. They have many issues to tell us, which sometimes seem contradictory or provide the possibility for different readings.

I don’t think this is a fault of Darwin. Instead, I think this is one of the things that makes Darwin such an influential thinker for us today. If he had just said something straightforward, like “there is no God”, then I think it wouldn’t be very interesting. However, when he says something like, “there’s a moment at first creation when we don’t know what happened” – although he admits at the end of On the Origin of Species that the creator may have breathed life into the first form of life – that’s not just some trivial consideration for him. That’s not just him, as he once said in a private letter, “truckling”. Quite the contrary, it’s something that he wants others to see as a possible way of thinking about what he’s doing.

When a figure becomes as significant as Darwin, there will inevitably be a vast range of positions on his arguments. One of my favourite examples is the most famous quote that Darwin is supposed to have said. The quote says something along the lines that it isn’t the strongest or the most intelligent that survive, but those that are the most adaptable to change.

Now, Darwin never said this. In fact, he wouldn’t say it because for him, if something was stronger and being stronger made it more likely you would survive, then you would survive. Similarly, if you were more intelligent and being intelligent was a useful characteristic in relation to those around you, you would also survive.

So, that wasn’t something Darwin said at all. A few years ago, we were able to verify this was the case. The quote was attributed to a Louisiana management sociologist. Still, this quote was almost everywhere for a long time. It was even engraved into the floor of the California Academy of Sciences, a building that was built for over $1 billion. Darwin’s name has since been taken off that quote there, but the quote remains.

Overall, this is just one example of how Darwin often isn’t read very closely or sometimes isn’t read at all. He represents something that people often take in many different directions. For example, people often misinterpret Darwin as an atheist to serve a contemporary and potentially perfectly legitimate way of debating questions. However, as an interpretation of Darwin, it doesn’t have a lot of support.

Darwin’s letters

Photo by Vicky Jirayu

Overall, people tend to have these rather simplistic views of Darwin, almost caricatures like those that were done of him when he was still alive. Unfortunately, I don’t think that they do justice to what he’s saying. I find it useful to take some of Darwin’s writings’ crucial passages and read them very carefully to remedy this.

I’ve also always enjoyed reading his letters, partly because I have to; I’m involved in editing them. Nevertheless, they show Darwin in terms of someone who’s not just out there talking to people. Instead, he’s someone engaged in discussion and debate. He writes to over 2,000 people of all different walks of life and other nationalities. He writes to leaders of various groups in Africa. He’s very much involved in central European debates about species and origins. He writes to American doctors and veterinarians, discussing and debating his ideas with all these different people. Darwin gets information from these people as well. So considering Darwin as someone who’s very much engaged with both his readers and his correspondence is a much better way of thinking about Darwin’s message.