This chapter outlines the development of the theory of natural selection and the events surrounding the publication and reviewing of Darwin’s Origin of Species, especially in non-specialist publications. The different responses in Britain and the United States are noted. The role of supporters such as T. H. Huxley in reaching a popular audience is explored, although their reservations about the adequacy of the theory are also taken into account. Conservative efforts to present evolution as the unfolding of a divine plan provided a very different way of understanding the general idea of evolution. Many popular accounts failed to understand the difference between Darwin’s ‘tree of life’ model and older ideas of a linear ascent toward humanity, especially when dealing with the issue of human origins. In this area, popular interest in the gorilla as a potential ancestral form distracted attention from some aspects of Darwin’s model, as shown in more detail in Chapter 3. The early evolutionism of Herbert Spencer is introduced and his relationship to Darwinism explained.

In 1866 Alfred Russel Wallace, Herbert Spencer, and Thomas Henry Huxley teamed up to urge Darwin to replace ‘natural selection’ with ‘survival of the fittest’ in future editions of the Origin. They felt that the purely ex post facto process suggested by this phrase would undercut the creationist objection that natural selection is haunted by intentional design. However, this is inaccurate. Thinking of natural selection as survival of the fittest leads to confusions between Darwin’s theory and the closely related but different accounts of Wallace, Spencer, and Huxley. Darwin’s own conceptual framework relied on comparing natural selection to the artificial selection of plant and animal breeders to argue for a trans-generational process in which natural selection gradually shape chance variant traits of individuals into adaptations. The notion of survival of the fittest changed that to perceiving natural selection primarily as the executioner of unfit organisms, in the process allowing it to serve as backing for unrestricted capitalism (‘social Darwinism’), racist imperialism, and eugenics.

Is there room for weaklings in Darwin’s theory of evolution? The “survival of the fittest”—that muscular phrase taken from Herbert Spencer—would seem to suggest not. A more nuanced and counterintuitive picture emerges, however, when fitness is remapped: as a form of mutuality between the human and the nonhuman, rather than an exclusively human attribute vested in a single individual. I explore that possibility in the contemporary novel, a genre evolving steadily away from its Victorian antecedents, and circling back to the epic to reclaim an elemental realism, alert to the reparative as well as destructive forces of the nonhuman world. In Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and Richard Powers’s The Overstory, these nonhuman forces turn the novel into a shelter for disabled characters, granting them a testing ground and a future all the more vital for being uncertain.

On November 24, 1859, the English naturalist Charles Robert Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life . In that book (Darwin 1859), he argued that all organisms, living and dead, were produced by a long, slow, natural process, from a very few original organisms. He called the process “natural selection,” later giving it the alternative name of “the survival of the fittest.” This first chapter is devoted to presenting (without critical comment) the argument of the Origin, very much with an eye to the place and role of natural selection. As a preliminary, it should be noted that the Origin, for all it is one of the landmark works in the history of science, was written in a remarkably “user-friendly” manner. It is not technical, the arguments are straightforward, the illustrative examples are relevant and easy to grasp, the mathematics is at a minimum, meaning non-existent. Do not be deceived. The Origin is also a very carefully structured piece of work (Ruse 1979a). Darwin knew exactly what he was doing when he set pen to paper.

Now we come to the elephant in the room. Darwin’s theory was incomplete. When the theory was completed, would natural selection prove to be that effective? Although he threw in a lot of assorted, presumed-relevant facts, no one, starting with Darwin, had much idea about the nature of variation – how it comes, what form it takes, how regular it is. And, without this knowledge, given that natural selection supposedly works on this variation, it is hard to make definite judgments about its effectiveness; especially since Darwin stressed that, although variation has causes, it is random in the sense of not appearing according to need. When he was not pushing the Lamarckian alternative, he was adamant that it is selection alone that is responsible for adaptation.

Turn now to those who think natural selection is vastly overrated as a cause of evolutionary change. It is at best a clean-up process after the real creative work has been done. It is little surprise that these critics come from within the organismic model, implicitly or explicitly. At the scientific level, we have encountered already the most (and properly) distinguished of them all, the American population geneticist Sewall Wright. Remember his “shifting balance theory,” where the key lay in genetic drift, as gene levels fluctuated randomly in small subpopulations, and then, when new adaptive features appeared, the subpopulations rejoined the larger group (probably the species), and through a form of group selection the new feature spread through the whole group. This is highly Spencerian – infused with a solid dose of Bergsonian vitalism – as equilibrium is disturbed and then regained at a higher level, part of an overall progressive process, presumably ending in humankind.

A little arbitrarily, but not entirely without reason, let us take 1959, the 100th anniversary of the Origin, as the date when the Darwinian paradigm finally came into its own. Natural selection and Mendelian genetics, now rapidly becoming molecular genetics, gave the explanation of the tree of life. If we continue to think in Kuhnian terms, what now of normal science? We should expect to see the subbranches of the consilience come into their own, as practitioners moved forward, theoretically, experimentally, and in nature, raising and solving their problems. And in major respects we do see exactly this.

In 1866, Thomas Hardy, raised a sincere member of the Church of England, wrote his sonnet “Hap.” It expressed the anxiety about – “fear of” is not too strong a term – the world into which natural selection has pitched us. No longer can we rely on a Good God to care for us, to suffer for us, to make possible eternal life. In the non-progressive world of Darwinian evolution, all is meaningless.

Among the many books authored by Peter Bowler, the eminent historian of evolutionary biology, three stand out: The Eclipse of Darwinism (1983); The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (1988); and Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World without Darwin (2013). Bluntly, he says: “there is now a substantial body of literature to convince anyone that the part of Darwin’s theory now recognized as important by biologists had comparatively little impact on late nineteenth century thought” (Bowler 1988, ix). I cannot say Bowler is entirely wrong. Indeed, in The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw (1979), I contributed to this “body of literature,” and my book was quite openly a synthesis of the state of Darwinian play in the second half of the nineteenth century. But is this the end of the story, and if it is, why is it the end of the story? Today, as Bowler also recognizes, we accept the finding of natural selection as a major scientific achievement, up there with relativity theory. Let us pick up on this paradox.

Natural selection. I am an evolutionist, which means that, to understand the present, we must dig into the past. That holds for culture as much as for biology. So, taking my own advice, where do we end up? Or, more precisely, where do we start off? As always, when dealing with Western culture, we begin with the Greeks, Plato and Aristotle. Neither of them was an evolutionist. Indeed, rather like the Buddhists, they believed that the (physical) world is eternal: no beginning, no end. But they did have much to say of great interest to our inquiry.

Time to pull back and get a little more conceptual. We need to ask some penetrating questions about the nature, the scope, the truth-value of natural selection. Finding answers, the quest begins in the past. Charles Darwin was a graduate of the University of Cambridge. The greatest British scientist of them all, Isaac Newton, was also a graduate of the University of Cambridge, and his spirit, his achievements, his reputation, infused every discussion about science, including about the life sciences. In his Principia, Newton started with his three laws of motion, together with his law of gravitational attraction, and then went on to infer, deductively, the pertinent terrestrial laws, those of Galileo, and the pertinent celestial laws, those of Copernicus affirming the heliocentric nature of the Universe and those of later thinkers, especially Kepler on planetary motion. It was a given that the ambitious young Charles Darwin would want to show Kant dead wrong. There could be a Newton of the blade of grass, and that Newton was going to be Charles Darwin.

When a new cause is introduced into science, as often as not it is accepted without trouble. Few, if any, had worries about the Watson–Crick double helix and the subsequent working out of the genetic code. Genetics was put on a molecular causal basis. However, it is not uncommon for there to be opposition. Huygens’ wave theory of light was an outsider for nearly two centuries. Sometimes worries are ongoing. One doubts that, as long as there are those interested in mental health, Freud’s Oedipus Complex is going to be happily accepted by all. There have been, continue to be, and probably always will be disputes, often bitter, about its causal status. As we have seen, natural selection did not have an altogether easy birth. But as time went by, things seem to have improved. Newton and Leibniz all over again.

Chapter 7 treats two philosophers who directly influenced Durkheim: Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. Looking at their use of the society–organism analogy, their versions of functional explanation and functional analysis, and their conceptions of what a scientific sociology must be like helps one to understand both the content of Durkheim's positions and why he held them. Three types of functional explanation employed by Comte are relevant: two forms of existential functional explanation as well as functional analysis, which makes no claims regarding the existence of what it analyzes but "explains" what it is by specifying the function it serves and showing how its features are suited to accomplishing that purpose without implying anything about how it originated or why it persists. The chapter argues that Comte and Spencer rely too heavily on the society–organism analogy, leading to an overly biologistic understanding of normative critique available to social pathologists.

The first chapter argues that stylistic virtue was an important concept in British aesthetics that significantly influenced the development of formalism. It begins by examining the prevalence of stylistic virtues in eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century rhetoric, where they were shaped by two approaches that mirror those described in the introduction: a psychological one that viewed style as extrinsic to textual content, and a belletristic one that emphasized the stylistic construction of aesthetic “character.” As the division between rhetoric and literary criticism began to harden, a new generation of Victorian critics co-opted the belletristic approach, placing the analysis of style at the heart of the emerging discipline of “English.” While some scholars have argued that Victorian readers were insensitive to style, this chapter reveals that wide-ranging figures such as Thomas De Quincey, Alexander Bain, David Masson, and Herbert Spencer each centered the aesthetic distinctiveness of literature around small-scale stylistic properties.

How does the organicist tackle the nature and justification of moral claims? Through the upward rise of the evolutionary process. Morality is helping it on its way to produce ever-better humans. This has been known in the past as “Social Darwinism,” and has a dreadful reputation. Supposedly, it leads straight to Hitler and the gas ovens. It cannot be denied that dreadful things have been said in the name of Darwin. Spencer wanted to drive widows and children to the wall. Andrew Carnegie was one of the worst robber barons of the late nineteenth century. Friedrich von Berhardi epitomized the worst kind of rapacious German general. But there is another side too. Spencer was in favor of free trade and virtually a pacifist. Carnegie used his fortune to found public libraries. Von Bernhardi got more from the Prussian militaristic ethic than from the Origin of Species. Hitler didn’t believe in evolution! Today, too, the story is more complex. Julian Huxley was into large-scale public works. E. O. Wilson is an ardent conservationist. The naturalistic fallacy, you cannot get ought from is, is no deterrent. Organicists do not accept that the world is value-free. Organicists and mechanist/Darwinians are in different paradigms.

Two root metaphors help us to interpret the world. The older, going back to the Greeks, sees the world as an organism, organicism. The younger, which came into play during the Scientific Revolution, sees the world as a machine, mechanism. The former sees the superiority of humans as part of the natural development of an organic world. The latter thinks that if science is to show humans superior, then it must show how and why. Prominent mechanists include Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory through natural selection. Prominent organicists, all owing a debt to the German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling, include Herbert Spencer, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead.

This chapter recasts the intellectual history of US sociology as a reception study of the poems of Walt Whitman, focusing on “Song of Myself.” Prominent early sociologists such as Robert Ezra Park and Daniel Brinton engaged Whitman under the banner of “social science.” They recirculated poetic extracts to illuminate the range of issues – from mass media and crowd psychology to race relations and urban studies – that became the foci of modern sociology. As the fledgling discipline probed for new conceptual models of social development in a modern, secular age, this professionalizing, reform-minded class of social scientists employed nineteenth-century verse to explicate twentieth-century social theory. More than most, Whitman’s poetry, which demanded empathy as well as observation, furnished the vocabulary for a compassionate, impartial, and distinctively American sociology.