Viewed against a wider historical backdrop, Darwin’s ideas have had a mixed press.¹ Contested for many decades (at least in its macromutational aspect) the notion of “natural selection” (recte preservation²) appeared to go into a state of abeyance and more-or-less passive acceptance for much of the 20th century. Then came the publication of Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (1976) which whipped up a storm of protest over its author’s unabashed instrumentalization of Darwin to pursue his own agenda of atheistic proselytization. Readers disliked being preached at and, counterproductively for the ever-embattled Dawkins, anger led some to revisit the original source of Darwin’s writings. On rereading the Origin of Species (with the requisite diligence) they were taken aback to find that evidence for Darwin’s speculations was wholly inadequate or, in formal code, underdetermined by the evidence. It was a significant straw in the wind that that acute observer of human affairs and foibles, Tom Wolfe, was moved to conclude a few years before his death that Darwin was not so much a disinterested student of Nature as one looking beyond empirical evidence to advance his claim of being a “cosmogonist” — Wolfe’s neologism for a person concerned to promulgate an over-ambitious Theory of Everything.³

The Cosmogenic Myth 

Wolfe in 2016 was wittingly or unwittingly echoing the sentiment of biological specialist Michael Denton who had already in 1985 referred to Darwinism as the great cosmogenic myth of our era.⁴ This was because Darwin’s explanatory claim was nothing less than to have solved what the Victorians called the mystery of mysteries, that is, the unsearchable workings of the mainsprings of life itself. In parenthesis it might be noted that, although Denton’s intervention startled many in the 1980s, it was by no means unheralded. A similar critique of Darwinian overreach had already been flagged as early as 1858-9 by a science professor at the University of Dublin. He, having become privy to the ideas of Darwin and Wallace in the year before formal publication of the Origin of Species, warned that Darwin and Wallace were — by dint of their very lack of empirical documentation — peddling a form of pseudo-revelation.⁵

There is little doubt that historically simplistic nostrums holding out the promise of a solution to the greatest of human mysteries can exert a fatal appeal; some surprise has been registered that Darwinism has not yet been demoted to the ranks of other exploded mythologies or “displaced messianisms”⁶ of the last century (such as Marxism, Freudianism, or behaviorism in psychology).⁷ Notwithstanding some serious reservations about messianic thinking, however, a greater number of persons (Including many with the most impeccable scientific credentials) remain drawn to the seductive appeal of Darwin’s explain-it-all theory. Furthermore, in the last four decades Darwinism as a kind of umbrella concept has expanded so much that one wonders what Darwin himself might have made of these exponential increases in the applications of his original idea.

Runaway Darwinism

The first time that the term “universal Darwinism” entered the public domain is thought to have come in 1983 as a coinage of Richard Dawkins. He subsequently went on to roll out his (highly contested) theory of “memetics,” the idea that cultural “memes” can spread and exert their influence on our lives in a way analogous to that of genes. In the last few decades, Darwinism in this and other expansive forms has been held up as a virtual talisman to promote claims far more far-reaching than Darwin himself originally envisaged and which he might well have found questionable given his modesty and philosophical reserve. That scholarly caution for instance caused him to present his Origin as a theory worthy of consideration only until a better one might be advanced. As to wider implications of his work, he remained remarkably wary. For instance, he pointedly kept his distance from the British atheist party leader, Charles Bradlaugh, who found to his cost that he was unable to woo Darwin into supporting his secularist cause (despite threats to take Darwin to court over the matter).

Darwin of course cannot be completely exonerated from the modern stampede towards the ever more omniscient-sounding claims we have recently heard about. There are clear lines of filiation between Darwin’s thinking and that of his successors. For example, on the penultimate page of his Origin we read,

In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on man and his history.⁸

Those words can only be interpreted as giving the green light to the (still much resisted) trend towards “sociobiology” of the 1970s and beyond. Darwin’s own Descent of Man (1871) was to cover just this territory, and so on the face of it, it might not seem unreasonable to claim the Darwin name in support of what has now been tactically rebranded “evolutionary psychology.” The brouhaha a half century ago over E. O. Wilson’s book Sociobiology⁹ (widely seen as over-reductive and simplistic) was at the time seen as a sign that Wilson was overplaying his hand by extending Darwinian notions from biological to cultural life. Since that time, still further forms of supposedly Darwinian selection have been claimed to be active in a further cluster of cultural, technological, educational, and countless further areas of life, as is evidenced in the very title of Matt Ridley’s The Evolution of Everything, a volume which reads for all the world like a Lucretian hymn to the idea that chance, given the requisite amount of time, will provide all that is needful in life.¹⁰

How is this trend towards extended Darwinism to be explained? It certainly does not depend on any further scientific breakthroughs in our own age, hence it can only derive from a faith that natural selection must represent a kind of cosmic formula, a reliable rule of thumb that can lead us through the labyrinths of our perplexities. My suspicion is that, at core, these new applications of the original idea have been triggered by nothing more profound than a change of intellectual fashion and as a reflex of the changing philosophical temper of our own day. A brief reprise of thinking from the 19th century to the 21st may serve to clarify the point.

The 19th Century: An Age of Natural Theology

The fact of the Creation (and hence, in good logic, the existence of an original “cosmic architect”) was hardly to be disputed when pre-Industrial Victorians looked out of their mullioned windows at the then unspoiled countryside surrounding them. This sense of natural theology provided considerable reassurance during a time when deist ideas were coming into the ascendant and when many were beginning to experience God as a receding presence — rather like Lewis Carroll’s fictional Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland whose smile was described as gradually dissolving into the landscape itself.

Hence although fewer Victorians retained belief in a personal God benignly superintending human affairs, there nevertheless remained quite literally undeniable evidence of numinous wonders inscribed in the landscape itself. To be sure, towards the end of the 19th century, figures such as the aforementioned Charles Bradlaugh and his associate Annie Besant (who later defected to Madame Blavatsky’s “theosophy”) formed the small vanguard of a minority atheist party. Yet even Bradlaugh was careful to point out that he was more agnostic than atheist since he insisted it would be ridiculous to deny the existence of God on the basis of nil evidence. As is well known, Darwin himself professed to be a Theist (Darwin’s upper-case “t”) in a letter written in 1879. It was only the following century which would see Bradlaugh’s philosophical circumspection finally tossed to the four winds. Fast forwarding to the next century we witness a fresh and unprecedented zeitgeist gaining an imaginative hold on people’s minds.

The 20th Century: The Age of the Absurd

For the French writer and philosopher Albert Camus, writing under the shadow of Nazism in the 1940s, the irredeemable absurdity of the human condition meant that people’s often futile striving was invariably terminated by their peremptory extinction. In accordance with that gloomy conviction, he chose as anti-hero for his The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) one of the more pitiable figures in Greek mythological lore — an ancient king condemned by the gods to roll a heavy boulder up a mountainside only for the boulder to roll down again at the end of each long day (hence our modern phrase, Sisyphean struggle). Such was Camus’s mortifying metaphor for the human state.

But such thoughts were not just the recondite concern of what English reviewers have sometimes sniffily referred to as “Continental philosophy.” Such French maîtres de penser as Camus and Sartre have sometimes been treated warily across the English Channel, but in this case Aldous Huxley (the novelist and philosopher descendant of Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Huxley) had also concluded in the 1930s that what he termed “a new culture of meaninglessness” had descended upon the Western world. This philosophy of the absurd was to become an important leitmotif of 20th-century imaginative writing and thinking, and the related philosophy of existentialism insisted we should find (or impress) our own, individual meanings on life, rather than seek meaning outside ourselves.

So for instance the two drifter anti-heroes of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) wait for an interminable amount of time for the arrival of the enigmatic “Godot” but the latter pointedly never arrives (a scene from a 1978 production is pictured at the top). The moral would seem to be that each of us must seek his or her own salvation. The play, despite its slapstick externals, was no farce in the conventional sense but rather a laconic comment on a new, godless age where external rhyme and reason are sought in vain, and where meaning (if such there be) may only be found (or invented) within.

The clear implication of our human isolation for Camus was that we cannot know and must live our lives against the backdrop of a silent universe that declines to clarify its purposes or our own. The human dilemma consists in the need to seek meaning over against the unreasonable silence of the cosmos.¹¹ It may seem that Camus’s searing verdict must have exerted a subtle but powerful influence on scientific thinking in the decades following his death in 1960.

Existentialist Science

The existentialist story might arguably start with Charles Darwin and his conception of the chance evolution of life, an idea which made of him something of a proto-absurdist. On his reading, God had been shown the door, rendered superfluous to evolutionary proceedings said to unfold autonomously. Darwin had little patience with those many colleagues who objected to him that there would have to be some version of “theistic Darwinism” in place, otherwise no form of constructive biological evolution could be contemplated or postulated logically. Opponents of Darwin were clearly thinking in Shakespearean terms of there being “some divinity that shapes our ends/Rough hew them how we will,” and that Darwin’s idea of unguided evolution was a species of magical thinking. However, whether logically complete or no, Darwin ploughed on with his theory unamended.

His insistence on the validity of auto-creation has influenced successors so decisively that both biologists and cosmologists have endeavored to complete, rather than critically confront, the Darwinian paradigm. For instance, it is well known that Darwin did not touch on the absolute origin of life in his Origin of Species. In a later letter he did muse on the possibility of life having formed from unknown chemical reactions in a warm pond, but this was as far as things went. Tom Wolfe in fact compared the Darwinian conception with some Apache and other Native American cosmogonies which “avoided the question of how the world developed ex nihilo.”¹² But this in our own age has been viewed as an unacceptable gap in Darwin’s time-line and so, rather like the way in which later scribal redactors were tempted to fill in from their own imagination Biblical accounts they deemed too sparse, so cosmologists have been tempted to fill in Darwin’s rather large temporal lacuna with fresh etiological speculation — newly minted creation myths (meaning explanatory narratives).

So in the third decade of the 21st century we are asked to believe that the world came into existence from a “quantum fluctuation” — although the logical coherence of that theory has been much disputed (e.g., how did matters so arrange themselves that such an event could occur in the first place? How does one define “nothing”? ). The generation of all from nothing does after all contravene the foundational logic of ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing can come of nothing) which has been binding upon us since ancient Roman times.

A similar argument has been used with regard to the notion of the much bruited “multiverse” which is held by some to account for why Planet Earth is a unique, life-promoting location. The argument here is that such a privileged (but not providential!) planet “had” to emerge at some stage given the near infinity of opportunities afforded by deep time. Needless to say, such an argument remains unfalsifiable in the Popperian sense and will remain so for all future time since it is clearly not possible for us to know about anything beyond our known universe. At this point, depending on one’s cultural background, one might be tempted to compare such cosmological fantasies with the teasingly strange world of Lewis Carroll or with that most dizzyingly absurd of all absurdist fictions, Albert Camus’s Caligula with its deranged psychopath as its anti-hero. It is sometimes difficult to resist the irreverent (but compelling!) thought that some modern science must be starting to imitate avant-garde art

However we as individuals may view such cosmogenic speculations (and many view them with scant regard), it can hardly be denied that they remain congruent with Darwinian conceptions. In fact, they provide a much-needed prelude to Darwin’s Origin of Species which notoriously ducks the question of the absolute origin of the created world. Whether we choose to believe that the universe “just happened” (quite literally according to the doctrine of quantum fluctuation) or that entirely random mutations played a dominant role in promoting life on Earth is quite another matter. Both are ingeniously speculative forms of ratiocination, but my suspicion is that, if people were to consent to play the adolescent game of “truth or dare” (or else submit to a polygraph!) we might well find out that such ideas belong to that twilight realm of half-belief that historian Hugh Trevor-Roper imputed to seventeenth-century persons’ belief in witches.¹³

The same general point was made by David Berlinski when he wrote that “Darwin’s theory of evolution remains the only scientific theory to be widely championed by the scientific community and widely disbelieved by everyone else. ”¹⁴ There is no doubting that autocreative notions have insinuated themselves into the popular consciousness at some level of apprehension but their ultimate status, I suspect, is that of mental furniture rather than that of mental conviction. To persons of that mindset I would simply plead that it might be more intellectually honest (and perhaps liberating) to resume the more modest Victorian point of view and accept that we are involuntarily enveloped by the same proverbial “mystery of mysteries” as that which faced our forebears in 1858.

Notes

1. See David L. Hull, Darwin and His Critics: The Reception of the Theory of Evolution by the Scientific Community (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1973).
2. The analogy with human breeders’ ability to select biological traits so dear to Darwin is in fact an anthropomorphic fallacy as was very early pointed out to Darwin by Wallace and by leading geologist Sir Charles Lyell (on the grounds that a process Darwin bruited as being witless could not pro-actively select anything at all, only passively preserve).
3. Drawing Noam Chomsky to his aid, Tom Wolfe in The Kingdom of Speech (London: Jonathan Cape, 2016) discusses inter alia how human speech could not have developed from animal yowls et al.
4. Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis [1985] (Bethesda, Maryland: Adler and Adler, 1986).
5. The Dublin academic was Samuel Haughton.
6. The phrase is that of David Bentley-Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2009), p. 223.
7. On this point see Tina Beattie, The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason and the War on Religion (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2007), Preface. 
8. Origin of Species, edited by Gillian Beer (Oxford: OUP, 2008), p. 359.
9. E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 1975).
10. Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge (London: Fourth Estate, 2015). The truth claims made in this volume are in Popperian terms unfalsifiable and can often tend in the direction of what philosopher A. J. Ayer termed indiscussable. Cf. in the same vein Steve Stewart Williams, Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Thought You Knew (Cambridge: CUP, 2010).
11. An excellent discussion of this point is found in Alister McGrath’s The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (London: Rider, 2004), pp. 154-8.
12. Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech (London: Jonathan Cape, 2016), p.26.
13. Hugh Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Penguin, 1967).
14. David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p. 186.