Peter J. Bowler

(review originally published on Bookslut)

Reading the newspapers or watching the daily news on TV, it's easy to come to the conclusion that in regards to evolution, the people of America belong to two highly polarized camps. In one corner, you have the Godless scientists, supporters of evolution, genetic engineering, and cloning, determined to stomp out all last vestiges of religion from American culture, and make life over in their own images. In the other, evangelistic fundamentalists, show more proponents of a 6,000 year-old Earth, a 7 24-hour day creation, and Noah's flood as the cause of the Grand Canyon, determined to institute religious law and bring about the rapture. The only people in the middle seem to be apathetic and don't care one way or another. Each new headline ratchets up the tension and increases the stakes, until it seems that it must have always been this way, science and religion locked in conflict over the future of the human race ever since Darwin stepped off of the Beagle.

Thankfully, we have Peter J. Bowler, professor of the history of science from Queen's University in Belfast, to bring us some much needed perspective. His remarkable little book, Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons, goes back to the first pre-Darwinian inklings that life on earth may not always have been as it appears today, and traces the conversation about the origins of man and their implications through the ages to the present day. Even the most familiar events along this journey are illuminated afresh by Bowler's use of current historical research. For example, the famous crushing of Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, by scientist Thomas Huxley at the 1860 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, when Huxley declared that he would rather have an ape for an ancestor than a man who misused his intelligence to attack a theory he didn't understand. According to modern understanding, this event was invented by later followers of Darwin. In reality, there was no decisive victory on that day. Darwin's theory of evolution was accepted very gradually by the scientific community. In time, parts of his theory were even accepted by most religious thinkers, until the return to tradionalism in many Christian movements led to fresh attacks, particularly on the teaching of evolution, in the early twentieth century. Though it wasn't until well the 1950s and '60s that even the more unpopular materialist aspects of Darwinism were accepted by the majority of the scientific community, setting a far different stage for the current conflict.

The final section of the book is devoted to the modern debates. Bowler links the rise of intelligent design and young-Earth creationism with the rise of fundamentalism worldwide. A brief discussion on the social forces that are making fundamentalism so appealing to so many these days, and why any fundamentalist movement would necessarily be opposed to the scientific theory of evolution, is enough to make any liberal fall into despair. On the other side, a few modern evolutionary scientists have grown so hostile to any form of religion that one has even gone so far as to declare all of the world's religions a danger to humanity. But thankfully, that is not where the book ends. For much of the history of this debate, there were many movements in Christianity that tried to accept some version of evolution, but the final breaking point was always natural selection as the primary mechanism. There were those who could accept common ancestors, who could accept random variation, but when it came to natural selection, most of these Christians simply replaced this with God. It's not too surprising, for decades natural selection made even the most avowed Darwinists nervous. This partial acceptance made these theologies easy to criticize for both scientists and more conservative Christians. However, today there are a number of religious thinkers who are able to reconcile their visions of God and Christ with all of evolutionary theory. Indeed, a few have even suggested that a universe ruled by natural selection is the only possible universe in which intelligent creatures with free will could emerge. They have thus made the modern theory of evolution essential to their theology.

What is made most clear from this book is that our ideas about the nature of the human race and the universe in which we live are always changing. We will probably never come to some static interpretation of how the world is and why, but this book gives me faith that we have some good directions to move in. show less

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2938907.html

Twenty-five years ago, Peter Bowler was my PhD supervisor in Belfast; I owe him a lot. He had made his reputation a decade earlier with Evolution: The History of an Idea, and had managed to find a rhythm of writing a scholarly book a year, riffing off the general possibilities of the history of evolutionary biology. Recently, in retirement, he's been veering a little bit further from his usual territory. In Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World without show more Darwin (2013), he imagined what would have happened in science in an alternate timeline where Darwin had drowned during the voyage of the Beagle, something he had been muttering about doing for years. This year, in A History of the Future: Prophets of Progress from H.G. Wells to Isaac Asimov, he has surveyed futurology as perpetrated both by science fiction writers and by popular science writers, mainly in the UK but looking also at the USA, in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.

People like me who read a fair amount of academic and fannish commentary on sf literature will be a bit thrown by this approach. Peter Bowler has unapologetically put technology and other scientific advances, real or imagined, at the centre of the narrative, and crunches everything down to nine shortish chapters, on How We'll Live, Where We'll Live, Communicating and Computing, Getting Around, Taking to the Air, Journey into Space, War, Energy and Environment, and Human Nature. He makes the point very strongly that the First World War made a much bigger difference to the Zeitgeist than the Second; there is much more continuity in terms of vision and concerns between 1939 and 1945 than between 1914 and 1918.

There are some interesting misses and hits along the way. Lord Birkenhead, writing in 1930 about the world of 2030, expected that “Instead of party politics, our descendants will probably be content with the rule of experts, who will seek popular sanction for each measure they purpose through a referendum.” (Hollow laugh.) On the other hand, A.M. Low correctly saw the potential of telephones:

"In his Wireless Possibilities, Low predicted that in a few years’ time it would be possible to talk to a recipient anywhere in the world, even when flying on an aeroplane. Five years later, he made a similar point in one of his regular Armchair Science features: ‘I shall be glad when we have made wireless sufficiently selective to enable me to ring up during every rail journey I make and talk direct to my friends.’ Note that his concern was the problem of interference between transmitters, not miniaturization. He also recognized that there would be a downside to the facility: ‘Why should I inflict a description of my mother’s children to a radius of six yards, until all those around are driven to fury … ?’ Low thus not only predicted the mobile phone – he realized what a nuisance they could become when used in public."

There are lots of good nuggets here, including the frightening irresponsibility of some early supporters of nuclear power, who nonchalantly discussed melting the ice caps and re-engineering coastlines with atomic weapons. There is a tension also between those who thought that women being liberated from housework and reproduction would bring benefits and those who feared the costs to society. (It would be interesting to know the extent to which feminists interacted with these discussions.) show less

Bowler, Peter J. Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World without Darwin. U of Chicago Press, 2013.
Peter J. Bowler’s Darwin Deleted is an exercise in counterfactual history, a branch of history that, he admits, is a hard sell to most historians. Bowler begins by asking the question, how would the history of science have changed if Charles Darwin, who was a notoriously bad sailor, had been washed overboard from the Beagle and never arrived home to write his books on evolution. This is the kind of show more thing science fiction writers do all the time with great abandon—any book by Harry Turtledove will make the point. But Bowler insists that counterfactual speculation is the best way to assess the role of a man whose name quickly became synonymous with all evolutionary theories, including those he would never have espoused. He concludes that Darwin was ahead of his time. Darwin had a combination of knowledge and experience that uniquely positioned him to develop an evolutionary theory based on natural selection. First, he knew more than most of his colleagues about biogeography and the variation among species around the world. His colleague, Alfred Russel Wallace, whose seminal paper Darwin helped to publish, was his only serious competitor. But Darwin knew more than Wallace about the selective breeding of domestic animals, which added a piece to the theory that Wallace did not have. Bowler suggests that without Darwin, all the insights in Origin of Species might not have arrived until early in the twentieth century. The second part of Bowler’s argument is even more speculative. He suggests that without Darwin’s image and name, evolution would not have been so ready a target for the antiscientific religious debates of the period or so easily used to justify the racism of the eugenics movement and the economic rationalizations that came to be known, quite unfairly, as social Darwinism. Bowler’s discussion is extremely detailed and is, if nothing else, a good introduction to the various evolutionary theories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Four stars. show less

A counterfactual in which the author imagines what the world of science would look like if Darwin had never existed. He has done his research on the history of evolution well, and much of his writing shows a depth of understanding of the historical issues, but in some places, he glosses over important facts with a superficial discussion meant to point us in a particular direction without looking too hard at the evidence. He discusses the impact on both science and religion if the theory had show more developed more gradually without a charismatic figure at the head; while he agrees that natural selection would eventually have become the dominant theory, he feels it would have had less trauma for the religious if coming about in a non-Darwin world. He defeats his own argument many times by admitting that certain things would happen which he had earlier stated would not; the discussion becomes especially convoluted when dealing with the issue of liberal vs. conservative religious views. He also makes statements about things that are accepted by conventional wisdom without actually presenting any evidence to support his statements, such as that there has been a long period of moral decay throughout the 20th century. This is arguable, and depends in part on how you define morality. He appears to accept the conservative view, though not himself a conservative Christian, and seems to attribute the two world wars to this nebulous "decline in morality" - though, to his credit, he does not attribute that (completely) to Darwinism. He never questions the assumption that it would be a good thing for religion to retain more sway over science; he just assumes it would, because it would be easier for some people to accept. While it is difficult to cope with the seismic tremors that run through our communities over the teaching of science, it is not completely evident that the trauma caused by the publication of the Origin is bad; this is just the author's opinion. In addition, his complacency that it would merely have moved the target of religious ire to other areas, such as Geology (What? There isn't already a lot of conflict over Geology? I'm hornswoggled!) is questionable; this would not actually put science in a better position, just one small branch of science. The author writes well, and his ideas make you think, but it is difficult to believe he has accomplished his goal. show less