The Surprise of Darwin's Success
Learn from a counterintuitive view from the great C. S. Lewis
One of the great puzzles about the success of Darwin’s evolutionary thinking is: how did his argument, so completely lacking in evidence, win over so many so quickly. It can be surprising, in a way, when one is familiar with the devastating critiques Darwin received from his fellow naturalists. (See chapter 7, The Critics, in my book The Naked Darwin). One helpful explanation can be found from one of the great minds of the twentieth century, C.S. Lewis (1898-1963). What Lewis has to offer us involves how we come to understand (make sense) of our world, our ‘model’ of it, that is a working model of the world we live in and our place in it. His thoughts on all this will, perhaps, seem counter intuitive, but I ask for your patience and consideration. In a late work published after his death, The Discarded Image, and in an essay, The Funeral of a Great Myth first published in 1967, Lewis shows how the science of a given age, follows from the temperament and imagination of that age.
In our time we are conditioned to think that science and facts primarily determine how we view/understand the world we inhabit. In The Discarded Image, Lewis shows how the medieval model of the universe came to be discarded and replaced with a different one. His essay The Funeral of a Great Myth, deals with a much more recent time, a period that gave rise to the time when Darwin’s ideas would enjoy great success. In the essay he shows us how the belief in a world developing from the simple to the complex was already part and parcel of the outlook of many by the mid nineteenth century. In short, Darwin’s success was, in large part, due to the fact that people were already there. People were already believing in some form of an evolving world. What they needed was for science to endorse it. In the middle of the nineteenth century many thinkers had already moved “from a cosmology in which it was axiomatic that ‘all perfect things precede all imperfect things’ to one in which it is axiomatic that ‘the starting point (Entwicklungsgrund) is always lower that what is developed’”.
The quote from German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelliing regarding Entwicklungsgrund (meaning- reason for development) comes from an essay in 1812, but related ways of understanding the world from poets like Keats (1795-1821) Goethe (1749-1832), from the philosopher Kant (1724-1804) and, perhaps best realized in stunning fashion in Der Ring des Nibelungen, by Richard Wagner (1813-1883) all preceded Darwin’s publication. All these artists have this view of life developing on and upward from simple beginnings. The following is from the Epilogue of The Discarded Image.
The demand for a developing world-a demand obviously in harmony both with the revolutionary and romantic temper-grows up first; when it is full grown the scientists go to work and discover the evidence on which our belief in that sort of universe would now be held to rest. There is no question here of the old Model’s being shattered by the inrush of new phenomena. The truth would seem to be the reverse; that when changes in the human mind produce a sufficient disrelish of the old Model and a sufficient hankering for some new one, phenomena to support the new one will obediently turn up. I do not at all mean that these new phenomena are illusory. Nature has all sorts of phenomena in stock and can suit many tastes.
The myth that was percolating from the poets and philosophers in the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, was one of development. From the smallest primordial beginnings, up and up nature gives us a world growing in diversity and complexity. I can think of no better way to experience this concept than to listen to the prelude to the first work of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. This first ‘opera’ is itself a prelude to the story that follows, and it begins with a prelude of its own, a stunning opening of 36 measures using a pedal e flat and for 36 slow measures the unchanging e flat chord. The French horns begin at the bottom of their register and working, only with the e flat chord, rise and rise while the strings begin to give the sensation of moving water (the Rhine River) all the while we experience a gradual crescendo.
If the outlook of the nineteenth century regarding development was simply impacted by Darwin’s ideas, we would see something very different from what Lewis notes in his essay. Here from The Funeral Of A Great Myth, “We should have the theorem known first of all to a few, then adapted by all the scientists, then spreading to all men of a general education, then beginning to affect poetry and the arts, and so finally percolating to the mass of people. (However) The clearest and finest poetical expressions of the Myth come before Origins (1859) and long before it had established itself as scientific orthodoxy….Almost before the scientist spoke, certainly before they spoke clearly imagination was ripe for it…..Already before science had spoken, the mythical imagination knew the kind of “Evolution” it wanted. It wanted the Keatian and Wagnerian kind…”
I would not want the reader to think Lewis is disparaging this way of viewing life. He himself grew as a thinker under its sway and finds it deeply satisfying. “To those brought up on the Myth nothing seems more normal, more natural, more plausible, than that chaos should turn into order, death into life, ignorance into knowledge. And with this we reach the full blown Myth. It is one of the most moving and satisfying world dramas which have ever been imagined.”
However, it is a model of the universe that has now been displaced by a different model, one that incorporates new sciences such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states things like: …any naturally occurring process will always cause the universe’s entropy(S) to increase and heat energy cannot transfer from a body at a lower temperature to a body of a higher temperature without the addition of energy. This way of understanding our world, this model, is nearly opposite of the Myth of development from simple beginnings where complexity increases without the aid of any outside force.
Darwin’s view of life, unfolding from primal beginnings to ever more complex forms without any outside assistance, was part of the zeitgeist of his day. His ideas were welcomed, in part, because the temper of the times wanted badly for that conception of the world to be true. Darwin would validate the imagination of the nineteenth century and be rewarded for that validation. His book was a bestseller, and he is buried in Westminster Abbey.
