Robert Richards

Historians, the good ones, mark a century by intellectual and social boundaries rather than by the turn of the calendar page. Only through fortuitous accident might occasions of consequence occur at the very beginning of a century. Imaginative historians do tend, however, to invest a date like 1800 with powers that attract events of significance. It is thus both fortunate and condign that Abiology@ came to linguistic and conceptual birth with the new century. Precisely in 1800, Karl Friedrich Burdach, a romantic naturalist, suggested that his coinage Biologie be used to indicate the study of human beings from a morphological, physiological, and psychological perspective.i Many other neologisms of the period (and Burdach issued quite a few) were stillborn or survived only for a short while. Biologie, though, fit the time, and with slight adjustment received its modern meaning two years later at the hands of the Naturphilosoph Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus. In his multi-volume treatise Biologie, oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur (1802-1822), Treviranus announced: AThe objects of our research will be the different forms and manifestations of life, the conditions and laws under which these phenomena occur, and the causes through which they have been effected. The science that concerns itself with these objects we will indicate by the name biology [Biologie] or the doctrine of life [Lebenslehre].@ii Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, also in 1802, employed the term with comparable intention.iii In the work of both of these biologists, the word became immediately associated with the theory of the transmutation of speciesCa new term in recognition of the new laws of life. Treviranus thought the progressive deposition of fossils..

Chapter III contains several puzzles and unexpected features. The first puzzle regards the chapter’s relationship to Chapter IV: Natural Selection. Both chapters treat of natural selection, so what distinguishes them? Is it that Chapter IV indicates the intelligence behind nature’s selections and Chapter III introduces the analog of intelligence? And is it that Chapter III suggests that natural selection performs an eliminative function, while Chapter IV shows the positive impact of selection? In Chapter IV, and in many subsequent chapters, natural selection, Darwin says, operates only for the good of each individual creature, though Chapter III suggests it destroys most individuals. Darwin asserts that he uses the term “struggle” metaphorically, which raises the question of the explanatory weight his metaphors carry, such metaphors as "the face of nature.” There are a number of unexpected features of Darwin’s analysis displayed in the chapter: for example, his introduction of a new concept of the selective environment and the several experiments he performs to establish his theory, e.g., from mathematical and thought experiments to controlled empirical experiments. Chapter III is a rich though puzzling chapter.

The sciences of ethology and sociobiology have as premisses that certain dispositions and behavioural patterns have evolved with species and, therefore, that the acts of individual animals and men must be viewed in light of innate determinates. These ideas are much older than the now burgeoning disciplines of the biology of behaviour. Their elements were fused in the early constructions of evolutionary theory, and they became integral parts of the developing conception. Historians, however, have usually neglected close examination of the role behaviour has played in the rise of evolutionary thought.

From Charles Darwin to Edward Wilson, evolutionary biologists have attempted to construct systems of evolutionary ethics. These attempts have been roundly criticized, most often for having committed the naturalistic fallacy. In this essay, I review the history of previous efforts at formulating an evolutionary ethics, focusing on the proposals of Darwin and Wilson. I then advance and defend a proposal of my own. In the last part of the essay, I try to demonstrate that my revised version of evolutionary ethics: (1) does not commit the naturalistic fallacy as it is usually understood; (2) does, admittedly, derive values from facts; but (3) does not commit any fallacy in doing so.

Darwin's theory of natural selection and its moral purpose -- Appendix 1: the logic of Darwin's long argument -- Appendix 2: the historical ontology and location of scientific theories -- Darwin's principle of divergence: why Fodor was almost right -- Darwin's romantic quest: mind, morals, and emotions -- Appendix: assessment of Darwin's moral theory -- The relation of Spencer's evolutionary theory to Darwin's -- Ernst Haeckel's scientific and artistic struggles -- Haeckel's embryos: fraud not proven -- The linguistic creation of man: August Schleicher and the missing link in Darwinian theory -- Was Hitler a Darwinian?

Alan C. LoveDarwinian calisthenicsAn athlete engages in calisthenics as part of basic training and as a preliminary to more advanced or intense activity. Whether it is stretching, lunges, crunches, or push-ups, routine calisthenics provide a baseline of strength and flexibility that prevent a variety of injuries that might otherwise be incurred. Peter Bowler has spent 40 years doing Darwinian calisthenics, researching and writing on the development of evolutionary ideas with special attention to Darwin and subsequent filiations among scientists exploring evolution . Therefore, we would expect that when Bowler engages in a counterfactual history—imagining a world without Darwin—he is able to avoid historical injury and generate novel insights. My assessment is that the results are mixed. Before we can see why, it is necessary to walk briskly through the main contours of his argument.Bowler begins with an apologia for a counterfactual appr ..

"All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one." Friedrich Schlegel's words perfectly capture the project of the German Romantics, who believed that the aesthetic approaches of art and literature could reveal patterns and meaning in nature that couldn't be uncovered through rationalistic philosophy and science alone. In this wide-ranging work, Robert J. Richards shows how the Romantic conception of the world influenced (and was influenced by) both the lives of the people who held it and the development of nineteenth-century science. Integrating Romantic literature, science, and philosophy with an intimate knowledge of the individuals involved—from Goethe and the brothers Schlegel to Humboldt and Friedrich and Caroline Schelling—Richards demonstrates how their tempestuous lives shaped their ideas as profoundly as their intellectual and cultural heritage. He focuses especially on how Romantic concepts of the self, as well as aesthetic and moral considerations—all tempered by personal relationships—altered scientific representations of nature. Although historians have long considered Romanticism at best a minor tributary to scientific thought, Richards moves it to the center of the main currents of nineteenth-century biology, culminating in the conception of nature that underlies Darwin's evolutionary theory. Uniting the personal and poetic aspects of philosophy and science in a way that the German Romantics themselves would have honored, The Romantic Conception of Life alters how we look at Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology.

Evolutionary ethics - the application of evolutionary ideas to moral thinking and justification - began in the nineteenth century with the work of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, but was subsequently criticized as an example of the naturalistic fallacy. In recent decades, however, evolutionary ethics has found new support among both the Darwinian and the Spencerian traditions. This accessible volume looks at the history of thought about evolutionary ethics as well as current debates in the subject, examining first the claims of supporters and then the responses of their critics. Topics covered include social Darwinism, moral realism, and debunking arguments. Clearly written and structured, the book guides readers through the arguments on both sides, and emphasises the continuing relevance of evolutionary theory to our understanding of ethics today.

In a late reminiscence, Goethe recalled that during his close association with the poet Friedrich Schiller, he was constantly defending “the rights of nature" against his friend's “gospel of freedom.”1 Goethe’s characterization of his own view was artfully ironic, alluding as it did to the French Revolution's proclamation of the "Rights of Man." His remark implied that values lay within nature, values that had authority comparable to those ascribed to human beings by the architects of the Revolution. During the time Goethe made his defense, he also faced another revolution, in which Schiller was a partisan—that of Kant in the intellectual sphere. Both upheavals had undermined the autonomy of nature, replacing her authority with that of human will and understanding. Previous papers in this volume have recorded the shifting fortunes of nature that brought her to this stage of jeopardy. In the early classical period, nature as a unified whole had not yet arisen. Animate and inanimate objects had natures— characteristic modes of action—but there was as yet, according Slatkin, no articulate concept of nature as a whole standing over against human beings. Park has described a long period of transition, when nature became personified in the form of a didactic female, a figure imaginatively based, it would seem, upon the system of a 1 natural philosophy that stood in contrast to the revealed wisdom of God. Nature in this guise yet derived her authority and nurturing capacity from that higher, divine power. During the seventeenth century, writers like Mandeville, as Allen has shown, began to suspect that nature might be a chimera, a fictive creature that disguised humanity's own hidden desires and inclinations. These doubts grew during the next century—with the likes of Hume accelerating the skepticism— till finally, in the two revolutions that so troubled Goethe, nature was completely stripped of her authority. Goethe had become confirmed in his defense of the rights of nature during his travels to Italy during the years 1786-1788.

In 1971, Daniel Gasman saw published his Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League, the dissertation he had produced at the University of Chicago two years before. That book argued that Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), the great champion of Darwinism in Germany, had special responsibility for contributing to Nazi extermination biology. Gasman stacked up the evidence: that Haeckel’s Darwinian monism (which held that no metaphysical distinction separated man from animals) was racist; that he was a virulent anti-Semite; and that leading Nazis had adopted his monistic conceptions and racial..

The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin is universally recognized as one of the most important science books ever written. Published in 1859, it was here that Darwin argued for both the fact of evolution and the mechanism of natural section. The Origin of Species is also a work of great cultural and religious significance, in that Darwin maintained that all organisms, including humans, are part of a natural process of growth from simple forms. This Companion commemorates the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species and examines its main arguments. Drawing on the expertise of leading authorities in the field, it also provides the contexts - religious, social, political, literary, and philosophical - in which the Origin was composed. Written in a clear and friendly yet authoritative manner, this volume will be essential reading for both scholars and students More broadly, it will appeal to general readers who want to learn more about one of the most important and controversial books of modern times

I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.2 In 1902, the year after Acton died, the president of the American Historical association, Henry Lea, in dubious celebration of his British colleague, responded to the exordium with a contrary claim about the historian’s obligation, namely objectively to render the facts of history without subjective moralizing. Referring to Acton’s lecture, Lea declared.

If religion means a commitment to a set of theological propositions regarding the nature of God, the soul, and an afterlife, Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was never a religious enthusiast. The influence of the great religious thinker Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher (1768-1834) on his family kept religious observance decorous and commitment vague.2 The theologian had maintained that true religion lay deep in the heart, where the inner person experienced a feeling of absolute dependence. Dogmatic tenets, he argued, served merely as inadequate symbols of this fundamental experience. Religious feeling, according to Schleiermacher’s Über die Religion (On religion, 1799), might best be cultivated by seeking after truth, experiencing beauty, and contemplating nature.3 Haeckel practiced this kind of Schleiermachian religion all of his life. Haeckel’s association with the Evangelical Church, even as a youth, had been conventional. The death of his first wife severed the loose threads still holding him to formal observance. The power of that death, his obsession with a life that might have been, and the dark feeling of love forever lost drove him to find a more enduring and rational sub-.

In late winter of 1864, Charles Darwin received two folio volumes on radiolarians, a group of one-celled marine organisms that secreted siliceous skeletons of unusual geometry. The author, the young German biologist Ernst Haeckel (fig. 1), had himself drawn the figures for the extraordinary copper-etched illustrations that filled the second volume.1 The gothic beauty of the plates astonished Darwin (fig. 2 ), but he must also have been drawn to passages that applied his theory to construct the descent relations of these little known creatures. He replied to Haeckel that the volumes "were the most magnificent works which I have ever seen, & I am proud to possess a copy from the author."2 Emboldened by his own initiative in contacting the famous naturalist, Haeckel, a few days later, sent Darwin a newspaper clipping that described a meeting of the Society of German Naturalists and Physicians at Stettin, which occurred during the previous autumn. The article gave an extended and laudatory account of Haeckel's lecture defending Darwin's theory.3 Darwin immediately replied in his second letter: "I..

Just before Ernst Haeckel’s death in 1919, historians began piling on the faggots for a splendid auto-da-fé. Though more people prior to the Great War learned of Darwin’s theory through his efforts than through any other source, including Darwin himself, Haeckel has been accused of not preaching orthodox Darwinian doctrine. In 1916, E. S. Russell, judged Haeckel's principal theoretical work, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, as "representative not so much of Darwinian as of pre-Darwinian thought."1 Both Stephen Jay Gould and Peter Bowler endorse this evaluation, and see as an index of Haeckel’s heterodox deviation his use of the biogenetic law that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.2 Michael Ruse, without much analysis, simply proclaims that “Haeckel and friends were not true Darwinians.”3 These historians locate the problem in Haeckel’s inclinations toward Naturphilosophie and in his adoption of the kind of Romantic attitudes characterizing the earlier biology of Goethe. These charges of heresy assume, of course, that Darwin’s own theory harbors no taint of Romanticism and that it consequently remains innocent of the doctrine of recapitulation. I think both assumptions quite.

In a series of articles and in a recent book, What Darwin Got Wrong, Jerry Fodor has objected to Darwin’s principle of natural selection on the grounds that it assumes nature has intentions.1 Despite the near universal rejection of Fodor’s argument by biologists and philosophers of biology (myself included),2 I now believe he was almost right. I will show this through a historical examination of a principle that Darwin thought as important as natural selection, his principle of divergence. The principle was designed to explain a phenomenon obvious to any observer of nature, namely, that animals and plants form a hierarchy of clusters. Theodosius Dobzhansky made this the motivating observation of his great synthesizing work, Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937): “the living world is not a single array of individuals in which any two variants are connected by a series of intergrades, but an array of more or less distinctly separate arrays, intermediates between which are absent or at least rare. . . Small..