The Reluctant Mr. Darwin Read Online Free PDF Page A

“a good instance probably of rudimentary bones.” He hadn’t collected an apteryx during his New Zealand stop with the Beagle , hadn’t even glimpsed one, and he didn’t call it by its native Maori name, the kiwi. But he knew enough from his reading to mention it, a small piece of the great puzzle, whose place would be found later.
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    For two years he lived a strange double life, like a spy in the corridors of the British scientific establishment, which at that time was closely attuned to Anglican orthodoxy and grounded in the tradition of natural theology.
    Biology hadn’t yet emerged as a secular profession. Studying nature was considered a path toward piety. Many prominent natural historians such as Gilbert White, author of a mellifluous little book of observational lore titled The Natural History of Selborne , first published in 1789, were clergymen who preached on Sunday and watched birds or chased insects the rest of the week. A blacksmith’s son named John Ray, after an education at Oxford (which was then an Anglican university, like Cambridge), had sounded the theme back in 1691 with his book The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation . William Paley reaffirmed it in 1802 with Natural Theology , subtitled Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature , a book Darwin had read for amusement during his time at Cambridge. Paley popularized the analogy of the divine watchmaker: If we find a watch lying on the ground, we infer that some intelligent craftsman has made it; if we find intricately designed and marvelously adapted animals and plants, we should likewise infer that some wise, powerful Creator has made them. A series of books called the Bridgewater Treatises , published during the 1830s, offered eight further statements, from highly respected researchers, of the same argument about God’s wisdom, power, and direct role in creating the natural world piece by piece. One of those Bridgewater authors was William Whewell, a polymathic scholar and science philosopher whose influence spread in many directions, and who invented the very word “scientist.” Whewell’s treatise considered astronomy and physics “with Reference to Natural Theology.”
    Behind the Paleyite natural theology lay even deeper and older forms of conventional belief, such as essentialism, the notion that reality is undergirded by a finite number of “natural kinds,” the essential patterns or archetypes of entities seen in the world. This one goes back to Plato. Following his influence, essentialists held that these natural kinds are discrete and immutable, and that physical objects are merely their inexact manifestations. Geometric shapes, for instance, were thought of as natural kinds—triangles being always three-sided, various in their minor characteristics (equilateral, isosceles, scalene) and forever distinct from rectangles or octagons. Inorganic elements were another example—iron being always iron, and lead always lead unless some alchemist found a magical way of turning it into gold. Animal and plant species were also considered natural kinds, rigidly demarcated and unchangeable, though individual dogs or chickens might be various within their hard-sided categories. The essential form of a species, according to this view, is more fundamental and durable than the individuals embodying it at a given time. That’s what William Whewell meant when, in 1837, he wrote emphatically: “ Species have a real existence in nature , and a transition from one to another does not exist.” To believe otherwise was to reject an assumption that was interwoven with ecclesiastic teachings and ideas of civil order.
    Whewell, whose interests and writings ran to geology, mineralogy, political economics, moral philosophy, and German literature as well as astronomy and biology, became one of the heavyweight intellectuals