Sci & Educ

DOI 10.1007/s11191-015-9792-4

BOOK REVIEW

Non-Darwinian Evolutionary Thought in the 19th

Century
Peter J. Bowler (2013) Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World Without
Darwin. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-06867-1, 318 pp, $30.00/£19.50 (hardback)

Ana Barahona1

! Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

1 The strategy

In 2015, I attended an International Colloquium on Darwinism held on the Galapagos

Islands. It was my first time there, and I was fascinated by the place, the warm weather, and
the people. Together with Tahiti, the Galapagos Islands, or the Galapagos Archipelago, are
the most famous of the Pacific tropical islands. They were discovered in 1535 by the
Archbishop of Panama, Tomás de Berlanga, and later annexed to Ecuador. The Galapagos
Archipelago is 972 km east of Ecuador, and it is composed of 13 big islands of volcanic
origin, plus 6 small ones and 107 rocks or islets. Of these, only four are inhabited, Santa
Cruz (Indefatigable), San Cristóbal (Chatham), Floreana (Charles), and Isabela (Albe-
marle). From the seventeenth century onwards, the Galapagos Archipelago was very well
known as a pirates’ refuge and for its peculiar vegetation and fauna. Now it is associated
with the theory of evolution by natural selection that Charles Darwin published in On the
Origin of Species in 1859.
After flying from Ecuador’s capital city of Quito to the small island of Baltra where the
airport is located (just north of Santa Cruz Island), you need to cross by aquatic taxis
through the Itabaca Canal to Santa Cruz. Once there, it takes about 1 h to get to Puerto
Ayora, the most inhabited point of the island and an important tourist destination for the
whole archipelago. The Galapagos National Park and the Charles Darwin Scientific
Research Station, which has a giant tortoise breeding center, are in Puerto Ayora. An hour
from the city, you can see the island’s large lava tunnel in the mountains. The city’s main
avenue, Charles Darwin Avenue, crosses it from one side to the other, and there are many
coffee shops, restaurants, handicrafts, and clothing shops that remind us of the great
achievements of the British naturalist. Even more, the guides that take you on the field trips
quote Darwin all the time. It was the right place and the precise moment to read Peter

& Ana Barahona

[email protected]
1
Department of Evolutionary Biology, School of Sciences, National Autonomous University of
Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City, Mexico

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Bowler’s latest book. On the Galapagos Archipelago, it is not possible to forget Darwin’s
evolutionary theory and legacy, so imagining a world without Darwin is impossible here.
But this is the real world. What if we could imagine that Darwin had never returned from
his voyage around the world, as Bowler suggests in his Darwin Deleted? His book opens
like this:
Imagine a dark, stormy night in the South Atlantic at the end of December 1832. Aboard the Royal
Navy survey vessel HMS Beagle a young naturalist, racked with seasickness, staggers on deck. A
sudden wave makes the ship heel violently, and he is washed over the side. The lookout calls ‘‘Man
overboard!’’ but it is too dark to see anything in the churning sea, and the storm is too fierce for the
officer on watch to risk turning the ship about. Charles Darwin is gone, and Captain Fitzroy will have
to face the task of writing to his family in England… and tell them that in addition to their personal
tragedy, the scientific community has lost a promising young naturalist who might have achieved
great things…. to write one of the most controversial books of the century… On the Origin of
Species. (Bowler 2013, p. 1)
Bowler presents his argument in eight chapters. In the first, he develops the idea that
contingent events may swing the balance in favor of one theory at the expense of a valid
rival, with huge implications for the future development of science. If scientists’ ideas are
constrained by cultural and social conventions and the knowledge and technology of their
time, ‘‘are the constraints so rigid that they effectively channel science into only one viable
channel of development, or are they loose enough to allow rival concepts to emerge and be
tested?’’ (Bowler 2013, p. 15). For Bowler, some forms of evolutionism would have
emerged in the nineteenth century given scientific discoveries and cultural developments
and given the fact that there were trends toward evolutionism. The historical evidence is
that the idea of natural selection remained highly controversial for many decades in the
nineteenth century, being accepted later in the 20th by the whole scientific community.
Many have written about the ideas that rivaled Darwinism at the end of the nineteenth
century and were accepted as alternatives, while natural selection was in doubt. For
Bowler, ‘‘Imagining what would happen without Darwin’s theory is worthwhile because …
we have enough evidence from our own world to show that the alternative could work’’
(Bowler 2013, p. 16). This strategy forces us to reexamine links between theories and
developments at the time that were perfectly plausible, and to abandon the idea that things
had to develop in the way they did. Then we can examine why they actually did turn out
that way, ‘‘challenging values and attitudes that rest on the assumption that the way things
are is the product of historical inevitability’’ (Bowler 2013, p. 24).
Many historians have said that in the event Darwin had not existed the idea of evolution
by natural selection would have been developed by other naturalists, particularly Alfred
Russel Wallace, because it was ‘‘in the air,’’ as evolution was a common expression of the
way naturalists began to think at the time. But Bowler does not concur with this idea;
natural selection would have not been developed by anyone else because ‘‘natural selection
was by no means an inevitable expression of mid-nineteenth century thought, and Darwin
was unique in having just the right combination of interests to appreciate all of its key
components. No one else, certainly not Wallace, could have articulated the idea in the same
way and promoted it to the world so effectively’’ (Bowler 2013, p. 17). Given the historical
evidence, evolutionary biology would certainly have emerged, but through alternative
theories, promoted by other naturalists, scientists, and religious thinkers who saw the
dangers of the idea of natural selection regarding materialism and anti-religious thinking.
Bowler’s strategy is very compelling. He asks us to remove the veils that prevent us seeing
beneath the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection (a theory that eventually
prevailed), to see the non-Darwinian ideas of the time.

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This helps us to understand that Darwinism reception and acceptance were historically
contingent. Once Darwin and his theory of evolution by natural selection have been
deleted, we might see the theories and developments that had taken place in the late
nineteenth century more clearly (without the magnifying glasses of Darwinism), and then
thoroughly understand why Darwinism was later on finally accepted. That, says Bowler, is
our gain if we can effectively imagine a world without Darwin.

2 Darwin’s Originality

But what about Darwin’s originality? Bowler’s chapter 2 deals with this question. Dar-
win’s previous studies and his traveling on Her Majesty’s Ship Beagle around the world
were very important to develop his theory. It was in 1835 that the HMS Beagle arrived to
the Galapagos Archipelago where it spent 5 weeks from September 15 to October 20.
While the officers of the ship were taking cartographic measurements, Darwin spent his
time visiting different islands, making diverse geological and biological observations, and
collecting a huge amount of specimens. As a result of this and other expeditions, the
amount of collections of plants and animals exhibited in botanical gardens, natural history
cabinets, zoological parks, museums, and universities were considerably increased. When
Darwin arrived to London 1 year later, he began to systematize all the information he got
from his voyage, distributing the specimens he had collected to specialists like Richard
Owen, Robert Grant, John Gould, Leonard Jenyns, Thomas Bell, and George Waterhouse.
Between 1837 and 1839, Darwin began writing his transmutation ideas down in a series of
notebooks, later known as Notebooks B, C, D, and E, initiating the process that finally led
him to propose a scientific explanation for the great amount of diversity and for the
adaptation of populations to their local environments, along with a mechanism of evolu-
tion: natural selection. Darwin applied his theory both as an explanatory tool and as a
rhetorical device. ‘‘Darwin not only fleshed out the selection theory with details of how it
operated, explained through effective analogies with artificial selection, he also embedded
it in a comprehensive program for reforming whole swathes of biology’’ (Bowler 2013,
p. 34).
Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species saw the light in 1859 and is one of the most
important books ever written. Charles Darwin changed biology forever: He concluded that
all species on Earth have changed through time (evolution) due to natural processes, that
they are related because they share common ancestors, and that the vast amount of
diversity is the outcome of a process that has taken millions of years, a process that is still
at work. The theory of evolution by natural selection allows us to understand the geo-
graphic distribution of living beings, the fossil record, biodiversity, the origin of species,
and the adaptation of the organisms to their environment and is the cornerstone of modern
biology: It extended to the living world the idea that natural phenomena can and should be
explained by immanent laws, without considering supernatural agents. For having changed
our understanding of the living world in the same manner that Galileo’s, Newton’s, and
Einstein’s ideas did with our understanding of the physical world, Darwin’s achievement is
called the Darwinian Revolution.
In the chapters that follow, Bowler presents us the non-Darwinian ideas developed by
many biologists who ‘‘promoted alternatives, leading to an episode known as the ‘eclipse
of Darwinism’’’ (Bowler 2013, p. 19). Lamarckism and other non-selectionist mechanisms
would have been explored as the best explanations of adaptation. For example, in his

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Zoological Philosophy of 1809, Lamarck outlined his alternative to divine creation in

which the inheritance of acquired characteristics, often known as ‘‘Lamarckism,’’ was a
key element to explain adaptation, idea that became a very plausible alternative to Dar-
winism in the late nineteenth century. With the rise of Mendelism in the twentieth century,
the idea that the characteristics acquired during the life of a living organism are transmitted
to the offspring was proved to be inaccurate, leaving neo-Darwinism as the dominant
theory of evolution. Here Bowler has one key question. Are these ideas simply wrong and
could not have become the foundation for an effective evolutionism? For Bowler,
Lamarckism and other non-selectionist ideas are no longer obviously wrong as they
seemed to be in the twentieth century. With the development of the Evo-Devo thinking
(modern evolutionary developmental biology), many scientific disciplines have shown
interest in non-selectionist theories that could explain how new characteristics emerge, for
example embryology; many evolutionists saw the development of the embryo as a model
for evolution and embryology as an integral component of evolution. Research on genetics
and molecular biology in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has also shown
that some acquired information is inherited and that evolutionary change can result from
instruction as well as selection. These investigations have shown, for example, that cells
can transmit information to the offspring through non-DNA inheritance (epigenetics) or
that many animals transmit information to others through behavior. This could mean that
all organisms have more than one system of heredity. Might these investigations be
interpreted as the resurgence of Lamarckism? They might not, but these new ideas chal-
lenge the gene-centered version of neo-Darwinism that has dominated evolutionary biol-
ogy since the twentieth century. Eva Jablonka, among others, has called attention to four
hereditary dimensions, genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic variation, that can
explain the history of life on Earth. These new developments are worth exploring.
The case of Alfred Russel Wallace is a different story, to which Bowler devotes some
lines in his book. Despite the many debates that have taken place regarding Wallace’s
contribution to the development of the theory of evolution by natural selection, we know
that Wallace worked on a general theory of adaptation and accepted the term ‘‘Darwinism’’
and the way Darwin’s supporters handled the paper he had sent to Darwin in 1858. In this
paper, Wallace acknowledged the significance of the struggle for existence (after an earlier
reading of Malthus) and, as a consequence, the idea that the best adapted organisms would
survive and have descendants, while the other ones would eventually die. Nevertheless, in
this paper, a clear idea of the theory of natural selection acting on individual variants
within populations is lacking. This point is important, because, as Bowler notes, ‘‘there
were significant differences between the ways the two men seem to have thought selection
would operate… while Darwin always visualized selection in terms of competing indi-
viduals seeking to survive in a given environment, Wallace seemed to think that the
environment sets a fixed standard against which organisms are measured, some passing the
test and others failing’’ (Bowler 2013, pp. 61–62). It was just after his reading of the Origin
that Wallace was acquainted with individual selection. Thus, the question arises, what
would have happen if there were no Origin for Wallace to read? Wallace published
important studies of speciation and geographic distribution focusing on group rather than
individual selection to explain the multiplication of species; he always disliked the term
natural selection because it could lead to the idea of evolution as governed by an intelligent
supernatural agent; finally, Wallace’s religious beliefs led him to the idea that natural
selection could have not operated on humans because the higher qualities of the human
mind needed some supernatural input. Thus, in a theory developed by Wallace alone
natural selection operating at the individual level would not have emerged to the surface of

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the public domain and Wallace’s theory ‘‘would have been much less likely to shock his
readers and to challenge their deeper beliefs’’ (Bowler 2013, p. 65).
The ideas that I find most appealing in the exercise that Bowler proposes we perform are
the ones that have to do with the implications of non-Darwinian evolutionary thought on
the science and religion debates and on social Darwinism. Although the debates could not
have been avoided because any theory of evolution refers to an animal origin of humanity,
‘‘…for religious thinkers in the late nineteenth century, taking Darwin’s theory out of the
equation would make a significant difference, allowing evolutionism to appear in a much
less threatening light’’ (Bowler 2013, p. 24). For their part, Darwin’s ideas were used to
justify many social policies and attitudes at the time (racial hierarchy, militarism, Nazism,
eugenics) and were later on associated with them; but rival non-Darwinian theories would
have also done the job; the sole mention of:
… evolution, progress, or struggle is automatically perceived as a reference to Darwin’s influence,
whether or not there was any direct link to his theory. If we can plausibly imagine how the same
attitudes could have found scientific justification in a non-Darwinian world, we can expose the
prejudices that have allowed Darwin’s critics to present him as the cause of the social evils that have
emerged over the last century or more… (T)he absence of one man and his theory would have
transformed not just the science of the time, but the whole course of social and cultural history
(Bowler 2013, p. 26).
Bowler’s strategy leaves us two important issues. First, there were other evolutionary ideas
in the nineteenth century that were overshadowed by Darwin’s theory, and second, it is
precisely the study of these non-Darwinian evolutionary ideas that allows us to thoroughly
understand Darwin’s originality and why Darwinism was later on finally accepted.
I have only raised these comments to mark the importance of Bowler’s ideas and his
contribution to the fields of history of science and evolutionary theory. The reader will find
this book an excellent tool for getting into the life and work of Darwin, as well as into the
history of evolutionary thought. This book will also help higher education teachers com-
mitted to evolutionary biology and to the history and philosophy of science. It is well worth
the read.

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