Paradigm Lost: Darwinism and the Idea of Human Progress

Evolution had long been mooted in Europe before Charles Darwin arrived on the scene, but for many centuries the how and why of the process remained obscure. Hence, seen against previous centuries of unproductive speculation, Darwin’s Origin of Species must have seemed to many like an unheralded epiphany. All earlier generations had resigned themselves to accepting that the most fundamental aspects of human existence must forever remain a mystery — a puzzle which children would ask about but then cease enquiring once years of discretion showed them that some mysteries were simply insoluble. Arguably there was much wisdom in the earlier Victorians’ acceptance of what they termed the mystery of mysteries yet in the late 1830s the young Charles Darwin, unable to accept his peers’ position of dignified “nescience,” set about the audacious task of cracking the universe’s deepest secrets with regard to the coming into being and seemingly limitless diversification of the planet’s sentient life.

Procrustean Science

All philosophers, who find

Some favourite system to their mind

In every point to make it fit,

Will force all nature to submit.¹

That satirical quatrain — which pours scorn on the seemingly hydra-headed human temptation to Procrusteanism in speculative thought — issued from the pen of Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866), Victorian Britain’s best-loved humourist. Peacock’s novels are essentially set-piece dinner-table debates which set out to show up some of his coevals’ more monomaniacal obsessions. (Such idées fixes were in contemporary parlance termed “crotchets” — perverse or questionable notions touted as unexceptionable “facts” by their obsessional proponents — hence the title of one of Peacock’s novels, Crotchet Castle.)

Much of Darwin’s life after the Beagle expedition involved a search for the secrets of creation, a quest that some of his contemporaries might well have accounted a crotchet. In fact, no less a modern satirist than the late Tom Wolfe opined, “Darwin had fallen, without realizing it, into the trap of cosmogonism, the compulsion to find the ever-elusive Theory of Everything, an idea or narrative that reveals everything in the world to be part of a single and suddenly clear pattern.”² The subtext of Wolfe’s critique is of course that Darwin was attempting a feat as unrealizable as it was hubristic.

There is no escaping Wolfe’s scorn when he concludes his Kingdom of Speech with the observation, “To say that animals evolved into man is like saying that Carrara marble evolved into Michelangelo’s David.”³ The gravamen of Wolfe’s critique was that Darwin was arguing intuitively and analogically rather than analytically. For instance, elsewhere in his book Wolfe had suggested that what moved Darwin to postulate ape ancestry for humankind had less to do with science proper than with a visit to London Zoo he made in 1838 and his observations there of the facial and postural movements of the female orangutan “Jenny,”  Such also were the anthropomorphic prepossessions that informed Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) and which — Wolfe added for good measure — will ultimately have lain behind the accumulated improbabilities of that much later, Darwin-inspired discipline which took off in the 1970s, calling itself first sociobiology before tactically rebranding itself evolutionary psychology.

The Origin of the Origin

Darwin was, then, not a systematic scientist in our modern sense. His big idea, what he termed natural selection, did not come to him from bona fide fieldwork during the Beagle expedition but, as documented in my recent book, False Messiah, from a chance reading of the work of the demographer Thomas Malthus.⁴ The earliest written records of Darwin’s vertiginous imaginative leap — not fully developed and documented until the publication of On the Origin of Species in November 1859 — can be traced to two essays written in 1842 and 1844. The longer, 1844 version, conventionally referred to as an essay, is in reality a hundred-page booklet: it is only by comparing the 1844 version with the final version of 1859 that the 1844 edition could be described as an essay. One might more justly (and candidly) describe it as an extended piece of theorizing unencumbered by too much empirical back-up, rich in imagination but low on data.

Hence when in 1909 Darwin’s son Francis came to publish both earlier essays in tandem, he pointed out that the 1844 version did not adduce many illustrative examples — that sometimes rather fussy practice which, although it fortifies Charles’s arguments, can at times impede the easy readability of the finished version. In his Introduction, Francis commented that “in the 1844 essay there is an air of freedom, as if the author were letting himself go, rather than applying the curb.”⁵ Behind Francis’s filial piety one may detect here the indulgent but unmistakable hint that Francis suspected his late father might at times have allowed his imagination to get the better of him. The aspect of “letting himself go” is reflected in Charles’s complacent and unequivocating animadversions on natural selection:

There will be a natural means of selection, tending to preserve those individuals with any slight deviations of structure more favourable to the then existing conditions, and tending to destroy any with deviations of an opposite nature. If the above propositions be correct, and there be no law of nature limiting the possible amount of variation, new races of being will, — perhaps only rarely, and in some few districts, — be formed.⁶

Later we will see that Charles himself came to acknowledge that the imaginative component of his reflections was a trifle overdone and he began to “row back” from some of what he had written in 1842/4. Hindsight and further scientific reflection were to provide their own correctives once he reached middle age (in 1844 he was only 35 years old). Yet in the bright new dawn of 1844 Darwin’s trumpet was giving off no such uncertain sound. Self-effacing as he was by nature, he would surely have been less than human not to have entertained the thought (or fantasy) that he was the one “on whom those truths do rest/which we are toiling all our lives to find.”⁷ At this stage of his life there is no hesitancy or hint of an appeal to those Lamarckian notions to which, faute de mieux, he was increasingly drawn in older age after his faith in natural selection had begun to waver. In 1871 for instance he was driven to give an ad hoc, all too transparently Lamarckian explanation of how humans developed mental faculties superior to those possessed by apes when he wrote that “we may confidently believe that the continued use and advancement of this [linguistic] power would have reacted on the mind itself, by encouraging it to carry on long trains of thought.”⁸

Faith and Doubt

By 1871 on the other hand Darwin was clearly not so sure of his previous convictions. His reservations account for his later flirtation with “supplementary” Lamarckism — which he now saw as being necessary to buttress the theory of natural selection. No longer did he regard the former as a self-standing explanation. Such doubts might also go some way to explaining the otherwise anomalous peroration in the Origin to the effect that evolution had come about by dint of “laws impressed upon matter by the Creator.” Furthermore, only six months after the publication of Origin (November 24, 1859), Darwin wrote in a letter to an American supporter, the theistic evolutionist Asa Gray (May 22, 1860),

I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. […] I can see no reason, why a man, or other animal, may not have been aboriginally produced by other laws; & that all these laws may have been expressly designed by an omniscient Creator, who foresaw every future event & consequence. But the more I think the more bewildered I become.⁹

This was no temporary failure of nerve. More than a decade and a half later he confessed himself no less “bewildered.” For instance, in his autobiography of 1876 he registered “the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.”¹⁰

From Conjecture to Dogma — And Back Again

There are numerous other examples of what Neal Gillespie in a memorable phrase termed Darwin’s “epistemological double vision,” but I will not belabor that point any further here since it is a matter that I (along with others) have discussed previously, not least in my recent False Messiah (2025). Suffice it to say that here can be no greater contrast between Darwin’s “conflicted” state of mind and the typical mindset of those biologists of our own generation keen to push a form of ultra-Darwinism. Here for instance is Richard Dawkins, in a way reminiscent of the less mature Darwin, weaving a fantastical story of evolution as if it were an empirically unexceptionable fact,

Given enough generations, ancestors that look like newts can change into descendants that look like frogs. Given even more generations, ancestors that look like fish can change into descendants that look like monkeys. Given yet more generations, ancestors that look like bacteria can change into descendants that look like humans. And this is exactly what happened.¹¹

(Dawkins is of course a contemporary example of what Thomas Love Peacock loved to lampoon!)

Vera Causa aut Nulla Causa ?

The validity of what philosopher David Stove called “Darwinian fairytales” such as the one cited above has been a point of contention since 1860 when Sir Charles Lyell explained that the passive preservation of physical/neurological features did not amount to an active selection of anything. Yet the fable endures to this day, so much so that Stove was obliged to play a wearisome version of “whack-a-mole” by re-intoning the perennial objection to Darwinism in laborious detail (almost as if writing for a child):

What cause or forces are there which would make one kind of grass or fish or mammal evolve into a different kind? Where is the vera causa as they used to say or (as we would say), where is the mechanism which would drive the alleged process of evolution?¹²

To that he sensibly subjoins the point that the best available explanation of something may not be a good or valid one and may in the end turn out to be a mere canard.

In recent decades we have indeed witnessed a great deal of pushback against apodictically proclaimed certainties together with a principled retreat from empirically unproven assertions. The veteran journalist Melanie Phillips (a trusted regular on the BBC’s flagship Question Time program) wrote a book some time ago as a widespread critique of both political and scientific practices in the early 21st century in which she complained that “reality seems to have been recast with fantasies recently recalibrated as facts” and that “objectivity has been replaced in large measure by ideology.”¹³

In particular she makes mention of a debate she once had with Richard Dawkins on the subject of “directed panspermia”¹⁴ as a possible explanation for the appearance of Homo sapiens on our planet, which Dawkins was prepared to allow as one possibility. Phillips recollects her reaction to Dawkins:

I thought for a moment that I had misheard him. But no, he was indeed suggesting that life on earth might have been imported by beings from outer space. It amazed me that the arch-apostle of reason found the concept of God more unlikely as an explanation of the universe than the existence of the plenipotentiary power of little green men.¹⁵

Little wonder then than that Phillips placed no more trust in Dawkins’s would-be ex cathedra pronouncements than she would in the truth-value of works of science fiction writers, or indeed that American professor Louise Mabille was moved to make the witty observation that Dawkins “almost pulled off the impressive metaphysical feat of doing away with the notion of causality altogether.”¹⁶

Evolution’s “Black Hole”

But undoubtedly the most cogent and impressive objection to Darwinian pseudo-certainties has come from the top echelons of the biological guild itself. G. B. Müller and S. A. Newman have pointed out that population genetics, and thus evolutionary biology, have not identified a specifically causal explanation for the origin of true morphological novelty during the history of life.¹⁷ In other words, neo-Darwinism simply cannot account for nontrivial innovations. This in turn is obviously fatal to any macromutationalclaims. As leading biochemist Nick Lane explains, “It is generally assumed that once simple life has emerged, it gradually evolves into more complex forms, given the right conditions. But that’s not what happens on Earth…. If simple cells had slowly evolved into more complex ones over billions of years, all kinds of intermediate forms would have existed and some still should. But there are none. Instead, there is a great gulf.”¹⁸ Or as he says elsewhere, “There are no surviving evolutionary intermediates, no “missing links” to give any indication of how or why these [cellular] complex traits evolved, just an unexplained void between the morphological simplicity of bacteria and the awesome complexity of everything else. An evolutionary black hole.”¹⁹

“This means there is no inevitable evolutionary trajectory from simple to complex life,” Lane insists. “Never-ending natural selection, operating on infinite populations of bacteria over millions of years, may never give rise to complexity. Bacteria simply do not have the right [physiological] architecture.”²⁰

What are the implications of such scientific reservations? Many premier biologists now tend to see each organism not in Darwinian terms as some kind of physiological waystation to something greater or better. Creatures (of whatever kind) are seen as functional in their own right, and this gives considerable support to the notion that creatures were created rather than simply evolved in the willy-nilly way postulated by Darwin. Consciously or not, a common thread now seems to link scientific and theological thinking. James Moore, in his standard study of Darwinian receptions in America and Britain,²¹ recorded that many in the 19th century and beyond conceived of a crucial layer of divine superintendence behind the evolutionary process.

Author Charles Kingsley and future archbishop Frederick Temple saw in Darwinism a form of progressive revelation, what German theologians call Heilsgeschichte, that is, salvation history, according to which God moves behind the scenes to promote the welfare and ultimate salvation of his subjects. Remarkably, Archbishop Temple had in effect conferred on Darwinism an unequivocally theological meaning and status. It is perhaps no coincidence that Darwinism (at least in the form of guided, theistic Darwinism) achieved more acceptance in the 19th century because it was seen as a biological analogue to the idea of human progress in general. Belief in progress had appeared to have been validated by Darwinism with its ideas of upward evolution. Creation could even be construed in theological terms as a continuing movement and could be linked (albeit somewhat imaginatively!) to the concept of Parousia — the ultimate consummation of human hopes linked to the Second Coming of Christ.

The notion of progress is now of course increasingly questioned,²² especially after what has come to be known almost proverbially as “the calamitous 20th century.” In the 19th century, however, idealizing conceptions of human advancement were aided by the fact that in purely material terms Britain was leading the Western world into a bright new industrial future. Though it seems culpably complacent now, Britons saw themselves as recipients of a particular and distinctive form of grace. Even as late as 1967 I recollect a school debate in which I was required to defend the proposition that “God is an Englishman,” a task which, according to one of my teachers, I managed with every show of conviction!

The Western world no longer subscribes to the automatic superiority of the present over the past, except in the purely technological sense. The unspoken thought that the future would always be better than the past was an idea reinforced by Darwinism because it was so readily conformable with the optimistic zeitgeist of his era. But just as the myth of continuous progress has been exploded, so too has Darwinism come under more critical scrutiny. In fact, future generations may well question what grounds there were for the idea of progress even in the heyday of that belief.

Notes

1. The Novels of Thomas Love Peacock, edited by J.B. Priestley (London: Pan, 1967), p. xvix.
2. Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech, (London: Cape, 2016), p. 20.
3. Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech (London: Cape, 2016), p. 169.
4. This is a well enough known fact which Darwin made no attempt to conceal. See My False Messiah: Darwinism as the God That Failed (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2025), pp. 92-8.
5. The Foundations of the Origin of Species [1909], edited by Francis Darwin (London: Lector House, 2020), Introduction, p. xxiii.
6. The Foundations of the Origin of Species, p. 65.
7. Wordsworth, “Ode on Intimations of Immortality.” In Darwin’s case the sense of amour propre must have been magnified since the alternative view of the French naturalist Lamarck (which saw evolution rooted in the use or disuse of bodily organs prompting physiological changes or lack thereof) had been persistently mocked by Darwin and by other competent scientists.
8. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, edited by James Moore and Adrian Desmond (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 110.
9. Charles Darwin to Asa Gray, May 22, 1860, Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter no. 2814, University of Cambridge, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-2814.xml.
10. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809-1882, edited by Nora Barlow (New York: Norton, 1958), p. 92.
11. Richard Dawkins, The Magic of Reality (London: Transworld, 2011), p. 30. It may perhaps be mentioned en passant that Darwin rode back on his fancy that an elephant might once have “morphed” into a whale.
12. David Stove, Darwinian Fairy Tales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution (New York; Encounter, 1995), p. 25.
13. Melanie Phillips, The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God Truth and Power (New York and London; Encounter Books, 2010), citation Preface pp. xv and xvii. I would personally recommend to readers the chapters on “Scientific Triumphalism” (chapter 5), “The Secular Inquisition (Chapter 6), and “Reason and the Bible” (Chapter 15).
14. The idea that life was “seeded” on Earth by erstwhile inhabitants of other planets in the universe.
15. The World Turned Upside Down, p. 74
16. Louise Mabille, “The God Delusion and Probability” in Coming to Faith through Dawkins, edited by Denis Alexander and Alister McGrath (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2023), pp. 160-173, citation 172.
17. G. B. Müller and S. A. Newman, “Origination of Organismal Form: The Forgotten Cause in Evolutionary Theory,”in Origination of Organismal Form: Beyond the Gene in Developmental and Evolutionary Biology, eds. G. B. Müller and S. A. Newman(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 3-12.
18. Nick Lane, “A Miraculous Merger” in Chance: The Science and Secrets of Luck, edited by Michael Brooks (London: Profile/new Scientist, 2015), pp. 22-33
19. Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is? (London: Profile, 2015), p. 2.
20. Lane, “A Miraculous Merger,” pp. 22-33, notes 28 and 32.
21. James Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwinism in Britain and America, 1870-1900 (Cambridge, UK: CUP, 1981), p. 15.
22. See Samuel Miller McDonald, Progress: A History of Humanity’s Worst Idea (London: Collins, 2025).