Design After Darwin, 1860–1900

Design After Darwin, 1860–1900

Introduction

Darwin destroyed the design argument. That?s the familiar shorthand for the impact of natural selection on the argument that God?s handiwork was apparent in the diverse and intricate adaptations of structure to function in living nature. Archdeacon William Paley, the Anglican author of Natural Theology (1802), considered the way that a flower?s parts were each adapted to particular functions and assembled to produce a viable, reproducing organism, and concluded that this gave as much (and perhaps even better) evidence of contrivance than one might find on examining the parts of a watch. As Paley repeated throughout his book, the presence of design requires a designer, contrivance, a contriver. Examining the same kinds of adaptations, Darwin inferred the gradually accumulated products of a contingent, undirected, and natural process though in places, his Origin of Species (1859) does seem a hymn to the marvels, beauties, and intricacies of design in nature.

Darwin?s contemporaries and followers, however, did not universally abandon the argument from design. In the decades after the publication of the Origin, British men of science, clergy and philosophers turned their attention to just what adjustments evolutionary theory demanded for teleological arguments for the existence of God. In essays scattered across the landscape of late-Victorian periodical literature, these authors created revisions of evolutionary theory and natural theology that draw on Darwinian and Paleyan visions of nature to create something like an updated, biology-centred version of David Hume?s Dialogues on Natural Religion (1779). After Darwin, sceptics and believers turned their attention to several central questions. Did the very language Darwin used demand a place for teleology and if so, for a Designer? What were the limits of analogical and metaphorical arguments? What were the likely relationships between the laws of nature and the will and action of the Creator? If one could not find evidence of design directly figured in organic adaptations, could one locate it in the organization of the laws which brought them about? And how could one reconcile the apparent imperfections and horrors of nature ? clumsy and inefficient adaptations, or the existence of ingeniously appalling parasites ? with the idea of a beneficent creating God? These questions are dealt with by most of the selections in this set, and they reveal the diversity and depth of Victorian reactions to the impact of Darwinism on design, and conversely the role of metaphysical commitments in reading evolutionary theory. Many of the questions that these Victorians wrestled with are still asked today by philosophers of biology and disputants in the controversy over Intelligent Design Theory.

The essays in this collection represent a sample of a rich literature on the design question. They are limited to sources which influenced a British readership in the forty years following the publication of Darwin?s Origin of Species. I have not included works available elsewhere in reprinted editions, such as John Stuart Mill?s essays on religion or St George Mivart?s powerful anti-Darwinian essay, On the Genesis of Species (1871).¹ The selections here begin with the debates of the 1860s over the implications of natural selection for natural theology, in which Darwin himself participated. They continue with the explosion of comment from diverse quarters which followed in the 1870s. Most of these articles are from periodicals which range from obscure, short-lived science monthlies to the well known conservative quarterlies and radical reviews. One of these responses is George St Clair?s little-known Darwin and Design (1873), a well annotated attempt to locate God in the evolutionary process which demonstrates the challenges that natural selection raised for orthodox conceptions of divine action. The set concludes with a late Victorian debate between the American botanist Asa Gray, and Darwin?s disciple George Romanes, that echoes the debate between Darwin and Gray in the 1860s. Romanes was perhaps the last eminent Victorian biologist to give much attention to the metaphysical questions raised by evolutionary theory, and his spiritual pilgrimage, from unbelief to an attenuated form of theism, was tied up with his changing views on design. The final volume follows the development of Romanes?s thought. In all, the collection offers a glimpse of the chief questions and answers in the early stages of a controversy which began in the Victorian period and has lingered on into the twenty-first century.

Modern readers might wonder why the debate continued even in the Victorian period. Many of Darwin?s contemporaries were glad that he supplied a natural explanation for the apparent designs in nature which lent scientific substance to Hume?s doubts about natural theology. The overthrow of Paley?s argument was greeted enthusiastically by some of Darwin?s contemporaries. Darwin?s defender, the biologist Thomas Huxley, not only attacked Darwin?s religious opponents, but also defended him against scientific critics who complained that his theory was too teleological. In an 1864 paper, Huxley claimed that

?nothing can be more entirely and absolutely opposed to Teleology, as it is commonly understood, than the Darwinian Theory?. [Darwin] has rendered a most remarkable service to philosophical thought by enabling the student of Nature to recognize ? those adaptations to purpose which are so striking in the organic world, and which Teleology has done good service in keeping before our minds, without being false to the fundamental principles of a scientific conception of the universe. The apparently diverging teachings of the Teleologist and of the Morphologist are reconciled by the Darwinian hypothesis.²

Huxley welcomed Darwinism precisely because it gave a natural explanation of adaptations which allowed them to be explained by science. Like-minded scientists included the positivist and physiologist George Lewes, who ridiculed creationism and praised Darwinism in a series of essays in the Fortnightly Review. The same sentiment can be found in the liberal Westminster Review?s 1875 article on ?The Evidences of Design in Nature? ? after the Origin of Species, its author argued, they were no more.³

Darwin?s own interest in settling the design question can be seen in his essay On the Various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilised by Insects (1862), his first book after the Origin. Here Darwin argues that the ingenious adaptations of orchids can be seen to present a series of slightly varying types, with the structures used for a particular function in one genus warped and renovated to serve a different function in others. Natural selection must be at work, contriving adaptations:

Although an organ may not have been originally formed for some special purpose, if it now serves for this end we are justified in saying that it is specially contrived for it. On the same principle, if a man were to make a machine for some special purpose, but were to use old wheels, springs, and pulleys, only slightly altered, the whole machine, with all its parts, might be said to be specially contrived for that purpose. Thus throughout nature almost every part of each living being has probably served, in a slightly modified condition, for diverse purposes, and has acted in living machinery of many ancient and distinct living beings.⁴

This, he claimed, does not indicate the designing intelligence of the Creator. Rather, it suggests that natural selection has used whatever materials were to hand in order to fulfil different functions as groups of orchids have evolved.

Despite such seemingly straightforward readings about the incompatibility of natural theology and natural selection, there were diverse reactions which can be understood in light of the ambiguities of Darwin?s work, and the complex relationship between design, natural selection, and teleology. Darwin?s theory contained traces of the natural theology which it would replace. Many scholars have examined the theological resources which Darwin used and transformed: the notion of absolutely perfect divine creations which was gradually replaced by the relative perfection of evolved beings; the idea of natural selection as a divinely instituted mechanism for preserving adaptations; and the personification of an active Nature wielding the creative force of an immanent self-creating deity.⁵ Even in the passage, above, where Darwin compares Nature to a demiurge making do with junkyard materials to fashion new machines from old, some readers saw this as a remaking of Paley?s watchmaker argument, rather than a refutation. In the Origin of Species there are many passages which evoke the spectre of natural theology, and Darwin?s Christian interpreters were quick to point out the apparent consonance between his language and Paley?s.

This was the reaction of George Douglas Campbell, the eighth Duke of Argyll. An influential politician and critic of naturalistic science, Argyll tangled frequently with Darwin?s defenders. In his Edinburgh Review paper on ?The Supernatural? Argyll insisted that Darwin?s teleological language revealed the underlying necessity of a divine designer.⁶ Argyll claimed that Darwin?s speculative attempt to give a naturalistic explanation for the marvellous adaptations of orchids was less successful than his demonstration of the universality of purpose in organic nature. The fact that there were recognizable contrivances in nature suggested that the human mind could perceive the intentions of the divine mind which made them. Argyll?s assumptions were answered not by Darwin, but by the co-discoverer of natural selection, the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. In a review of Argyll?s Reign of Law (which included his paper on ?The Supernatural? as its first chapter), Wallace attacked the view that adaptations in nature necessarily suggested a designing intelligence. He considered the universe to be self-regulating, and rejected the idea of a constantly interfering designer. However, Wallace did not reject the idea of a Creator altogether: it was, rather, ?simply a question of how the Creator worked?.⁷ He also noted that Darwin ?had laid himself open to much misconception, and has given to his opponents a powerful weapon by his continual use of metaphor in describing the wonderful co-adaptations of organic beings?.⁸

Argyll was not alone in considering Darwin?s theory teleological. Charles Kingsley, the Anglican Broad Churchman, novelist, and amateur naturalist, welcomed Darwin?s work on orchids as ?a most valuable addition to natural theology?.⁹ What may seem a misreading of Darwin?s work is perhaps more understandable if we consider the emphasis on adaptation central to natural selection. Huxley noted that ??there is a wider Teleology, which is not touched by the doctrine of Evolution, but is actually based upon the fundamental proposition of Evolution?.¹⁰ Huxley?s ?wider teleology? refers to the fact that natural laws do govern a process which adapts structures to functional purposes in organic nature. Even at the turn of the twenty-first century, philosophers of biology debate the relationship between Darwinism and teleology or final cause. While they certainly don?t admit a role for a designing God, their reflections show that natural selection has a teleological aspect that might well be reworked in revisions of the argument from design and provide ample ground for debates about the relationship between God and Nature.¹¹

Many of Darwin?s critics recognized that natural selection demanded a relocation of the designing influence of God. An early and influential reconciliation was made by Darwin?s leading proponent in America, the Harvard botanist Asa Gray. Gray reviewed The Origin in a series of articles in the Atlantic Monthly.¹² Here he advanced his view that the variations which natural selection acted upon might be considered to be directed by the Creator, allowing evolution to remain a vehicle for divine design in nature. Darwin himself was so impressed by these essays, that he arranged for their publication in Britain as a pamphlet bearing the title Natural Selection not inconsistent with Natural Theology (1861), and sent them out to influential men of science and clerics. Through further conversations however, Darwin and Gray found that they could not agree about the place of God in evolution. Darwin held that variations were random, and that to assume that God acted in directing variations would simply make natural selection a secondary sorting process. His response to Gray?s claim that the Creator directed variation came in his ?stone house argument? at the end of The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868). Here Darwin likened natural selection to an architect making a stone house from the rocks that had fallen from a cliff. While the architect would select stones which were best fitted to their role in the structure he created, it would be unreasonable to say that God had overseen the shapes that the stones took. Instead the stones, like variations, were formed by natural laws, and their final shapes were not determined by the purpose of the architect (or natural selection) involved in construction. However, Gray insisted in his later writings on teleology that beneficial variations could be detected, and that natural selection was compatible with a new conception of the argument from design.¹³

Many others who accepted some form of evolutionary theory located divine design in the operation of natural laws. Kingsley thought that it was more marvellous that God had designed all things to make themselves, rather than merely creating them directly. Bishop Frederick Temple (later Archbishop of Canterbury) announced in his Bampton Lectures for 1884, that

The fact is that the doctrine of Evolution does not affect the substance of Paley?s argument at all. The marks of design which he has pointed out remain marks of design still even if we accept the doctrine of evolution to the full. What is touched by this doctrine is not the evidence of design but the mode in which it was executed.¹⁴

This was also the view of George St Clair, whose Darwin and Design (1873) attempted to show that creation occurred through an evolutionary process. God was, he claimed, constrained by the laws of nature, and so we should expect to see the marks of natural process in his design. This was the earnest attempt of a Christian to explain in some detail how God might act using natural law, although his critics noted that such a Creator had more in common with a gnostic demiurge than the transcendent God of the Judeo-Christian tradition.¹⁵

More sophisticated apologists dealt with the relationship between God and nature in more philosophical depth. The Oxford theologian James Mozley asserted that those who claimed that natural laws alone were responsible for the apparent design in nature were attempting to evade the necessary choice between chance and intelligence as the ultimate cause of nature. Natural law was merely a shorthand, he claimed, for observed regularities, and as a category it lacked explanatory force. Ultimately, he said, we must choose between chance and design, whatever intervening evolutionary process we may discover or accept.¹⁶ His student, the Anglo-catholic Oxford lecturer, Aubrey Moore, used the idealist philosophy of Thomas Hill Green and the Trinitarianism of the Church fathers to forge a connection between the regularities of natural law and an immanent, omnipresent creating Logos. Moore differed from Mozley however, in abandoning the argument from design as an apologetic strategy. His view was put forward as an interpretation that an already convinced Christian could apply in understanding nature, not as an argument to be used against atheists.¹⁷

Some sought design in phenomena that evolution could not explain. The High Church Dean Henry Liddon insisted that the origin of matter, life and mind, could not possibly be explained by the action of natural laws, and so could be directly attributed to God?s creative power. The Unitarian biologist William Benjamin Carpenter observed the evolutionary history of certain marine molluscs, and claimed that their shells evolved in a mathematically predictable direction which could not be explained by natural selection. This was a sign that a designing intelligence was guiding the process.¹⁸ However, many accepted Darwin?s explanation of evolution, and simply sought to identify evolution as a mode of creation.

The main difficulty with this approach was the way that Darwinism intensified the problem of pain in nature. Ernst Haeckel, the German zoologist, introduced the term ?dysteleology? in his popular works. He insisted that Darwinism did away with the idea of a teleological and designed world, and replaced it with a purposeless mechanical cosmos full of waste and imperfection.¹⁹ The main British champion of this view was the positivist George Lewes, who set out the mistakes and horrors of nature in his review of ?Mr Darwin?s Hypothesis? in the Fortnightly Review in 1867. Lewes noted that the so-called ?Architect of Nature? could even be criticized on embryological grounds. Mammalian embryos pass through a series of stages in which they resemble certain types of lower animals. No-one would praise a mortal architect who built ??by first using his materials in the shape of a hut, then pulling them down and re-building them as a cottage, then adding story to story and room to room; not with any reference to the ultimate purposes of a palace, but wholly with reference to the way in which houses were conducted in ancient times?.²⁰

Theodicy applied to nature was nothing new, but those who claimed that God acted through natural selection had to accept that all of the cruel facts of nature, including the struggle for existence, must be seen as the result of divine creative action. Some frankly welcomed Darwinism. The geologist and clergyman Thomas Stebbing chose evolution over creationism, or teleology. In a merciless essay in the Popular Science Review he described the relationship between a hermit crab (which relied on the death of molluscs to survive), a Sacculina parasite which infested its intestines, and another parasite which in turn subverted the Sacculina for its own ends. To imagine that such an intricately engineered system of parasitic cruelty had been intentionally designed by a creating God was unthinkable. Far better, according to Stebbing, was the view that such miseries were the product of a system of laws governed by God in a gradually progressing nature.²¹

The botanist and clergyman George Henslow argued that the imperfections in nature were to be expected of a wise designer. Given that environments changed, organisms could achieve at best a relative perfection, not the absolute perfection which might be expected of a static universe. This ?inideal? or relative state of perfection was inevitable in a changing world, and allowed the mutual adjustment of organisms to new conditions through evolution.²² William Forsell Kirby, an entomologist and man of letters, offered a more surprising view of the apparent imperfections of nature. In his book on Evolution and Natural Theology (1884) he followed Henslow in noting that nature was a ?vast self adjusting machine? in which relative perfection was to be expected.²³ He also notes that certain parts of nature might be governed by intermediate intelligences, bound by natural laws. Hume, in his Dialogues on Natural Religion (1779) speculated that one might well view nature as the product of multiple creators: Kirby seems to have taken this possibility seriously.

Many others attempted to minimize the significance of the problem of pain for the argument from design. Mozley argued that men like Lewes raised difficulties which merely distracted our attention from the main problem to be explained, the overwhelming presence of design in nature. Lewes, focusing on the apparent absurdities of nature, was like a parish schoolboy grasping the wrong part of a complex classical sentence:

Mr Lewes buries himself so in the anomalies and curious irregular corners of Nature, that he fails to grasp the great interpretation of Nature ? the interpretation of her as a whole. Nature has what may be called her backbone construction, analogous to the grammatical backbone of a sentence, which may still contain a clause of ambiguous government?. [Mr Lewes] immures himself in some of the petty clauses of Nature which are obscure, and will not see the great construction of Nature?s sentence, which is plain.²⁴

Nonetheless, many who saw the cruelties and imperfections of nature could not simply explain them away as hard parts of a difficult sentence. One of the leading biologists of the late nineteenth century was George Romanes, whose friendship with Darwin shaped his researches into animal behaviour and intelligence, nervous system physiology, heredity and variation, and theories of evolutionary mechanisms. Romanes was also a prolific amateur metaphysician who wrote several books on theism, monism and materialism, and religion.²⁵ Romanes lost his faith at least in part because of his acceptance of evolutionary theory. Through the late 1870s and much of the 1880s he saw no evidence of design in nature, and was much struck with the wastefulness and pain involved in natural selection. His agnosticism was absolute, and when men like Asa Gray claimed that design could be perceived in the variations of nature, Romanes argued that such a claim needed to be backed with evidence of directed variations. Such evidence would be welcome, he said, but it had yet to be produced.²⁶ In the early 1880s Romanes held that the question of design in nature was a matter of evidence. On reading the work of Aubrey Moore in 1889, however, he modified his opinion. Moore offered a way of moving the debates about design into the realm of opinion: by claiming that natural processes could be seen as the action of an immanent God, a convinced Christian could indeed see design in nature. Romanes, an agnostic, personally could not see such design, but he welcomed Moore?s reformulation of the issue which moved the question of design in nature from ??the lower courts of objective fact to the supreme courts of subjective personality??.²⁷

Romanes was impressed by Moore?s work but remained uncertain about the possibility of accepting his conclusions about the presence of design in nature. One of the chief difficulties was the problem of pain. His posthumously published Thoughts on Religion (1895) returns to this difficulty, which he first explored in his Candid Examination of Theism (1878). Ultimately, Romanes concluded, the facts of science revealed a world painfully at odds with traditional natural theology. His Thoughts on Religion is a thorough and moving personal account of the difficulties of belief for a mind steeped in the implications of Darwinism.

This collection samples materials which read like precursors of Richard Dawkins as well as religious reworkings of Darwinism which one modern critic has styled ?The Varieties of Religious Avoidance?.²⁸ Many believers attempted to reconcile Darwinism and design, and to many modern readers their essays will seem to avoid the force of natural selection theory. The value of these papers however, is in what they tell us about what diverse Victorian commentators understood by such terms as ?theory of evolution?, ?natural selection?, ?Darwinism?, ?teleology? and ?design?. The range of this set of texts may allow us to transcend the ?science versus religion? approach which still subtly informs much historical analysis of the interactions between scientists, popularizers, religious apologists and philosophers in the late nineteenth century. It also provides a broader context for understanding the development of Darwinism, which like all isms evolved new meanings and connotations in response to its wider cultural environment.²⁹ For those who are puzzled by the revival of the argument from design almost a century and a half after the publication of the Origin, this collection shows that in the early stages of discussion diverse opinions were offered, and there was little consensus about the relationship between Darwin and design.³⁰ It is perhaps not surprising that under the right cultural circumstances, unresolved questions should resurface in the modern controversy over intelligent design theory ? a controversy which unconsciously echoes many of the themes first sounded in the essays presented here.

Richard England, 2003
Salisbury University, Maryland, USA

¹ Mivart?s Genesis of Species (1871) is the fourth volume of John M. Lynch?s Darwin?s Theory of Natural Selection: British Responses: 1859?1871 (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001).
² Thomas Henry Huxley, ?Criticisms on the Origin of Species?, [1864] in Darwiniana (London: Macmillan, 1893), pp. 80?106, p. 86. Reprinted herein, Volume 1.
³ Anonymous, ?The Evidences of Design in Nature? Westminster Review, vol. 48 (New series) (1875), pp. 182?212. Reprinted herein, Volume 2.
⁴ Charles Darwin On the Various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilised by Insects (London: Murray, 1862), p. 348. Excerpts reprinted herein, Volume 1.
⁵ Dov Ospovat, The Development of Darwin?s Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1981); John Brooke, ?The Relations between Darwin?s Science and his Religion?, in Darwinism and Divinity, ed. John Durant (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), pp. 40?75; Phillip Sloan, ??The Sense of Sublimity?: Darwin on Nature and Divinity?, Osiris, vol. 16 (2001), pp. 251?69. Further work on the role of religion in Darwin?s thought includes John Cornell, ?Newton of the Grassblade? Darwin and the Problem of Organic Teleology?, Isis vol. 77 (1986), pp. 405?421; idem, ?God?s Magnificent Law: The Bad Influence of Theistic Metaphysics on Darwin?s Estimation of Natural Selection?, Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 20 (1987), pp. 381?412; Robert Richards, ?The Theological Foundations of Darwin?s Theory of Evolution?, in Exploring Nature, eds P. Theerman & K. Parshall (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), pp. 61?79.
⁶ George Douglas Campbell (Duke of Argyll), ?The Supernatural?, Edinburgh Review vol. 116 (1862) pp. 378?97. Reprinted herein, Volume 1.
⁷ Alfred Russel Wallace, ?Creation by Law?, Quarterly Journal of Science vol. 4 (1867) pp. 471?88, p. 472. Reprinted herein, Volume 1.
⁸ Ibid., p. 473.
⁹ Charles Kingsley, ?The Natural Theology of the Future? Macmillan?s Magazine, vol. 23 (1871), pp. 369?78, p. 376. Reprinted herein, Volume 2.
¹⁰ Thomas Henry Huxley, ?On the Genealogy of Animals?, [1869] in Darwiniana (London: Macmillan, 1893), pp. 107?119 , p. 110. Reprinted herein, Volume 1. Huxley?s remark is discussed in John Beatty, ?Teleology and the Relationship between Biology and the Physical Sciences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries?, in Some Truer Method: Reflections on the Heritage of Newton, eds F. Durham & R. Purrington (New York: Columbia U. P., 1990), pp. 113?44, on pp. 130?32.
¹¹ A discussion of this is contained in the following set of articles: James Lennox, ?Darwin was a Teleologist?, Biology and Philosophy, vol. 9 (1993) pp. 409?21; Michael Ghiselin, ?Darwin?s Language may Seem Teleological, but his Thinking is Another Matter?, Biology and Philosophy, vol. 9 (1994), pp. 489?92; James Lennox, ?Teleology by Another Name: A Reply to Ghiselin? Biology and Philosophy, vol. 9 (1994), pp. 493?95. An interesting commentary is provided in T. L. Short, ?Darwin?s Concept of Final Cause: Neither New nor Trivial? Biology and Philosophy, vol. 17 (2002), pp. 323?40.
¹² Asa Gray, ?Darwin on the Origin of Species?, Atlantic Monthly, vol. 6, pp. 109?16, 209?39; ?Darwin and his Reviewers?, pp. 406?25. Reprinted in his Darwiniana, (New York: Appleton, 1876), pp. 87?177, and reprinted herein, Volume 1.
¹³ For further discussion see, Kenneth W. Herrmann ?The Gulf between Design and Descent: Charles Darwin?s Rejection of Asa Gray?s Apologia? in Facets of Faith and Science. Volume 4: Interpreting God?s Action in the World, ed. J.M. van der Meer (The Pascal Centre / The University Press of America: Lanham, 1996), pp. 155?71.
¹⁴ Frederick Temple, The Relations between Religion and Science (London: Macmillan, 1885), Lecture IV, pp. 99?123, pp. 113?14. Reprinted herein, Volume 2.
¹⁵ George St Clair, Darwinism and Design; or, Creation by Evolution (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1873). Reprinted herein, Volume 3.
¹⁶ James Mozley, ?The Argument of Design? Quarterly Review vol. 127 (1869): 134?76. Reprinted in his Essays, Historical and Theological (London: Rivingtons, 1878) and reprinted herein, Volume 2.
¹⁷ Aubrey Moore, ?The Christian Doctrine of God? in Charles Gore, ed. Lux Mundi (London: Murray, 1889), pp. 47?90. Reprinted herein, Volume 4.
¹⁸ William Benjamin Carpenter, The argument from design in the organic world, reconsidered in its relation to the doctrines of evolution and natural selection (London: W. Speaight, 1884). Reprinted herein, Volume 2.
¹⁹ Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation (trans. E. R. Lankester) (London: Henry S. King, 1876). Excerpt reprinted herein, Volume 2. Huxley argued against Haeckel?s concept of dysteleology and his separation of the mechanical and teleological views of nature. See his ?On the Genealogy of Animals? (cit. n. 10), reprinted herein, Volume 1.
²⁰ George Henry Lewes, ?Darwin?s Hypotheses?, Fortnightly Review, vol. 9 (1868), pp. 611?17. Reprinted herein, Volume 2.
²¹ T.R.R. Stebbing, ?Evolution or Teleology? What to Believe in Science?, Popular Science Review, vol. 13 (1874), pp. 11?24. Reprinted herein, Volume 2.
²² George Henslow, The Theory of Evolution of Living Things and the application to the Principles of Evolution to Religion (London: Macmillan, 1873). Excerpt reprinted herein, Volume 2. In his attention on the difference between absolute and relative perfection Henslow picks up on themes suggested by Huxley, and seems to anticipate aspects of some modern scholarship on Darwin?s theory. See Dov Ospovat, ?God and Natural Selection: The Darwinian Idea of Design?, Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 13 (1980), pp.169?94 and idem., ?Perfect Adaptation and Teleological Explanation?, Studies in the History of Biology, vol. 2 (1978), pp. 33?56.
²³ William F. Kirby, Evolution and Natural Theology (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1883). Excerpts reprinted herein, Volume 2.
²⁴ James Mozley, ?The Argument of Design? (cit. n. 16).
²⁵ Romanes?s chief scientific publications include Animal Intelligence (London: Kegan Paul, 1882); Mental Evolution in Animals (London: Kegan Paul, 1883); Jellyfish, Starfish and Sea Urchins (London: Kegan Paul, 1885); Darwin and after Darwin: an exposition of the Darwinian theory and a discussion of post-Darwinian questions (London: Longmans, 1892?97), three volumes. His religious and philosophical works include A Candid Examination of Theism (London: Kegan Paul, 1878); Mind and Motion and Monism (London: Longmans, 1895); and his posthumously published Thoughts on Religion (London: Longmans, 1895).
²⁶ George Romanes, ?Natural Selection and Natural Theology?, Nature, vol. 28 (May 31, 1883), pp. 100?101. Reprinted herein, Volume 4.
²⁷ George Romanes, S. Alexander & W.S. Gildea ?Symposium ? Is there Evidence of Design in Nature?? Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 1 (1889?91), pp. 49?76, p. 76. Reprinted herein, Volume 4.
²⁸ David Kohn, ?Darwin?s Ambiguity: The Secularization of Biological Meaning?, British Journal for the History of Science, vol. 22 (1989), pp. 215?39, p. 237.
²⁹ See James Moore, ?Deconstructing Darwinism: The Politics of Evolution in the 1860s?, Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 24 (1991), pp. 355?408; David Depew and Bruce Weber, Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (Boston: MIT Press, 1996).
³⁰ See James Moore, Post-Darwinian Controversies (Cambridge University Press, 1979); David Livingstone, Darwin?s Forgotten Defenders (Edinburgh: Eerdmans & Scottish Academic Press, 1987); and Michael Ruse, Darwin and Design (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).

Richard England,‘Introduction’, Design After Darwin, 1860–1900 (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003)

Introduction © Richard England, 2003
All Rights Reserved. For personal use only.