Destroyer or Nurturer? Darwin’s Divinized Conception of Nature

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present this excerpt from Chapter 2 of Neil Thomas’s new book, False Messiah: Darwinism as the God That Failed (Discovery Institute Press).

Charles Darwin’s metaphorical thinking is sometimes subject to a tension between nature as destroyer and nature as nurturer. Hard questions from one or more friends, and from reviewers of the book, led him to consider replacing talk of “natural selection” with the term “natural preservation,” so as to avoid errant associations with choice and, by extension, teleology. But Darwin seems to have sensed that such acquiescence would have been fatal to his idea of major morphological change. After all, his book was about the origin of new species, not their preservation having once arrived. Darwin needed the term “natural selection” to modify the reader’s conception of nature’s role — not an exterminator or even a mere embalmer of the status quo but a nurturing facilitator.

Hence we encounter Darwinian locutions such as natural selection “tending” to its innumerable charges, or “daily and hourly scrutinizing” in order to foster healthy developmental outcomes. Essentially, we witness Darwin’s switching of metaphorical allegiance from one historically attested conceptual archetype to another, from the idea of nature as blind, uncaring, and chance-driven to that of Nature as a maternal figure.

For these reasons it is tempting to sympathize with George Levine in his bracing contention that Darwin in the back of his mind conceived of natural selection not as an indifferent process but as “a woman, perhaps a goddess” whose operations have every appearance of working teleologically. Her sway seems in fact to be so positive, even providential, that Robert J. Richards once termed Darwin’s conception of natural selection a form of “divine surrogate.”

Given such a subtext, it is little wonder that Darwin held out so long against Alfred Russel Wallace’s argument that natural selection and human breeding methods were about as comparable as chalk and cheese. For the unacknowledged subtext of Darwin’s presentation of natural selection is that it came close in his mind to becoming the de facto goddess of the natural world. This would explain his faith in what he stated were the directive powers of a process which others could see only as unfathomable and wholly unpredictable (such having been the original connotation of the term “natural selection” coined by breeders).

Judging from a number of Darwin’s evocations, the powers of natural selection transcend human intelligence to such a degree that he came perilously close to imputing to it the capacity for intelligent design, as observed above. The capstone to this crypto-theological way of thinking appears to have been laid when he contrasted the selfishness of mankind with the dispassionate care for all animal and human life shown by natural selection. Here natural selection seems curiously reminiscent of the limitless goodness of the Christian God, while being contrasted with the sinfulness of mankind.

Levine, like many others before him, repeats the point that “it has long been understood that Darwin was much influenced by the [Paleyan] Natural Theology that much of the Origin is devoted to displacing” and that “his imagination of nature is of a designed place, and he adapts many natural theological terms, not least ‘adaptation’ and ‘contrivance’ in his description of the way nature works.” Levine’s response to the text in his capacity as a literary critic leads him to corroborate Richards’s view that Darwin did indeed have a divinized conception of nature. As Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini have trenchantly observed, Darwin strove to exorcize “ghosts in the machine” such as God, selfish genes, or a World Spirit, yet “Mother Nature and other pseudo-agents got away scot-free.”

Darwin would defensively counter such accusations by insisting that in using the term natural selection, he had meant only the aggregate action and product of many laws. However, this denial founders on his inability to account for the meanings disclosed by the metaphorical terms in which he clothed his ideas. Those more oblique modes of self-disclosure provide hints of the way his mind was working, partly at a sub-rational level, what in modern parlance might be called “tells.” In sum, the linguistic analysis above corroborates the point first made by Edward Pusey and later endorsed by others, to the effect that the Darwinian conception of nature was, for all his protests to the contrary, that of a power acting according to design.

I have already more than hinted that Darwin was not romancing idiosyncratically. Instead, his imagination was nourished by conceptual and imaginative templates he had access to in early 19th-century culture. But to properly recover and explore these, some old-style scholarship is required. This will allow us to re-enter a thought-world which was Darwin’s birthright and came to him as easily as breathing. An important clue on our journey there was recently provided by Ronald Hutton in his Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe, to whose chapter on Mother Earth we now turn.

The tradition of a personified Natura creatrix (Nature the creator) has a long pedigree in Christian and pre-Christian European thought, stretching back at least to the ancient Greek Physis and her Roman counterpart, Natura. To Aristotle, Physis was the force which generated and animated living things and embodied the elements and primary materials of the world. Aristotle saw her as a form of governess and steward to the sublunary world — as opposed to that of the heavens which were envisaged as the place of the most supreme divinity. She was sometimes assimilated to Plato’s conception of the anima mundi (world soul or spirit), an entity endowed by the creator god with the role of linking his ideal realm with the realm of material and mortal beings. Some poets of the imperial period (such as Ovid) conceived of her as a cosmic power subordinate only to the Creator himself. The later writer Claudian referred to her as Mother Nature and credited her with producing an ordered world out of chaos.

Natura was inducted with some ease into the Christianized world in the fifth century, and in the 12th century the philosopher and poet Bernard Silvestris portrayed her as having been created by the Christian God, tasked by Him to put the finishing touches to His universe. Similar conceptions were expressed in the work of Alan of Lille towards the end of the 12th century when he too saluted Natura as the ruler of the world on behalf of the Christian God. Jean de Meun, in the Romance of the Rose, referred to her as God’s chamberlain, and Chaucer depicts her essentially as God’s deputy.

In sum, concludes Hutton, “the concept of a mighty female figure embodying and ruling over the terrestrial world was embedded in Christian intellectual and literary culture all through the periods in which Christianity most completely dominated Europe, the medieval and early modern,” that is, up until about 1650. One may debate to what degree such language was regarded as literal versus metaphorical in European society and for any given individual, but what is undeniable is that she continued her reign up to the 19th century, maintaining a secure place in the Christian cosmological imagination.

Turning towards Darwin’s own day, in the later Romantic period of the 19th century, when poets like William Wordsworth were exhorting readers to let nature be their teacher, Natura was eulogized as a fount of wisdom. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley even apostrophized her as “Sacred Goddess, Mother Earth/Thou from whom whose immortal bosom/Gods and men and beasts have birth.” The poet Algernon Charles Swinburne too conceived of Nature as a mighty female deity, embodying and creating the universe itself. Hutton also points to the remarkable example of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, whose eponymous heroine, finding herself one night alone and sleeping rough on a moor, is comforted by the thought of Nature, conceived of as a maternal figure, and by that of a loving God, as Nature’s creator.

The idea will seem alien to many of us, but it was in such filiations that Natura remained, as Hutton puts it, “resiliently adaptable” up to Darwin’s day and slightly beyond. Over countless centuries there had established itself in Europe a “Christian pattern of a cosmic feminine force subject to a patriarchal sky deity.” Some modern archaeologists have even gone so far as to claim that the archetype of the Great Mother has been a mythic universal — an image inherent in or somehow “hard-wired” into the human psyche since prehistoric times.

Such historical representations of Natura and the fact that she continued to be so deeply embedded in Victorian cultural understanding make it likely that the idea was lodged in Darwin’s psyche too at some level and that his conception of natural selection may not have been anywhere near as purely materialist as the strictly Cartesian part of his mind might have wished. Despite his rational(ist) efforts, it seems he was never able to free himself completely from that form of Christian cosmology which enjoyed such wide currency in the ambient culture of his day.

Prosaically summarized at the purely rational level, the Origin aspires to supply a fresh, materialist myth to account for the development of the earth’s numerous species. In reality, however, that single-minded project is compromised or even subverted by an insistent metaphorical subtext that introduces a covertly metaphysical dimension into Darwin’s conceptions. That submerged stratum of meaning, with its unmistakable echoes of the figure of Natura in Christian cosmological thought, makes its influence felt at many metaphorical and lexical levels.

It was not long before Darwin’s peers called him out on this. In the end Darwin was persuaded to capitulate on multiple fronts, as for instance when he conceded, in a September 1860 letter to Charles Lyell, “Talking of ‘Natural Selection,’ if I had to commence de novo, I would have used natural preservation.”

This emendation amounted to much more than mere verbal finessing: Darwin’s self-correction brought with it significant conceptual consequences. The letter to Lyell involved a fatal concession which, had it been made public and analyzed dispassionately at the time, could have halted the unstoppable march of Darwinism there and then. For as noted, the term that in September 1860 Darwin conceded was preferable, “natural preservation,” by definition refers to a process that only preserves rather than creates new body parts, let alone whole new body plans. The whole Darwinian theory of an advance from organic simplicity to complexity — from microbes to man — must at best fall moot after such a major semantic retreat.

Even Darwin himself seemed to harbor doubts. Could natural selection really have exerted the vast transformative powers he had claimed for it? Such doubts could account for his flirtation with what we might call supplementary Lamarckism — present in the first edition of the Origin and to an increasing degree in subsequent editions. His doubts also might go some way to explain 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.”

One might even speculate that Darwin’s two-decade procrastination over publication of the Origin might have owed something to his difficulties in convincing himself of many ideas which, on the advice of colleagues and critics, he was driven to modify quite considerably over his five later revisions of the book. Most strikingly, the selection/preservation problem would appear to have anticipated some significant modern developments in biological research, a brief account of which will now be intercalated. As will be seen, modern developments have provided a retrospective confirmation of some of Darwin’s worst fears.

This essay is republished with the kind permission of The Discovery Institute.

Neil Thomas is a Reader Emeritus in the University of Durham, England and a longtime member of the British Rationalist Association. He studied Classical Studies and European Languages at the universities of Oxford, Munich and Cardiff before taking up his post in the German section of the School of European Languages and Literatures at Durham University in 1976.