Pre-Darwin Science

From History of Evolution

This is a brief overview of the state of the relevant sciences in the first half of the 19th century before Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Links within the overview and resources at the bottom of the page lead to more detailed material.

Contents 1 Teleology 2 Developments in Science 2.1 Chemistry 2.2 Geology 2.2.1 Uniformitarianism and Catastrophism 2.2.2 Age of the Earth 2.3 Biology 2.3.1 Taxonomy 2.3.2 Species Fixity 2.3.3 Scala Natura 2.3.4 Transmutationism 2.4 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation 3 Summary

Teleology

A core concept in pre-Darwinian science was teleology. Teleology is the view that dynamic processes or functional structures have (future) goals, and operate so as to achieve/bring about those goals. Further, the behavior of the structures or processes can be explained by reference to the goals. Wilkins distinguishes between two sorts of teleological explanations, external and internal explanations:

External teleological explanation derives from Plato - a goal is imposed by an agent, a mind, which has intentions and purpose. Internal teleological explanation derives from Aristotle, and is a functional notion. Aristotle divided causes up into four kinds - material (the stuff of which a thing is made), formal (its form or structure), efficient (the powers of the causes to achieve the things they achieve) and final (the purpose or end for which a thing exists). Internal teleology is really a kind of causal explanation in terms of the value of the thing being explained. This sort of teleology doesn't impact on explanations in terms of efficient causes. You can, according to Aristotle, use both.

Pre-Darwinian science was full of external teleology in keeping with its central purpose: to illuminate God's plan through the study of nature. Things are as they are because that's what God wanted them to be. Louis Agassiz, an eminent naturalist, founder of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard and an implacable opponent of Darwinian evolution, wrote

The combination in time and space of all these thoughtful conceptions exhibits not only thought, it shows also premeditation, power, wisdom, greatness, prescience, omniscience, providence. In one word, all these facts in their natural connection proclaim aloud the One God, whom man may know, adore, and love; and Natural History must in good time become the analysis of the thoughts of the Creator of the Universe. . . (Quoted on theUniversity of California Museum of Paleontology site.)

Mayr (1992, 2004) provides a useful taxonomy of the various sorts of teleology, summarized by Wilkins.

Developments in Science

The two sciences that mainly concern us are geology and biology, though chemistry also contributed to changes in the state of scientific thinking that characterized the first half of the 19th century.

Chemistry

Two developments in chemistry were important in setting the tone for the 19th century. First, studying the phenomena associated with the mass of combinations of substances, John Dalton demonstrated that matter was composed of atoms, particles; that different substances had atoms of different masses; and that the atoms of any given substance were identical in mass (at least within the measurement accuracy of which his instrumentation was capable). This argued for a unity underlying the variety of substances: Everything is made of atoms.

The second important contribution from chemistry was Wöhler's 1828 synthesis of urea, an organic compound, from inorganic precursors. Prior to that, the doctrine of vitalism was widely accepted. Vitalism held that there is a fundamental difference between living and non-living things, and that some sort of "vital spark" or "vital essence" differentiates living from non-living things. In classifying chemical compounds into two types depending on whether they were produced by animals and plants or by non-living processes, chemists and alchemists were operating on this principle. Wöhler's synthesis of urea from inorganic precursors showed that there was no fundamental chemical difference between organic and inorganic compounds. It's of some interest that part of the 19th century opposition to the use of anesthesia was based on the argument that anesthetics weakened the "life force" and was therefore dangerous. Wöhler's work was not immediately accepted as wholly refuting vitalism, but it laid the foundation.

It is also of interest that early in his career Darwin at least once hinted at vitalism as a distinguishing characteristic of living organisms. In The Voyage of the Beagle, his account of the 5-year circumnavigation of the globe aboard a British survey ship, he writes of reef-forming coral polyps thus:

The organic forces separate the atoms of carbonate of lime, one by one, from the foaming breakers, and unite them into a symmetrical structure. Let the hurricane tear up its thousand huge fragments; yet what will that tell against the accumulated labour of myriads of architects at work night and day, month after month. Thus do we see the soft and gelatinous body of a polypus, through the agency of the vital laws, conquering the great mechanical power of the waves of an ocean which neither the art of man nor the inanimate works of nature could successfully resist. (pp. 436-437)

Later, of course, Darwin devised a mechanistic theory of evolution by natural selection that did not invoke vitalism.

Geology

Descriptive geology was well developed by the mid-19th century. Both continental and British geologists were mapping the geological features of their respective countries. In 1815-1817 William "Strata" Smith, a surveyor, published a magnificent geological map of England, Scotland, and Wales. Smith recognized the regularity of the distribution of fossils in the several strata, and pioneered their use as index fossils correlating the sequence of strata in different locations.

Uniformitarianism and Catastrophism

Theory in geology was characterized by several vigorous debates. One was between "catastrophism" and "uniformitarianism." Briefly, catastrophism held that the major geological features of the earth were produced by intermittent upheavals separated by periods of (relative) stasis. Georges Cuvier, an eminent French paleontologist and comparative anatomist around the turn of the 19th century, accepted an old earth, but explained the fossil record (as he knew it) as a series of major extinctions caused by localized natural catastrophes, floods, which killed off some proportion of the then-existing species. Thus he accounted for the occurrence of fossils of extinct animals. On the basis of a faulty translation of Cuvier's work into English, some interpreted the most recent such catastrophe as Noah's Flood, though Cuvier did not make that identification.

Uniformitarianism is the view that the geological features of the earth could be accounted for by processes observable in the present. James Hutton, an influential 18th century British geologist, was a strong proponent of uniformitarian thinking, and his ideas were amplified by Charles Lyell in the early 19th century. Darwin had Lyell's Principles of Geology with him on the Beagle, taking the first volume with him when he sailed and receiving the later two volumes while in South America, and it was a strong influence on his thinking. Note that uniformatarian thinking does not exclude the possibility of catastrophes. Indeed, Darwin observed an earthquake and its aftermath while in South America, and in Voyage of the Beagle he remarked on the "permanent elevation of the land" caused by the earthquake. However, the uniformitarians declined to invoke massive world-wide events of the sort envisioned by the catastrophists.

A second debate in the 18th century was over the origin of rocks and their strata. The two views were Neptunism and Vulcanism (or Plutonism). The former -- mainly due to Abraham Werner who wrote in the late 18th century -- held that rock strata mainly originated from the successive crystallization (or precipitation) of different sorts of rock out of a universal deluge, the latter arguing that while some rock was clearly sedimentary (but not the product of crystallization), igneous rocks were the product of volcanoes. The influential Scottish mineralogist Robert Jameson, who introduced the 16 year-old Charles Darwin to geology during Darwin's truncated education in medicine at the University of Edinburgh, was a Neptunist. By the mid-19th century Neptunism was in rapid decline in spite of being congenial to a literal reading of the Biblical Flood story.

Age of the Earth

Finally, the issue of the age of the earth was a constant question. Estimates during the 18th and early 19th centuries ranged from the Biblical 6,000 years to billions of years. See TalkOrigins for an overview.

James Hutton, a founding father of British geology in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, saw a cyclic earth in the geological record, concluding at the end of the introductory chapter of Theory of the Earth in 1795 that

We have now got to the end of our reasoning; we have no data further to conclude immediately from that which actually is: But we have got enough; we have the satisfaction to find, that in nature there is wisdom, system, and consistency. For having, in the natural history of this earth, seen a succession of worlds, we may from this conclude that there is a system in nature; in like manner as, from seeing revolutions of the planets, it is concluded, that there is a system by which they are intended to continue those revolutions. But if the succession of worlds is established in the system of nature, it is in vain to look for any thing higher in the origin of the earth. The result, therefore, of this physical inquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an end.

Hutton was not arguing for an infinitely old earth so much as saying that the data did not admit of an estimate of the age of the earth. He saw a continuous cycle of "consolidation" of the debris washed from continents to form new rock due to undersea volcanism, and "destruction" due to the erosion of the continents by water. Since each cycle wipes out evidence of prior cycles, no estimate of how long it has been going on is possible. Note also the Newtonian influence -- "... in like manner as, from seeing revolutions of the planets...". The picture of a law-governed universe, even a clock-work universe, on the model of Newtonian mechanics was influential outside physics.

It's important that Hutton saw the surface of the earth as dynamic, with new land being raised by volcanism and old land being lost through erosion. That was an important shift from the single-Deluge catastrophism of, say, Werner, and also, in my view, reflects the influence of Newtonian dynamics. Hutton even cites Newton in Theory of the Earth, though in connection with the question of mass and latent heat, not dynamics.

Influential estimates of the age of the earth were made by physicist William Thompson, later known as Lord Kelvin of Kelvin temperature scale fame. As early as the mid 1840s, when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge, he reportedly estimated the earth to be just 100 million years old, basing his estimate on a model that posited that the earth began as a molten mass of rock and had cooled steadily to its present temperature, with only the last 20 or so million years being cool enough for life as we know it. Later Kelvin revised his estimate several times, settling in a range from 20 to 40 million years. In any case, it was a vexatious estimate for Darwin whose view lay more in the hundreds of millions of years range. Kelvin also estimated the age of the sun to be in the same neighborhood, basing his estimate on a model of heat generation by gravitational contraction, a model still used by a few young-earth creationists.

Biology

The 16th through 19th centuries was the time of the collectors. Naturalists, at first amateurs but later professionals paid to find new and exotic specimens, voyaged to distant places, sending thousands of specimens of plants and animals from Asia, Africa, and the New World to Europe and Great Britain. Darwin himself collected masses of specimens, including numerous fossils, on the five-year surveying voyage of the Beagle. Alfred Wallace, co-discoverer of the principle of natural selection, made his early living as a professional collector. That put an amazing array of different organisms into the hands of naturalists, and making sense of that diversity was a central problem.

The early center of gravity of large collections of exotic plants and animals was Italy. For example, Ulisse Aldrovani, a 16th century physician and botanist at Bologna, had a collection of 18,000 "objects" -- actual animal specimens as well as representations of others -- and he had books containing 7,000 pressed plant specimens. Aldrovani also established a firm empirical rule for naturalists, claiming that

I have never described any thing without first having seen it with my eyes and done the anatomy of both its external and internal parts. (Quoted in Huxley, Thomas (2007). The Great Naturalists, London: Thames & Hudson. p. 59.)

Later the center of gravity of naturalists moved to France, where men like Georges Cuvier, an unparalleled comparative anatomist, used collections of both extant organisms and fossils to analyze relationships among those organisms. Note carefully that analyzing those relationships did not imply (for Cuvier and others) that one species was descended from another, or that transmutation of species occurred. Rather, they were (in their view) examining a fixed structure of relationships built into creation, often regarded as manifestations of a Divine plan. Cuvier in particular opposed early theories of evolution ("transmutationism") because he saw organisms as integrated wholes, no part of which could change without deleterious effects. (This is an early version of what current intelligent design creationists call "irreducible complexity.") Not until around the turn of the 19th century was a coherent theory of the dynamics of species change offered by Lamarck.

With the rise of British mercantilism and the defeat of the Spanish and French fleet by Nelson at Trafalgar the center of gravity shifted to Great Britain. Private amateurs, as Darwin was on the voyage of the Beagle, and professional collectors like Alfred Wallace sailed to far away places with strange sounding names to collect exotic specimens, alive or preserved, for private and public collections at home.

Taxonomy

Taxonomy is critical to any science. How a science cuts up and classifies phenomena is a major determinant of how those phenomena will be explained. There is an interaction between taxonomy and theory such that the one can significantly advance (or impede) the other.

With the growth of collections and the introduction of specimens from strange and exotic places, taxonomy became a significant concern. How does one organize a collection of thousands of plant and animal specimens for display? Early taxonomies of plants, going back to Dioscorides' De Materia Medica, which was in use for 1,600 years, were organized in terms of their therapeutic uses. Plants were thought to be a source of remedies for any number of ailments and therefore their taxonomy was organized with respect to their functional utility rather than their morphology.

On the other hand, in the 18th century Linnaeus established his classification system based on the morphology of organisms. This reflects a shift from treating organisms as objects of study because they are useful to objects of study to illuminate the pattern(s) of organic life. That shift indicates the rise of natural theology, the study of the world to learn about God.

Species Fixity

Two strands of thought about the question were present in the first half of the 19th century, Species fixity vs. transmutationism. Species fixity -- the notion that one species did not change into another -- was a manifestation of essentialism, and followed John Ray and Linneaus' 18th century ideas. Linnaeus, as we all know, devised a version of binomial nomenclature to designate species in the form Genus-name species-name. As noted, he focused on morphology, especially the morphology of sexual organs, in deciding how to classify organisms. He grouped organisms into ever more inclusive categories -- families, orders, and kingdoms. Moreover, in contrast to some earlier views which allowed for change of one sort or another, Linnaeus unequivocally held to essentialism (the notion that a species was defined by a small set of core essential traits) and species fixity (a species does not change). John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin has an informal review of Linnaeus' views.

Linnaeus grouped humans with chimpanzees in the same genus, Homo. He did so with reluctance, knowing the theological implications. In a letter he wrote

It is not pleasing that I placed humans among the primates, but man knows himself. Let us get the words out of the way. It will be equal to me by whatever name they are treated. But I ask you and the whole world a generic difference between men and simians in accordance with the principles of Natural History. I certainly know none. If only someone would tell me one! If I called man an ape or vice versa I would bring together all the theologians against me. Perhaps I ought to have, in accordance with the law of the discipline [of Natural History]. (Quoted in translation by John Wilkins.)

Not long after Johann Blumenbach revised that classification, creating the genus Pan for chimpanzees, apparently on purely religious grounds.

As mentioned above, Cuvier argued strongly for the fixity of types of organisms, strongly criticizing Lamarck and Etienne Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, both of whom offered conjectures about the transmutation of species over time and the progressive nature of the changes in species.

John Ray was the proximate intellectual father of Natural Theology, which William Paley developed in detail in his Natural Theology (12th edition of 1809) which begins with his famous watch on the heath analogy:

IN crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for any thing I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for any thing I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone? why is it not as admissible in the second case, as in the first? (p. 1)

That same argument from analogy recurs through the whole history of the controversies surrounding the theory of evolution right up to today with Intelligent Design Creationism's "irreducible complexity."

John Ray instantiates an important shift in thinking in biology, in that he focused on reproduction in his classification scheme rather than solely on comparative morphology. Ray defined a species thus:

After long and considerable investigation, no surer criterion for determining species has occurred to me than the distinguishing features that perpetuate themselves in propagating from seed. Thus, no matter what variations occur in the individuals or the species, if they spring from one and the same plant, they are accidental variations and not such as to distinguish a species. ... Animals likewise that differ specifically preserve their distinct species permanently; one species never springs from the seed of another nor vice versa. (Quoted in Wilkins (large pdf), p. 59).

A principal exponent of species fixity in the early 19th century was Georges Cuvier, perhaps the most influential continental comparative anatomist and paleontologist. In his analyses of fossils Cuvier established the fact of species extinctions, but argued that extinctions were caused by (local, not global) catastrophes and that the biota of an area of extinction was restored through migration from areas not affected by a given catastrophe. Cuvier rejected transmutationism on both theoretical grounds and what were at that time reasonable empirical grounds: he saw no evidence to support it. For example. he analyzed 3,000 year-old mummified cats collected during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and showed that they were identical to extant cats. Moreover, his theoretical view of organisms as tightly integrated systems of functional parts would not allow for change in a part, because change in a part would destroy the tight integration of the organism and therefore would be lethal. This view was adopted by Richard Owen in Great Britain.

Another French naturalist, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in the 18th century proposed notions of species change, but within originally created kinds and with no mechanism of change offered.

In Great Britain Charles Lyell, whose Principles of Geology were an inspiration to Charles Darwin during the voyage of the Beagle, also rejected species transmutation, opting instead for a sort of progressive creation where new species were created at intervals through the deep geological time that Lyell did much to establish.

Richard Owen, a prominent British anatomist, also opposed the notion of transmutation, at least across the boundaries of his archetypes. His opposition rested on his analysis of morphological homologies from which he inferred that the various kinds of animals represented archetypal forms, four common structural plans: fish, birds, reptiles, and mammals. Owen was here influenced by the transcendentalism of Goethe (and ultimately Platonism) as well as Cuvier. For Owen the archetypes represented ideal forms in the Divine mind, while the various actual species were different realizations of the underlying archetypes. See the Berkeley site for more on Owen, and see Richard Carter's essay for another view. Owen apparently changed his views as time went on, though he wrote (anonymously)a very critical review of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, citing the theoretical position of Cuvier and Agassiz, and the lack of transitional fossils. Owen's actual posiiton on transmutation in later life is murky, though.

Referring to Owen's view, in 1854 Rev. John Tulloch, a theologian, wrote in Theism: The Witness of Reason and Nature to an All-Wise and Beneficent Creator:

Throughout the vertebrate skeleton—from that of the fish, the reptile, and bird, to that of the mammal—from the cetaceans up to man Professor Owen has demonstrated that there are no fewer than seventy of such homologous bones, 178 which may be clearly traced, showing the uniform plan, or archetypal model, upon which the whole vertebrate races have been formed. This vertebrate archetype has been figured by him; and, in connection with the respective type-skeletons of the fish, the reptile, the bird, and the beast, is said to constitute a perfect anatomical study. With the details of the subject we feel ourselves incompetent to meddle; but the great conclusion is one which claims our earnest attention—the fact, namely, of the demonstrated unity of constructive plan underlying all the singular diversity of the vertebrate form. What a pregnant fact is this! and how vast a scheme of order does it open up in the animal creation!

...

For what is the typical order recognised as pervading creation but the signal expression of a reason allied to man’s, and yet above it? What is the evidence of an ideal archetype for the world, or any part of it, but the special evidence of a Mind subsisting apart from the world, and antecedent to it? For it is clear that such an archetype could never have existed—such a pattern could never have been stamped on creation so deeply inlaid that we are only now discovering it—without a Mind to conceive and plan it. In the language of Professor Owen—language of the highest interest for our subject—“The recognition of an ideal exemplar for the vertebrated animals, proves that the knowledge of such a being as man must have existed before man appeared. For the Divine Mind which planned the archetype also foreknew all its modifications. The archetypal idea was manifested in the flesh, under divers modifications, upon this planet, long prior to the existence of those animal species that actually exemplify it. To what natural or secondary causes the orderly succession and progression of such organic phenomena may have been committed, we are as yet ignorant. But if, without derogation to the Divine Power, we may conceive the existence of such ministers, and personify them by the term Nature, we learn, from the past history of our globe, that she has advanced with slow and stately steps, guided by the archetypal light amidst the wreck of worlds,—from the first embodiment of the vertebrate idea, under its old ichthyic vestment, until it became arranged in the glorious garb of the human form.” (pp. 179-180)

Here are the essential elements of Owens' view preceding Darwin's publication: a progressive creation proceeding according to a plan, with observed organic life being but foreknown variations on underlying archetypes. Note that Tulloch leaves open the possibility of secondary causation -- the view that some mechanistic system may have been used by the Divine Creator to produce the observed patterns.

In the United States, Louis Agassiz, a Swiss naturalist who emigrated to the U.S. to take a position at Harvard in 1848, was a prominent opponent of transmutationism. Agassiz was perhaps the most respected scientist in America in the mid-19th century, and founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. He largely accepted Cuvier's views, and felt that any conception that ignored design in nature was erroneous. In his 1859Essay on Classification he wrote

The combination in time and space of all these thoughtful conceptions exhibits not only thought, it shows also premeditation, power, wisdom, greatness, prescience, omniscience, providence. In one word, all these facts, in their natural connection, proclaim aloud the One God, whom man may know, adore, and love ; and Natural History must, in good time, become the analysis of the thoughts of the Creator of the Universe, as manifested in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, as well as in the inorganic world. (p. 205)

That's in the best tradition of Natural Theology.

Finally, William Whewell, one of the most influential intellectuals of the time, a co-founder of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the man who coined the word "scientist," asserted

Species have a real existence in nature, and a transition from one to another does not exist. (Quoted in Quammen, D. 2006. The Reluctant Mr. Darwin. New York: Norton)

Later, in 1858 just before Darwin published, in History of the Inductive Sciences from the Earliest to the Present Time, Whewell wrote

And the reader may recollect that the consideration of that controversy led us to very different anticipations from his respecting the probable future progress of physiology. The discovery of the Sivatheriurn supplies no particle of proof to the hypothesis that the existing species of animals are descended from extinct creatures which are specifically distinct and we cannot act more wisely than in listening to the advice of that eminent naturalist M de Blainville "Against this hypothesis, which up to the present time I regard as purely gratuitous, and likely to turn geologists out of the sound and excellent road in which they now are, I willingly raise my voice, with the most absolute conviction of being in the right.

Not surprisingly, Whewell was later a vocal critic of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

Scala Natura

Another conception about biological life deriving from earlier thinking was of a great chain of being or scala natura, the Aristotelian idea that persisted for millenia. It pictured life as a sort of ladder or hierarchy of kinds of organisms ranging from primitive to advanced, with each kind having its fixed place in the hierarchy with God at the top. This conception of a hierarchical arrangement of organisms was not a theory of dynamics -- change -- but a picture of the static order of the biological world. Not incidentally, it is still around, most prominently every time a newspaper (or a creationist) mentions a "missing link." That term is a relic of a medieval conception of biological nature as progressive, teleological.

Transmutationism

Transmutation, the view that species can change, was in the air in the last part of the 18th and first half ot the 19th centuries. Charles Darwin's grandfather Erasmus, a prominent physician, published Zoonomia in 1796 arguing for species transmutation, though he offered no mechanism of change beyond a sort of Lamarckian view. After describing a number of adaptations for obtaining mates, food, and security, he wrote

From thus meditating on the great similarity of the structure of the warm-blooded animals, and at the same time of the great changes they undergo both before and after their nativity; and by considering in how minute a portion of time many of the changes of animals above described have been produced; would it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of time, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which THE GREAT FIRST CAUSE endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!

That last clause is pure Lamarck.

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the dominant view of the origin of species was special creation in one form or another. Whether it was a Biblically literal creation of all "kinds" in six days 6,000 years ago or the progressive creationism of Lyell, the kinds of organisms were created by a supernatural agency. Only a few thinkers offered naturalistic conjectures, and they were in the main disregarded.

The Frenchman Jean Baptiste de Lamarck was Darwin's most important predecessor in offering a fairly coherent theory of transmutation -- evolution. As John Wilkins of the University of Queensland says,

Lamarck held that there were two causes of evolutionary change: a drive towards perfection, and a capacity of organisms to react to the environment and adapt to the needs of the present situation. Mayr says that Lamarck was neither a vitalist nor a teleologist, meaning that he neither held that life was a mysterious non-physical force, nor that it had any goal or direction, contrary to later popular misconceptions. Instead, he saw the environment as the driving force of evolution (unlike Darwin, who considered that the environment sorted out the end results of natural variation). Lamarck also held that organs were strengthened in the way they were inherited through use, and weakened through disuse (a view that Darwin also accepted).

Wilkins's essay is an excellent overview of Darwin's precursors, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science also has a review of the historical context of Darwin's work. Charles Darwin, of course, provided a mechanism for change, natural selection acting on the range of variation among the members of a population. We refer the reader to those resources.

Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

In 1844, about the time Darwin was writing the first extended sketch of his theory of evolution by natural selection, Robert Chambers, a Scottish journalist and publisher, published a book called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chambers' book was excoriated by the scientific (and religious) establishment on a number of grounds. Scientists rejected it for the egregious errors of fact regarding the various sciences, mainly geology and natural history, that it contained. However, it provides an interesting window into views that were becoming more prominent in biology. For example,

A candid consideration of all these circumstances can scarcely fail to introduce into our minds a somewhat different idea of organic creation from what has hitherto been generally entertained. That God created animated beings, as well as the terraqueous theatre of their being, is a fact so powerfully evidenced, and so universally received, that I at once take it for granted. But in the particulars of this so highly supported idea, we surely here see cause for some re-consideration. It may now be inquired, - In what way was the creation of animated beings effected? The ordinary notion may, I think, be not unjustly described as this, - that the Almighty author produced the progenitors of all existing species by some sort of personal or immediate exertion. But how does this notion comport with what we have seen of the gradual advance of species, from the humblest to the highest? How can we suppose an immediate exertion of this creative power at one time to produce zoophytes, another time to add a few marine mollusks, another to bring in one or two conchifers, again to produce crustaceous fishes, again perfect fishes, and so on to the end? This would surely be to take a very mean view of the Creative Power - to, in short, anthropomorphize it, or reduce it to some such character as that borne by the ordinary proceedings of mankind. And yet this would be unavoidable; for that the organic creation was thus progressive through a long space of time, rests on evidence which nothing can overturn or gainsay. Some other idea must then be come to with regard to the mode in which the Divine Author proceeded in the organic creation. Let us seek in the history of the earth’s formation for a new suggestion on this point. We have seen powerful evidence, that the construction of this globe and its associates, and inferentially that of all the other globes of space, was the result, not of any immediate or personal exertion on the part of the Deity, but of natural laws which are expressions of his will. What is to hinder our supposing that the organic creation is also a result of natural laws, which are in like manner an expression of his will? More than this, the fact of the cosmical arrangements being an effect of natural laws is a powerful argument for the organic arrangements being so likewise, for how can we suppose that the august Being who brought all these countless worlds into form by the simple establishment of a natural principle flowing from his mind, was to interfere personally and specially on every occasion when a new shell-fish or reptile was to be ushered into existence on one of these worlds? Surely this idea is too ridiculous to be for a moment entertained.

This clearly reflects a shift from a continuously intervening Deity that superintends every detail of its creation to a front-loading Deity that created the laws by which the world runs but doesn't thereafter continuously tinker. The world unfolds (evolves, in the then-contemporary meaning of the word) according to the plan embodied in those laws. That gave religious critics substantial ammunition.

And then there is this:

We have yet to advert to the most interesting class of facts connected with the laws of organic development. It is only in recent times that physiologists have observed that each animal passes, in the course of its germinal history, through a series of changes resembling the permanent forms of the various orders of animals inferior to it in the scale. Thus, for instance, an insect, standing at the head of the articulated animals, is, in the larva state, a true annelid, or worm, the annelida being the lowest in the same class. The embryo of a crab resembles the perfect animal of the inferior order myriapoda, and passes through all the forms of transition which characterize the intermediate tribes of crustacea. The frog, for some time after its birth, is a fish with external gills, and other organs fitting it for an aquatic life, all of which are changed as it advances to maturity, and becomes a land animal. The mammifer only passes through still more stages, according to its higher place in the scale. Nor is man himself exempt from this law. His first form is that which is permanent in the animalcule. His organization gradually passes through conditions generally resembling a fish, a reptile, a bird, and the lower mammalia, before it attains its specific maturity. At one of the last stages of his fœtal career, he exhibits an intermaxillary bone, which is characteristic of the perfect ape; this is suppressed, and he may then be said to take leave of the simial type, and become a true human creature.

This is 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' a dozen years before Haeckel (with whom that view is usually identified) advanced the idea in 1866. The quotation above is from the 10th edition of Vestiges published in 1853. Vestiges went through 10 editions before Darwin published, with two more editions published after Origin, the last published posthumously in 1884.

The tumultuous reception of Vestiges (see here may have played a role in Darwin delaying publication of his theory until he had a rock-solid case supported by a mass of evidence, though that was Darwin's normal working style. Darwin didn't think much of Vestiges. In the Introduction to the first and second editions of Origin, where he sets the problem to be addressed in the book, Darwin wrote

In considering the Origin of Species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist, reflecting on the mutual affinities of organic beings, on their embryological relations, their geographical distribution, geological succession, and other such facts, might come to the conclusion that each species had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species. Nevertheless, such a conclusion, even if well founded, would be unsatisfactory, until it could be shown how the innumerable species inhabiting this world have been modified, so as to acquire that perfection of structure and coadaptation which most justly excites our admiration. (p. XXX)

Addressing one possible explanation, Darwin then wrote

The author of the 'Vestiges of Creation' would, I presume, say that, after a certain unknown number of generations, some bird had given birth to a woodpecker, and some plant to the mistletoe, and that these had been produced perfect as we now see them; but this assumption seems to me to be no explanation, for it leaves the case of the coadaptations of organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life, untouched and unexplained. (pp. 3-4)

In later editions Darwin softened that rejection, but retained his disavowal of saltational species change, a disavowal about which T.H. Huxley had reservations.

Summary

So in the mid-19th century there were pretty good grounds for inferring an old earth, and there was a strong flavor of species fixity and teleology in biology, with some intimations of transmutation -- e.g, Lamarck -- but no satisfactory mechanism for it. Naturalists were amassing large collections of exotic animals and plants, and more, were identifying relationships among extant species in both morphology and biogeography, and were describing similarities between extant species and fossil forms.

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