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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison, and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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Again, the name of the show is entitled opinions, and you all know what that means.
It means that some opinions have titles, others don't.
Which ones do, and which ones don't?
Well, that's a matter of opinions.
I guess it all depends on what you're opinionating about.
And maybe it depends on who you ask and who you don't.
All I know for sure is that on this show, everyone is entitled to my opinions,
and to the opinions of my guests.
Those of you who have feasted on our shows over the years know that we're not gingerly or miserly around here.
We dish out our opinions lavishly in great abundance, and we ask for nothing in return, but your ability to digest them.
If you're of the opinion that there's no better radio program on Earth than entitled opinions,
you're not going to get indigestion from us no matter how much you gorge on our shows.
So here we go.
The feast is laid out.
The flute girls are standing by.
Is everybody in?
This symposium is about to begin.
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Looks so good.
It looks so cool.
We have a special show coming your way today, special for a number of reasons.
First, because we're finally getting back into our groove here on entitled opinions after a long hiatus.
Second, because I have with me in the studio, my friend and colleague Paul Robinson,
one of the eminent intellectual historians of our time, author of many excellent books,
and third, because I'll be talking with him about Charles Darwin.
We've never done a show on Darwin on entitled opinions before.
Believe it or not.
We've done shows on evolution, notably our two-part conversation with Dr. Michael Hendrickson,
some four years ago on the topic, "What is life?"
But today we're going to focus on the man whose name is practically synonymous with evolutionary theory.
Over the years, Professor Robinson has lectured often on Darwin,
who many people consider the most important figure in the entire history of science,
along with Copernicus and Einstein.
Darwin belongs among that generation of 19th and early 20th century titans,
which includes the likes of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.
But unlike those seminal thinkers, whose grand theories have been battered and even shattered over the past century and a half,
Darwin's grand theory of organic evolution has continued to thrive and flourish,
as scientific research has uncovered ever more evidence, unknown even to Darwin,
confirming both the assumptions and explanatory mechanisms of Darwinism.
Our intention today is to focus on the place Darwin occupies in the intellectual history of the West,
to talk about the man, his gold and reputation in the history of science,
and the methods he employed to argue his theory of organic evolution, Paul,
welcome to the program. Thank you very much, Robert.
I'd like to begin with an irony that surrounds the figure of Charles Darwin.
He published on a number of things, volcanic islands, coral reefs, barnacles, plant movement,
the fertilization of our kids, the action of earthworms on the soil,
the variations of domesticated animals and plants, and in addition to that, the theory of evolution.
And even if he had not written the origin of the species or the scent of man,
he would have been considered one of the great biologists of the 19th century.
In fact, when he died in 1882, he was buried near the grave of Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey.
So you can see how important he was considered even in his own time as a science.
Yet the irony is that Darwin was at bottom a gentleman, naturalist, of this Victorian period that he belonged to.
He never obtained an advanced university degree in any branch of science.
Instead, he was what one might call an amateur fossil collector.
He relied heavily on scientific experts to describe his collections.
Yet he also happened to come up with the most compelling theory about the origin of species ever proposed.
So how was he able to pull that off?
Darwin was not that unusual in the mid 19th century in being a kind of amateur.
This is before most of the disciplines that we now think of as both scientific and social scientific disciplines had been established in the university.
So most of the people he dealt with, most of his contemporaries, certainly in biology, were non-academics.
He had a few academic friends that were important for him.
But this is characteristic of that moment when before these disciplines had become part of the academy.
Think of another figure as a contemporary John Stuart Mill, who could be a more important English think of the 19th century,
a little bit of a broad tradition than John Stuart Mill.
He has no advanced degree.
He held no university position.
So I don't think it's not unusual for now and to be in the position of a gentleman, scholar, gentleman scientist.
Two or three of the people are important to him like Charles Lyle, the geologist did have places, did have chairs at universities.
But many of his associates did not.
So I see him, the fact that he was a gentleman, which has got to do with his social and economic situation,
does set him apart from many of these contemporaries.
He came from a major upper middle class family that had property married into money.
He lived in, not in splendor, but in great comfort all of his life.
This in contrast to, let us say, Karl Marx, a new biography of Karl Marx, is just reviewed in the times this morning,
who was always waiting for a handout, either from his mother or for Friedrich Engels, just to get by.
So he did leave a gentlemanly existence. He liked to go hunting. He liked to go birding.
He didn't have to work for a living.
At the same time, he did rely on expertise for analysis of his specimens and opinions.
And when the origin of the species came out, I gather that some of the biologists had severe hesitations about the methods that he employed.
And the conjectures, and they were used to just subsuming observed phenomena under general rules, and he had a completely different way of going about things.
That certainly drew. He did rely on what we would call experts, particularly one man named Gould, who worked at the National Geological Center for helping him classify some of the specimens that he failed to classify correctly himself when he was on the beagle trip.
So in that respect, you're certainly right. And as to his method, which involves not just the collection of information, the collection of data, but the development of the imaginative development of a theory that will explain those facts.
It's at once empirical, but also theoretical.
That is in a way that the only kind of explanation that's possible in fields of historical biology or historical geology, Charles Lyle before a most important geologist in the history of the science, developed likewise.
He had information about rocks and formations and so forth, and he developed a hypothesis to explain the nature of these findings.
Darwin's method, which involves the creation, the invention of a theory, is not that out of line.
I think you could make a case that that's what Newton does.
Yeah. Newton observes the heavens, and then he comes up with a hypothesis which will account for this observation.
Except that I believe that Darwin said that he never professed to have invented the idea of organic evolution, but to have produced the first scientific proof of it.
No, not proof would be the wrong word.
The distinction needs to be made between evidence for the fact of evolution that one species is given rise to another.
And on the other hand, the explanation you offer for evolution.
Darwin comes at the end of a nearly century-long period in which evolution, as an idea, as a fact, has been advanced increasingly by a number of things, including his own grandfather, a raspid star, when in the 18th century.
So the idea of evolution is out there, and it's being advanced in a number of fronts.
But Darwin comes up with the first really successful explanation for this process, namely natural selection.
The natural selection is the mechanism, the blind mechanical mechanism through which one species gives rise to another.
That was the intellectually significant part.
It doesn't prove evolution, but it does provide it with an explanation.
Was that explanation the first one?
Because wasn't there Wallace in the picture, and they co-presented at the same time there?
They came up with the same idea of saying something about the same idea.
Someone in different scale, Wallace produced a brief article, scientific text, which was sent.
He was sent to England, and a number of Darwin's friends recognized right away that this was the very idea that Darwin himself had been working on.
And for 20 years, these folks got in touch with Darwin's and looked at somebody's about to win the prize.
They persuaded him to quickly put together the course of a year to put together what we now know as the order of species.
A very long 400-page book, which would present both his theory and the evidence that he had for it.
So, yeah, there had been earlier attempts to explain evolution.
You know, Lamarck's had insisted that most of these changes from one species to another could be explained by the conscious adaptation of the organism to its environment.
And the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which Darwin doesn't entirely reject that.
They can retain some elements of it.
But basically, the notion that it depended on the evolution, it depended on the will of individual agents to rafts reaching to the top of the trees to get the leaves that are left and so forth.
It's rejected by Darwin in favor of a mechanism that has blind.
It doesn't involve agencies, it doesn't involve will.
That was the genius of it.
And of course, it's proved to be an enormously powerful ex-vinatory tool, not just in explaining plants and animals,
but explaining aspects of human society and history and so forth as well.
One of the most powerful ideas, explanatory ideas, or hermeneutic ideas, if you want, in the modern period.
Daniel Dennett in his book, "The Darwin's Dangerous Idea," was about 15 years old now, says it's the best idea anybody ever had.
So we'll talk more in depth about the theory, but first about the man, there's something about not the biography,
but there's something about the personality of Darwin, which is extremely appealing.
I mean, I know that you believe that he was extremely ambitious and that he was single-mindedly determined to go down as, you know, one of the great scientists in history.
But everything one reads about him in his autobiography, it was a very modest man in a certain sense.
He was honest and he had a kind of integrity that we associate with the ideal of science,
where, for him, evidence had to be the final tribunal in which all theories were judged.
And even when we're talking about the competing theory that Wallace was proposing at the same time,
that they, in a gentlemanly-like manner, decided that they would both co-present at the same scientific meeting, their thing,
and that there was, there's some profound decency about Charles Darwin, the man.
I agree with that. I think that's true.
Not only in his respect for evidence, but in his manner.
He was a man of, he did have a kind of modest way about him.
Leslie Stevens, a great 19th century liberal thinker, said he was "ch almost childlike" in his demeanor.
I think some of that was a little bit of that, as I suggested, was bluff,
and that he actually managed his scientific career with great astuteness.
You know, he retired to the country.
The other intellectuals had to come to him, because, you know, he was ill.
He sat his emissaries after he had all these flunkies, if you will,
who be sent to various scientific meetings and so forth, to advance the cause to present his ideas, to argue with detractors and so forth.
So, all of his modest, as usual said, he was also extremely ambitious and extremely attentive to seeing that his big idea was properly spread, was properly propagandized.
But do you believe that that motivation was ego-driven more than it was a commitment to the truth of the theory as such?
Oh, I think it's over-determined. I think it's both.
I think he is absolutely committed to the idea that the theory is true.
But he's also committed to the idea that people recognize that it's one of the great ideas in the history of science.
He wanted, and you're sorry about his remains, confirms this, he wanted very much to be compared to Newton.
The last paragraph of the origin of species makes it clear that contains a distinct reference to Newton and the law of universal gravitation with which he wants to compare the idea of natural selection.
So, talking about the theory, Paul, the specimens that he gathered during his five-year voyage on the beagle, and all of the kind of data that he was putting together in those years before he published the origin of species.
There was one important breakthrough for his theorization, which was his reading of Malthus, and the essay on population, and I believe that's the Malthus book that he--
Yeah.
He actually, one of the proponents of Malthusianism was the novelist Harriet Martin O, who's that Darwin knew well.
And something about the reading of Malthus provided him with what he thought was the theoretical framework that could substantiate the suppositions that he had been making earlier.
Can you figure out--
Yeah, he says so himself in his autobiography. He says after the beagle voyage ended in 1836, he says he happened across, he says it's in the autobiography.
He happened across Malthus's essay on population, and he found in it the idea that the populations, animal and plant populations, tend to reproduce at a rate much faster than the economy than the environment can support.
And that meant that there had to be destruction. There had to be death in order to keep the population numbers down so that they could be fed in houses or--
So this idea that there was a competition for resources, competition for a place in the economy of nature, which he got from Malthus, was very important for providing the situation in which natural selection could take place.
Which would be that when there is a competition of resources, those with even the slightest reproductive advantage will prevail over those without advantage, whatever it might be.
And in this fashion, new traits, new qualities, and ultimately new species would arise.
So Malthus is crucial. And this of course is given rise to a kind of critical suggestion that the deepest impulse behind, if not the invention of the origins being.
The perception of it is that it sort of justifies the political economy of the 19th century, that it represents a writing of early capitalist economics into nature.
So people on the left, generally speaking, who've disliked Darwin, and dislike what they see as a conservative politics that seem to follow from this idea, have argued that from the get-go, the idea was deeply charged, deeply informed by essentially economic and political concerns, rather than being a disinterested reading of the natural attempt to explain the natural order.
And I think there's something to that, particularly in terms of the reception of the theory.
I don't think it can't be supported, eventually, anyway, in terms of Darwin's own motivations.
When he got the Harriet Martyn, the Buhari Martyn was on the poor law, was sent to him.
And it's not what is called "poppers and pore laws" or something like that.
And it's an attempt to suggest that you can't save everybody. Some people have to drop out. There are limited resources.
It's not to that Darwin even read it. He was busy thinking about geology and biology.
He's so single-minded.
What extent he was taking in this argument, this debate, this discourse about society and about economics in the 1830s and 1840s?
I'm not certain, but there's no question that the theory came to be used in his own lifetime to justify lay-safe air economics.
You're referring to social Darwinism, right?
Social Darwinism, which may have preceded Darwinism.
That's the... we usually think of social Darwinism being unfair or inappropriate or exaggerated application of Darwin's biological idea to the study of society and politics.
There's not a suggestion that the social use of this idea actually proceeded and maybe to a certain extent inspired the biological use of it in Darwin.
What I don't get is what was so revelatory about the observation that nature produces at astonishing excess of numbers in any given species, that most of which will die rather than before they're able to make themselves.
It seems to be a fact that is well-observed and that competition for resources doesn't take some kind of visionary to see that this is a law of nature from the very start.
Well, but you know, when Martha's published this book in the '79, it was considered a revelation and it was aimed politically precisely at the enlightenment's view of notion of progress.
Martha's wrote against Condor's A and Condor's A's notion that everything's getting better.
The history of the world is the history of progress.
This is a shift from the 18th century to the 19th century and the darker, more pessimistic, conservative view of humanity that comes in the wake of the French Revolution.
So the idea is not, I mean, we may think, it's self-evident, but it was not self-evident at the time it was being proposed by Martha's.
In fact, it was considered--
And it was incredibly hostile and pessimistic.
It was not a well-received idea at all.
People said, "That's such a nasty way."
Little bit like Hobbes to think about human nature.
Well, human nature, yes, that's one thing, but the familiarity with the natural world and the numerical excess of production and the survival rates of, you know, whether it's among fish or mammals or it seems pretty clear.
But this leads to a philosophical issue of Darwin's tragic, rather bleak vision of nature.
When he looks at what is taking place in the natural world, he sees a truly cruel war of all against all.
The war of all against all, but nature is red in tooth and claw, and this merciless, ruthless and remorseless law of nature that is willing to sacrifice all sorts of individuals for the sake of the survival of the species as such, seems to him to be as far from the human ideology of his Christian Victorian age.
And this probably had an effect of a kind of almost traumatic shock on him because he was looking into the abyss as it were.
Well, that's true, that's true.
But you've left off the other half of the story.
It's all-- Nature, the human situation, provides us with a gory, nasty picture.
But out of that nastiness, out of that war of all against all, comes improvement.
Because the fight that leaves many carcasses in its wake, many dead, produces new features, new varieties.
So it is also a story of triumph and betterment.
So true, the premise is dark, but Darwin's conclusion, you could say, is almost utopian.
That there's a constant improvement and elaboration of forms, intelligence emerges, all kinds of good things happen as a result of this struggle.
So some people redarm a kind of radical progressivist.
Yeah, you could read it that way, and you have social Darwinism that could also be allied with that.
At the same time, you can look at a Vibenya Minyin, we're taking a figure much later in the early 20th century, but the idea of this testifying to the numberless countless victims of this process by which only the strongest survive, or the most fits, I'm not sure that the fittest means the strongest, but that survival is reserved for the few, not for the many.
And the mountains, as you say, carcasses and dead infants and so forth are all there in the picture, and it seems that there's a cruel indifference to the victims of this process.
So I think that's right. I think it's both of those things.
And depending on how you're looking at it, or what mood you're in, you're going to see him as a pessimist or as an optimist.
You also raised rightly the question of, did he not regard this idea as unsettling or profoundly damaging to the Victorian bourgeois world in which he lived?
And I think he did. I think one of the reasons he had trouble bringing himself to publish these findings, and when he did publish them in 1859, all excepted from one ambiguous phrase does not refer to human evolution.
He doesn't suggest in 1859 when the origin was published that this mechanism also explains humanity.
He's forced to do that a decade later in the descent of man as a result of the controversies of the 1860s.
So I think he sensed that this idea was potentially disruptive, dangerous to the values, to the social order that he enjoyed.
It did so particularly in the realm of religion. I mean, he was deeply troubled, worried that natural selection undermined the most important argument in favor of the existence of God in the 19th and 90s, actually argument from design.
And therefore, it would undermine traditional piety, undermine traditional religion, and perhaps lead to kind of social chaos.
So that was part of his thinking and more recent biographers of Darwin have emphasized that he's very in the autobiography. He spends a lot of time talking about religion, his own religion, and the consequences in his view of his theory for the future of religion.
And he's absolutely certain that the consequences is that the traditional intellectual basis for religion, the belief, the argument from design has been undone.
Destroyed.
Do you think this is a speculative question that the 20th century totalitarianism would have been possible had it not been for Darwinism?
In the sense that it's more clear in the case of Nazism that there was a theory of racial superiority and hence you could kind of amalgamate it with an idea that the survival of the strongest of the fittest.
But even the notion that everything is in a state of evolution for Marxist, the Soviet version of a Marxist philosophy, that the dynamism of the natural world now transferred into the historical world means that certain forms of government, certain forms of statehood and so forth are, if not inevitable, then are desirable because now we have a new
understanding of the evolutionary dynamic that thanks to Darwin we can apply to the political realm.
Well, I, there's something to this and you know, these things about the origin of totalitarianism. The three, the most commonly charged 19th century characters, Nietzsche, Wagner and Marx.
Darwin doesn't come in as far as much attention as regarded as those guys as it were due.
And indeed Marx, you know, was basically hostile to Darwin's theory, insofar as he saw it as a kind of bourgeois emanation and a kind of rationalization for bourgeois society.
So there's always been a certain amount of skepticism on the part of the Marxist tradition about this idea.
Whether or not, you know, you can draw on large analogies between struggles between states or between classes and the notion of natural selection, it seems to me very dubious.
Of all the people who might be candidates for fathers of totalitarianism, I think Darwin is the least probable, but particularly because his sensibility is, as you pointed out earlier, so open to evidence, so open to argument.
Darwin is constantly taking up objections to his theory, looking at them seriously, talking about what they are and then dealing with them.
So his sensibility, it seems to me, is very hostile to the totalitarian spirit.
No, I agree with that. It's profoundly ideological in its habits and in its methods.
But I was just wondering about the notion of an evolutionary dynamic that is at work in history as well as in nature, and that therefore, for example, a communist state is what history, you know, is selecting out for.
And other forms are going to are destined to kind of fall by the wayside because it's history, favor somehow the development of a certain form of government.
But we can leave that.
That sounds more like Hakel and Darwin to me. Yes, it does.
And of course, this idea of a dynamic developmental dynamism is Hegelian as much as Darwinian.
You're right about that.
So, Paul, on the question of the moods that Darwin went through from optimistic to pessimistic, there's no doubt that at times he looked at the heart of nature.
And he saw a heartless process at work in which the human place in nature is one that is not at all special. It's not exceptional.
It's the result of the same sort of, I don't want to say accidental process of variation evolution, but nevertheless, it's, we are now part of the natural world in a way that makes us one species.
That's right. And you know, Freud famously said that more than once in his writings that there were three great revolutions in intellectual revolutions in history that had resulted in a debunking of man's sense of his own importance.
Displacing him from the center of the universe first, he said, came with Copernicus, Freud says, who said that human beings did not live at the center of the physical universe, but on a random insignificant planet.
So that, with the end of heliocentrism, you no longer have this image you get in the Bible or Milton of Man at the Center of the Universe.
Freud said the second revolution was Darwin's, who was just, you just said, argued that human beings, humanity had no special place in the order of nature.
He was just another off-street of this impersonal process of natural selection, and no claim to be somehow ontologically superior or more important.
And then Freud modestly said that the final of these three revolutions was his own, the psycho-in-litic revolution, which showed that human beings, who were not even in charge of their own mental household, but adrift, buffeted about by urges and wishes and desires that they weren't even conscious of.
And so, you get this devolution from Copernicus to Darwin to Freud, all of which are in insult to humanity.
And the irony for this, about this for me is that in this devolution of the human standing and this naturalization of humanity takes place historically at the same moment in which the human species, at least in the West, is radically detaching itself from nature.
Dominating nature, becoming the masters and possessors of it, as Descartes said.
And with the industrial revolution creating itself as the most exceptional, unearthly species on the history of the earth.
And so precisely at the moment when we detached ourselves from nature, the most is when these thinkers start realizing that we're re-naturalizing human nature itself.
When Freud presumed to have brought about a third Copernican revolution by displacing the primacy of consciousness and looking at the unconscious as the place where the game is really being played out, the one thing that does remain there is a phenomenon of consciousness.
Now in the 20th century and 21st century, the Darwinian challenge that everyone's all excited about is how we can naturalize consciousness from a Darwinian point of view.
But I think it's funny the way there's the further away we get socially, existentially, and in our modes of being in the world.
We get from nature the more insistence there is that we are nothing but just one natural phenomenon or one another.
Whereas all the evidence, if you want to speak from the Darwinian point of view, would seem to suggest that we are so unearthly that maybe this assumption needs to be revisited.
That's a good point, a good point.
And Freud acknowledged the fact that it was after all human being Copernicus and another human being Darwin and a third Freud himself who made these embarrassing discoveries.
So they're empowering themselves in the very process of trying to demote the status of humanity.
I thought it was a manual Kant who said that he was bringing about the second Copernican revolution.
He did, he did.
Freud leaves him out of the...
He leaves him out and I was Freud very hostile.
He's uninterested in philosophy and when he thinks about it he thinks it's a bad idea.
He's very anti-philosophical.
He liked Nietzsche because Nietzsche was a philosopher of the will.
He didn't like Nietzsche too much because he claimed that many times he hadn't read him because he was afraid that people who claim, well this is already present in Nietzsche.
So he's not the kind of thinker that Freud would have liked even if he had spent more time on him.
But he's a little too close, I think, a little too close for Freud if you'll come to the rhythm.
Yeah.
And two fates could not be more different than Freudianism and Darwinism.
The Darwinism is triumphant, it's glorious, it's the paragon of scientific excellence and it's the model of emulation for any kind of science.
Freudianism in the meantime has taken a huge hit on a level of scientific credibility and a lot of people feel entitled now to treat it with contempt and scorn unjustly in my view but nevertheless.
Freud's talk in the scientific community has gone way, way, way down while Darwin says done nothing but rise.
True.
Can I go back to this question of the nihilistic vision of the natural world which operates according to a remorseless law of producing excess of numbers with minority of survivors who will go on to reproduce.
And what you said that sometimes he was Darwin had more optimistic moments.
I want to read to you what he wrote in his autobiography when he said that at times he found it impossible to imagine, right, Darwin.
To imagine that this immense and wonderful universe with our conscious selves arose by chance.
But in the end he concluded I quote again that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's intellect.
The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.
Either you say that he writes something like that in order to cover himself against accusations of impiety and so forth.
Or you believe that he's actually being quite earnest and sincere that in the final analysis he believes that he does not understand what the ultimate scope of things is.
What was the initial impulse stall of life?
Not live to exist in the beginning.
Well the mystery of the beginning of all things is different from the beginning of life.
But maybe I'm not sure he's signing off or saying he can ever cement and wonderful universe with our conscious selves arose by chance is something that he finds it impossible to imagine at times.
But then the universe would also include the cosmos, the planets and so forth.
I think he's being absolutely honest here.
I think he in fact felt that these questions, these ultimate questions of why there's something rather than nothing.
Why the world exists as Jim Holt has put it recently.
We're insoluble, we'll be on our can intellectually and it was best to stop fretting about them and to turn your attention to things you could understand.
I don't think he necessarily felt that the origin of life as opposed to the origin of existence, the origin of being.
Was beyond the capacity of human beings to understand sometime in the future.
He didn't think he had an explanation himself.
But I think he's open to the possibility that there will be an explanation for it.
But we talked before coming on air that there might be some sympathy between this position, what he calls this agnostic position of Darwin's and
Keats's negative key to the position that Darwin takes here is precisely Keats's position of negative capability.
Being psychologically and emotionally mature means recognizing that there are certain things that remain unclear, mysterious, inexplicable, and you learn to live with that.
You don't keep yearning after final explanations. You don't keep asking the question why is there something rather than nothing.
You learn that we're not going to be able to answer that. So let's move on. Let's get on to something we can talk about.
Although I disagree about the recommendation that you just can't do anything about it.
Therefore you move on and you turn your attention elsewhere.
The way I understand Keats and perhaps even Darwin is that there's something enriching about remaining within the adigma,
focused on it, with attention on it, because the world's inexplicable nature, ultimate nature, is something that the more you dwell within the mystery, the more you are fully awake to the presence of things in their inexplicable, impenetrable, gratuitous givenness.
Maybe true of Keats, it's certainly an "I don't think it is true" of Darwin. It's more true, of course, of Heidegger.
That's what you've described to me is to me, my mind, a much more Heideggerian, being aware of the mystery of being, not going a day without thinking about it.
Heidegger says that seems to me when it was both basic ideas, is that if you do not contemplate and think about this question on a regular basis, you're living a trivial life.
I don't think that's true of Darwin. It may be true of Keats, because Keats, of course, is a poet, and it may be keeping in mind the mystery of things.
Dwelling in the mystery is a valuable enterprise for the poet. It's not a valuable enterprise for the scientists as far as Darwin's concern.
I think there's a difference there.
I'll go with Keats, I can quote him here, because not everyone is familiar with his concept of negative capability, I'm assuming.
He only mentions that concept once, I think.
In a letter to two of his brothers in 1817.
I mean, negative capability that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
I'll continue in a moment, but scientists, I think if they're Darwinian in your interpretation, I think they could not be more hostile to this invitation to dwell within the uncertain and the mysterious and the doubtful.
Because very often they are the first ones to propose specious explanations and interpretations that will actually not just ignore the mystery and move on, but militate against it and give impoverished explanations that will remove the mysterious from the equation.
So then he goes on, he says, "Coldridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated, verisimilitude cut from the penitralium of mystery, whatever penitralium of mystery is, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge."
This pursuit through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration or rather obliterates all consideration.
And this being content with half knowledge, I mean, I hear what you're saying that it's the scientific impulse is not at home with this being content with half knowledge.
Because it would seem to be related to a form of passivity, you allow things to be as they are without going out there and explaining them.
So this drive for explanation is perhaps what was Darwin's primary motivation.
But ultimately the theory of evolution, what appeals to me about it is that it does not presume to penetrate the mysteriousness of the fact that life of the
earth originated once and once only, and that all the laws that you can provide for the theory of the evolution of the species will do nothing to dispel the
impenetrable mystery of the fact that wherever this point of origin came from, there is no accounting for that.
Yeah, no, okay, I take your point and I think that that is an attractive feature of Darwin.
It's a kind of kind of modesty, I think.
The key thing is interesting because you know what we haven't talked about here is the status of the aesthetic.
It may be, may well be the contemplating beauty and experiencing beauty, which is neither scientific nor religious is some kind of
intermediate condition that Keats obviously wants to encourage, think to good thing.
So even if you don't think about why is there something rather than nothing, you do think about about beauty.
And you cherish me.
I've done shows before on this issue and one in particular on avian life and referred to Portman, Adolf Portman, who wrote this book about
the urge to self display in nature that cannot be reduced to any Darwinian understanding of the struggle for survival and reproduction and the sheer excess of beauty in the realm of appearances.
And he shows how everything that is intended to appear in the visible world is of an exquisite kind of aesthetic complexity compared to the inner organs of animals, for example.
Which are practically indistinguishable from one species to another because they were never intended to appear in the public world.
Or the roots of plants, for example, which can be quite ugly compared to how they appear.
And that if you have this vulgar Darwinian notion that the whole purpose of appearance is just to serve as a enhanced means for the reproduction of the inner organs,
Portman and others will turn that around and say, well, actually no.
It's the urge to self display in this gratuitous aesthetic spontaneity that the inner organs and the roots and all those ugly things are there to provide the support for that aesthetic impulse.
And that's something where the Darwinian theory, I think, falls short of providing us with an explanation because it will invariably revert to the selective importance of the inner organs.
The selective advantage of drawing a mate into your nest.
Yeah, with the fact that--
Two sexual selection.
Right.
Now, Darwin thought that most what we would call aesthetic qualities in the natural world.
Beauty, flowers, feathers, and so forth.
Were functioned as part of the selective process.
But it's an interesting theory in that it attributes agency, particularly in a matter of beauty and charm, to the female of the species.
It's the female who finds these qualities charming and aesthetically pleasing in the male. Think of a peacock and so forth.
Most feminists don't like Darwin. They see him as part of the masculine as project.
But in fact, he's got a rather complicated view of gender politics, if you will.
Yeah, but in his world, it's the inverse of the normal stereotypical understanding which is in the world.
In our society, the typical thing is that women have to make render themselves beautiful or appeal to the male subject.
In Darwin's world, the males who have to go to all the effort to make themselves beautiful.
And--
Well, don't you think that's interesting?
Yes, I do.
I think it's very interesting.
Yeah, no, I agree.
And I think it's very interesting because he doesn't want to push it too far and he'll leave the mystery of it a little bit open.
Whereas what I cannot stand or the sociobiologist, for example, who will say women like men with symmetrical features because that means that there's a lower chance of genetic abnormalities for example.
This is a kind of--
Yeah, no, I agree. I agree entirely.
So, here I'm going to quote you one other thing that Darwin says in his autobiography, which relates to this.
He says, "I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis.
However, much be luvied and I cannot resist forming one on every subject as soon as the facts are shown to be opposed to it."
And that, I think, is another confirmation of this scientific integrity or modesty on the one hand, but also maybe his willingness to live with uncertainty if the facts contradict a given theory which would provide certainty otherwise provides.
But you have to allow that he's in a work like mad to try to cope with these unfriendly facts or try to make sense of them within the bounds of the theory he is already advancing.
But ultimately, if they cannot be reconciled to the theory, the theory must be abandoned.
But he didn't ever abandon natural selection. He reduced its importance in the largest scheme of things as he grew older.
And I would say it was the only mechanism of evolutionary advance. But he never gave it up.
And indeed in all these other books that you mentioned that he wrote about, in sex, in sex, in sex eating plants and so forth, almost everyone depends on the same method and advances the notion of natural selection in its own fashion.
There is the whole of his career, his written career, is informed by this one great idea which he thought was his ticket to immortality.
It's also very interesting to me in the autobower of view, if you read along and he is a little bit like our own lives, as he gets older he says, "My life has been reduced to the writing of books.
I spend all this time and I write this book and then I, this book cost me two years, that book cost me three years."
And he says, "Since this has happened to me, I have lost my capacity to respond to beauty. I used to love poetry, I used to love music, they do not mean anything anymore.
And I have lost my capacity to have strong relations with other human beings."
So he describes a process by which his life, his existential experience is reduced, impoverished, as he puts all of his money, all of his energy into the production of knowledge, into the production of books.
So I like to say, as you get older you become your bibliography. You become your CV.
So what would you say is the main difference between the origin of species and the descent of man?
Well, it's very simple. I mean, the descent of man answers some of the objections that have been raised to the theory.
But it mainly addresses the question unaddressed in the origin of human evolution.
That humanity, the human beings are also subject to this process.
So it bites the bullet that he refused to bite earlier in 1859.
To me, one of the most interesting things about the descent of man is the way he tries to bring human beings and non-human animals closer together.
By suggesting that animals have an intellectual and emotional life that's much richer and more complicated than we have generally allowed.
So that the distance between human beings and non-human animals is reduced by Darwin.
At the same time, he does something much more dubious in the book.
And that is to argue that primitive people, when you see a bubble of the inhabitants of Tia Del Fuego in South America,
three of whom were on the boat during the journey of the vehicle, how so-called primitive people represent a kind of halfway house between the higher apes and European man.
And he's divided about this.
He comes from an anti-slavery family.
And he has a great believer in the full humanity of all peoples, as it were.
But on the other hand, he also has that neo-colonial impulse, which is to see savages as he's more likely to say, as almost distinct species or distinct variations anyway.
It intellectually, culturally inferior to what Newton and Shakespeare and so forth have become.
So the main thing that's going on in the descent of man is an attempt to explain how human characteristics are also a product of natural selection and to show that, especially as I said at the beginning, human beings are much more like animals and animals much more like human beings than traditional thinking.
So therefore Darwin figures also, interestingly, is a very important forebear of modern animal rights movement.
People like Peter Singer and others who have argued the case for animals and for animal animals being subject to a moral consideration depend a great deal on Darwin as an inspiration and as a source.
The other person who's gotten re-ability in this fashion, interestingly, is Mark Twain, whose writings about animals have been seen as kind of forebears of modern ecology.
The other aspect of natural selection that I find interesting is that with the discovery of genetics, discoveries of genetic science, we now know that there's a very precise mechanism by which this sort of selection takes place through the random variation in genetic variation and so forth.
But then it looks like nature is this vast laboratory of attempts, of essays, of this kind of profound essayism of the process by which all sorts of possibilities are always in play and somehow the real will select from an infinite source of possibilities what will become actualized and what will not become actualized.
And I find this particularly interesting about the Darwinian understanding of nature as a matrix of vast potentialities, most of which don't get realized at any given time, but which continue to proliferate infinite possibilities and then that there's some mechanism of selection by which some of them will be realized in some or not.
So that rather than being this big system, which was the 19th-century way of thinking whether Hegelian system or Marx and so forth, that it is the essay rather than the encyclopedia that becomes redeemable.
Who do you associate this idea with it in particular, thinkers or just what the essayistic idea.
Well, I'm thinking for example Nietzsche.
Not I thought there was some recent figure that you thought there's more Robert Muzier in the man without qualities.
And other theories of the essay about as a genre which arises not in opposition to but counter to the great systematic thinking of certain grand theories where you have fatalities and everything belongs as a part of a larger whole.
The essayistic understanding of knowledge for knowledge for example would say that well you try something out and see where it leads.
You don't know where it's going to lead but you attempt it, you say it.
And the idea that nature would operate according to an essayistic procedure where through genetic variations and random mutation and one thing will be tried out, it might work, not most of them don't work.
We know that most of the vast majority, vast vast majority of genetic variations are doomed to failure.
Only small tiny proportion actually succeed.
But if I were God and we're trying to think of how I would try to create a world in which I would maximize the possibility of diversity and richness and the earth as we know it,
I would probably install some kind of radically essayistic mechanism like the one under description in order to say let everything be tried out and let it keep going, you know, generation after generation, millennia after millennia and see what will arise from it.
And the results is what has arisen from this process is just nothing short of miraculous really.
We have been speaking with Professor Paul Robinson from the Department of History here at Stanford on behalf of entitled opinions.
I want to thank you Paul for coming on for your second stint at entitled opinions and we'll be talking to you in the future I hope.
Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. You're doing the Lord's work here.
Not quite, but we're doing what we can. You take care.
Yes, man.
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