(Book review by Marek Kohn) Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World without Darwin
By Peter J Bowler (University of Chicago Press 336pp £19.50)

The author argues that the world would have accepted evolution in a more orderly,progressive and purposeful way without the Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.

( F.Sheikh)

Some excerpts;

“Although Darwin’s theory of natural selection transformed the understanding of life by turning all eyes to evolution, the subsequent decades saw a successful effort to sideline it in favour of less disturbing candidates for mechanisms of change. People were ready to accept the idea of evolutionary transformation as long as it seemed orderly, progressive and purposeful. Lamarckian ideas, suggesting that individuals could improve themselves through their own striving and then pass on these improvements to their offspring, were a popular alternative. Other theories proposed that living forms were shaped by inner laws that guided change in beneficial directions. Arguments such as these did not confront respectable men with undignified implications about their relationship to monkeys, or threaten to make the universe look meaningless. By the century’s end Darwinism was in eclipse, as the biologist Julian Huxley later put it, but the cracks it had made in the foundations of existential belief were beyond repair.”

“He even goes so far as to suggest that Darwin’s radical insight ‘distorted’ the process of scientific development by answering the question of life’s variety before everybody else had managed to formulate it. If it had waited its proper time, the ground would have been prepared for it by earlier theories, which were wrong in ways that made them acceptable. Darwin argued for gradual evolution in nature, but the theory he presented was a sudden, disruptive leap. This view of scientific history is compelling where it is persuasive and even more so where it is not. It casts Darwin in the role of a reformer who demands what he believes is right rather than what society is ready to grant – like campaigning for universal suffrage before the abolition of slavery, or for gay marriage before the repeal of laws against gay sex. In Bowler’s court of history, Darwin stands accused of being prematurely right.” Click link below to read full review;

http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/kohn_04_13.php