Ideology and the History of Science ROBERT J. RICHARDS Conceptual Foundations of Science University of Chicago 1126 E, 59th St. Chicago, IL 60637 U.S.A.
Antoine Destutt de Tracy, who coined the term "ideology," considered his new discipline a general science of our "intellectual faculties, their principal phenomena, and the more remarkable circumstances of their activities" (1801, p. 4). Convinced of the sensationalist epistemology of Locke and Condillac, Destutt de Tracy believed one could resolve all ideas into the sensations that produced them and thereby test their soundness. The sensationalist assumptions of his project led him to propose that "ideology is a part of zoology" (1801, p. 1), and he consequently paid close attention to the way physiological circumstance shaped and often misshaped ideas. Though Karl Marx appropriated this concept of ideology, he explored not physiological but cultural determinants. He concerned himself with the way material and economic conditions influenced ideas, especially when they produced a false consciousness of the supposed reality to which they referred. Marx believed his principles of analysis would allow him to distinguish sound ideas from those tainted by particular circumstance. The concept of ideology from its beginning has thus depended upon the presumption that some ideas can escape the kind of distortion from which others suffer. During our century, the concept of ideology has speciated. In the social sciences and humanities, it has come to be applied with a variety of different assumptions and meanings. 1 Historians and philosophers of science, however, have usually sustained the original presumption that a clear distinction can be made between true - or at least 'rationally sound' - and false ideas. Karl Popper, for instance, conceives ideology as a pseudo-scientific system - like psychoanalysis or, for that matter, Marxism - that pretends to science but essentially lacks the requisite rational methodology. For Popper, of course, the rational method of science, by which it can be distinguished from its ideological counterfeit, is falsificationism. The uncritical and stubborn adherence to a position, protecting it from confuting evidence by developing ad hoc hypotheses, clearly indicates an ideological conception. It is in this Viennese vein that Georges Canguilhem (1988), mentor of Foucault, defined a scientific ideology: in a scientific ideology there is an explicit ambition to be science, in an imitation of some already constituted model of what science is ... A scientific ideology comes to Biology and Philosophy 8: 103-108, 1993. © 1993Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
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an end when the place that it occupied in the encyclopedia of knowledge is taken over by a discipline that operationally demonstrates the validity of its claim to scientific status, its 'norms of scientificity' (1988, p. 33). Canguilhem, avec brio, bashed out the brains of Spencer's evolutionism, leaving what he thought as only the cracked shell of a scientific ideology, one that merely aped authentic science. For Canguilhem, Darwin's theory represented that real science. Canguilhem might also have mentioned Ernst Haeckel, who usually shares with Spencer the indictment of covertly infecting evolutionary conceptions with the political germ of progress and so violating the "norms of scientificity." Most contemporary historians of Darwinian biology, such as Peter Bowler, David Hull, Stephen Jay Gould, Ernst Mayr, and Michael Ruse, certainly have distinguished Darwin's theory, which they assume avoided ideological taint - at least in its essentials - from the theories of Spencer and Haeekel, which are regarded as rotten to the core. Bowler leverages this distinction - between ideology and true science - in several of his recent and justly praised works to separate all the miscreant theories of evolution from the authentic Darwinian lineage that has led to the right kind of contemporary neoDarwinism. Ideological science not only commits an epistemological sin, but has decided practical and human consequences. Gould (1977, pp. 77-78) condemns Haeckelian science because, as he believes, it gave succor to the Nazis. Bowler (1988) also seeks to uncover "the cultural and ideological significance of the evolutionary philosophies promoted by Spencer, Haeckel, and others." These ideologies spewed forth "a callous indifference to the fate of those individuals or races that could not keep up with the march of progress"; and they have led "to modem ideas of genetical determinism and sociobiology" (1988, pp. 198-199). For Bowler it is "recapitulation theory that illustrates the non-Darwinian character of Haeckel's evolutionism" (1988, p. 84). Gould (1977,' pp. 76--85), too, finds Haeckel's biogenetic law - i.e., ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny - as the clear sign of the difference between Darwin's theory and ideologically tainted Haeckelian theory. Darwin, according to Gould, had the better sense to reject the idea that the embryo of higher organisms goes through the same morphological stages as the lower ancestral adults of the same phylum. Darwin simply adopted von Baer's law that the embryo develops from the more homogeneous condition of its type to the more heterogeneous and specifically differentiated condition of the individual: the vertebrate embryo, for instance, begins life displaying a pattern common to all vertebrates at a similarly early stage - i.e., the vertebrate "archetype" - and becomes more individuated during gestation. Von Baer's embryology seems to our eyes quite congenial to Darwin's branching conception of descent, since it would allow natural selection play during any stage of gestation and thus incline the species to ramify in unexpected directions. Had Haeckel the fight von Baerian embryological theory, as Darwin had, his ideological notions of progress would have been orphaned from the beginning. This is the view of most scholars who have described the historical development of evolutionary theory in the last half of the nineteenth
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century. In my book The Meaning of Evolution: the Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin's Theory (1992), I attempt to show that this entire historiography is mistaken and that the fault can be traced to a certain unreflective ideology, not that of Haeckel or Darwin, but of the historians who rather too easily have employed the very concept of ideology. Their sin, like most, is rather banal - namely, reading the assumptions of modem neo-Darwinism back into Darwin's theory. Historiographic sin ought really to be more contextual, more intriguing, more seductive - as, for instance, the sort usually committed by the social constructionists. The gist of my argument against the Whiggism perpetrated is virtually analytic, namely that Darwin was not a ricoDarwinian. Of course, there is a bit more to it than that. The first half of the book traces the history of the term "evolution" and its underlying conceptions from its original embryological usage, which was to describe the doctrine of preformationism, through its use in various versions of the recapitulation thesis, especially as formulated by such thinkers as Goethe, Carus, Oken, Schelling, Meckel and other post-Kantian Naturphilosophen. This first part of my history concludes by drawing out the historical and logical connections between theories of the morphological evolution of the embryo and theories of the morphological evolution of the species. In the second half of the book, I try to trace the roots of Darwin's own theory of species evolution back into the dark pool of German transcendental morphology, indeed, to show that Darwin modeled species development on embryological development. My strategy is to dissect out for full display the heart of Darwin's theory, which I believe is that very maligned but tell-tale principle of recapitulation. Briefly stated, Darwin's recapitulation theory holds that embryos pass through the same morphological types as their adult ancestors had gone through in species descent. Darwin argued for two propositions that made recapitulation virtually a logical necessity: first, that in the long past, adults more resembled their own embryos than currently; and second, that natural selection and inherited habit operated generally only on the mature or adult organism. The first proposition is really a corollary of the second. In Darwin's estimation, von Baer was correct in one sense: embryos did advance from a more homogeneous condition of the type to a more heterogeneous and differentiated condition of the individual. Darwin maintained, however, that the morphological type of an embryo at an early stage had been embodied in an actual creature that existed long ago - the archetype was a real ancestor and it was an adult. Bowler does concede that I was "successful in confounding the myth that Darwin had no time for recapitulationism." But he diffuses the impact of this concession by now arguing that there were two versions of recapitulation: the wicked kind - i.e., "the linear model of development represented by the MeckelSerres law of parallelism" - and Darwin's kind, which was really O.K. since it allowed for the branching of species off a common root. But isn't this an effort merely to save the hypothesis of two distinct strains of evolutionary theory, the ideological kind and Darwin's? This tactic does seem to me to meet one of the
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criteria that Popper would offer for an ideology at work - you cannot refute it. But I know that Bowler is susceptible to rational argument and direct evidence, so let me try by offering three contrary and, I think, indisputable points. First, there is no "Meckel-Serres law of parallelism." That is an idea that E.S. Russell invented in his nonetheless extraordinarily fine history Form and Function (1916). The law does not exist, not because the phenomenon does not exist, but because Meckel and Serres, as I tried to show in my book, had very different theories of recapitulation. The most fundamental difference was that Meckel was a species evolutionist and Serres was not. Second, Meckel, the evolutionist, never claimed, as far as I know, that "lower animals are merely immature human beings." But remarkably, Darwin did. He conceived the relationship between ancestors and descendants in almost exactly the terms Bowler thinks represent a tainted recapitulationism. In a letter responding to Huxley's attack on the development hypothesis, Darwin confessed that he himself believed "the archetype in imagination was always in some degree embryonic, and therefore capable [of] and generally undergoing further development" (1989, pp. 133-134). Since Darwin argued that the archetype, say of the vertebrates, was a real creature, this passage clearly means that he did think of ancestral lower animals as embryonic to higher organisms, including human beings. This is simply another manifestation of his embryological model of species evolution. The third point is that Darwin's model of evolution was not designed to be branching - at least not in the sense usually understood. Up to the time of the publication of the Origin, Darwin was content to have some ten or so originally created (or spontaneously generate) stems that would give rise to the some four or five general animal types and a comparable number of plant types. 2 He did not conceive of the vertebrates, for instance, branching off any invertebrate types. In the Origin, Darwin expressly allowed this same conception; though he did argue that analogy suggested all life may have descended originally from only one form (1859, p. 484; see also my [1992], p. 216, n.64). Now, does any of this essentially differ from Haeckel's conception of recapitulation? Not one little bit. Does the Darwin-Haeckel theory of recapitulation imply that evolution is progressive? Yes, at least as they both constructed the theory of evolution. I'll leave the arguments, though, for the book. Bowler thinks that my treatment of Darwin's morphology is one dimensional, because it does not consider the Beagle voyage and the many other aspects of his theory of evolution - for example, his theory of adaptation, biogeography, speciation, and reproductive success. I confess, I did not set out to provide a comprehensive account of Darwin's accomplishment. Mine was to be a semantic history that focused on morphology and embryology, with a special concern to show what light these cast on Darwin's general theory. Nonetheless, I believe I have Darwin's own warrant for concentrating on these neglected subjects; for he himself thought that his construal of the embryological facts provided the strongest empirical evidence for the general theory of evolution.3 Further, with a bit more careful scrutiny, Bowler would have found in my book accounts of adaptation, natural selection, and, admittedly, brief mention of
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speciation and biogeography. I did set Darwin out on his voyage and brought him back again. 41 suspect Bowler thinks my account one dimensional because it is a dimension whose existence he has always denied; its manifest presence seems to have produced a distracting anxiety. Bowler's final set of objections I find passing strange. He says that I take "for granted that the idea of progress is a touchstone for measuring the extent to which Darwin's theory reflected the values of his own time." Yet, as he continues, Desmond and Moore have not mentioned, in their new biography (1991), a progressivist influence seeping over from the general culture into Darwin's theory. But surely, Bowler argues, if there were such ideological influence, these social constructionist historians would have landed on it foursquare. Since they have not, I must be wrong in holding Darwin to be an evolutionary progressivist. This argument leaves me flummoxed. First, I made no assumption that social notions of progress were the source of Darwin's evolutionary progressivism, though the conceptual atmosphere of such ideas may well have added weight to what I understand as a fundamentally zoological consideration: namely, that over vast periods of time, evolution has produced more complex, more advanced, more improved, more progressive creatures - quite independently of their political preferences. What makes Bowler's argument so strange is that I spend some time in my book attempting to confute not only the ideology of the type Bowler exemplifies, but also that of social constructionism, especially Desmond's. Hence, I would not likely argue or presume that social ideals of progress were chiefly responsible for Darwin's evolutionary progressivism. Bowler has accused Haeckel and Spencer of pernicious ideology, while Darwin was left fairly free of such charge. I have returned the compliment to Bowler, but perhaps unfairly. In the brief discussion of ideology that introduces this response, I allow the supposition to remain unanalyzed that one can distinguish an ideologically tainted enterprise from an unsullied one, suggesting as well that my own historiographic practices are as pure as Darwin's science has been depicted as being. The distinction between ideology and true science, while one might nostalgically long for its validity, was sunk in 1962, when it hit that submerged intellectual iceberg, Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I believe, nonetheless, that with some refitting, the concept of ideology in history of science - or even in meta-history of science - can be made quite useful again. I attempt such reformulation in my book. Whether I myself have escaped from ideological infection, only a more careful reading of the book and more pointed argument can answer. Oh yes, it was the British Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery who devised the disastrous plan to take the Arnhem Bridge. He dismissed objections that the situation was simply more complex than he imagined (see Ryan 1974).
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NOTES 1 The most recent effort to consider the uses of the concept in the social sciences is that of Raymond Boudon (1989). 2 See Darwin's 1844 Essay (1909, p. 252). See also my discussion in The Meaning of Evolution (1992, pp. 125-126). 3 Charles Darwin to Asa Gray (10 September 1860): "embryology is to me by far the strongest single class of facts in faovur of change of forms, and not one, I think, of my reviewers has alluded to this" (1891, p. 131). 4 See, for example, my (1992), pp. 81-84 (adaptation), 84-89 (natural selection), 87--89 (speciation), 157 (paleontology and biogeography), and 65 and 80 (voyage).
REFERENCES Boudon, R.: 1989, The Analysis ofldeology, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Bowler, P.: 1988, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Canguilhem, G.: 1988, Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences, MIT Press, Cambridge. Darwin, C.: 1859, On the Origin of Species, Murray, London. Darwin, F.: 1891, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. 2, D. Appleton, New York. Darwin, C.: 1909, "Essay of 1844," Foundations of the Origin of Species, ed. F. Darwin, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Darwin, C.: 1989, Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 5, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Desmond, A and Moore, J.: 1991, Darwin, Michael Joseph, London. Destutt-Tracy, A.: 1801, Projet d'dl~ments d'iddologie, Didot, Pads. Gould, S.: 1977, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Richards, R.: 1992, The Meaning of Evolution: the Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin's Theory, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Ryan, C.: 1974, A Bridge Too Far, Simon and Schuster, New York. Russell, E.: 1916, Form and Function: A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology, University of Chicago Press (reprint, 1982), Chicago.
