The Big Bluff

Darwin’s Unfulfilled Promissory Note

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) has become a mythical figure of gigantic proportions, and his theory drives a surprising amount of popular discussion. I often hear pundits referring to “evolution,” and by that they always mean Darwinism. It’s as much science as they care to know, in most cases.

That fact makes reading Robert Shedinger’s Darwin’s Bluff: The Mystery of the Book Darwin Never Finished (Discovery Institute Press, 2024) an unusual experience. By meticulously analyzing Darwin’s massive correspondence with his associates, Shedinger, a professor of religion at Luther College in Iowa, quietly blows up the Darwin myth. He shows that, in actual history, Darwin never demonstrated to his colleagues’ satisfaction that the mechanism of natural selection acting on random mutations accounted for what was known about the history of life.

Darwin’s colleagues were not concerned about the effect of his theories on religion. Rather, they frequently complained that “while he made arguments, he provided little evidence and essentially proved nothing.”

Reticence to Publish

Spurred by Alfred Russel Wallace’s famous letter outlining a theory very similar to his own, Darwin, to avoid preemption, published On the Origin of Species in 1859 as an abstract, while promising a much longer book that would supply the evidence for his thesis. But he never published that longer book, even though it was, as Shedinger tells us, three-quarters written by that time. He went on to publish works on orchids and sexual selection instead.

Two questions arise: Why didn’t Darwin publish the evidence for his momentous theory? And why was his thesis hailed as one of the greatest ideas in science despite that fact?

Darwin often cited illness as a reason for not publishing. But Shedinger draws a different conclusion, based on reading the manuscript:

Darwin, I want to suggest, knew that he did not have the kind of evidence necessary to prove the theory of natural selection, and his rhetoric of illness provided a ready excuse for his endless delays in presenting the promised evidence to the public. It was also a ready excuse for his absence from scientific meetings where he might be confronted by critics and have to defend his ideas.

When the “Big Book” was eventually published a century later in 1975,¹ it promptly disappeared from public attention. Why? Well, one reason, Shedinger says, is that it never did supply the promised evidence. Darwin continued to rely on artificial selection by humans as an analogy for unplanned, blind selection by nature. Instead of the promised long catalog of facts, he offers ten proposed examples of natural selection, along with imaginary scenarios of how it might have worked. Shedinger comments, “Readers hoping to see a rich array of empirical evidence for the creative powers of natural selection would have been disappointed.”

Natural Selection Deified

A bigger problem for Darwin’s argument is that the Big Book continues to endow natural selection with the power of foresight. Contemporaries had pointed out the flaw in Darwin’s logic in his then-published works and chided him for deifying natural selection—and they had, of course, never even seen the big manuscript. But by 1975, qualms like theirs were long in the past. Shedinger notes that 1975 reviews of the Big Book “provide virtually no engagement with the contents of the manuscript.”

Why not? Whereas Darwin’s contemporaries had been looking for hard, specific data showing that natural selection could turn cows into whales, our own contemporaries simply assume that the evidence is overwhelming. Shedinger observes:

The man whose name is today synonymous with naturalistic evolutionary theory and natural selection knew, it would seem, that he couldn’t find and present the crucial confirming evidence for his theory in his own lifetime. The notion that he did so, and that the decades following his death were a mere mopping-up operation, is the mythology. The reality is very different, and the tell is that Darwin, a master bluffer, never showed his hand.

And he never really needed to. Stephen Jay Gould thought Darwin did not need to publish his longer work. Of course not; by then, evidence had long been irrelevant.² Faith had substituted for the lack of evidence, filling in gaps everywhere. Thus, changes in life forms are assumed, rather than shown, to have been caused by Darwinism. Other possible causes are subject to, at best, scrutiny and, at worst, hostility.

One area where the Darwin myth has made mince pie out of reality is the famous Huxley–Wilberforce debate, in which “Darwin’s bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley, supposedly humiliated a pompous bishop, Samuel Wilberforce. Wilberforce, we are told, opposed Darwin’s theory without really understanding it. In reality, Shedinger found, Wilberforce wrote a nearly 14,000-word review of The Origin that “documents how deeply he did understand Darwin’s work.” In the review, Wilberforce made clear that he would not oppose Darwin’s theory if the evidence supported it. But, like so many of his contemporaries, he judged that it didn’t.

Ironically, some of Darwin’s own work testified against him in his day as well. Delaying the Big Book, he decided to study orchids, thinking that they might provide enough evidence for his theories to hold off his critics. Among his contemporaries, however, the strategy backfired rather badly. They discerned in the evidence he provided the work of an “intelligent designer”: “Review after review of Darwin’s orchid book sounded the same theme. Darwin had provided evidence not for natural selection, but for natural theology.”

Mythologized & Corrupted History

For my part, after a thorough immersion in the voluminous letter- and journal-writing of Darwin’s day, as analyzed by Shedinger, I must come to terms with the fact that a historic controversy has been utterly corrupted and entirely subsumed by myth. The myth is aimed at promoting the creation story of atheistic naturalism. Many have quoted zoologist Richard Dawkins’s claim that Darwinism made it easier to be “an intellectually fulfilled atheist,”³ or philosopher Daniel Dennett’s claim that the theory was “the single best idea anyone has ever had.”⁴

But that’s cultural politics, not science. And these days, few are aware that much misrepresentation of the source material was required to produce the desired result.

Notes
1. Darwin’s “Big Book”: Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection: Being the Second Part of His Big Species Book Written from 1856 to 1858, R. C. Stauffer, Ed., Cambridge University Press (1975).
2. Stephen Jay Gould, “Darwin’s ‘Big Book’,” Science Vol 188, Issue 4190 (May 23, 1975).
3. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, Longman, Scientific and Technical (1986), p. 6.
4. Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Simon & Schuster (1995).