Category: Articles

President Obama (if that is your real name), we are real Americans, the ones who’ve patiently demanded that you release your long-form birth certificate – a demand you have apparently now met thanks to the counterfeiting skills you learned in your true birthplace of Kenya. Your clever forgery may quell the suspicions of some Americans, but not us. We’ve already swapped demands for your long-form birth certificate for demands that you show your college records. But that’s just the beginning. We demand that you show us more stuff, and that you show us now.

Here is a list of what we will need to see, at a minimum, if we are ever going to stop drawing Hitler mustaches on your pictures and shouting “Terrorist!” at your likeness on our TV sets.  Or, maybe not completely stop, but at least pause to catch our breath in between hateful, face-reddening screams.

First, we need a list of every book you read as a child, both inside and outside of school.   Did you read “Hardy Boys” books, and if so, did they teach you that the world is a mysterious, complicated place, and undermine your faith in America? Or did you reject the Hardys in favor of Nancy Drew, which may show an unhealthy belief that girls were your equals, or (although it’s much the same thing) a latent homosexuality? Did you write any comments about hating America in the margins of your books, or deface your history books by drawing a schlong in Washington’s mouth? We also need you to fork over any book reports you completed, so that we can scan them for seditious sentiments, and while we’re at it, we’ll independently review the teacher’s evaluation of your grammar and reading comprehension skills. It goes without saying that you’d better also show receipts for all books you owned, or we’ll have to assume you stole them. And while you’re at it, why don’t you explain to us how a Kenyan boy even knew what “reading” and “books” were.

We’ll also need to see all of the art projects you completed as a grammar school student. We’ll be evaluating them for form as well as content. For instance, if you didn’t color within the lines, that could be a sign of an aggrandized ambition to conquer, one the American people should know about. A preponderance of grey colors could indicate a desire to destroy white America by engaging in interracial sex on a massive, frightening scale. And will we see any disturbing images in the work from your crayon and Elmer’s glue period, Obama? Perhaps drawings of Satan giving a roundhouse kick to the face of Jesus? Or drawings of the founding fathers being eaten by a pack of hungry Muslims? You were REALLY sick if you drew that, Obama.

We want written testimony from each and every student you ever attended classes with, from kindergarten to college. Did you sit at the popular tables, or off by yourself like some kind of geek? (Note: all possible answers to this question can and will be used against you). Did you recite the Pledge of Allegiance properly, or did you whisper a few things about Allah during the middle of it? Did you fold the American flag using the traditional protocol, or did you crumple it up and shove it down the front of your pants? Did any students ever remember you having an odor, and did they have any playground rhymes about it? What if anything did you do about that odor, Obama? You should know that if you yourself reported any gaseous odors in your vicinity back then, Obama, that he who smelt it probably dealt it. You may have fooled your classmates, but you can’t fool the American people.

Also, did you go to your high school prom? If so we need to see the pictures. Were you smiling? Did your pants make your butt look big? Did you carpool in a limo, as someone who believes in global warming should, or did you rent a whole limo for you and your date, and laugh as you let several gallons of gasoline flow onto the street while you fueled it up? More importantly, was your date someone we’d consider attractive? We’re going to show her picture to the American people and let them decide if they’re happy with their president’s prom date.

Please produce all of your immunization and dental records, ASAP. A president who’d let himself get impacted molars is a president who will let the terrorists play hopscotch on the lawn of the White House. And we need to be sure that you’re not going to give the American people the Black Death, Obama. We want Americans to die as Americans should: from American diseases, without viable health care coverage.

Yes, you’ve shown us what you claim to be your birth certificate. But what about testimony from those who remember you being born? What we really would like to know is if anyone got an icy sensation of evil as they gazed into your infant eyes. Or if anyone had any disturbing or portentous dreams about you, such as one in which you walked through a field of skulls while flaming dead bald eagles fell from the sky. Certainly the American people deserve to know about those dreams, Obama, if we are to have any chance at all at preventing them from coming true.

While we’re on the subject of evil, it occurs to me that we have no definitive proof that you are not a witch. In the interests of the American people, we demand that you place a spoon under your pillow at night, so that we can see if it rusts by morning. I also propose to place you in a burlap sack and toss you into the nearest river to see if you float. If you don’t, good news! You’re innocent, and this whole sorry mess will be behind you.

Oh, one another thing. In the interests of properly vetting you, we absolutely are going to need to see your penis. What are you hiding in your pants, Obama? It’s time to pull down your pants and your presidential boxers and be honest with the American people. If your penis is too small, we cannot properly respect you as Commander in Chief. If on the other hand, it is very large, that’s bad too, because you might literally use it to fuck our deepest values. As taxpaying citizens who want transparency in government, we demand that this transparency be extended to your pants and underpants. The era of secrets must end.

You and some of your liberal defenders always try to say that this movement of birthers/schoolers/penis gawkers is racist. That’s an absolutely appalling and dishonest charge, and frankly, it’s just the kind of thing that lazy, lying blacks would say. The important thing is that we need to calm the fears of the American people about you, and as you know, nothing calms Americans quite as much as making numerous demands for information to rule out the fact that there might be a bomb under your vest RIGHT NOW!!!!

Mr. Obama, we are simply trying to make sense of the fact that you, an American whose name and skin tone are so different from ours, is president instead of one of us.  If you really want to be treated with the respect your office has traditionally commanded, you will comply with each and every request we make of you, no matter how belittling it may seem. Any disrespect you get either way, Obama, whether by complying with demands that make you look like a buffoon or by refusing to comply with them, will in our opinion be the result of your own actions, only.

As one of the grammar school bullies we plan to grill for information about you might put it: Stop hitting yourself, Obama. Stop hitting yourself.

Prologue: James Croft wondered about some fundamental value not shared among gnu atheists and accommodationists. Paul offered an answer which many readers found illuminating, too illuminating to be hidden as comment 29 on a long thread.

I think that gnu atheists and accommodationists disagree mainly over one thing: is there too much forthright criticism by atheists of religion generally, or too little?

Gnu atheists think more people ought to regularly speak up critically about bad religious ideas, and that those bad religious ideas are common to “liberal” religion as well as, e.g., fundamentalism.

The reasons why gnus think there’s too little forthright criticism and accommodationists think there’s too much vary considerably.

Accommodationists typically think some or all of the following, in some mix:

0. Distinctively religious beliefs aren’t all false, or aren’t all inconsistent with science, or aren’t so importantly false as to be worth objecting to.

1. In terms of its effects on human well being, religion isn’t a bad thing overall. A lot of religion (e.g., fundamentalism) is bad, but a lot of religion (e.g., theologically moderate or liberal Christianity) is actually good for the world, on the whole, promoting civilized conceptions of morality, or at worst harmless. If we dispensed with religion, or just diminished the mindshare of religion across the board, we’d lose a lot of good along with the bad.

2. Liberal religion is our friend, because liberal religious people are our main allies in the fight against conservative religion. If we talk people out of being liberally religious, that won’t help anything much, and may hurt because it will weaken institutions that we should be strengthening, or leaving as they are. Liberal religion is a crucial part of the solution to the problem of bad religion.

3. You can argue against the worst sorts of religion effectively without arguing against the best sorts. Fundamentalism is he problem, not religion, and critiques of religion should generally focus on distinctive features of bad religion. We should argue against theological conservatism, as liberals, more often than we should argue against religion, as atheists.

4. Even to the extent that it might be advantageous to undermine religion across the board, it is strategically unwise to attempt to do so. It will mostly alienate potential allies and generate backlash, doing more harm than good. It is better to be very “civil,” and only gently criticize religion, and mostly focus criticism on especially bad religion. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

Gnus, in contrast, tend to think at least some of the following to a greater extent than accommodationists:

0. Distinctively religious beliefs are generally false, are generally inconsistent with science, and are false enough to be worth objecting to, out of a more or less free-floating commitment to truth.

1. In terms of its effects on human well-being, religion is a bad thing overall. Some religion (e.g., very theologically liberal religion) isn’t especially harmful in its direct effects on people, and sometimes is even good, but most religion is a net negative, and religion as a whole could be dispensed with, and that would be a generally good thing, with lots of pluses and relatively few minuses.

2. Liberal religion is our friend in some senses, and not in others. On average, if we talk liberally religious people out of being liberally religious, that will be a good thing because they’ll be even better allies against religion, including especially conservative religion.

3. You can’t argue effectively against bad religion effectively without arguing against religion fairly broadly, because the most important features of bad religion—belief in God and souls and divinely or supernaturally inspired morality—are common to almost all religion. Once you grant those mistaken premises, or fail to challenge them, you’ve mostly given away the store, and are reduced to making the kind of lame-ass arguments that liberal religious people use so ineffectively against conservatively religious people. (E.g., justifying certain ways of picking and choosing religious beliefs—rather than explaining why it’s all a load of bollocks, for which there are much better more basic, and correct arguments.)

The root problem isn’t fundamentalism, but central premises of almost all religion, which are themselves stupid and dangerous ideas, acquiesence to which enables fundamentalism—and basic nonfundamentalist orthodoxy, which is a bigger problem than outright fundamentalism.

4. Criticizing religion does generate backlash and alienate some people, but fears of backlash are overrated, and it is important to challenge religious privilege and especially to shift the Overton window of public opinion. Being too afraid of short-term backlash—and too pessimistic about major shifts of popular opinion about religion—is a recipe for perpetuating religion’s privileged position and dominance. It is demonstrably untrue that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar—successful social movements generally require a spectrum of opinion, including relatively “extreme” views. Excessive moderation is a recipe for stasis, and you need both reformists and “radicals,” who more or less play good cop / bad cop.

—

To summarize, gnus and accommodationists tend to differ in some or all of the following respects

0. How systematically false and/or antiscientific religion is,

1. How systematically harmful religion is,

2. Whether liberal religion is best thought of as part of the solution, or part of the problem,

3. Whether the most telling critiques of conservative religion apply to liberal religion as well, such that criticizing the only the former is pulling your best punches, and

4. Whether frequent forthright criticism of religion does more harm than good, strategically, in the big picture and the long run—is it worth the backlash? Is centrist triangulation a better political strategy than shifting the Overton window of popular opinion?

—

In general, gnus do recognize that there are important roles for both “radicals” and “moderates” (not that gnus are actually radicals—nobody’s talking about using force or anything like that).

They generally just don’t think we already have too many “radicals” (forthright critics of religion across the board), as accommodationists do.

What accommodationists say that sets gnus off is usually a criticism of gnus that implies that we’re wrong to be as “radical” as we are, and that we should sit down and shut up, or do something else instead, because our anti-religious fight

1) isn’t worth fighting in principle, because religion’s not so bad, or

2) isn’t winnable, to any particularly useful extent, so isn’t worth fighting in practice, or

3) isn’t winnable by our overt, backlash-generating means, so we should all be nice moderates like the accommodationists instead of being noisy troublemakers who undermine sound, centrist political triangulation strategy.

We generally think all those things are false, and get really tired of hearing them from people who don’t seriously address the issues of fact, of worthwhile goals, or of effective political strategy.

Every time we hear strategic advice that amounts to “you catch more flies with honey” by somebody telling us what to do, who is apparently entirely ignorant of Overton window strategies, it pisses us off.

We get really, really sick of people telling us what to do without addressing our very good reasons for doing what we’re doing, and actually showing that their reasons are better than our reasons.

One thing that does frequently bring deep emotions into play is the sense that accommodationists frequently advise us what to do as though they think we’re simplistic strategically naive zealots, as opposed to thoughtful people with well-thought-out positions, good arguments, and an arguably excellent strategic rationale that is almost never even mentioned, much less properly addressed, by people who proffer an “obviously better” strategy toward apparently different goals.

Until accommodationists are willing to talk very, very seriously about Overton issues, we’re going to dismiss their strategic advice as the shallow, platitudinous crap that we think it is. As long as they act like we don’t even have a strategy, and criticize us for not going along with theirs, we’re going to be seriously annoyed when they tell us to do what they want us to do, instead of what we’re doing.

Talking about us as though we’re simply strategically naive and gratuitously confrontational is straw-manning us, and we are sick as shit of it. Its been going on nonstop for years, and doesn’t show any sign of stopping.

We do understand accommodationist arguments. Of course we do. We always have. It isn’t exactly rocket science. (Or even passable political science.) And we’ve always had good reasons for disagreeing with them, which are almost universally ignored by accommodationists, who continue to talk past us, and talk systematically misleading cartoonish smack about us.

That’s just seriously annoying, isn’t? Should we not be annoyed by that?

 When and why did you become an atheist?

I was brought up in a non-religious family, and when I first encountered religion it simply seemed incredible, no more believable that the fairy stories and Greek myths that I had read and enjoyed as a child.

What motivated you to write The Good Book?

Several decades ago, while studying the ethical theories and systems of the world, I saw a fundamental difference between religion-derived ethics and what I call ‘humanism’, that is, non-religious ethics, namely, that the former present themselves as the commands and requirements of a monarchical deity whereas the latter premises itself on efforts to understand human nature and the human condition – and whereas the former typically cut across the grain of human nature by requiring excessive self-denial and limitation, the latter is more sympathetic and reasonable by far.

How much time did it take you to organise all the information available to make the book and to write it?

I started to gather the materials for The Good Book about 30 years ago, after the realization described above, and as time went by began the process of selecting and editing – going from a great quantity of material to the final selection and arrangement that constitutes The Good Book now.

Why did you decide to publish it now? Has it something to do with the 400^th anniversary of the King James Bible?

The 400^th anniversary of the KJB is coincidental; unlike sending a rocket to the moon where precision of timing is possible, I couldn’t have planned that this would be the year of publication when I began this so long ago! But it is a useful coincidence, because the KJB provides a good example of how the religious Bible was made, and why it is printed as it is, and why its language is deliberately archaic (even in 1611 the English of the KJB was 100 years out of date, on purpose to give it that authoritative, vatic, somewhat heightened tone).

Aren’t you afraid of being called pretentious or arrogant for this ambitious initiative?

I’ve already been called even worse things than either of those! – I don’t expect that anyone who is hostile to the idea of The Good Book will readily believe this, but I have done it in a sober and collegial spirit. After all, almost all the words in The Good Book are from great minds of the past, from people who experienced much and thought deeply, and in almost all cases were people of great intellect – so when people attack The Good Book they attack Aristotle, Pliny, Seneca, Cicero, Confucius, Mo Zi…all the way to Spinoza, Hume, Chesterfield, Mill and Pater. If they read these people outside the context of The Good Book they would be struck by their insight and wisdom – so if they give The Good Book a fair chance, they would see that I have collected and arranged these valuable texts as a resource for everyone, so that even religious people would find good things in it.

In your opinion, do atheists really need their own Bible?

No one needs a bible, because everyone has the potential to find things out and read for themselves. Since atheists are more likely than religious people to be independent-minded, they are even less in need of guidance and help, because they can go to libraries, learn, and think for themselves. But even atheists need to read and study, and a distillation of the past’s insights and experience relating to questions about how to live (Socrates’ question!) might be of use to some. No-one is under an obligation to read The Good Book given that they can do the work for themselves, and indeed this latter would be the best way; but I offer it anyway as a resource should it be of value to some. And given the wealth of insight, inspiration and consolation that the book gathers together, I have good hopes that some will indeed find it useful, as a starting point for their own reflections. The one demand that The Good Book makes is for people to go beyond all teachings and teachers (and therefore beyond books like The Good Book) and think for themselves.

Is the Good Book made for everyone? Can a religious person read it?

As just indicated, yes, definitely: there is nothing in The Good Book that a religious person could or at least should disagree with – except for those who say we must not think for ourselves but must submit our will and intellect to the doctrines of a religion.

What do you want to achieve with the Good Book?

Again as noted in the preceding remarks, The Good Book is intended as a resource to help anyone who cares to use it as such on their journey to autonomy and independence of mind.

Don’t you fear that it will be considered a self-help book, full of prescriptions for a good life?

Not prescriptions, but suggestions; and from very great minds of the past.

Have you faced any criticism from atheists or harsh reactions from religious communities?

Those atheists and theists who have not seen the book or who have not grasped its purpose, and either think it is a rule-book for atheists (so some atheists might think) or an attack on the religious bible or religion itself (so theists might think) have of course been critical – but the kind of criticism that would be truly germane would concern itself with the choice of texts, their arrangement, the translations used, etc, unless the critics in question are so authoritative that they disagree with what Aristotle et al. have to offer in the way of suggestions for reflecting on ethical questions.

You say that religious influence is overinflated in our society. What are the biggest consequences of this in our lives?

This question is almost too big to answer in a few lines. All the way from distortion of education (opposition to evolutionary biology, false views of the nature and origins of the universe, corruption of science etc) to oppressive moralities (think of teenagers fearfully struggling with ‘sinful feelings’ because of their burgeoning sexuality) to policies on contraception, AIDS prevention, abortion and stem cell research, to persecution of gays, to murderous interreligious conflicts in many countries (Christians versus Muslims versus Hindus – and Protestants versus Catholics, and Sunnis versus Shias, attacking each other in Nigeria, Iraq, Pakistan, India, Ireland, Croatia…) to religious leaders (e.g. mullahs) inciting hatred, terrorism and mass murder – where are the aspects of our lives that are not in some way affected by the toxin of religion?

In an interview in the Guardian, you joked about being a god in five centuries. Do you believe that the Good Book message can and will last as long as great philosophical books?

The message of the great philosophical books will last as long as there are intelligent minds to appreciate them. Whether The Good Book, which is a distillation of some of the best of these books, will last with them, is an open question. I certainly hope not to be a ‘god’ because, even though history shows that the bar has not been set very high in this regard, I would not be a good one, and anyway if I have a message it is ‘think for yourself, take responsibility for yourself, do not be a disciple, do not abdicate your mind and put it under the feet of someone else’s ideology’.

In the same interview, you said that being a ‘militant atheist’ was like ‘sleeping furiously’. But haven’t you worked and still work really hard to defend the atheist point of view?

‘Militant’ is a term used by religious people who wish that they could continue to enjoy the status and privileges which the now-lost ‘respect agenda’ (‘I think weird thoughts so respect me, I am a man of faith’) once protected for them. My friends Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens do not burn people at the stake for holding opposite views, but criticize them by speaking frankly and bluntly; and I have done the same in other places. There are three areas of debate: metaphysics (does the universe contain supernatural agencies? Answer: No; learn some science) secularism (what is the place of religion in the public square? Answer: it has every right to have its say, but no greater right than anyone else – yet for historical reasons it has a massively over-amplified voice there) and ethics (do you need a ubiquitous invisible policeman watching everyone for people to be good? Answer: No, read e.g. the Good Book). My interest is in all three, but as just noted The Good Book addresses the third of these, by showing that there is a rich, deep, serious non-religious tradition of thought about the good, which is in fact richer and deeper than religious ethics (New Testament ethics says ‘give away all you own, make no plans, do not marry…’ i.e. the ethics of a people who thought the Messiah was very soon going to return; after four centuries Christianity had to borrow great swathes of Greek non-religious ethics to bolster itself.)

What do you say about the thesis that new atheism looks like a religion?

That is nonsense. As has been well said, atheism is to religion what not collecting stamps is to stamp collecting. Not collecting stamps is not a hobby. Not believing in gods and goddesses is not a religion.

Can we live completely guided by rigorous reason and rationality? Do you yourself try to live that way, without emotional subjectivity?

Of course we need emotion; who said that we do not? This is the most important part of our lives: loving, responding to beauty, feeling joy, coping with grief and loss, being human. But we know that a partnership of emotion and reason makes our emotions deeper and finer; the emotions can be educated by reflection – as when we read thoughtfully, learn, study science, acquire greater appreciation of music and painting – recognizing the central importance of emotion does not exclude being rational where rationality is called for (from science to thinking about our children’s health and education to voting to planning our pensions – these are not matters for emotion) and emotion is not mere thoughtless whim and arbitrariness. To go from the thought that emotion is central to life to saying that therefore we can believe any old nonsense is an example not of emotion but or irrationality or even stupidity.

Any special message to an atheist reader?

I congratulate any atheist on being one, and wish him or her well.

My article on the Afghan Koran protest – an unfortunate incident which left over 20 people dead and many more injured – generated many comments and criticisms on the internet. In fact somebody said the piece was informed by ‘racism and islamophobia’. Well I guess this fellow thought I was a white or a Christian or someone living in the West.

 I do not in this article intend to respond to issues raised by those who read the article. For me let the debate continue. I have made my point. What I said in that piece – and in this very one – applies to many Muslims, not all.

So, once again in reaction to the protest over the Koran burning in the US and to other similar violent reactions of our Muslim friends to actions and expressions which they consider provocative or ‘an insult to Islam’, I say : learn to tolerate offence and dissent. You cannot expect to live in a world where nobody offends or disagrees with you.

Yes, Muslims  should learn to live with actions and expressions which they find provocative or annoying.We live in a world of diverse religions and beliefs, so Muslims should not expect that nobody will do or say anything that will offend them. Look: that is not possible. And for those of them who think otherwise now is the time to realize that they are mistaken. Now is the time for them to have a change of mind and attitude for the sake of humanity and civilization.  

Yes, our Muslim friends need to drop this idea that anybody who says or does something which offends them  should be killed – beheaded, executed, imprisoned – or penalized. If we were to make  that a universal law then nobody would be alive today; or most of us would be in jail. And if ever such a sharia law obtained in the past or during the days of prophet Muhammed then Muslims should know that it is out of place today. If that is what their Koran teaches then they should know that this time around Allah (or whoever must have put such an injunction into ‘his’ mouth) got it wrong; that on this issue they should disobey the Koran.

Because if we are to go by that sharia law we will find ourselves in a situation of perpetual conflict. Muslims or Islam will be on a collision course with humanity and civilization as is the case in some parts of the world. We will find ourselves in a situation where everybody including Muslims will be in jail or will be dead. In fact all human beings will go into extinction.

Our Muslim friends should learn to accomodate criticisms or caricature of Islam, of the Koran or of prophet Muhammed. They should know that not all human beings are Muslims. Not all of us are believers in Allah. Not all human beings revere the prophet Muhammed as Allah’s messenger. Not all of us believe in the Koran as the revealed word of Allah. Just as the actions and expressions of Muslims are in line with their beliefs, some other people’s actions and expressions are in line with their unbelief.

So Muslims should not expect non-Muslims to  treat Islamic beliefs and the prophet the same way they do, just as one should not expect Muslims to revere other religious beliefs. That means some people are bound to make irreverent remarks or expressions about Islam and its doctrines just as Muslims also make or can make irrevent remarks – or remarks which others consider irreverent – about other religions or beliefs. And that is what freedom of religion is all about. If our Muslim friends in Afghanistan were aware of this then the Koran burning in the US would not have generated the violent protests it did. It would have passed without any incident. But it did not.

Meanwhile, I don’t think protests – violent or otherwise – would stop anyone who wants to burn a Koran or a Bible or any book at all from doing so. They will not. Not everybody who wants to burn books – sacred or secular – goes public as the US pastor did. Surely the pastor was not the first or the only person who has burnt or destroyed a copy of the Koran. On the contrary, violent reactions like the ones we saw in Afghanistan often make some people, who ordinarily wouldn’t have wanted to burn their copies of the Koran, to do so.

Books are people’s personal property which they dispose of in any way they deem fit. Violent protests by Muslims cannot stop them from exercising this right or power. Muslims must understand this and learn to ignore or react in any other civilized way when anybody decides to publicly dispose his or her copy of the Koran in a way they (Muslims) may consider offensive or an insult to Islam. Instead of saying ‘Kill those who insult Islam’ or ‘Behead those who defile the Koran’,  Muslims around the would should begin to preach and propagate in their mosques and Koranic schools this saying: ‘Ignore those who defame Islam’.  Or better ‘Dialogue with those who criticize Islam’.

For me that is a more civilized approach. As long as Islam remains in the public sphere, it cannot be shielded from public scrutiny, examination, criticism or caricature.

The same is applicable to the cartoons of prophet Muhammed. Those cartoons did not warrant the bloodletting we witnessed across the world at all. They did not! In fact it was Muslim clerics who made those cartoons an issue and brought them to the knowledge of the world. If Muslims had ignored those cartoons and the artists behind them, and had not reacted as they did, most people wouldn’t have known about the cartoons. In fact it was the  riots that made me know that it was such a taboo to draw an image of Mohammed. When I heard about the cartoon riots, the question that instinctively came to my mind was “Who is prophet Muhammad that he cannot be cartooned?”

I  still find it difficult to comprehend why Muslims reacted the way they did. Because if Muslims believe Muhammad cannot be cartooned, there are others who believe he can. If Muslims refrain from drawing the image of Muhammed or from cartooning him in any way out of belief, others draw his image or want to cartoon him in various ways out of unbelief.

And as we saw, the violent protests did not stop people from cartooning prophet Muhammed. In fact the protests by Muslims led to more cartoons, more printing and reprinting of the cartoons. I guess the way Muslims in Afghanistan reacted to the Koran burning in the US would make or might have made some people to burn or consider buring their copies of the Koran – in counter-protest.

So our Muslim friends should learn to tolerate anything they consider offensive to them or their religion. They should learn to register their anger or opposition in civilized ways without violence and bloodshed. Because some of these ideas, expressions or dissenting opinions which many Muslims consider offensive are actually bitter truths which are urgently needed to realize Islamic reformation, and the enlightenment and intellectual awakening of Muslims in this 21st century.

Sam Harris asks an interesting question in the introduction, after laying out his central (and not really controversial) claim that questions about values are questions about the well-being of conscious creatures. “Is it possible,” he asks, “that certain people are incapable of wanting what they should want?” Of course, he answers; there are always people who get things wrong. But that question doesn’t exhaust the difficulties that arise in moral discussion, yet Harris separates it out as if it did. The really hard question, which he generally gives short shrift, asks “is it possible that there are many people who are incapable of wanting what other people want?” In other words is it possible that many people do just fine at wanting what they should want for themselves and fail only at wanting what they should want for other people? Yes it is, and this is why the world is not a happy Utopia of people adding their bliss together to make a sum of Megabliss. The owl’s well-being is to eat the mouse, and the mouse’s well-being is to dodge the owl. We have an impasse.

It is surprising that Harris doesn’t put more emphasis on competition, on rivalry and scarcity and zero-sum games and prisoners’ dilemmas, on exploitation and labour and hierarchy, on the fact that more well-being for me is not the same as more well-being for you, let alone for everyone, and that this fact by itself is enough to make morality contentious and difficult. He does address these issues eventually, but not until well into the book, and then only briefly and somewhat perfunctorily. The emphasis is all on insistence that “the well-being of conscious creatures” is pretty much all we need to consider.

He does tell us some interesting things in the process, though, such as that “neuroimaging has also shown that fairness drives reward-related activity in the brain, while accepting unfair proposals requires the regulation of negative emotion.” That is a hopeful observation – but it is vulnerable to the familiar fact that humans are brilliant at rationalization, which means among other things that we know how to understand “fairness” in such a way that it maximizes our own well-being at the expense of other people. Tax-cuts for the super-rich make a tidy example of that, since one can view both sides of the debate as defining “fairness” in their own favor. (Michael Moore performed this dialectic in one of his films: on being told that his new book had just hit the New York Times best-seller list he said, “Oh! Well now I believe in tax-cuts for the rich.”)

The depressing truth that Harris never really confronts is that no one really wants to maximize the well-being of everyone. Economies depend on not doing so: cheap labour is the engine that drives various economic miracles and tigers. Lip service is paid to the idea of eradicating poverty, but meanwhile all sorts of visible and occult mechanisms make sure that there will always be plenty of poor people around. Rich countries subsidize their own cotton farmers at the expense of desperately poor African counterparts. Where is the brain reward for the feeling of fairness then? Africans are far away, and easy to ignore, so their immiseration doesn’t interfere with the well-being of prosperous Europeans.

This isn’t an issue of not understanding that morality is about the well-being of conscious creatures. It’s an issue of not caring, of selective attention, of studied ignorance, of institutions, regulations, habits, expertise – it’s a myriad of things. It’s easy to get people to agree that well-being is good; the hard part is getting them to agree on what that implies they should do, and getting them to do it.

Harris spends most of the book hammering home the point that morality is about the well-being of conscious creatures, which means he spends far too little time considering the difficult questions that arise even if everyone agrees on that. He also frequently treats those questions as easily settled, for instance when he says, “I think there is little doubt that most of what matters to the average person – like fairness, justice, compassion, and a general awareness of terrestrial reality – will be integral to our creating a thriving global civilization and, therefore, to the greater well-being of humanity”.

Almost halfway into the book he does suddenly admit the difficulty – “population ethics is a notorious engine of paradox, and no one, to my knowledge, has come up with a way of assessing collective well-being that conserves all of our intuitions”. He then quotes Patricia Churchland saying, “no one has the slightest idea how to compare the mild headache of five million against the broken legs of two…” Quite so, and this acknowledgement should have come much earlier and been woven into the discussion throughout. Because it isn’t, the first part of the argument seems much too quick and effortless. If it were that simple, the reader keeps thinking, why wouldn’t everyone just do it?

Introduction

Darwin’s Illness

Charles Darwin suffered from a persistent, debilitating illness for most of his adult life with a wide range of bizarre symptoms.[1] Attacks of nausea and vomiting were his most distressing complaint but he also experienced headaches, abdominal pains, ‘lumbago’, palpitations and chest pain, numbness and tingling in the fingers, sweating, heat and cold sensitivity, flushing and swelling of his face and extremities, eczema, recurrent boils, attacks of acute anxiety, a sensation of dying and hysterical crying. His abdominal symptoms were associated with much flatulence with the noisy expulsion of pungent gas both ‘upwards and downwards’. In addition to all of this he also suffered from episodes of severe lethargy when he was virtually confined to his sofa.

Apart from these major symptoms Darwin also occasionally vomited blood, he developed dental decay and skin pigmentation. The sea-sickness he experienced during the entire five year voyage of HMS Beagle was also part of his illness.[2] Apart from these very many troublesome symptoms Darwin also had mild dyslexia;[3] his sister habitually would correct his spelling [4] and like most dyslexics he had difficulty learning language  – Greek and Latin when at school and German in later life. With the dyslexia there is a frequent association of amusica – tone deafness, and Darwin was tone deaf.[5]

Darwin’s symptoms were certainly unusual but they had several even more unusual features:

= His illness was episodic and attacks were brought on by stressful events, even very minor stresses or pleasurable events such as the visits of friends. Perhaps the first of these attacks was after he attended two concerts in the one day, in Birmingham in 1829, when: ‘It knocked me up most dreadfully, & I will never attempt again to go to two things on the one day’.[6] Again in 1862, writing to Thomas Rivers (an expert on roses), he said: ‘… but I suffer severely from an ailment of a very peculiar kind, which prevents me from all mental excitement, which is always followed by spasmodic sickness, & I do not think I could stand conversation with you, which to me would be so full of enjoyment’.[7] In the same year three of his former shipmates from the Beagle came to visit him. ‘Two days ago three officers of the Beagle came here to dinner; I took every possible precaution, but it made me very ill with violent shaking and vomiting till early morning; & Could not even wish them goodbye next morning.’[8] Darwin declined a visit from the brother, John King of a former shipmate, Phillip Gidley King: ‘I grieve to say that my health is so indifferent, I cannot stand seeing at present anyone here. Twice lately I could not resist seeing old friends (once was when Wickham & Co came here) and the excitement made me so ill afterwards, that I have been advised not to do so again. I am well enough in the mornings and when I keep quiet.’[9]

= The vomiting occurred several hours after meals (not immediately, like bulimia), so that he vomited bilious fluid, not food. He may certainly have suffered from fluid and salt depletion but not from starvation – he seldom lost much weight.[10]

= His major symptoms had a reciprocal relationship to his eczema and to his ‘lumbago’ or ‘rheumatism’(fibromyalgia). He noted that when either of these conditions was bad his other symptoms improved. In a letter to Hooker in January 1864 he described how for five months he ‘had done nothing but be sick’. In the same letter he mentions how he ‘suddenly had a slight attack of rheumatism in my back & I instantly became almost well & so wonderfully strong that I walked to the Hothouse, which must be more than 100 yards’.[11]

= He obtained relief, at least initially, from hydrotherapy, ‘the Water-Cure’: ‘The Water Cure is assuredly a grand discovery & how sorry I am I did not hear of it, or rather that I was not somehow compelled to try it some five or six years ago.’[12]

Previous Diagnoses

More than 40 diagnoses for this illness have been proposed, a list beginning from when Darwin first showed symptoms of his ailment until the present day.[1] Many of these diagnoses can be dismissed as they were for conditions that are no longer recognised (‘aggravated dyspepsia’, ‘suppressed gout’) or for conditions that exist only in the realm of alternate medicine (‘pyroluria’, ‘candida overload’). Other suggested diagnoses that relate to his five-year voyage with the Beagle may also be crossed from the list as Darwin had definite symptoms before he sailed. These include exotic infections such as Chagas Disease,[13] malaria and brucellosis. The sickness that Darwin experienced at Valparaiso in 1834, during the voyage, was a separate illness, probably typhoid.[14] It was not the cause of his lifetime illness, as was suggested by Huxley.[15] The various gastrointestinal conditions that have been put forward as the cause of his illness (biliary disease, Crohn’s disease,[16] peptic ulceration) might explain some of Darwin’s symptoms but by no means all. Psychological or psychogenic suggested causes of his illness abound. None other than Sir George Pickering, Professor of Medicine in Oxford from 1956 until 1968, eloquently described Darwin’s illness as ‘polymorphous symptomatology’, but then he wrongly concluded that Darwin’s illness was psychogenic in nature: ‘The case for a psychoneurosis is first that the symptoms suggest it, and, taken in their entirety, they fit nothing else.’[14]

Darwin certainly had some of the conditions that have been proposed as the essential cause of his ailment such as multiple allergies,[3] panic attacks,[17] and other psychiatric symptoms but these were all an integral part of his illness, not the cause.

Other conditions such as dental decay and vomiting blood may be regarded as complications of his disorder; dental decay is seen in other chronic vomiting conditions such as bulimia and the hematemesis is a consequence of bruising or tearing of the lower oesophageal sphincter from forceful expulsion of gastric contents. His eczema has been reliably diagnosed as atopic dermatitis[18] but this diagnosis does not account for his other gastrointestinal and nervous symptoms. Patients with atopic dermatitis harbour staphylococci (Staph. pyogenes) in their skin both in the lesions and in apparently normal skin areas with the result that may develop recurrent staphylococcal skin abscesses (or boils).[19] His skin pigmentation was not the result of arsenical poisoning, as has been suggested,[20] but was a physiological response to increased ACTH and concomitant melanocyte stimulating hormone (MSH) secretion following salt and fluid loss.

Darwin’s mother died when Charles was eight; she appears to have had a similar illness having been dipped into the icy Irish Sea as a child ‘to cure her pukes and boils’. As an adult she was unable to ride in a carriage without being ill, had hyperemesis with her pregnancies and died at the relatively early age of 52 years with abdominal pains.[21]

Her younger brother Tom, Charles’ maternal uncle suffered severe headaches, abdominal pains and was confined to his cabin with seasickness on his one voyage to the West Indies, a journey taken in an attempt to improve his health.[22] He died with opium overdosage at the young age of 34.

Darwin’s Diagnosis

Darwin suffered from the Cyclical (or Cyclic) Vomiting Syndrome (CVS),[23] a little known but well described condition, first recognised in children, but one which may produce symptoms for the first time in early adult life.[24] The disorder may be related to mitochondrial dysfunction. Mitochondria in the human are entirely maternally inherited – the ovum contains many hundreds of mitochondria and the few mitochondria present in sperm are lost in the fertilized ovum. Where there is a maternal history of the disorder, as there was in the Darwin family, it is probable that the dysfunction is due to an inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) abnormality.[25]

An inherited mitochondrial disorder not only fully explains Darwin’s illness, it also explains the illness in Darwin’s mother and in his uncle Tom.

Mitochondria provide most of the energy for cellular function, producing ATP (adenosine triphosphate) from ADP (adenosine diphosphate), glucose and oxygen.[26] Regardless of the particular enzyme abnormality the end result is much the same – decreased ATP production. Mitochondria split during cell division and pass randomly to the daughter cells so that the proportion of normal to abnormal mitochondria may vary widely in subsequent cell generations (heteroplasmy). Variations early in embryogenesis lead to considerable heteroplasmy in different organs or tissues. As a result of this patients with the same mtDNA abnormality may have very different symptoms or may have no apparent symptoms at all. (These patients may have susceptibility to some drugs such as streptomycin, suffer post-viral chronic fatigue, have hyperemesis when pregnant, or have minor complaints such as the restless legs syndrome or increased susceptibility to motion sickness – but this is speculation.)

Patients diagnosed as having CVS also vary with their symptoms. Some have only occasional episodes of nausea and vomiting, others are severely incapacitated with additional symptoms of headaches, abdominal pain and severe lethargy. There may be coalescence of episodes with nausea and vomiting lasting for weeks or months.[24] Others experience noxious flatulence, symptoms of fibromyalgia, and suffer from eczema. Panic episodes may occur at the beginning or during an attack; some patients have panic episodes at times when they have no other symptoms. Some experience severe motion sickness to the extent that they cannot watch television with rapidly changing or moving scenes; one mother reported that she was unable to watch her children on a swing in the playground. Many have heat or cold intolerance and find great difficulty in finding a comfortable temperature.

Attacks may be brought on by stressful events, particularly positive stresses such as the anticipation of a holiday. Attacks are more common at Christmas and in America at Thanksgiving. Like Darwin, many patients experience relief from water exposure and spend long hours under a shower during attacks.[27]

Pathophysiological Ruminations

Many of the symptoms of Darwin’s illness and those of patients who have CVS today, such as the headache, fatigue, muscle pain and palpitations, may be explained by the concept of mitochondrial failure – the mitochondria in cells that have high energy requirements (such as neurones, cardiac and skeletal muscle cells) are simply failing to meet the energy requirements of those cells. When glycolysis is inadequate ATP is produced along with lactic acid by anaerobic metabolism, a much less efficient mechanism and the lactic acidosis resulting may be responsible for some symptoms. A further mechanism is the conversion of two molecules of ADP to one of ATP and one of AMP (adenosine monophosphate). AMP is catabolized and the ADP is not immediately regenerated so that reserves of the source of ATP are lost, providing a mechanism for persistent fatigue.

Other symptoms, such as the vomiting, flatulence, abdominal pain, heat and cold intolerance may originate from cells of the neuroendocrine system. This system has two components, a central in the brain, and a peripheral, with cells in various endocrine organs including the islets of the pancreas and in the epithelium of the gut and bronchi. The system has a long evolutionary history, evolving before the nervous system with which it is closely associated.[28] The cells of this system are characterised by possessing neurosecretory granules, complex granules containing the secretory product of the cell that have a high osmolality and are highly acidic.[29] They also contain a high concentration of ATP that maintains the stability of the granule, reducing osmotic pressure by linking the secretory molecules and reducing acidity by acting as a buffering agent. If ATP is deficient the granules are likely to be unstable and hormone secretion variable or inadequate.

Numerous differing peptide hormones are present in the granules of different cells including insulin, its antagonist glucagon, secretory agents such as gastrin, a pain perceptor, substance P and a general inhibitory agent, somatostatin. Briefly, if secretion of an activator is adequate but an antagonist, such as somatostatin, is deficient, then symptoms will result.

The effectiveness of the ‘water cure’ in Darwin’s case may have had two different but not incompatible mechanisms. Firstly, it may have provided reflex vagal stimulation and by this means reduced his abdominal symptoms.[30] The vagus, or 10^th cranial nerve, is a complex nerve with sensory, motor and autonomic components, again with a long evolutionary history. It is stimulated by water on the face or body and its autonomic function, among other effects, relaxes the antral region of the stomach.

Secondly, there may have been psychological factors involved. We know that Darwin’s episodes of sickness were brought on by minor stress, even by pleasurable events. The water cure, particularly at the beginning, was carried out in resorts where, apart from the excruciating treatments, there was very little stimulation. Darwin sought this treatment when he was persistently ill when dissecting and classifying barnacles (Cirripedia). Darwin wrote to his friend and mentor, John Henslow: ‘One of the most singular effects of the treatment is that it includes in most people and eminently in my case, the most complete stagnation of mind. I have ceased to think even of barnacles.[31]

Apart from his numerous symptoms, symptoms all of which occur today in patients with CVS,[27] Darwin had several other, rather sinister symptoms. He had several episodes of transient paralysis and memory loss, greatly worrying his family.[32] They could reasonably be described as ‘stroke- like’ episodes. These are characteristic of the MELAS syndrome; MELAS is another disorder known to regularly associated with mitochondrial dysfunction; MELAS is an acronym for Mitochondrial Encephalopathy, Lactic Acidosis and Stroke-like episodes. Lactic acid was unknown in Darwin’s time and was certainly not measured but, given Darwin’s other symptoms, it would surely have been elevated during his periods of illness. Other symptoms are muscle weakness, muscle pain, headaches and vomiting – all of which Darwin certainly had. The MELAS syndrome has been shown to be associated with a mitochondrial gene mutation designated A3243G mutation; the same mutation has been shown to be present in some cases of CVS.[33] As Darwin had evidence of both the CVS and MELAS syndromes it is a reasonable guess that he in fact had the A3243G mutation.

Epilogue

The name Cyclical Vomiting Syndrome is not an attractive name; like the disorder that may have the same background aetiology, the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, it is not a name that immediately attracts great sympathy for the sufferers. Furthermore it is not a name that will attract research funding, and research into this group of conditions is badly needed. Importantly also it emphasises only one aspect, albeit the principle aspect of the disease, the vomiting, and the other abdominal, nervous and psychological features of the disorder are not suggested in the title. Another term that has been proposed, ‘Mitochondrial Cytopathy’, appears too vague and is possibly inaccurate as it suggests that the cell cytosol is disordered rather than the function of one type of organelle in that cytoplasm.

A new term, ‘Intermittent Mitochondrial Failure’ (IMF) is suggested. This assumes that the causation is always in these organelles, which may not be correct, but is sufficiently broad to take in the whole range of symptoms that may occur with this group of disorders. Intermittent Mitochondrial Failure could be linked with ‘Persistent (or Permanent) Mitochondrial Failure’ (PMF) to encompass coalescent episodes of CVS, chronic conditions such as unrelenting and chronic fatigue and the severe mitochondrial disorders of childhood. As an acronym, IMF is more likely to attract attention and sympathy; a disorder termed ‘IMF’ should also draw in research funding.

Regardless of the name, Darwin would be pleased with the diagnosis. A mitochondrial disorder does not explain his wife’s illnesses or the illnesses of his children but it does provide an explanation for almost all of his own symptoms. His seasickness and recurrent boils are explained, and even, if somewhat tenuously, we now know why Darwin had difficulty in learning German. If the diagnosis is accepted, 150 years from the first symptoms of an illness to a correct identification may be something of a record.

1.         Colp, R., Jr, Darwin’s Illness. 2008, Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

2.         Darwin, C., Voyage of the Beagle. 1839, London: Henry Colburn.

3.         Smith, F., Charles Darwin. J Hist Biol, 1990. 23(3): p. 443-59.

4.         Darwin, S.E. (1835) Letter 288 — Darwin, S. E. to Darwin, C. R.,. Darwin Correspondence Project Database. http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-288/ (letter no. 288; accessed 8 December 2010).

5.         Barlow, N., The autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882, with original omissions restored. 1958, London: Collins.

6.         Darwin, C.R. (1829) Letter 73 — Darwin, C. R. to Fox, W. D. Darwin Correspondence Project Database. http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-73/ (letter no. 73; accessed 29 September 2010)

7.         Darwin, C.R. (1862) Letter 3879 — Darwin, C. R. to Rivers, Thomas. Darwin Correspondence Project Database. http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-3879 (letter no. 3879; accessed 12 April 2011).

8.         Darwin, C.R. (1862) Letter 3779 — Darwin, C. R. to Lubbock, John. Darwin Correspondence Project Database. http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-3779 (letter no. 3779; accessed 12 April 2011).

9.         Darwin, C.R. (1862) Letter 3809 — Darwin, C. R. to King, P. G. Darwin Correspondence Project Database. http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-3809 (letter no. 3809; accessed 12 April 2011).

10.       Darwin, E.W. and H. Litchfield, Emma Darwin : a century of family letters, 1792-1896. London, John Murray. 1915, Biodiversity Heritage Library /www.archive.org/details/emmadarwincentur02litc (accessed16 February 2011).

11.       Darwin, C.R. (1864) Letter 4397 — Darwin, C. R. to Hooker, J. D. Darwin Correspondence Project Database. http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-4397/ (letter no. 4397; accessed 8 December 2010).

12.       Darwin, C.R. (1849) Letter 1249 — Darwin, C. R. to Fox, W. D. Darwin Correspondence Project Database. http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-1249/ (letter no. 1249; accessed 8 December 2010).

13.       Adler, S., Darwin’s Illness. Nature, 1959. 184(Oct 10): p. 1102-1103.

14.       Pickering, G., Creative Malady. 1974, New York: Oxford University Press.

15.       Huxley, T.H., Obituary notice: Charles Robert Darwin. . Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 1888. 44(269): p. 1-25.

16.       Orrego, F. and C. Quintana, Darwin’s illness: a final diagnosis. Notes Rec R Soc Lond, 2007. 61(1): p. 23-9.

17.       Barloon, T.J. and R. Noyes, Jr., Charles Darwin and panic disorder. JAMA, 1997. 277(2): p. 138-41.

18.       Sauer, G.C., Charles Darwin consults a dermatologist. Int J Dermatol, 2000. 39(6): p. 474-8.

19.       Aly, R., H.I. Maibach, and H.R. Shinefield, Microbial flora of atopic dermatitis. Arch Dermatol, 1977. 113(6): p. 780-2.

20.       Winslow, J.H., Darwin’s Victorian Malady. Evidence for its Medically Induced Origin. Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society. Vol. 88. 1971, Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.

21.       Healey, E., Emma Darwin: The Inspirational Wife of a Genius. 2001, London: Headline Book Publishing.

22.       Wedgwood, B. and H. Wedgwood, The Wedgwood Circle 1730-1897. 1980, London: Macmillan Publishing Co.

23.       Hayman, J.A., Darwin’s illness revisited. BMJ, 2009. 339: p. b4968.

24.       Fleisher, D.R., et al., Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome in 41 adults: the illness, the patients, and problems of management. BMC Med, 2005. 3: p. 20.

25.       Boles, R.G., K. Adams, and B.U. Li, Maternal inheritance in cyclic vomiting syndrome. Am J Med Genet A, 2005. 133A(1): p. 71-7.

26.       Cohen, B.H. and D.R. Gold, Mitochondrial cytopathy in adults: what we know so far. Cleve Clin J Med, 2001. 68(7): p. 625-6, 629-42.

27.       Cyclic Vomiting Association (2010) Forums. http://cvsa.websitetoolbox.com/.

28.       Hartenstein, V., The neuroendocrine system of invertebrates: a developmental and evolutionary perspective. J Endocrinol, 2006. 190(3): p. 555-70.

29.       Payne, C.M., Phylogenetic considerations of neurosecretory granule contents: role of nucleotides and basic hormone/transmitter packaging mechanisms. Arch Histol Cytol, 1989. 52 Suppl: p. 277-92.

30.       Andrews, P.L. and T. Scratcherd, The gastric motility patterns induced by direct and reflex excitation of the vagus nerves in the anaesthetized ferret. J Physiol, 1980. 302: p. 363-78.

31.       Darwin, C.R. (1849) Letter 1241 — Darwin, C. R. to Henslow, J. S. Darwin Correspondence Project Database. http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-1241/ (letter no. 1241; accessed 9 December 2010)

32.       Jones, H.B. (1867) Letter 5639 — Jones, H. B. to Darwin, Emma. Darwin Correspondence Project Database. http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-5639/ (letter no. 5639; accessed 9 December 2010)

33.       Salpietro, C.D., et al., A mitochondrial DNA mutation (A3243G mtDNA) in a family with cyclic vomiting. Eur J Pediatr, 2003. 162(10): p. 727-8.

Today, the great wave of postmodernist and poststructuralist academic writing, with its epistemological relativism and obfuscating rhetoric, has largely subsided.  It may never disappear, as few things do, and it may have become so thoroughly embedded in certain disciplines as to color them for the foreseeable future.  However, the vogue for “discourses” and “hermeneutics” has largely passed its prime, and disciplines which once felt themselves to be engaged in a life-or-death struggle with the new wave of academics (anthropology, history, e.g.) now seem to be regaining their footing and reclaiming a scientific basis. 

History cannot be written if we do not believe that any one narrative of the past is more “true” than another, or that it is possible, despite the inevitable prejudice and short-sightedness of the human mind, to gain a rough understanding of what actually occurred in history and why.  Of course, this is not an argument against the postmodernists.  Whether or not historians can justify their salaries has no bearing on the truth or falsehood of the postmodernist’s claims.  What it does mean, however, is that there can be no such thing as a truly postmodernist history, for such a history would have no reason to claim its narrative of events was worth reading over any other, or more “true” than any other book on the subject.  And the only reason academic presses churn out books year after year is in the hope, after all, that they contribute to the general store of knowledge in society. 

Despite their apparent contradictions, however, postmodern histories have been written.  This article deals with one such attempt, The Witch in History (1996) by Diane Purkiss.  The work is a perfect representative sample of postmodern history because it (a) is not written by a historian, and (b) does not make use of historical evidence to prove its point (beyond three briefly dissected reports of early modern witch-trials).  Purkiss dismisses the vast body of literature on English witchcraft which preceded her with facile psychological analyses of eminent historians such as Keith Thomas, Alan Macfarlane, and Norman Cohn, whom she accuses of being enthralled to Enlightenment scruples and possibly misogynistic in their treatment of witchcraft.  Keith Thomas’ 800-plus-page masterpiece, Religion and the Decline of Magic, covers the entire early modern period of English history and contains innumerable references to the entire corpus of witch trial records that are available to us.  Purkiss dismisses it not on the grounds of historical fact or interpretation (her three trials are not offered in refutation of Thomas, apart from a snide parenthetical remark which mentions him by name [1]) but rather on the grounds of Thomas’ alleged Enlightenment bias, which is defined as necessarily male and elitist by Purkiss. 

Implied and sometimes explicitly stated throughout the book is the notion that witchcraft might have truly existed, that we cannot discount the role of the supernatural in history, and that the early modern view of magic is no less “true,” necessarily, than our own, for nothing, after all, can be established objectively, if one ascribes to Purkiss’ philosophy.

To refute the limited historical arguments of Purkiss’ work is not hard to do, and Thomas’ magisterial work stands as its own defense.  Besides, Purkiss’ book was written more than a decade ago now and often reads like a period piece of sorts—a mixing of all the fads of the academic culture of the ‘90s which seemed shocking and groundbreaking at the time but now seem thoroughly vapid.  Why, then, should we return to it now?  What use is there is refuting a book that has already been discredited and a fad that has already long since fizzled out?

My answer is essentially that the book’s subject matter, witchcraft, remains a matter of life and death in many parts of the world, and that the old battles of the skeptics and the witch-hunters must be revisited and replayed as long as there are any intellectuals who defend the possibility that witchcraft might really exist.  The mere fact that in the recent past the Academy was host to theories such as those of Purkiss is cause for concern. 

Of course, Purkiss is not a defender of the witch-hunters, simply of their epistemological worldview.  Witchcraft may have existed, village women in the early modern period may have exhibited supernatural powers, she claims, but they should not have been killed for it.  However, it is not much of a stretch to say that to argue that witchcraft and magic exist is to empower those who persecute people in the name of stamping them out. 

Today, a belief in witches persists in many parts of the world, including the United States.  Recent Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell even felt the need to go on television to insist that she was not a witch, although she dabbled in Wicca as a teenager.  Even in the twenty-first century, it would seem, we Americans need this type of assurance (although I suppose with Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin in one place, the Tea Party is starting to look like a “Witch’s Sabbath” in its own right).

Less comically, witchcraft accusations are often the basis of collective violence in Sub-Saharan Africa and Saudi Arabia (where the state still officially recognizes witchcraft as a crime).  The tragic persecution of Albinos in Tanzania and elsewhere, particularly children, is generally tied to witch beliefs.  The body parts of murdered Albinos are often used by witchdoctors for their supposed “magical” properties, as documented by Amnesty International [2], which has led to an underground trade in such gruesome artifacts and the kidnapping and murder of innumerable people.  While the government of Tanzania has cracked down on such violence (often with methods nearly as brutal as that of the criminals [3]), other African nations, such as the Gambia, have wedded the coercive apparatus of the modern state to ancient witch beliefs with deadly results.  In 2009, Amnesty International documented the kidnapping and forced drugging of over 1000 people, most of them elderly women, in a literal government witch-hunt [4].

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that any avowal that witchcraft might exist, whatever its intentions, provides legitimation for this sort of injustice.  The “discourse” that states that Albino body parts make for good magical amulets is not a perfectly acceptable alternative to the “discourse” of scientific Enlightenment, with its naturalistic world-view and emphasis on human rights.  The one is not only deadly but demonstrably false; the other is the only force which allows us to successfully defend the victims of social paranoia and collective delusion.

This is the most important reason for arguing against Purkiss, even at this late date.  The other is that Purkiss’ book, whatever its relative insignificance as a single volume, can be used as a stand-in for a wide-variety of new forces which in the last thirty years or so have challenged history as a discipline and made the task of discovering objective truth in the past much more difficult.  The phenomenon has been dealt with at length elsewhere by a variety of historians: see Richard Evans’ In Defense of History and Eric Hobsbawm’s lecture on “The New Threat to History” [5] for some of the best accounts of the problem. 

We can, however, offer the broad outlines of what took place.  Following the postmodern left’s demolition of the notion of objective truth in the past, various nationalist, chauvinist and identity-group histories have appeared, all benefitting from the general relaxation of empirical standards in history.  History may never be an exact science, but in the past, it was taken for granted that it would be conducted within a certain methodological framework.  After this framework was ridiculed by the postmodernists, it was only a matter of time before Hindu nationalists in India would start removing all mention of the caste system and the cultural achievements of the Mughal rulers from school textbooks, identity groups would begin falsifying the record of history to suit the interests of group members, and so on.  Today, the American Right has caught on in a big way to the advantages of making up history as one pleases: it can be seen offering a steady stream of historical obfuscation and misinformation, all of it in popular texts like Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism which reach a much wider audience than any scholarly histories ever could. 

The new rules of history, with their tendency to dismiss one’s opponents without debate and denigrate one’s colleagues on the basis of spurious personal or political accusations, certainly originated on the Left.  But they have now, predictably, been picked up by the Right as the perfect excuse for self-congratulatory escapism.  They offer a way of cleansing the record of whatever nation, religion, or culture group they seek to apologize for. 

Because Purkiss’ book belongs to the period and the movement which bequeathed to us this enormous historical catastrophe, we are justified in returning to it now and attempting to undo some of the damage it has wrought.

Purkiss is chiefly arguing against those “skeptical narratives which divided modernity from the rural past, and scientific skill from supernatural and providential narrations.”  In other words, she is opposed to the Enlightenment narrative that stresses a growing awareness of scientific fact in the modern world and a displacement of earlier “magical” paradigms.  She claims that “such narratives did great violence to the actual stories told by early modern people” [6].  That is, by denying the truth claims of the villagers who claimed that Mrs. So-and-So had given them the Evil Eye and that Mr. X had turned into a toad and back again (as one freely-given English confession maintained [7]), modern historians who doubt the plausibility of witchcraft and the supernatural are belittling early modern people and their view of the world.  They are offering an elitist version of events which discounts the views of those ordinary people in favor of scientific rationality.  And how arrogant of them, after all, when everyone knows that truth is relative and that there is no such thing as objective fact!  Purkiss everywhere places the word “truth” in question-begging quotation marks, saying for instance that she is not particularly “interested in the ‘truth’ of various figurations of the witch” [8].  Empiricism, and the whole notion of truth itself, she claims, is justly “under attack from both poststructuralist theory and postmodern reality” [9]. 

Purkiss is blissfully unaware of the many inconsistencies into which this position forces her.  She is perfectly happy, for instance, to quote historical facts and statistics when they serve the purpose of her argument.  If she doesn’t believe these facts to be “true,” then how can she use them to buttress her claims?  She describes herself as a feminist historian, yet among her rhetorical enemies are the “radical feminists” of the 1970s, who preceded Purkiss’ more advanced form of feminism, dared to insist on certain “eternal verities” rather than postmodern relativism, and took a hard-line stance against pornography, a position which Purkiss seems to regard as self-evidently absurd.  The chief antagonist here is Barbara Ehrenreich’s Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, a book which offers “clear oppositions” between misogynistic witch-hunters in the Inquisition and innocent healers and midwives, persecuted for their secret feminine knowledge which was threatening to the elites of the time [10].  Ehrenreich’s narrative certainly deserves to be challenged on historical grounds, as Purkiss proceeds to do.  She points to the fact that there was no necessary or statistically significant correlation between midwives and those persecuted for witchcraft.  She also points out that the Spanish Inquisition was actually comparatively lenient in dealing with witchcraft cases [11], though as another historian has pointed out, this was generally because they were so busy persecuting Jews and Moors that they were content to leave the witches to the secular authorities! [12].

These are all legitimate uses of historical evidence and constitute a clear contribution to an ongoing historical debate.  However, why Purkiss should appeal to facts here when she supposedly does not believe they exist is less clear, unless one attributes it to sheer unabashed inconsistency.

Purkiss’ argument ultimately seems to be that the factual accuracy of any historical claim is irrelevant: what matters is the emotional satisfaction it provides.  Feminist historians may, according to her, use the figure of the witch to fill their own emotional needs, but so too do male historians who write on the subject [13].  These, she laments, dominate the field of English witchcraft studies, in which no female scholar has written a major study [14].

Purkiss’ chief objects of scorn are Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane, whom she forgivably lumps together as representing the currently orthodox position in English witchcraft studies.  These two worked closely with and influenced one another, and were among the first historians to apply anthropological methods to the study of the past, particularly the work of social anthropologists such as E.E. Evans-Pritchard on the phenomenon of witchcraft.  Less forgivably, Purkiss accuses these historians of having in their work “created a narcissistic myth, which shapes them as skeptical empiricists, confirming their academic identities”[15].  This is the “hidden agenda” [16] of academic work in the field: to portray early modern people as primitive and gullible and thereby elevate the historian to the status of heroic crusader for enlightenment.

Of course, every historian has personal motives for investigating a certain region of the past.   No doubt many historians of witchcraft are drawn to the subject out of compassion for the victims of the persecution and disgust with the bigotry of the time.  To tell the stories of the otherwise forgotten victims of past injustices, to rescue the poor and oppressed from what E.P. Thompson once called “the enormous condescension of posterity,” is one of the most important moral tasks of the historian.  If some historians would like to ease the burden of painstaking research that must go into such endeavors by reminded themselves of the limited sort of heroism to which they can lay claim, this should not surprise or bother us.

However, this is very different from saying that the mere existence of these personal motives nullifies the claim to scientific accuracy of the historian, as Purkiss does.  Not only is she intensely presumptuous in her claim to be able to divine the motives of Thomas and Macfarlane in their writing of history, she also offers absolutely no historical evidence to question their statements.  The mere fact of their being male empiricists is enough in her eyes to make them guilty by association.  Most outrageously, given Keith Thomas’ outspoken feminism, Purkiss implicitly accuses the two historians of misogyny.  She comes up time and again with bizarre statements like this one: “Enlightenment thought… has always offered a way to seize and clutch and penetrate the mystery of the feminine otherness” [17].  We are left with an image of the bookish, near-sighted Keith Thomas as the unforgiving rapist of the early modern period. 

Reginald Scot, the early modern skeptic and opponent of witch-hunting, is portrayed by Purkiss as a hero to Thomas, for he echoed Thomas’ variety of misogyny.  He too doubted the supernatural power of elderly village women and claimed that such women were probably just batty old things rather than witches—that they most likely suffered from mental illness rather than demonic possession.  Purkiss bemoans the fact that Thomas takes a similar view of the women accused of witchcraft.  He portrays them as most often victims of mental illness—poor, maligned, cast out, and victimized by village society—certainly not supernatural entities capable of calling on Satanic powers.  Purkiss, however, finds this view sexist.  “Where [Thomas, Scot, etc.] deny the witch all supernatural power, [they also] deny her all social and cultural power” [18]. 

Of course, the blunt fact of the matter is that most women accused of witchcraft did not have any social or cultural power to start with: it was their powerlessness which left them open to victimization.  To make this point is not sexist any more than it is a form of class discrimination to say that the poor and victimized are indeed poor and victimized.  Thomas describes long-standing village beliefs in the efficacy of verbal cursing, a practice which often became the only means available to poor old people and beggars of exacting revenge on society [19].  The sight of such lonely old folk muttering anathemas under their breath played on social fears: it was no great leap from this to the notion that such people must be witches and that they ought to be persecuted.  Thomas also systematically documents the motives of those men and women who freely confessed to acts of witchcraft rather than being forced to do so under torture.  All of them were incredibly poor, and all profoundly disaffected and alienated from the society around them.  Many poor folk were simply drawn to the Devil by the promise of measly material rewards (one woman claimed to have sold her soul to the Devil for two and sixpence [20]).  For all such individuals, the Devil had a sort of “subjective reality.”  He was a way of personifying their own evil thoughts and feelings of worthlessness, of giving their execration of society tangible form [21]. 

The examples offered by Thomas are copious enough and do not need repeating, especially since Purkiss shows no sign of actually doubting Thomas’ research on any point.  All of this adds up to a very weak and unconvincing argument on Purkiss’ part.  I wonder if Keith Thomas was ever even made aware of the bizarre scouring his personal life and motivations received in this book—it did not, to my knowledge, provoke much scholarly reaction or interest when it appeared.  Richard Evans makes use of it, in his In Defense of History, as a representative sample of postmodernist balderdash, but other than that, the book was hardly taken seriously.

Of course, I can hear Purkiss’ objections now were she to read this article.  One sentence of her book leapt out at me as I was researching this article and struck a note with my guilty conscience: “Historians of witchcraft,” she writes, “often set themselves up via the ritual slaughter of a rival academic who has allowed herself to become indivisible from witch-beliefs” [22]. 

Of course, Purkiss has herself become indivisible from witch-beliefs.  And though I’m hardly a rival academic to anyone, I can easily imagine the sort of pseudo-psychological dissection Purkiss would give my foregoing article. She would no doubt see me as another would-be Enlightenment hero trying to combat “feminine” irrationality.

Every closed system of thought has its own means of turning any criticism against itself.  Just as Stalinists were once in the habit of accusing their critics of being motivated exclusively by class prejudice, postmodern relativists are able to absorb all criticism because they make no effort to refute it—they simply claim to divine the hidden sexist or racist agenda of the critic and thereby render everything she says irrelevant and senseless. 

The essence of a closed system of thought is that it can neither be proven nor refuted: such is the case with relativism.  It thrives on circular logic and turns all possible refutations back in upon themselves.  We cannot hope to ever argue relativism out of existence, because ultimately, we cannot prove that our knowledge of the world is accurate.  We could simply be imaginary critters in the solipsistic brain of some demon who has thought us into existence—who knows? 

What we do know is that Enlightenment rationality offers a way of ordering our experiences in a way that is useful.  It is also capable of changing and reshaping the worldview it provides in response to new information.  Relativism and other closed systems of thought can do no such thing, by definition. 

We also know that to undo the work of Enlightenment rationality, and to reopen the door to the possibility of the truth of witchcraft and supernatural power, is to play a dangerous game.  Open that door too far, and one lets in a host of unwanted reminders of the past: the witch-doctors and Inquisitors, the torturers and kidnappers: in a word, all those tormenters of the innocent, poor, and socially maligned who in the West we take to be a relic of the past.  We should take the time to remember that they still exist to this day wherever a widespread belief in the reality of witchcraft persists.

REFERENCES

[1] Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History (Routledge 1996), 95.

[2] http://www.amnestyusa.org/all-countries/tanzania/page.do?id=1011252

[3] http://www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?id=ENGNAU2009110313864&lang=e

[4]  http://www.amnesty.org/en/for-media/press-releases/gambia-hundreds-accused-%E2%80%9Cwitchcraft%E2%80%9D-and-poisoned-government-campaign-20

[5] E.J. Hobsbawm, “The New Threat to History,” The New York Review of Books. December 16, 1993.

[6] Purkiss, 3

[7] Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1971), 517.

[8] Purkiss, 10

[9] ibid, 61.

[10] ibid, 8.

[11] ibid.

[12] H.R. Trevor-Roper, “The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ” in Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (Macmillan, 1967), 111.

[13] Purkiss, 10

[14] ibid, 59.

[15] ibid, 60.

[16] ibid, 61.

[17] ibid, 63.

[18] ibid, 66.

[19] Thomas, 509.

[20] ibid, 520-21.

[21] ibid.

[22] Purkiss, 62.

I have been asking myself this question for some time but I have now decided to ask it out loud following the chilling news coming out of Afghanistan. The news is not something new. It has become a recurrent feature in many Islamic countries.

Yes, my question is this – which one is more valuable to our muslim friends – is it the Koran, or human life? Is it Islamic piety or respect for this one life we have? Is it this real temporary life in this world or the imaginary eternal life in the hereafter?

Because it is now confirmed that at least 10 more people have been killed and over 45 injured in Southern Afghanistan during a protest by muslims against the burning of the Koran in the US.  Some UN workers were among those beheaded by Muslim protesters – who I guess are now expecting bountiful reward from Allah when they die!

I think, given the evolutionary stage of Muslim pride, patience, temper, comportment and sensibility, to burn a copy of the Koran is provocative. But that is not a justification for this madness and senseless bloodletting by Islamic mobs. Personally I have followed with utmost shock and disgust the violent reactions of Muslims in Nigeria, Africa, the Middle East and Europe, to anything that they consider provocative or offensive or as they often say ‘an insult to Islam’. Muslims easily resort to killing, maiming, destruction and bloodshed to register their anger, opposition and objection to an issue. And in the course of protesting against the burning of a Koran in the US, they beheaded UN workers and killed other persons. While I really do not support anyone burning the Koran (I think rather that the Koran should  be critically evaluated, revised, or be re-written or be seen and read as a piece of ancient literature), I dont think such an act should warrant anyone beheading people or shedding human blood in protest. What is the connection between the person who burnt the Koran in the US and those killed in Afghanistan by the protesters? None. Will the blood shed in Afghanistan restore the Koran burnt in the US? No. A copy of the Koran burnt – even a thousand copies burnt – can be replaced, but those lives wasted by these bigots cannot be ‘replaced’.

It has become the case that the mere act of cartooning Prophet Muhammad or making some innocuous comment about his love life or criticizing the Koran has caused Muslims to riot and rampage across the world leaving death, destruction and blood in their wake. These violent reactions are expressions and manifestions of the prevailing mindset in Islamic societies. It is a clear sign that all is not well with how most Muslims are brought up in this 21st century. Surely Muslims have the right to protest or to march in demostration of whatever they oppose or disapprove of – whether it is the burning of the Koran or the cartooning of the ‘Allah’s messenger’. But they should not in the course of doing that deny others their rights, as is often the case – as it is in this case.  So this idea of Muslims always resorting to killing and beheading to express their anger or Islamic offence should be condemned and not condoned by the civilized world. Such criminal acts should not go unpunished. Today, the civilized world should be able to tell Islamic societies to their face: ‘Enough is enough’. Enough of this outrageous behaviour. Enough of this distortion of human values. Enough of this religious madness. Enough of this nonsense and bloodshed. Enough of this mob action and fanatical hatred.

The Islamic world must purge itself of this fanatical strand which has alienated it from the civilized world and made life ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ for its people. The Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) should wake up from its slumber and take up this task of self renewal. The OIC should abandon the jihad it is championing at the UN through the infamous resolution on the defamation of religion (Islam). The OIC should strive and get all Islamic countries to attach more value to human life and the human being, than to the Koran.

That recycled accounts of events or reports frequently contain inaccuracies going beyond anything in the original is a phenomenon well documented in the psychological literature.[1] I recently happened upon an extreme example of this, made more notable by the fact it occurs in an issue of the highly respected magazine, National Geographic – though not, I hasten to add, the familiar English-language publication. The article in question was published in the Hungarian National Geographic in 2005, the “Einstein Year” centenary of the publication of Einstein’s celebrated 1905 articles in Annalen der Physik. It pays tribute to several individuals whom it describes as “forgotten Hungarian collaborators” with Einstein, albeit that in the next paragraph it is acknowledged that for the most part they were not actually of Hungarian origin. Pride of place is given to Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Marić, whose birthplace was Titel in Serbia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The most remarkable paragraph is the following:[2]

Maric didn’t just simply enter into the history of science as Einstein’s wife, but as a mathematician who definitely developed the general theory of relativity together with Einstein. When the first scientific paper was written about this, originally they were both shown as authors, at the last minute, however, Einstein crossed out his wife’s name on the manuscript. When the editor of the scientific paper asked him why did he do this, Einstein answered: “Wir sind ein Stein.” That is, playing with his own name, “one stone”, which is how he categorised the pair of them.

The basic factual errors here include that the paper in question was Einstein’s exposition of his general theory of relativity (which actually came a decade later) and the assertion that Marić was a mathematician, as well as the false claim that she co-authored the paper.[3] But most remarkable is the central story itself, a garbled version of what was originally itself a tall story. This report of Einstein’s supposedly explaining why he took Marić’s name off the paper originates from a passage (with no references supplied) in Trbuhović-Gjurić’s biography of Marić,[4], translated as follows by Santa Troemel-Ploetz in her 1990 article in Women’s Studies International Forum:[5]

Together with Paul Habicht she [Marić] worked at the construction of a machine for measuring very small currents by way of multiplication. It took a long time, not only because she had so much to do [Einstein’s mathematical problems, ST-P], but also because of her thoroughness and perfectionism. She had already distinguished herself in the physics lab in Zurich. When both she and Habicht were satisfied with the results, they left it to Albert Einstein, as patent expert, to describe the apparatus.

This relates to an electrical device that Einstein developed with his friend Paul Habicht, who had just started a small instrument-making workshop, in the period 1907-1911, the progress of which can be followed by numerous letters exchanged between the pair. While Marić may have assisted in the testing at some stage, there is no mention of her in the correspondence, and no evidence she played any appreciable role in either the theory or the construction of the device.[6]

Trbuhović-Gjurić concludes her account, in relation to the fact that device was patented under the name “Einstein-Habicht”, as follows:

When one of the Habicht brothers asked why she had not given her own name to the application for the patent, she answered: What for, we are both only one stone (“Ein Stein”). Then Habicht also decided to give only his last name.

Again, no reference is supplied for this unlikely story, which is undoubtedly an example of the folklore passed down the generations by one or other of the proud folk of Novi Sad (the Marić family’s home town), recorded by Trbuhović-Gjurić in the 1960s. That this story should end up in a reputable magazine as if it related to the 1905 special relativity paper, with the words put into Einstein’s mouth, serves to illustrate just how unreliable are hearsay stories,[7] especially when related by interested parties.

The Hungarian National Geographic article continues with more dubious contentions:

Marić most likely helped Einstein to develop the mathematical principles, since he wasn’t really an expert in this science, as he was a physicist. Another argument also supporting Marić being the co-author is that Einstein was not the first to discover the theory of relativity, as there were two mathematicians before him, one being the famous French Poincaré who also published a similar theory. These theories were published in mathematical papers, – this is why the world did not get to know about them -, and it is doubtful that Einstein himself would have been reading mathematical papers, it is more likely that Marić knew these journals. The role of Marić however still has to be clarified by science historians, and many questions remain to be solved by them in this area.

Now Marić failed the Zurich Polytechnic physics and mathematics teaching diploma examinations in 1900 almost certainly as a consequence of her very poor grade in the mathematical component (theory of functions), only 2.5 on a scale 1-6.[8] (None of the other four candidates in the group got less than 5.5.) Yet here we are told not only (absurdly) that Einstein was not competent to handle the conventional mathematics he used for the special relativity paper (which would not stretch a first year university physics student), but that Marić’s mathematical talents were such that she would have been reading mathematical journals and reporting on them to Einstein. In addition the remarks about precursors to Einstein’s special relativity theory are ill-informed and misleading.

The above garbled report of an original story that is itself highly dubious perfectly illustrates how untrustworthy are Trbuhović-Gjurić’s third or fourth hand reports of Marić’s supposed contributions to Einstein’s work obtained from friends and acquaintances of the Marić family some sixty years after the events in question. (In her influential 1990 article Troemel-Ploetz treats these reports with extraordinary credulity.)

The misinformation in wide circulation on this topic is exemplified by a statement in the 2008-2009 Europa Diary, distributed to 23,000 schools in the European Union and with a print run of 3 million copies:[9]

Did you know? Mileva Marić, Einstein’s first wife, confidant and colleague – and co-developer of his Theory of Relativity – was born in what is now Serbia.

So, despite the detailed refutations of the story that Marić collaborated with Einstein on his celebrated 1905 papers by several historians of physics,[10] huge numbers of schoolchildren throughout the European Union (and their teachers) will no doubt have taken this as historical fact. Yet the purported evidence for it is based on poor scholarship, recycled by equally flawed articles or books.[11]

Unfortunately erroneous assertions, albeit on a lesser scale, may be found in the writings of highly respected authors. For instance, in E=mc²: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation, the author and academic David Bodanis writes of Marić that “she really was a good student – on the university final exams where he scored 4.96, she came close, with a 4.0…”[12] But Bodanis fails to record that these grade averages in the Zurich Polytechnic final teaching diploma exams in 1900 were on a scale 1-6, which means the difference was appreciable, not small. In fact Einstein’s grade average was actually 4.91, and the highest grade for the five candidates in their mathematics and physics group was 5.45. Whether one measures it by direct grade averages or by approximate percentages, the difference between Marić’s grade and that of Einstein (in fourth place) was almost twice that between Einstein’s and the highest grade.

Was Marić as good a student as Bodanis is at pains to emphasise? She certainly achieved excellent grades (especially in physics and mathematics) in the end-of-year examinations at high school in Zagreb in 1894, two years before she entered Zurich Polytechnic, and her grades in the Matura (university entrance level) in 1896 must have been good to enable her to be accepted for the physics and mathematics teaching diploma course at the prestigious Zurich Polytechnic. However she was required to take the mathematics component of the Polytechnic’s own entrance examination, and achieved a moderate grade average of 4.25 on a scale 1-6.[13] (Einstein, incidentally, excelled in the Matura examinations, despite being a year younger than the normal age for sitting them.[14])

While her coursework grades at the Polytechnic were moderately good, Marić came fifth out of six candidates in the intermediate diploma examinations,[15] and twice failed the final diploma examinations. On the second occasion (1901), under the adverse circumstance of being some three months pregnant, she failed to improve her 1900 grade average.[16] (Einstein was top in the intermediate examinations, but in his final two years he neglected his Polytechnic coursework to study extra-curricular physics, and his grades suffered accordingly.)

Bodanis compounds his misleading assertions by stating that Marić “missed her chance to retake her final university exams”,[17] when in fact she did re-sit the final Polytechnic teaching diploma examinations the following year as noted above. This erroneous information enables Bodanis to intimate that Marić’s failure to achieve a scientific career was down to Einstein’s “sexism”,[18] a contention that also occurs in the 2005 PBS NOVA production “Einstein’s Great Idea: E = mc²“ , based on Bodanis’s book. The notion that Marić’s missing out on a scientific career was essentially Einstein’s fault, rather than academic failure at the highest level as was actually the case, is now close to conventional wisdom. (It is by no means certain that she even wanted such a career. Her closest friend, Helene Kaufler, wrote to her [Helene’s] mother in July 1900 that Marić had been offered an assistantship, but that she “did not wish to accept it; she would rather apply for an open position as librarian at the Polytechnic”.[19])

The widely disseminated myth that Einstein was responsible for Marić’s failure to follow a career in science can only be maintained by exaggerated claims about her academic prowess, and in ignorance of the evidence in the correspondence from their student days of Einstein’s encouraging Marić in her studies and expressing his hopes of their having a future life together researching physics.[20] The undoubted fact that with many women, especially in her era, factors other than lack of academic success were frequently a barrier to a career in science does not mean that this was so in Marić’s case.

Unfortunately erroneous and misleading contentions frequently attain wide currency, and it seems that many people fail to treat factual assertions in print with appropriate caution. It is always worth bearing in mind John Stachel’s dictum: “I must emphasize that bare assertions, particularly by interested parties, do not constitute proof of such assertions, even when these assertions are repeated in print, even in a book.”[21]

Addendum

The fallacious story of Mileva Marić’s supposed contributions to Einstein’s scientific achievements is the subject of one of the chapters in a forthcoming book by Alberto Martínez:

Science Secrets: The Truth About Darwin’s Finches, Einstein’s Wife, and Other Myths.

NOTES

1.  Neisser, U. and Hyman, I. E. (eds.) (2000). Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts. Second Edition. New York: Worth Publishers.

2.  Einstein és elfeledett magyar segítői. National Geographic Magyarorszag, April 2005. (Professional translation.)

3.  See Stachel, J. (2005): Appendix to Introduction, Einstein’s Miraculous Year: Five Papers that Changed the Face of Physics. Centenary Edition: Princeton University Press.

4.  Trbuhović-Gjurić, D. (1988). Im Schatten Albert Einsteins: Das tragische Leben der Mileva Einstein-Marić. Bern: Paul Haupt.

5.  Troemel-Ploetz, S. (1990). “Mileva Einstein-Marić: The Woman Who Did Einstein’s Mathematics.” Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 13, No. 5: 415-432.

6.  See Esterson, A. (2010). Scholarly Standards in Feminist Science Studies. See also A. Maas, “Einstein as Engineer: The Case of the Little Machine”, Physics in Perspective, 9, 2007: 305-328.

7.  Hunter, I. M. L. (1964). Memory. Penguin Books: pp. 160-161.

8.  Einstein Collected Papers, vol. 1, doc. 67. Princeton University Press, 1987.

9.  Europa Diary 2008-2009.

10. For example, Gerald Holton, John Stachel and Alberto A. Martínez. See The Einstein Controversy.

11. For example, Andrea Gabor (1995), Einstein’s Wife: Work and Marriage in the Lives of Five Great Twentieth Century Women. New York: Penguin Books. For a comprehensive critique of Gabor’s chapter on Mileva Marić, see Esterson 2007.

12. Bodanis, D. (2000). E=mc²: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation. London: Macmillan: p. 90.

13. Trbuhović-Gjurić, D. (1988): pp. 26-28, 60.

14. Einstein Collected Papers, vol. 1, doc. 13; A. Fölsing, Albert Einstein. London: Penguin Books: pp. 44-45.

15. Trbuhović-Gjurić, D. (1988): pp. 43, 63.

16. Stachel (2002). Einstein from ‘B’ to ‘Z’. Boston/Basel/Berlin: Birkhäuser: pp. 40-41; p. 52, n. 22.

17. Bodanis (2000): p. 223.

18. Bodanis (2000). p. 90.

19. Popović, M. (2003). In Albert’s Shadow: The Life and Letters of Mileva Marić, Einstein’s First Wife. Johns Hopkins University Press: p. 61.

20. Renn, J. and Schulmann, R. (eds) (1992). Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić: The Love Letters: pp. 13-14, 15, 25, 32, 33, 38, 39, 54, 71.

21. Stachel, J. (2002), p.32 (Reply to Troemel-Ploetz). See also A. A. Martínez (2005): Handling evidence in history: the case of Einstein’s wife.  

March 2011

The Prevent the Abuse of Children Today (PACT) campaign team has concluded its school outreach program in Eket senatorial district in Akwa Ibom state. The outreach targeted schools because we believe they are places where we could ‘catch them young’ in terms of preventing the abuse of children today – and tomorrow – in Akwa Ibom state. The schools are places that we can empower children and young people to defend themselves. In the first leg of the tour (February 28 to March 4), the PACT team visited schools in Oron, Okobo, Urue Offong Oruko, Udung Uko, and Mbo .  And the second leg of the tour (March 7- 11) the team was at Esit Eket, Eket, Ibeno, Onna, Eastern Obolo, and Mkpa Enin LGAs. The tour was another opportunity to take the PACT campaign message of stopping the abuse of children in the name of witchcraft to a critical segment of the local population, and to ignite the flame of enlightenment in communities ravaged by the forces of dark age and superstition.

On Monday, March 7 the team was at Esit Eket and performed at Eket Modern High School and Community  School Edo. Over 2000 students and teachers turned out for the performance. On Tuesday, March 8, the team staged its drama at CDA Secondary school and Government Secondary school in Eket. Over 4000 students watched the drama in both schools. On March 9 the campaign team toured Ibeno and Onna. We performed at Secondary Grammar School Ibeno and Onna People’s High School. Around 4000 students watched our performance and shared their thoughts about witchcraft accusations and related abuses. On Thursday March 10, the PACT team visited Community Secondary School Iko Town and Okoromita Comprehensive Secondary School in Eastern Obolo LGA. Around 1,500 students watched the drama performance. And on Friday, March 11, the team was at Mkpa Enin and performed at Secondary School Ukam and Community Technical College. Over 1500 students watched the performance, asked questions and received awareness materials – calendar, T-shirt, posters and stickers. Many teachers and students who watched the drama said it would take some time for the local population to embrace our campaign message and asked us not to relent in our efforts.

In the course of the tour there were unexpected outcomes. For instance, at the end of our performance at Eket Modern High School, a student named Abigail informed us about a case of witchcraft accusation in her family: that some family members had threatened to exile two children accused of witchcraft. We gave her our contacts and some campaign materials and asked her to contact us if the situation worsened. Also three children, Esther, Uwana and John, who allegedly confessed to be witches, were presented to the Commmission of Inquiry set up by the Akwa Ibom state government to verify claims of witchcraft accusations and child rights abuses. The children were later handed over to the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and Social Welfare for proper care. At the Ministry, the children were interviewed by a top government official who confirmed that the children actually said they were witches, and that one of the kids said that somebody gave her witchcraft and she infected the brother using local ‘afang’ soup. This official believed what the child said and was reluctant to take the kids to the state-owned shelter. She feared these ‘witch children’ would  infect others at the Center. All my attempts to get this top government official and others at the Ministry not to take these confessions seriously fell on deaf ears – very deaf ears. I tried to get them understand that these ‘confessions’ of the children were pronouncements which these traumatized children had been compelled to make, and which they repeated whenever asked, and that their confessions were a result of their abused and ‘broken’ family background and upbringing and had nothing to do with witchcraft. In fact at one stage I challenged this top government official to get the child to give me the withcraft or put it in ‘afang’ soup or in any food at all and I would take it. And they were staring at me as if I was out of my senses.

I did this to let them know that child witch confession was all nonsense, and that it was stupid for any adult to take such ‘confessions’ by children seriously. All my arguments were irritating the woman and at one point she almost walked me out of the office. She felt I was making unnecessary arguments and expressing foolish and useless doubts about what she saw as a clear case of child witchcraft that was before us. In fact the woman told us how she was bewitched by her househelp. According to her, the househelp inflicted her with some sickness and later confessed to her, and the illness later stopped. She sent the househelp away. I wanted to ask her if she had not taken ill since then. Or if the househelp was never sick when they were living together.

But that would have annoyed her all the more. Anyway the children were, at last, taken to the state-run children’s home at Shelter Afrique in Uyo where they are currently staying.

One of the factors hampering the efforts of the government of Akwa Ibom state to eradicate witchcraft accusations and child rights abuses is that most of the government officials believe in witchcraft, and believe that children can actually be witches; hence most of them are reluctant to take adequate care of these innocent children. So the Akwa Ibom state government lacks competent hands and critical minds to effectively address the problem and implement its child rights law. I think the PACT campaign team should explore ways of taking its Operation Enlightenment to government officials in Akwa Ibom state. Officials at ministries of Women Affairs, of Justice, Information, Education and other relevant agencies need programs that will help them shed the superstitious belief that children can be witches so that they can be intellectually and psychologically equipped and disposed to tackle this menace. Government officials in Akwa Ibom state urgently need some reorientation to ensure the safety, security and survival of the state’s witch children.

Nine years ago, controversy erupted regarding a Christian school in the UK (Emmanuel College, Gateshead), which openly challenged the theory of evolution in its lessons and taught creationism alongside evolution.  

One of the school’s defenders, journalist Melanie Phillips, quoted  Emmanuel’s head teacher Nigel McQuoid and the former head John Burns, who stated that ‘the school should teach both evolution and creation theory [my italics], and that both are ‘faith positions [my italics].’[1]

You may think that this issue is now old hat, a storm in a tea cup that has long subsided.  You may well be mistaken; if opinion polls are to be believed, such views appear to be gaining traction in the UK. One recent poll suggested that more than ‘half of [the UK] public believe that the theory of evolution cannot explain the full complexity of life on Earth, and a “designer” must have lent a hand, and one in three believe that God created the world within the past 10,000 years.’[2]

This article has no intention of rehashing the specifics of the Emmanuel College controversy.[3] But since the views expressed in Phillips’ defence of the school appear to be gaining ground, the misunderstandings and misrepresentation that inform them deserve challenge. We will take Phillips’ article as representative of these views in order to develop a wider critique.  In doing so, we will demonstrate that it is totally false to bracket evolution with creationism as a ‘faith position’.

Although Phillips has distanced herself from creationism in recent writings,   she still defends Intelligent Design (ID), claiming that ID has its roots in science, whereas creationism does not.[4] We will see that such a distinction will not hold up under closer scrutiny, so we will also consider the shortcomings of ID as well as creationism throughout this article, as neither position presents anything like a credible scientific alternative to Darwinism.

Back in 2002, Phillips asked rhetorically:

What is wrong with a Christian school encouraging its pupils to debate and question such great matters from different perspectives?[5]

There is nothing wrong with encouraging debate. But if any school were to teach creationism (or ID) in science classes there would be something seriously wrong with that.  It would be like teaching that the Earth is flat in geography classes.

This didn’t seem to trouble Ms. Phillips:

It is being said that taxpayers’ money should not be spent on teaching creationism because this runs contrary to scientific fact. But evolution is not a fact. It is a theory with holes in it … In science, teachers and pupils discuss the gaps that Darwin himself acknowledged in his theory of evolution.[6]

Phillips claimed that Darwin himself acknowledged gaps in his theory but she didn’t actually quote Darwin or any other scientist to support her claim. And neither does her claim that Darwinism has ‘holes in it’ invalidate the assertion that ‘creationism runs contrary to scientific fact.’

But still, let’s turn to the question of whether evolution is a ‘theory’ or a ‘faith position.’ I take theory in this context to mean ‘speculation’ and faith position to mean that the evidence as it stands does not lean toward creationism or Darwinism.  Hence, on the evidence there is, it is equally reasonable to opt to ‘believe’ in either.  

Here we should introduce Jerry A. Coyne’s excellent recent book, Why Evolution is True,[7] which tackles the misunderstandings about Darwinian theory head-on. Evolution is a theory, but that does not make it speculation. In science a theory is much more than speculation about how things are: it is ‘a well thought-out group of propositions meant to explain facts about the real world.’ Second, for a theory to be scientific, as opposed to mere speculation, it must be ‘testable and able to make verifiable predictions’ and, third, ‘the scientific theories can be tested against other theories.’[8] [author’s emphasis]

But the theory goes better than predictions: it makes retrodictions, facts and data not necessarily predicted by evolution, but that only make sense in the light of it.  We’ll look at examples of these later.

In other words, the facts about nature support the theory of evolution, and the theory itself makes sense of facts about nature.

What facts, then, support the theory of evolution – what predictions does it make that have been confirmed? I will confine myself to a few salient examples Coyne offers.

First of all there is the movement from simplicity to complexity. If life has evolved ever greater complexity over eons of time, the theory predicts that the fossil record should show greater and greater complexity over time. The oldest layers of rocks contain simple fossils, younger layers more complex examples. Simple organisms evolved before complex ones, predicted ancestors before descendants, with transitional fossils. Evolution predicts this and these and the fossil record confirms the prediction.[9]

So take the largest mammal on Earth, the blue whale, the distant ancestor of which was a shallow-water dwelling hippopotamus. Fossil mammals have been found that existed 60 million years ago but no fossil whales exist at this point. These appear 30 million years ago. Therefore the theory predicts that the transitional forms from hippo to whale would appear between 60 and 30 million years ago. The transitional fossils have been found exactly as predicted, appearing between 60 and 30 million years ago.  

Then there is remodelling of the old into new: whales are elongated land animals with paddles that used to be forelimbs, and nostrils that have moved to the top of the head. ‘Darwinism predicts, then, that new species will be modified versions of older ones.  The fossil record amply confirms this prediction.[10]

If species didn’t evolve, then there is no way their distribution on Earth would make sense. Marsupials like the platypus are not found outside Australia yet their oldest fossils, over 80 million years old, are not found in Australia but North America.  The theory is that marsupials originated in North America and migrated southwards to Australia, reaching the tip of South America 40 million years ago and reaching the Australia around 30 million years ago. But how did they cross the South Atlantic? There was no ocean to cross: the continents were joined. The tip of South America was joined to what is now Antarctica, which in turn was joined to Australia. Marsupials migrated across Antarctica. If this is true, then marsupial fossils should be found in Antarctica, and they should be younger than those in South America but older than those in Australia.  Scientists set out to prove just that and indeed did just that and they were of the right age, around 35 to 40 million years old.[11]

Perhaps the greatest anathema to creationists and intelligent designers is the idea that humans descended from ‘apes’. What is the evidence for this? When Darwin made this prediction, in The Descent of Man, in 1871, there was very little fossil evidence around to back this up – just a handful of Neanderthal bones. He made this prediction on the basis of anatomy and behaviour. But since then, starting with the discovery of the ‘Southern Ape Man’ in South Africa in 1924 and ‘Lucy’ in 1974, among others, the evidence has been coming in.

As the fossils become more recent, we should see brains getting larger, teeth smaller and posture becoming more erect and this is what has been confirmed. It’s not possible with the existing stock of bones and fossils to trace a linear descent and this may never be possible, as all the links may never be found. But, as Darwin predicted, ‘fossils that start off ape-like … become more and more like modern humans as time passes.’[12]

But evolution doesn’t just make predictions, it explains facts about the natural world, or retrodictions.

The greatest of these is natural selection, the engine of evolution, which explains why there we see so much complexity and diversity in the natural world. There is no need for a supernatural designer or creator to feature at all in the creation of life. Natural selection does the job sufficiently well to dispense with their services. Selection is the adaptation of traits to enable an organism to better survive its environment and enhance its reproductive fitness. It is a combination of chance (a random mutation) and lawfulness (in that mutations which produce traits suited to survival will persist).

The hoverfly has black and yellow stripes, ‘imitating’ a wasp and signalling to predators that it is venomous and inedible. It’s not as if the hoverfly has purposely adapted itself. The adaptation is the result of a mutation in a gene, which confers on the hoverfly an excellent survival advantage. No one intended it or designed it. The process of mutation is widely understood and known and can be seen. Ask any dog breeder.

We know about the alarming tendency of bacteria to develop resistance to drugs.[13] This is a result of random genetic mutation occurring in pathogens,  enabling them to survive and replicate, thus producing resistant strains. Creationism and ID cannot explain this phenomenon but evolution via natural selection can.

Then there are the facts of vestiges, atavisms and bad design.[14] The most troublesome vestige for us is the appendix, which may once have served some purpose for our ancestors’ roughage-rich diet but now only serves to generate work for surgeons.

The presence of atavisms – re-expressions of ancestral traits – confirms that our genetic heritage carries the genes of long-extinct ancestors. One whale in 500 is born with a rear leg that protrudes outside the body wall. Whales still have genetic information to make legs, carried from their landlubber ancestors from millions of years ago. Successive generations of whales still carry these genes, albeit degraded, but, occasionally, these genes flicker back into life to instruct the creation of an utterly useless extra limb.

Genes for redundant traits then do not disappear, they become dormant. Evolution predicts the existence of just such genes. In contrast, creationism would predict that no such genes would exist. If we do not descend from defunct ancestors, we would not be carrying their genes within us. But we do. Of our 30,000 genes, we humans carry a ‘graveyard’ of 2,000 dead or pseudo-genes. ID is hardly a better explanation – what an inefficient way of doing things!

We share with other primates and guinea pigs a dead gene for synthesising vitamin C. But neither primates, guinea pigs nor humans can synthesise vitamin C – we all have to take it through food. As Coyne writes: ‘if you believe that primates and guinea pigs were specially created, these facts don’t make sense. Why would a creator put a pathway for making vitamin C in all these species, and then deactivate it?[15]

We also carry the dead genes of viruses that tried to infect our ancestors but now sit safe and inactive. And, crucially, we share identical dead viruses with chimps, strongly suggesting the same viruses infected our mutual ancestor. Some of these sit in exactly the same location of in the chromosomes of chimps and humans. The probability of a dead virus inserting itself independently into the same place in two species is slight. But if the two species had a common ancestor, then this makes sense.

So when Coyne says evolution is true, he means the major tenets of the theory have been verified. There are controversies and divisions but that this is not the same thing as saying it’s not a fact because some mysteries remain unsolved.

Evolution has not explained everything.  Natural selection needs to explain a lot more than specific traits: can it account for complex traits, like the clotting of blood or the development of the human brain? There are complex biochemical processes the evolution of which is not yet entirely understood. And there are gaps in the fossil record that make systematic reconstruction of lineages difficult.

Gaps in evolution do not mean that the entire theory has no foundation or is just speculation. Moreover over time the gaps are becoming fewer. We know that birds came from dinosaurs. They were not created out of thin air.  We have evidence of the evolution of complexity in the eye, with many types of eye, at various levels of complexity all around us.  The precursors of complex biochemical processes such as clotting have been identified in invertebrates[16].

But still the existence of gaps allows proponents of ID to attempt to refute the theory. If there is complexity, and it is not entirely understood, then this is evidence for supernatural intervention.[17] But this is simply a ‘God of the gaps’ argument and explains and predicts nothing. If you do not have a complete understanding, then you postulate a God or supernatural designer to fill the gap. There is no way that this can be verified. It makes no sense whatsoever to explain facts about nature by appealing to something that is outside nature. This to me is the fatal flaw that undermines all appeals to ID: the idea is incoherent.

Further observation about the facts of the world undermines the plausibility of ID.

Natural selection is a tinkerer, not a precision engineer. It works with the material it has. So some adaptations maximise reproductive fitness but are otherwise a disadvantage to the organism concerned. The peacock’s tail is fantastically well-adapted for attracting mates but also predators. Female sea turtles dig their nests on beaches with flippers, an arduous process. It would be better if they had shovel-like flippers but this would mean they couldn’t swim very well. Selection involves trade-offs.[18]

An intelligent designer could resolve this by giving the turtle an extra pair of retractable shovel-like limbs, or maybe giving the peacock a tail it could unfurl away outside mating season.  Natural selection cannot do either of these things. It can only work with the existing framework but an all-powerful creator or designer by definition should not be limited by structural flaws.

Percy Bridgman, Harvard Professor of Physics and tutor of Robert Oppenheimer, once remarked: ‘Scientists aren’t responsible for the facts that are in nature. If anyone should have a sense of sin, it’s God. He put the facts there.’[19] How indeed to explain these facts?  Not all of them pretty facts, either. We’ve seen how drug-resistance bacteria evolve. Is the creator creating new resistant strains out of nothing or is the designer tweaking microbes’ DNA to develop resistance? How can we explain the existence of parasites like tapeworms? Are these the creations or the design of a benevolent deity? Why have 99% of species gone extinct? Is this really evidence of ID?

It is sometimes said that scientists are proselytisers and evangelicals for atheism and materialism. This is way off the mark. All scientific proof is provisional. New data may conceivably undermine Darwinism. The theory of evolution would not survive if fossils of Cro-Magnon were found in the same layer of rock as a Tyrannosaurus Rex. If this happened, this would refute the entire theory. But the theory is supported not because of a dogmatic refusal to countenance other possible theories but because the data support the theory.

The adherents of a literal version of the Christian faith cling to its tenets regardless of the evidence. Creationists hold that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. Therefore, if the sun stood still, as the book of Joshua claims it did, then it’s true. Needless to say, this is a physical impossibility, given that we know that sun does not revolve around the Earth. There are numerous instances in the Bible whereby the laws of nature are irrationally suspended, which modern science shows are simply impossible. Yes of course it is possible to say that this is metaphorical and allegorical. But that is beside the point. It isn’t science. Science is not fable.

It is therefore false to say that evolution and creationism are both ‘faith positions’, if by this it is meant that it is equally reasonable to believe or teach either position based on the evidence available. The evidence out there does not lean equally either way: it leans one way – and overwhelmingly so.

Scientific theory is not about utter, inerrant certainty and absolute truths, but degrees of plausibility. It’s not that one can prove beyond all reasonable doubt that evolution is true and creationism or ID is false: it is that one can show strong reasons for accepting (as opposed to ‘believing’) that evolution is true, while its detractors cannot show any strong reasons for acceptance. You can of course believe that creationism or ID is true if you so desire, but this is an act of will and faith, and cannot be supported by an appeal to evidence. 

Evolution is not a theory of everything and it does not have all the answers. Darwin called his book ‘The Origin of Species’, a fairly modest endeavour that set out how life came to be on Earth. He never called it the theory of everything. There are plenty of legitimate questions that evolution cannot answer. But it provides the best answer there is to why Earth isn’t a barren rock, but teems with life.  

Notes

[1] All quotes taken from http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles/archives/000756.html (last accessed 27 Feb 2011). The article originally appeared in the Daily Mail, 15 March 2002

[2] ‘Poll reveals public doubts over Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution’, Daily Telegraph, 31 Jan 2009 see  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/4410927/Poll-reveals-public-doubts-over-Charles-Darwins-theory-of-evolution.html (last accessed 27 Feb 2011).

[3] From my reading around the issue, it was not clear to me whether or not creationism was being taught in the school’s science classes. The article confines itself to whether the stated defence that evolution is on par with creationism and ID as a ‘faith position’ is valid.

[4] Melanie Phillips, ‘Creating an Insult to Intelligence’, The Spectator, 29 April 2009 http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/3573761/creating-an-insult-to-intelligence.thtml (last accessed 27 Feb 2011)

[5] Phillips, op cit, 2002

[6] Ibid.

[7] Jerry A. Coyne, Why Evolution is True, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009. Coyne is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago.

[8] Ibid, pp.15-17

[9] Ibid, p.30

[10] Ibid, p.57

[11] Ibid. pp. 102-103

[12] Ibid, p.227

[13] Ibid, pp. 139-141

[14] Ibid, see pp. 59-91

[15] Ibid, p.73

[16] Ibid. p.151

[17] See for example Michael Behr, Darwin’s Black Box, Free Press, New York, 1996 and his argument of irreducible complexity

[18] Coyne, op cit, p.13

[19] Cited in Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Oppenheimer, Atlantic Books, London, 2009, p. 388

State governments and (Republican) Governors currently are going through paroxysms of false hand wringing and despair.  They pretend not to know why state budgets are so wildly out of balance.  In mock anguish they lament the need to cut education budgets, renege on public employee pensions and cut health benefits for these groups.

Something has to be done to balance state budgets.  But the nation can’t simply eliminate all the give-away programs and policies for the wealthy and the big corporations.  These are the people and businesses that provide the hand-full of jobs in the U.S. that haven’t yet been moved abroad or phased out in essential cost saving measures.

But wait……there may be yet another (Republican) way out after all.  What about all those bloated pension funds and costly health care benefits promised to state employees and their families in return for years of low-paying, unrecognized public service employment?  It was the (Democrat [sic]) policies of providing reasonable assurances of old age and health benefits to these public workers that got us into this mess.  And, of course, the unions, that allowed public employees to actually bargain for a few insignificant rights.  Not in Texas, of course, but in some socialistic northern states.

So if we simply crush those nasty public employee unions, and renege on all those promises to take care of public employees and their families in retirement, we might be able to save the states and balance state budgets without imposing on our rich supporters.  After all, these public employees and their families have to be willing to make some sacrifices, just like the Wall Street financiers and mortgage and insurance brokers had to forego multi-billion dollar bonuses for an entire year, in 2009.

The financial crises facing state and local governments were not caused by public employee retirement and benefit programs.  They were caused by unregulated and irresponsible profiteering by the people and institutions in control of the major private financial systems of the country, and by individual greed.  Under the blind eye of Republican deregulation the “whiz kids” of these entities embarked on one of their most ‘creative’ periods of financial fraud in U.S. and world history.  They made Enron, Kenneth Lay, Bernie Ebbers, and Worldcom look like kids playing tinker toys.

The whiz kids invented the derivative.  This clever, deliberately misleading financial device created paper values where none previously existed, and permitted financial titans to bundle worthless loans (i.e. loans in or near default) into packages, for sale abroad or to unsuspecting domestic investors.  The good loans in the bundle surely would balance out the bad loans and no one would be hurt, or any the wiser. 

This enabled the financial whiz kids and their bosses to rake in literally billions of dollars in bonuses annually.  And thanks to their friends in the White House and Congress they got to keep an even larger share of the loot than their fathers and mothers.  Life was good —– for the whiz kids.

But the fraud couldn’t last forever.  The housing bubble was destined to burst and with it the “junk” derivatives loan bundles.  Some of the investors in the “junk” bundles began to smell the odor coming from the derivative loan packages they had purchased from the Wall Street whiz kids.  Some of them began to demand a refund or a “do over.”  Uh, oh……bad news for the whiz kids.  They now owned billion dollar mansions and vacation properties of their own and had to make huge mortgage payments.  “We need regulatory relief and financial relief,” became the new mantra.

The whiz kids’ fraud of the public and world financial markets was so immense that their fake empire began to shake and soon crumble. Since the whiz kids and their enablers all were against big government interference with private markets, they naturally turned to the government for a rescue, for a bail out. (“Forget the deregulation stuff for now, this is a real emergency and calls for  public assistance.”)  Holding as their ace-in-the hole the threat of a complete collapse of world finances, they asked for a financial bailout from the same people they had defrauded, the public. “We’re too big to allow to fail.  If you don’t rescue us it will cost you more in the long run.”

So the Federal Reserve Bank and the U.S. Treasury and the administration and Congress all joined the Wall Street/corporate bread line and assembled a huge bailout package for the crooks, more than a trillion dollars and counting.

Whew!  The huge bonuses were back for the whiz kids,–they only had to survive without them for a little more than a year.  And only one financial titan had to file for bankruptcy protection.

The effects of the financial fraud were not limited to Wall Street.  The cancer spread to the entire nation.  Millions of ordinary people lost their jobs, their homes and all sources of income.  Their inability to spend and pay state sales taxes and income taxes helped fuel a financial crisis for the states and for local governments.

So the whiz kids and politicians, federal, state and local, all agreed that it was the state pension funds and health benefits and even Social Security that were responsible for the states’ financial problems.  Outlaw unions, renege on state promises, eliminate programs for the needy and suffocate public education.  It’s a bitter pill they all hated to inflict but because these items cost taxpayers too much money, it was the only thing that could work.  The New York Times joined the juggernaut with an lop-sided, uncontested* editorial you can read here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/opinion/06sun1.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha21

WRONG!  Here is a simpler, better, honest and fool proof way to solve the states’ financial problems.  And the nation and the states are not broke, far from it.

Make those responsible for the problem — Wall Street, mortgage brokers, insurance giants, big corporations and very rich people — pay for the damage they have caused.  “You broke it, you bought it.”

Rescind the huge tax breaks given to the richest people in the nation by the Republican administration of George W. Bush and Tom (Felonius) DeLay.  Require these heavy contributors to the national debt to pay back the taxes they legitimately owe on the immoral benefits they’ve already received at the expense of the American working class.  Require the financial billionaires to refund to the public their fraudulent gains and multi-billion dollar bonuses they received for wrecking the economy.  Require the politicians who voted for the huge give away to the rich, to forfeit their own pensions and life time health care to help out the working people of the states and local governments who have been defrauded.

Levy special surcharges on the bloated incomes of the fraudsters to help bail out the states.  Require the corporate beneficiaries of government largess to fund unmet state financial needs to pay for legitimate state and local obligations to working people and for education, a cleaner environment and public health.

It isn’t rocket science.  Place the blame where it belongs.   And it can be done.

All honest and fair minded Americans need to remind their state legislators and congresspersons in forceful terms who their representatives work for and that this is not an oligarchy ruled by the rich for the rich.

*Fox news style ‘fair and balanced’ reporting.

My time in Pakistan was glorious.  I taught bright, beautiful and hopeful students who saw the world not as a series of entitlements but rather as a steep staircase to be climbed, littered with challenges set up by a crooked government that lunged from disaster to catastrophe.  It is easy in such circumstances to forget that Pakistan was founded on a crest of hope that soon dissipated into old rivalries, pissing contests between elites, indifference to the mountain men of the Pashto borderlands, suspicion (much of it justified) of eastern and western geopolitics, and an infrastructure that in every decade after 1950 fell further and further behind its more progressive western neighbor and rival–India.

But that is history.  Pakistan treated the Sikhs badly, turning the once Sikh-dominated Punjab and its lead city Lahore into a dying old man with dreams of former glory.  In hard times, given the choice between restoring a splendid (Non-Islamic) religious shrine or buying another nuclear warhead, you can bet the bricks will continue to fall from the shrine. I wasn’t in Lahore long enough to know the city well.  I was just there long enough to know that it was a city of disappointments. –Symbolic of the country as a whole.

The biggest disappointment was the disappointment of the young. Stuck with a government that looks like it was strung together with character actors from a gypsy jamboree, they wait impatiently while it plods on–blaming the west for the ills it has foisted on itself. Insofar as any nation’s government reflects the average face of the nation, they find it hard to swallow western criticism, not least because western criticism is dull (often duller than they are), uninformed, and monotonous. 

There is even a segment of the young and hopeful population that has to be seen biblically: when things got politically impossible for the Jews in the first century of the common era and it was clear to even the most political that their time was running put, they looked to the heavens for deliverance, a messiah.  One of those apocalyptic sects was pacifist—the Christians—not all, not uniformly but mainly.  Others, like the zealots and sicarii were contract killers and had they lived into the modern era, they would have been suicide bombers.  The fallacies of the sociology of history are many; but I stake my claim on the fact that Pakistan is going violently downhill because it has entered into the apocalyptic age.

The assassination of Pakistani Christian Shahbaz Bhatti, the government leader for minority religious affairs, is symbolic of that hopelessness. It follows closely on the heels of the murder of Pakistani Muslim Salman Taseer who had criticized the  blasphemy laws. 

The laws themselves date from the British era, and were subject to a number of revisions through the time of Independence in 1947. From imprisonment and fines, the law, under Zia-ul-Haq, degenerated further in 1986 with a death penalty for defaming Islam. The current (post-2008) controversy springs from the case of Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman, who was sentenced to death last November after being found guilty of insulting the Prophet Mohammed following a row with Muslim women in her village. According to Human Rights Watch, Aasia was “charged under the blasphemy law after a June 2009 altercation with fellow farm workers who refused to drink water she had touched, contending it was unclean because she was a Christian.” 

The operant offensive sections of the law are these:

Section 295: Insult

“Injuring or defiling place of worship, with Intent to insult the religion of any class: Whoever destroys, damages or defiles any place of worship, or any object held sacred by any class of persons with the intention of thereby insulting the religion of any class of persons or with the knowledge that any class of persons is likely to consider such destruction damage or defilement as an insult to their religion. Shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to two years, or with fine, or with both.”

Section 295-A: Deliberate insult — imprisonment for 10 years, fine

“Deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting Its religion or religious beliefs: Whoever, with deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings of any class of the citizens of Pakistan, by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representations insults the religion or the religious beliefs of that class, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, or with fine, or with both.”

Section 295-B: Defiling — life imprisonment

“Defiling, etc., of Holy Qur’an: Whoever wilfully defiles, damages or desecrates a copy of the Holy Qur’an or of an extract therefrom or uses it in any derogatory manner or for any unlawful purpose shall be punishable with imprisonment for life.”

Let me repeat my assertion this is not a free speech issue—not yet.  It is an attempt to remove from the books laws that belong to a sect that rejects the ability of the human animal to reason.

The day before I left Lahore to return to the States, the country was ablaze with gossip that Christians were stuffing pages of the Quran down toilets.  The rumours were (almost certainly) spread by children.  Whatever the source, it is a recurrent pathological lie dragged out on cue by troublemakers.  There are always thousands willing to believe it, such is the religious insecurity of the country. A fraction of that number will kill Christians because they believe it—behavior according to type.

But there is a lesson here.

It is time for the Pakistani government to acknowledge that only when blasphemy laws are repealed is a religion deserving of respect.  Religions will not do that: protected status is their writ of survival and dominance. Only a nation-state can do that. Only when it is no longer an offense against the state to criticize the worst and most repugnant elements of religion can a religion begin to talk about tolerance.  Officially, as opposed to the Islamic diaspora currying favor in the west, that has not happened in the Islamic world. And only when a religion is able to define tolerance should it be entitled to  suggest (not demand) to any other nation or any world body–like the United Nations– that it deserves respect simply because it is a religion.

Pakistan so far has followed just the opposite course.  While practicing intolerance and the murder of innocent nonconformists at home, it deigns to lecture the world on the prerogatives of Islam.  Almost bizarrely, it then dances a dance of death and calls it life: defends truth through murder, and righteousness with violence.  

I am an unbeliever who knows the sins of the west as well as any citizen of the realm.  I will shed a tear for the crusades, or for the Raj, or for the arrogance of the west if I have to.  But that is hardly the place to begin modern discussion

So let me remind our Muslim brothers and sisters that there is not nearly as much Muslim blood on Christian hands as there is Christian blood on Muslim hands. I hate to put it so starkly, and I am likely to be bludgeoned with statistics from Iraq and Afghanistan. But bludgeon me as you will, I do not think those conflicts were religious.  I do not think they would have eventuated without the apocalyptic mentality that still dominates the religious ethos of the Middle East and other parts of the Islamic world.  

And I do not think—believe it or not—that most Americans who had to fight those dirty battles did it as Christians. That is my rejoinder, take it or leave it.

But the murder of Shabaz Bhatti is a pathological symptom of religious dysfunction in real time.  By synergy, it includes his family and the not quite 3,000,000 Christians remaining (not for long) in Pakistan. Change the mood, and you can substitute the name “Lebanon,” where the entire absurd Constitution is based on a census taken when almost half the population was Christian.

What of course makes the blame-the-west message harder to sell however is not the death of Christians in an Islamic country.  It is the death of so many Muslims who find tolerance, co-existence, and simple justice a “foreign” concept–an un-Islamic one.  We have a long way to go before this becomes a matter of free speech.

With the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and a series of ongoing protest sweeping across other countries of North Africa and the Middle East, a new Arab world is imminent. The old Arab world is slowly and gradually fading away and ushering in a new era of hope, freedom and progress. But there are uncertainties and anxieties as to what this wind of change holds for the people in the region and the world at large. There is a growing concern as to what would be the role of Islam in the new dispensation particularly in this era of Islamic terrorism. The Arab world and the Islamic world are often seen as identical. North Africa and the Middle East are the world’s political and financial capital of Islam. In fact the Arab League is the Islamic league-it promotes Islam, defends Islam and would want the criticism of Islam criminalized globally. Most of the islamic groups that terrorize the world are headquartered or have strong links in North Africa and the Middle East. One hopes that these changes do not play into the hands of islamic extremists, jihadists and fundamentalists in the regions. But it must be noted that unlike many protests and demonstrations in these countries, the anger-popular anger- is not directed on Israel or on ‘infidels’ or on Western countries and their leaders or on those who ‘insult’ Islam or Prophet Muhammad. The protests are against local leaders and their governments, against prevailing corruption, poverty, unemployment and lack of democracy in these countries. The protests are for radical change and reform. So the revolutions sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East are not Islamic revolutions meant to spread the faith and foist islamic theocracies on the world. From all indications, the ongoing protests in the Arab world are not jihads against unbelievers. They are popular secular democratic revolutions. They are expressions of people’s yearnings and aspirations for progress and good governance. They are popular agitations for freedom, emancipation and change.

Today more than ever the Arab world is in a position to dispel the looming Islamic Dark Age and realize a New Enlightenment. The Arab world is in a position to translate itself into a beacon of civilization and universal human rights. The Arab world is in a position to break away with the past- the past of religious(Islamic) fanaticism, racism, slavery, subordination of women, honor killing and homophobia.

The people of North Africa and the Middle East must strive to preserve the democratic and secular nature of this wind of change and deepen its gains. They should not allow Islamists-Islamic jihadists, terrorists and brotherhoods- to hijack this historic process and rob them of this vital opportunity to realize an Arab civilization with a global dimension.

To this end, the people of new North Africa and the Middle East should stir their ‘new’ governments away from religion particularly Islam. They should ensure a total separation of Mosque and State. In the new Arab world, the states should be religiously neutral-not biased for or against Islam or any religious or non religious outlook. The states should guarantee the equal rights of all individuals in spite of their religious belief or unbelief including the rights of individuals to profess or renounce Islam. The states should protect the rights of all persons to intellectual freedom, the exercise doubt or the entertainment of opinions that are critical of Islam or of prophet Muhammad or of any religious or secular ideas and institution. The states in the new(emerging) Arab world should discard the so called Universal Human Rights Under Islam and abolish sharia law. Human rights are universal. There are no special rights for those who live under Islam. In fact the ‘new’ Arab states should be poised to reform Islam and bring the religion into the 21st century. They should be ready to combat human rights abuses that are committed in the name of Islam.

The states should protect the rights of all religious minorities and abolish all legal provisions that discriminate against anybody on the basis of religious belief or unbelief. The people of the new Arab world should not relent but fight on and use this opportunity to realize cultural renaissance and rebirth.

Despite the title, I have no intention of discussing the extensive literature on the origin and nature of Darwin’s chronic illness.[1] My concern here is to examine the contention that trepidation about the potential vehement opposition his evolutionary theory would evoke from his religious friends and acquaintances, and among the privileged classes in general, greatly exacerbated his symptoms. The widely-held view that there was such a link is a significant feature of Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s biography Darwin (1991), and in the course of challenging the very basis of this contention, I shall also examine the means by which these authors seek to persuade their readers to accept it.

On his return from the five-year Beagle voyage, Darwin was committed to an immense amount of writing directly related to his experiences, and was also keen to follow up his geological discoveries. He was not in any position to give much time to his ideas on evolution that were ignited in March 1837 (Sulloway 1982), but in July 1837 he started jotting down miscellaneous items in the first of his “Transmutation of Species” notebooks (Notebook B). Desmond and Moore immediately describe it as “clandestine” (1991, p. 229), though a more accurate description would be “private” since there was no reason at that stage for him to mention it to anyone. In September 1837 Darwin was showing early signs of the illness that was to become chronic a few years later, and Desmond and Moore immediately associate this with his evolutionary work: “deep into his clandestine work… his health was breaking” (1991, p. 233).

While not suggesting that Darwin’s severe bouts of sickness were attributable solely to worries related to his evolutionary writings, Desmond and Moore frequently associate these writings, and also purported concerns about contemporary political events, with such episodes. In a chapter that focuses almost entirely on the notes on the transformation of species that Darwin made in 1838, the authors write: “He continued mutating species, but each conceptual leap turned the screw on his stomach.” Supposedly “he was feeling jumpy about the hysteria his views would unleash among his clerical friends”; moreover, “This sort of flaming science was favoured by street agitators, the people trying to overthrow the undemocratic state.” (1991, p. 249) 

Later in 1838, we are told, “Worries about his heresies made him repeatedly ill” (p. 269). Despite the categorical way in which this assertion is made, there is not a single item in any of Darwin’s notebooks or letters to support it. Elsewhere the authors note that during that year “His geology book…was grinding on slowly…and the Zoology numbers ‘murder much of my time’. The notebooks were draining his energy and the Journal [of Researches of the Voyage of H. M. S. Beagle] still was not out” (p. 262). As was to become a permanent feature of his life, concentrated work on his writings exacerbated his illness, and this was evidently starting to occur in 1838.

Moving on to 1839, Desmond and Moore insinuate that political events were impinging on Darwin’s life and making him ill: “By summer the disorder on the streets was impossible to avoid… The radical workers…were taking matters into their own hands”, and so on (1991, p. 286). The authors immediately follow their recording of contemporary political activities with a paragraph beginning “Darwin was sick with worry”. But there is nothing in Darwin’s letters or notebooks of the time that indicates concern about concurrent political events.

In 1840, according to Desmond and Moore, Darwin’s “double life” of socialising with opponent of evolutionary theory such as Richard Owen “was the stuff of inner conflict, as his sickness confirmed” (p. 291). But Darwin’s personal Journal and letters show that his transmutation of species theory was unrelated to bouts of illness. His Journal entry for 24 December 1839 notes that he had to suspend his main work schedule because he “became unwell, & with the exception of two or three days remained so till the 24^th of February. In this interval read a little for Transmutⁿ theory, but otherwise lost these whole months.” In the early part of 1840 he again “became unwell & did not commence Coral volume till March 26th”. In a letter to his friend William Fox dated 7 June 1840 he reported that he had “scarcely put pen to paper for the last half year, & everything in the publishing line is going backward”. In the Journal entry for 14 November Darwin wrote: “During this summer when well enough did a good deal of species work.” In other words, contrary to the impression Desmond and Moore assiduously seek to create, it was concentrated work, not thoughts about his transmutation theory, that led to severe episodes of illness.

Social activities also exacerbated his symptoms. On the 28 March 1840 Darwin wrote to the Geological Society apologising for having been missed their last four meetings as “I have never once attended, without having suffered the next day”. Again, in a letter to Fox on 25 January 1841 he wrote: “I am forced to live, however, very quietly and am unable to see anybody & and cannot even talk long with my nearest relatives.”

To reiterate: close examination of Darwin’s letters and notebooks demonstrates that there is no correlation between Darwin’s severe bouts of illness and his working on evolutionary theory. If anything, the contrary was the case: when not well enough to work on his writing commitments, he sometimes turned to his notes on the transmutation of species. In the spring of 1841 he noted that he had completed a “paper on Boulders & Till of S. America”, then records: “idle & unwell – sorted papers on Species theory”. As he later wrote in the context of his work pertaining to his Beagle voyage in the period up to his leaving London in 1842: “Nor did I ever intermit collecting facts bearing on the origin of species; and I could sometimes do this when I could do nothing else from illness” (Darwin 1958, p. 99).

Desmond and Moore portray Darwin as a man who trembled at the very thought of the hostile reaction that publication of his evolutionary views would evoke. For instance, they highlight his writing that he had read Adam Sedgwick’s scathing review of the journalistic Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published anonymously in 1844, “with ‘fear and trembling’” (1991, p. 322). The authors convey the impression that his fears related to the vehemence of Sedgwick’s scornful rejection of the book’s evolutionary content, but an examination of the letter in question shows this is not the case. Darwin tells his friend Charles Lyell that he thought the review “a grand piece of argument against the mutability of species, and I read it with fear and trembling, but was well pleased to find I had not overlooked any of the arguments” (letter, 8 October 1845). In other words, his fear on reading Sedgwick’s review was merely an expression of his concern that it might contain arguments he had failed to consider, though on reading it he was relieved to find that it did not.

Summing up, Desmond and Moore’s intimating that Darwin’s illness was greatly exacerbated specifically when he turned his mind to his evolutionary work is evidence-free. But worse, in Darwin’s Sacred Cause (2009) they manufacture evidence to support their contention:

He was also a sick man. For years he had been regularly, often wretchedly, ill. The closer to “man” and to publication, the worse he became. Five times while writing the Origin of Species he was forced to decamp to a rest home to take the water cure, his nerves wrecked. “No nigger with a lash over him could have worked harder”, he explained as he struggled with his prose. But the real cause “of the main part of the ills to which my flesh is heir”, he admitted, was the Origin’s inflammatory case for the evolution of life by a chancy natural selection, and the expected uproar over its bestial implications. He dreaded being “execrated as an atheist”. For a respectable gentleman, for whom reputation and honour were everything, it was barely endurable. Later, at his spa, sending out copies of the Origin, it was “like living in Hell”. [References supplied] (Desmond and Moore 2009, p. 313)

It is instructive to examine the truncated quotations in the above paragraph in context. The authors claim that Darwin admitted that the real cause of his illness was “the Origin’s inflammatory case for the evolution of life by a chancy natural selection, and the expected uproar over its bestial implications”. But here is what Darwin actually wrote in the letter in question:

I have been extra bad of late, with the old severe vomiting rather often & much distressing swimming of the head… My abstract [On the Origin of Species] is the cause, I believe of the main part of the ills to which my flesh is heir to; but I have only two more chapters & to correct all, & then I shall be a comparatively free man. (Letter to William Fox, 12 February 1859)  

There is nothing here to suggest that he had the supposed “inflammatory case” in mind, rather it was all the hard work he was putting into writing his book that was causing the severe exacerbation of his illness. This is also evident in his intimating that he expected an improvement in health once the work was completed, whereas any fears about the reaction to his work in the terms expressed by Desmond and Moore would hardly be reduced on publication of the book.

The next truncated quotation supposedly has Darwin saying that he “dreaded being ‘execrated as an atheist’.” Again, here is what he actually wrote:

I have been thinking that if I am much execrated as atheist &c, whether the admission of doctrine of natural Selection could injure your Works; but I hope & think not; for as far as I can remember the virulence of bigotry is expended on first offender, & those who adopt his views are only pitied, as deluded, by the wise & cheerful bigots. (Letter to Charles Lyell, 23 November 1859)

So he is not saying that he “dreaded being execrated as an atheist”, he is expressing his concern that Lyell might be found guilty by association by “the wise and cheerful bigots”. Contrary to what Desmond and Moore write, there is nothing here to suggest he was particularly perturbed by the thought that the “virulence of bigotry” will be directed at him.

Desmond and Moore’s final truncated quotation in the above paragraph, in which they directly associate Darwin’s sending out copies of Origin with his reporting it was “like living in Hell”, comes from a letter to Joseph Hooker (27 October or 3 November 1859). The full passage is as follows:

I have been very bad lately; having had an awful “crisis” one leg swelled like elephantiasis – eyes almost closed up – covered with a rash & fiery Boils: but they tell me it will surely do me much good. – it was like living in Hell.

Darwin’s description of his “living in hell” referred to the gruesome symptoms from which he was suffering, and there is nothing here to link these to the mailing of complimentary copies of Origin at that time as the authors would have their readers believe.

Desmond and Moore are clearly intent on impressing on the reader their demeaning portrait of Darwin as having a rather weak character, a man who “rushed towards his debut, with the stomach-churning fear of exposing mankind’s real origin from the beasts. It was the sort of fear that kept him quiet for two decades:[2] the sort that would put him in a sanatorium as the eve of exposure dawned” (2009, p. 289). As Sulloway observes (1996, p. 240), this portrayal of Darwin as someone tormented by his radical ideas to the point of sickness is part and parcel of Desmond and Moore’s social constructivist view of Darwin’s scientific career.[3] Their portrait, however, is a travesty that they make plausible only by resorting to dubious methods of exposition.

Footnotes

1. See R. Colp, Darwin‘s Illness (2008). For an important recent addition to the literature, see John A. Hayman, Darwin’s illness revisited. British Medical Journal, 13 December 2009.

2. For a rebuttal of the claim that fear kept Darwin “quiet for two decades”, see J. van Wyhe (2007). See also A. Esterson (2011a), Darwin’s “Delay”.

3. On the dubious methods Desmond and Moore employ to portray Darwin as a man supposedly “tormented” by fear of the consequences of making public his evolutionary theory, see A. Esterson (2011b), Desmond and Moore’s Darwin.

References

Colp, R. Jr. (2008). Darwin‘s Illness. University of Florida Press.

Darwin, C. R. (1958). The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882. Edited by Nora Barlow. London: Collins.

Darwin, C. R.  The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online. Edited by John van Wyhe.

Desmond, A. and Moore, J. (1991). Darwin. London and New York: Michael Joseph

Desmond, A. and Moore, J. (2009). Darwin‘s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins. London: Allen Lane, Penguin Books.

Levine, G. (1994). “Darwin Revised, and Carefully Edited.” Configurations, 1994, 1: 191-202. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Grene, M. (1993). ‘Recent Biographies of Darwin: The Complexity of Context’ Perspectives on Science. vol. 1, no. 4: 659-675.

Sulloway, F. J. (1982). Darwin’s Conversion: The Beagle Voyage and Its Aftermath. Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 15, no. 3 (Fall 1982): 325-396.

Sulloway, F. J. (1996). Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. London: Little, Brown and Company.

Wyhe, J. van (2007). Mind the Gap: Did Darwin Avoid Publishing His Theory for Many Years? Notes & Records of the Royal Society (2007), 61: 177-205.

February 2011

It is widely believed that Darwin delayed publication of his evolutionary theory for some fifteen years largely because he feared the wrath of his contemporaries.[1] The most influential exponents of this view are Adrian Desmond and James Moore, who have promoted it not only in their 1991 biography Darwin, but also in a number of articles and broadcasts. For instance, having reported that in 1842 Darwin had “fleshed-out a thirty-five-page sketch of his evolutionary theory”, they add that “he could have planned to publish” were it not for the fact that it was “heresy to the geologists and blasphemy to the parsons” (Desmond and Moore 1991, pp. 292, 294). A little later they write:

Of course Darwin could not publish… He was too worldly-wise not to sense the danger, the damning class implications. He had no illusions about how he would be treated… […] Ultimately he was frightened for his respectability. For a gentleman among the Oxbridge set, priming itself to guard man’s soul against the socialist levellers, publishing would have been tantamount to treachery – a betrayal of the old order. (1991, p. 296)

Again, following their recording that in the spring of 1844 “the sketch expanded into a full 189-page essay”, they continue:

He also knew, grinding away month after month, that he could not publish – he would be accused of social delinquency, or worse. Transmutation was still a weapon wielded by the militants, angrily eyeing the islands of gentrified opulence… […] No, publishing would be suicidal. Clergy-baiting was on the increase, and country parsons were among Darwin’s friends and family. He risked being accused of betraying his privileged class. (1991, pp. 316-17)

As George Levine writes, “Insofar the book has a thesis, it is that Darwin spent his life in terror of the consequences of publishing his theory” (Levine 1994, p. 200). The issue I want to address in this article is not only whether Desmond and Moore’s portrait of Darwin as someone “tormented” by the very thought of making public his evolutionary theory is justified by the unvarnished documentary evidence, but also the means by which they have sought to persuade their readers to their point of view.

Desmond and Moore’s Darwin provides an extraordinary amount of information, missing from previous biographies, about the socio-political background to the various stages in Darwin’s life. They have also laboriously sought out original sources (Darwin’s notebooks, letters and marginalia, as well as the contemporary literature) as have no other biographers. However, the central issue arising from their constant focusing on contemporary political events is whether it was actually the case that these played a significant role in relation to Darwin’s views on the transmutation of species.

They make their position clear from the outset: “We can trace the political roots of his key ideas, following his reading on population, the poor laws, and charity… We have to see him as part of an active Whig circle, in an age when the Whig government was building the workhouses and the poor were burning them down” (1991, p. xx). As Michael Ruse sees it, “They are writing with an end in view, namely, to show how Darwin was a cork bobbing on the surface of the society of his day, and how his theory was a product of the various ideologies of him and his family and his class” (Ruse 1993, p. 229). But, as we shall see, they achieve their aims by a highly selective use of evidence, and by insinuating connections between Darwin’s evolutionary writings and concurrent political events for which there is no documentary warrant. Marjorie Grene observes that in “follow[ing] the social constructivist route” to understanding the sources of Darwin’s scientific views, Desmond and Moore “are inventing a politicized Darwin, and cleverly they do it” (Grene 1993, p. 672).

Grene writes that the authors’ attempt to make the link between Darwin and contemporary political activities seems to her “sometimes just a bit fraudulent” (p. 671). She is particularly scathing about their use of quotations to intimate a political connection with Darwin’s life that doesn’t actually exist: “In short, one can only conclude that when it comes to their strictly political context Desmond and Moore are having us on” (p. 673). She cites “a few examples of two particularly striking techniques” used by Desmond and Moore. “One is to provide a nonannotated paragraph purporting to represent Darwin’s position”, when there is no documentary evidence that it actually does so. The second “device they use is to give carefully annotated political descriptions juxtaposed with accounts of Darwin’s anxieties, the sources for which, when inspected, have nothing to do with politics” (pp. 671-72). As she also notes, the authors’ “clustering method” of citing several references within a single endnote “helps to conceal what (for this reader at least) are small bits of cheating in support of a favored thesis” (p. 664).

In similar vein, Levine objects to “the book’s strategies of representation, of ‘factually’ cloaked argument, of lively rhetoric and fictionalizing techniques. The remade Darwin is gradually squeezed from implicit interpretations of data that have long been available, interpretations that are not argued for but presented as fact.” In short, there is “a lot of cheating going on this biography” (Levine 1994, pp. 194, 200).

The twin characteristics of the authors’ providing truncated quotations embedded in sentences and paragraphs shaped to implicitly convey their own interpretations, and the juxtaposing of extra-scientific occurrences with Darwin’s activities to insinuate a causal connection between them, are a pervasive feature of the book. They are part and parcel of “strategies of persuasion” which include “some quite devious writing” (Levine 1994, p. 197) by means of which they impute to Darwin fears in relation to concurrent radical political activities that supposedly influenced his behaviour, both scientific and private. They write of London in 1842 that it was “a cauldron”, “Malthusian hatreds were festering”, and “society was teetering”, followed immediately in the next paragraph by “The Darwins’ house-hunting acquired a new urgency”, clearly implying a connection between the two items. There follows more melodramatically presented material about civil unrest: “The [London] streets were frightening”, and a little later: “Working men and women milled about in the streets, shouting and cheering… The worst was expected.” This is immediately followed by a paragraph commencing with Emma Darwin “overseeing the packing”: “It was now the fourth week of the general strike… The Darwins were thankful to be getting out” (1991, pp. 296-298).

Levine writes that “it is hard to read this without feeling that the stress of those days was very important to Darwin, that he was deeply sensitive to the Chartist uprisings and to the government’s reaction, that he and Emma sat nervously in their home as the mobs screamed by”, creating the impression that “he wants desperately to get away from all this revolutionary hubbub”. But a perusal of his letters at the time shows no indication that these events intruded on his mind, only that with his growing family, his illness, and his continuing immersion in his ongoing writings it was imperative that he acquired more amenable premises away from London. As Levine observes, “As far as I can see, there isn’t a single reference in the published correspondence to those Chartist uprisings that play so important a role in Desmond and Moore’s narrative” (1994, pp. 198-99). Moreover, Sandra Herbert writes, contrary to the scenario portrayed by Desmond and Moore, “the Chartist movement in London was militant but not violent”, and after noting the absence of  any mention of concurrent political events in Darwin’s letters, she advises: “One should be cautious in accepting the biography as reflecting Darwin’s political opinions or his fears” (Herbert 1993, p. 116).

One paragraph devoted to Chartist activities in 1839 begins “By summer the disorder on the streets was impossible to avoid…”, and the next paragraph opens with “Darwin was sick with worry”. This is immediately followed by: “Yet he felt compelled to confess to the priests vilified by the mob – or at least to the orthodox Henslow – that he was ‘steadily collecting every sort of fact, which may throw light on the origin & variation of species’. It would have been music to the ears of street atheists, but not, of course, to Henslow” (1991, pp. 286). However, as Grene notes, there is no “confession” by Darwin, only his reporting to his friend that “he is collecting facts to do with the ‘origin & variation of species,’ followed by an account of how withdrawn the Darwins’ life is, with the days alike as ‘as two peas’” (Grene 1993, p. 672).

Desmond and Moore write in the same section: “Entertainment grew uncomfortable: ‘we are living a life of extreme quietness… We have given up all parties, for they agree with neither of us…’” (1991, p. 286). Grene observes about this passage: “From the context, one is given the impression that this withdrawal is a response to political crisis. In fact, however, the description of the Darwins’ routine occurs in the very same letter to his sister Caroline in which he remarks that ‘London is so cheerful’” (Grene 1993, p. 672).

The authors ask rhetorically, “And what was to stop out-and-out dissidents from appropriating his theory for real revolutionary ends?” (p. 285), though they do not provide any evidence that the notion of such consequences ever entered Darwin’s head. In fact Darwin later expressed his disdain towards such views: “What a foolish idea seems to prevail in Germany on the connection between Socialism and Evolution through Natural Selection” (Darwin, F. 1887, vol. 3, p. 237). 

Joseph Carroll observes that “with whatever distortions and falsifications they find necessary,… [Desmond and Moore] have created an imaginative atmosphere in which it is possible to regard evolutionary biology as subordinate to the world of social and political activity” (Carroll 1995, p. 300). The means they frequently use to promote their viewpoint is perceptively characterised by Levine when he writes of “how devious is a narrative that acquires its ‘blood’ by eliding the ambiguities, by disguising the absence of direct and literal connections, by presenting as fact what is speculation, or more precisely, by avoiding calling it fact but making it feel like fact” (Levine 1994, pp. 199-200).

The opening words in Darwin set the tone for much of what follows: “It is 1839. England is tumbling towards anarchy, with countrywide unrest and riots. The gutter presses are fizzing, firebombs flying. The shout on the streets is for revolution” (1991, p. xvii). Ruse takes issue with this historical setting: “…let me point out that all of this stuff about Britain being in the throes of revolution is pretty old-fashioned Marxist history, and that in the last quarter-century a huge amount has been written casting doubt on the scenario (Cannadine, 1992)” (Ruse 1993, p. 229).[2] In Ruse’s view, Desmond and Moore’s “neo-Marxist analysis of Darwin [that] has him cowering in rural Kent, while England burned around him, wracked with guilt because he was betraying his class by contributing to the revolution” is “silly nonsense” (Ruse 1999, p. 319).

Sulloway writes on the same topic:

Limited by their Marxist conception of history, Desmond and Moore were forced into a series of Don Quixote-like reconstructions of Darwin’s scientific career. According to Marxist expectations, Darwin should have abhorred evolution. Given the undeniable fact that he endorsed it, Desmond and Moore conclude that Darwin must have been “tormented” by his radical ideas. (Sulloway 1996, p. 240)

Moore takes the “tormented” portrait of Darwin to extraordinary lengths. When the Darwin family moved to Down House in 1842 he attached a mirror to the inside of his study window to enable him to see the arrival of visitors. The Darwin biographer Janet Browne suggests that this was “in order to catch the first glimpse of the postman” (Browne 1999), but Moore finds a motive in accord with his own agenda in a 2009 BBC radio programme:

[Darwin] knew that this terrible burden he carried, of the belief in evolution, including humans in society in that evolutionary process, would open him to persecution, if he let people know that he was working on that project… [At Down House] he could control access to himself. That’s the most important point. He was far enough away from railway stations, scientific societies, actually outside this window behind you he had a mirror installed so that he could see people coming up the drive. That’s not paranoia, that’s prudence in a man who was carrying a kind of burden that Darwin had, evolution. (Moore 2009b)[3]

John van Wyhe disputes the very notion that Darwin regarded his preparatory work on the transformation of species as a “secret” (2007, pp. 182-84). As Desmond and Moore acknowledge, in the year that he wrote his brief sketch of his theory (1842) “he could not resist telling Lyell” his “secret” (1991, p. 292). Then in the following year he mentioned his views on the transmutation of species to the taxonomist George Waterhouse, and in 1844 told his recently-acquired friend Joseph Hooker and his old friend Leonard Jenyns, and entrusted his 1844 sketch to the local schoolmaster in the neighbouring village of Downe to make a fair copy (Letters, 26 and 31 July 1843; 11 January 1844; 12 October 1844; Desmond and Moore 1991, pp. 313, 316; Wyhe 2007, pp. 183, 184). Frank Sulloway writes that “Far from being a ‘closet evolutionist,’ as Desmond and Moore claim, Darwin told a dozen of his closest friends about his evolutionary ideas” before he made them public (Sulloway 1996, p. 246).

On Desmond and Moore’s portrayal of a politicised Darwin, Helena Cronin is at one with the historians quoted above:

Here, indeed, is a Darwin hitherto unknown. But did this Darwin exist? Again and again I checked the footnotes, eager to track down the newly-revealed soul in his own diaries and letters. But again and again my hopes were dashed; references to recent historians a-plenty but to the sage himself, none. (Cronin 1991)

In other words, what we have in Desmond and Moore’s biography is a Darwin carefully crafted to accord with a preconceived view of scientific history, one which needs to be viewed “with extreme caution” and “contested at almost every sentence” (Levine 1994, p. 194). That their Darwin won, among other awards, the 1997 British Society for the History of Science Dingle Prize “for the best book of the decade in communicating the history of science to a wide audience” is a measure of  how successful Desmond and Moore have been in promoting both their portrait of Darwin and their social constructivist view of the origins of his evolutionary theory. But close reading of the text, such as those by well informed and conscientious historians like Grene and Levine which reveal the authors’ dubious techniques of persuasion, indicates that the book does not merit the accolades it has received.

Notes

1. That there actually was a “delay” in the sense promoted by Desmond and Moore in their Darwin (1991) is strongly disputed by several Darwin scholars, most notably John van Wyhe (2007). See also A. Esterson (2011), Darwin’s “Delay”.

2. D. Cannadine, 1992, pp. 52-57; see also A. Briggs, 1960, pp. 236-343.

3. In the same BBC radio series on Darwin, Moore plumbed the depths of implausibility when invoking a Marxist-style explanation in relation to Darwin’s receiving the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in part because of his researches into barnacles:

Now that’s a very important thing to do in a seafaring nation. Any expert on barnacles is obviously promoting British trade. Ships go faster if you understand how these things behave, how to get them off your hulls. So it’s not surprising if in 1853 Darwin was awarded the Royal Medal of the Royal Society of London, the great gold medal. (Moore 2009a)

Hooker’s report to Darwin on the Royal Society meeting provides a rather more likely scenario:

The R.S. have voted you the Royal Medal for Natural Science – All along of the Barnacles!!!… Portlock proposed you for the Coral Islands & Lepadidae. Bell followed seconding, on the Lepadideae alone, & then, followed such a shout of pæans for the Barnacles that you would have [sunk] to hear. (Letter, 4 November 1853)

References

Briggs, A. (1960). The Age of Improvement, 1783-1867. London: Longmans.

Browne, J. (1999). Men of Letters: Charles Darwin’s Correspondence with Victorian Naturalists. Bath Royal Literary & Scientific Institution, 12 November 1999.

Cannadine, D. (1992). “Cutting Classes.” The New York Review of Books, 17 December 1992, pp. 52-57.

Carroll, J. (1995). Evolution and Literary Theory. Columbia and London: University of Michigan Press.

Cronin, H. (1991). “The origins of evolution.” The Times Educational Supplement, 29 November 1991, p. 25.

Darwin, C. R.  The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online. Edited by John van Wyhe.

Darwin, F. (ed.) (1887). The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter. Vol. 3. London: John Murray.

Desmond, A. and Moore, J. (1991). Darwin. London and New York: Michael Joseph.

Grene, M. (1993). “Recent Biographies of Darwin: The Complexity of Context.” Perspectives on Science. Vol. 1, no. 4: 659-675.

Herbert, S. (1993). “Essay Reviews.” Isis, 84: 113-127.

Levine, G. (1994). “Darwin Revised, and Carefully Edited.” Configurations, 1994, 1: 191-202. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Moore, J. (2009a). Darwin – In Our Time – Programme 3. BBC Radio 4, 7 January 2009.

Moore, J. (2009b). Darwin – In Our Time – Programme 4. BBC Radio 4, 8 January 2009.

Ruse, M. (1993). “Will the Real Charles Darwin Please Stand Up?” The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 68, No. 2 (June 1993): 225-231.

Ruse, M. (1999). The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw. Second Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sulloway, F. J. (1996). Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. London: Little, Brown and Company.

Wyhe, J. van (2007). Mind the Gap: Did Darwin Avoid Publishing His Theory for Many Years? Notes & Records of the Royal Society (2007), 61: 177-205.

February 2011

Most people interested in the literature on Darwin are aware that he alighted on his theory of natural selection a short time after returning from his five-year Beagle voyage in 1836 (Sulloway 1982). It is rather less well-known that during the first decade following his return he produced a large body of work not directly related to his evolutionary theory: Journal of Researches of the Voyage of H. M. S. Beagle (1839 and revised in 1845); five volumes of Zoology of the Voyage of H. M. S. Beagle (1840‑1843), which he edited; three volumes of the Geology of the Voyage of the Beagle (1842‑1846); and numerous papers and reviews (Richards 1983, pp. 46-47).

Darwin started jotting down notes on the “transmutation of species” in 1837, and, following his encounter with Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population in September in that year, realised he now had “a theory by which to work” (Sulloway 2006, p. 118). Having completed the bulk of his immediate writing commitments and researches in geology, in 1842 he wrote a brief sketch of his evolutionary theory which he developed substantially and completed in 1844. As Rebecca Stott observes, at that stage this amounted to no more than “a hypothesis; an idea in embryo” (2003, p. 81). However, Darwin set this aside for another decade, giving rise to much speculation about the delay in publishing his evolutionary ideas. Joseph Carroll writes: 

Virtually every commentator on Darwin’s career broaches the question, ‘Why the delay?’ If Darwin had a book-length ms. prepared in 1844, why did he wait another fifteen years before publishing his book? One common answer to the question is that he delayed because he was afraid to publish – afraid to offend the public, afraid to endanger his social and professional position, afraid even to upset his wife. (Carroll 2003, p. 45) 

Carroll goes on to note that this view appears in its most extreme form in the highly influential biography Darwin (1991) by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, who also attribute severe bouts of Darwin’s chronic gastrointestinal disorder to anxieties about the potential public reception of his evolutionary theory. Carroll proceeds to dispute the now widely-held view, noting that

It fails to register the difference in the quality of argument between a lightly and not very coherently sketched outline, on the one side, and a dense, comprehensive, tightly woven fabric of argument on the other… Darwin [in 1844] did not yet know enough, and had not thought enough, to produce the definitive work his theory had the potential to produce. From 1844 to 1859, the efforts that went into Darwin’s studies on geology and natural history, and particularly his work on barnacles, enabled him to master entire fields of information in respect to which, in 1844, he was but a novice. In addition to his published work, over those years he collected an immense quantity of information – of facts accompanied by analytic reflection – that were slated for publication in the big species book… There was no “delay,” only a protracted preparation. (pp. 45-46)

Implicit in Carroll’s comments is that Darwin was well aware that if his theory was to have any hope of convincing a wide range of people it had to be buttressed by a huge array of corroborating factual information and woven into a cohesive overall argument. He could have added that few people realise the full extent that Darwin’s illness hampered his work. After a few hours on his writings in the morning, he customarily had to rest for the remainder of the day, and there were periods when he had to cease working altogether for weeks on end, occasionally undertaking “water cures” at health resorts. His diaries and letters show the deleterious effect this had on his work, e.g.:

I will give you statistics of time spent on my Coral volume, not including all the work on board the Beagle. I commenced it 3 years and 7 months ago, and have done scarcely anything besides. I have actually spent 20 months out of this period on it! and nearly all the remainder sickness and visiting!!! (Darwin to Emma Darwin, May 1842).

Again, during the years he worked on his major barnacles study he reported:

I have lost for the last 4 or 5 months at least 4⁄5 of my time, & I have resolved to go this early summer & spend two months at Malvern & see whether there is any truth in Gully & the water cure: regular Doctors cannot check my incessant vomiting at all.— It will cause a sad delay in my Barnacle work, but if once half-well I c^d do more in 6 months than I now do in two years. (Letter to Richard Owen, 24 February 1849.)                                                                                                                                 

But why venture on the barnacles studies in 1846 in the first place? The explanation can be found in his response to a comment by his friend Joseph Hooker, directed at another naturalist, which he took personally: “How painfully (to me) true is your remark that no one has hardly a right to examine the question of species who has not minutely described many” (Letter, 19 September 1845). Robert Richards writes:

In 1846 he began an eight‑year study of barnacles, resulting in four volumes completed in 1854. The barnacle project seduced Darwin. He initially planned merely to do a little study of one species and ended up investigating the whole group of Cirripedia. His work on barnacles has been singled out as both a necessary stage in preparation for the Origin of Species and a significant cause of its delay. (Richards 1983, pp. 46-47)

Desmond and Moore acknowledge:

So barnacles were not totally irrelevant to his evolutionary work. In fact, as he proceeded, he began to uncover the most extraordinary proofs of his notebook speculations. […] He called in specimens from far and wide…[…] To be definitive a monograph would have to embrace fossil barnacles as well…It was dogged, grinding work. The modern species had to be dissected, the fossils disarticulated or sectioned. He was inundated with so many species that the labour became exhausting and the smell of spirits nauseating. (Desmond and Moore 1991, pp. 341-343)

In addition to the immense amount of painstaking work required for a comprehensive study of barnacles, there were the lengthy periods lost to illness:

Finished packing up all my cirripedes. preparing Fossil Balanidae distributing copies of my work &c &c.— I have yet a few proofs for Fossil Balanidae for Pal: Soc: to complete, perhaps a week’s more work. Began Oct. 1 1846 On Oct. 1^st. it will be 8 years since I began! But then I have lost 1 or 2 years by illness. (Personal Journal, 9 September 1854)

The Darwin specialists John van Wyhe and Frank Sulloway also take the view that there was no “delay” in the sense promoted by Desmond and Moore. In an article devoted to this issue, van Wyhe writes:

By re-examining the historical evidence, without presuming that Darwin avoided publication, it can be shown that there is no reason to introduce such a hypothesis in the first place… A fresh analysis of Darwin’s manuscripts, letters, publications and the writings of those who knew him intimately shows the story to be quite different from one of a lifetime of  avoiding publication… In fact, Darwin hardly veered from his original plans for working out and publishing his species theory in due course. Finally, it will be shown that, contrary to common belief, Darwin did not keep his belief in evolution (or transmutation as it was then known) a secret before publication in 1858–59. (van Wyhe 2007, p. 178)

 Similarly, Sulloway writes:

Far from being a “closet evolutionist,” as Desmond and Moore claim, Darwin told a dozen of his closest friends about his evolutionary ideas. His twenty-year “delay” in announcing his theory of natural selection was not really a delay. Darwin used this time advantageously to bolster his arguments for evolution, and especially to resolve some of its weakest links. (Sulloway 1996, p. 246)

 Carroll expands on this:

The Notebooks reveal that Darwin had gained the essential insights of his work two decades before it was published, and the essays of 1842 and 1844 demonstrate that he was already at that time able to give a coherent exposition of the basic theory of descent with modification by means of natural selection. What then, if anything, did Darwin gain through waiting for fourteen years before writing the final version of his work? There were three main forms of gain: (i) vastly more detail both in apt illustration and in considered inference, (2) an extended compositional process that resulted in an extraordinary density, coherence, and clarity in the exposition; and (3) one new idea, or at least a latent idea rendered explicit and available for development. The process of composition consisted of alternating phases of expansion and condensation, of filling in details and then of abstracting and summarizing. The one new idea is described in Darwin’s Autobiography. He explains that there was one basic problem he had not adequately formulated in I844 – the problem of “divergence” or branching speciation, as opposed to linear descent. (Carroll 2003, p. 38)

I’ll give the last word to Alfred Russel Wallace, who, in a generous tribute to Darwin, recognised the vital importance of Darwin’s having published their theory in a meticulously comprehensive form rather than as an ingenious speculation:

As to the theory of “Natural Selection” itself, I shall always maintain it to be actually yours & your’s only. You had worked it out in details I had never thought of, years before I had a ray of light on the subject, & my paper would never have convinced anybody or been noticed as more than an ingenious speculation, whereas your book has revolutionized the study of Natural History, & carried away captive the best men of the present Age. (Letter to Darwin, 28 May 1864.)

References

 Carroll, J. (2003). Introduction. In C. R. Darwin, On the Origin of Species. First edition (1859), edited by J. Carroll. Broadview: Ontario, Canada: pp. 9-87.

Darwin, C. R.  The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online. Edited by John van Wyhe.

Desmond, A. and Moore, J. (1991). Darwin. London and New York: Michael Joseph

Richards, R. J. (1983). “Why Darwin Delayed, or Interesting Problems and Models in the History of Science”, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, vol. 19 January 1983: 45-53.

Stott, R. (2003). Darwin and the Barnacle: The Story of One Tiny Creature and History’s Most Spectacular Breakthrough. London: Faber & Faber.

Sulloway, F. J. (1982). Darwin’s Conversion: The Beagle Voyage and Its Aftermath.  Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 15, no. 3 (Fall 1982): 325-396.

Sulloway, F. J. (1996). Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. London: Little, Brown and Company.

Sulloway, F. J. (2006). Why Darwin Rejected Intelligent Design.  In J. Brockman (ed.), Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design  Movement, New York: Vintage Books: pp. 107-125.

Wyhe, J. van (2007). Mind the Gap: Did Darwin Avoid Publishing His Theory for Many Years?  Notes & Records of the Royal Society (2007), 61: 177-205.

February 2011