Wilberforce on Darwin

The Huxley-Wilberforce debate: why did it happen? There is another respect in which it didn't - or rather nearly didn't! Huxley had planned to return to his wife on the Saturday, having little appetite for what was on the British Association menu. He had got wind of the bishop's intention to use the occasion. He also knew that Wilberforce "had the reputation of being a first-class controversialist." Consequently, "I was quite aware", he later told Francis Darwin, "that if he played his cards properly, we should have little chance, with such an audience, of making an efficient defence". It had been a chance meeting with Robert Chambers that had kept him in Oxford, Chambers remonstrating with him that he must not desert the cause. The immediate trigger on the day was of course the bishop's jibe, whatever precisely that was. And that, too, reminds us of the contingency of the event. Like many off-the- cuff jokes this one misfired. But, as Adrian Desmond has insisted, it was just a bit of ad-libbing to try to brighten two hours in a stuffy room.

What is clear is that the bishop's main speech, and intention to make it, had been premeditated. This brings us, at last, to the heart of the matter. Wilberforce was confident that the best science and the best philosophy were on his side. And we can see this in one of the most revealing texts of the day: his formal review of Darwin's Origin for the Quarterly Review. This was published a matter of days after the debate, so when he spoke he had all the resources of that review on which to draw. It makes interesting reading. It contains that succinct account of Darwin's threat to Christianity that we heard earlier. Towards the end he does go over the top, making the kind of extravagant remark that has allowed scientific rationalists to caricature him. He does say or at least imply that there is something flimsy and fanciful about the Darwinian hypothesis, as if it were "the frenzied inspiration of the inhaler of mephitic gas." That line is good for a laugh; but there is much more to the review. The first forty pages contain no theologising, admittedly as part of a deliberate strategy. What do they contain?

Initially at least, a courteous and pretty fair exposition of Darwin's main contentions. Darwin is not set up for ridicule. His writings are said to be "unusually attractive"; the book is "most readable", its language so "perspicuous" that it sparkles. He is evidently impressed by the interdependence of all of nature as Darwin has described it. Indeed it is a wonder Wilberforce has not been hailed as a new age prophet! He speaks of the "golden chain of unsuspected relations which bind together all the mighty web which stretches from end to end of this full and most diversified earth." Darwin's argument is then contested; but to be fair the bishop identified moves made by Darwin that could easily produce incredulity. It was one thing to argue that all living things might have descended from a few original forms; but Darwin had been lured further by the quest for unity: "Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype." For Wilberforce that extra step would strain credulity even if no other did.

We might expect him to cavil at Darwin's references to self-acting powers in nature. They could surely be taken to imply the autonomy of a natural order? But no: Wilberforce is content to say that there is a self-acting power in nature, continuously working in all creation. What is this power? Surprisingly perhaps, it turns out to be natural selection. Darwin is even said to have established the law of natural selection. To be sure the bishop assigned limits to its action; but he did not deny there were real effects of a struggle for life. Such a struggle, he wrote, "actually exists, and that it tends continually to lead the strong to exterminate the weak we readily admit." But then we detect the limits of his tolerance. It is in this law of natural selection that we see a "merciful provision against the deterioration, in a world apt to deteriorate, of the works of the Creator's hands." Natural selection prevents the deterioration of existing species rather than effecting new ones.

Two critical difficulties were often raised in discussions of Darwin's theory. Wilberforce was too clever to miss them. One concerned the analogy Darwin had drawn between the selective breeding of domesticated species and what nature could ostensibly do over extensive periods of time. The problem was that, although the domestic breeder could accentuate and accumulate variation to produce fancy pigeons and the like, the evidence suggested that, once released into the wild, their progeny would soon return to the original type. This was not a ridiculous objection. It had been used by Charles Lyell against the evolutionary hypothesis of Lamarck. A second difficulty was the seeming absence of transitional forms in the fossil record. To deal with that, Darwin had appealed to Lyell's principle that the fossil record was necessarily incomplete. He had also suggested that transitional forms, precisely because they were transitional, were less likely to leave a record than stabilised species. But was that not a bit like using the theory to explain why there was no direct evidence for the theory? One adjective might describe such logic and Wilberforce used it: "unsatisfactory". We should also note that Darwin himself had been worried about the degree to which he was exploiting the imperfection of the fossil record, seeking reassurance from Lyell on that very point.

There are, then, surprises in this clerical review, especially if one is expecting an ignorant riposte. There is even one delicious moment when Wilberforce becomes almost more Darwinian than Darwin. The context is Darwin's discussion of the blackbird and why its young, like the young of other birds, were spotted. No-one, Darwin had written, would suppose that the stripes on the whelp of a lion or the spots on the young blackbird "are of any use to these animals, or are related to the conditions to which they are exposed." Their prevalence and their very lack of utility were an indication of common descent. But not for Wilberforce, who chose to give Darwin instruction in natural history. Every observant field naturalist knew that this alleged uselessness of colouring was "one of the greatest protections to the young bird, imperfect in its flight, ... sitting unwarily on every bush through which the rays of sunshine dapple every bough to the colour of its own plumage." In his book Evolutionary Theory and Christian Belief (1957), David Lack also noted this intervention. Well known for his work on Darwin's finches, Lack was not generally impressed by Wilberforce's scientific grasp. But on this particular issue of the young blackbird's spots, he conceded that Wilberforce's remark was the shrewder. The belief that every feature of an organ or organism had to have some use was more strongly held within a Christian natural theology than by Darwin. In his Descent of Man Darwin said as much, explaining the difficulty he had experienced in emancipating himself from that presupposition.

Darwin's own reaction to Wilberforce's review is worth recording: "it is uncommonly clever; it picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts, and brings forward well all the difficulties. It quizzes me quite splendidly." Darwin told Hooker that he detected Owen's hand in it, leaving Owen's name as a derisive blank. Now, I do not wish to be misunderstood. It is not my brief to defend Wilberforce, or to suggest that he was more sympathetic to Darwin than he was. His review was, and was meant to be, scathing. He refers to an "utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation". But it does have another feature that undercuts the crude polarities between science and religion that are so often invoked. This is his appeal to eminent scientists of the day to buttress his attack: Charles Lyell on the limits of organic variability; Roderick Murchison on evidence that was missing for the Silurian life Darwin was assuming; Richard Owen on the caution that should be exercised before admitting any possible mechanism for the transformation of species. It was precisely that caution that allowed Wilberforce to upset Darwin by upholding Owen as "a far greater philosopher".