Most biologists have believed for over a century that selection is the sole source of order in biology, that selection is the tinkerer that crafts the forms. But if the forms selection chooses among were generated by laws of complexity, then selection has always had a handmaiden...If all this is true, what a revision of the Darwinian worldview will lie before us! Not we the accidental, but we the expected!
Stuart Kauffman,
At Home in the Universe, p. 9

4.1 Darwinism and Scientism
The modern discovery, or rediscovery of the idea of evolution, was one of the greatest turning points in the development of human thought. First appearing during the Axial Age, in Greece and India, then reemerging in the period of the Enlightenment (note how it follows our non-random pattern), it begins a complex development in multiple dimensions, beside its track toward science, from the Kantian philosophy of history, the teleomechanists, Hegelian Naturphilosophie, and the embryologists. The work of Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin foretells the coming of evolutionary science with the first theories. The marriage of Darwin’s theory to population genetics will lead in the twentieth century to the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis.
Lamarck, especially, had the gist of a true theory of evolution, despite his thinking about acquired characteristics. But in the next generation, in the fall-off of the Enlightenment kleiglight we see the onset of positivism, and the crystallization of Darwinism as a brand of reductionism.
As in the tale of the blindmen and the elephant, we find a dialectical field of candidates, each with a piece of the answer, and then a collapse into an obsessive reductionism armed with a fragmented piece. The result is the classic metaphysical deadlock of the Darwin debate, effectively depriving the public of any clarity or viable options on the subject of evolution. The sudden crystallization of positivism reduced science to what is sometimes called ‘scientism’, the obsessive application of reductionist universalism to all forms of explanation. This is part of the mystique of natural selection. The result is, for example, a disregard of the fact/value distinction. But if this distinction is essential for understanding evolution, then a new category of methodological science is needed.
Darwin’s seminal publication of his Origin of Species consolidated the revolution in thought we associate with ‘evolution’. But this was a highly flawed triumph of publicity, as the reality of evolution went mainstream. The resulting theory has left the endless Darwin debate in its wake, a debate that has become a central feature of modern culture itself as it downshifts into the conflict of science and religion. Darwin’s theory of evolution became a defining moment in the emergence of a distorted pseudo-secularism, and resulted in the twentieth century opposition of fundamentalist religious groups whose challenges to Darwin have grown into a series of skirmishes in a cultural war.   
Much of the controversy over evolution predates the work of Darwin and it was Darwin’s achievement to create an almost packaged formulation of gestating ideas of evolution, one that the public was prepared to accept. In many ways, the real founder of evolutionary science was Lamarck whose more cogently intelligible, but still inchoate perspective never survived the radical associations of evolution in the wake of the French Revolution. Accounts of the history of biology tend to put the central focus on Darwin, even to the point of suggesting indirectly that the idea of evolution was his achievement. But in fact all of the main ideas, even that of natural selection, preceded Darwin, and the real source of the new biology was in the period of the Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century, a period replete with a host of innovations in all fields.
There is something almost mysterious in the creative career of the Enlightenment, especially in the last half of the eighteenth century. This period, which should include the Romantic reaction, and much else, creates a sort of great divide in which a whole new culture comes into being. We see the Industrial Revolution, and the birth of modern capitalism, the triumph of liberalism in the era of the French and American Revolutions, a cascade of technical innovations, and the crystallization of the secular society struggling to be born since the equally seminal period of the Protestant Reformation. We have a tendency to produce univalent descriptions of this rich and many-sided period of bursting change.
It is significant that the idea of evolution appeared in concert with the era of the French and Industrial Revolutions. After the groundwork of figures such as Linnaeus and Buffon we find the foundations of evolutionary thought in Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin, the ancestor of Charles Darwin, first formulating explicitly the idea of transmutation or development. To see the inherent ideological character lurking in the idea of evolution, we can look at the birth of the idea under the specter of Jacobinism in the wake of the generation of revolution. The conservatizing Darwin all too obviously fixed the idea of ‘slow evolution’ from its association with ‘revolution’, in the match with emergent ideologies of classical liberalism, managing to pass this off as ‘science’.
And then suddenly the period of reaction set in created by the turmoil of the revolutionary generation. The period of the Restoration indirectly conditioned the confusions over evolution, and the association of the idea with revolution made the idea highly controversial, even politicized. The dilemma over slow and fast evolution arises here. The very idea of progress or revolution was subject to concerted attacks by the forces of reaction, and this seems to have delayed the acceptance of evolutionary thought for a full generation. In fact, it was in many ways Lamarck who first formulated a theory of evolution, and yet by the end of his life he was almost a forgotten figure. In the background the new biology of the embryologists, such as Von Baer and Geoffrey St. Hilaire, was creating the foundation for a new conception of evolutionary development.
Then came the famous Vestiges of Creation by Robert Chambers whose immensely popular but anonymous bestseller paved the way for the work of Darwin twenty years later. In this context we have a better sense of how Darwin managed to succeed where these earlier figures had failed, and the conservatizing of evolution was one of the keys to his success. We can thus see that Darwin’s theory was successful as an unconscious reaction to this political background, and the attempt to fix the idea in association with a triumph of liberalism in its classical version made for an easy passage at the right time. This association of the issues with ideology and the development of modern politics would seem to be irrelevant to the question of science. And yet it can help us to uncover the chronic confusion of cultural and biological evolution that has always been a notable feature of Darwinian thinking.
The explosive generation of industrialization, emergent liberalism, and revolution is the hidden context of Darwin’s theory. Darwin’s social position and genealogy, scion of the family of Wedgewoods so prominent at the birth of the industrial revolution in England, colors his thinking, and his strategy proved to be brilliant in the way he packaged his theory and timed its publication. In fact, the curious phenomenon of the delay in the presentation of a theory that was essentially tabled in the 1840’s has many different aspects. It was sudden appearance of the famous Ternate letter of Alfred Wallace that forced the issue and drove Darwin to make public the nexus of ideas that he had long kept private, even from many of his friends and colleagues.
But the idea of evolution was in the air, always with the built-in ambiguity between social and biological development. One of the transparent influences on Darwin’s thinking can be seen in the work of Herbert Spencer whose views on cultural evolution produced the classic phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, beginning the career of ‘traveling concepts’ between evolutionary and cultural categories of development.
The crystallizing classical liberalism was a natural companion of Darwinian theory, and the still more vexacious Social Darwinism arising in the wake of Darwin’s work springs from this incestuous constellation of mismatched conceptual themes claiming the title of evolution. The work of Herbert Spencer, now a very dated figure, is often made to take the blame for the Social Darwinist implications of evolutionary ideology, but these deflections of the essence of the problem away from Darwin tend to make us fail to see the ideological core of Darwin’s theory.
The point should be clear from the direct influence of Malthus on Darwin’s formulation of his theory. Malthus was the founder of the science of demography, but he was also a highly contentious conservative figure, one of the most blatant in his propensity to use theory for social legitimation. The polarized and acrimonious debate over Malthus’ work went on for an entire generation, and in many ways prefigured the more complex and subtle Darwin debate, still colored with underground strains of class struggle, revolution, and the reform bill. It is easy to lose sight of a simple fact: the mechanism adopted by Darwin under the influence of Malthusian thinking is open to severe challenge on its own terms. The struggle of populations, and the incidence of natural disasters or sudden population fluctuations, is seldom seen as a very weak candidate for an evolutionary theory. It is very doubtful if what we mean by evolution is really caused by anything like a Malthusian scenario. Certainly the factor of natural selection is a given, but there is no inherent reason to assume that this generates the emergence of complex forms that we see in the fossil record.
The Triumph of Positivism The nineteenth century produced an immense proliferation of the methods of scientific reductionism in the biological and social sciences, as the onset of positivism led the way to a monolithic consolidation of scientific viewpoints. A symbolic influence is seen in the figure of Comte, and his somewhat idiosyncratic Positivism, which influenced Darwin at the early stage of his career. One of the problems here is that Comte’s work exhibited its own metaphysical tendency, and the historicist philosophy of history in which the Age of Positivism was to succeed those of theology and metaphysics induced a sense of an irreversible progression of thought, with the methodology of science in the starring role.
It is significant that the formulation of Darwinism and the so-called Age of Positivism followed directly in the wake of the collapse of the great era of German philosophy. The end of the reign of Hegelianism, which began with Kant, was very sudden and the history of the 1840’s shows us the drama of Feuerbach and Marx challenging the legacy of idealism and championing the need for sciences of society. This period produced a clear delineation of the human and natural sciences, with a challenge to the reductionist implications of the expanding scientific revolution. A kind of amnesia has overtaken science in the stubborn regression, fueled by spectacular, but misleading, technological wonders, to reductionist obsessions dressed up in scientific methodological jargon. It is nonetheless true that Darwinism thrived on this sense of the epochal transition of modernity attempting to establish the foundations of a new age of secularism. This is not an unreasonable view, once its tacit assumptions are brought out. The problem is Darwin’s selectionist metaphysics, which cannot sustain the task of defining secularism. A strong case can be made for the ‘new age of science’, but this is not something fixed or defined by a passing phase of evolutionary theory.
In this context the triumph of the theory of natural selection became a driving force to legitimate an immense passage of culture across a threshold but in the process upheld a kind of naïvete about culture, history, and evolution itself. The mechanization of the principles of biology under the reductionist perspectives of positivistic science blinded its champions to the sudden contraction of thought created by their own advance. Just as science wished to take over a sudden narrowing of vision occurred, and the result has produced many false starts, bogus paradigms in social science, and the restive underground of puzzled dissenters watching the triumph of secularism turn into a nest of adders.
The Coming of Scientism In the wake of the Enlightenment a contraction of thought occurs, reflected in the emergence of positivism, and the new brand of science called ‘scientism’, a reductionist universalism that cannot do justice to evolutionary realities, as the phenomena of mind, consciousness and ethics are treated like phenomena of physics. It is not surprising that the debate lapses into a debate with religion, given the extreme positions generated by reductionist oversimplifications. Many warnings emerged here, from Rousseau and the Romantic Movement to the phase of German Classical philosophy initiated by Kant.

Is There a Science of Evolution? The issue of scientism casts doubt on the status of a science of evolution. The coming of reductionist thinking in the formation of a science of evolution was almost a regression from right understanding, and produced a dumbed-down mechanics almost silly in some of its extensions. The question has a one-punch knockout: the failure to take into account the fact/value dichotomy makes theories of evolution one-dimensional. But we must suspect an entire dimension is missing in standard theories.
The Iron Cage The sociologist Max Weber cogently depicted the onset of scientism in his chronicle of the Iron Cage.

Beyond the public promotion the reality is that Darwinism is an incomplete account. And the theory of natural selection has become the keynote for a series of agendas. Some very obvious issues are ignored in the promotion of a science of evolution, such as the disregard of the fact/value distinction, beside the failure to fully account for the enigma of consciousness, and the agent of human ethical action, with an intangible element of will.
These issues should remind us that no real theory of evolution in its complete form as yet exists. This situation should be common knowledge, by the testimony of scientists themselves. Instead we see the constant promotion of reductionist ideology as a completed science able to resolve all questions. A kind of religious metaphysics has taken hold, and the theory becomes the object of a series of agendas.
 
Chapter 4: The Evolution Controversy

Introduction
Chapter 2: Science, Ideology, and World View
Chapter 3: World History: A Hidden Teleology
Chapter 4: The Evolution Controversy
Chapter 5: History and Evolution
 Conclusion