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Progress and Direction
Darwin did not use the noun “evolution” until 1871, twelve years after the Origin, whose last word is “evolved”. He never said why. The historians’ explanation, and it is theirs rather than his, is that the word arrived carrying a direction: preformation’s unrolling of what was already there, Lamarck’s ascent up a predetermined sequence, and above all Spencer’s law, which by the 1850s had made “evolution” and “progress” one thing. Whether Darwin’s theory has a direction is the question that colouring left behind, argued ever since on both sides of his own text.
Spencer’s law
“Progress: Its Law and Cause” (1857) took the law of individual development from von Baer’s embryology, the passage from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and made it the law of everything: “this law of organic progress is the law of all progress”, holding, in Spencer’s words, in the development of the Earth, of life upon its surface, and of society. When “evolution” became the common word for Darwin’s theory in the late 1860s it brought Spencer’s direction with it, and much of the later argument is an attempt to separate the two again.
Darwin on both sides
Both readings quote him.
Against. In Notebook B (1837–38) he wrote that “it is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another”. To Alpheus Hyatt, on 4 December 1872, he wrote: “After long reflection I cannot avoid the conviction that no innate tendency to progressive development exists, as is now held by so many able naturalists, & perhaps by yourself.” The sixth edition of the Origin says that natural selection “does not necessarily include progressive development — it only takes advantage of such variations as arise and are beneficial to each creature under its complex relations of life”.
For. The closing chapter of the Origin, in the first edition and retained in the sixth, says that “as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection”. Each new species, Darwin held, is formed by having had some advantage over the forms that preceded it.
The twentieth century
Julian Huxley put progress back at the centre of the synthesis: Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942) has a chapter titled “Evolutionary progress”, and his definition, as later quoted, made evolution “a directional and essentially irreversible process occurring in time”.
Two books of 1996 restated the question from opposite sides. Gould’s Full House argued that apparent progress is an artefact of a skewed distribution: life began near a wall of minimal complexity and could only spread away from it, so the mean drifts upward while the mode stays with the bacteria, and no trend toward complexity is built into the process. Michael Ruse’s Monad to Man argued the reverse for the idea’s history: that progress was the hidden motor of evolutionary thought from its beginnings and was never removed, only made unrespectable to say.
The argument in its most direct recent form is an exchange in the New York Review of Books in December 2005. Lewontin, reviewing, had set Darwin’s marginal warning, “never speak of higher and lower”, against the progressivist reading. Robert Richards wrote in objecting, citing the “progress towards perfection” passage and Darwin’s claim that each new species has some advantage over its predecessors, and holding that a sense of progress “permeates his text”. Lewontin replied that progress is marginal to the text, and that the “tangled bank” paragraph which is the book’s actual conclusion lists the laws at work, growth and reproduction, variability, inheritance, the struggle for life, and that no law of progress is among them.
The growth metaphor
Robert Nisbet’s Social Change and History (1969) put the whole question one level up. Developmentalism, in his account, is the organic metaphor of growth and decay used to assert the inevitability and the direction of social change, and it runs unbroken from the Greeks through Christian providence into natural history and social evolution. On that reading the direction came with the metaphor, and the metaphor came from the organism. The critiques of progress page of the philosophy-of-history bundle carries Nisbet beside Benjamin, Löwith, Popper and Foucault.
The contrary: recurrence
The arrow is defined against a pole, and the pole has a history of its own. Its oldest Western statements are Greek, and they are cycles of the whole cosmos. Heraclitus’s fragment B30 describes a world-order “no god or human made”, which “was always, is, and will be: fire ever-living, kindled in measures, quenched in measures”. Empedocles set the four elements under Love and Strife, swinging between their complete mixture in the Sphere and their complete separation. The Stoics made the return periodic: the cosmos is resolved into fire in a conflagration (ekpyrosis) and formed again. Recurrence also shapes cosmologies outside the Western line. In the Hindu reckoning a thousand cycles of four ages make a day of Brahmā, followed by a night of dissolution of equal length, and within each cycle virtue declines. The Pāli Aggañña Sutta has the cosmos contract and expand over immense periods. In one main Nahua source the present sun is the fifth, each earlier one having ended in destruction.
Hutton’s world-machine, in the geology of the 1780s, ran in cycles of uplift and erosion with “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end”. Lyell’s steady state was his case against progression in the fossil record, a world in which the ages might return and iguanodons with them. Gould’s Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (1987) read Burnet, Hutton and Lyell as the discovery of deep time under two governing metaphors: the arrow, in which each event is unique and sequence carries meaning, and the cycle, in which meaning comes from lawfulness and return. None of those authors called their cycles evolution, and Lyell’s one use of the word was his hostile summary of Lamarck.
See also: Evolution (the subject landing) · The word · The criterion · Critiques of progress · Darwinism