History, humanity and evolution: essays for John C. Greene

JAMES R. MOORE (ed), History, humanity and evolution: essays for John C. Greene, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. xii, 429, illus., £35.00, $59.50 (0-521-33511-6). John C. Greene is a grand old man of the history of science. His career crucially interlocks with the subject's fortunes in America since the 1940s, both as a discipline in its own right and as a significant constituent of apres-Lovejoy intellectual history. This volume sets Greene's work as an historian of evolutionary thought against the current state of the art in studies of natural theology, evolutionary theory and scientific naturalism as cultural and polemical constructs. It does this through the framing devices of an "Introductory conversation" between Greene and the editor and an "Afterword" in which Greene comments on the preceding essays put together in his honour. James R. Moore's interview with Greene is a notable feature of the book and suggests comparisons with an earlier festschrift of a great historian of science. In "The making of an honorary Taoist", the first essay in the 1973 collection, Changing perspectives in the history of science-Essays in honour of Joseph Needham (ed. Mikulas Teich and Robert Young), Needham, writing under the pseudonym of "Henry Holorenshaw", gave his own account of how "a biochemist turned into a historian and sinologist" and came to regard himself as an "honorary Taoist". Greene, in conversation with Moore, tells of how a liberal Congregationalist from Vermillion, South Dakota passed through the Harvard of the 1 940sthe Pareto Circle and Society of Fellows in the era of Craine Brinton and A. N. Whiteheadand came to produce the classic account of the dissolution of the static view of nature that was to be published as The death of Adam: evolution and its impact on western thought (1959). Another parallel between the two volumes is that both are seen by their editors as important staging posts along the road from the subject's "coming of age. . . as a discipline" (Teich and Young) in the late 1950s and early sixties. Where Teich and Young emphasized the increasingly interdisciplinary character of the history of science since that time, Moore sees the thirty-year interval since the centennial commemorations of The origin of species as a period during which the "interests and interpretations" of the principal commentators on evolution have changed fundamentally. In spite of, but also because of the "Darwin industry", Moore observes, "Today's historians are more likely to fault than to flatter biologists' triumphal polarization of their disciplinary past. Darwin, for them, is not the revolutionary figure he once appeared to be, evolutionary ideas are not simply the rational outcome of a self-correcting science." Greene's particular contribution to this change has been to show the primary importance of the religious, philosophical and political constituents of evolutionary thought in all its biological, geological and astronomical complexities. His emphasis on the ways in which, as Moore puts it, "the human significance of evolution" was and continues to be "paramount" has inspired the generation of historians represented in History, humanity and evolution. Historiographically, Greene's influence can be located in three related areas. In the first place, his writings have provided a bridge between Lovejoy's "unit ideas" and the more recent project of a social history of ideas. Second, most notably in the 1971 essay "The Kuhnian paradigm and the Darwinian revolution in natural history", Greene convincingly argued that Kuhn's model of scientific change, "sealed off" from the extra-scientific influences of religion, ideology and culture, was peculiarly inappropriate for explaining the success of natural selection in Victorian Britain. Although Greene has always stressed that ideas do have a history of their own, his adage in the title essay of the 1981 collection Science, ideology and world view that "The lines between science, ideology, and world view are seldom tightly drawn" has