Free The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution by Henry Gee

transcendent light, is something espoused only by misinformed journalists and newspaper readers who know no better, we must think again. When I was an undergraduate, back in the mists of time (okay, it was 1981), my zoology textbook was the very latest edition of
The Life of Vertebrates
, by the influential, immensely respected, and very sensible zoologist, the late John Zachary Young. Here is Young summarizing the evolution of mammals, the group of creatures to which we ourselves belong.
    We shall expect to find in the mammals even more devices for correcting the possible effects of external change than are found in other groups. Besides means for regulating such features as those mentioned above we shall find that the receptors are especially sensitive and the motor mechanisms able to produce remarkable adjustments of the environment to suit the organism, culminating in man with hisastonishing perception of the “World” around him and his powers of altering the whole fabric of the surface of large parts of the earth to suit his needs. 11
    Yes, you read that correctly—Young really does use the phrase “culminating in man.” And if that’s in a modern undergraduate textbook, written by an acknowledged authority, it is little wonder that people more generally find it hard to grasp what evolution (in the sense of descent with modification) is all about.
    We can’t put all the blame at Haeckel’s door, however. When the
Origin
first erupted (there is no other word) into the public consciousness, commentators were less worried about the niceties of natural selection, still less that Darwin could not explain the mechanism of inheritance on which his theory depended, but about the challenge that Darwin’s ideas made to established social orthodoxy. In place of a static social order, a possibility of change—of liberation, progression, advancement, improvement. What we would now call a left-wing thinker such as Harriet Martineau (who knew Darwin personally) and particularly Herbert Spencer (who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”) co-opted Darwinian evolution in support of a general theory of social evolution that had all the hallmarks of the directed, progressive strivings that one would see turning up everywhere from manifest destiny and Marxism to fascism and advertising.
    The
OED
defines sense 10 of “evolution” as “progression from simple to complex forms, conceived as a universal principle of development, either in the natural world or in human societies and cultures” and cites Martineau.
    It was Spencer, not Haeckel, who championed evolution among what we might now call the “chattering classes,” in opposition to the nobility and the established church, and who wrote, just before the
Origin
was published, that “those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by the facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all.” The battle lines were drawn between the agents of political progress, marching forward with evolution as a kind of justification for social improvement, and the established orthodoxy to which evolution was seen as a threat. One sees the same lines drawn to this day, especially in the United States. It’s a pity that somewhere along the line, the exquisite beauty and infinite subtlety of natural selection as a mechanism has been lost, trampled intothe dust by the simplistic slogans of those who’d use evolution as a device to further their own ends.
    The accretion of all this social, political, and philosophical baggage over the past century and a half has tended to dull any appreciation of the disarming simplicity and beauty of natural selection as a mechanism. All other schemes of transformation current in Darwin’s day required strange and mysterious ingredients, such as Lamarck’s
besoin
, or cosmic strivings for betterment favored by the nature philosophers—none of which could be seen or touched, and