Anti-Darwinism in the Scientific Community

The scientific community was not only the bastion of Darwinism but also the main source of anti-Darwinian criticism. In most cases, this criticism was more subtle than that generated by theologians and academic philosophers, but it was also more penetrating and more diversified. In some notable cases it was as unyielding as the antiDarwinian tirades of the more combative philosophers and theologians. The anti-Darwinism generated by the scientific community made extensive use of metaphysical and ethical arguments. The biologists who criticized individual propositions of Darwin's theory solely on scientific grounds refrained from joining the ranks of anti-Darwinists. Although R. E. Regel' and lu. A. Filipchenko, for example, were clearly unwilling to treat natural selection as a prime mover of organic evolution, they showed no hesitation in expressing their great admiration for Darwin as the true pioneer of evolutionary orientation in modern biology.^[52]

The criticism of Darwinism generated by the scientific community but placed into ideological channels added a distinctive parameter to modern antievolutionism. A. A. Tikhomirov provided a classic example of this kind of criticism. A professor of zoology at Moscow University, Tikhomirov was noted for his anatomical and embryological studies of the silkworm and for his contributions to silk technology, which earned him a faculty position. His original work on artificial parthenogenesis attracted international attention. Gradually, he abandoned experimental work altogether, moving to a very active engagement in the defense of autocratic ideology from mounting attacks staged, he thought, by "science materialism" in general and Darwinism in particular. His lectures at the university were anti-Darwinian harangues, dominated more by moral obsessions and religious fervor than by presentation of current developments in science and philosophy.^[53] Many times he appeared at

government-sponsored education centers for industrial workers to present scornful and emotionally charged descriptions of the evils of Darwinism. And every time he stressed the pernicious influence of Darwinism on "Russian values" embodied in the autocratic system. His lectures and published papers were aggregates of standard scientific arguments, disconnected philosophical categorizations, and moral exhortations. His line of argumentation differed from theological criticism only in that he displayed more passion and outright bitterness. "There is renewed hope," he wrote in The Fate of Darwinism (1907), "that after temporary blindness, biology will return to a view of human nature that is harmonious with the striving for an absolute ideal, about which an internal voice gives us daily reminders."^[54] In soliciting favorable responses from his listeners, he asserted categorically that Russia received Darwin's ideas more uncritically and with more "blind servitude" than any other country.

Tikhomirov belonged to a group of the most conservative advocates of university reforms. At a time when liberal professors fought against the university charter of 1884, which imposed serious limitations on academic autonomy, he fought against the same charter but for completely different reasons: he thought that this document did not go far enough in eliminating the last vestiges of academic autonomy guaranteed by the 1863 charter. Despite the intent of government authorities, the subsequent ordinances, as he interpreted them, combined to give the charter a more liberal interpretation.^[55] The government appreciated Tikhomirov's help in consolidating its control over university affairs. His reward came in 1911. In that year all leading Darwinists at Moscow University resigned from their teaching positions. They joined a large group of professors from the same university who resigned in protest against the new oppressive measures instituted by Lev Aristidovich Kasso, minister of public education. Exactly at this time Tikhomirov received a substantial reward from the government for his patriotic war against Darwinism: he was appointed superintendant of the Moscow school district, one of the highest positions in the central administration of educational institutions at all levels.

Tikhomirov was among the very few Russian naturalists who criticized Darwin by weaving "scientific arguments" into a fabric of beliefs held together by religious maxims, and who transformed both "science" and "religion" in such a way as to make them parts of the ideology of the Black Hundreds, an ultraconservative political organization that made deep inroads into the academic community during the waning years of tsarist rule.

The great novelist Leo Tolstoy died in 1910. In 1911 Tikhomirov published a pamphlet unleashing a savage attack on Darwin and Tolstoy, the chief creators of "anti-Christian delusions" in "science and an."^[56] "The biological theory currently known as Darwinism," he wrote, "is undoubtedly an anti-Christian theory, and its founder must be regarded as an enemy of Christianity." "We must remember," he added, "that the difference between Darwin and Haeckel, and his followers, is only that Darwin has tried to refute the truthfulness of the world view based on the teachings of Christ without making a public statement about it, while Haeckel has loudly demonstrated his hostility."^[57] Darwin's major sin, in Tikhomirov's view, was in expressing a sympathetic attitude toward Haeckel's anti-Christian works. He reminded his readers that Darwin stated publicly that Haeckel's History of Natural Creation made it possible for him to undertake the writing of The Descent of Man .^[58] In the bitter and unscrupulous attack on him, Darwin found himself in good company. Tikhomirov viewed Tolstoy as another major source of anti-Christian statements. In War and Peace, as Tikhomirov read it, Tolstoy preached "pantheism," which stood in direct opposition to Christianity. In Resurrection he made "a blasphemous attack" on everything "dear and holy" to true Christians.

S. S. Glagolev, the leading theological scholar involved in a relentless war on Darwinism, noted in 1911 that only two Russian scholars were anti-Darwinists: N. la. Danilevskii and A. A. Tikhomirov. By "scholars" Glagolev obviously meant "scientists." If he meant that Danilevskii and Tikhomirov were the only Russian scientists who carried out a sustained, systematic, and comprehensive war on Darwin's ideas, he was very close to the truth. Even these two scholars took time to pay homage to Darwin as a brilliant naturalist and a man of intellectual and moral integrity.

Criticism of Darwinism had difficulty in establishing a strong foothold in the Russian scientific community. This can best be explained by the continuing strength of Darwinism in the leading universities, by the categorical and enthusiastic support given to Darwin's evolutionary thought by such eminent leaders of the scientific community as Ivan Pavlov, I. I. Mechnikov, K. A. Timiriazev, and N. A. Umov, and by the unwillingness of the critics of Darwinism to undertake a sustained antimechanistic campaign or to transform the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences into a bastion of anti-Darwinism.

As might have been expected, there were biologists who were regarded as anti-Darwinists by some groups and as Darwinists by others. Korzhinskii, Borodin, and Famintsyn were among the better-known

scholars who did not escape such a conflicting identification. These three eminent botanists had two traits in common. First, while rejecting the "mechanistic" affiliation of Darwin's theory, they expressed a favorable attitude toward neovitalism, not as a set of acceptable answers to the key problems of organic evolution but as a source of challenging questions on the future development of biological theory. Second, they recognized the preeminence of Darwin's role in making the history of the forms of life the central concern of biology. Of the three scholars, Famintsyn was much more explicit in making his allegiance to Darwin a matter of public record. Borodin was not explicit at all—the main reason his contemporaries remembered him primarily as an anti-Darwinist. He attracted wide attention mainly by his "Protoplasm and Vitalism," a scorching attack on the exaggerated role of physicochemical analysis in modern biology and of mechanical models in the explanation of life processes. One of his biographers went so far as to assert that at no time was Borodin ready to side with the vitalist orientation in modern biology.^[59]

Korzhinskii, according to Timiriazev, started his scholarly career as a Darwinist and ended as an anti-Darwinist. Perfunctory in paying homage to Darwin as a founder of modern biology, he was profuse and unbending in his anti-Darwinian exhortations. He added new fuel to the anti-Darwinian fire, which for a while appeared to have been running out of control. On the basis of a mass of published records he concluded that organic evolution takes place not through "slight modifications" in the existing forms of life but through heterogenesis—sudden and saltatory digressions from the existing types. He also claimed that "the struggle for existence and natural selection limit the number of emergent forms and prevent further variation, but in no case do they lead to the emergence of new forms." Adaptation, he said, may be a result of the struggle for existence, but it is not a synonym for progress.^[60] He was careful to add that in the world of homo sapiens "progress does not depend on victory in the struggle for existence but is guided by an internal principle, a striving toward the ideals of truth, goodness, and beauty, which are deeply rooted in man's soul, and, perhaps, represent only a special expression of the impulse for progress that characterizes all life." Korzhinskii made no effort to elaborate on his philosophical proclamation.^[61] Raoul Francé, the well-known Munich botanist and psycho-Lamarckian, was so impressed with the new formulation of heterogenesis that he called Korzhinskii the Columbus of mutationism.^[62]

Criticism of Darwin's theory also came from scientists who did not

work in biology. It came from all corners of the scientific community, usually in small doses. In mathematics, to give one example, most criticism came from the so-called arithmological school, founded by a group of conservative professors affiliated with Moscow University. Arithmology was based on a theory of discontinuous or discrete functions, a mathematical apparatus for a new orientation in science that went beyond the exclusive Newtonian concern with the continuity of natural processes. In rejecting the universality of "continuity," the principal notion behind the Newtonian clockwork picture of the universe, arithmology rejected the monopolistic position of the analytical orientation in mathematics—of infinitesimal calculus. The arithmological theory of discrete functions "reestablished" free will as the supreme law of nature. Arithmology was a mathematically expressed philosophical attack on causality as a prime instrument of scientific explanation. It was admittedly an effort to establish harmony between science and religious faith.^[63] Its basic aim was to separate science from materialism.

N. V. Bugaev, the founder of arithmology, directed particularly sharp criticism at efforts to make the study of "continuous phenomena" the main task of biology, psychology, and sociology. In his opinion, "the theories of Lamarck and Darwin are nothing else but efforts to build biology on the idea of the continuity of change in the living world—the same idea that had reigned supreme in geometry, mechanics, and physics."^[64] Darwin, arithmologists argued, found the strongest support among scientists who defended the supremacy of analytical mathematics, a tool of Newtonian science and Laplacian determinism. Darwin's major error was in making evolutionary biology a subsidiary of Newtonian science. Darwin, they wrote, "transformed" the discontinuity of random variation in plants and animals into the continuity of Newton's mechanical motion.^[65] In the massive evidence presented in the Origin of Species they saw an exercise in "sham empiricism" and an endorsement of rigid causality and absolute determinism, which, in turn, they viewed as the fulcrum of materialism.^[66]

The physicist-philosopher A. I. Bachinskii praised arithmology for its rebellion against the monopoly of continuous functions in mathematics and against Darwin's mechanistic bias. A translator of Henri Poincaré's La science et l'hypothèse into Russian, he identified Newtonianism as a world view expressed in infinitesimal calculus, the main tool of mathematical analysis that reduces discrete cosmic forces to continuous functions and simple dependencies. In Darwinism, as an integral component of Newtonianism, he saw part of a reigning scientific philosophy domi-

nated by the mechanistic picture of the universe. He did not miss the opportunity to identify the discontinuities of Hugo de Vries's mutationism as a triumph of the arithmological attack on the analytical orientation in mathematics.^[67] In his crusade against the "analytical world view," Bachinskii did not spare the writer Leo Tolstoy, who, in a passage in War and Peace, viewed differential calculus—the main instrument of analytical orientation—as the most effective method the students of human history had at their disposal.^[68] Differential calculus, it should be noted, represents a mathematical response to the Newtonian principle of the continuity of motion. It searches for continuities even where they do not exist.

The arithmologists made it clear that they did not advocate a total rejection of analytical orientation—the mathematics of continuous functions. All they wanted was a recognition of both continuous and discontinuous functions, the latter ready to utilize the enormous potential of probability theory. They wanted a full recognition of both analytical and arithmological orientations in mathematics. They presented their emphasis on discontinuous functions as an original Russian contribution to modern science. By a considerable stretch of the imagination, they made Butlerov's pioneering work in structural chemistry and Mendeleev's periodic law of elements early victories for the arithmological point of view. In their isolation, they failed to note that the theory of discontinuous functions in mathematics had many pioneers. They had no rivals, however, in their effort to fasten arithmology to a political ideology that granted autonomy only to the monarch and the state.^[69] The road from castigating Newtonianism and Darwinism to praising monarchical autocracy was bumpy and not perfectly logical.

The arithmologists and their admirers viewed the new mathematics not only as a powerful addition to science but also as a notable development in the broad field of philosophical attitudes. The arithmologist V. G. Alekseev noted that the attack on the Darwinian notion of the continuity of organic evolution was a frontal attack on atheism.^[70] The philosopher L. M. Lopatin congratulated the arithmologists for making freedom a "philosophical imperative."^[71] He claimed that the existence of discontinuities in the "inner" or "mental" domains of life provided the best proof for the presence of a force in nature that is not limited by the laws of the physical world.^[72] Biology, unlike physics, must be mindful of the unlimited powers of a supreme intelligence. A. I. Vvedenskii, another philosopher, greeted the arithmological crusade as a "turning point" in the growth of modern mathematics.^[73] The theologian S. S.

Glagolev commended arithmologists for showing the full unity of theology and mathematics, the most perfect of the sciences.^[74]

While a strong wing of metaphysicists accepted arithmology with utmost enthusiasm, the leading mathematicians chose to ignore it. The mathematicians wanted no part of an orientation that identified the defense of free will with the defense of autocratic values. Aside from the heavy and obvious ideological entanglement, for which Alekseev and Nekrasov were awarded high government positions, arithmology represented a sensible but insufficiently elaborated effort to meet the modern need for systematic work on the mathematics of discrete or discontinuous functions.^[75]

The primary battle against Darwin was carried out on ideological rather than on scientific grounds. The ideologues used scientific arguments to achieve ideological results. In the 1880s—as typified by N. Ia. Danilevskii—they criticized Darwin's theory because it "violated" the cardinal principles of Newtonian continuity and Laplacian causality. Darwin's random variation was no match for the majestic sway and calculable regularity of Newtonian gravitation. At the beginning of the twentieth century the critics aimed their fire in the opposite direction: now Darwin's fault was not in ignoring the guidelines of Newtonian explanation but in fitting himself too snugly into the Newtonian fold. At the same time he was found guilty of dogmatic adherence to the supreme authority of causal explanations and of disregarding the element of discontinuity in natural processes.

Neovitalist criticism of Darwin's theory flared up during the 1890s. After 1900 it survived in the scientific community primarily as a component of the organicist orientation, which claimed historical roots in, but not full identity with, the philosophical views of Aristotle, Leibniz, and Schelling, and which professed close ties with the ideas of Bergson and Driesch. The chief representatives of the organicist orientation were the Moscow University histologists I. F. Ognev and V. P. Karpov, teacher and disciple. Ognev started the process of developing the new orientation in a critical review of neovitalism published in 1900. While rejecting the monopoly of mechanical models and interpretations in biology, he at the same time criticized neovitalism for unpardonable lapses into mechanistic patterns of scientific explanation. Mechanism, he contended, was clearly on its way out as a unitary orientation in biology, but neovitalism was in no position to replace it. Neovitalism did not become a fully developed and independent orientation; it did not achieve a full emancipation from mechanism.^[76]

Ognev did not expect neovitalism to replace mechanism fully, but he was ready to announce that mechanism had already surrendered its prerogatives as a unitary orientation in biology and had become "only one of the possible methods of studying nature."^[77] The period of the absolute reign of the mechanistic world outlook was giving place to a "period of synthesis" of different views. Ognev felt that he lived in a period of transition: "The altars of the old gods have been destroyed; fire is still burning in them, but their gods have only a few believers. New gods have not yet arrived to take the place of old gods." He made no effort to anticipate or to elaborate the details of the philosophy of the new gods. This did not prevent him from making it abundantly clear that he regarded Darwinism as a system of theoretical and methodological principles encased in a mechanistic world view and much in need of a broad philosophical and scientific recasting.

In a later essay, Ognev endorsed Emil du Bois-Reymond's classic discussion of the cognitive limitation of science in general and of Newtonian mechanism in particular. He stated that the laws of organic nature are incompatible with the mechanistic world outlook, and that Darwin's effort to read "purposiveness" into natural selection is far from convincing.^[78] He reaffirmed his belief that the future of biology is neither in the supremacy of mechanistic views nor in the reign of vitalism, but in a new orientation that would be equipped conceptually and methodologically to handle the universal aspects of both the structure and the evolution of life. Unsure about the course of the future development of neovitalism, he was only certain that the days of mechanism were numbered.

Vladimir Karpov gave the organicist effort wider scope and more depth in a series of studies from 1908 to 1913.^[79] After a detailed and critical analysis of the ideas of Driesch, Reinke, Hartmann, and Bergson, he decided that the future of biology lay in a "higher synthesis" of a thesis (mechanism) and an antithesis (vitalism).^[80] He was also influenced by Ostwald's energeticism, a unique criticism of mechanistic views, and by the neo-Kantianism of the Baden school. The future "general biology," as he saw it, should consist of two branches: one identified as "natural science," the other as "history." As a natural science, biology should concentrate on cosmic characteristics that unite organisms with other natural objects, whether they be celestial bodies or drops of water. This branch calls for an ahistorical or "geometrical" approach. It deals with organisms as holistic entities and as states of equilibrium in the constant flow of organic energy.^[81] As history, biology concentrates on organic evolution. Karpov may be counted among the Russian pioneers

of the structuralist orientation in biology—a unique reaction to the supreme reign of the evolutionary approach.

Karpov may also be counted among the pioneers of organicism in Russian biological and philosophical thought. Insofar as it applied to his theoretical views, organicism had two meanings: it stressed the morphogenetic and holistic unity of organisms, and it suggested the use of the organism as a model for the explanation of the internal unity of all cosmic objects and of the cosmos itself. Karpov could not accept Bergson's emphasis on fundamental differences between living and inorganic nature.^[82]

Karpov envisaged the "natural science" branch of biology as a discipline concerned with the organism as a network of reversible processes. He viewed the historical branch of biology as a special discipline concentrating on irreversible processes. Under the spell of the Baden school of neo-Kantianism, he was ready to treat the first branch of biology as a nomothetic discipline, and the second branch as an idiographic science. The future of biology, he said, was in synchronizing a study of the structural stability of living forms with the study of evolutionary dynamics. He tried to cast biology within a framework that embraced a general theory of organization and a concern with evolution. Combined, the two orientations covered not only genetic ties but also formal similarities between organisms.^[83] His arguments carried one unmistakable message: the Darwinian or any other evolutionary study of the forms of life was not sufficient for a full understanding of the structure and dynamics of life.

The organicists seldom mentioned Darwin and avoided a direct confrontation with his theory. Their general orientation, however, worked against Darwinism on three strategic fronts. In the first place, it emphasized the need for abandoning the Darwinian tradition of keeping teleology out of biology. Indeed, it relied heavily on ideological metaphors borrowed from neovitalist literature. In the second place, it favored a reversal of the historicist trend in biology by shifting the central emphasis from the instability of evolution and transformism to the stability of the structural features of life. In the third place, it encouraged close cooperation with relevant currents in philosophical thought, even when these lapsed into metaphysical speculation of the most tenuous kind. At one point, Karpov hinted at the possibility of advancing a philosophy that would treat the universe as an organism.^[84] While organicism did not present a major threat to Darwinism, it did contribute to the growing pressure to bring Darwin's legacy closer to the conceptual and meth-

odological challenge of new developments in experimental biology—and to the new ties between biology and physics.

Karpov's argumentation lacked precision and any consistent use of philosophical terminology. Buried in the dim passages of his unwieldy discussion was a two-pronged criticism of Darwinism. In the first place, Karpov admitted the evolutionary approach to life only as a subsidiary of the organismic or holistic approach. In the second place, he thought that Darwinism could survive as a viable theory only by separating itself from the models of Newtonian mechanics. Karpov found neovitalism open to criticism as well. He thought that the neovitalists erred in pushing the boundaries of biology beyond their natural limits. In his opinion, the neovitalists concentrated too much on proving that an organism is not a machine, even though the answer to the question was obvious and required no lengthy discussion. The neovitalists, he charged, exaggerated the role of the psychological factor in biology.^[85]

Organicism was a mere episode in the history of Russian attitudes toward Darwinism. Ognev and Karpov did not occupy positions high enough on the scale of academic prestige and honors to attract influential followers. Nor did they give their analysis sufficient depth and requisite precision. Both Ognev and Karpov eventually abandoned their efforts on behalf of organicism—and holism—and returned to more traditional academic work. Karpov's new activity included the writing of a basic textbook in histology and translations of ancient Greek medical texts. He also produced a Russian translation of Aristotle's Physics .

In the scientific community, anti-Darwinism took on many forms and appeared in various intensities, levels of organization, and types of scholarship. It seldom took the form of a pure and detached scientific inquiry. All sweeping refutations of Darwinism depended more on philosophical convictions than on carefully adduced and examined empirical facts and scientific arguments. The anti-Darwinists in the scientific community were not ideologically united. A. A. Tikhomirov and the arithmological school made the attack on Darwinism part of a determined effort to contribute to the preservation of autocracy and the value system clustered around it. Bachinskii looked forward to the triumph of an ideology that rejected Laplacian determinism because of its philosophical affinity with political absolutism. He found Darwin guilty of a Laplacian bias. Borodin criticized the mechanistic bent of nineteenth-century science (which included Darwinism) and the positivism and materialism of Russian nihilism. His attack on nihilism did not make him a

defender of autocratic ideology; he belonged to the academic intelligentsia involved in a search for political moderation. In 1905 he was among 342 scholars who signed the famous "Note" to the government demanding extensive reforms in the educational system.^[86] V. P. Karpov made neither laudatory nor unfavorable statements about Darwin's theory; what he inferred, however, was that the time had come for biology to sail to a new ocean, rich in challenges that eluded Darwin. He did not want to do away with Darwin's contribution: he merely wanted to reduce its authority to a more modest size.