Ideology and the History of Science

ROBERT J. RICHARDS

Conceptual Foundations of Science

University of Chicago
1126 E, 59th St.
Chicago, IL 60637
U.S.A.

Antoine Destutt de Tracy, who coined the term "ideology," considered his new
discipline a general science of our "intellectual faculties, their principal
phenomena, and the more remarkable circumstances of their activities" (1801,
p. 4). Convinced of the sensationalist epistemology of Locke and Condillac,
Destutt de Tracy believed one could resolve all ideas into the sensations that
produced them and thereby test their soundness. The sensationalist assumptions
of his project led him to propose that "ideology is a part of zoology" (1801,
p. 1), and he consequently paid close attention to the way physiological
circumstance shaped and often misshaped ideas. Though Karl Marx ap-
propriated this concept of ideology, he explored not physiological but cultural
determinants. He concerned himself with the way material and economic
conditions influenced ideas, especially when they produced a false conscious-
ness of the supposed reality to which they referred. Marx believed his principles
of analysis would allow him to distinguish sound ideas from those tainted by
particular circumstance. The concept of ideology from its beginning has thus
depended upon the presumption that some ideas can escape the kind of distor-
tion from which others suffer.
During our century, the concept of ideology has speciated. In the social
sciences and humanities, it has come to be applied with a variety of different
assumptions and meanings. 1 Historians and philosophers of science, however,
have usually sustained the original presumption that a clear distinction can be
made between true - or at least 'rationally sound' - and false ideas. Karl Popper,
for instance, conceives ideology as a pseudo-scientific system - like
psychoanalysis or, for that matter, Marxism - that pretends to science but
essentially lacks the requisite rational methodology. For Popper, of course, the
rational method of science, by which it can be distinguished from its ideological
counterfeit, is falsificationism. The uncritical and stubborn adherence to a
position, protecting it from confuting evidence by developing ad hoc
hypotheses, clearly indicates an ideological conception. It is in this Viennese
vein that Georges Canguilhem (1988), mentor of Foucault, defined a scientific
ideology:
in a scientific ideology there is an explicit ambition to be science, in an imitation of
some already constituted model of what science is ... A scientific ideology comes to

Biology and Philosophy 8: 103-108, 1993.

1993Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
104 ROBERTJ. RICHARDS

an end when the place that it occupied in the encyclopedia of knowledge is taken over
by a discipline that operationally demonstrates the validity of its claim to scientific
status, its 'norms of scientificity' (1988, p. 33).
Canguilhem, avec brio, bashed out the brains of Spencer's evolutionism, leaving
what he thought as only the cracked shell of a scientific ideology, one that
merely aped authentic science. For Canguilhem, Darwin's theory represented
that real science. Canguilhem might also have mentioned Ernst Haeckel, who
usually shares with Spencer the indictment of covertly infecting evolutionary
conceptions with the political germ of progress and so violating the "norms of
scientificity." Most contemporary historians of Darwinian biology, such as Peter
Bowler, David Hull, Stephen Jay Gould, Ernst Mayr, and Michael Ruse,
certainly have distinguished Darwin's theory, which they assume avoided
ideological taint - at least in its essentials - from the theories of Spencer and
Haeekel, which are regarded as rotten to the core. Bowler leverages this
distinction - between ideology and true science - in several of his recent and
justly praised works to separate all the miscreant theories of evolution from the
authentic Darwinian lineage that has led to the right kind of contemporary neo-
Darwinism.
Ideological science not only commits an epistemological sin, but has decided
practical and human consequences. Gould (1977, pp. 77-78) condemns
Haeckelian science because, as he believes, it gave succor to the Nazis. Bowler
(1988) also seeks to uncover "the cultural and ideological significance of the
evolutionary philosophies promoted by Spencer, Haeckel, and others." These
ideologies spewed forth "a callous indifference to the fate of those individuals or
races that could not keep up with the march of progress"; and they have led "to
modem ideas of genetical determinism and sociobiology" (1988, pp. 198-199).
For Bowler it is "recapitulation theory that illustrates the non-Darwinian
character of Haeckel's evolutionism" (1988, p. 84). Gould (1977,' pp. 76--85),
too, finds Haeckel's biogenetic law - i.e., ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny - as
the clear sign of the difference between Darwin's theory and ideologically
tainted Haeckelian theory. Darwin, according to Gould, had the better sense to
reject the idea that the embryo of higher organisms goes through the same
morphological stages as the lower ancestral adults of the same phylum. Darwin
simply adopted von Baer's law that the embryo develops from the more
homogeneous condition of its type to the more heterogeneous and specifically
differentiated condition of the individual: the vertebrate embryo, for instance,
begins life displaying a pattern common to all vertebrates at a similarly early
stage - i.e., the vertebrate "archetype" - and becomes more individuated during
gestation. Von Baer's embryology seems to our eyes quite congenial to Dar-
win's branching conception of descent, since it would allow natural selection
play during any stage of gestation and thus incline the species to ramify in
unexpected directions. Had Haeckel the fight von Baerian embryological theory,
as Darwin had, his ideological notions of progress would have been orphaned
from the beginning. This is the view of most scholars who have described the
historical development of evolutionary theory in the last half of the nineteenth
 IDEOLOGYAND THE HISTORYOF SCIENCE 105

century.
In my book The Meaning of Evolution: the Morphological Construction and
Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin's Theory (1992), I attempt to show that
this entire historiography is mistaken and that the fault can be traced to a certain
unreflective ideology, not that of Haeckel or Darwin, but of the historians who
rather too easily have employed the very concept of ideology. Their sin, like
most, is rather banal - namely, reading the assumptions of modem neo-Dar-
winism back into Darwin's theory. Historiographic sin ought really to be more
contextual, more intriguing, more seductive - as, for instance, the sort usually
committed by the social constructionists. The gist of my argument against the
Whiggism perpetrated is virtually analytic, namely that Darwin was not a rico-
Darwinian. Of course, there is a bit more to it than that. The first half of the
book traces the history of the term "evolution" and its underlying conceptions
from its original embryological usage, which was to describe the doctrine of
preformationism, through its use in various versions of the recapitulation thesis,
especially as formulated by such thinkers as Goethe, Carus, Oken, Schelling,
Meckel and other post-Kantian Naturphilosophen. This first part of my history
concludes by drawing out the historical and logical connections between
theories of the morphological evolution of the embryo and theories of the
morphological evolution of the species. In the second half of the book, I try to
trace the roots of Darwin's own theory of species evolution back into the dark
pool of German transcendental morphology, indeed, to show that Darwin
modeled species development on embryological development. My strategy is to
dissect out for full display the heart of Darwin's theory, which I believe is that
very maligned but tell-tale principle of recapitulation.
Briefly stated, Darwin's recapitulation theory holds that embryos pass through
the same morphological types as their adult ancestors had gone through in
species descent. Darwin argued for two propositions that made recapitulation
virtually a logical necessity: first, that in the long past, adults more resembled
their own embryos than currently; and second, that natural selection and
inherited habit operated generally only on the mature or adult organism. The
first proposition is really a corollary of the second. In Darwin's estimation, von
Baer was correct in one sense: embryos did advance from a more homogeneous
condition of the type to a more heterogeneous and differentiated condition of the
individual. Darwin maintained, however, that the morphological type of an
embryo at an early stage had been embodied in an actual creature that existed
long ago - the archetype was a real ancestor and it was an adult.
Bowler does concede that I was "successful in confounding the myth that
Darwin had no time for recapitulationism." But he diffuses the impact of this
concession by now arguing that there were two versions of recapitulation: the
wicked kind - i.e., "the linear model of development represented by the Meckel-
Serres law of parallelism" - and Darwin's kind, which was really O.K. since it
allowed for the branching of species off a common root. But isn't this an effort
merely to save the hypothesis of two distinct strains of evolutionary theory, the
ideological kind and Darwin's? This tactic does seem to me to meet one of the
106 ROBERTJ. RICHARDS

criteria that Popper would offer for an ideology at work - you cannot refute it.
But I know that Bowler is susceptible to rational argument and direct evidence,
so let me try by offering three contrary and, I think, indisputable points.
First, there is no "Meckel-Serres law of parallelism." That is an idea that E.S.
Russell invented in his nonetheless extraordinarily fine history Form and
Function (1916). The law does not exist, not because the phenomenon does not
exist, but because Meckel and Serres, as I tried to show in my book, had very
different theories of recapitulation. The most fundamental difference was that
Meckel was a species evolutionist and Serres was not. Second, Meckel, the
evolutionist, never claimed, as far as I know, that "lower animals are merely
immature human beings." But remarkably, Darwin did. He conceived the
relationship between ancestors and descendants in almost exactly the terms
Bowler thinks represent a tainted recapitulationism. In a letter responding to
Huxley's attack on the development hypothesis, Darwin confessed that he
himself believed "the archetype in imagination was always in some degree
embryonic, and therefore capable [of] and generally undergoing further
development" (1989, pp. 133-134). Since Darwin argued that the archetype, say
of the vertebrates, was a real creature, this passage clearly means that he did
think of ancestral lower animals as embryonic to higher organisms, including
human beings. This is simply another manifestation of his embryological model
of species evolution. The third point is that Darwin's model of evolution was not
designed to be branching - at least not in the sense usually understood. Up to the
time of the publication of the Origin, Darwin was content to have some ten or so
originally created (or spontaneously generate) stems that would give rise to the
some four or five general animal types and a comparable number of plant
types. 2 He did not conceive of the vertebrates, for instance, branching off any
invertebrate types. In the Origin, Darwin expressly allowed this same concep-
tion; though he did argue that analogy suggested all life may have descended
originally from only one form (1859, p. 484; see also my [1992], p. 216, n.64).
Now, does any of this essentially differ from Haeckel's conception of
recapitulation? Not one little bit. Does the Darwin-Haeckel theory of recapitula-
tion imply that evolution is progressive? Yes, at least as they both constructed
the theory of evolution. I'll leave the arguments, though, for the book.
Bowler thinks that my treatment of Darwin's morphology is one dimensional,
because it does not consider the Beagle voyage and the many other aspects of
his theory of evolution - for example, his theory of adaptation, biogeography,
speciation, and reproductive success. I confess, I did not set out to provide a
comprehensive account of Darwin's accomplishment. Mine was to be a
semantic history that focused on morphology and embryology, with a special
concern to show what light these cast on Darwin's general theory. Nonetheless, I
believe I have Darwin's own warrant for concentrating on these neglected
subjects; for he himself thought that his construal of the embryological facts
provided the strongest empirical evidence for the general theory of evolution.3
Further, with a bit more careful scrutiny, Bowler would have found in my book
accounts of adaptation, natural selection, and, admittedly, brief mention of
 IDEOLOGYAND THE HISTORYOF SCIENCE 107

speciation and biogeography. I did set Darwin out on his voyage and brought
him back again. 41 suspect Bowler thinks my account one dimensional because it
is a dimension whose existence he has always denied; its manifest presence
seems to have produced a distracting anxiety.
Bowler's final set of objections I find passing strange. He says that I take "for
granted that the idea of progress is a touchstone for measuring the extent to
which Darwin's theory reflected the values of his own time." Yet, as he
continues, Desmond and Moore have not mentioned, in their new biography
(1991), a progressivist influence seeping over from the general culture into
Darwin's theory. But surely, Bowler argues, if there were such ideological
influence, these social constructionist historians would have landed on it
foursquare. Since they have not, I must be wrong in holding Darwin to be an
evolutionary progressivist. This argument leaves me flummoxed.
First, I made no assumption that social notions of progress were the source of
Darwin's evolutionary progressivism, though the conceptual atmosphere of such
ideas may well have added weight to what I understand as a fundamentally
zoological consideration: namely, that over vast periods of time, evolution has
produced more complex, more advanced, more improved, more progressive
creatures - quite independently of their political preferences. What makes
Bowler's argument so strange is that I spend some time in my book attempting
to confute not only the ideology of the type Bowler exemplifies, but also that of
social constructionism, especially Desmond's. Hence, I would not likely argue
or presume that social ideals of progress were chiefly responsible for Darwin's
evolutionary progressivism.
Bowler has accused Haeckel and Spencer of pernicious ideology, while
Darwin was left fairly free of such charge. I have returned the compliment to
Bowler, but perhaps unfairly. In the brief discussion of ideology that introduces
this response, I allow the supposition to remain unanalyzed that one can
distinguish an ideologically tainted enterprise from an unsullied one, suggesting
as well that my own historiographic practices are as pure as Darwin's science
has been depicted as being. The distinction between ideology and true science,
while one might nostalgically long for its validity, was sunk in 1962, when it hit
that submerged intellectual iceberg, Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I
believe, nonetheless, that with some refitting, the concept of ideology in history
of science - or even in meta-history of science - can be made quite useful again.
I attempt such reformulation in my book. Whether I myself have escaped from
ideological infection, only a more careful reading of the book and more pointed
argument can answer.
Oh yes, it was the British Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery who
devised the disastrous plan to take the Arnhem Bridge. He dismissed objections
that the situation was simply more complex than he imagined (see Ryan 1974).
108 ROBERTJ. RICHARDS

NOTES

1 The most recent effort to consider the uses of the concept in the social sciences is that
of Raymond Boudon (1989).
2 See Darwin's 1844 Essay (1909, p. 252). See also my discussion in The Meaning of
Evolution (1992, pp. 125-126).
3 Charles Darwin to Asa Gray (10 September 1860): "embryology is to me by far the
strongest single class of facts in faovur of change of forms, and not one, I think, of my
reviewers has alluded to this" (1891, p. 131).
4 See, for example, my (1992), pp. 81-84 (adaptation), 84-89 (natural selection), 87--89
(speciation), 157 (paleontology and biogeography), and 65 and 80 (voyage).

REFERENCES

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Canguilhem, G.: 1988, Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences, MIT
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Darwin, C.: 1859, On the Origin of Species, Murray, London.
Darwin, F.: 1891, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. 2, D. Appleton, New
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Darwin, C.: 1909, "Essay of 1844," Foundations of the Origin of Species, ed. F. Darwin,
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Ryan, C.: 1974, A Bridge Too Far, Simon and Schuster, New York.
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