Samuel Wilberforce on Darwin | Evolution News and Science Today

Introduction by Andrew McDiarmid: In June 1860, just seven months after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, three men hotly debated the merits of Darwin’s argument at a meeting of the British Association. Biologist Thomas Henry Huxley and botanist Joseph Hooker defended Darwin’s theory. English bishop, speaker, and writer Samuel Wilberforce critiqued it. And though he was a man of the cloth, Wilberforce did not build a theological case against Darwin. Rather, he evaluated the argument for natural selection on scientific grounds, exposing its “loose statements and unfounded speculations” by weighing it “in the simple scales of logical examination.”

In an essay in the Quarterly Review of over 18,000 words, published shortly after the debate in 1860, Wilberforce tracks Darwin’s journey “into the jungle of fanciful assumption,” scrutinizing each proposition Darwin makes to support his conclusion. It’s a powerful critique of Darwin’s seminal theory. Wilberforce was ahead of his time, and when we place his arguments, written right after the publication of Darwin’s theory, alongside what we’ve learned in the last century about the digital code of DNA, the nano-machinery powering even the simplest living cells, the evidence of a beginning to the universe and exquisite fine-tuning throughout it, as well as what we’ve discovered about the mathematical limitations of natural processes, we can see Wilberforce was correct to push back on Mr. Darwin’s assumptions.

Here, then, is a selection of excerpts from Wilberforce’s review, to give you a taste of the potency of its arguments.  

Darwin’s Origin of Species (July 1860)

Any contribution to our Natural History literature from the pen of Mr. C. Darwin is certain to command attention. His scientific attainments, his insight and carefulness as an observer, blended with no scanty measure of imaginative sagacity, and his clear and lively style, make all his writings unusually attractive. His present volume on the Origin of Species is the result of many years of observation, thought, and speculation; and is manifestly regarded by him as the “opus” upon which his future fame is to rest.…

The essay is full of Mr. Darwin’s characteristic excellences. It is a most readable book; full of facts in natural history, old and new, of his collecting and of his observing; and all of these are told in his own perspicuous language, and all thrown into picturesque combinations, and all sparkle with the colors of fancy and the lights of imagination. It assumes, too, the grave proportions of a sustained argument upon a matter of the deepest interest, not to naturalists only, or even to men of science exclusively, but to everyone who is interested in the history of man and of the relations of nature around him to the history and plan of creation.

With Mr. Darwin’s “argument” we may say in the outset that we shall have much and grave fault to find. But this does not make us the less disposed to admire the singular excellences of his work; and we will seek to give our readers a few examples of these. Here, for instance, is a beautiful illustration of the wonderful interdependence of nature, of the golden chain of unsuspected relations which bind together all the mighty web which stretches from end to end of this full and most diversified earth.…

Now, all this is, we think, really charming writing. We feel as we walk abroad with Mr. Darwin very much as the favored object of the attention the dervise must have felt when he had rubbed the ointment around his eye, and had it opened to see all the jewels, and diamonds, and emeralds, and topazes, and rubies, which were sparkling unregarded beneath the earth, hidden as yet from all eyes save those which the dervise had enlightened. But here we are bound to say our pleasure terminates; for, when we turn with Mr. Darwin to his “argument,” we are almost immediately at variance with him. It is as an “argument” that the essay is put forward; as an argument we will test it.

A Clear View of Darwin’s Reasoning

We can perhaps best convey to our readers a clear view of Mr. Darwin’s chain of reasoning, and of our objections to it, if we set before them, first, the conclusion to which he seeks to bring them; next, the leading propositions which he must establish in order to make good his final inference; and then the mode by which he endeavors to support his propositions.

The conclusion, then, to which Mr. Darwin would bring us is that all the various forms of vegetable and animal life with which the globe is now peopled, or of which we find the remains preserved in a fossil state in the great Earth-Museum around us, which the science of geology unlocks for our instruction, have come down by natural succession of descent from father to son—“animals from at most four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or less number,” as Mr. Darwin at first somewhat diffidently suggests; or rather, as, growing bolder when he has once pronounced his theory, he goes on to suggest to us, from one single head:

Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that ALL ANIMALS AND PLANTS have descended from some one prototype. But analogy may be a deceitful guide. Nevertheless, all living things have much in common in their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their cellular structure, and their laws of growth and reproduction …… Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth [man therefore of course included] have descended from some one primordial form into which life was first breathed by the Creator.

This is the theory which really pervades the whole volume. Man, beast, creeping thing, and plant of the earth, are all the lineal and direct descendants of some one individual ens, whose various progeny have been simply modified by the action of natural and ascertainable conditions into the multiform aspect of life which we see around us. This is undoubtedly at first sight a somewhat startling conclusion to arrive at. To find that mosses, grasses, turnips, oaks, worms, and flies, mites and elephants, infusoria and whales, tadpoles of today and venerable saurians, truffles and men, are all equally the lineal descendants of the same aboriginal common ancestor, perhaps of the nucleated cell of some primaeval fungus, which alone possessed the distinguishing honor of being the “one primordial form into which life was first breathed by the Creator”—this, to say the least of it, is no common discovery—no very expected conclusion. But we are too loyal pupils of inductive philosophy to start back from any conclusion by reason of its strangeness. Newton’s patient philosophy taught him to find in the falling apple the law which governs the silent movements of the stars in their courses; and if Mr. Darwin can with the same correctness of reasoning demonstrate to us our fungular descent, we shall dismiss our pride, and avow, with the characteristic humility of philosophy, our unsuspected cousinship with the mushrooms.…

Darwin’s Main Propositions 

Now, the main propositions by which Mr. Darwin’s conclusion is attained are these:—

1. That observed and admitted variations spring up in the course of descents from a common progenitor.
2. That many of these variations tend to an improvement upon the parent stock.
3. That, by a continued selection of these improved specimens as the progenitors of future stock, its powers may be unlimitedly increased.
4. And, lastly, that there is in nature a power continually and universally working out this selection, and so fixing and augmenting these improvements. 

Mr. Darwin’s whole theory rests upon the truth of these propositions, and crumbles utterly away if only one of them fail him. These therefore we must closely scrutinize. We will begin with the last in our series, both because we think it the newest and the most ingenious part of Mr. Darwin’s whole argument, and also because, whilst we absolutely deny the mode in which he seeks to apply the existence of the power to help him in his argument, yet we think that he throws great and very interesting light upon the fact that such a self-acting power does actively and continuously work in all creation around us.

Mr. Darwin finds then the disseminating and improving power, which he needs to account for the development of new forms in nature, in the principle of “Natural Selection,” which is evolved in the strife for room to live and flourish which is evermore maintained between themselves by all living things. One of the most interesting parts of Mr. Darwin’s volume is that in which he establishes this law of natural selection; we say establishes, because, repeating, that we differ from him totally in the limits which he would assign to its action, we have no doubt of the existence or of the importance of the law itself.…

That such a struggle for life then actually exists, and that it tends continually to lead the strong to exterminate the weak, we readily admit; and in this law we see a merciful provision against the deterioration, in a world apt to deteriorate, of the works of the Creator’s hands.…

No New Observation 

This indeed is no new observation: Lucretius knew and eloquently expatiated on its truth.… And this, which is true in animal, is no less true in vegetable life. Hardier or more prolific plants, or plants better suited to the soil or conditions of climate, continually tend to supplant others less hardy, less prolific, or less suited to the conditions of vegetable life in those special districts. Thus far, then, the action of such a law as this is clear and indisputable.

But before we can go a step further, and argue from its operation in favor of a perpetual improvement in natural types, we must be shown first that this law of competition has in nature to deal with such favorable variations in the individuals of any species, as truly to exalt those individuals above the highest type of perfection to which their least imperfect predecessors attained—above; that is to say, the normal level of the species;—that such individual improvement is, in truth, a rising above the highest level of any former tide, and not merely the return in its appointed season of the feebler neap to the fuller spring-tide;—and then, next, we must be shown that there is actively at work in nature, co-ordinate with the law of competition and with the existence of such favorable variations, a power of accumulating such favorable variation through successive descents. Failing the establishment of either of these last two propositions, Mr. Darwin’s whole theory falls to pieces. He has accordingly labored with all his strength to establish these, and into that attempt we must now follow him.

Mr. Darwin begins by endeavoring to prove that such variations are produced under the selecting power of man amongst domestic animals.…

Pleasant for Pigeon-Fanciers 

Now all this is very pleasant writing, especially for pigeon-fanciers; but what step do we really gain in it at all towards establishing the alleged fact that variations are but species in the act of formation, or in establishing Mr. Darwin’s position that a well-marked variety may be called an incipient species? We affirm positively that no single fact tending even in that direction is brought forward. On the contrary, every one points distinctly towards the opposite conclusion; for with all the change wrought in appearance, with all the apparent variation in manners, there is not the faintest beginning of any such change in what that great comparative anatomist, Professor Owen, calls “the characteristics of the skeleton or other parts of the frame upon which specific differences are founded.”…

Nor let our readers forget over how large a lapse of time our opportunities of observation extend. From the early Egyptian habit of embalming, we know that for 4000 years at least the species of our own domestic animals, the cat, the dog, and others, has remained absolutely unaltered.

Yet it is in the face of such facts as these that Mr. Darwin ventures… 

Nor must we pass over unnoticed the transference of the argument from the domesticated to the untamed animals. Assuming that man as the selector can do much in a limited time, Mr. Darwin argues that Nature, a more powerful, a more continuous power, working over vastly extended ranges of time, can do more. But why should Nature, so uniform and persistent in all her operations, tend in this instance to change? why should she become a selector of varieties? Because, most ingeniously argues Mr. Darwin, in the struggle for life, if any variety favourable to the individual were developed, that individual would have a better chance in the battle of life, would assert more proudly his own place, and, handing on his peculiarity to his descendants, would become the progenitor of an improved race; and so a variety would have grown into a species.

We think it difficult to find a theory fuller of assumptions; and of assumptions not grounded upon alleged facts in nature, but which are absolutely opposed to all the facts we have been able to observe.

1. We have already shown that the variations of which we have proof under domestication have never, under the longest and most continued system of selections we have known, laid the first foundation of a specific difference, but have always tended to relapse, and not to accumulated and fixed persistence.

The Battle of Life

But, 2ndly, all these variations have the essential characteristics of monstrosity about them; and not one of them has the character which Mr. Darwin repeatedly reminds us is the only one which nature can select, of being an advantage to the selected individual in the battle of life, i.e. an improvement upon the normal type by raising some individual of the species not to the highest possible excellence within the species, but to some excellence above it. So far from this, every variation introduced by man is for man’s advantage, not for the advantage of the animal. Correlation is so certainly the law of all animal existence that man can only develop one part by the sacrifice of another. The bull-dog gains in strength and loses in swiftness; the greyhound gains in swiftness but loses in strength. Even the English racehorse loses much which would enable it in the battle of life to compete with its rougher ancestor. So too with our prize-cattle. Their greater tendency to an earlier accumulation of meat and fat is counterbalanced, as is well known, by loss of robust health, fertility, and of power of yielding milk, in proportion to their special development in the direction which man’s use of them as food requires. There is not a shadow of ground for saying that man’s variations ever improve the typical character of the animal as an animal; they do but by some monstrous development make it more useful to himself; and hence it is that Nature, according to her universal law with monstrosities, is ever tending to obliterate the deviation and to return to the type.

The applied argument then, from variation under domestication, fails utterly. But further, what does observation say as to the occurrence of a single instance of such favorable variation? Men have now for thousands of years been conversant as hunters and other rough naturalists with animals of every class. Has any one such instance ever been discovered? We fearlessly assert not one. Variations have been found: rodents whose teeth have grown abnormally; animals of various classes of which the eyes, from the absence of light in their dwellings, have been obscured and obliterated; but not one which has tended to raise the individual in the struggle of life above the typical conditions of its own species. Mr. Darwin himself allows that he finds none; and accounts for their absence in existing fauna only by the suggestion, that, in the competition between the less improved parent-form and the improved successor, the parent will have yielded in the strife in order to make room for the successor; and so “both the parent and all the transitional varieties will generally have been exterminated by the very process of formation and perfection of the new form”—a most unsatisfactory answer as it seems to us; for why—since if this is Nature’s law these innumerable changes must be daily occurring—should there never be any one produceable proof of their existence?

Here then again, when subjected to the stern Baconian law of the observation of facts., the theory breaks down utterly; for no natural variations from the specific type favorable to the individual from which nature is to select can anywhere be found.…

From Turnips to Men

Is it credible that all favorable varieties of turnips are tending to become men, and yet that the closest microscopic observation has never detected the faintest tendency in the highest of the Algae to improve into the very lowest Zoophyte?

Again, we have not only the existing tribes of animals out of which to cull, if it were possible, the instances which the transmutationists require to make their theory defensible consistently with the simplest laws of inductive science, but we have in the earth beneath us a vast museum of the forms which have preceded us. Over so vast a period of time does Mr. Darwin extend this collection that he finds reasons for believing that “it is not improbable that a longer period than 300,000,000 years has elapsed since the latter part of the secondary (geological) period” alone. Here then surely at last we must find the missing links of that vast chain of innumerable and separately imperceptible variations, which has convinced the inquirer into Nature’s undoubted facts of the truth of the transmutation theory. But no such thing. The links are wholly wanting, and the multiplicity of these facts and their absolute rebellion against Mr. Darwin’s theory is perhaps his chief difficulty. Here is his own statement of it, and his mode of meeting it:

Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.

The Testimony of the Rocks

This “Imperfection of the Geological Record,” and the “Geological Succession,” are the subjects of two labored and ingenious chapters, in which he tries, as we think utterly in vain, to break down the unanswerable refutation which is given to his theory by the testimony of the rocks.…

But not only do the facts to which Mr. Darwin trusts to establish his vast lapses of years,… not only do these give him the same power of supposing the progress of changes, of which we have found neither the commencement, nor the progress, nor the record, … but when, passing from these unlimited terms for change to work in, he proceeds to deal with the absence of all record of the changes themselves, the plainest geological facts again disprove his assumptions.…

Mr. Darwin is compelled to admit that he finds no records in the crust of the earth to verify his assumption: 

To the question why we do not find records of these vast primordial periods, I can give no satisfactory answer.

…It would be wearisome to prolong these proofs; but if to any man they seem insufficient, let him read carefully the conclusion of Sir Roderick Murchison’s masterly work upon “Siluria.” We venture to aver that the conviction must be forced upon him that the geological record is absolutely inconsistent with the truth of Mr. Darwin’s theory; and yet by Mr. Darwin’s own confession this conclusion is fatal to his whole argument….

A Deadly Gripe 

If these forms of life had existed they must have been found. Even Mr. Darwin shrinks from the deadly gripe of this argument. “The case,” he says, “at present must remain inexplicable, and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.” More than once indeed does he make this admission. One passage we have quoted already from his work. With equal candor he says further on:

I do not pretend that I should ever have suspected how poor a record of the mutations of life the best-preserved geological section presented, had not the difficulty of our not discovering innumerable transitional links between the species which appeared at the commencement and close of each formation pressed so hardly on my theory.

And, once more:

Why does not every collection of fossil remains afford plain evidence of the gradation and mutation of the forms of life? We meet with no such evidence, and this is the most obvious and forcible of the many objections which may be urged against my theory.

…We come then to these conclusions. All the facts presented to us in the natural world tend to show that none of the variations produced in the fixed forms of animal life, when seen in its most plastic condition under domestication, give any promise of a true transmutation of species; first, from the difficulty of accumulating and fixing variations within the same species; secondly, from the fact that these variations, though most serviceable for man, have no tendency to improve the individual beyond the standard of his own specific type, and so to afford matter, even if they were infinitely produced, for the supposed power of natural selection on which to work; whilst all variations from the mixture of species are barred by the inexorable law of hybrid sterility. Further, the embalmed records of 3000 years show that there has been no beginning of transmutation in the species of our most familiar domesticated animals; and beyond this, that in the countless tribes of animal life around us, down to its lowest and most variable species, no one has ever discovered a single instance of such transmutation being now in prospect; no new organ has ever been known to be developed—no new natural instinct to be formed—whilst, finally, in the vast museum of departed animal life which the strata of the earth imbed for our examination, whilst they contain far too complete a representation of the past to be set aside as a mere imperfect record, yet afford no one instance of any such change as having ever been in progress, or give us anywhere the missing links of the assumed chain, or the remains which would enable now existing variations, by gradual approximations, to shade off into unity.

On what then is the new theory based? We say it with unfeigned regret, in dealing with such a man as Mr. Darwin, on the merest hypothesis, supported by the most unbounded assumptions….

And in the following passage he carries this extravagance to the highest pitch, requiring a license for advancing as true any theory which cannot be demonstrated to be actually impossible:

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case. [Emphasis in the original.]

The True Baconian Philosophy 

…What new words are these for a loyal disciple of the true Baconian philosophy?—”I can conceive,” “It is not incredible,” “I do not doubt,” “It is conceivable.”…

In the name of all true philosophy we protest equally against such a mode of dealing with nature, as utterly dishonorable to all natural science, as reducing it from its present lofty level as one of the noblest trainers of man’s intellect and instructors of his mind, to being a mere idle play of the fancy, without the basis of fact or the discipline of observation.…

We cannot open the august doors of the venerable temple of scientific truth to the genii and magicians of romance. We plead guilty to Mr. Darwin’s imputation 

that the chief cause of our natural unwillingness to admit that one species has given birth to other and distinct species is that we are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps.

The Great Magician 

…The other solvent which Mr. Darwin most freely and, we think, unphilosophically employs to get rid of difficulties, is his use of time. This he shortens or prolongs at will by the mere wave of his magician’s rod. Thus the duration of whole epochs, during which certain forms of animal life prevailed, is gathered up into a point, whilst an unlimited expanse of years, impressing his mind with a sense of eternity, is suddenly interposed between that and the next series, though geology proclaims the transition to have been one of gentle and, it may be, swift accomplishment. All this too is made the more startling because it is used to meet the objections drawn from facts. “We see none of your works,” says the observer of nature; “we see no beginnings of the portentous change; we see plainly beings of another order in creation, but we find amongst them no tendencies to these altered organisms.” “True,” says the great magician, with a calmness no difficulty derived from the obstinacy of facts can disturb; “true, but remember the effect of time. Throw in a few hundreds of millions of years more or less, and why should not all these changes be possible, and, if possible, why may I not assume them to be real?”

Together with this large license of assumption we notice in this book several instances of receiving as facts whatever seems to bear out the theory upon the slightest evidence, and rejecting summarily others, merely because they are fatal to it. We grieve to charge upon Mr. Darwin this freedom in handling facts, but truth extorts it from us. That the loose statements and unfounded speculations of this book should come from the author of the monograms on Cirripedes, and the writer, in the natural history of the Voyage of the “Beagle,” of the paper on the Coral Reefs, is indeed a sad warning how far the love of a theory may seduce even a first-rate naturalist from the very articles of his creed.…

We have dwelt a little upon this, because it is by such seeming solutions of difficulties as that which this passage supplies that the transmutationist endeavors to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation.

There are no parts of Mr. Darwin’s ingenious book in which he gives the reins more completely to his fancy than where he deals with the improvement of instinct by his principle of natural selection.…

Such assumptions as these, we once more repeat, are most dishonorable and injurious to science; and though, out of respect to Mr. Darwin’s high character and to the tone of his work, we have felt it right to weigh the “argument” again set by him before us in the simple scales of logical examination.…

Scientific Grounds Alone

Our readers will not have failed to notice that we have objected to the views with which we have been dealing solely on scientific grounds. We have done so from our fixed conviction that it is thus that the truth or falsehood of such arguments should be tried. We have no sympathy with those who object to any facts or alleged facts in nature, or to any inference logically deduced from them, because they believe them to contradict what it appears to them is taught by Revelation. We think that all such objections savor of a timidity which is really inconsistent with a firm and well-instructed faith….

He who is as sure as he is of his own existence that the God of Truth is at once the God of Nature and the God of Revelation, cannot believe it to be possible that His voice in either, rightly understood, can differ, or deceive His creatures. To oppose facts in the natural world because they seem to oppose Revelation, or to humor them so as to compel them to speak its voice, is, he knows, but another form of the ever-ready feebleminded dishonesty of lying for God, and trying by fraud or falsehood to do the work of the God of truth. It is with another and a nobler spirit that the true believer walks amongst the works of nature.…

We cannot, therefore, consent to test the truth of natural science by the Word of Revelation. But this does not make it the less important to point out on scientific grounds scientific errors, when those errors tend to limit God’s glory in creation, or to gainsay the revealed relations of that creation to Himself. To both these classes of error, though, we doubt not, quite unintentionally on his part, we think that Mr. Darwin’s speculations directly tend.…

If any of our readers doubt what must be the result of such speculations carried to their logical and legitimate conclusion, let them turn to the pages of Oken, and see for themselves the end of that path the opening of which is decked out in these pages with the bright hues and seemingly innocent deductions of the transmutation-theory.…

It is by our deep conviction of the truth and importance of this view for the scientific mind of England that we have been led to treat at so much length Mr. Darwin’s speculation.…

That Mr. Darwin should have wandered from this broad highway of nature’s works into the jungle of fanciful assumption is no small evil.

We trust that he is mistaken in believing that he may count Sir [Charles] Lyell as one of his converts.… [N]o man has been more distinct and more logical in the denial of the transmutation of species than Sir C. Lyell.…

[Lyell] shows the fallacy of [Jean-Baptiste] Lamarck’s reasoning, and by anticipation confutes the whole theory of Mr. Darwin, when gathering clearly up into a few heads the recapitulation of the whole argument in favor of the reality of species in nature. He urges:

1. That there is a capacity in all species to accommodate themselves to a certain extent to a change of external circumstances. 
2. The entire variation from the original type…may usually be effected in a brief period of time, after which no further deviation can be obtained.
3. The intermixing distinct species is guarded against by the sterility of the mule offspring.
4. It appears that species have a real existence in nature, and that each was endowed at the time of its creation with the attributes and organization by which it is now distinguished.

We trust that Sir Lyell abides still by these truly philosophical principles; and that with his help and with that of his brethren this flimsy speculation may be as completely put down as was in spite of all denials we must venture to call its twin though less-instructed brother, the Vestiges of Creation. In so doing they will assuredly provide for the strength and continually growing progress of British science.

Editor’s note: For the full text of this review, see the collection by Samuel Wilberforce, Essays Contributed to the “Quarterly Review,” Vol. 1 (London: John Murray 1874), pp. 52-103.