Was Samuel Wilberforce Another Torquemada?

Was Samuel Wilberforce another Torquemada? For the April 1986 issue of NATURAL HISTORY, Stephen Gould wrote an article SOAPY SAM'S LOGIC. Stephen Gould did not actually claim that Samuel Wilberforce was another Torquemada--but he did connect the names of Torquemada and Samuel Wilberforce in a manner that strongly suggests the idea that Samuel Wilberforce was, at least to some extent, another Torquemada.

Wilberforce begins with the classic setup of rhetoric: fulsome praise for Darwin accompanied by protestations of the pain that will wrack Wilberforce for the criticisms forced upon him by necessity. "The essay is full" we learn, "of Mr. Darwin's excellencies...told in his own perspicuous language, and all thrown into picturesque combinations that sparkle with the colors of fancy and the lights of imagination"(p.226). Nonetheless he laments later: We grieve to charge upon Mr. Darwin this freedom of handling facts, but truth extorts it from us.

Wilberforce cranks his nastiness up slowly and then lets it cascade. The first twenty-five pages present a standard critique of Origin, nothing new, but nothing egregious either. Then Wilberforce begins his rhetorical barrage in earnest. He begins with ridicule, attacking evolution as absurd for invented claims never made by Darwin--for example, this lovely passage on our supposed descent from fungi:

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 mushrooms. Wilberforce then moves on to personal attack, accusing Darwin of carelessness, of dogmatism, and finally of dishonesty. On page 250, we find the first summary of charges:

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 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.

Terrific line, that last, but Soapy Sam is only warming up. By page 253, Darwin's book is an "utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation"; and, on page 254, "most dishonorable and injurious to science."
Wilberforce now shifts to his own turf of religion and closes in for the kill. He starts again with praise and protestations of affection and respect:

Mr. Darwin writes as a Christian, and we doubt not that he is one. We do not for a moment believe him to be one of those who retain in their hearts a secret unbelief which they dare not vent; and we therefore pray him to consider well the grounds on which we brand his speculations with the charge of such a tendency.

(So much for anyone who thought that Joe McCarthy was the first since Torquemada to ask the accused when they stopped beating their spouses.)

Stephen Gould trivialized the Inquisition. Torquemada did things that were far worse than asking the accused when they stopped beating their spouses. There was a world of difference between Torquemada and Joe McCarthy--to say nothing of Samuel Wilberforce.

The Torquemada comment, however, was in the nature of an aside. But a major focus of Stephen Gould's argument was labeling Samuel Wilberforce as a farce. Gould began his article as follows:


History has long arms. The petty people of today will justify their projects by vainglorious comparisons with truly sublime events of the past. Thus, Marx proclaimed in introducing his treatise on Louis Bonaparte (likened by his boosters to the original Napoleon) that all great events occur twice in history--the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Compare Son of King Kong on the sterile World Trade Center with the grand original, swatting airplanes on the art deco tower of the Empire State Building; or Dracula five, six, and seven (in gory colors) with Mr. Lugosi's old world manner and accent.

I have just encountered a remarkable example of one of the original reviews of Darwin's Origin of Species...The article, by tradition, is unsigned, but no one could have mistaken the style(the Quarterly Review guessing game was a great intellectual diversion...)--so I shall leave you guessing for a page or two.

The farce, in this case, is one of the nastiest and phoniest arguments I have ever read. The reviewer accuses Darwin of supporting racism by dwelling on the supposed fact that slave species of ants are black!

We have already seen that Gould himself would be both nasty and phony with his Torquemada aside. In addition. leaving the reader guessing as to the author of the review was also phony considering that the title of the article was "Soapy Sam's Logic" and that most readers would only have known the name of one Victorian opponent of Darwin--Samuel Wilberforce. And, of course, Gould does identify the author of the review as Samuel Wilberforce, although he gave no evidence to support the claim beyond his assertion that "no one could have mistaken the style".

Later on the next page with a large illustration of an anti-slavery medallion by Josiah Wedgwood I, Gould continues:

You may not know--and I now expose the tragedy before the farce--that Soapy Sam was the son of William Wilberforce, a hero of abolition and the man most responsible for ending Britain's slave trade. That Samuel Wilberforce would invoke the prestige of his father's name by proxy to score a cheap and craven point against Darwin, strikes me as a fine example of Marx's contention about repeated events in history.

Samuel's rhetoric is doubly ugly when we understand Darwin's own views on slavery and his family ties with the elder Wilberforce. Darwin's grandfather Josiah Wedgwood (the great potter who gave his name to the famous ware), struck hundreds of cameos in his kilns, showing a black slave in chains surrounded by the words: "Am I not a man and a brother?" Darwin himself was an active and passionate abolitionist. Some of the most moving passages ever written against the slave trade appear in the last chapter of the Voyage of the Beagle:

On the 19th of August we finally left the shores of Brazil. I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave country....Near Rio De Janeiro I lived opposite an old lady who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal. I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean....And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbors as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth. It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cries of liberty, have been and are so guilty. (The omitted portions here were omitted by Gould.)

The tragedy of Napoleon was not the pretensions of his nephew. It would have been a real stretch to talk about the life of William Wilberforce as being a tragedy because of some things charges his son wrote about Darwin long after he died--and to do so simply because his son wrote those things using a last name which he shared with his father. But in fact, the review was published anonymously. If it was written by Samuel Wilberforce, he used no name at all--not his own, and certainly not that of his father by proxy or in any other way. If Stephen Gould had simply wanted to label the review or the reviewer as a farce, he could have simply declared that an argument based upon the black color of slave ants was so inane as to be a farce. Instead he chose to make a very personal attack on Samuel Wilberforce, and one that rests upon some very shaky ground. Why? Gould provided some answers in the following paragraph:

I read Wilberforce's review as part of my research for next month's column on his famous confrontation with Huxley. My problem as a scholar has always been my Will Rogers complex--an inability to dislike anyone after reading his works. I invariably find some redeeming value, some unnoticed complexity, some honest passion. Through the years, these columns have tried to resurrect some of the most notorious fools (Burnet on a young earth, or Buckland on Noah's flood) and cranks (Gosse on Adam's navel, or Thayer on flamingos and sunsets) of conventional accounts. But in Wilberforce my geniality has met its match and succumbed in flames. I don't know that I have ever read an argument more slippery, more dishonest, than his on Darwin. That he invested these calumnies in prose so purple (admittedly by modern tastes more spare and economical than his own) can only add insult to injury. Yet, as I read, I detected something of value for this forum. I liked Wilberforce himself no better; I found no strength at all in his claims. But I did recognize the internal logic of argument rested upon a common misconception that remains a major stumbling block to understanding Darwinian, and all manner of historical, argument. A precis of Wilberforce's review might therefore illuminate a problem that still presses upon us. Besides, I'd like to get some use out of that S.O.B.

Stephen Gould brought Samuel Wilberforce's father into the discussion, so it only seems fitting to take a look at Stephen Gould's father. Gould's father was a Jewish Marxist. We can see both of these aspects of Gould's heritage in the paragraph above. It was Stephen Gould's Jewish heritage which led him to invariably find some redeeming value in anyone whose works he read, and it was Stephen Gould's Marxist heritage that led him to view this as a problem. Jewish tradition teaches honesty and fair play, while in Marxism the ends justify the mean.

Gould's criticism of the anonymous reviewer whom he identifies as Samuel Wilberforce can be divided into two parts: (1) Objections to claims that Darwin was supporting racism, and (2) General points regarding whether the approach Darwin took represented legitimate science. Beginning with the first part, Gould rightly noted that Darwin did not pointedly dwell on the fact that it was always the black ant who was enslaved by his other colored and more fortunate brethren--but simply described an example where this was true, and where size and color helped to distinguish the two species of ants for human observers. It is also true that in the quotation "The slaves are black!" taken from Darwin's book, the reviewer quoted only part of a sentence, and then added an exclamation mark within the quotations that was not to be found in Darwin's text.

Gould also objects to the reviewer for proceeding "to indict Darwin for things he doesn't say, but which the reviewer conjures he might say:"

We believe that, if we had Mr.Darwin in the witness-box, and could subject him to a moderate cross examination, we should find that he believed the tendency of the lighter-colored races of mankind to prosecute the negro slave-trade was really a remains, in their more favored condition, of the "extraordinary and odious instinct" which possessed them before they had been "improved by natural selection' from Formica Polygeres into Homo.

According to Gould "As supposed evidence this remarkable accusation the reviewer cites a totally different comparison made by Darwin between humans and other animals:


This at least is very much the way in which he slips in quite incidentally the true identity of man with the horse, the bat, and the porpoise--[now quiting from Darwin] "The framework of bones being the same in the hand of a man, wing of the bat, fin of a porpoise, and leg of a horse, the same number of vertebrae forming the neck of a giraffe and the elephant, and innumerable other facts, at once explain themselves on the theory of descent with slow and slight successive modifications.

Every part of this argument is phony in logic, false in fact, and nasty in concept. First , and most decidedly, Darwin makes no point whatever about the color of slave species (most ants are black, after all)....Second, the indictment for validating human institutions by animal analogies is patent and viscous nonsense. The reviewer justifies it, in the absence of a explicit comparison of ants and humans from Darwin, by quoting a line about similarity of anatomical structure between humans and other vertebrates. But Darwin's comparison is wholly appropriate, for the bones are homologous (similar by descent from a common ancestor). This passage is a non sequitur as supposed evidence for the reviewer's charge. Moreover, ants are not on an evolutionary lineage leading to vertebrates, so no comparison could be made, despite the reviewers fanciful statement about transforming Formica into Homo, the African slaver.

The second part of Gould's criticism involves more general questions about evolution and science:

Over and over again, with increasing emphasis on every page, Wilberforce accuses Darwin of leaving the strict path of experiment and observation for the fictional fancy of pure speculation. Thus Darwin has substituted "the spasmodic fluttering flight of fancy for the severe conclusions to which logical accuracy of reasoning had led the way" (p .231) He has abandoned "the stern Baconian law of the observation of facts" (p. 239) and proceeded instead "on the merest hypothesis, supported by the most unbounded assumptions" (p. 248) to produce "this flimsy speculation" called natural selection.

Wilberforce's documentation of this charge is as dishonest as ever. Darwin's treatise is largely a recitation of undoubted facts(marshaled to support a theoretical argument of course, but facts nonetheless). But Darwin also conjectures, although rarely, about possible modes of historical transformation. He is always careful, in these uncommon passages to label his argument as pure hypothesis by adding appropriate phrases such as "we might suppose that... "

Wilberforce simply ignores the factual compendium and tries to turn Darwin's honest admissions against him by depicting the entire book as a list of speculations. He egregiously selects every one of these passages (not many, for they consume but two pages) and ridicules Darwin in summation(p.249):

What new words are these for a loyal disciple of true Baconian philosophy?--'It is not incredible,'--'I do not doubt,'-- 'It is conceivable.' "

Gould acknowledged that Darwin's did not advance his theory of natural selection either as a conclusion drawn from pure observation or a deduction proved by repeated and controlled experiment. But Gould believed that Darwin should not be held to that standard. "Darwin, after all, was providing a new foundation for all of biology." Gould continued, "Experiment tends to be a conservative procedure in science, a way of testing ideas derived in other ways. Natural selection is one of those big ideas' that we ask observation and experiment to affirm(or reject). We cannot rightly insist, as Wilberforce did, that natural selection emerge only from observation and propose nothing beyond what observation has already affirmed, for we would then be asking that a method for testing ideas also be the only source for their generation--an impossible circle that would bring all thought to a grinding halt."

I would now like to make some comments of my own. When Gould complained about the exclamation mark inside the quotation marks, I thought he was making a major issue of something quite minor. I thought the same when he complained that the reviewer put words into Darwin's mouth in a situation where the reviewer made it quite clear that the words were not an actual quotation. These are what I call "rhetorical little white lies". I am willing to accept the premise that such tactics should not be used in scientific discussions. Indeed, I would like to see little white rhetorical lies excluded from scientific discussions. If Gould wished to set the bar so high as to exclude what seemed to me to be these fairly minor infractions, then I can certainly go along with that. But I do insist that the standards he sets for critics of Darwin should also be applied to supporters of Darwin and to Darwin himself.

I believe that Gould was probably guilty of one of those rhetorical little white lies when he claimed that Wilberforce "egregiously selects every one of these passages". I would imagine the reviewer omitted some. I am quite certain that Gould did not carefully read Darwin's entire work to check that no such passage was left out. Instead I would imagine that he considered himself justified in making the statement since even if it were not literally true--it was in his view a valid use of rhetorical hyperbole. Of course, such use of hyperbole would be unacceptable if it were used against Darwin. Like Darwin's ideas on evolution, this is all speculation--but while Gould takes great offense at the suggestion that that Darwin's ideas on evolution were speculation, I have no problem at all if Gould supporters want to call my idea speculation.

Whether the reviewer listed every instance or not--it was not an egregious thing for him to do so. I think it probably says a lot about supporters of evolution that as prominent an evolution supporter as Stephen Gould would label as egregious what was apparently accurate quoting of Darwin.

There is also a lot of specious reasoning here. Darwin devotes far more space to giving background facts than he does to speculation regarding evolution and natural selection. But the focus of Darwin's book is not these background facts, but his ideas with respect to evolution and natural selection. If these ideas are routinely couched in language such as "I can conceive..." or "It is not incredible...." then the reviewer was entirely justified in making his point, and Gould was out of line with his objections.

One of the problems with evolution is that the supporters of evolution rarely give us any predictions that can be tested in a straightforward manner. But in last paragraph I quoted Stephen Gould does give us such a prediction. If we insist that natural selection emerge only from observation and propose nothing beyond what observation has already affirmed, then it will bring all thought to a grinding halt. This actually follows logically from what Gould said. If a ridiculous claim like this was made by one of the leading scientists in the field, is it any wonder that many people do not believe that evolutionary biology is worthy of the respect given more traditional fields of science like physics, astronomy and chemistry?

I find it interesting that so many Christians are so disturbed by scientific claims that conflict with the Jewish Bible. This suggests a strong connection with their Jewish roots. When we look at Old Testament roots for both Judaism and Christianity, we see a very firm foundation upon which to build science. In the Book of Joshua, we are told that God commanded his people to kill certain inhabitants of the Promised Land. Instead the Jews entered into a covenant with these people. At that point, God isisted that his people honor their covenant even though they had made the covenant against the expressed commandment of God. Whatever you may think of God's original commandment--it is hard to imagine a stronger message on behalf of honoring one's word. I would also consider it to be a very strong message on behalf of truthfulness in general.

The insulting moniker "Soapy Sam" was inspired by a comment of Benjamin Disraeli essentially calling Samuel Wilberforce slippery. An accusation of being slippery is basically a complaint that one may be technically telling the truth, but one is doing so in a deceptive fashion. Jews are often viewed as being slippery in this fashion, and people are often more enraged by slipperiness than by outright lies. But it is much better to have a code of honesty, and push the limits of that code, than to have no code at all. This is particularly true if people understand the code.

It is my understanding that the code does allow some of what I have called rhetorical little white lies. Gould could justify his comment aobut all thought coming to a grinding halt if he argued that any intelligent person should recognize it as hyperbole--but he could do this onlyif he made his point in passing, and did not hammer away at it. In a similar I could take him literally and criticize him based upon my taking his point literally--but once again, I am only allowed to do so in passing, and the same thing applies to the objections Gould raises regarding the rhetorical little white lies of Samuel Wilberforce, assuming he is the reviewer. Jewish Law requires two witnesses for a conviction, so it sort of makes sense that charges are to be taken more seriously when they are made more than once. Poetic license, or some other rhetorical justification for saying something that is not literally true, is far less likely to be considered an acceptable excuse if the point is made repeatedly.

The reviewer repeatedly called Darwin's idea speculation, and Gould repeatedly objected to this term:

The structure of Darwin's argument rests upon two types of reasoning that Wilberforce disparaged as speculation. First, Darwin's central statement--that natural selction produces major transformation over millions of years--is based upon analogy, not observation. Darwin presents copious facts for small-scale artifical selection as practiced by humans; improved crops, production of numerous breeds of pigeons and dogs. The extension to millions of years and major effects is an extrapolation subject to the objection that pigeons are always pigeons and that artifical selection has limits imposed by boundaries of permanently created types.

Second, Darwin often imposed his theory on imperfect evidence to make sense of observations that, in their literal appearance, did not support natural selection. Most notably, he explained gaps in the fossil record by arguing that natural selection predicted continuity, and that geological evidence must therefore be even more imperfect than we had realized--much like a book with only a letter or two perserved for each page.

"Speculation" is a loaded word, since its vernacular meaning usually includes an unstated adjective before the noun--"vain", "fatuous", or "unsupported" for example. Yet I think we must admit that any theory as comprehensive will include many important parts fitting within a logical structure of a genarl argument, but not resting upon completed observation and experiment--what any thetorician of Wilberforce's style and skill will brand as "speculation."

What then is the difference between Darwin's unproved componentsand speculation that does merit the opprobrioum of our vernacular? The criteria for proper separation must be fruitfulness and testability. Vain speculations go nowhere. They emerge from personal preference or the inspiration of an armchair, not from deep thought about puzzling phenomena. They may be clever, exciting titillating; but they either suggest no way to obtain evidence for their test or may even be untestable in principle. Fruitful ideas, on the other hand, burst with intrinsic suggestions for observation and experiment--action that may require their prompt rejection. Fruitful ideas also lead to other testable insights; vain speculation turns in upon itself....So many people have not graspedd the most basic principle of science as fruitful activity--the criterion that separates Darwin's ideas from Wilberforce's ridicule. So many people think that an idea becomes true or probsble by their very cleverness in devising it. They have missed what any good scientist knows in his bones: That fruitfulness in action, expressed as testablitiy in practice, separates the good idea from idle speculation.... Darwin knew that he could not observe the origin of new species directly, much less major evolutionary trends in lineages--for these events take too much time compared to our paltry lif spans. Darwin argued that such historical hypotheses could be judged by seeking concordance of pattern among large sets of independent criteria.

According to Gould, "Darwin's speculations were fruitful ideas, testable by the historain's method of concordance among independent criteria. Some were wrong; many were right. But at least Darwin tolf us how to find out." Gould then concluded his article:

William Whewell, a great philospher of science and Darwin's contemporary, thought hard about modes of testing in science and affirmed Darwin's view abouthistorical hypotheses in his two-volume Philosphy of the Inductive Sciences Founded Upon Their History(second edition, 1847). He argued thatstrongest possible confirmation arose when hypotheses explained facts of several different, and apparently independent, kinds under the same rubric--particularly when these facts played no role in forming the hypotheses, but arose laater to challenge any available explanation (consider, for example, the sucess of evolutionary theory in making sense of biochemical data, unknown in Darwin's century). Whewell called the process the "consilience of inductions":

Accordingly the cases in which inductions from classes of facts altogether different have jumped together, belongs only to the best theories which the history of science contains....I will term it the Consilience of Inductions.

Whewell, a conservative Anglican, later banned Darwin's Origin of Species from the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was master. Darwin, perhaps had been too good a pupil in understanding the consilience of induction. For what greater blow can a man suffer than the proper use of his own arguments in an alien context? Which makes me wonder all the more what the ghost of William Wilberforce thought about his son Soapy Sam and the black ants.

Gould's treatment of Whewell and his consilience of inductions is worth some comment. Based upon what Gould quoted from Whewell I can see that Whewell thought the best theories were supported by evidence from multiple sources--but I see nothing to indicate that he thought that having lots of evidence made up for not having any evidence that was very strong. Basically, if we make an analogy with a legal case, Darwin has built up a case that has a lot of evidence, but it is all circumstantial. The reviewer, identified as Samuel Wilberforce, only wanted to focus on the fact that the evidence was circumstantial, while Gould only wanted to look at the mass of evidence from independent sources, downplaying the fact that it was all circumstantial. Neither one wanted to really look at the whole picture.

I believe it is useful to look at the two OJ Simpson criminal trials. In 2008 OJ was tried for a Las Vegas armed robbery. They had him dead to rights. We might reasonably be upset with OJ for putting the state to the expense of a trial. But the 1995 murder trial was different. The evidence was circumstantial. In my opinion, the evidence was overwhelming and OJ should have been convicted. I think the defense used a lot of cheap tricks and got away with them because the jury was stacked in OJs favor. I would imagine that a lot of supporters of evolution think about creationists the way I think of the Simpson defense team. But in any case based on circumstantial evidence it is vitally important opposing views be given an adequate hearing. There may be people who abuse the system, but we must never use such abuses as a justification for only allowing just the one view to be expressed.

As far as new evidence is concerned, think about Richard Nixon and suppose that in 1960 Bill claimed that Nixon was a great American, while Ted said he was a horrible person. As we move forward in time, Bill will find new evidence not available in 1960 to support his claim, and so will Ted. If you are only going to look at the evidence you like, this whole process is meaningless. People with opposing views both need to be able to point to both old and new evidence if this whole process is going to have any value.

Gould's final paragragh is quite interesting. After providing some background on Whewell, Gould proceeded to engage in what I can only consider to be gloating. "Darwin, perhaps, had been too good a pupil in understanding the consilience of induction. For what greater blow can a man suffer than the proper use of his own arguments in an alien context?" He then switched his attention back to Samuel Wilberforce, engaging in what I would have to call the idlest of idle speculation in a parting shot at the bishop "Which makes me wonder all the more what the ghost of William Wilberforce thought about his son Soapy Sam and the black ants?" Even if we accept Stephen Gould's underlying assumption that the ghost of William Wilberforce existed, it is very hard to image how we could ever know what the ghost thought.

Taking a more general look at Gould's article we should notice a number of things. Gould was very critical of mere cleverness with nothing to back it up--yet this is exactly what we see repeatedly from Gould himself. Gould wrote of the "criterion that separates Darwin's ideas from Wilbeforce's ridicule"--but on the very page where these words appear, we see a large caricature from VANITY FAIR ridiculing Samuel Wilberforce. There is also Gould's use of "Soapy Sam" in the title of his article, which was also a way of ridiculing Wilberforce. In scientific discourse, the same rules should apply to both sides, and if we are going to cricize one side for mere cleverness and ridicule, we should do the same for the other. Marxism has no conception of the idea that the rules they apply to others should also apply to themselves--but Jewish and Jewish based Christian cculture does have such an iea--which is an important reason that science coming out of such cultures has accomplished so much--and why the agricultural disaster of Lysenkoism happened not in a Jewish or Christian culture, but a Marxist one. But there are other points to consider. (1) It can be harder to recognize these tactics when they are used against others than when they are used against you. (2) It can be a lot harder to recognize these tactics in a context where we haven't been trained to see them. I could honestly believe that Gould might not have seen that he was using the tactics he critized others for using--but as a scientist that was something he was supposed to be able to see.

Irving Kristol claimed that scientists like Stephen Gould were were continuing to fight the battle between science and religion that we saw in Victorian England. This article by Gould provides strong evidence in support of Kristol's claim. How normal is it for a scientist to get that hot and bothered by a book review by a non-scientist 126 years earlier? Even if we think of Gould as a science historian, It is clear that Gould showed very little unbiased historical perspective--but rather got down and dirty fighting for Darwin against crationist criticism.

The two main compalints that Gould made involved (1) the black slave ants, and (2) the issue of whether Darwin's ideas were speculation. Gould objects to the use of the term "speculation" calling it a loaded word based upon how it is used in the vernacular. Putting this another way, Gould was objecting to the use of "speculation" as a word that would tend to prejudice readers against Darwin's ideas. According to Gould, the fossil record was like a book with only a letter or two preserved for each page. If that was true, it is hard to see how any conclusions based upon the fossil record could have been anything but speculation. Nevertheless, if we are going to be really picky about the use of prejuidical language, I could agree that we avoide the use of words like speculation. Whi;e the reviewer did have a point that Darwin was not meeting the normal test of scieence in terms of direct observation or experimentation--but he could have said that Darwin's ideas did not meet the test of what a scientific theory should be without using a word like "speculation".

A few months later, in a January 1987 Discover article, Gould quoted Darwin from DESCENT OF MAN: I had two distinct objects in view; firstly to show that species had not been separately created, and secondly that natural selection had been the chief agent of change...If I have erred in...having exagerated its [natural selection's] power...I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations." Now it seems to me that "dogma" is even more of a loaded term likely to prejudice readers than "speculation" is. Gould did not seem to have any problem with Darwin using a loaded term like "dogma". But loaded terms need not be negative ones. I think calling evolution an historical science is using a loaded term that prejudices readers in favor of evolution. For most people anything that is historical is by definition true. Gould mentions that Darwin uses the historian's method--but what he was doing was much closer to what an archeologist does. Even if ivory tower historians often put clues together to figure out what is likely to have happened in the past--most of what the average person knows about history is a rather straightforward matter of historical record. This is not at all the case with evolution. If I had to provide a two word description of evolution I would either say that evolution is a forensic science, in cases where it is studied in an honest fashion, or I would say it is a rhetorical science when that honesty is not present.

Darwin was also very upset over the reviewer's comments about black slave ants. Gould got very harsh and very personal in his criticism of Samuel Wilberforce on this issue. Was Gould fair in his criticism of Samuel Wilberforce on this issue? I do not believe so. According to Gould, the article in the prestigous QUARTERLY REVIEW was one of the original reviews of Darwin's Origin of Species. But there is no such book. The book Darwin wrote which was reviewed had a different title: On the Origin of Species Through Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. It is interesting that Darwin referred to "Favored Races" in his title. If Darwin was not a racist himself, the title of his book was certainly one that would appeal to racists.

The idea of validating human institutions by animal analogies may be nonsense--but it is certainly something that people do. Gould certainly knew this to be true, since his father was a Marxist, and Karl Marx used Darwin's ideas about evolution among animals to validate his ideas on the evolution of social institutions. But Samuel Wilberforce, assuming he wrote the review, faced a problem. He did not want slave owners using an analogy of slavery among ants to help justify human slavery. So he made his argument to justify human slavery as ridiculous as he could possibly make it. The point was not so much to criticize Darwin as to make any slave supports look like fools if they seriously tried to make such an argument--and Samuel Wilberforce was willing to take one for the team and make himself look ridiculous if that was what it took to accomplish his goal.

Gould called Darwin an active and passionate abolutionist. But the quotation that Gould takes from VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE tells a very different story if you read it carefully. Darwin was quoted as writing "I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean". How is it that Darwin happened to be in a position where a slave would hand him a glass of water? It sounds to me like Darwin was enjoying the hospitality of a slave owner, allowing himself to be waited upon by a slave--and then Darwin got upset when the slave was treated with brutality. By his actions, Darwin was not an opponent of slavery, but a supporter, willing to enjoy the fruits of being waited upon by a slave. I will grant that he did believe slaves should be treated without cruelty--but I would have expected more than that from the grandson of a great abolitionist like Josiah Wedgewood. If Darwin directed any criticism against himself for what happened to the little boy, we see no evidence of it from what Gould quoted.

Darwin is known to have described himself as an agnostic, rather than someone who believed in God. Yet in criticising what he had seen he declared: "And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbors as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his will be done on earth!" I find it interesting that the man more responsible than anyone else for undermining belief in God and the Bible, should have condemned the abuses of slavery in a way that depends so heavily upon a belief in God. He included references to loving their neighbors as themselves and God's Will being done on earth which are obviously taken from the Bible. It seems to me that Darwin undermined his own argument against slavery abuses when he published his ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES THROUGH NATURAL SELECTION OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVORED RACES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE.