Negative Homogeneity: Our Mutual Friend, Richard Owen, and the ‘New Worlds’ of Victorian Biology

Abstract

Stephen Jay Gould’s book, Wonderful Life (1989), named after a Dickensian Frank Capra movie of the 1940s, tells how later nineteenth-century natural history formed a ‘Darwinian’ template based on assumptions about the ‘march of progress’, which caused the scientists of the Smithsonian to transcribe wrongly what they found in the fossil beds of the Cambrian slate. Gould shows how Walcott and his colleagues suppressed the monstrosities and eccentricities of the creatures they were looking at — ‘normalising’ for example the sites of their organs — because they simply could not believe that such a purely contingent proliferation of organic differences could have existed simultaneously so near the beginning of organic life. Such a finding was simply not imaginable — it implied that radical heterogeneity of form was present at the very beginning, in some of the earliest and most ‘primitive’ forms of life, and that the orderly progression from the simple and homogeneous to the complex and heterogeneous presented in Victorian biological textbooks — and, indeed, in textbooks modelled on them up to the post-Second World War period — which Gould terms ‘the cone of increasing diversity’, was contradicted by the fossil-findings before the very eyes of these honest and dedicated orthodox Darwinian biologists. It was not, says Gould, that they faked the evidence through dishonesty — the template-theory through which they viewed the empirical evidence — which has come to be known as ‘phyletic gradualism’ — was so well-defined that they could not see anything which appeared inconsistent with it.