Darwin Among the Machines (6 page)

“Dr. Darwin possesses perhaps a greater range of knowledge than any man in Europe,” remarked Samuel Coleridge, who coined the word
Darwinising
in reference to evolutionary speculations; in this as in most other Darwinisms, Erasmus preceded Charles.
³³
“The Darwinian theory of evolution is very much a family affair,” concluded Desmond King-Hele, “in which the shares of Erasmus and his grandson Charles are more nearly connected, and more nearly equal, than is usually supposed.”
³⁴
Whether Charles's neglect of his grandfather's work was a conscious or unconscious oversight has been diagnosed both ways. The first edition of
Origin of Species
makes no mention of Erasmus Darwin. “The history of error is quite unimportant,” explained Darwin to Huxley.
³⁵
In the third edition, of 1861, Darwin added a “brief, but imperfect” historical sketch, in which he commented in a footnote that “it is curious how largely my grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, anticipated the erroneous grounds of opinion, and the views of Lamarck.” This cast his grandfather in all but invisible type.

In 1879, Charles Darwin published, with a lengthy introduction, an English translation of Ernst Krause's
Life of Erasmus Darwin
, just as Butler was about to publish his
Evolution, Old and New
.
³⁶
Instead of pacifying Butler, Darwin's belated acknowledgment of his grandfather had the opposite effect. Butler discovered that Darwin's translation of the original article by Krause, accompanied by “a guarantee for its accuracy” and presented as predating the appearance of
Evolution, Old and New
, contained several additional passages, including a final paragraph that Butler interpreted as a personal attack. “Erasmus Darwin's system was in itself a most significant first step in the path of knowledge which his grandson has opened up for us,” suspiciously appended Krause, “but to wish to revive it at the present day, as has actually been seriously attempted, shows a weakness of thought and a mental anachronism which no one can envy.”
³⁷

The Darwin–Butler dispute arose from an alliance gone awry. The grandson of the surgeon of Lichfield and the grandson of the bishop
of Lichfield had been launched on a collision path, burdened by illustrious ancestors and driven to claim new territory for themselves. In the cold climate of a Victorian childhood the Reverend Thomas Butler is remembered as particularly harsh. Butler's alienation from his father and the church was followed by a disillusionment with Darwinism, which he denounced as early as January 1863 as “nothing new, but a
rechaufée
.”
³⁸
Charles Darwin had been a student of Butler's grandfather and an acquaintance of Butler's father, who noted that “he inoculated me with a taste for Botany which has stuck by me all my life.”
³⁹
Darwin would only reciprocate with a comment that “nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind than Dr. Butler's school.”
⁴⁰

Darwin's great treatise appeared in November 1859, but, recalled Butler, “being on my way to New Zealand when the
Origin of Species
appeared, I did not get it until 1860 or 1861.”
⁴¹
The long sea voyage, the grand spectacle of the New Zealand wilderness, and a religious upbringing that sought to shift its convictions to a scientific faith rendered Butler keenly receptive to the theories presented in Darwin's book. Reading
Origin of Species
by candlelight in a thatched-roof hut, the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere above, Butler's imagination took flight beyond where Darwin left off. “Residing eighteen miles from the nearest human habitation, and three days' journey on horseback from a bookseller's shop, I became one of Mr. Darwin's many enthusiastic admirers,” Butler recollected, “and wrote a philosophical dialogue (the most offensive form, except poetry and books of travel into supposed unknown countries, that even literature can assume) upon the
Origin of Species
.”
⁴²

This dialogue was printed anonymously in the Canterbury
Press
of 20 December 1862. By some means a copy reached Charles Darwin who, in forwarding it to an unknown editor in England, noted that “this Dialogue, written by some [one] quite unknown to Mr. Darwin, is remarkable from its spirit and from giving so clear and accurate a view of Mr. D[arwin]'s theory. It is also remarkable from being published in a colony exactly 12 years old, in which it might have [been] thought only material interests would have been regarded.”
⁴³

Butler's dialogue aroused much discussion in the colony, and it was followed on 13 June 1863 by another installment, signed “Cellarius” and titled
Darwin Among the Machines
. In this essay Butler laid out the ideas that would be incorporated into
Erewhon
as the “Book of the Machines.” “We find ourselves almost awestruck at the vast development of the mechanical world, at the gigantic strides with which it has advanced in comparison with the slow progress of the
animal and vegetable kingdom,” warned Butler. “We shall find it impossible to refrain from asking ourselves what the end of this mighty movement is to be. . . . The machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them; more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life.”
⁴⁴

Butler's essay did more than spoof a fashionable theory; it coupled a meticulous analysis of Darwin's thesis to a keenly unencumbered view of the world as it stood in 1863. On his return to London, Butler produced another commentary, “The Mechanical Creation,” published in the (London)
Reasoner
, 1 July 1865. “Those who accept the Darwinian theory will not feel inclined to deny that whatever impulse the animal and vegetable kingdoms have sprung from, has been derived from within the natural influences which operate upon this world, and not from any extra natural source,” argued Butler. “They will believe that the changes and chances with which countless millions of years have been pregnant, have brought the existing organizations to their present condition without any specially creative effort of an overruling mind. What shall we think then? That the resources of nature are at an end, and that the animal phase is to be the last which life on this globe is to assume? or shall we conceive that we are living in the first faint dawning of a new one? Of a life which in another ten or twenty million years shall be to us as we to the vegetable? What has been may be again, and although we grant that hardly any mistake would be more puerile than to individualize and animalize the at present existing machines—or to endow them with human sympathies, yet we can see no a priori objection to the gradual development of a mechanical life, though that life shall be so different from ours that it is only by a severe discipline that we can think of it as life at all.”
⁴⁵

The relations between mind and mechanism have been argued since the time of Aristotle and Lucretius, the distinctions given a trademark presentation by René Descartes in his 1637
Discourse touching the method of using one's reason rightly and of seeking scientific truth
. Butler adopted an open-minded position that “the theory that living beings are conscious machines, can be fought as much and just as little as the theory that machines are unconscious living beings; everything that goes to prove either of these propositions goes just as well to prove the other also.”
⁴⁶
This was less radical a view than that suggested by Darwin's colleague Thomas Huxley, who announced in 1870 that “we shall sooner or later arrive at a mechanical equivalent
of consciousness, just as we have arrived at a mechanical equivalent of heat.”
⁴⁷

In
Erewhon
's “Book of the Machines” the author of the anonymous manifesto presented within the anonymous book gives voice to these concerns: “Why may not there arise some new phase of mind which shall be as different from all present known phases as the mind of animals is from that of vegetables? It would be absurd to attempt to define such a mental state (or whatever it may be called), inasmuch as it must be something so foreign to man that his experience can give him no help towards conceiving its nature; but surely when we reflect upon the manifold phases of life and consciousness which have been evolved already, it would be rash to say that no others can be developed, and that animal life is the end of all things. There was a time when fire was the end of all things; another when rocks and water were so. . . . There is no security . . . against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. . . . Either, a great deal of action that has been called purely mechanical and unconscious must be admitted to contain more elements of consciousness than has been allowed hitherto (and in this case germs of consciousness will be found in many actions of the higher machines)—or (assuming the theory of evolution but at the same time denying the consciousness of vegetable and crystalline action) the race of man has descended from things which had no consciousness at all. In this case there is no
a priori
improbability in the descent of conscious (and more than conscious) machines from those which now exist.”
⁴⁸

In May 1872, Butler sent a letter to Darwin apologizing “about a portion of the little book
Erewhon
which I have lately published, and which I am afraid has been a good deal misunderstood. I refer to the chapter upon Machines. . . . I am sincerely sorry that some of the critics should have thought that I was laughing at your theory, a thing which I never meant to do, and should be shocked at having done.”
⁴⁹
In reply, Darwin invited Butler to visit him at the Darwin estate at Down. Butler stayed with the Darwins for a weekend, a visit, wrote the Darwins' houseguest, “of which I shall always retain a most agreeable recollection.”
⁵⁰
It was the memory of this visit, perhaps, that would prompt Darwin to write to Huxley eight years later that “the [Butler] affair has annoyed and pained me to a silly extent . . . until quite recently he expressed great friendship for me, and said he had learnt all he knew about evolution from my books.”
⁵¹

The Butler–Darwin quarrel smoldered for many years. Reconciliation was achieved only after both parties were deceased, the peace
mediated between Francis Darwin on behalf of his father and Henry Festing Jones on behalf of Butler's literary estate.
⁵²
The affair drew considerable attention at the time; what the nineteenth century lacked in television it made up for with a facility with words. “When a writer who has not given as many weeks to the subject as Mr. Darwin has given years,” complained the
Saturday Review
, “is not content to air his own crude though clever fallacies, but assumes to criticize Mr. Darwin with the superciliousness of a young schoolmaster looking over a boy's theme, it is difficult not to take him more seriously than he deserves.”
⁵³

“When I thought of Buffon, of Dr. Erasmus Darwin, of Lamarck, and even of the author [Robert Chambers] of the
Vestiges of Creation
, to all of whom Mr. Darwin had dealt the same measure which he was now dealing to myself,” responded Butler, “when I thought of these great men, now dumb, who had borne the burden and heat of the day, and whose laurels had been filched from them . . . dead men, on whose behalf I now fight, as I trust that some one—whom I thank by anticipation—may one day fight on mine.”
⁵⁴

Was Samuel Butler right? Although the priority of Erasmus Darwin is now acknowledged, Butler's own evolutionary theories remain discredited as the unscientific speculations of a bitter and self-published crank. But several of the arguments he made in
Life and Habit
(1878),
Evolution, Old and New
(1879),
Unconscious Memory
(1880), and
Luck, or Cunning?
(1887) anticipated questions that are gnawing at the pillars of Darwinism today.

Butler's obsession with “the substantial identity between heredity and memory, and the reintroduction of design into organic development” anticipated the discovery of the genetic code and presaged the mysteries that bedevil our understanding of how living organisms are translated to and from sequential strings of DNA. The engines of evolution are driven by computational processes whose alphabet has been deciphered but whose language we do not yet understand. Butler's notion of species as composite organisms, transcending the temporal and physical boundaries between individuals, is echoed by recent models of how the space of evolutionary possibilities is searched and brought to life. The ghost of Samuel Butler haunts the fringes of evolutionary biology today. How random is random variation? Is life the work of natural selection alone—or is there an element of intelligent search, if not design?

In 1876, Butler explained the continuity of the germ plasm and hinted at what Richard Dawkins (1976) would label the
Selfish Gene:
“See the ova only and consider the second ovum as the first two ovas'
means not of reproducing themselves but of continuing themselves—repeating themselves—the intermediate lives being nothing but, as it were, a long potato shoot from one eye to the place where it will grow its next tuber.”
⁵⁵
This insight would be immortalized as the aphorism that a chicken is an egg's way of making another egg. Butler's ideas about ideas, expressed best in his introduction to
Luck, or Cunning?
anticipated what, also thanks to Dawkins, we now call memes: “Ideas are like plants and animals in this respect also. I do not merely mean their growth in the minds of those who first advanced them, but that larger development which consists in their subsequent good or evil fortunes—in their reception, favourable or otherwise, by those to whom they were presented. This is to an idea what its surroundings are to an organism, and throws much the same light upon it that knowledge of the conditions under which an organism lives throws upon the organism itself.”
⁵⁶