Darwin helped to move things a step away from the Cartesian world of mechanical certainties in science. His theory meant that species once seen as fixed and immutable were instead somehow fluid and malleable. He also disavowed clear distinctions between them, being aware, as science historian Bruce Mazlish writes, “that a finch in one territory could breed with those slightly different from it in an adjacent territory, and that that second finch could breed with its next-door neighbor, and so on until at some farther remove, the original finch could not breed with its nth neighbor.” Rejecting Descartes on another front, Darwin also held that animals had feelings and could experience pleasure and pain, saying, “There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties.”

Darwin’s belief that absolute truth was unavailable to science upset some critics even more than his views on the link between humans and apes. His own theory was valid, he said, not because it was certain but because it was productive. Simply speaking, it made sense. Writing to a friend in 1861, he noted, “The change in species cannot be proved, and…the doctrine must sink or swim according as it groups and explains [disparate] phenomena.” Uncertainty permeated Darwin’s view of nature. In Newton’s universe, causes predicted effects in a linear progression. In Darwin’s world, as one writer describes it, “no elegant equations could predict the future of even a single organism.”

The disapprobation of mechanists had other targets, too. Changes were afoot in the “hard” sciences, where work in topology and set theory was replacing elemental certainties with broad, statistical measures. And widespread consternation ensued when the mathematical physicist Ludwig Boltzmann together with James Clerk Maxwell—arguably the century’s leading physicist—claimed that probabilities were okay for analyzing thermodynamics. But they were on the right path, and with their work a door was opening that would add new complexities to our understanding of the world.

Increasing levels of complexity were also being noted in what would soon be called ecology. In a rarely noted passage from Origin, Darwin relates a story told to him by a Colonel Newman:

The number of humble-bees [sic] in any district depends in a great measure upon the number of field mice, which destroy their combs and nests…Now the number of mice is largely dependent, as everyone knows, on the number of cats; and Col. Newman says, “Near the villages and small towns I have found the nests of humble-bees more numerous than elsewhere, which I attribute to the number of cats that destroy the mice.” Hence it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district!

Tags: 2nd Law, complexity, Darwin, Descartes, evolution, maxwell, Maxwells Demon, Mazlish, Newton, thermodynamics, uncertainty

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Posted on April 14th, 2006 @ 6:00 am