The figure of Darwin in colloquial science

Abstract

In works of colloquial science, by Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, Charles Darwin appears as a Great Man. The authors cite substantial biographies of Darwin and serious histories of science. Yet the figure of Darwin that makes it into these colloquial texts is conveyed in just a few sentences and represents not so much an outline sketch of the full portrait found in the biographies, as a mythic hero, one that needs no introduction. We can assume that the authors assume that their audiences meet the text with cultural knowledge of Darwin, priming them to see him as a singular, ahistorical figure. This cultural knowledge is what Adrian Wilson has called “science’s imagined pasts”—a set of stories perpetuated by scientists today, about how science has progressed in the last few centuries. This prompts an irony of the sub-genre, i.e. books advocating Darwinism using Darwin. In communicating the blind and purposeless process of natural selection, they rely on a pre-scientific and teleological notion of human action: history happens because of the designs of Great Men like Darwin. For critical readers of these texts, there is another irony to heed. We are in a position analogous to the biologist trying to understand the functions of an organism’s traits. Dawkins and Coyne read traits as reflections of the environment in which ancestors evolved: an imagined past of a different kind. But as with organisms, so with texts; this interpretive strategy is reliable in proportion to how long its target has survived.