Against finality: Darwin, Mill and the end of essentialism

Abstract

A few years ago it was widely reported that girls really do prefer pink. Scientists have apparently proved it. The stories drew on a study published in Current Biology 2 in which two neuroscientists ‘report a robust, cross-cultural sex difference in color preference’ and suggest links to the evolution of sex-specific behaviour.3 The Telegraph remarked, ‘the reason could have its origins in the hunt for food on the African savannah millennia ago’4 and the Independent, under the weighty subtitle ‘It's in our genes’ (this claim is a media favourite), observed that the study was ‘the first to show that there is a scientific basis for the idea that girls are born with a particular affinity for pink colours’.5 The story has continued to be newsworthy; earlier this year, beneath a triumphant headline, ‘Modern girls are born to plump for pink’, the Mail stated that, according to scientists, females are drawn to pinks and reds because their brains became ‘fine-tuned’ to the colours of ripe fruits and berries.6 Hence they opt for pink toys at an early age. Men, meanwhile, have ‘developed a preference for the clear blue skies that signalled good weather for hunting’.7 Women's brains, the Mail asserted, are more specialised for gathering-related tasks. It extends this to sexual preference – men with rosy cheeks are seemingly more desirable (because they are healthy), noting that at Newcastle University researchers claim to be able to deduce sex from the anonymised results of their colour tests. The reports seek to lend credence to the story through their references to ‘experts’ and ‘researchers’. The BBC quoted the lead investigator Anya Hurlbert: ‘Evolution may have driven females to prefer reddish colours – reddish fruits, healthy, reddish faces’.8 The Eurocentric assumption here is worth noting: the remark overlooks the fact that humans evolved in Africa and are thought to have had dark skins, losing pigmentation at a later stage in adapting to northern climates.9 And how is evolution being used here? It is a word with ready media appeal, offering a story that combines the comfort (from where we are now) of a just-so story with the authority of science. If evolution is development over time, then how do we account for a preference for reddish colours in a society in which to gather fruit is no longer one of the main responsibilities of women and girls. On the other hand, a commodity culture which bombards girls with pink objects is likely to produce girls who like pink. Evolutionary biology challenges concepts of the innate, concerned, as it is, with change over time. Observable characteristics of living organisms are necessarily viewed in a time frame that is narrow when compared to evolutionary time. And an ability or preference measured for a set of men and women will give a distribution of results dependent on genotype, environment and experience. The distributions will inevitability overlap: sex cannot be reliably deduced from an individual's preference or ability in a particular area. And yet essentialism persists as a way of seeing and ordering: boys will be boys.10 Nearly a century and a half ago the biologist and novelist Grant Allen, in his influential Physiological Aesthetics (1877), dedicated to the biologically minded philosopher Herbert Spencer, had argued for the influence of bright-coloured fruits, berries, and flowers on the growth of aesthetic feelings.11 He claimed, ‘the very existence of reds, yellows, and purples in the outer world is indirectly almost entirely owing to their special effect upon animal organs’.12 Allen was an essentialist thinker on matters both of sex and race; committed to a deterministic view, he stressed that ‘men and women differ infinitely in emotions and intellect’.13 His views were widely disseminated. In his ‘Plain Words on the Woman Question’, which appeared in both the Fortnightly Review and Popular Science Monthly in 1889, he insisted that women be educated ‘for the functions which Nature intended them to perform’; this was resonant with the dominant view that gender was an expression of nature, not culture.14 In this paper I will consider challenges to the idea pervasive in cultural studies and in popular culture that biology is deterministic. This has been upturned in philosophy, notably by John Dupré in The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (1993), which rejects the idea that the world is deterministic; this forms part of Dupré's argument against the idea that a thing has an essence that will determine to which laws of nature that thing is subject, as he observes the connections between reductionism, determinism and essentialism as the three pillars of conventional classificiation.15 He extends this to biological sex, questioning the assumption of homogeneity among the members of any kind.16 Nonetheless, deterministic assumptions about biology and sex remain. Emphasising the centrality of history to Darwin's biology, and considering correspondences between his ideas and those of the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill, and their shared emphasis on the value of individual difference, I will explore ways in which Victorian evolutionary biology can be situated against essentialist biology and anticipates the new emphasis on dynamic process, plasticity and freedom in twenty-first-century biology. Turning to parallel developments in the Victorian novel, I examine the extent to which the writer and pioneering women's rights campaigner Mona Caird (whom Grant Allen would decry in the press as lisping Greek)17 drew both on Darwin's non-essentialist biology and on Mill's individualism as a way of conceiving change, calling into question the idea that biology was necessarily limiting to women. Sophisticated analyses of gendered behaviour, which take into account the complex and changing relation between nature and nurture, are emerging in contemporary biology. The developmental biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, in a recent talk on sexual difference, delivered against a background of a dramatic pink and blue toy dimorphism, suggests using a dynamic systems approach to think about sex and gender, and, specifically, how development produces a phenotype – the set of observable characteristics of an individual.18 According to the developmental psychologist Paul van Geert, a dynamic system is ‘a set of variables that mutually affect each other's changes over time’.19 The variables interact and this interaction itself changes over time. This approach works with a complex world ‘where real infants live and develop in a world filled with people, things and events in continuous interaction’.20 Fausto-Sterling asks what happens developmentally to a nervous system and visual system developed in an environment of intensive exposure to either pink or blue toys, according to sex. Considering preference as a developing pleasure centre that responds to familiarity, to exposure and to positive emotional feedback, she suggests this is a new and different way of framing the question. In this sense, then, she argues, preference is a biological phenomenon because it develops in the brain, but it is stimulated by exposure and by positive emotional affect from care givers. She argues that in a dynamic systems model nurture is not outside of nature. According to this model, nature and nurture are so closely related they do not so much interact, which suggests they are independent entities, as are entwined and help constitute each other.21 While the researchers claiming a biological component to colour preference made their argument in Current Biology a deterministic one, produced by an imagined past, it is possible to understand preference in biological terms without recourse to essentialism. New concepts of plasticity and malleability in biology undercut essentialist thinking about sex and identity.22 Aside from the conflation of reddish-brown with pink necessary to make a splash in the papers, there is a hole in the story about gendered colour preferences and evolution. We do not inhabit a hunter-gatherer society. Something that happened thousands of years ago is not necessarily a means of explaining present characters or behaviour. When Charles Lyell published his voluminous Principles of Geology (1830–33) he subtitled it ‘An attempt to explain the former changes of the Earth's surface by reference to causes now in operation’, but this stable geological relation between present and past, predicated on the relatively steady state of the earth, does not obtain in the dynamic world of evolutionary biology. In the often quoted words of the population geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky in his 1973 essay in the American Biology Teacher, ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution’; evolution has revolutionised knowledge.23 The biologist Steven Rose extends this claim: ‘nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of history’, and counters the assertion by evolutionary psychologists that evolutionary selection pressures have not produced significant change.24 Evolution is development over time. Species, individuals and cultures have histories. (Darwin himself does not stand outside of history, which both enriches and delimits his research.) In Human Nature and the Limits of Science (2001) Dupré offers an extended challenge to evolutionary psychology, emphasising the remarkable nature of the interaction between the human brain and environment. Interrogating attempts to find universals across cultures, he insists on a pluralistic understanding of human nature.25 Context and environment matter in evolution, and are now coming to be seen as inseparable from the organism. Arguments which seek to explain present behaviours through their relation to largely unknown and therefore imagined original human societies are deeply flawed. In On the Origin of Species, by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) Darwin set in train an epistemological revolution which must inform any assessment of the impact of his ideas on questions of sex, or wider considerations of the politics of biology. Species are a contingent effect of process. John Dewey, the leading American pragmatist and educational reformer, set out the implications of Darwin's idea with acuity in his 1909 contribution to a series of public lectures on Darwin and his influence on science, subsequently published in Popular Science Monthly.26 Underpinning Dewey's philosophy is an acceptance – and a celebration – of mutability, which has particular resonance with Darwin's theory. He stressed that the combination of ‘origin’ and ‘species’ was itself an intellectual revolt which is ‘easily overlooked by an expert’;27 for two thousand years the fixed and final had been central to ideas of nature and knowledge. Both change and origin had been signs of ‘defect and unreality’.28 A species isn't supposed to originate, it just is. The Origin, which undid the concept of permanency, ‘transformed the treatment of morals, politics and religion’.29 It precipitated a crisis. This was not one of a clash between science and theology – though this myth is perpetuated. Dewey points out that the real opposition to Darwin was to be sought not in religion but in science and philosophy: the concept of species which had controlled philosophy for two thousand years, subordinating aimless flux to a perfect manifestation, was over.30 Species was conceived as ‘leaping the boundaries of time and space’; individuals ‘distant in space and remote in time’ were kept to a uniform structure and function.31 The disorder, the flux of the natural world which has always been observable was discounted in favour of underlying permanency. But after Darwin, nature was to be read without reference to permanency, to ‘real essences, hidden forms’.32 With the espousal of empiricism, observations and sense-perceptions were suddenly more important. Nature was to be read closely, on its own, immediate, terms. When Darwin said that species changed, Dewey states, ‘he emancipated, once for all, genetic and experimental ideas as an organon of asking questions and looking for explanations’.33 The very logic of science, which had rested on fixity, was upturned. Now change as the condition of life had to be accommodated. And the new logic introduces, Dewey argues, responsibility into the intellectual life.34 Previously, straining at permanent, invisible, forms, meant avoiding engaging with immediate life. we shall have to treat species in the same manner as those naturalists treat genera, who admit that genera are merely artificial combinations made for convenience. This may not be a cheering prospect; but we shall at least be freed from the vain search for the undiscovered and undiscoverable essence of the term species.35 This shift from the permanent to the changing still needs to be more widely acknowledged if we are to think fully through the possibilities of biology. To think biologically is not to think biologistically. Biology can be non-essentialist, indeed evolutionary biology must, by definition, reject inevitability and the concept of differences that remain constant over time. Darwin refers constantly to history in the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). His work was a development of natural history, but the emphasis of natural history lay on nature rather than history, on taxonomic diversity rather than development.41 In the words of the evolutionary biologist and historian of science Ernst Mayr, ‘the natural history of animals was studied mainly as part of natural theology, in order to bolster the argument from design’.42 Mayr notes, though, the contribution of natural history to biology.43 Darwin shared with naturalists a joy in observation, but sought to relate the objects of study to new, dynamic processes which would necessitate a deeper understanding of history. In the Origin, he emphasises that he is concerned with ‘the changing history of the organic world’44 and with ‘slow and gradual process’.45 It is history that allows Darwin to reject progress as the normal rule.46 Only history would allow him to work out the relations which upturned immutability: ‘The terms used by naturalists of affinity, relationship, community of type, paternity, morphology, adaptive characters, rudimentary and aborted organs, &c., will cease to be metaphorical, and will have a plain signification.’47 The Origin is about history more than origin, and Darwin proposed that in his next book, ‘Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’.48 Referring in the Origin to Lyell's metaphor of the geological record as a book with only a few pages preserved, Darwin extends this. Giving close attention to historical change, he imagines a history imperfectly kept, changing dialect, and only a few lines on each page.49 The image brings home the vastness of time unrecorded – written history is only a tiny slice of human history – but also the effort that must be made to understand the past, to decipher. Through the metaphor, Darwin brings together history and biology – ‘each word of the slowly-changing language, in which the history is supposed to be written, being more or less different in the interrupted succession of chapters, may represent the apparently abruptly changed forms of life’.50 He positions himself as a historian. History is necessarily concerned with change, and with the social or the environmental. If environment, with which Darwin was so concerned, is understood to include the social, then to what extent might we see Darwin as a social constructionist? While this might seem a curious idea, and somewhat counter-intuitive – Darwin is, after all, a biologist – if we take as social construction the idea that what is is not inevitably the case, it would seem plausible. Ian Hacking, in his The Social Construction of What?, distinguishes degrees of social construction.51 By focusing on construction rather than social in the idea of social construction, he argues that social construction is a way of arguing against the inevitability of something: ‘social constructionists about to not have or not be at as it is. or as it is at is not by the nature of it is not He by as a way of about inevitability – the of Hacking, the least of is ‘a historical could be about is good or is about Darwin's story that is expression of Darwin's is his on He a that the individual is by the processes of natural more individuals of each species are born than can of nature – of the she of the – this could – and – to the But it was not the While the individual would in one sense be by the seemingly of evolution, they would in be – for it was through individual difference and, in the of sexual individual that evolution was were now a new as of dynamic process. The of the individual in an world a new attention in in natural history and biology, the of the but also in by wider In in ‘The Natural History of of the first two of in the she biological will to the produced by the of of characters who to see their individual difference and that of their of novel, is the story of the of a social developed and the individual to the The into stories by the of the at this time, Mona a of Mill's and into in his emphasis on individual on between the and She also on questions in the press over a of Considering the implications of evolution for relations between the and offering the of social in the Review the of the century – a – through from the world in the pages of the Telegraph the of The made its way into The of A in later in the year, with had a about the on a It has been no in our I shall Caird drew closely on the ideas of Darwin, his views with those of as she the development of the and the and pressures to which they were in their no longer to be to an invisible, as Darwin changed the from to dynamic The change in an individual was now of ‘The of the in the individuals of the same species is an for Darwin a new in to explain the value of he animals their is and, their he the view of the are often by difference, was an effect an I had also fully the of individual and this to so on the of that of selection by which from the of the individuals of each without any on his part to the characters of the it is that are there be different so is it that there be different of that be to of of to and that the worth of different of life be proved when any one to It is in that in things which do not not the but the of of other are the of there is one of the of human and the of individual and social of the and animals which have been and which have under the different and I think we are driven to that this is to our been under of life not so uniform and somewhat different those to which the have been under Mona Caird the implications of Darwin's and them with the ideas of Mill, as I have In she published an in the Review with the ‘The of The offers not only into Darwin's but also into ways in which biology could be and she also suggests ways in which of could to the new biology and new possibilities for developing In she the concept of biological arguing for the influence of environment or In The of which also appeared in under the same but with different and immediate show The counters the concept of in nature, and the idea that could be of one of the ‘where The appeared to be more here than could account But science had this always to upon its and Darwin's emphasis on Caird argued in the Review that ‘the and is to take as we to find it in our and must on no account admit that as a constant but must it as a of the that to be at work at the and of the that have been at work in the This emphasis on and on the combination of present and is Darwin's – term – are produced by different born of the same Darwin, she Darwin had remarked, of our have from the same Caird an ability to record change, to humans pos

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