Samuel Grove

Samuel Grove recently published Retrieving Darwin’s Revolutionary Idea: The Reluctant Radical. In commemoration of the 150th Anniversary of The Descent of Man (1871), Roberto Navarrete sat down with him to discuss the philosophical dilemmas Darwin faced in applying his theory of natural selection to human beings.

- Roberto Navarrete

Darwin isn’t generally known as a philosopher. Didn’t he explicitly avoid grand philosophical speculation in favour of science?

Indeed. But that doesn’t mean to say he wasn’t interested in philosophical questions. He just believed that they were best approached from a scientific angle: “He who understands baboons would do more toward metaphysics than Locke” he wrote in his notebook. Elsewhere he wrote:

“To study Metaphysics, as they have always been studied appears to me to be like puzzling at astronomy without mechanics. – Experience shows the problem of the mind cannot be solved by attacking the citadel itself. – the mind is function of body. – we must bring some stable foundation to argue from.”

Darwin was fascinated by the problem of free will, for example. Like the philosophers, he was plagued by how freedom could arise in a universe that from a scientific perspective appeared to run on mechanical cause-and-effect lines, in a predetermined fashion. Darwin’s solution was primarily one of method. If your point of entry is philosophical you will quickly become entrenched in an irresolvable paradox; but if your point of entry is scientific – that is, if you cut the problem down to size and focus on more manageable problems – you might get somewhere. “Our faculties are more fitted to recognize the wonderful structure of a beetle than a Universe,” he wrote.