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Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World without Darwin. By Peter J. Bowler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. x + 318. $30.00 hardcover.
This book offers a counterfactual history of bioevolutionary science from the decades prior to the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) up to the present. As Peter Bowler imaginatively sets the scene, young Darwin is lost at sea during the voyage of the Beagle and so does not live to formulate his famous theory. Would evolutionism still have come to dominate biological science, and if so, how might its development have played out differently? Bowler's answers to these questions will be of general interest, although it helps if readers already are acquainted with the main ideas and leading players in the real-life story. For despite his lucid and non-technical exposition, Bowler tells a complex tale.
In the alternative history presented here, evolutionary science ends up pretty much the way it actually is today. The interest lies in what happens en route. Even here, Bowler argues, parts of that process would not have been all that different from reality. Darwin's theory of natural selection, as well as other distinctive aspects of his system, would have arisen in essentially the same form, albeit later (in the early twentieth century) and of course without Darwin's name attached. A theory of human evolution also would have arisen, spurred by developments in physical anthropology and African exploration, the latter bringing knowledge of the great apes. Bowler constructs these arguments by building on his long-standing thesis that Darwin's role in formulating modern evolutionism has been exaggerated. Bowler's alternative account emphasizes non-Darwinian theories (Lamarckism and orthogenesis), for these in actual fact became the dominant forms of evolutionism in the late nineteenth century. That period-to use Julian Huxley's evocative phrase, which Bowler adopts-saw the "eclipse of Darwinism."
What is new about the present work is the idea that, in those areas in which the evolution story would have turned out differently, the result would have been better-better science, less unproductive scientific controversy, and less...