Charles Darwin

Wilber's View

Wilber's treatment of Darwin is a deliberate demotion, and he spells out exactly what he thinks Darwin did and didn't accomplish. What Darwin did not do, in Wilber's account, is discover evolution — the idea that reality unfolds developmentally through time was already "in the air" for a century before him, out of Leibniz, Schelling, and the whole "developmental philosophy" tradition that treated evolution as Spirit's own self-unfolding (Eros). What Darwin did do was supply meticulous empirical evidence, backed by the mechanism of natural selection (co-discovered with Wallace), for the continuity of species — a genuinely novel and important scientific contribution, but a much narrower one than "evolution" itself. Wilber's real charge against the Darwinian legacy is what it did to that older tradition: by explaining speciation without any appeal to a directional, self-transcending drive, Darwinism let science quietly drop Eros from the picture altogether, and let a generation of scientists believe they'd explained away any need for it. That, for Wilber, is Darwin's lasting effect — not a discovery but an obscuring: "a massive obscurantism" that took over a century to see through. He's careful to note the irony that Darwin himself "notoriously wavered" on the point, and that Wallace, his co-discoverer, explicitly did not think natural selection could replace a directional, spiritual reading of evolution.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

"There was precisely nothing new or unusual in Darwin's presentation of the continuous tree of life"

The idea of the continuity of life—the web of life, the tree of life, the "no gaps in nature" view—was at least as old as Plato and Aristotle, and… there was precisely nothing new or unusual in Darwin's presentation of the continuous tree of life.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 1, "The Web of Life"

"The lasting contribution of Darwin's theory… was primarily a massive obscurantism"

The lasting contribution of Darwin's theory, then, was not that it discovered a mechanism for macroevolution, for it did not; rather, it obscured for over a century the fact that a genuine theory of evolution demands something resembling Eros. Darwin's lasting contribution was primarily a massive obscurantism. Scientists all cheery and self-content began to scrub the universe clean of anything resembling love and its all-encompassing embrace.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 13, "The Dominance of the Descenders"

"Darwin was never the problem. It was Carnot, Clausius, and Kelvin."

But it wasn't the Darwinian "revolution" that would play most decisively into the hands of the Descenders. After all, the Darwinists could always be seen… as simply supplying empirical evidence for a scheme already known and accepted, namely, evolution as God-in-the-making… Darwin was never the problem. It was Carnot, Clausius, and Kelvin.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 14, "The Unpacking of God"

"Wallace… did not think natural selection could replace Eros; evolution was itself… 'the mode and manner of Spirit's creation'"

Wallace, as is well known, did not think natural selection could replace Eros; evolution was itself, he thought, "the mode and manner of Spirit's creation," and Darwin himself notoriously wavered.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 13, "The Dominance of the Descenders"

See Also

• eros-and-agape — the directional drive Wilber thinks Darwinism let science forget
• involution-and-evolution — the fuller developmental scheme Wilber sees Darwin's "evolution" as only half of
• great-chain-of-being — the older continuity-of-life tradition Wilber says Darwin's "web of life" already belonged to