Peter J. Bowler

Bowler, Peter J. Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World without Darwin. U of Chicago Press, 2013.
Peter J. Bowler’s Darwin Deleted is an exercise in counterfactual history, a branch of history that, he admits, is a hard sell to most historians. Bowler begins by asking the question, how would the history of science have changed if Charles Darwin, who was a notoriously bad sailor, had been washed overboard from the Beagle and never arrived home to write his books on evolution. This is the kind of thing science fiction writers do all the time with great abandon—any book by Harry Turtledove will make the point. But Bowler insists that counterfactual speculation is the best way to assess the role of a man whose name quickly became synonymous with all evolutionary theories, including those he would never have espoused. He concludes that Darwin was ahead of his time. Darwin had a combination of knowledge and experience that uniquely positioned him to develop an evolutionary theory based on natural selection. First, he knew more than most of his colleagues about biogeography and the variation among species around the world. His colleague, Alfred Russel Wallace, whose seminal paper Darwin helped to publish, was his only serious competitor. But Darwin knew more than Wallace about the selective breeding of domestic animals, which added a piece to the theory that Wallace did not have. Bowler suggests that without Darwin, all the insights in Origin of Species might not have arrived until early in the twentieth century. The second part of Bowler’s argument is even more speculative. He suggests that without Darwin’s image and name, evolution would not have been so ready a target for the antiscientific religious debates of the period or so easily used to justify the racism of the eugenics movement and the economic rationalizations that came to be known, quite unfairly, as social Darwinism. Bowler’s discussion is extremely detailed and is, if nothing else, a good introduction to the various evolutionary theories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Four stars.… (altro)

A History of the Future: Prophets of Progress from H. G. Wells to Isaac Asimov by Peter J Bowler is look back on science-fiction prophecy and what the future actually became. Bowler is Emeritus Professor of the History of Science at Queen's University Belfast. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has published a number of books on the history of biology and several general surveys.

Flying cars, wristwatch phones, and robot servants were all part of the future when I was young. There was plenty of disappointment growing up with 8-track tapes and phones that were still affixed to the wall. Some things, however, did come about. The electronic pad that Captain Kirk regularly signed is close to an iPad, the computer may be an advanced “Alexa” device, and the communicator is much like a cellphone. Yes, there are differences but not bad for a 50-year-old science fiction show that begins with the launch of the Enterprise in the year 2245.

Bowler pulls heavily from several writers in the book; Wells, Huxley, and a little Asimov and Clarke. Perhaps much of the predictions of the future as more so come from the understanding of man than science. One thing many writers got right is man’s willingness for war and creating better weapons. Airships and aircraft are a means for more destructive warfare that targets cities and civilians. Much of the pulp fiction, however, are stories of “cowboys and Indians” played out in space as earthlings against aliens. Little is done to explain the technology of ray guns and rockets. It’s just entertainment.

Many future predictions in science fiction were based on the newest technology of the time. Electricity was more than a power source it was the path to utopia. Radiation, on the other hand, could be a blessing or a bane. Flying cars, an idea which seems to be as old as cars themselves is never clearly thought out. Thought to be the end of road-bound traffic, however, no thought, however, is given how to organize and control an airborne rush hour. Outside of the science, many thoughts are given on future governments -- World government, weakness of democracy, totalitarian rule, interplanetary rule.

As I sit here and write this review there is one thing the past never predicted. There were predictions of robots with computer brains. There are predictions of computers the size of city blocks. But perhaps the biggest miss of science fiction predictions is the personal computer. The machine that has transformed modern life like no other is missing. No internet. No social media. No online shopping. No movies on demand. It is the unexpected that makes the future.

Bowler gives a detailed look at the past looking forward. Nearly one-third of the book is source material providing, even more, detail for those interested. How the past saw the future is interesting in the evolution of the newest technology of the time. Nuclear power held the promise of almost free electricity (another marvel of the past) but no thought of what to do with the nuclear waste. Visionaries of the past did understand human nature and saw the many dangers the atom could bring as well as the dangers man could bring on himself. The history of the future depends on man's development as much as the development of science.… (altro)

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2938907.html

Twenty-five years ago, Peter Bowler was my PhD supervisor in Belfast; I owe him a lot. He had made his reputation a decade earlier with Evolution: The History of an Idea, and had managed to find a rhythm of writing a scholarly book a year, riffing off the general possibilities of the history of evolutionary biology. Recently, in retirement, he's been veering a little bit further from his usual territory. In Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World without Darwin (2013), he imagined what would have happened in science in an alternate timeline where Darwin had drowned during the voyage of the Beagle, something he had been muttering about doing for years. This year, in A History of the Future: Prophets of Progress from H.G. Wells to Isaac Asimov, he has surveyed futurology as perpetrated both by science fiction writers and by popular science writers, mainly in the UK but looking also at the USA, in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.

People like me who read a fair amount of academic and fannish commentary on sf literature will be a bit thrown by this approach. Peter Bowler has unapologetically put technology and other scientific advances, real or imagined, at the centre of the narrative, and crunches everything down to nine shortish chapters, on How We'll Live, Where We'll Live, Communicating and Computing, Getting Around, Taking to the Air, Journey into Space, War, Energy and Environment, and Human Nature. He makes the point very strongly that the First World War made a much bigger difference to the Zeitgeist than the Second; there is much more continuity in terms of vision and concerns between 1939 and 1945 than between 1914 and 1918.

There are some interesting misses and hits along the way. Lord Birkenhead, writing in 1930 about the world of 2030, expected that “Instead of party politics, our descendants will probably be content with the rule of experts, who will seek popular sanction for each measure they purpose through a referendum.” (Hollow laugh.) On the other hand, A.M. Low correctly saw the potential of telephones:

"In his Wireless Possibilities, Low predicted that in a few years’ time it would be possible to talk to a recipient anywhere in the world, even when flying on an aeroplane. Five years later, he made a similar point in one of his regular Armchair Science features: ‘I shall be glad when we have made wireless sufficiently selective to enable me to ring up during every rail journey I make and talk direct to my friends.’ Note that his concern was the problem of interference between transmitters, not miniaturization. He also recognized that there would be a downside to the facility: ‘Why should I inflict a description of my mother’s children to a radius of six yards, until all those around are driven to fury … ?’ Low thus not only predicted the mobile phone – he realized what a nuisance they could become when used in public."

There are lots of good nuggets here, including the frightening irresponsibility of some early supporters of nuclear power, who nonchalantly discussed melting the ice caps and re-engineering coastlines with atomic weapons. There is a tension also between those who thought that women being liberated from housework and reproduction would bring benefits and those who feared the costs to society. (It would be interesting to know the extent to which feminists interacted with these discussions.)… (altro)

(review originally published on Bookslut)

Reading the newspapers or watching the daily news on TV, it's easy to come to the conclusion that in regards to evolution, the people of America belong to two highly polarized camps. In one corner, you have the Godless scientists, supporters of evolution, genetic engineering, and cloning, determined to stomp out all last vestiges of religion from American culture, and make life over in their own images. In the other, evangelistic fundamentalists, proponents of a 6,000 year-old Earth, a 7 24-hour day creation, and Noah's flood as the cause of the Grand Canyon, determined to institute religious law and bring about the rapture. The only people in the middle seem to be apathetic and don't care one way or another. Each new headline ratchets up the tension and increases the stakes, until it seems that it must have always been this way, science and religion locked in conflict over the future of the human race ever since Darwin stepped off of the Beagle.

Thankfully, we have Peter J. Bowler, professor of the history of science from Queen's University in Belfast, to bring us some much needed perspective. His remarkable little book, Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons, goes back to the first pre-Darwinian inklings that life on earth may not always have been as it appears today, and traces the conversation about the origins of man and their implications through the ages to the present day. Even the most familiar events along this journey are illuminated afresh by Bowler's use of current historical research. For example, the famous crushing of Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, by scientist Thomas Huxley at the 1860 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, when Huxley declared that he would rather have an ape for an ancestor than a man who misused his intelligence to attack a theory he didn't understand. According to modern understanding, this event was invented by later followers of Darwin. In reality, there was no decisive victory on that day. Darwin's theory of evolution was accepted very gradually by the scientific community. In time, parts of his theory were even accepted by most religious thinkers, until the return to tradionalism in many Christian movements led to fresh attacks, particularly on the teaching of evolution, in the early twentieth century. Though it wasn't until well the 1950s and '60s that even the more unpopular materialist aspects of Darwinism were accepted by the majority of the scientific community, setting a far different stage for the current conflict.

The final section of the book is devoted to the modern debates. Bowler links the rise of intelligent design and young-Earth creationism with the rise of fundamentalism worldwide. A brief discussion on the social forces that are making fundamentalism so appealing to so many these days, and why any fundamentalist movement would necessarily be opposed to the scientific theory of evolution, is enough to make any liberal fall into despair. On the other side, a few modern evolutionary scientists have grown so hostile to any form of religion that one has even gone so far as to declare all of the world's religions a danger to humanity. But thankfully, that is not where the book ends. For much of the history of this debate, there were many movements in Christianity that tried to accept some version of evolution, but the final breaking point was always natural selection as the primary mechanism. There were those who could accept common ancestors, who could accept random variation, but when it came to natural selection, most of these Christians simply replaced this with God. It's not too surprising, for decades natural selection made even the most avowed Darwinists nervous. This partial acceptance made these theologies easy to criticize for both scientists and more conservative Christians. However, today there are a number of religious thinkers who are able to reconcile their visions of God and Christ with all of evolutionary theory. Indeed, a few have even suggested that a universe ruled by natural selection is the only possible universe in which intelligent creatures with free will could emerge. They have thus made the modern theory of evolution essential to their theology.

What is made most clear from this book is that our ideas about the nature of the human race and the universe in which we live are always changing. We will probably never come to some static interpretation of how the world is and why, but this book gives me faith that we have some good directions to move in.… (altro)