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. ( )

A counterfactual in which the author imagines what the world of science would look like if Darwin had never existed. He has done his research on the history of evolution well, and much of his writing shows a depth of understanding of the historical issues, but in some places, he glosses over important facts with a superficial discussion meant to point us in a particular direction without looking too hard at the evidence. He discusses the impact on both science and religion if the theory had developed more gradually without a charismatic figure at the head; while he agrees that natural selection would eventually have become the dominant theory, he feels it would have had less trauma for the religious if coming about in a non-Darwin world. He defeats his own argument many times by admitting that certain things would happen which he had earlier stated would not; the discussion becomes especially convoluted when dealing with the issue of liberal vs. conservative religious views. He also makes statements about things that are accepted by conventional wisdom without actually presenting any evidence to support his statements, such as that there has been a long period of moral decay throughout the 20th century. This is arguable, and depends in part on how you define morality. He appears to accept the conservative view, though not himself a conservative Christian, and seems to attribute the two world wars to this nebulous "decline in morality" - though, to his credit, he does not attribute that (completely) to Darwinism. He never questions the assumption that it would be a good thing for religion to retain more sway over science; he just assumes it would, because it would be easier for some people to accept. While it is difficult to cope with the seismic tremors that run through our communities over the teaching of science, it is not completely evident that the trauma caused by the publication of the Origin is bad; this is just the author's opinion. In addition, his complacency that it would merely have moved the target of religious ire to other areas, such as Geology (What? There isn't already a lot of conflict over Geology? I'm hornswoggled!) is questionable; this would not actually put science in a better position, just one small branch of science. The author writes well, and his ideas make you think, but it is difficult to believe he has accomplished his goal. ( )

Library Journal August 2013