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Biology Before Darwin
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To understand Darwin correctly is, in fact, crucial. Even today, the question remains whether we truly understand him in the right way. If Darwin is not understood properly, he is easily appropriated; his theory too becomes a tool for misuse—something history has repeatedly demonstrated. The very moment we define Darwin merely as “the scientist who proposed the theory of biological evolution,” we end up narrowing his intellectual significance.
To understand Darwin does not mean merely to understand the theory of evolution he articulated. It requires us to understand the kinds of questions biology asked before Darwin, the rational foundations from which those questions emerged, and how that rationality transformed and advanced through history. In other words, to understand Darwin is to understand the *journey of Reason* within biology prior to him. This is why reconstructing the rational trajectory of pre-Darwinian biology becomes such an important task.
We know that Darwin’s theory of evolution is inseparably linked to natural selection. Yet we cannot imagine such an intellectual idea emerging within the biological thought of Aristotle’s time. Nor could such an idea be conceived within the medieval world shaped by moral and religious theology. Likewise, Darwin’s theory cannot be imagined without the contributions of geology, anatomy, and population studies. This means that biology did not suddenly begin with Darwin; it had already begun earlier and was progressing through a specific form of rational inquiry. That inquiry was not irrational. However, only when those rational modes matured did Darwin’s theory take shape. This was a continuous process—a historical sequence—which we must understand.
What follows is an attempt to reconstruct the rational dimension of biology before Darwin.
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## Teleology: Kant versus Religion
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In 1755, Immanuel Kant published—anonymously—a work titled *Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens*. In this text, he explained the origin, evolution, and cosmic order of the non-living world entirely in mechanical terms, consistent with Newtonian laws, without invoking any purpose. He even predicted that long before one could mechanically explain the organized complexity of a caterpillar or a seed, humanity would first succeed in explaining mechanically the order of planets, their orbits, and the origin of the universe itself. (Darwin would arrive a hundred years later.)
According to Kant, the entire natural world—from stars to living beings—develops gradually through natural laws. Even the order required for biological organization, he argued, emerges from mechanical principles. Life itself, therefore, is an emergent phenomenon. Kant thus proposed an explanatory dualism: while the existence and evolution of the non-living world are purposeless, the living world appears purposive. Kant was not an atheist, but his God was not the God of religion. Rather, it was a rational God—what the Enlightenment called rational theism or natural theism. This God resembles a clockmaker: once the clock is made, it runs without further intervention. After establishing order in the universe, divine interference is no longer required.
According to religious doctrine, the Creator directly creates living beings. Each species is created as it is, without change (the fixity of species). All beings are arranged on a hierarchical ladder from lower to higher—the Great Chain of Being. Humans occupy the highest position, the final rung. God created humans in His own image, and all other beings were created for humanity. This is known as anthropocentric teleology.
For Kant, teleology is not an objective truth but a heuristic principle—a rational aid for understanding biological complexity. He did not accept teleology as truth. According to him, the purposiveness observed in organisms cannot be fully explained by human reason through cause-and-effect relations. Therefore, imagining an *“as if” intelligent designer* makes understanding easier. In other words, due to the limitations of human reason, we are compelled to think *as if* there were a divine intellect, even though this is not a claim about reality itself.
By the time Kant died in 1804, biology was still in its infancy. It lacked foundational theories and systematic observations. Consequently, Kant had virtually no influence on early biology. As a result, both before and after Kant, the idea that “the ultimate goal of creation is humanity” continued largely unchallenged.
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## Biology Before Darwin
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Pre-Darwinian biology, while not directly subordinated to religion, went beyond Kantian teleology and advanced through its own rational framework. It naturalized and adopted Aristotle’s idea of internal purpose. That is, organisms were understood as possessing purpose intrinsically, and nature was explained on that basis. In this framework, divine presence was removed, but internal teleology, fixity of species, and hierarchical ordering (the ladder of ascent) remained intact.
Linnaeus classified species as fixed natural kinds. Through classification, he believed he had discovered nature’s inherent order. Species, once created, did not change—this was central to his thinking. This teleological rationality appears explicitly as religious Natural Theology in John Ray, and in a more naturalized form in Georges Cuvier, where it manifests as an internal correlation between structure and function.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck introduced the first major intellectual rupture in biology by introducing history—time—into biological thought. He understood species not as static structures but as historical realities that change over time. These changes, he argued, were not imposed by divine will but arose from internal natural processes. However, Lamarck did not fully abandon teleology. He imagined evolution as directional, goal-oriented, and non-random—moving from simplicity to complexity. This internal, directed progress resembles Aristotelian teleology, though it is historically dynamic rather than static.
What Lamarck lacked was a non-intentional mechanism capable of explaining differential survival based on variations within populations. A similar limitation appears in Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather. Though Erasmus rejected the fixity of species, he still interpreted evolution as internal progress within a teleological conception of nature. Unlike Lamarck, he lacked a concrete biological mechanism such as use-and-disuse, making his theory weaker.
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## Darwin’s Background
Pre-Darwinian biological rationality was saturated with teleology. Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin introduced history into this framework, recognizing that organisms change over time. According to Lamarck, organisms acquire traits through use or disuse of organs during their lifetime, and these acquired traits are inherited, leading to directional evolutionary progress. However, Lamarck could not explain variation among individuals of the same species. Though he rejected divine purpose, he retained internal teleology.
Seen against this background, Darwin’s significance lies not merely in proposing a theory of evolution, but in transforming the very nature of biological rationality. He separated history from purpose. He redefined evolution not as goal-directed progress but as a blind, non-intentional population-level process—natural selection—that explains differential survival based on variation within species. In doing so, Darwin liberated biology from teleology and established life as the outcome of historical yet purposeless natural processes.
From this perspective, the idea that Darwin initiated conflict with religion is false. That conflict had begun much earlier within biological rationality itself.
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## Why Darwin Is Misunderstood
Only by reconstructing pre-Darwinian biological rationality can we truly grasp Darwin’s significance and protect him from misinterpretation. Failure to do so has led to four major misunderstandings of Darwin:
### 1. Darwinism as Pure Empiricism
Viewing Darwin’s theory as merely the product of observations and data collection is a serious mistake. In this view, Darwin remains only a great naturalist. Without understanding where pre-Darwinian biological reason stalled, Darwin is reduced to an empirical data collector.
### 2. Darwinism as Ideology
Transforming Darwin’s theory into a social or moral doctrine gave rise to Social Darwinism—a dangerous distortion. Here, natural selection becomes not an explanatory mechanism but a social norm or moral justification. This misuse stems from projecting pre-Darwinian teleological thinking back onto Darwin—reading evolution as progress, as “survival of the strongest,” and reintroducing the very directional rationality Darwin rejected.
### 3. Darwinism as Metaphysics in Disguise
Reading Darwin’s theory as a new metaphysical doctrine turns natural selection into an all-encompassing, necessary law. God is replaced by Nature or Natural Selection—resulting in biological determinism. This strips Darwin’s theory of its historical, population-based character and converts it into a doctrine of destiny—an idea Darwin explicitly rejected.
### 4. Darwin as an Anti-Religious Thinker
Most commonly, Darwin is portrayed as someone who directly attacked religion. This is misleading. Darwin did not directly refute religion; his significance lies in completing—at the level of theory—a process already underway in biology: making religious explanations unnecessary. He rendered religion explanatorily irrelevant within biology, which is why he appears antagonistic to religion.
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Therefore, what protects Darwin’s theory is not the theory alone, but the historical reconstruction of the rational transformations within biology that preceded him. Without reconstructing this internal journey of biological reason, Darwin cannot be understood. And this journey did not end with Darwin—it continues even today.
Dr. Virinchi Virivinti
