That rough punk of evolution, Mark Pallen, has a table up documenting the formulation and spread of the story that it was the horrible death of Darwin’s favoured daughter, Annie, which, he reckons, is not true. He’s working up a paper on the matter, he says. But Darwin’s stated reasons in the Autobiography, that he found the Christian religion morally outrageous and intellectually unconvincing, and that he was older when he gave up his religion, say otherwise. We’ll have to wait for Pallen’s article, but some people find it hard to accept that anyone, let alone one of the clearest thinkers of all time, might choose a religious position for intellectual reasons. Keep an eye out for it.
2 responses so far ↓
John M. Lynch // July 6, 2009 at 6:40 pm |
The autobiography is – as you know – a very imperfect source of information about Darwin. Pallen’s going to have to do a lot better than that if he’s going to correct Moore. Unless he can actually do some digging in the letters, my gut feeling is that he’s fighting a losing game here.
(And if he wants to get this published in an historical journal, it’s best to avoid the “spread of a myth” angle. It’s just not interesting.)
John // July 7, 2009 at 2:08 am |
If you have evidence of a positive sort that A believed X for reasons R, and a hypothesis that A actually believed X for nonreasons Y, and the argument requires that you must not only disbelieve the evidence, but do so in several instances, because of a prior commitment to the view that people don’t believe things for stated reasons but rather because of emotional and economic forces they are partially if at all aware of, then I would say there’s something wrong here.
The Autobiography is not, as I happen to know, all that Mark is relying upon; and the myth is interesting because of who said it and why. And it’s not for a history journal (I also happen to know :-) ).