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A Neglected Victorian Era Dissenter from Darwinism: St. George Mivart
Science and Culture Today ^ | 10/15/2025 | Neal Thomas

Posted on 10/15/2025 8:39:56 PM PDT by SeekAndFind

A new volume represents a very timely reprint of St. George Mivart’s provocatively titled On the Genesis of Species (New York: Appleton, 1871). The general editor of the Inkwell Press, James Barham, announces in his introduction that further forgotten classics in the same genre will presently follow. The text presents the second edition (slightly revised to take account of Darwin’s Descent of Man published earlier in the same year).

Mivart (1827-1900) throughout his life remained something of a thorn in Darwin’s side, joining sides with Harvard professor Asa Gray, geologist Sir Charles Lyell, Alfred Russel Wallace, and many others who argued that it was absurd to accord mere chance such an overwhelming role in the evolutionary process. Mivart was convinced that, just as there is a principle internal to an organism which determines its embryological development, so must there be an internal principle determining the species as a whole. He echoed the originally Aristotelian idea of immanent teleology in opposition to the Epicurean and Lucretian philosophies which put everything down to the random jostling of atoms producing accidental new shapes and forms (hence the term “atomism” given to that ancient way of thinking that the modern world has taken to with such uncritical alacrity).

A Philosophical Counterblast

Mivart’s Genesis of Species was in its origin conceived as a philosophical counterblast to Darwin’s Origin of Species and in its pages we find many early critiques of Darwin’s logic. Mivart includes a whole chapter (pp. 35-75) on the inability of natural selection to account for incipient structures. Like Charles Lyell, leading paleontologist Richard Owen, and the scientifically educated Duke of Argyll, he felt that so-called natural selection could not possibly be the vera causa of anything whatsoever since it was an inert, purely passive phenomenon incapable of producing novelty.

Mivart’s objection has not gone away (although it is often studiously ignored). The same goes for his pointing to the lack of fossil evidence to back up Darwin’s gradualist notions of animal development over the eons. Anticipating modern notions of saltations (sudden and unheralded new developments in animal physiology) associated with the name of the late Stephen Jay Gould, Mivart felt that this (problematical as it is) was a more likely developmental route for animal/human development than the one proposed by Darwin.

The Unforgiven

Darwin’s inner circle could never forgive Mivart for being a practicing Roman Catholic and there is certainly much truth in Mivart’s claim that he was shunned by the Darwin party out of what he termed odium antitheologicum (prejudice against theists). But Mivart was no shrinking violet in his repeated attacks on “the inconsistencies and ambiguities” in Darwinian theory, and it has even been mooted that Darwin ultimately withdrew from the evolutionary fray he himself had caused by retreating in older age to study the entirely “safe” subject of barnacles. 

Those interested in Mivart’s life might consult the older volume by Jacob Gruber, A Conscience in Conflict: The Life of St. George Mivart (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), and David L. Hull’s Darwin and His Critics: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by the Scientific Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). Hull’s important work contains not only generous excerpts from Mivart’s writings (pp. 351-384) but by many other early critics including that critic whom Darwin feared most, Fleeming Jenkin (pp. 302-50), together with the first man to poke holes in Darwin’s argument when he became privy to a pre-publication document outlining the theory later developed in the Origin of Species, namely Professor Samuel Haughton (pp. 216-228). 

Mivart in Context

By consulting these additional works the reader will be in a better position to contextualize Mivart within the intellectual milieu of the Victorian era. Mivart was by no means an outlier since a veritable cohort of sympathizers rose up in the 1860s and 1870s to create a very audible chorus of dissent, and for much the same reasons as that dissent continues unabated to the present day. For Darwin then as now trades on the reiteration of what the ancient Romans called the ipse dixit (“he himself said it” — implication: it MUST be right). I’ll give the last word to Mivart on this issue (cited from Hull’s Darwin and His Critics, p. 359):

Darwin, starting at first with an avowed hypothesis, constantly asserts it as an undoubted fact, and claims for it, somewhat in the spirit of a theologian, that it should be received as an article of faith.

I warmly recommend this book to all those who value evidence-based thinking and wish to look beyond the ideological assertions which are all too often a substitute for properly reasoned argument.


Neil Thomas is a Reader Emeritus in the University of Durham, England and a longtime member of the British Rationalist Association. He studied Classical Studies and European Languages at the universities of Oxford, Munich and Cardiff before taking up his post in the German section of the School of European Languages and Literatures at Durham University in 1976. There his teaching involved a broad spectrum of specialisms including Germanic philology, medieval literature, the literature and philosophy of the Enlightenment and modern German history and literature. He also taught modules on the propagandist use of the German language used both by the Nazis and by the functionaries of the old German Democratic Republic.

He published over 40 articles in a number of refereed journals and a half dozen single-authored books, the last of which were Reading the Nibelungenlied (1995), Diu Crone and the Medieval Arthurian Cycle (2002) and Wirnt von Gravenberg's 'Wigalois'. Intertextuality and Interpretation (2005). He also edited a number of volumes including Myth and its Legacy in European Literature (1996) and German Studies at the Millennium (1999). He was the British Brach President of the International Arthurian Society (2002-5) and remains a member of a number of learned societies.

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TOPICS: History; Religion; Science; Society
KEYWORDS: darwin; evolution; origins

1 posted on 10/15/2025 8:39:56 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
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To: SeekAndFind

Need to read more about this man! Thank you for the introduction!

“Inherit the Wind” ultimately sides with the Darwin side…Refreshing to know there were figures other than William Jennings Bryan carrying the torch…

And from a scientific, empirical perspective at that.


2 posted on 10/15/2025 8:43:37 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
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To: SeekAndFind

...geologist Sir Charles Lyell, Alfred Russel Wallace, and many others who argued that it was absurd to accord mere chance such an overwhelming role in the evolutionary process.

BS. Wallace was right there with Darwin in with macro evolution. Lyell was the father of it all with his supposition that the geologic processes can be assumed to take place with the same rate processes (superposition can be assumed) as we observe this instant. in other words, no catastrophic geological change, no Creator.


3 posted on 10/15/2025 8:53:08 PM PDT by dadfly
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To: CondoleezzaProtege

Bump.


4 posted on 10/15/2025 9:25:30 PM PDT by Bob434 (Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana)
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