17.2: Scientific and Pseudo-Scientific Discoveries and Theories

During the Victorian Era, some of the most important breakthroughs had to do with medicine and biology. Those genuine advances were accompanied by the growth of scholarship that claimed to be truly scientific, but that violated the tenets of the scientific method, employed sloppy methods, were based on false premises, or were otherwise simply factually inaccurate. Those fields constitute branches of “pseudo-”, meaning “false,” science.

Disease had always been the greatest threat to humankind - of the “four horsemen of the apocalypse,” it was Pestilence that traditionally delivered the most bodies to Death. In turn, the link between filth and disease had always been understood, but the rapid urbanization of the nineteenth century lent new urgency to the problem. For example, a modern sewer system was built in London after a terrible epidemic of cholera in 1848. Thus, before the mechanisms of contagion were understood, at least limited means to combat it were implemented in some European cities. Likewise, the first practical applications of chemistry to medicine occurred with the invention of anesthesia in the 1840s, allowing the possibility of surgery without horrendous agony.

First pioneered by the French chemist Louis Pasteur (1822 - 1895), bacteriology was a significant medical advancement of the era. While experimenting on the process of fermentation, Pasteur built on his ideas and proved microscopic organisms caused disease. Subsequently, he definitively proved that life's “spontaneous generation” was impossible and that microbes were responsible for putrefaction. He developed the technique of pasteurization to make foodstuffs safe (originally in service to the French wine industry), and created effective vaccines against diseases like anthrax that affected both humans and animals. In the course of just a few decades, Pasteur overturned the entire understanding of health itself. Other scientists followed his lead, and by the end of the century, deaths in Europe by infectious disease dropped by a full sixty percent, primarily through improvements in hygiene. (Antibiotics would not be developed until the end of the 1920s).

Figure 17.2.1: Pasteur, with some of his early experimental subjects.

These advances generated understandable excitement. At the same time, they fed into a newfound obsession with cleanliness. All of a sudden, people understood that they lived in a dirty world full of invisible enemies - germs. Good hygiene became a matter of survival, and a badge of class identity for the bourgeoisie. In addition, the inherent dirtiness of manual labor was further cause for bourgeois contempt for the working classes. For those who could afford servants, homes and businesses were regularly scrubbed with caustic soaps, but there was little to be done in the squalor of working-class tenements and urban slums.

Comparable scientific breakthroughs occurred in the fields of natural history and biology. For centuries, naturalists (later known as biologists) had been puzzled that the fossils of marine animals could be found on mountaintops. Likewise, fossils embedded in rock were a conundrum that the biblical story of creation could not explain. By the early 19th Century, some scientists argued that these phenomena could only occur through the stratification of rock, a process that would take millions, not thousands, of years. British naturalist Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology was so popular among the reading public that it went through eleven editions. Meanwhile, archeological discoveries of ancient tools and the remains of settlements pushed the existence of human civilization back thousands of years from earlier concepts (all of which had been based on a literal interpretation of the Christian Bible).

In 1859, the English naturalist Charles Darwin published his Origin of the Species, which argued that lifeforms "evolved" over time due to random changes in their physical and mental structure. Some of these traits are beneficial and increase the likelihood that the individuals will survive and propagate, while others are not and tend to disappear as their carriers die off. Darwin based his arguments on both the fossil record and what he had discovered as the naturalist aboard a British research vessel, the HMS Beagle, that toured the coasts of South America. While visiting the Galapagos Islands, he encountered numerous species that were uniquely adapted to live only in specific, limited areas. On returning to Britain, he concluded that only changes over time within species themselves could account for his discoveries.

Darwin’s arguments shocked most of his contemporaries. His theory directly contradicted the biblical account of the natural world, in which God’s creation is fundamentally static. In addition, he argued that nature itself was a profoundly hostile place to all living things. Even as nature sustains species, it constantly tests individuals and kills off the weak. Evolutionary adaptations are random, not systematic, and are as likely to result in dangerous (for individuals) weaknesses as newfound sources of strength. There was no plan embedded in evolution, only random adaptation.

Nevertheless, Darwin’s theory was the first to systematically explain the existence of fossils and biological adaptation based on hard evidence. As early as 1870, three-quarters of British scientists believed evolutionary theory to be accurate, even before the mechanism by which evolution occurred, genetics, was understood. In 1871, Darwin's The Descent of Man explicitly argued that humans are descended from other hominids - the great apes. Despite popular backlash prompted by religious conviction and the simple distaste for being related to apes, the Darwinian theory became one of the founding discoveries of modern biological science.

Figure 17.2.2: Caricatures of Darwin as a monkey appeared almost as soon as the Descent of Man was published.

Unknown to anyone at the time, during the 1850s and 1860s, an Austrian monk named Gregor Mendel carried out a series of experiments with pea plants in his monastery’s garden. In the process, he discovered the basic principles of genetics. Although Mendel presented his work in 1865, it was entirely forgotten. A number of scholars simultaneously rediscovered the work in 1900. In the process, Mendel's ideas were linked to Darwin’s evolutionary concepts. Mendel's work revealed that through gene mutation new traits emerge. In addition, genes that favor the survival of offspring tend to dominate those that harm it.

Social Science and Pseudo-Science

Many Europeans regarded Darwinian theory as proof of progress: nature ensured that the human species would improve over time. Evolutionary theory was used as a justification for rigid class distinctions and racism. Elite male theorists believed that Darwinism implied a parallel kind of evolutionary process at work in human society. In this view, success and power are the result of superior breeding, not just luck and education. The rich fundamentally deserve to be rich, and the poor (encumbered by their poor biological traits) deserve to be poor. This set of concepts came to be known as Social Darwinism. Social Darwinist, British writer, and engineer Herbert Spencer summarized this outlook with the phrase “the survival of the fittest,” a phrase often misattributed to Darwin.

The new movement led to an explosion of pseudo-scientific apologetics for notions of racial hierarchy. Usually, Social Darwinists claimed that non-white races were inherently inferior and had stopped evolving, while the white race continued. Encyclopedia illustrations of the evolutionary process were replete with an evolutionary chain from small creatures through monkeys and apes and then on to non-white human races, culminating with the supposedly “fully evolved” European “race.”

Figure 17.2.3: A typical pseudo-scientific racial hierarchy. (In fact, all human races have skulls of identical dimensions and shapes, as well as identical intellectual and moral capacities.)

In addition to non-white races, Social Darwinists lumped together various identities and behaviors as “unfit.” The "unfit" included alcoholics, those who were promiscuous, unwed mothers, criminals, the developmentally disabled, and those with congenital disabilities. Charity, aid, and rehabilitation were misplaced, since they would supposedly lead to the survival of the unfit and thereby drag down the health of society overall. Thus, the best policy was to allow the "unfit" to die off if possible and to try to impose limits on their breeding if not. Social Darwinism soon led to the field of eugenics, which advocated programs to sterilize the "unfit."

Ironically, even as Social Darwinism provided a pseudo-scientific foundation for racist and sexist cultural assumptions, these notions of race and culture also fed into the fear of degeneration. In the midst of the squalor of working-class life, or in terms of the increasing rates of drug use and alcoholism, many people came to fear that certain destructive traits were flourishing in Europe and being passed on. Further, high birth rates among the weak and unintelligent would simply overwhelm the smart and capable classes.

In the late nineteenth century, a Frenchman (Emile Durkheim) and a German (Max Weber) independently began the academic discipline that would become sociology: the systematic study of how people behave in complex societies. Durkheim treated Christianity like just another set of rituals and beliefs whose real purpose was regulating behavior. Meanwhile, Weber provided insights into the operation of governments, religious traditions, and educational institutions. Another German, Leopold von Ranke, created the first truly systematic forms of historical research, in turn creating the academic discipline of history.