Darwin and Neuroscience: The German Connection

Abstract

Ernst Mayr, a leading contributor to the modern evolutionary synthesis, once wrote that “the only solid support Darwin received for natural selection was from the naturalists” (Mayr, 1982, p. 511). Mayr was wrong. The first German convert to Darwin’s theory was the neurophysiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896). Why this was so is the subject of this essay. Du Bois-Reymond had always ridiculed arguments from theological design and organic development (du Bois-Reymond, 1848–1884, p. xxv-l; du Bois-Reymond, 1918, p. 18, 52, 108). The only explanations he deemed scientific were those that dispensed with the “superstition” of final causes (du Bois-Reymond, 1853). This was the main advantage offered by Darwin’s theory: it accounted for “the apparently teleological arrangement of nature” without having to rely on either divine intervention or innate purposes (du Bois-Reymond, 1880, p. 75). The principle of natural selection operated mechanically, setting natural history on the same basis as physiology. As du Bois-Reymond saw it, Darwin had done for species what he had done for nerves.