Historians of science (and authors of pre-evolutionary ideas) have pointed out that scientists had considered the concept of biological change well before Darwin. In the 17th century, the English
Nonconformist/
Anglican priest and botanist
John Ray, in his book
The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (1692), had wondered "why such different species should not only mingle together, but also generate an animal, and yet that that hybridous production should not again generate, and so a new race be carried on". 18th-century scientist
Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) published
Systema Naturae (1735), a book in which he considered that new varieties of plants could arise through
hybridization, but only under certain limits fixed by God. Linnaeus had initially embraced the Aristotelian idea of immutability of species (the idea that species never change), but later in his life he started to challenge it. Yet, as a Christian, he still defended "special creation", the belief that God created "every living creature" at the beginning, as read in Genesis, with the peculiarity a set of original species of which all the present species have descended. Linnaeus wrote: Linnaeus attributed the active process of biological change to God himself, as he stated: and paleontology were still connected to Old Earth creationism. The above depicts a brutal world of deep time, existing before Adam and Eve, from
Thomas Hawkins' book on
plesiosaurs. Artist:
John Martin, 1840 Jens Christian Clausen (1967), refers to Linnaeus' theory as a "forgotten evolutionary theory [that] antedates Darwin's by nearly 100 years", and reports that he was a pioneer in doing experiments about hybridization. Later observations by Protestant botanists
Carl Friedrich von Gärtner (1772–1850) and
Joseph Gottlieb Kölreuter (1733–1806) denied the immutability of species, which the Bible never teaches. Kölreuter used the term "
transmutation of species" to refer to species which have experienced biological changes through hybridization, although they both were inclined to believe that hybrids would revert to the parental forms by a general law of reversion, and therefore, would not be responsible for the introduction of new species. Later, in a number of experiments carried out between 1856 and 1863, the Augustinian friar
Gregor Mendel (1822–1884), aligning himself with the "new doctrine of special creation" proposed by Linnaeus, As seen in correspondence between Lyell and
John Herschel, scientists were looking for creation by laws rather than by miraculous interventions. In continental Europe, the idealism of philosophers including
Lorenz Oken (1779–1851) developed a
Naturphilosophie in which patterns of development from
archetypes were a purposeful divine plan aimed at forming humanity. These scientists rejected
transmutation of species as
materialist radicalism threatening the established hierarchies of society. The idealist
Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), a persistent opponent of transmutation, saw mankind as the goal of a sequence of creations, but his concepts were the first to be adapted into a scheme of theistic evolutionism, when in
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation published in 1844, its anonymous author (
Robert Chambers) set out goal-centred progressive development as the Creator's divine plan, programmed to unfold without direct intervention or miracles. The book became a best-seller and popularised the idea of transmutation in a designed "law of progression". The scientific establishment strongly attacked
Vestiges at the time, but later more sophisticated theistic evolutionists followed the same approach of looking for patterns of development as evidence of design. The comparative anatomist
Richard Owen (1804–1892), a prominent figure in the Victorian era scientific establishment, opposed transmutation throughout his life. When formulating
homology he adapted idealist philosophy to reconcile natural theology with development, unifying nature as divergence from an underlying form in a process demonstrating design. His conclusion to his
On the Nature of Limbs of 1849 suggested that divine laws could have controlled the development of life, but he did not expand this idea after objections from his conservative patrons. Others supported the idea of development by law, including the botanist
Hewett Watson (1804–1881) and the Reverend
Baden Powell (1796–1860), who wrote in 1855 that such laws better illustrated the powers of the Creator. In 1858 Owen in his speech as President of the
British Association said that in "continuous operation of Creative power" through geological time, new species of animals appeared in a "successive and continuous fashion" through birth from their antecedents by a Creative law rather than through slow transmutation.
On the Origin of Species When
Charles Darwin published
On the Origin of Species in 1859, many
liberal Christians accepted evolution provided they could reconcile it with divine design. The clergymen
Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) and
Frederick Temple (1821–1902), both conservative Christians in the
Church of England, promoted a theology of creation as an indirect process controlled by divine laws. Some strict
Calvinists welcomed the idea of
natural selection, as it did not entail inevitable progress and humanity could be seen as a fallen race requiring
salvation. The
Anglo-Catholic Aubrey Moore (1848–1890) also accepted the theory of natural selection, incorporating it into his Christian beliefs as merely the way God worked. Darwin's friend
Asa Gray (1810–1888) defended natural selection as compatible with design. Darwin himself, in his second edition of the
Origin (January 1860), had written in the conclusion: Within a decade most scientists had started espousing evolution, but from the outset some expressed opposition to the concept of natural selection and searched for a more
purposeful mechanism. In 1860
Richard Owen attacked Darwin's
Origin of Species in an anonymous review while praising "Professor Owen" for "the establishment of the axiom of
the continuous operation of the ordained becoming of living things". In December 1859 Darwin had been disappointed to hear that Sir
John Herschel apparently dismissed the book as "the law of higgledy-pigglety", and in 1861 Herschel wrote of evolution that "[a]n intelligence, guided by a purpose, must be continually in action to bias the direction of the steps of change—to regulate their amount—to limit their divergence—and to continue them in a definite course". He added "On the other hand, we do not mean to deny that such intelligence may act according to law (that is to say, on a preconceived and definite plan)". The scientist Sir
David Brewster (1781–1868), a member of the
Free Church of Scotland, wrote an article called "
The Facts and Fancies of Mr. Darwin" (1862) in which he rejected many Darwinian ideas, such as those concerning vestigial organs or questioning God's perfection in his work. Brewster concluded that Darwin's book contained both "much valuable knowledge and much wild speculation", although accepting that "every part of the human frame had been fashioned by the Divine hand and exhibited the most marvellous and beneficent adaptions for the use of men". In the 1860s theistic evolutionism became a popular compromise in science and gained widespread support from the general public. Between 1866 and 1868 Owen published a theory of derivation, proposing that species had an innate tendency to change in ways that resulted in variety and beauty showing creative purpose. Both Owen and
Mivart (1827–1900) insisted that natural selection could not explain patterns and variation, which they saw as resulting from divine purpose. In 1867 the
Duke of Argyll published
The Reign of Law, which explained beauty in
plumage without any
adaptive benefit as design generated by the Creator's laws of nature for the delight of humans. Argyll attempted to reconcile evolution with design by suggesting that the laws of variation prepared
rudimentary organs for a future need. Cardinal
John Henry Newman wrote in 1868: "Mr Darwin's theory need not then to be
atheistical, be it true or not; it may simply be suggesting a larger idea of Divine Prescience and Skill ... and I do not [see] that 'the accidental evolution of organic beings' is inconsistent with divine design—It is accidental to us, not to God." In 1871 Darwin published his own research on human ancestry in
The Descent of Man, concluding that humans "descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears", which would be classified amongst the
Quadrumana along with monkeys, and in turn descended "through a long line of diversified forms" going back to something like the larvae of
sea squirts. Critics promptly complained that this "degrading" image "tears the crown from our heads", but there is little evidence that it led to loss of faith. Among the few who did record the impact of Darwin's writings, the naturalist
Joseph LeConte struggled with "distress and doubt" following the death of his daughter in 1861, before enthusiastically saying in the late 1870s there was "not a single philosophical question connected with our highest and dearest religious and spiritual interests that is fundamentally affected, or even put in any new light, by the theory of evolution", and in the late 1880s embracing the view that "evolution is entirely consistent with a rational theism". Similarly,
George Frederick Wright (1838–1921) responded to Darwin's
Origin of Species and
Charles Lyell's 1863
Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man by turning to Asa Gray's belief that God had set the rules at the start and only intervened on rare occasions, as a way to harmonise evolution with theology. The idea of evolution did not seriously shake Wright's faith, but he later suffered a crisis when confronted with
historical criticism of the Bible. ==Acceptance==