The possibilities that the worldviews inherent in both darwinism and neo-darwinism had hidden, unexplored assumptions, going beyond 'chance' and 'chaos'
To what extent can the scientific research writings of Charles Darwin be said to be adhere to a principle of openness to alternative interpretations of data, as is a sort of law in the philosophy of science?
This is something everyone with an interest in biology ought to look into, as Darwin--turned into an ideology, as 'darwinism', then modified along the lines of 'neo-darwinism'--seems to have established some main perspectives that are still pervasive when biologists seek to explore more of the billions of mysterious aspects of the structures of human being, and Nature in general.
This can be explored in great depth. The short version is, in my own readings, that all his studies, by and large, took place in a dualistic kind of worldview: either God created all beings at once, some time ago, as eg according to the Christian Bible, or Newton's laws of local cause-and-effect as expanded into chemistry etc, somehow led to life as we see it.
In the newtonian perspective, as we can call the 'local cause-and-effect' picture, there is of course no holistic element which obviously give rise to complex organism. However in the newtonian perspective, there is room for the notion of 'chance', and in that sense randomness, or a sort of chaos. And it is also, of course, room for thinking in terms of vast expanses of time, of duration. And so Darwin, who could not believe that God created all beings at once, some time ago, sought to explore the possibility of letting time + chaos be the sort of 'designer principle'. As is well known, he suggested that by there being variations due to chance, and that some of these variations would prove more successful or 'fit' in life than others, over time this would lead to the appearance of intelligent design while it is really an effect of the accumulated 'natural' selection or choice in the brutal interplay in Nature where only some survives.
This sounds indeed like the beginning of an alternative form of thinking given the severely limited worldview within which Darwin was operating. However, there are many other worldviews than the particular one as associated with fundamentalistic christians and the one associated with newtonians. An example of another worldview is that of Goethe; who again drew on formative principles found in the several versions of cause and effect of Aristotle. I mention these two because both of these thinkers precede Darwin. In the 21st century, the number of proposed worldviews is, put simply, vast. But even at Darwin's time there was no need to be stuck in duality.
Is a scientist who explores life, its variations, its possible sources, within the paradigm of newtonianism as set up against a fundamentalist theology, entirely objective? Is he entirely scientific in an ideal sense? Is he actually submitting all important assumptions in his theory to checking by others? Or is he possibly deliberately obfuscating other perspectives than these two so as to get an easy win with his own approach? To say that he was 'deliberately obfuscating' presupposes, however, that he really knew alternatives, or at least had imagined other alternatives, and I don't know of any evidence that Darwin had neither read Goethe's views nor Aristotle's views on the shapes and causes of life and change in Nature. But we can certainly said that he had not read monumental works created after his time, such as that by Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead, who had some kind of belief in God, in his Process and Reality sets forth a worldview in which the dichotomy within which Darwin was formulating his theory of the evolution of life can be re-phrased with entirely new questions asked, also so as to put into severe doubt the reliance on 'chance' or 'chaos' as the only alternative to local cause-and-effect.
Aristo Tacoma, December 2025
