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In this essay we will discuss about the impact of Darwinism on geographical thinking with its appraisal.
In geography, Darwinism was interpreted primarily as evolution, in the sense of a ‘continuous process of change in a temporal perspective long enough to produce a series of transformations’. Darwin was primarily concerned with the mechanism of the change, or as The Origin was subtitled, the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life’. This ‘element of struggle’ was applied in a deterministic way, particularly in human geography, at about the same period.
In both physical and human geography, supposedly Darwinian ideas were applied in an eighteenth rather than a nineteenth century fashion, and geographers were still applying essentially Newtonian views of causation well into the twentieth century. The Darwinian evolution seemed to have provided fresh incentive to concepts of biological origin which date back to Ritter and before, and the subsequent development of ecology led to new insights in some branches of geographical scholarship.
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Stoddart (1965) suggests that the following four main themes from Darwin’s work are to be taken as significant contribution to the contemporary geographical thought from biology:
1. The idea of change through time;
2. The idea of organisation and ecology;
3. The ideas of selection and struggle;
4. The randomness or chance character of variations in nature.
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1. The strongest and most explicit impact of the idea of change through time or evolution was in the study of landforms, a field in which Darwin had worked during the ‘Beagle Years’ when he developed his famous ‘subsidence theory’ regarding the coral reef formation.
The initial deduction and subsequent development of this theory closely resembles the later development of Darwin’s biological ideas and it could serve as the archetype for the ‘cyclic’ ideas later developed in geomorphology. Though Huxley wrote on the new subject of ‘physiography’ in the 1870s, but it was W. M. Davis who considered evolution to be the source of his inspiration in the idea of the geographical cycle.
In his first article on the development of landforms, Davis referred to a cycle of life and used such terms as birth, youth, maturity and old age, and which he channelized into the restricted field of denundation chromology. Davisian geomorphology was deductive, time-oriented, and imbued with mechanistic notions of causation.
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Closely similar views were being developed at about the same time in plant geography and particularly in ecology. Hooker seemed to have worked on this aspect. Clements occupied in plant ecology a position similar to that of Davis in geomorphology. Plant ecologists and pedologists followed Davis’ biological analogy for change through time. They have also adopted terms such as ‘infancy’, ‘youth’, ‘maturity’ and ‘old age’ to describe development through time.
Change through time has been a dominant theme in much of geography, particularly in the work of the Berkeley School on the settlement of the American southwest and other areas. Here Sauer’s influence has been a dominant factor and it is interesting that he himself worked at Chicago under Salisbury and Cowles.
Another pupil of Cowles, who also studied under Davis and published in both geomorphology and plant geography, was the historical geographer, Ogilvie who carried their emphasis on time into regional studies. The influence of plant ecology and the historical viewpoint was also clear, both in concept and language, as also in Whittlesey’s ideas of sequent occupance in the development of landscape.
2. Darwin’s second major theme which made significant contribution to geography was the idea of organisation and ecology which dealt with the inter relationships and connection between all living things and their environment. This theme developed in Haeckel’s new science of ecology. Darwin seemed to have been impressed by the exquisite adaptation and interrelationship of organic forms in nature and the theme of ecology are implicit in many of his writings.
Perhaps Darwin’s most significant contribution to ecological thinking was to include humankind in the living world of nature. Huxley in his ‘Man’s Place in Nature’ (1863) attempted to show how humankind had emphatically become a subject for scientific speculation, and Darwin treated modern man on the same level as other living things.
The term ‘ecology’ was used by Haeckel in 1869 and from about 1910 ‘human ecology was used for the study of humankind and environment not in a deterministic sense but for humankind’s place on the web of life or the economy of nature. Park defined the scope of human ecology, as dealing with the web of the balance of nature, concepts of life, the balance of nature, concepts of competition, dominance and succession, biological economics and symbiosis— all concepts taken from plant and animal ecology. Human ecology seemed to have investigated the processes involved in biotic balance in which ‘man interacts with nature through culture and technology’.
For Barrows, ‘geography is the science of human ecology…. Geography will aim to make clear the relationships existing between natural environments and the distribution and activities of man…. The centre of geography is the study of human ecology in specific areas. This notion holds out to regional geography a distinctive field, an organizing concept throughout, and the opportunity to develop a unique group of underlying principles’.
Ecology has, however, become increasingly empirical in method. In doing so, it has run counter to, and has superseded, the synthetic geographical tradition of explanation by analogy, which attempted to understand the complexity and interrelationships of phenomena by reference to the even greater complexity of living organisms. In geography as a whole, the organism analogy operated on three distinct levels—those of the Earth, its regions, and its states—and on each level it uses long predates of the Darwinian evolutionary theory.
The idea of the organic unity of the Earth basically manifested the Ritterian tradition in geography, because to him the Earth was an organism, with a divine intent, to fit the needs of man to perfection. Humboldt also conceived of the idea of the ‘harmonious unity of the cosmos’ as a ‘living whole’, a unity in multiplicity.
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For both Ritter and Humboldt, unity, harmony and interdependence of parts constituted the organic analogy. Half-a-century later, Vidal de la Blache arrived at a similar conclusion and recognised his debt to Ritter, both at the Earth and at the regional level.
The idea of organism analogy also appeared to have profoundly influenced the contemporary regional geography as the idea served as a unifying theme, making it an increasingly particularistic discipline. Herbertson, in 1905, applied the term ‘macro-organism’ for the complex unity of physical and organic elements of the Earth’s surface.
To him, ‘the natural regions are definite associations of inorganic and living matter with definite structures and functions, with as real a form and possessing as regular and orderly changes as those of a plant or an animal’.
The region—that particular field for geographers—has been regarded as a unique functional complex mutually interdependent, which despite a steady stream of material and energy, ‘is in apparent equilibrium and constitutes a whole (or Ganzheit) which is more than the sum of its parts. The understanding of the region is found in the French School of regional geography.
Ratzel made use of the organism analogy in his Politische Geographie, published in 1897, in which he compared the state to an organism—the state as an organism attached to the land. The organic quality of states depends upon organisation and interdependence of parts; it then assumes properties of growth and competition, and in doing so goes beyond the organic analogies of the Earth and the geographical region.
The major objection to the organic approach in geography is methodological, for it is a synthetic notion which gives no assistance in actual investigation, and is an essentially idiographic concept in an increasingly nomothetic science.
The concept is thus reduced to a metaphor of dubious value, hinging on gross formal and functional comparisons between living matter and complexly interrelated facts in areas, and as such has dropped out of geographic work since 1939, except in occasional mention of Herbertson and Vidal de la Blache.
3. Darwin’s third major theme, selection and struggle, was much more influential than his other themes as it did lead towards both ‘scientific determinism’ and ‘possibilism’ in the contemporary geographical concepts. The philosophy of selection and struggle seemed to have been based on cause-effect relationships, as it talked about the environmental influence, selection and adaptation, depending upon the way of life. Most Darwinian writers on the effects of environment were content to look for cause-effect relationships without enquiring too closely into the process.
The theme of the effects of environment on the course of human activities was taken up by Ratzel in the first volume of Anthropogeographie, and later developed by his pupil Semple and Demolins. The theme of ‘selection and struggle’ also found mention, of course, in a different manner, in the possibilist philosophy of Vidal Blache who treated it in the light of the ‘genre de vie’ or the way of life of the people.
Fleure stressed the need for the physiological study of environmental effects on humankind, and in his typology of human regions (regions of difficulty, of effort, of increment) came close to applying Darwinian ideas of natural selection through environmental influence on human groups.
Huntington analysed the problem of natural selection, effects of environment, and human population on a world scale. Taylor explored the same theme in a series of studies of race, people, states and towns, emphasising their development through time under the influence of environmental factors.
It was in political geography that the theme of ‘selection and struggle’ found its legitimate expression because it led to the ‘increasing space consciousness and conception’ on a national level. In 1896, Ratzel developed his seven laws of the growth of states, from which he derived the powerful concept of ‘lebensraum’.
‘Just as the struggle for existence in the plant and animal world always centres about a matter of space, so the conflicts of nations are in great part only struggles for territory.’ It is clear that the organic analogy for Ratzel not only provided a simple and powerful model in analytical political geography, but also an apparently scientific justification, in Darwinian selection, for political behaviour.
Mackinder argued that ‘European civilisation is the outcome of the secular struggle against Asiatic invasion.’ He further remarked – ‘through the steppe there came from the unknown recesses of Asia in all the centuries from the fifth to the sixteenth, a remarkable succession of Turanian nomadic peoples … against the settled peoples of Europe.
A large part of modern history might be written as a commentary upon the changes directly or indirectly ensuing from these raids.’ This argument of Mackinder also reveals the ideas of struggle and selection on a super-continental level, which the Asiatic nomads attempted to, expand their space through a series of raids upon the fringes of the pivot to which they belonged.
Similarly, Mackinder’s ‘Heartland’ concept also deals with the struggle for the territorial aggrandisement of that part of the World Island which was inaccessible to the maritime powers, but had immense strategic value for its vast resources. In this thesis, Mackinder seemed to have incorporated the idea of selection and struggle in an organised manner, though his philosophy was highly deterministic in approach.
Ratzel’s concept of ‘Lebensraum’ and Mackinder’s ‘Heartland’ thesis appeared to have formed a symbiosis which led to the development of the Geopolitik in Europe between 1919 and 1945. For Kjellan, states were biological manifestation, endowed not only with the mortality but also with ‘organic lusts’.
The political usage made of the organic view of the state, and the ideas of struggle and Lebensraum, brought the subject into intellectual disgrace in the 1930s, and modern political geography is at pains to dissociate itself from any kind of organic analogy.
4. The theme of ‘randomness’ or chance character of variation in nature appears to have made no significant contribution to the geographical thought. No agreement was reached as to whether variation and development occurred by chance or were determined.
Any discussion of the biological impact on geographical thinking must hinge on the central question- Why was Darwinism, a theory for the selection of randomly occurring variants, interpreted in a deterministic and not a probabilistic sense? Why was chance omitted in geography? The problem is more remarkable in the sense that the study of random processes in the nineteenth century was by no means limited to Darwinian biology. ‘The study of this blind chance in theory and practice is one of the greatest scientific performances of the nineteenth century’.
In both the natural and social sciences, the ‘probabilistic sense’ found its legitimate expression. Why, then, in such an intellectual atmosphere, was the geographical interpretation so deterministic? Darwin’s theory made a clear distinction between the way in which evolution was effected and the course of evolution itself; geography emphasised on the latter and ignored the former.
Darwin began with the idea of the selection of chance variations, which are undoubtedly governed by ‘laws’ which he failed to point out or discover. Nowhere does he use the word ‘random’ and in the fourth chapter of The Origin he points out that the rise of word ‘chance’ is wholly in concept. He explained adaptation in nature by variation and natural selection, but he could not offer any explanation of the basic variation.
The theme of random variation remained neglected in the contemporary geographical tradition because of religious and scientific reasons. It is interesting to note that the method which includes and incorporates randomness is now being increasingly used by geographers.
Appraisal:
Darwinism caused a methodological shift in the contemporary geographical thinking, especially in the field of human geography. Darwin set up a sphere of scientific enquiry free from a priori theological ideas in which he made humankind a fit object for scientific interpretation. The geographical thinking since the mid- nineteenth century appears to have relied on the Darwinian tradition as it laid the foundation of ‘Scientific Geography’.
However, Darwinism had no impact on the contemporary Russian geography. The four basic themes of The Origin were more influential in Britain, Germany and France, but were perhaps less intoxicating in Russia because of the earlier studies of evolution by the Russian biologist, K. F. Rul’ye.
In any case, the Russian rejected the more extreme forms of environmental determinism stemming from Herbert Spencer and also the use of the biological analogy to describe sequences of landforms as suggested by the American geographer Davis.