Sir, – I very much enjoy Joe Humphreys's weekly column on philosophy.
However, I was puzzled by the interview with Prof Peter J Bowler (“Unthinkable: Why Charles Darwin is a threat to religion”, February 3rd).
In the article, Prof Bowler states that “Christians would have been more accepting of evolution had Darwin not explained it through natural selection”.
This seems a rather strange statement, given that the hypothesis of natural selection formed a crucial part of Darwin’s theory of evolution (it remains a key component of evolutionary biology today).
It seems to me that it makes very little sense to speculate about the possible reception of a hypothetical “Darwinian” theory that did not feature natural selection – rather like asking whether Rutherford’s nuclear model of the atom might have been more easily accepted had it not involved the difficult concept of the nucleus.
Indeed, while Prof Bowler’s book has received rave reviews from historians, his “counterfactual” approach to the history of science seems quite peculiar to this scientist.
Prof Bowler’s key suggestion is that a different mechanism for evolution might have been more palatable to the church, but how can we know this for sure? It seems unlikely that any theory resembling evolution would have been welcomed by Christian authorities.
In any case, my understanding is that history is the study of what happened – not what might have happened under different circumstances. – Yours, etc
CORMAC
O’RAIFEARTAIGH,
School of Science,
Waterford Institute
of Technology.