This review by Terry Scambray of Darwin’s Bluff (Discovery Institute Press 2024) by Robert F. Shedinger is reprinted from Touchstone with the author’s permission.

When a seasoned poker player bluffs, he never shows his cards unless another player calls his bluff.  Likewise, Charles Darwin never publicly showed his hand, in this case, his “big book” which would confirm his magnum opus, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.  Now along comes Robert F. Shedinger, who demonstrates that Darwin’s promised confirmation of his theory was a bluff.

And herein lies the remarkable character of Darwin’s Bluff, based as it is on Shedinger’s deep dive into thousands of letters written by Darwin, which makes the book read much like a novel with a running commentary by the protagonist, in this case, Charles Darwin.

In these letters, mostly composed between 1830 and 1863, Darwin repeatedly states that “Origin is only an abstract.”  This apologia appears most prominently in ten letters he sent just prior to the publication of Origin on November 24, 1859.  For example, in a letter to creationist Louis Agassiz, a renowned Harvard professor, Darwin writes, “Enclosed is a copy of my book (as yet only an abstract) on the origin of species.” To James Dwight Dana, professor of natural history at Yale, he says the same thing, as he does to others to whom he sent copies of Origin.

Shedinger writes that, in describing Origin “as a mere abstract of his theory,” Darwin acknowledged that the book “lacked much of the facts, evidence, and authorities he promised would follow in a much larger work that was three-quarters complete before events forced him to put it aside.”

So modernity’s most influential book was merely an abstract of a promised book, which, we learn, was never completed! Which is to say, Origin was not “settled science” and Darwin himself didn’t think it was “settled science.”

A failed analogy

If this was the case, what was Origin an abstract of and why did the promised longer work languish until even anticipation of it faded into obscurity?

These are the crucial questions that Shedinger, a professor at Luther College in Iowa and author of two previous books on Darwin, answers in Darwin’s Bluff.  Shedinger reveals that Darwin was painfully conflicted about his theory of origins and neurotically avoided defending it.

In his most important chapter, titled “Darwin’s Unfinished Book Under the Microscope,” Shedinger recounts the hopes of scientists like Swiss botanist Alphonse de Candolle, who wrote to Darwin in June 1862, “I await with great impatience your detailed evidence” for Origin.  Even Darwin’s enemy Richard Owen, a renowned scientist of his time (he coined the word “dinosaur”), graciously conceded that “a rich mine of research is alluded to and promised by Mr. Darwin, in a more voluminous collection.”

Yet although the unfinished “big book,” titled On Natural Selection, already contained some 300,000 of the 400,000 words projected for its final form, Shedinger reveals that it merely repeated Origin’s “parade of minor variations,” such as the different shapes and colors of birds’ eggs, or a monkey with extra molars, or the occasional appearance of antlers on female deer.  

In other words, far from presenting “a more voluminous collection” of concrete evidence, Darwin remained in his rut of recording minor differences within species.  Nowhere in Natural Selection does he offer examples or explanations of how an organism “evolved” from one species to another, not to mention how different orders or families developed.

Most egregiously, Shedinger writes, “Darwin doubles down on his failed analogy between artificial selection and natural selection.” This is the bluff that Bishop Samuel Wilberforce called him on as early as the spring of 1860, in his critique of Origin in the Quarterly Review.  Indeed, in conflating the two processes Darwin suggests, knowingly or unknowingly, that natural selection, like artificial selection, has a purpose, a design, the very idea that his efforts were directed to overturn.

Alfred Russel Wallace, a contemporaneous developer of the theory of evolution, wrote to Darwin in the summer of 1858 that “no inference as to variations in nature can be deduced from those changes in domestic animals.”  Wallace, who in contrast to Darwin had spent much of his life as a naturalist in the wilds, wrote that such comparisons were false because artificial breeding conducted by humans resulted in “abnormal animals like short-legged sheep and poodles,” which could not survive in nature.

Darwin did acknowledge to Wallace in an April 6, 1859, letter, “You are right, that I came to [the] conclusion Selection was the principle of change from the study of domesticated productions.” He also admits in Origin that “no deductions” can be made by drawing comparisons between artificial selection and natural selection.  Nonetheless, he also writes in Origin, “I have in vain endeavored to discover on what decisive facts the above statement has so often and so boldly been made.”

Waning confidence

The reasons for Darwin’s failure to complete Natural Selection are, as Shedinger shows, complicated, though Shedinger believes they ultimately boil down to Darwin’s lack of confidence in his own evolutionary ideas.  Certainly Darwin was conflicted over the theological implications of an accidental universe empty of meaning, as well as over the Christian doctrine which would consign his skeptical family members to perdition.

Shedinger emphasizes that Darwin’s ambition was to become one of the leading men of science, “yet his confidence that he could pull this off flagged, and he dragged his feet” in publicizing his theory.  Only when he learned that Wallace had come up with the same theory of evolution by natural selection did he agree to go public with his own, and even then he had to be goaded into it by Charles Lyell, a confidante upon whom he depended to bolster his confidence.

After edging out Wallace for the honor of being proclaimed the inventor of the theory of evolution, Darwin belittled Origin, while promising that, in Natural Selection, the main force of his argument would be presented with reinforcements to counter the attacks of his critics.  

But after realizing that Natural Selection was merely a verbose repetition of Origin, “Darwin abandoned the idea of publishing the big book” and busied himself instead with writing On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects, which was published on May 15, 1862.  In the introduction to that book, he writes that his purpose is to show that “the contrivances by which Orchids are fertilised are as varied and almost as perfect as any of the most beautiful adaptations in the animal kingdom and to show how flowers cross pollinated one another.”

Clearly the purpose of this and other subsequent works was to create the impression that there was real evidence for evolution.  But perhaps Darwin had actually stumbled onto the truth, for, as one reviewer of the orchids book wrote, “Darwin provided evidence not for natural selection, but for natural theology.” Another reviewer commented, “It is full of the marvels of Divine handiwork.”

That Darwin wrote other books during this time, including, notably, The Descent of Man, destroys the rationale that his weak constitution prevented him from completing Natural Selection.  He did frequently use ill health as an excuse for delays in publication, claiming that he couldn’t work more than a couple of hours a day before needing complete rest.  But, as Shedinger points out, Darwin had a strong constitution, and although he had an inheritance and did not need to work for a living, he was industrious and prolific.  His published works on geology, botany, emotions, and other subjects, combined with his unpublished manuscripts and his 15,000 letters, amount to over a million words composed during his lifetime.

Indeed, in this regard Shedinger expresses admiration for Darwin, who answered correspondents from all over the world who sent him specimens to examine and comment on.  He also had time for an active conjugal life, fathering ten children, and he maintained a healthy sense of humor even though he suffered the grief of the childhood deaths of three of them.

Darwin’s cards shown

The Victorian age boasted many giants, individuals who launched the industrial revolution, made life-saving medical discoveries, ended slavery, and created great literature and art, all of which they spread to the entire world.  Yet, although Darwin is considered preeminent among them, he was less an innovator and more a product of nineteenth-century materialism who gave a scientific patina to the legend of a self-created cosmos, a legend whose proliferation has infused a poisonous worldview into Western culture.

Although Darwin’s bluff was called immediately, as we have seen, it continues to cozen contemporary society.  The late Stephen Jay Gould thought that since Origin convinced the world that evolution had occurred, presenting additional support for it would be redundant.  Apparently, Gould believed that Darwin held the cards that Darwin himself denied holding.  Likewise for Richard Dawkins, who insists that, since we’re here, “evolution has occurred.”

In contrast to such question-begging, and Darwin’s own habitual evasions, the clarity of Darwin’s Bluff stands in sharp relief.  Professor Shedinger’s rich and rewarding book resounds with the call for Darwin’s cards to be shown to the widest audience possible.

Terry Scambray lives and writes in the “Other California”: the Great Central Valley of California.