St. George Mivart (30 November 1827 – 1 April 1900) was a prominent zoologist and initially a strong proponent of Darwin’s theory of evolution. However, in 1871, he published “The Genesis of Species”, in which he acknowledged the reality of evolution as a historical fact but criticized natural selection as the sole mechanism driving evolutionary processes. Mivart argued that natural selection had limitations and that other biological factors must be considered in association with it. Charles Darwin found Mivart’s critique significant enough to respond to it in detail in the sixth edition of “On the Origin of Species”.
Mivart’s career was long and distinguished. In 1862, he was appointed Lecturer on Comparative Anatomy at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School. In 1874, he was appointed professor of Biology at the (Catholic) University College, Kensington. From 1890 to 1893, he gave a course of lectures on “The Philosophy of Natural History” at the University of Louvain. He was a member of the Royal Institution from 1849, a Fellow of the Zoological Society from 1858, and served as Vice-President twice (in 1869 and 1882). He was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society in 1862, served as its Secretary from 1874 to 1880, and was later named Vice-President in 1892. In 1867, he was elected a member of the Royal Society. He received honorary degrees in 1876 from Pope Pius IX and in 1884 from the University of Louvain.
Mivart was a proliferate and methodologically careful scientist, but a stubborn character, coming first in serious conflict with scientific colleagues and breaking with the Darwinian circle in 1875. In his later life, and on questions unrelated to evolution, he also got in conflict with the Catholic Church Authorities.
His review of Charles Darwin’s “Descent of Man” is snarky in tone and a tedious read. Let me just highlight two thoughts. First: humans are “animales”, but “animales rationales”, as the Scholastics said in the tradition of Aristotle, and our intellectual capacities are bound to our brain, but are not reduced to our brain.
“To return to the bodily and other characters enumerated at such length by Mr. Darwin. They may, and doubtless they will, produce a considerable effect on readers who are not anatomists, but in fact the whole and sole result is to show that man is an animal. That he is such is denied by no one, but has been taught and accepted since the time of Aristotle. We remember on one occasion meeting at a dinner-table a clever medical man of materialistic views. He strongly impressed the minds of some laymen present by an elaborate statement of the mental phenomena following upon different injuries, or diseased conditions of different parts of the brain, until one of the number remarked as a climax, ‘Yes; and when the brain is entirely removed the mental phenomena cease altogether’—the previous observations having only brought out vividly what no one denied, viz., that during this life a certain integrity of bodily structure is requisite for the due exercise of the mental powers. Thus Mr. Darwin’s remarks are merely an elaborate statement of what all admit, namely, that man is an animal. They further imply, however, that he is no more than an animal, and that the mode of origin of his visible being must be the mode of his origin as a whole—a conclusion of which we should not question the legitimacy if we could accept Mr. Darwin’s views of man’s mental powers.” (p.64)
Second: even more importantly, we humans are moral agents:
“It would be so if he were intelligent and no more. If he could observe the facts of his own existence, investigate the co-existences and successions of phenomena, but all the time remain like the other parts of the visible universe a mere floating unit in the stream of time, incapable of one act of free self-determination or one voluntary moral aspiration after an ideal of absolute goodness. This, however, is far from being the case. Man is not merely an intellectual animal, but he is also a free moral agent, and, as such—and with the infinite future such freedom opens out before him—differs from all the rest of the visible universe by a distinction so profound that none of those which separate other visible beings is comparable with it.” (p.89)
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Further recommended reading:
Louis Caruana SJ: Is Mivart still relevant? in: Thinking faith, 2009
Science meets Faith 