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ABSTRACT
Philip Sherrard and Theodosius Dobzhansky, both Eastern Orthodox intellectuals, would have agreed on little. While Sherrard rejected modern science, especially evolution, Dobzhansky was one of evolution’s leading figures. But Sherrard saw climate change coming and warned of it, whereas Dobzhansky was perhaps too easy in his liberal progressivism. Despite their major differences, however, Dobzhansky and Sherrard both shared a hostility towards reductionism and a mechanistic view of the universe. In studying their ideas and incorporating ecology into the conversation, we can consider different ways to view evolution and climate change.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Theodosius Dobzhansky, The Biology of Ultimate Concern (New York: New American Library, 1967), 5.
2 Philip Sherrard, Human Image: World Image: The Death and Resurrection of Sacred Cosmology (Ipswich, UK: Golgonooza Press, 1992), 1.
3 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question of Technology and Other Essays, ed. Martin Heidegger, trans. William Lovitt (New York: HarperCollins, 1977), 17.
4 A more in-depth study of Dobzhansky’s religious and political views can be found in my own article “Between Darwin and Dostoevsky: The Syntheses of Theodosius Dobzhansky,” Christian Perspectives on Science and Technology, New Series, Vol. 1 (2022), 28–45.
5 Dobzhansky, Ultimate Concern, 1
6 Detailed biographical information about Dobzhansky is included in the volume The Evolution of Theodosius Dobzhansky, ed. Mark B. Adams (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), especially a chapter by his daughter Sophie. See Sophie Dobzhansky Coe, “Theodosius Dobzhansky: A Family Story,” The Evolution of Theodosius Dobzhansky, 13–28
7 Mark B. Adams, “Introduction: Theodosius Dobzhansky in Russia and America,” in The Evolution of Theodosius Dobzhansky, 3.
8 Nikolai L. Krementsov, “Dobzhansky and Russian Entomology: The Origin of His Ideas on Species and Speciation,” in The Evolution of Theodosius Dobzhansky, 31.
9 Garland E. Allen, “Theodosius Dobzhansky, the Morgan Lab, and the Breakdown of the Naturalist/Experimentalist Dichotomy, 1927-1847,” in The Evolution of Theodosius Dobzhansky, 87.
10 Ibid., 92.
11 Theodosius Dobzhansky, Genetic Diversity and Human Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 114.
12 Theodosius Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving: The Evolution of the Human Species (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), 22.
13 Ibid., 18.
14 Jitse M. van der Meer, “Theodosius Dobzhansky: Nothing in Evolution Makes Sense Except in the Light of Religion,” in Eminent Lives in Twentieth-Century Science and Religion, ed. Nicolaas Rupke (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009), 113.
15 Dobzhansky, Ultimate Concern, 120.
16 Ibid., 112.
17 Quoted in Costas Krimbas, “The Evolutionary Worldview of Theodosius Dobzhansky,” in The Evolution of Theodosius Dobzhansky, 188.
18 Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving, 132
19 Ibid., 54–55.
20 A longer treatment of Philip Sherrard's thought can be found in my upcoming book chapter, “The Holiness of Creation,” Orthodox Christianity and the Study of Nature: Histories of Interaction (Brepols, 2024). Research into Sherrard was supported by the National Hellenic Research Foundation.
21 Sarah Watling, Noble Savages: The Olivier Sisters—Four Lives in Seven Fragments (London, UK: Jonathan Cape, 2019).
22 Sherrard’s doctoral dissertation, a study in modern Greek poetry, was published in 1956 as The Marble Threshing Floor: Studies in Modern Greek Poetry (London: Valentine, Mitchell & Co., 1956).
23 Good biographical overviews of Sherrard’s life can be found in Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 230–46, and Kallistos Ware, “Foreword,” in Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition, Philip Sherrard (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1998), ix–xlv.
24 Ware, “Foreword,” Christianity, xiv.
25 Philip Sherrard, Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition, Philip Sherrard (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1998), 23
26 Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 230–31.
27 Ibid., 236, 240.
28 See Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), for an example of an anti-capitalist history that nevertheless sees science as largely tangential to the story Sherrard tells (though it must be mentioned that McCarraher does make critical room for engineering and applied science, he does not extend this critique to theoretical science the way Sherrard did).
29 Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature: An Enquiry into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science (Limni, Evia, Greece: Denise Harvey Publisher, 2020), 5.
30 Charles E Taylor, “Dobzhansky, Artificial Life, and the ‘Larger Questions’ of Evolution”, in The Evolution of Theodosius Dobzhansky, 166.
31 Philip Sherrard, Human Image: World Image: The Death and Resurrection of Sacred Cosmology (Limni, Evia, Greece: Denise Harvey Publisher, 2004), 8.
32 Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature, 60.
33 Ibid., 87.
34 Ibid., 106.
35 Sherrard, Human Image, 56.
36 Philip Sherrard, The Sacred in Life and Art (Limni, Evia, Greece: Denise Harvey Publisher, 2004), 153.
37 Sherrard, Human Image, 124.
38 Sherrard, The Sacred in Life and Art, 87–97.
39 Ibid., 43.
40 Ibid., 50.
41 Sherrard, Human Image, 42–43.
42 Ibid., 66.
43 Ibid., 68.
44 Ibid., 70.
45 Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving, 17.
46 Dobzhansky, Ultimate Concern, 17.
47 Ibid., 7.
48 Dobzhansky, Genetic Diversity and Human Equality, 114.
49 This view may have been derived from Sherrard’s reading of the Traditionalist thinker René Guénon. He cites Guénon’s influence most explicitly in a letter to Seferis (see This Dialectic of Blood and Light, 255). But Sherrard was not simply a carbon-copied Traditionalist, as he embarked on a long defense of Christianity against Guénon (along with a defense of Trinitarian theology) in Christianity: The Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition, 76–113.
50 Sherrard, Christianity, 59–61.
51 Sherrard, Human Image, 63–64.
52 Ibid., 71.
53 Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature, 70.
54 Dobzhansky, Ultimate Concern, 111–13.
55 Dobzhansky, Genetic Diversity and Human Freedom, 111.
56 Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving, 2.
57 Dobzhansky, Ultimate Concern, 37–38.
58 Sherrard, Human Image, 122.
59 Michael Ruse, “Dobzhansky and the Problem of Progress,” in The Evolution of Theodosius Dobzhansky, 240.
60 Dobzhansky, Genetic Diversity and Human Freedom, 109.
61 Dobzhansky, Ultimate Concern, 137.
62 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Human Development: The Myth of the Machine Volume 1 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967), 37.
63 Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature, 5.
64 Mumford, Technics and Human Development, 279.
65 Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power: The Myth of the Machine Volume 2 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 238.
66 Ibid., 387–91.
67 Ibid., 392.
68 Ibid., 393.
69 Ruth Nanda Ashen, “Introduction,” in The Biology of Ultimate Concern, vii.
70 Mumford, The Pentagon of Power, 393.
71 Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature, 124.
72 Mumford, The Pentagon of Power, preface.
73 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 105.
74 Dobzhansky, Genetic Diversity and Human Equality, 115.
75 Lewis Mumford, The Condition of Man (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), vii.
76 Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature, 122
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C. W. Howell
C. W. Howell holds a PhD in religion from Duke University and has taught at both Duke and Elon Universities. He is the author of forthcoming book on the history of intelligent design, to be published by NYU Press.