Darwin’s Method: Induction, Deduction, or Synthesis?

From The Box Move,

From Becquerel’s uranium rock to Newton’s proverbial apple and Fleming’s serendipitous observation of penicillin, the way science is done has come to be associated often with a romanticized but highly suspect notion of objectivity. This may very well be the effect on science of inductivism and the bold claim of the proponents of inductivism that science could not possibly lead to any kind of truthful explanation of the world around us without it. The questions any historian of science must then ask are: to what extent does objectivity, as surely as it is the hallmark of science, lead to the best scientific discoveries and further, how do we weight the role of accident, hunch, intuition, experimenters’ bias in the role of science especially if they happen to lead us to the right conclusion?

Charles Darwin in his Autobiography stated that he had ‘worked on true Baconian principles…collected facts on a whole-sale scale…and by extensive reading’. Such a canonical biography may be appealing but it is also a dangerous way of approaching history. At some point it must be recognized that evolution by natural selection was not the result of years of observation in which Darwin had no working hypothesis, but instead years of observations geared towards designing proofs for a hypothesis based on little more than a hunch; a frantic search on ‘the species question’ that ensued as little more than a rat race with Alfred Russell Wallace. This is all counter to the inductive procedure. Stephen Jay Gould concurs – in his essay ‘Darwin’s middle road’, Gould argues that Darwin was no inductivist but instead marshaled evidence from many different aspects:

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