On a wing and a prayer: the biomechanics of the Rev. Dr. Samuel Haughton (1821-1897)

In 1873, Samuel Haughton published Principles of Animal Mechanics. Based on research begun in 1862, it was a response to Darwin's The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection published three years earlier. In this article, the nature of Haughton's biomechanical researches is described by reviewing and re-analysing some of his original work. He showed how muscles could be seen as designed to carry out the maximum amount of work with the least expenditure of energy. Haughton used the results to argue against Darwin's theory of natural selection, the "unproved hypothesis" as Haughton called it. Despite correspondence with Darwin, Haughton received no scientific rebuttal of his arguements. To this day, it would seem, there is a lack of concordance between the biomechanical view of organic life as "optimised" and the evolutionary view of life under continual transformation as organic forms descended "from a supposed common ancestor."