Extract: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Darwin and Evolutionary Thought

T H E C A M B R I D G E E N C Y C L O P E D I A O F D A RW I N A N D E VO LU T I O NA RY T H O U G H T

This volume is a comprehensive reference work on the life, labors, and influence of the great evolutionist Charles Darwin. With more than sixty essays written by an international group representing the leading scholars in the field, this is the definitive work on Darwin. It covers the background to Darwin’s discovery of the theory of evolution through natural selection, the work he produced and his contemporaries’ reactions to it, and his influence on science in the 150 years since the publication of Origin of Species. It also explores the implications of Darwin’s discoveries in religion, politics, gender, literature, culture, philosophy, and medicine, critically evaluating Darwin’s legacy. Fully illustrated and clearly written, it is suitable for scholars and students as well as the general reader. The wealth of information it provides about the history of evolutionary thought makes it a crucial resource for understanding the controversies that surround evolution today.

Michael Ruse is Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science at Florida State University. He is the author of twenty books and the founding editor of Biology and Philosophy.

A portrait of Charles Darwin by the noted watercolorist George Richmond, painted in 1839 in celebration of his marriage to his first cousin Emma Wedgwood. Permission: English Heritage

THE CAMBRIDGE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF

D A RW I N A N D E VO LU T I O NA RY T H O U G H T

Edited by MICHAEL RUSE Florida State University

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013–2473, usa www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521195317 © Cambridge University Press 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2013 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The Cambridge encyclopedia of Darwin and evolutionary thought / [edited by] Michael Ruse. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-521-19531-7 (hardback) 1. Darwin, Charles, 1809–1882 – Encyclopedias. 2. Evolution (Biology) – Encyclopedias. I. Ruse, Michael. qh360.2.c36 2012 576.8′203–dc23 2012010226 isbn 978-0-521-19531-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Contributors Preface Acknowledgments

page vii xi xv

12 Darwin and Heredity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Robert Olby

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

13 Darwin and Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 Keith Bennett

1 Origins and the Greeks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Jeremy Kirby

14 Darwin’s Evolutionary Botany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 Richard Bellon

2 Evolution before Darwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Michael Ruse

15 Mimicry and Camouflage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 William Kimler and Michael Ruse

3 Charles Darwin’s Geology: The Root of His Philosophy of the Earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 David Norman

16 Chance and Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 John Beatty

4 Looking Back with “Great Satisfaction” on Charles Darwin’s Vertebrate Paleontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Paul D. Brinkman 5 The Origins of the Origin: Darwin’s First Thoughts about the Tree of Life and Natural Selection, 1837–1839 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Jonathan Hodge 6 Darwin and Taxonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Mary Pickard Winsor 7 Darwin and the Barnacles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Marsha L. Richmond

17 Darwin and Teleology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152 James G. Lennox 18 The Evolution of the Origin (1859–1872) . . . . . . . . . . 158 Thierry Hoquet 19 Alfred Russel Wallace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 John van Wyhe 20 Darwin and Humans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 Gregory Radick 21 Darwin and Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182 Stephen G. Alter 22 Darwin and Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 Eric Charmetant

8 The Analogy between Artificial and Natural Selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Bert Theunissen

23 Social Darwinism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 Naomi Beck

9 The Origin of Species . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Michael Ruse

24 Darwin and the Levels of Selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .202 Daniel Deen, Brian Hollis, and Chris Zarpentine

10 Sexual Selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Richard A. Richards

25 Darwin and Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 Mark Pallen and Alison Pearn

11 Darwin and Species . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 James Mallet

26 Darwinism in Britain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218 Peter Bowler

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Contents

27 Darwinism in the United States, 1859–1930 . . . . . . . . .226 Mark A. Largent

46 Developmental Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375 Manfred D. Laubichler and Jane Maienschein

28 The German Reception of Darwin’s Theory, 1860–1945 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Robert J. Richards

47 Darwin’s Evolutionary Ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383 James Justus

29 Darwin and Darwinism in France before 1900 . . . . . . 243 Jean Gayon 30 Encountering Darwin and Creating Darwinism in China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .250 Yang Haiyan 31 Darwinism in Latin America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .258 Thomas F. Glick 32 Botany: 1880s to 1920s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .264 Dawn Mooney Digrius 33 Population Genetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 Michael Ruse 34 Synthesis Period in Evolutionary Studies . . . . . . . . . .282 Joe Cain 35 Ecological Genetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .293 David W. Rudge 36 Darwin and Darwinism in France after 1900 . . . . . . . 300 Jean Gayon 37 Botany and the Evolutionary Synthesis, 1920–1950 . . . 313 Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis 38 The Emergence of Life on Earth and the Darwinian Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322 Iris Fry 39 The Evolution of the Testing of Evolution . . . . . . . . .330 Steven Hecht Orzack 40 Mimicry and Camouflage: Part Two . . . . . . . . . . . . . .336 Joseph Travis 41 The Tree of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340 Joel D. Velasco 42 Sociobiology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .346 Mark E. Borrello 43 Evolutionary Paleontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353 David Sepkoski 44 Darwin and Geography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361 David N. Livingstone 45 Darwin and the Finches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 368 Frederick Rowe Davis

48 Darwin and the Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391 David Steffes 49 Molecular Biology: Darwin’s Precious Gift . . . . . . . . . 397 Francisco J. Ayala 50 Challenging Darwinism: Expanding, Extending, Replacing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405 David J. Depew and Bruce H. Weber 51 Human Evolution after Darwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 412 Jesse Richmond 52 Language Evolution since Darwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 420 Barbara J. King 53 Cultural Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 428 Kenneth Reisman 54 Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .436 Gowan Dawson 55 Darwin and Gender . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .443 Georgina M. Montgomery 56 Evolutionary Epistemology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 451 Tim Lewens 57 Ethics after Darwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 461 Richard Joyce 58 Darwin and Protestantism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 468 Diarmid A. Finnegan 59 Creationism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .476 Ronald L. Numbers 60 Darwin and Catholicism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .485 John F. Haught 61 Judaism, Jews, and Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .493 Marc Swetlitz 62 Religion: Islam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 499 Martin Riexinger 63 From Evolution and Medicine to Evolutionary Medicine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .505 Tatjana Buklijas and Peter Gluckman Bibliography Index Color illustrations follow pages 94, 130, and 382

vi

515 551

Contributors

Stephen G. Alter is an associate professor of history at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts. He is the author of William Dwight Whitney and the Science of Language (2005).

During 2010 he held a sabbatical year fellowship from the American Philosophical Society.

Francisco J. Ayala is University Professor and Donald Bren Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. In 2001 he received the U.S. National Medal of Science and in 2010, the Templeton Prize. His research focuses on molecular evolution, as well as on the philosophy of biology. For further information, see http://www.faculty .uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=2134.

John Beatty teaches history and philosophy of science, and social and political philosophy at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on the theoretical foundations, methodology, and sociopolitical dimensions of evolutionary biology.

Naomi Beck is a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Economics in Jena, Germany. Her recent research examines Nobel Laureate Friedrich A. von Hayek’s use of evolutionary concepts and theories in defense of free-market economics.

Richard Bellon teaches the history of science and science policy at Michigan State University, where he holds a joint appointment in the Lyman Briggs College and the Department of History. His most recent research examines the role of botany in the reception of the Origin of Species and the moral status of the inductive method in Victorian British science.

Keith Bennett is professor of Late Quaternary environmental change at Queen’s University Belfast. He held a Royal Society–Wolfson Merit Award (2007–12) and has recently been elected to the Royal Irish Academy.

Mark E. Borrello is an associate professor in the Graduate Program for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine and the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of

Evolutionary Restraints: The Contentious History of Group Selection (2010).

Peter Bowler is professor emeritus of the history of science at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a member of the Royal Irish Academy.

Paul D. Brinkman is assistant director of the Paleontology and Geology Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. His most recent book is entitled The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush: Museums and Paleontology in America at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (2010).

Tatjana Buklijas is a historian of science and medicine and Research Fellow of the Liggins Institute at the University of Auckland. Her key research interests are history of anatomy and embryology, development and disease, medicine and evolution, and science and medicine in Central Europe.

Joe Cain is professor of history and philosophy of biology at University College London. He edited a new edition of Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (2nd ed., 2009).

Eric Charmetant is associate professor of philosophy at Centre Sèvres–Jesuit Faculties of Paris. He recently published “Darwin et l’éthique – Une rencontre précoce, un chantier toujours ouvert” (2010).

Frederick Rowe Davis is associate professor of history and the history and philosophy of science at Florida State University. His first book is The Man Who Saved Sea Turtles: Archie Carr and the Origins of Conservation Biology (2007).

Gowan Dawson is senior lecturer in Victorian studies at the University of Leicester. He is the author of Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge, 2007), and coauthor of Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature (Cambridge, 2004).

Daniel Deen is an assistant professor of philosophy at Concordia University, Irvine, California. His interests are in the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of science.

vii

Contributors

David J. Depew is professor emeritus of communication studies and rhetoric of inquiry, University of Iowa. He is coauthor with Bruce Weber of Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (1995) and coauthor with Marjorie Grene of Philosophy of Biology: An Episodic History (2004).

Dawn Mooney Digrius is assistant professor of history at Stevens Institute of Technology. Her chapter on Gregor Mendel and his contributions to evolution is included in Greenwood Press’s Icons of Evolution, edited by Brian Regal (2007).

Diarmid A. Finnegan is lecturer in human geography at the Queen’s University of Belfast. He is the author of Natural History Societies and Civic Culture in Victorian Scotland (2009) and has published widely on the historical geographies of scientific knowledge in the nineteenth century. He is currently working on the rhetorical geography of science and religion debates in mid-Victorian Britain and Ireland.

Iris Fry teaches in the Department of Humanities and Arts at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology. Her book The Emergence of Life on Earth: A Historical and Scientific Overview (2000) was published by Rutgers. She has published articles on the science, history, and philosophy of the origin-of-life problem and on the interaction between science and religion.

Jean Gayon is professor of philosophy and history of science at the University of Paris–Panthéon Sorbonne. He is author of Darwin’s Struggle for Survival: Heredity and the Natural Selection Hypothesis (Cambridge, 1998).

Thomas F. Glick is professor of history at Boston University.

He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Valencia in 2010.

Peter Gluckman, FRS, is University Distinguished Professor, professor of pediatric and perinatal biology, and head of the Centre for Human Evolution, Adaptation and Disease of the Liggins Institute at the University of Auckland, specializing in fetal and developmental origins of disease. He has written extensively on evolutionary medicine.

John F. Haught , PhD, is a Senior Fellow at Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University and author of Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life (2010).

Jonathan Hodge , at the University of Leeds, researches the history and philosophy of theories of creation and evolution. He is coeditor, with Gregory Radick, of The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (2nd ed., 2009). Two volumes reprint many of his papers: Before and After Darwin (2008) and Darwin Studies (2009).

Brian Hollis is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lausanne. He studies sexual selection and social systems using experimental evolution.

Thierry Hoquet teaches history and philosophy of biology at the Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3, where he is a professor in the Faculty of Philosophy. He is the scientific editor of the Web site http://www.buffon.cnrs.fr/ and in 2009 published Darwin contre Darwin.

Richard Joyce is professor of philosophy at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He previously worked in Australia and the United Kingdom after gaining his PhD from Princeton. He is author of The Myth of Morality (Cambridge, 2001) and The Evolution of Morality (2006) as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters, mostly in the field of metaethics.

James Justus is an assistant professor in the Departments of Philosophy and History and Philosophy of Science at Florida State University, and he was recently a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science.

His research focuses on philosophy of science (biology in particular), environmental philosophy, formal epistemology, and logical empiricism.

William Kimler is associate professor of History and Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Professor at North Carolina State University. Recent public lectures include Darwin Day events and an American Scientist podcast on Darwin.

Barbara J. King , a biological anthropologist, teaches at the College of William and Mary. Her latest book, How Animals Grieve (2013), and her contributions to NPR’s 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog (see www.barbarajking.com) focus on animal cognition/emotion and the animal-human bond.

Jeremy Kirby is associate professor of philosophy at Albion College. He is the author of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: Form, Matter, and Identity (2011) and of several articles concerning epistemology in antiquity.

Mark A. Largent is an associate professor in James Madison College at Michigan State University, where he teaches courses in the history of science and in science policy. He is the author of Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States (2011) and Vaccine: The Debate in Modern America (2012).

Manfred D. Laubichler is President’s Professor at Arizona State University, where he directs the Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity and is associate director of the Origins Project; adjunct professor at the Marine Biology Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts; external professor at the Santa Fe Institute; external faculty member at the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Altenberg, Austria; and visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

James G. Lennox is professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh. Recent publications include “Darwinism and Neo-Darwinsim” in the Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Biology (2008) and “The

viii

Contributors

Darwin/Gray Correspondence, 1857–1869: An Intelligent Discussion about Chance and Design” (Perspectives on Science, 2010). He is author of Aristotle’s Philosophy of Biology (Cambridge, 2001) and coeditor of Being, Nature, and Life in Aristotle (Cambridge, 2010), and he has held fellowships at Clare Hall, Cambridge (1986–87), and the Istituto di Studi Avanzati, University of Bologna (2006).

Tim Lewens is reader in philosophy of the sciences at the University of Cambridge, where he is also a Fellow of Clare College. His publications include Darwin (2007).

David N. Livingstone is professor of geography and intellectual history at Queen’s University Belfast and a Fellow of the British Academy. His most recent book is Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion and the Politics of Human Origins (2008). He was awarded the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 2011 and has been invited to deliver the Gifford Lectures in 2014.

Jane Maienschein is Regents’ Professor, President’s Professor, and Parents Association Professor at Arizona State University, where she directs the Center for Biology and Society, and adjunct professor and director of the HPS Program at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

James Mallet is professor of biological diversity at University College London. His research is mainly on evolutionary genetics, particularly on color pattern mimicry and origins of species in butterflies of the Amazon basin. He has also published a number of historical papers on Darwin, Wallace, and their species concept.

Georgina M. Montgomery is an assistant professor in Lyman Briggs College and the Department of History at Michigan State University. She recently coedited Making Animal Meaning (2011), a collection of ten original essays, three that capture some of the most compelling theoretical underpinnings of animal meaning and seven that illustrate meaning making through studies of specific spaces, species, and human-animal relations.

David Norman is director of the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, reader in Vertebrate Palaeobiology at the University of Cambridge, and Odell Fellow in the Natural Sciences at Christ’s College, Cambridge. His most recent book is Dinosaurs (2005) in the prestigious Very Short Introductions series published by Oxford University Press, and in 2011 he published a lengthy scientific description of the skull of the very early ornithischian dinosaur Heterodontosaurus in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society of London.

Ronald L. Numbers is the Hilldale Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Among his books are The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (2006) and Darwinism Comes to America (1998), both published by Harvard University Press.

Robert Olby is a historian of the biological sciences.

Trained in the United Kingdom, he has taught at Leeds and Pittsburgh. His most recent book, Francis Crick: Hunter of Life’s Secrets, was published in 2009: Now he has returned to work on the history of genetics.

Steven Hecht Orzack is a senior research scientist at the Fresh Pond Research Institute. His current research concerns conservation biology, demography, human genetics, evolutionary biology, and the history and philosophy of biology.

Mark Pallen is a medical microbiologist at the University of Birmingham with wide-ranging interests in evolution, Darwin, and the history of ideas. He is author of the Rough Guide to Evolution (2009) and lives in Malvern a few hundred yards from where Darwin stayed in 1849 and 1851.

Alison Pearn is the associate director of the Darwin Correspondence Project at the University of Cambridge. She has jointly edited nine of the first nineteen volumes of the definitive edition of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin (1985–).

Gregory Radick is professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Leeds. His book The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language (2007) was awarded the 2010 Suzanne J. Levinson Prize of the History of Science Society.

Kenneth Reisman holds a PhD from Stanford University, where he studied philosophy of science and evolutionary biology. He is now a consultant with McKinsey & Company.

Richard A. Richards , professor of philosophy at the University of Alabama, writes on Darwin and the philosophy and history of biology. He recently published The Species Problem, with Cambridge University Press (2010).

Robert J. Richards is the Morris Fishbein Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Chicago.

He has written several books on the impact of evolutionary theory and on German intellectual thought. Currently he is coauthoring a book with Michael Ruse entitled Debating Darwin.

Jesse Richmond earned his PhD in History and Science Studies from the University of California, San Diego, in 2009.

He now teaches courses in the history of science at Union College in Schenectady, New York.

Marsha L. Richmond is an associate professor in the Department of History, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan. A former editor of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin (1985–) and winner of the 2010 Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize of the History of Science Society, her research focuses on heredity studies from Darwin through classical genetics.

Martin Riexinger , MA Tübingen, PhD Freiburg, Habilitation Göttingen, is associate professor at the Unit for Arabic and Islamic Studies at Aarhus University (Denmark).

ix

Contributors

David W. Rudge is an associate professor at Western Michigan University. He has published extensively on H. B. D. Kettlewell’s classic investigations of the phenomenon of industrial melanism from historical, philosophical, and science education perspectives.

Michael Ruse is the author of The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw (1979, 2nd ed., 1999). He is the coeditor with Robert J. Richards of The Cambridge Companion to the Origin of Species (2009).

David Sepkoski is a Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His most recent book is Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline (2012).

Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis is Distinguished Alumni Professor 2009–11 at the University of Florida and teaches the history of science in the Departments of Biology and History.

She is the author of Unifying Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology (1996) and is completing a scientific biography of G. Ledyard Stebbins Jr. David Steffes received his PhD in the history of science from the University of Oklahoma in 2008. He has recently held postdoctoral fellowships from the National Science Foundation at Arizona State University (2009–11) and Florida State University (2008–9), where he has researched the historical intersection of ecology, evolutionary biology, and environmental ideology in the twentieth century.

Marc Swetlitz holds a PhD from the University of Chicago and taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Oklahoma. Swetlitz coedited, along with Geoffrey Cantor, and contributed to Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism (2006).

Bert Theunissen is professor of the history of science at the Descartes Centre for the History of the Sciences and the Humanities at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His current work focuses on the history of animal breeding.

Joseph Travis is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of Biological Science and former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Florida State University. With Michael Ruse, he is the editor of Evolution: The First Four Billion Years, published by Harvard University Press in 2009.

John van Wyhe is a senior lecturer at the National University of Singapore who specializes in Darwin and Wallace. He has edited both The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online (http://darwin-online.org.uk/) and Wallace Online (http:// wallace-online.org/). He is the author or editor of a number of books, including Charles Darwin’s Notebooks from the Voyage of the Beagle (2009), edited with John Chancellor, and Charles Darwin’s Shorter Publications, 1829–1883 (2009). He is completing a book on Wallace’s voyage in the Malay archipelago and the independent path to evolution by natural selection.

Joel D. Velasco received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has been an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University and a visiting professor at Cornell. He is currently the Ahmanson Postdoctoral Instructor in Philosophy at the California Institute of Technology.

Bruce H. Weber is Professor of Biochemistry Emeritus at California State University, Fullerton, as well as Robert H. Woodworth Chair Emeritus in Science and Natural Philosophy at Bennington College. He is the coauthor with David Depew of Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (1995).

Mary Pickard Winsor (known as Polly) retired in 2004 from teaching history of biology, especially systematics and evolution, at the Institute for History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IHPST), University of Toronto.

Since that time she has spoken at conferences and published several articles, including “Creation of the Essentialism Story: An Exercise in Metahistory” in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, and “Taxonomy Was the Foundation of Darwin’s Evolution” in Taxon.

Yang Haiyan is an associate professor in the Department of Medical Humanities at Peking University and was a visiting scholar (2008–9) in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. With a PhD in the history and philosophy of science from the Department of Philosophy, Peking University, her research focuses on cultural history of biology and medical humanities.

Chris Zarpentine recently received his PhD from Florida State University. He currently teaches at the University of Utah.

x

Preface

Charles Robert Darwin, the fifth child (of six) and second son of Dr. Robert Darwin and his wife Susannah (formerly Wedgwood) of Shrewsbury (pronounced Shrowsberry), a town in the English Midlands next to the Welsh border, was born on 12 February 1809 (the same day as Abraham Lincoln across the Atlantic) (Fig. Preface.1). He was sent to one of England’s famous public (in reality private) schools and then at a young age was directed north, to Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, to study medicine. After two years he realized that medicine was not for him, and so he moved south to Cambridge, to work for a degree and prepare for the life of a clergyman in the Church of England. He graduated in 1831.

Through connections he had made as a student, Darwin was offered the chance to join the British warship HMS Beagle, as it set off for South America to map the coastline (Plate I). The voyage took five years, eventually going all the way around the world, returning to England in 1836. By this time, all thoughts of a clerical life had vanished, and Darwin, supported by family money, settled into full-time work as a scientist. He became an evolutionist shortly after the Beagle voyage and discovered the mechanism for which he is famous, natural selection, in 1838. He married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood early in 1839 (Fig. Preface.2), and by that time, starting to show the signs of a still-unknown illness that plagued him for the rest of his life, he settled into the role of a somewhat reclusive invalid. The couple moved to a house in Kent and in all had ten children, seven of whom lived to maturity.

Darwin did not publish for twenty years, and then did so only because a young naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, sent him an essay containing virtually the same ideas that he had discovered in the late 1830s. Rapidly Darwin wrote up his theory, and On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life appeared late in 1859 (Plate II). The work caused great controversy and was attacked by many, including leading churchmen (notably Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford), and defended by many others, including leading scientists (notably Thomas Henry Huxley, morphologist, paleontologist, college teacher and administrator, and general man of letters). Twelve years after Origin, in 1871, Darwin followed with a work on our own species, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. He died at home, his heart exhausted, in April xi

P r e fac e

Figure Preface.1. Charles Darwin at about age six with his younger sister at about age four. From H. E. Litchfield, Emma Darwin, Wife of Charles Darwin: A Century of Family Letters (Cambridge: privately printed by Cambridge University Press, 1904)

1882. By general acclaim he was buried in Westminster Abby, where he lies today, next to the great Isaac Newton.

Darwin is famous. Darwin is controversial. In England to this day his memory is cherished, and his name honored.

His face, nearly covered by his full beard, is on the back of the ten-pound note, a successor to that other great Victorian, Charles Dickens. Elsewhere also the name of Darwin is held in high esteem. Yet in many parts of America, and increasingly in other areas of the world, he is taken to be the apotheosis of all that is wrong with modern society: parents and teachers, church leaders and politicians, do all that they can to exclude him from the classroom. The Darwinian Revolution ranks up there in the history of science with the Copernican Revolution. No one today doubts that the Earth goes around the sun. Many today doubt that we humans are modified monkeys.

This is an encyclopedia about Darwin and his influence, written by a team of experts, drawn from the ranks of practicing scientists as well as from those on the side of the humanities. We are united in the conviction that Charles Darwin and his work were and are very important – in science and in many other fields of human activity and inquiry, including philosophy, theology, linguistics, and literature. If we do not infect you with our enthusiasm and leave you sharing our conviction, we have failed in our task. What we are not trying to do is convince you that Darwin was always right. He was not. Nor, conversely, are we trying to show you that Darwin

Figure Preface.2. An etching of the partner picture of Emma Wedgwood,

by George Richmond, painted to mark her marriage to Charles Darwin.

From H. E. Litchfield, Emma Darwin, Wife of Charles Darwin: A Century of Family Letters (Cambridge: privately printed by Cambridge University Press, 1904)

was basically wrong. He was not. And we are certainly not trying to show that, right or wrong, overall Darwin’s influence is either malicious or overrated. This is not true, although we agree fully that things are far more complex than simple good or ill. Finally, thank goodness, we are not trying to show that everything is known and that everyone agrees. You will see in these pages that often we differ among ourselves about some very important points. This is a good part of what makes it all so exciting. Charles Darwin was one of the towering figures in Western civilization, and his legacy is with us still today. We want to share with you our knowledge and our thrill at great ideas. Some monkeys! Some modification!

The volume is intended to be entire unto itself, but you might want to flesh out your reading by turning to some original sources. The Origin of Species is a remarkably readable book for a classic. All references in this volume, unless it is explicitly stated otherwise, are to the first edition, and this is the one that you should read. (You can tell if you have the first edition because the work does not contain the alternative name for natural selection, “survival of the fittest,” added to some of the later editions.) There is a facsimile (paperback) edition, with a short introduction by the eminent, twentieth-century evolutionist Ernst Mayr, published by Harvard University Press. All of Darwin’s published material is now online (The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, http://darwin-online.org.uk/).

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Thanks to immense labors by John van Wyhe, it is a wonderful resource with much supplementary material, including reviews and the like. It includes the invaluable bibliography Darwin: A Reader’s Guide, by Michael T. Ghiselin.

For almost three decades now a dedicated team of researchers has been producing the definitive edition of Darwin’s voluminous correspondence. In this Encyclopedia, published letters are referred to by volume and page, and also identify the sender and recipient. Thus: Darwin 1985–, 14:423, letter to M. E. Boole, 14 December 1866. There is much work still to be done. It is possible to access online almost all of the letters thus far edited, with synopses of

letters yet to be edited and published. Consult the “Darwin Correspondence Project,” http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/.

Unpublished letters, part of the Correspondence Project, are referred to by catalog number: DCP, 9105, letter to G. H. Darwin, 21 October [1873]. The notebooks in which Darwin worked out his ideas about evolution were transcribed, edited, and published in 1987 by a team headed by Paul Barrett. References are to this edition, with name and page of the particular notebook. Thus: Barrett et al. 1987, D2. Unpublished manuscripts in the Darwin Archives at the University Library, Cambridge, are referenced by catalog number. Thus: CUL DAR 210.8: 42.

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Acknowledgments

“I am rather sorry that you are Editor, as I have always heard that an Editor’s life is one of ceasless trouble & anxiety.” Sharing with Jane Austen and Michael Ruse a lifelong inability to master the spelling of the English language, this is from a letter written by Charles Darwin, on 24 December 1866, to Benjamin Dann Walsh, an American-residing entomologist who had been at Cambridge at the same time as Darwin and who was the associate editor of the Practical Entomologist. Forget the orthography and focus on the sentiment. Never were truer words said! Walsh had no illusions. After the failure of the Practical Entomologist, he took up the editorship of the American Entomologist. On 29 August 1868, quoting Proverbs, he wrote to Darwin: “I have recently returned like a dog to his vomit, & again become Editor of a Monthly Periodical (of which I enclose a Prospectus) devoted to Economic Entomology.”

So one asks oneself why one takes time and effort to edit a volume such as this.

The most obvious reason does not apply. There can be no pretense that this volume is designed to introduce readers to a new and growing field. To use a metaphor, Darwin Studies is a field very well plowed indeed. But that in a way gives us the reason. It became clear after 2009, the year of many conferences and publications celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his great book, On the Origin of Species, that there was huge interest in his ideas and their consequences. Much work was ongoing and many new and interesting facts were coming to light and equally new and interesting interpretations being offered. It was the genius of my editor at Cambridge University Press, Beatrice Rehl, to see that this was so and that there was now need of a volume that gathered all together in one place to give people a full sense of scholarship today on Darwin and his importance. This was a need obviously intensified by the fact that Darwin’s work is still highly controversial in the United States and increasingly elsewhere and that how we think about the topic has immediate consequences for education and much more.

I agreed with her, and after some hesitation – hesitation that would have been much greater had I realized the work involved – I committed myself to editing such a volume. So let me start by thanking all of my contributors (and some who in the xv

Acknowledgments

end did not join the collection) for sharing with me my enthusiasm for such a project and for putting up with my constant prodding and pushing. Ultimately this volume stands or falls by the essays that they have written. I should say that it has been very gratifying to have many very senior people join in the project when the last thing they needed was one more invitation to write a piece for a collection. It has been no less gratifying to find younger people working on all aspects of Darwin and his influence, and to them also I extend my thanks for taking this project so seriously. And it must be said that I am very much in the debt of my scientist authors who saw that we all have much to gain when scholars from different sides of the campus come together to share in understanding the work of a great man and his ever-widening influence of so many aspects of life today. One of the real joys of a job such as this is bringing into the public light work that you have long thought terrific, albeit regrettably unknown. Let me embarrass William Kimler by saying that I was determined to have his wonderful work on mimicry in this volume, and now I do.

Contributors are vital. So also is the editor. Such a volume as this cannot be just a collection of pieces, however good.

The editor has to have an underlying and unifying vision. That sounds a little pretentious, but it is true. My vision starts with the fact that ultimately and fundamentally Charles Darwin was a scientist – not a theologian, not a philosopher, not a literary critic, whatever his influence in those fields. This is the thread, the backbone, of this book, and if you do not see this, then I have failed myself and I have failed you. On this linking theme I have tried to build, to add and extend, in many different directions – those connected to the areas just mentioned like religion, philosophy, literature, as well as to other fields like politics, ecology (both in the more technical scientific sense and in the more popular value-laden sense), feminist theory, and more. I wanted also to show that although Darwin may have been the quintessential Englishman, his influence spread out across the world, changing and yet being changed by the cultures into which it entered. I am particularly pleased that I was able to conclude the volume with an essay on one of the newest areas of evolutionary thinking, its application to medicine. I am very grateful to one of today’s most eminent scientist-physicians for having agreed to coauthor this piece.

My thinking about Darwin and his importance was formed by and has persisted from a year (1972–73) that I spent at Cambridge University attached to the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. I like to joke that I rarely agree with the opinions of the Marxist scholar Robert M. Young, and he never agrees with mine, but I still think that his was the most original mind that turned to the study of Darwin. His influence was reinforced by contact with the great historian of geology Martin Rudwick, as well as by Roy Porter, then the equivalent of a postdoctoral student, and the future historian of medicine William Bynum. Across in the University Library, in charge of the Darwin Archives, was the ever-knowledgeable and helpful Peter Gautrey. Always available and willing to talk and share ideas was Sydney Smith of St. Catharine’s College, who concealed a keen intellect and immense background

understanding behind the facade of being the archetypal, old English buffer.

In the four decades since that tremendous year I have come to know many scientists who worked and continue to work in the tradition of Darwin. Above all, my life has been enriched by my friendship with the great student of social behavior, Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University. If I had not already made the joke about Bob Young, I would make the same joke about Ed Wilson. There isn’t much we agree on, in science or in philosophy. But we are bound by deep feelings of friendship and on my side by the realization that it is the science of men such as he that enrich our understanding of Darwin himself and of his great influence and importance. The same can be said of the many other evolutionists that I have read and met and argued with through the years: these include Ernst Mayr, George C. Williams, John Maynard Smith, William D. Hamilton, Nicholas Davies, Steven Jay Gould, John J. Sepkoski, Francisco J. Ayala, Richard Dawkins, and Randolph Nesse. Deduce who would be most likely to be doing mathematics while having flasks of home-made beer behind him fermenting on the windowsill. Then check your answer.

Throughout my career I enjoyed the friendship and support and advice of my fellow philosopher and historian of science, the late David Hull. I miss his presence every day and my greatest regret is that he was unable to contribute to this volume. He knew about this project and thought I was crazy to do it. Very much alive and contributors are my fellow-born Englishman Jonathan Hodge, whose incredible generosity to all scholars is deservedly legendary; Robert J. Richards, who has convinced me of the great importance to our story of the polymath Herbert Spencer, something of which Bob approves heartily and I do not; Jean Gayon, whose piece was way over-length but so interesting and ground breaking that I broke all of my rules and divided it into two so I had an excuse to use all of it; and Ronald L. Numbers, whose mistaken obsession with American college football is more than balanced by tremendous sensitivity to the history of the relationship between science and religion, especially since the coming of evolutionary thinking. More immediately, during those dark nights that afflict any editor, I have turned for support and advice to Bob Richards, Joe Cain, Greg Radick, David Sepkoski, Jane Maienschein, John Beatty, and many times to my colleague Fritz Davis.

Beatrice Rehl has been my friend and supporter and backbone through this whole task. She has been aided by her assistants and more recently by my production editor Brian MacDonald and indexer Lin Maria Riotto. Martin Young, my illustrator, worked and reworked the material I gave to him.

Eric Rogers, my research assistant, found sources and contacts that neither he nor I dreamed really existed. Mary Tudor complained that when she died they would find “Calais” (the last British possession in France) engraved on her heart. They will find the word “Permissions” on mine. As always my family was there for support. Words cannot tell of my love for my wife Lizzie, who always knows when I need criticism and

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when, emphatically, I do not. This debt should not be taken as an excuse to get yet another dog. Finally, I am very much obliged to my home institution, Florida State University, not just for giving me the time and support to do such a job as this, but for financial aid through the Werkmeister funds

attached to my professorship and through other sources from the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science and the College of Arts and Sciences. I am proud that my former dean and present friend Joe Travis agreed to contribute to this encyclopedia.

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Introduction

T

he ancient Greeks were not evolutionists (Essay 1, “Origins and the Greeks”). It was not that they had an a priori prejudice against a gradual developmental origin for organisms (including humans) but that they saw no real evidence for it. More importantly, they could not see how blind law – that is to say, natural law without a guiding intelligence – could lead to the intricate complexity of the world, complexity serving the ends of things, particularly organisms.

This need to think in terms of consequences or purposes, what Aristotle called “final causes,” was taken to speak definitively against natural origins.

It was not until the seventeenth century – what is known as the Age of the Enlightenment – that we get the beginnings of evolutionary thinking (Essay 2, “Evolution before Darwin”). This could have happened only if there was something, an ideology, sufficiently strong to overcome the worry about ends. Such an ideology did appear, that of progress: the belief that through unaided effort humans could themselves improve society and culture. It was natural for many to move straight from progress in the social world to progress in the biological world, and so we find people arguing for a full-scale climb upward from primitive forms, all the way up to the finest and fullest form of being, Homo sapiens: from “monad to man,” as the saying went (Fig. Introduction.1). It was not generally an atheistic doctrine, being more one in line with “deism,” the belief that God works through unbroken law. But it did increasingly challenge any biblical reading of the past, and it went against evangelical claims about Providence, the belief that we humans unaided can do nothing except for the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.

Radical claims like these did not go unchallenged. Critics, notably the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and his French champion, the comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier, continued to argue that final causes stand in the way of all such speculations. Moreover, particularly after the French Revolution, many thought the idea of progress to be both false and dangerous. For this reason, evolution was hardly a respectable notion. It had all of the markings of a “pseudoscience,” like mesmerism (the belief in bodily magnetism) or phrenology (the belief that bumps on the skull give clues to psychological traits). It existed as an epiphenomenon of a cultural ideology; it was valued because it was value laden through and through. This is not to say 1

Introduction

Figure Introduction.1. Particularly popular in medieval times were sketches of the “chain of being,” showing the structural order of things, from the simplest of nonliving things (like stones) up to the ultimately important, God. This is from the Ladder of Ascent and Descent of the Mind (1305) by the Catalan philosopher Ramon Lull (1232–1315), first printed edition 1512.

Although not in itself dynamic, it resonated in the eighteenth century with thoughts of progress and was surely an influencing factor in the thinking of early evolutionists. From M. Ruse, Monad to Man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996)

that it was an unpopular idea. As we see in our own day, manifested by such pseudosciences as homeopathy (the belief in the curative power of small doses of the poison that in quantity kills), pseudosciences can be very popular. But enthusiasm lay generally with the public and not with the professional community.

The Origin of Species (1859) set out to change all of this.

It is important therefore, from the beginning, to get Charles Darwin right. And as a start on this, we must recognize that the autobiography that he penned toward the end of his life, although captivating and very informative, is in many respects highly misleading. Darwin characterizes himself as a charming young man, not terribly directed or motivated, keenest of all on the country sports of shooting and the like, who almost by chance backed into one of the greatest discoveries of all time.

This is simply not true. We must keep balance and perspective and not let the English penchant for self-deprecating modesty cloud the story. As an individual, Darwin was genuinely warm and friendly, loyal to family and friends, a good master to his servants, and for all that he was very careful with his money, good at managing it, and generous to those in need. He was

Figure Introduction.2. The anatomist Robert Grant (1793–1874) was an ardent evolutionist and a close acquaintance of Darwin when the latter spent two years in Edinburgh training to be a physician. Darwin was lucky in his teachers and mentors, but clearly he had a nose for picking out those who could instruct and help. Permission: Wellcome

loved and with good reason. He was also hard working, even to the point of obsession. He did not have the kind of mind that is good at doing things that impress schoolteachers. He was not that gifted at mathematics, nor was he a brilliant success with languages, dead or living. That put him at a disadvantage, given that back then these were precisely the talents needed for formal academic success. But he was clearly very intelligent; moreover, older people (especially when he went to Cambridge) saw this and almost rushed to be his friends and mentors (see Fig. Introduction.2 and Plate III). Above all, Darwin had an oversized, inventive and discerning eye for a good theory or hypothesis. Added to this is the fact that he was ruthless in his pursuit of an idea and the supporting facts, using others (particularly by courtesy of the penny post introduced in 1840) to gather information for his speculations. He was indeed sick – possibly a psychological sickness but even more possibly purely physical – but he used this sickness to avoid distractions and other commitments. One of his biographers has written of Darwin as having a sliver of ice through his heart, and never were truer words written.1 1

2

The comment is made by Janet Browne in the introduction to her two-volume biography of Darwin: Charles Darwin: Voyaging (1995) and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (2002). In this Introduction, I have relied heavily on this biography for details of Darwin’s life and work. I have also used my own earlier writings, including The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw (1999a); Taking

Introduction

Figure Introduction.3. A cartoon by one of Darwin’s fellow Cambridge students (Albert Way) making fun both of Darwin’s love of horse riding and of his passion for beetle collecting. Permission: Cambridge University Library

That “Darwin of the Beagle” became “Darwin of the Origin” was no mere chance. The abilities and drive meshed smoothly with Darwin’s background and training. There was a great deal of money in the Darwin-Wedgwood family, and it was kept that way by the frequent intermarriages of which Charles Darwin and his cousin Emma Wedgwood were but one instance. Father Robert was a physician and also a very shrewd businessman, arranging mortgages between those with money to lend (generally industrialists) and those with need of money (often aristocrats with land to provide security). Maternal grandfather Josiah Wedgwood was the founder of the great pottery works, one of the biggest successes in the Industrial Revolution (see Plate IV). Charles inherited the cash, and one immediate payoff was that he never had to work formally to make a living. Not for him the boring jobs of marking papers and sitting on departmental committees. Darwin also inherited much that led to the making of the cash. He was no country bumpkin, nor was he (for all that he had been intended for the church) an ethereal scholar with thoughts fixed only on abstruse points of logic or theology. Science and technology lay behind the revolution, and it was this that grasped Charles Darwin from the beginning. From their Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to Philosophy (1986); Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology (1996); Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction?

(1999b); Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? The Relationship between Science and Religion (2001); Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose? (2003a); The Evolution-Creation Struggle (2005); Darwinism and Its Discontents (2006); Charles Darwin (2008); Philosophy after Darwin: Classic and Contemporary Readings (2009c); and The Philosophy of Human Evolution (2012).

earliest days, he and his older brother Erasmus were junior chemists with their own garden-shed laboratory. Then both at Edinburgh and increasingly at Cambridge, Darwin immersed himself in the biological sciences of the day – collecting, reading, listening to others, and attending courses pertinent to these interests (Fig. Introduction.3).

The earth sciences he also pursued, an area of inquiry that was growing and thriving by leaps and bounds. Industry demands fuel, coal now that the trees were vanishing, and materials, iron, copper, and the like. It also has need of transportation, initially waterways, including man-made canals, and then in the nineteenth century the highly successful railway system. All of this demands knowledge of the rocks.

No serious businessman wants to invest in a mine that might come up dry after vast expenditures. Equally, no serious businessman wants great effort made to drill tunnels through solid granite when a system of locks going up or around would be much cheaper. Geology holds the key to understanding what exists beyond direct sight, and by the time that Darwin was an undergraduate at Cambridge, the science was a ferment of action and discovery and controversy. That there was a frisson of worry about the time demands of the earth sciences, and the time restrictions of scripture read conservatively, added to its interest – especially given that, almost to a man, the Cambridge professors had to be ordained members of the Church of England.

It was entirely natural that when Darwin set off on the Beagle voyage – itself an opportunity to naturalize in new and strange parts of the world – geology should have been something foremost in his mind (Essay 3, “Charles Darwin’s Geology: The Root of His Philosophy of the Earth”). It was

3

Introduction

an exciting time to take up the subject, for opinion (in Britain) was starkly divided, between those (the “catastrophists” represented by one of Darwin’s Cambridge mentors, Adam Sedgwick, professor of geology) who thought that every now and then the earth is shaken up by huge earthquakes and the like (after which organisms are created, miraculously, anew) and those (the “uniformitarians” represented by Scottish lawyer-turned-geologist Charles Lyell) who thought that ongoing regular processes, like rain and snow and deposition and erosion, suffice to create the earth’s geological history. Lyell had just started publishing his Principles of Geology (1830–33), and Darwin devoured it and believed. It was ever the basis for his thinking about earth history and was the foundation of the three books on geology that Darwin published in the ten years after the Beagle voyage. No doubt time alone on the ship and the independence forced upon him by the distance from the British scientific community was significant, both in his thinking about geology and also on his mind frame as he now started to work toward the problem of organic origins.

That Darwin, in the mid-1830s – always remember that it was in this decade that Darwin did his creative work, not the future decade of the 1850s when he finally published – was interested in organic origins is no surprise at all. The Cambridge professors loathed and detested evolution, thinking it would subvert both science and religion – they were themselves treading a rather fine, delicate line with their fondness for science and so had to insist to the orthodox that religiously they were purer than pure. Like Mr. Dick in David Copperfield, evolution was their King Charles’s Head. They could not stay away from the topic. A bright young entrant like Darwin had to sense that there was something of interest here – a sense that would be confirmed when (in 1836) the leading astronomer and philosopher of science John F. W. Herschel wrote to Lyell (in a letter that became public) that origins is the “mystery of mysteries” (Cannon 1961). That it was Charles Darwin of all people who became an evolutionist (the usual word was “transmutation,” and “evolution” became generally used for organic origins only in the 1850s and 1860s) is less of a surprise than it might have been. His father’s father, Erasmus Darwin – physician, inventor, friend of business – was an ardent evolutionist, and as a youth Charles Darwin had read his grandfather’s major work, Zoonomia.

(Volume 1 was published in 1794 and Volume 2 in 1796. It is in the first volume that the evolutionary speculations occur.)

(Fig. Introduction.4). Then, when at Edinburgh, Darwin had been close to one of the very few open evolutionists in Britain at that time, the anatomist Robert Grant. Finally, thanks to Lyell – who gave a detailed exposition in the second volume of his Principles – Darwin knew in detail about the evolutionary theory of the Frenchman Jean Baptiste de Lamarck. (Lyell introduced the theory to criticize it. More than one, including Darwin’s contemporary and fellow evolutionist Herbert Spencer, read Lyell and was converted to evolution!)

It is always nice and romantic to suppose that new ideas demand a Road to Damascus experience. Probably for Darwin,

Figure Introduction.4. Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) was one of the early evolutionists. His Zoonomia was widely read, including by his grandson Charles. This is a copy of a painting from 1770 by Joseph Wright of Derby. Permission: Wellcome

becoming an evolutionist was a bit more gradual. There is no question but that major influences, along with the geology that was making him think about the operation of laws in nature and implications for such things as time and place, were the fossils that he was collecting on the Beagle trip. His finds were almost forcing him to think about origins and changes and causes, and Darwin said as much in his autobiography. We must not exaggerate. Again we see that the young Darwin was, from the first, right in the heart of science in a full-time and professional way. Yet, Darwin was not as skilled and knowledgeable a paleontologist as he was geologist (Essay 4, “Looking Back with ‘Great Satisfaction’ on Darwin’s Vertebrate Paleontology”). It is a field that demanded more biological knowledge than he had in those early years. But equally he was no mere tyro, and certainly, when he returned to England, he was keen to get the best authorities to study his findings – an ambition speaking not just to his own knowledge and abilities but also to his rapidly rising status in the scientific community as one who could expect and get the leaders in the field to work with or for him. Richard Owen, anatomist and paleontologist, was the obvious choice, and (given the quality and freshness of the fossils) it was clearly in the interests of both when Owen did work on Darwin’s collection. There is a poignant paradox here, for later it was Owen who became the outstanding opponent of the Darwinians and their theorizing. At first, however, Darwin and Owen were friendly, and although Owen always had yearnings for more metaphysical, German-influenced readings of life’s history, one suspects that the two may well have discussed origins and transmutation, not necessarily in an entirely hostile fashion (Rupke 1994). One thing always to be kept in mind is that Owen never had Darwin’s privileged

4

Introduction

start in life or financial independence. He was in the thrall of men who hated evolution. Later, when he himself moved to a public evolutionary stance, one has trouble seeing if his big complaint with the Darwinians is that they are wrong or that they have stolen ideas that he (Owen) had all along.

Along with the fossils, Darwin was certainly set on the path to evolution by the distributions of the organisms – birds and reptiles particularly – that he saw when the Beagle in 1835 visited the Galapagos Archipelago in the mid-Pacific.

Even more certainly, his thinking solidified early in 1837 when the taxonomist studying his bird collection confirmed that from island to island there are genuinely different species. It was at this point Darwin opened a series of private notebooks (the key species notebooks are B through E, and the key human notebooks are M and N) and jotted down thoughts on evolution. And its causes! Darwin was a graduate of the University of Cambridge, the home two hundred years previously of the great Isaac Newton. Again and again Darwin’s mentors stressed that Newton’s overriding achievement was to provide causal understanding of the major advances in physics in the Scientific Revolution.

Kant, in his Critique of Judgement (1790), had denied that there could be a “Newton of the blade of grass.” Darwin, determined to show him wrong, set out deliberately to find the cause of evolutionary change, the biological equivalent of Newton’s law of gravitational attraction.

The key insight leading to the discovery of the mechanism of natural selection, the systematic differential reproduction of organisms brought on by the limited supplies of food and space, came late in September 1838. It was then that Darwin read the Essay on a Principle of Population (1826) by the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, who argued the population pressures in humans lead to inevitable struggles for existence. Darwin generalized to all species – actually Malthus mentioned that he got his inspiration from a more general discussion by, of all people, Benjamin Franklin – and then argued that success in the struggle will (on average) be a function of the different variations of the competitors and that this will lead to ongoing change – change moreover of a particular kind, namely in the direction of features or characteristics (like the hand and the eye) that aid their possessors. In other words, this process of natural selection (the term is not used for another two or three years) produces contrivances or adaptations, things that seem as if designed for the ends they serve. That is to say, the process or mechanism gives a natural (in the sense of working according to blind, unguided law) explanation of Aristotelian final causes. There is no need to suppose outside, divine intervention.

Thanks to the notebooks, we can map in some detail the exact route to discovery of the mechanism and the thinking that came thereafter (Essay 5, “The Origins of the Origin: Darwin’s First Thoughts about the Tree of Life and Natural Selection, 1837–1839”). In a sense, though, we do have somewhat of an embarrassment of riches, especially when you add in our possession of many of the pertinent works that Darwin read (and annotated extensively) at that time. This has led to

some controversy about what the later Darwin said, especially in his autobiography, about his discovery and what the jottings seem to reveal. Particularly there are questions about the exact role played in the discovery by the analogy with artificial selection, the ways in which agriculturalists and fanciers choose the specimens they favor and use as breeding stock.

Darwin claimed that it was this that led directly to natural selection, but the notebooks (a reading endorsed by the essay given) suggest otherwise. Perhaps the answer is somewhere in the middle. Darwin was certainly conscious of artificial selection and its importance – an industrial revolution demands an agricultural revolution, to feed the workers, and Shrewsbury is in the heart of rural Britain (and the Wedgwoods particularly were interested in breeding) – but whether it played quite the direct role in discovery might be doubted. What is certainly the case – pointed out in no uncertain fashion to Darwin after the Origin was published – is that others had also hit on the notion of natural selection. Darwin at this time even read a pamphlet toying with the idea and noted it. He read: “A severe winter, or scarcity of food, by destroying the weak and unhealthy, has all the good effects of the most skilful selection.” About this (in the margin), showing that he sees that something pertinent is at work here although he still doesn’t quite get the full analogy, Darwin wrote: “In plants man presents mixtures, varies conditions and destroys, the unfavourable kind – could he do this last effectively and keep the same exact conditions for many generations he would make species, which would be infertile with other species.” What does seem to be true is that only Darwin was exploring the possibility that selection could lead to full-blown, permanent change.

Others deserve a footnote and little more. (The pamphlet is

by Sir John Sebright, a noted breeder mentioned in the first chapter of the Origin. See Ruse 1975b.)

A mechanism is not a theory. The public Darwin was getting married and starting a family, falling sick, and working and publishing frenetically on geology (Fig. Introduction.5).

The private Darwin was thinking furiously and by 1842 felt sufficiently confident to put his ideas on paper in a 35-page preliminary essay (usually known as the “Sketch”), and then some two years later in 1844 he expanded his ideas to a much longer, 230-page essay (usually known as the “Essay.”) We know that he did show material to a young botanist, Joseph Hooker (to become one of Darwin’s lifelong friends and a source of much material, physical and intellectual), and he left a note to his wife arranging for publication were he to die prematurely – something he thought quite possible. But that was it, and now the flat-out activity rather slowed as Darwin – the professional, public Darwin – turned increasingly away from geology and toward the life sciences. Obviously, they had always been part of his work and life: the fossils, the Galapagos (and many South American) specimens, both animal and plant, and more. Classification, what biologists call “taxonomy,” was both a vital tool and (certainly for the private evolutionist) a great font of inspiration. In the century previously, the great Swedish biologist Linnaeus had formulated the basic principles of classification (the “Linnaean system”),

5