The Orange of Species: Darwin's Classic Work. Now with More Citrus!

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While Darwin had been somewhat coy about human origins, not identifying any explicit conclusion on the matter in his book, he had dropped enough hints about human's animal ancestry for the inference to be made, [210] [211] and the first review claimed it made a creed of the "men from monkeys" idea from Vestiges. [212] [213] Human evolution became central to the debate and was strongly argued by Huxley who featured it in his popular "working-men's lectures". Darwin did not publish his own views on this until 1871. [214] [215] history” ( Origin 1859: 488). 3. The Reception of the Origin 3.1 The Popular Reception of Darwin’s Theory Various evolutionary ideas had already been proposed to explain new findings in biology. There was growing support for such ideas among dissident anatomists and the general public, but during the first half of the 19th century the English scientific establishment was closely tied to the Church of England, while science was part of natural theology. Ideas about the transmutation of species were controversial as they conflicted with the beliefs that species were unchanging parts of a designed hierarchy and that humans were unique, unrelated to other animals. The political and theological implications were intensely debated, but transmutation was not accepted by the scientific mainstream. Darwinian evolution, under the aegis of natural selection, is also progressive. As Darwin expresses it in the penultimate paragraph of the book: “And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection” (Darwin, 1859, p. 489). This kind of progress is not merely local. In chapter 10 of the Origin, for instance, Darwin asserts that “the more recent forms [of creatures] must, on my theory, be higher than the more ancient; for each new species is formed by having had some advantage in the struggle for life over other and preceding forms” (1859, pp. 336–337). This is a universal proposition, not confined to a local population. He then provides an operational test—at least in imagination—of this consequence. If Eocene creatures adapted to a particular environment were put in competition with modern animals, Darwin conjectures, “the Eocene fauna or flora would certainly be beaten and exterminated” (1859, p. 337). He assumes that the accumulation of improvements would give the advantage to more progressive (i.e., recent) creatures—even if compared with animals adapted to the same environment. This presumption of cumulative adaptational advantage, of course, does not play a role in neo-Darwinian theory. But then, as I’ve pedantically argued, Darwin was not a neo-Darwinian.

A recent article in the New York Times (July 15, 2008) was entitled “Let’s get rid of Darwinism.” It was written by Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist and the author of a best-selling evolutionary book (Judson, 2002). In that article, Judson wrote, “I’d like to abolish the insidious terms Darwinism, Darwinist, and Darwinian. They suggest a false narrowness to the field of modern evolutionary biology, as though it was the brainchild of a single person 150 years ago, rather than a vast, complex and evolving subject to which many other great figures have contributed…. Obessively focusing on Darwin, perpetually asking whether he was right about this or that, implies that the discovery of something he didn’t think of or know about somehow undermines or threatens the whole enterprise of evolutionary biology today.” The term Darwinism also “suggests that Darwin was the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, of evolutionary biology, and that the subject hasn’t changed much in the 150 years since the publication of The Origin.” Judson went on to suggest that constantly using terms such as Darwinism and Darwinian is rather like calling all of modern aeronautical engineering “Wrightism” after the Wright brothers, or referring to all fixed-wing aircraft as “Wrightian” planes. Similar sentiments were expressed by another well-known biologist, Carl Safina, in a New York Times article (Feb. 10, 2009), entitled “Darwinism must die so that evolution may live.” And Darwin’s views certainly did revolutionize. Yet before they could do so, they had to be accepted as fact. To ensure this he evoked the power of the factual itself. In Chapter II, Darwin specifies that the distinction between species and varieties is arbitrary, with experts disagreeing and changing their decisions when new forms were found. He concludes that "a well-marked variety may be justly called an incipient species" and that "species are only strongly marked and permanent varieties". [121] He argues for the ubiquity of variation in nature. [122] Historians have noted that naturalists had long been aware that the individuals of a species differed from one another, but had generally considered such variations to be limited and unimportant deviations from the archetype of each species, that archetype being a fixed ideal in the mind of God. Darwin and Wallace made variation among individuals of the same species central to understanding the natural world. [117] Struggle for existence, natural selection, and divergence [ edit ]See also: History of evolutionary thought and History of biology Developments before Darwin's theory [ edit ] About 170 years after its first publication, On the Origin of Species and the theory it has come to represent still define the way in which the biological sciences conceive the dazzling diversity of life. Its continuing legacy consists in laying out a view of life as “one grand system” and in having described the biological mechanisms shaping it. As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form. [112]

The conceit that nature is working for “the improvement of each organic being” is repeated several more times throughout the Origin (1859, pp. 149, 194, 201, and 489). Despite the ravages of natural selection, the nature that appears in Darwin’s theory nonetheless expresses compassion and altruistic concern—and thus hardly acts as a mechanical, indifferent force. the main factor accounting for the origin of human races. 4.3 The Ethical Theory of the Descent of Man Individuals less suited to the environment are less likely to survive and less likely to reproduce; individuals more suited to the environment are more likely to survive and more likely to reproduce and leave their heritable traits to future generations, which produces the process of natural selection (fact). a b c The book's full original title was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. In the 1872 sixth edition, "On" was omitted, so the full title is The origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. This edition is usually known as The Origin of Species. The 6th is Darwin's final edition; there w This is to say that, while life was first created by a God, it later became subject to the laws of mutation, variation, and natural selection – the evolutionary forces described by Darwin.Various biographers have proposed that Darwin avoided or delayed making his ideas public for personal reasons. Reasons suggested have included fear of religious persecution or social disgrace if his views were revealed, and concern about upsetting his clergymen naturalist friends or his pious wife Emma. Charles Darwin's illness caused repeated delays. His paper on Glen Roy had proved embarrassingly wrong, and he may have wanted to be sure he was correct. David Quammen has suggested all these factors may have contributed, and notes Darwin's large output of books and busy family life during that time. [50]