HOQUET 2018

HOQUET 2018

Introduction

Darwinian e Darwinianism já se referiam ao Erasmus. Conexão com Erasmus apontada por Hodge (1985, p 238) e Sloan (203) nos Companions.
Effect of readings > Beer.

Beer beautifully shows how Darwin’s own language allowed his contemporary readers to assimilate the Origin according to various protocols. She emphasises how Darwin constantly rephrased his sentences, but also how “the Darwinian theory has … an extraordinary hermeneutic potential— the power to yield a great number of significant and various meanings”.

Relação com a reescritura e o público

this constant process of rewriting and adapting to various audiences created a lot of ambiguities in Darwin’s text and his readers were often keen to underline these difficulties, to the point that, like Daedalus’ statues, “the object of popular consumption” would have escaped the control of its crafter.

was Wright himself truly faithful to Darwin? An anonymous reviewer of Wright’s rebuttal noted that the young mathematician placed too much focus on natural selection, whereas Darwin himself, in the Descent of Man, pronounced this important caveat: that he may, in previous editions of the Origin, have “attributed too much to the action of natural selection or survival of the fittest”. 21 Starting with the fifth edition of his Origin of Species, Darwin stated his intention to limit natural selection’s sphere of action to “adaptive changes of structure”.

Leituras por cima de leituras

Mivart read Darwin and commented on his text. Wright read Mivart reading Darwin and then, in turn, commented on this reading. Next, an anonymous reviewer voiced his opinion on Wright reading Mivart reading Darwin, having himself also read some of Darwin’s texts to conclude, quite paradoxically, that Darwin might actually be closer to Mivart than to Wright. Such entangled stacks of readings complexify the meaning of the word “Darwinism”, the evaluation of Darwin’s contribution to evolutionary theory, and the very existence of a so-called “Darwinian revolution”.

"hold it up against the host of interpretations it has spawned"
Darwin selecionista

Moore happily boasted that “fortunately” he had located “at least one passage in the Origin of Species that remained substantially unaltered throughout the book’s six editions (1859– 1872)”, and which therefore could be deemed to “[ distil] the essence of Darwinism into less than five hundred words”: the summary placed at the close of Darwin’s chapter on “natural selection”— a passage made striking by its overall hypothetico-deductive tone, with its repeated use of “if” and its eagerness to bring irrefutable facts to the table and then draw unavoidable conclusions from them; a passage also striking in its combination of two kinds of selection, both natural, leading to extinction, and sexual, leading to a competitive advantage in the mating process. 25 One may agree with Moore that readers of the Origin seeking out its core meaning should naturally turn to passages such as this since they offer, distilled, both the very spirit of Darwin’s epistemology and the main thrust of his contribution to science. Readers who are first and foremost intent on finding pronunciations of Darwin’s principal discovery are right to turn to those pages where the principle of natural selection is explained.
[...]
While reading the Origin, one may indeed be struck by the fact that Darwin seems sometimes to undermine the centrality of natural selection. The philosopher Michael Ruse, in his own plain-speaking manner, has related a similar feeling of surprise, and even confusion, at the way Darwin dealt with his concept of “natural selection” in the Origin of Species: [Ruse, 2008, p75]

Conclusão

Darwin’s writings are complex and not reducible to the picture of him presented in extreme selectionist (or “Neo-Darwinian”) versions of his theory— such as Wallace’s and Weismann’s, or that espoused by the Modern Synthesis— whereby natural selection is the sole legitimate explanatory cause within evolution. [....] while Darwin did of course propose a theory of natural selection, his Origin of Species can just as accurately be seen as a contribution to the study of variation and as the grounding for a new cosmology. Darwin-the-Selectionist is not the sole inhabitant of the Origin. Among the plurality of Darwins the Origin contains, one is of particular interest to us: Darwin the theoretician of variation, the ponderer of the conditions that bring it about, the seeker after the laws that govern its manifestation.

Darwin variacionista

Lamarck

First, Darwin’s relation to Lamarck is complex and he argued vehemently against any amalgamation of their respective theories. Darwin writes Lamarck into the “History of Error”, and to those who like to think the Origin offers nothing more than “Lamarck’s views improved by [Darwin’s]”, 35 the latter retorts that the author of Philosophie Zoologique made no original discoveries, noticing and relating only the obvious; general theories even Plato had been able to formulate. For this, Lamarck’s volume is written off as “a wretched book”, “one from which (I well remember my surprise) I gained nothing”. 36
Besides, the word “Lamarckism” doesn’t help us here. The intellectual movement known as Lamarckism can be of course identified with the ideas that Jean-Baptiste Monnet de Lamarck published in his Philosophie Zoologique (1809) fifty years before the Origin; but the history of Lamarckism is a complex one. Pietro Corsi has demonstrated what Lamarck’s fame owed, especially in Britain, to the second volume of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. 37 Peter Bowler even claimed that Lamarckism in France might well stem from the introduction of post-Darwinian German ideas— specifically Ernst Haeckel’s. 38 To many thinkers, Henri Bergson (Creative Evolution, 1907) among them, Lamarckism is an American tradition, through the works of Edward Drinker Cope, Alpheus Hyatt, or Alpheus Packard, who apparently coined the term “Neo-Lamarckism”. In its American version, Lamarckism embraces mystical theories of psychic forces driving evolution (bathmism, mnemogenesis). 39
Just like “Darwinism”, the theoretical entity known as “Lamarckism” has fuzzy boundaries. It acts more like a catch-all term for any evolutionary idea that does not accept natural selection as its central mechanism. 40 “Lamarckism” can designate the theory which states that evolution’s driving force resides within the will of individuals. It can indicate a theory of soft inheritance, where use and disuse, or environmental conditions, play a triggering role in the transformation of living forms.
As a result, I intentionally avoided referring to “Lamarckism”, a hodgepodge of various non-selectionist theses— few of which could in fact be interpreted as being Lamarck’s own theses. Indeed, as far as
possible, I have tried to avoid any such general terms as “Darwinism” or “Lamarckism” as I believe them to be a posteriori reconstructions which serve only to obfuscate real debate by posting easy-to-identify labels on the theoretical positions at play.
Given this fuzziness and all-encompassing character of the “Lamarckian” theoretical entity, it would of course be easy to isolate “Lamarckian” elements in Darwin’s works. As I have already mentioned, this would be true even of the first edition of the Origin (1859), and it has been claimed that the case for a “Lamarckian Darwin” only gets stronger with each subsequent edition, reaching a pinnacle in the final 1872 text. 42 Darwin undoubtedly included more than his fair share of “Lamarckian” elements in his writings: Chapter V on the “laws of variation” is the locus classicus one would inhabit in order to be fully surrounded by Lamarckian-esque notions on the effects of use and disuse in inheritance, etc. However, one must never forget that Darwin constantly distanced himself from Lamarck’s “wretched book” and its imperfect ideas. For all these reasons, it would be a violence to history and quite simply incorrect to equate Darwin with Lamarck. The case of a progressive “Lamarckianisation of Darwin”, increasing with each successive edition of the Origin, is often alluded to. But I doubt this conclusion as it leans on fragile evidence: some of Darwin’s additions to the Origin emphasised the role of natural selection while others stressed the importance of still other means of modification. In conclusion, a “Lamarckian Darwin” would be a very complex figure, one that would most likely create more problems than it solves. So then, there were not only two Darwins— namely, a “Darwinian” one and a “Lamarckian” one— but more.

Darwin cosmológo

“Darwinism” is often understood as the name of a new philosophy: it questions the limits of knowledge, causality or teleology. Reflecting this, many readers contemporary to Darwin called for his theory not to be criticised for its methodological foundations (it is meaningless to relegate it to the status of mere “hypothesis” since hypotheses are a normal part of how science works) and instead celebrated it as a new metaphysics. These same voices appealed for his work to be analysed according to the coherency of the system it proposed.
[...]
But all of these precautions were in vain. Indeed, it is as if, even before Darwin’s work was published, a certain number of questions had been tied, as though necessarily, to any theory of the origin of species by natural transmutation instead of by special creations that might come forth. Among these questions, two come regularly to the fore: the origin of life, and the origins of mankind.

Métodologia

The boundless erudition of the “Darwin Industry” has trained us into thinking that any thorough and sound work on Darwin should follow him step by step from the Beagle voyage, all along the winding ways traced in his notebooks, via the comparison of different versions of his theory, and, stopping off at each of the multiple editions of his works and their numerous variations en route, should then continue right up to the great man’s death. “From the Beagle to the Grave”
However, in spite of the enormous bulk of Darwinian literature, many lay readers deciding to read Darwin’s published work do not know every detail of Darwin’s thoughts and nonetheless start reading his book. A great majority of readers open the Origin with little or no prior knowledge of what Darwin’s thought was in 1837, 1844, or 1872. They are simply curious to read one of the milestones of scientific literature. As a result, and despite Darwinian scholars publishing thousands of pages demonstrating to us that Darwin’s world was nothing like our own, generation after generation, students of biology and philosophy, laymen, curious minds of all types still open up a popular edition of the Origin, such as the Penguin paperback, expecting to read the thoughts of a contemporary, someone they will understand at first reading, the familiar silhouette of the bearded old man on the cover. More importantly, they expect the book to contain a fully developed theory of evolution.
Sobre Darwinismo

“Darwinism” is an unclear, historically fluctuating set of theories or hypotheses. This has been studied by, among others, David Hull, James Moore or David Depew and Bruce Weber. 53 An atheist or materialist Darwinism can be defended, just as there is a coherent Christian Darwinism, or, if one prefers, a “Christian Darwinisticism”— a neologism coined by Morse Peckham to suggest a fusion of Darwinism and romanticism. 54 There have been gradualist Darwinians but also saltationist disciples too. In short, any narrow definition of Darwinism will always be incorrect for there are always plenty of exceptions to be found. Puzzled by the term “Darwinism”, Jacques Roger once bluntly asked: “I wonder whether it would not be simpler to start with Darwin himself and what he wrote than with an imaginary Darwinism whose existence in the realm of ideas creates unnecessary difficulties?” 55 However, it is hard to avoid speaking about “Darwinism”, and, indeed, everyone does refer to this term. Friends and foes of evolutionary ideas all refer to “Darwinism”. August Weismann, Alfred Russel Wallace, Clémence Royer, and many others all devoted papers, books, and encyclopaedia entries to “Darwinism”. But we suspect that their “Darwinisms” are always attempted coups or take-over bids: they claim to redefine whole disciplinary fields under their own views. It may well be that “Darwinism” is nothing more than a straw man that no one actually believes in. As Jean Gayon put it: “any historian intending to deal with all the historical manifestations of “Darwinism” has first to tackle their extreme heterogeneity”. 56 As Gayon’s book masterfully shows, we should not buy into the epistemological fable of a “Darwinism” that developed smoothly from 1859 onwards. Darwinism is a contested field involving various attempts at a new “synthesis” as well as proclamations of the “death” of Darwinism in favour of some emergent general theory of evolution. [...] All reference to Darwinism must be apprehended as a potential source of controversy, sometimes rolled out as a slogan, other times as a foil serving the ends of other positions. For these reasons, we would be wise to adopt David Hull’s stance when he concludes that “Darwinism” is a historical entity that must always be apprehended in a given context in time and space.
[...] cannot be reduced to the development of the theory of natural selection. In Darwin’s time, several dimensions, already mentioned above (variation, inheritance, natural selection), were sources of puzzlement and inquiry.
[...]
And yet its popular reception largely dispensed with natural selection, something Alvar Ellegård’s 1958 study of popular journals has ably demonstrated. 67 But it appears that the scientific reception of Darwinism also regularly dispensed with this key aspect. It is as though Darwin’s work was simply absorbed into debates on evolution that had begun long before it arrived. 68 [See, notably, Corsi 1988b; Secord 2000]
Indeed, “Darwinism” must not be seen as some intangible theory, nor the Origin of Species as a monolith that delivered the “truth” of modern biology. Rather than renewing praise of the Origin as a monument, it seems more useful to approach it as a complex philosophical object, subject to rival interpretations, and to thoroughly explore its every twist and turn.

Darwin as a text

Qual edição do Origin escolher? História das edições

This is why I chose to re-immerse myself in the Origin. But which edition of the Origin was I to choose? Here again I encountered the great figure of Ernst Mayr and the modern evolutionary synthesis, and their defining role in Darwinian debates. Above all, when it comes to the Origin itself, today’s scholarly consensus opts for the first edition from 1859. This preference has been well recognised ever since Harvard University Press republished the first edition of the Origin in facsimile in 1964, complete with a preface by Ernst Mayr. In Mayr’s view, the reason we should return to the initial eruption of this artefact onto the scientific scene, is that “the publication of the Origin of Species ushered a new era in our thinking about the nature of man”, thereby sparking an intellectual revolution, “greater than those caused by the works of Copernicus, Newton, and the great physicists of more recent times”. It is in the first edition that we find Darwin’s thought in its pure state, packing its full iconoclastic punch. As Mayr puts it, “Chastened, Darwin softened his statements and withdrew some claims in later editions”. Such attenuation ultimately rendered the sixth edition unfit for penetrating the meaning of Darwin’s true thoughts.
Over the course of the various editions, Darwin made all sorts of modifications, from simple comma corrections to considerable reorganisations. What’s more is that he attached great importance to these changes, even though today they are often seen as mere parasitic appendages. Present-day readings of the Origin set their sights on a “pure” Darwin. This goal preys on the minds of more than a few readers, and for this ill there is but one available tonic: to return to the original text. 50 Lurking behind these concerns with establishing a definitive version, the root cause of disquietude stemming from later editions of the Origin is a preoccupation with distinguishing, as much as humanly possible, “Darwinism” from all forms of non-Darwinian non-Darwinian evolution, such as the “orthogenetic” doctrines which posit “laws of necessary development” at work in evolution.
But in fact, even Mayr, in his optimistic comeback to the first edition, had to come to the conclusion that the original 1859 edition itself was enough to produce perplexity in the reader. The pristine 1859 edition turned out not to be the ultimate manifest of Darwinism, as Darwin himself appeared not to be the unconditional and orthodox defender of natural selection he was expected to be. From the time of its first publication in 1859, On the Origin of Species, Darwin’s masterpiece, already contained its fair share of ambiguities and diverse aspects, each of which has been extensively underlined, commented, and criticised. While the Origin did rapidly establish itself as an indispensable book and, more broadly, as one of the most remarkable works of Western science, it also gave immediate rise to innumerable different readings, in turn multiplied by the successive editions and translations, each and every one of which poses its own problems. What does it mean to be a Darwinian when we know that the role of natural selection was to some degree attenuated by Darwin himself, beginning with the 1859 version and reinforced with ever more insistence thereafter?
[....]
In the face of such a multiplication of perspectives from within Darwin’s manuscripts and letters, the text of the Origin itself offers scant reassurance: the innumerable differences between the six successive versions of the published text only add legitimacy to each of their respective claims to being the proper edition of reference.
With every successive biographical stage, a new Darwin steps forward: there is the Darwin of 1837 (the writing of his first notebooks), of 1838 (reading Malthus), of 1842 (writing the Sketch), of 1844 (writing the Essay), of 1854 (starting his Big Species Book), of 1859 (first publication of the Origin), of 1872 (sixth edition of the Origin), plus many others besides— the Darwin of the unpublished manuscripts, for instance, the Darwin of the margin notes, or the Darwin of the correspondence— a whole host of Darwins whose
mutual coherence we can no longer be sure of. Is one the genuine article while all the others are false Darwins? While Dov Ospovat focused on Darwin’s London years (the 1830s), Peter Vorzimmer focused on the post-Origin years: as a result, their views on Darwin are totally different, but can one then conclude that one is right and the other wrong?
On top of this, we also have to deal with a multitude of readings of Darwin, each one latching on to some single sentence and then marching under its banner. “Most readings”, James A. Secord wrote, “leave little or no trace— an ownership signature or a few pencil marks. Only certain types of reading, such as academic study and reviewing, produce more substantial records”. 63 These academic readings and reviews form the raw material from which I draw a sceptical or perspectivist lesson. Reading is a process of “defamiliarisation”, as Jeff Wallace has put it: “while helping us to see the Origin anew, [such defamiliarisations] also reveal that there is no thing itself to which defamiliarisation can give us access— no ‘stone’ to be seen in its original ‘stoniness’ ”64 Readings are multiple points of view diffracted from a unique object, in itself unattainable.

how is it that a single text, the Origin of Species, can lend itself to so many contradictory interpretations?

PART 1: Darwin-the-selectionist and beyond

1. A labyrinthine Origin

Historically, depending on whether readers were referring to one edition or another, they could easily play one Darwin against another. [Dá um exemplo bem claro]

In this episode involving the bear/ whale story, and on many other occasions like it, it is the various versions of the text that come into conflict, opening the way for vastly different readings and competing visions of what Darwin really had in mind. Darwin chose to delete a speculation that proved to be embarrassing, but not before critical damage had been done, as Alvar Ellegård [pp 238-41] has also pointed out.

"It seems a queer plan to give an abstract of an unpublished work" CD para Hooker, 30/07/1858

Darwin always quite bluntly presented his book as an “abstract”, inviting all the expected correlative implications this brought with it. Usually, its status as an “abstract” is perceived as being a positive quality, since it resulted in Darwin maintaining a clear line of argumentation. Darwin himself, however, certainly saw it as a failing. Having amassed hundreds of pages of material, Darwin (strictly to avoid being beaten to the post) decided at first to publish an abstract of his book under the quite cumbersome title of “An abstract of an essay on the origin of species and varieties through natural selection”. 15 In the first edition of the book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Darwin makes constant reference to a “longer work” that he was planning to complete. 16 The original Natural Selection manuscript was pushed aside (it would eventually be published post-humously in 1975) to make room for other writings, not to mention to allow time for Darwin’s involvement in the numerous debates sparked by the Origin. Instead, Darwin dedicated considerable time to carefully reworking the 1859 text, gradually turning his Origin into a book of many versions. During Darwin’s own life, no fewer than six successive editions were published by John Murray.

Questão das edições novamente

Some critics go so far as to suggest that dramatic modifications even changed the overall meaning of the Origin as well as the role that Darwin attributed to natural selection in evolutionary processes. But, unfortunately, within the immensely wide surface of Darwinian literature, those modifications remain today as what Darwin might have called “a grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry”. 18 Although we know what kind of misprints distinguish the first printing from its successors (“ speceies” on page 20, line 11), little has been written about the conceptual or theoretical evolution of the Origin. Two notable exceptions here are the works of Peter Vorzimmer and Helen P. Liepman. Peter Vorzimmer’s study, Charles Darwin: the Years of Controversy. The Origin of species and Its Critics (1972), takes as its focus the period between the first publication of the Origin (1859) and Darwin’s death (1882). Vorzimmer identifies “some fluctuation” in Darwin’s thought on the role of natural selection: while in 1859 Darwin may have thought that he had effectively demonstrated the validity of natural selection, however, by the end of his life in 1882, Darwin had become, under critical attack, increasingly frustrated by his inability to prove to the satisfaction of fellow scientists that the selection process was the sole or, in some cases, the principal agent of evolutionary development. 19
Throughout his book, Vorzimmer aims at showing that Darwin was muddled by his own poor conception of inheritance. Helen P. Liepman also documents an evolution in Darwin’s text: while the first alterations, in the main, support the theory of accumulation of modifications by natural selection, the last two editions grant more leeway to non-selective forces. 20
In spite of these contributions to the literature, it is still difficult to get a grasp on the issues and concerns that are really (i.e. theoretically, intellectually, conceptually, literally, or even socially) at play in and behind the various editions. The present chapter deals with the following questions: do any major changes of doctrine occur in the Origin, especially regarding the role of natural selection in the transformation of species, in the years from 1859 to 1872? In other words, is the 1859 edition of the Origin better conceived of as a culmination or as just a starting point? Can the later modifications Darwin made to the original edition all more or less be reduced to the categories of corrected typos, stylistic improvements, and annotation? After all, as Robert C. Stauffer has noted, “the Origin of species was, I believe, unique among Darwin’s published books and formal scientific papers in appearing without a single footnote”. 21 But in spite of its lack of footnotes, the Origin also, in some respects, constitutes a work of compilation, as Darwin himself wrote to Hooker while gathering data for his “big book” on species.
Following Darwin’s death, the sixth edition was widely considered to be the best, the one that represented Darwin’s final word on the origin of species. But in 1950, Cyril D. Darlington published what he described as “the first reprint of the first edition, the only changes being in punctuation”. In his foreword, Darlington claims that, due to Wallace’s essay (which gave Darwin “the shock of his life”), Darwin drew up the Origin as a short abstract: Freed from the mass of learned references, it gave the gist of the story; it gave what everybody wanted to know. The strange thing is that the Origin of species as we now see it in its first edition still gives the gist of the story. The foundations that it laid have provided the foundations of a large part of science just as Newton’s foundation did nearly two hundred years earlier. 23
Darlington was undoubtedly the first to bring the first edition back to the fore and he went to a great deal of effort in order to justify his claim that it was this edition that should be read ahead of any other. 24
Although Darlington’s advice was not heeded by Julian Huxley for the Mentor Edition (1958), 25 in 1964 Ernst Mayr, the Harvard ornithologist serving as director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, published a facsimile of the first edition of the Origin, in which he stated: “When we go back to the Origin, we want the version that stirred up the Western world, the first edition”. 26 Mayr’s reprint, however, made no mention of Darlington’s prior undertaking. Due to the wide distribution of the Harvard reprint, it is undoubtedly Mayr we have to thank for popularising this novel way of considering that, given the history of the Origin, the first edition is still undoubtedly the best one to read. After Mayr, it became accepted that the post-1859 editions clearly drifted away from Darwin’s original intentions.
There have been very few exceptions among subsequent editions in English to Darlington and Mayr’s considered opinion. 27 Gillian Beer chose to print the second edition, since it might itself “be considered to be a reprint”, or rather “Darwin’s immediate urgent response to the private and public reception of the Origin”. 28 But as for the third to sixth editions, it seems that their fate in the archives has been definitively marked as “Out of print”. As Beer puts it, these later editions “move the text increasingly far away from many of Darwin’s initial arguments in an attempt to assimilate the responses and critiques of his contemporaries, particularly palaeontologists and physicists”. 29 Much more now than a mere historical detail, the variation of the Origin throughout its successive editions is acknowledged as a theoretical problem.
Why, as Darlington and Mayr claim, should the first edition be given preference? Darwin described his book as “one long argument”. 30 It seems, however, that through the process of revision this “one” argument became less and less visible; that Darwin made his case for natural selection “less concise and pithy”, as Joseph Carroll put it, 31 and more equivocal and diffuse. The first edition, asserts Penguin editor John Burrow, “presents in many ways a more clear-cut and forceful version of Darwin’s theory” than the five later editions: “Darwin weakened his argument in an attempt to meet criticisms”. 32 After 1859, Darwin allowed himself to be led along the wrong path by critics whose objections belied commitments to either barren hypotheses or archaic frames of mind. And even in those cases where the book was actually “bettered” by a modification, either clarified or sharpened, it seems that, still, we have no genuine need for those later versions that lack the freshness of the first edition. Only a few short weeks separate versions [a] and [b], something Gillian Beer advances as her explanation for choosing to reprint the latter. John Murray, Darwin’s publisher, was more than 250 copies short for the orders received during his autumn sale and so he asked Darwin, then undergoing hydropathic treatment in Ilkley, Yorkshire, if he would revise his text. 33 The “Ilkley edition” contains only 7 per cent of the total variants found in editions [b] to [f]. 34 Darwin described it as “merely a reprint of the first with a few verbal corrections and some omissions”, or “only Reprint; yet I have made a few important corrections”. 35 As for the third edition [c], major changes include an “Historical sketch” where Darwin acknowledges the achievements of his predecessors, along with a postscript on Asa Gray’s favourable review, suggesting that Darwin wished to reconcile his theory with natural theology— but both ended up disappearing again by the fourth edition. Within the body of the third edition, almost half of its specific changes (which, in sum, amount to 14 per cent of the total changes across all editions) appear in Chapters IV and IX. These include Darwin’s reaction to some major reviews (by Owen, Bronn, and Harvey). The fourth edition [d] represents 21 per cent of the total revisions. It gives titles to many previously unnamed sections and makes allowances for new discoveries and new objections (Falconer).
The fifth edition [e], comprises nearly 30 per cent of the total changes and a more than 20 per cent increase in length. It is noteworthy on at least two accounts: for the introduction of Herbert Spencer’s famous expression “survival of the fittest” and for the responses it provides to certain important objections (like those of Fleeming Jenkin).
The sixth edition [f] is usually regarded as the last and was edited just after the publication of the Descent of Man (1871), which had sparked renewed and expanded interest in Darwin’s works. Designed for a wider audience, it was smaller and cheaper than its predecessors (about half the previous price) and also included a glossary, a key element in modifying the cultural status of the book, in that it fully assumed its new popular readership target audience. 36 A new chapter on “Miscellaneous Objections to the theory of natural selection” (Chapter VII), consisted of parts taken from Chapter IV cobbled together with additional material whose chief aim was to rebut St. George Mivart’s attacks (whose Genesis of Species was also published in 1871). The major issue with [f] resides in Darwin’s suspected “Lamarckianism”: had Darwin now diminished the role of natural selection and put more stress on “other means of modification”, such as habit, use and disuse of parts, direct effect of external conditions, etc.? With the 1872 edition, Darwin’s modification of the Origin came, at last, to an end. He corrected one more final printing that was issued in 1876, but this contained only the most minor of changes.
The influences that motivated Darwin to change his text are numerous. Ernst Haeckel is responsible for the introduction of the phrase “phylogeny, or the lines of descent of all organic beings”. 37 Other publications, such as Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Biology (1864), influenced Darwin’s maturing views on the question of variations. 38 Beyond such savant input, he was also tremendously affected by reviews and critiques and these, too, became powerful incentives in the ceaseless process of revising the text. Furthermore, he used later editions as a means to correct certain blunders: his figures on the denudation of the Weald, for instance, disappear from [c]. 39
In 1983, Gillian Beer suggested a different interpretation of how Darwin modified the Origin: she claimed that “the multivocality of Darwin’s language reached its furthest extent” in [a], due to him relying on expressivity rather than rigour. 40 The expressive qualities of [a] allowed space for an exuberance and multiplicity of significations that were not to be permitted in later editions: Darwin, then combatting misunderstandings, felt the need to be more consistent with his lexical palette. Yet, it seems that the more Darwin modified his book, the more intertextuality he added, the more the layers of multiple meanings became inextricably entangled.
The Origin evolved considerably between 1859 and 1872 and its various editions provide perfect ammunition for those wishing to uncover a variety of Darwins. In the following sections, I introduce several domains where fluctuations in Darwin’s thinking can be spotted: natural selection, variation, progressive evolution, Lamarckism, religion. To begin, I will lay out just an overview of how each theme changed through the six editions of the Origin. We will then return to these various domains in greater detail insofar as they constitute the main focus of later chapters.
[...]
Richard Owen, in his 1860 review, had already compared the first two versions and then violently attacked Darwin’s attempts to amend his own text. To Owen, the wording of [b] was no improvement on [a]: where [a] was vague, [b] was clear testimony to Darwin’s cowardliness. 43 Owen was indignant: in modifying his text, Darwin changes only details instead of revising and clarifying the global argument. Owen was criticising Darwin for his miserly addition of a single word “almost”, because, in reality, the problem posed by the bear/ whale controversy was a much more serious one: what can actually be effected by natural selection?
From early on in the Origin’s existence, Darwin had to explain that he did not conceive of natural selection “as an active power or Deity” (c85, Var 165). The great failing of the term “Natural selection” is that it tends to personify Nature: but one should never forget that it is a metaphorical expression. Darwin made efforts to be more accurate, recognising that “several writers [had] misapprehended or objected to the term natural selection”. 44 Darwin bluntly confessed that a large portion of the criticisms levelled at his beloved term were well-founded: “In the literal sense of the word, no doubt, natural selection is a misnomer”. Later, in the fifth edition, Darwin would go so far as to call it “a false term”. 45 Nature does not literally select, only metaphorically. Darwin even tried to explain the merit in the paradoxical character of the term “natural selection” to Heinrich G. Bronn, the German translator of the Origin: “its meaning is not obvious and each man could not put on it his own interpretation”; furthermore, the expression connects both “variation under domestication and nature”. 46 Personifications also cloud around the term “Nature” itself. In one addition, Darwin suggests how it is “difficult to avoid personifying the word Nature” and he firmly reminds us that by “Nature” he means only “the aggregate action and product of many general laws, and by laws the sequence of events as ascertained by us”. 47
In [d], Darwin deals with the issue of natural selection gradually producing “utter and absolute sterility” between two species. 48 This point is crucial for the question of “the origin of species”, or what Darwin terms in 1869 “species in process of formation” (e318). Darwin’s sentence was quoted by his son Francis Darwin in a polemic against George Romanes. 49 In 1886, Romanes claimed that natural selection was not sufficient to explain the formation of interspecific sterility and that another process was required, a process he called “physiological selection”. This suggestion entailed a huge debate on the “Darwinian” character of Romanes’ hypothesis. 50 Did Darwin’s sentence support Romanes’ physiological selection? Or, on the contrary, did it destroy Romanes’ claim to innovation? Through this example, we see that [a] is not the only version to have played an instrumental part in the reception of Darwin’s ideas. Darwinian scholarship, including that of Darwin’s own son, has always been eager to dig into the various layers of the Origin, to find the unexpected gold nugget that supports their own— or ruins others’— claims either to being Darwin’s true heirs or, perhaps a greater prize, to being themselves original.
Moreover, it seems that over time Darwin became more committed to isolation as a necessary condition for speciation, a point he had previously denied. 51 Here, the German naturalist Moritz Wagner undoubtedly played a role. 52 By 1868, Wagner was convinced that isolation was the all-important factor in accounting for the origin of species, even terming it “the law of migration” (Migrationsgesetz). Darwin partly acknowledges the importance of this factor, while clearly stating that he “can by no means agree with this naturalist, that migration and isolation are necessary for the formation of new species”. On the contrary, if “an isolated area be very small … the total number of the inhabitants will be small; and this will retard the production of new species through natural selection, by decreasing the chances of the appearance of favourable individual differences” (e120, Var 196). In this instance, we see Darwin trying to appease a critic all the while standing firm on his key argument (the importance of natural selection).

Sobre SN: He was especially cautious not to treat the causal mechanism he had discovered as some kind of magical wand, that is, as an all-powerful principle that would account for any and every structure.

although crystal clear to some readers, is nonetheless a stumbling block for many others. 55 He went on to suggest the following: since the English term selection seems to introduce an “intelligence” into the process, and since, furthermore, “natural selection” is equated with “preservation of favoured races” (which can plausibly lead to progress), there was no objection to identifying Darwin’s “natural selection” with Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest”. “Survival of the fittest”, rather than preservation, was the perfect way of avoiding “natural selection” coming to signify a personification of nature through analogy with the intelligent intervention of the breeder. Affirming the metaphorical character of the expression natural selection, Wallace indicated that nature “does not so much select special variations, as exterminate the most unfavourable ones”. 56 Ultimately, it seems that Darwin bowed to Wallace’s arguments, as evidenced by the introduction of survival of the fittest into the fifth and sixth editions of the Origin (1869 and 1872 respectively). 57
As Samuel Butler pointed out, Darwin appears to grant the reader free licence to take “survival of the fittest” as an equivalent to “natural selection”, though perhaps this should in turn be taken to mean “the fertility of the fittest”. 58 Butler further expounded that, while this “survival” or “fertility” may have been the “sine qua non for modification”, it in no way implied that it could in itself be interpreted as “especial means of modification”. Besides this, Darwin remained ambiguous on the status of natural selection and its potential causal relation to modifications: the proclaimed equivalence between natural selection and descent with modification, terms Darwin alternated in designating his system, only helped prolong confusion on this point. Taking it as a “means” of modification, natural selection is an agent, a genuine cause of variation; but, on the other hand, it is not the cause of individual modifications and explains neither generic nor specific differences: “the individual differences given by nature, which man for some object selects, must of necessity first occur”. 59 As long as the cause of individual variations was not forthcoming, Darwin was “giving us an ‘Origin of species’ with ‘the origin’ cut out”. 60
It is fair to argue that it did make a discernible difference whether readers of the Origin read the book with or without Spencer’s phrase included. A good example of this is Samuel F. Clarke’s work on larval cannibalism in salamanders. Published in 1878 under the title “An interesting case of natural selection”, it concludes with the words: “It has been a very interesting case of natural selection, by survival of the fittest. All the weaker individuals being destroyed and actually aiding the stronger ones by serving them as food”. The work was immediately reviewed in Nature as a case “illustrating survival of the fittest”, triggering further comments on the same subject by A. Crane in a subsequent issue. 61 “Natural selection” soon became a pretext for scientific gibbering on “survival of the fittest”.

Mudança de concepção teórica entre os Origins

Did Darwin move from a theory where variations are minute and continuous to a more saltationist vision?
Thomas Henry Huxley, both in private letters and in published reviews, was very critical of the principle “Natura non facit saltum”. 62 In light of this, Darwin made two changes in the second edition: the phrase “that old canon in natural history” becomes “that old but somewhat exaggerated canon”; and he simply deletes the sentence referring directly to Natura non facit saltum. 63 On similar points, “infinitesimally small inherited modifications” becomes “of small inherited” in the third edition. 64 Regarding continuous variation, and in spite of all the hesitations often attributed to him, Darwin quite categorically dispensed with the objection that new species can appear by saltations and, in [f], reaffirmed his commitment to continuous variation, saying that a “conclusion, which implies great breaks or discontinuity in the series, appears to me improbable in the highest degree”. 65
[c] Devotes specific attention to “various good objections” raised by H.G. Bronn. 66 Bronn thought the Darwinian theory required “that all the species of a region” should be “changing at the same time”. Darwin always considered this to be an unnecessary supposition: “it is sufficient for us”, he replies, “if some few forms at any one time are variable”. Bronn also remarked “that distinct species do not differ from each other in single characters alone, but in many”; and he asked how it comes to be that “natural selection should always have simultaneously affected many parts of the organisation?” To this, Darwin replied that “probably the whole amount of difference has not been simultaneously effected; and the unknown laws of correlation will certainly account for, but not strictly explain, much simultaneous modification”. 67 So, correlation of growth and a new emphasis on the laws of variation were, as we can see here, Darwin’s go-to answer for many objections.
William Harvey also raised influential objections on the problem of saltations and monstrosities. For Harvey, the origin of species cannot be causally explained until the origin of variation is better understood. [quote]
The nature of variation impacts on the status of natural selection. [e], for instance, contains an important (and much discussed) attempt to respond to the British engineer Fleeming Jenkin’s “able and valuable article in the ‘North British Review’ (1867)”. 69 Jenkin objected that there are absolute limits to variation, that a new form of a living entity would be swamped, and that the Earth is much younger than assumed by Darwin. Jenkin’s review increased Darwin’s attentiveness to the problem of variations: “I did not appreciate how rarely single variations, whether slight or strongly-marked could be perpetuated”. 70 Jenkin had taken the case of “a highly-favoured white” who, shipwrecked on an island, fails to “blanch a nation of negroes”. Darwin interpreted this as a convincing case against single variations and rethought the respective roles of individual differences (occurring in several organisms) and of single variations (rare and discontinuous forms of change). Jenkin’s review appears to have led Darwin to relax his emphasis on natural selection, for instance when he writes: “The conditions might indeed act in so energetic and definite a manner as to lead to the same modification in all the individuals of the species without the aid of selection”. 71 Darwin de-emphasised sports so as to place more emphasis on the normal range of variability. Indeed, Darwin’s insistence on the individual level is easily perceived in many of the additions and modifications to [e]. At the beginning of Chapter IV, “an endless number of strange peculiarities” becomes “peculiar variations”, before finally ending up as “slight variations and individual differences”. 72
Where the first edition reads: “A large amount of inheritable and diversified variability is favourable, but I believe mere individual differences suffice for the work”, the fifth states: “A great amount of variability, under which term individual differences are always included, will evidently be favourable”. 73 Other examples of Darwin’s focus on individual variation can be found in the fifth edition. 74 The limits and scope of variation are obviously of great concern to him, and he does tackle the question of whether “many changes would have to be effected simultaneously”: Darwin confesses that “this could not be done through natural selection”, but, confidently relying on his 1868 work on Variation, he considers it to be a superfluous condition.

Progresso

Progress was clearly a matter of concern for Darwin. As early as [b], in the summary of Chapter IV, he adds a complement to the sentence “This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection”, with the remark that natural selection “leads to the improvement of each creature in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life”— a sentence further developed in [c]: “and consequently, in most cases, to what must be regarded as an advance in organisation”. 78 In the discussion on geological succession, Darwin also adds that the best definition of highness is greater division of physiological labour and, consequently, that natural selection “will constantly tend” to make later forms “higher” than their progenitors.
In [c], a whole new section is added: “On the degree to which organisation tends to advance”. 80 Here, Darwin clearly distinguishes “highness” from “progress”. On the one hand, he asserts that: If we look at the differentiation and specialisation of the several organs of each being when adult (and this will include the advancement of the brain for intellectual purposes) as the best standard of highness of organisation, natural selection clearly leads towards highness. 81
On the other hand, Darwin plainly denies progressive development, stating that “natural selection includes no necessary and universal law of advancement or development— it only takes advantage of such variations as arise and are beneficial to each creature under its complex relations of life”. 82
A notable feature of the sixth edition is the belated entrance of the actual word evolution into the text of the Origin. Previously, the Origin contained only the word “evolved”, and even this appeared only in the closing words of the book. In [f], “evolution” occurs eight times and Darwin makes explicit reference to “the theory of evolution through natural selection”. Generally speaking, the prior absence of this term has been attributed to two distinct reasons: first, to avoid confusion with Herbert Spencer’s use of the word; and second, to avoid confusion with its embryological meaning of “development”. 83 As a result, it may seem like the eventual introduction of the term is a sign that Darwin was prepared to accept more confusion on these issues. But it might just as well be contended that, by the 1870s, the term evolution was simply much more commonly in use and that Darwin was, in fact, making things clearer rather than murkier for his readers.

Lamarckismo novamente

The formidable— though hazy— question of “Darwin’s Lamarckianism” must certainly be the primary argument for avoiding later editions of the Origin, as was made clear in C.D. Darlington’s reprint of the first edition. But the question is an anachronistic one, stemming mainly from Weismann’s refutation of “Lamarckian inheritance”, and one that I think should be avoided by any means possible. “Lamarckian” mechanisms generally include what Darwin called “use and disuse” or “direct effect of external conditions”. Are these factors or forces thrust into a more active or efficient role in the last edition compared with the first? In the Origin, Darwin clearly states that natural selection can aid in dispensing with Lamarckian explanations. 85 Nonetheless, the obvious signs of Darwin’s affinities for “Lamarckian” factors are numerous, even in the first edition. The direct effects of environment on organisms are admitted in several passages, such as: “we must not forget that climate, food, &c., probably produce some slight and direct effect”. 86 Then, on “habitual action” that becomes inheritable: “I think it can be shown that this does sometimes happen”. 87 The various instances of Lamarckian themes in the Origin seem to coalesce in a key sentence with which Darwin closes the introduction: “Furthermore, I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification”. 88
We will return to the issue of what those other “means of modification” are in later chapters. For now, it suffices to say that Darwin is chiefly referring to the action of a changing environment. Some have claimed to document a shift of emphasis in the role devoted to natural selection in the fifth and sixth editions. They advance that, up to the fifth edition, Darwin had modified his text such that it increasingly supported the theory of accumulation of modifications by natural selection, whereas in the last editions it was non-selective forces that he began to bring into play. Loren Eiseley was particularly vocal in stating that: "a close examination of the last edition of the Origin reveals that in attempting on scattered pages to meet the objections being launched against his theory the much-laboured-upon volume had become contradictory […] [T] he last repairs to the Origin reveal … how very shaky Darwin’s theoretical structure had become. His gracious ability to compromise had produced some striking inconsistencies. 89"
However, all things considered, the evidence presented by supporters of the “Lamarckianisation of Darwin” hypothesis is rather frail. Can we claim that Darwin gave “extra stress to the direct action of the conditions of life” just because, where [a] reads, “We should remember that climate, food, &c., probably have some little direct influence on the organisation”, Darwin went on to change little into, “some, perhaps a considerable, direct influence” 90? It is impossible to conclude from this alone that Darwin had significantly changed his views. There are some obvious and probably not insignificant changes, such as, in Chapter I: “Habit also has a decided influence”, which ends up becoming “Changed habits produce an inherited effect”; 91 or the next sentence: “In animals it has a more marked effect”, which would finally read, “With animals the increased use or disuse of parts has had a more marked influence”. But evidence of the contrary can also be mustered, like this sentence from the revised Chapter VII where Darwin refers to “the inherited effects of the increased use of parts, and perhaps of their disuse” being “strengthened by natural selection”: “How much to attribute in each particular case to the effects of use, and how much to natural selection, it seems impossible to decide”. 92 The emphasis on a “tendency to vary in the same manner” is strong, in both this latter passage and others such as: There can also be little doubt that the tendency to vary in the same manner has often been so strong that all the individuals of the same species have been similarly modified without the aid of any form of selection. 93
This tendency to vary certainly leads Darwin away from selection. But on the other hand, in opposition to Mivart’s belief that species change requires “an internal force or tendency”, Darwin is very clear: there is no need, as it seems to me, to invoke any internal force beyond the tendency to ordinary variability, which through the aid of selection by man has given rise to many well-adapted domestic races, and which through the aid of natural selection would equally well give rise by graduated steps to natural races or species. 94
In fact, it is the Darwin manifest in [f], more than any earlier incarnation, who may stand accused of making an all-powerful operator of natural selection. This was already the case in [c], 95 but it was the constancy of the accusation which provoked clear changes in various passages. For instance, [a] states that “species have changed and are still slowly changing by the preservation and accumulation of successive slight favourable variations”. 96 From [b] to [d], this same passage reads: “that species have been modified, during a long course of descent, by the preservation or natural selection of many successive slight favourable variations”. In [e], the end becomes: “a long course of descent, chiefly through the natural selection of numerous successive, slight, favourable variations”. But [f] adds to this again, stating that selection has been aided in an important manner by the inherited effects of the use and disuse of parts; and in an unimportant manner … by the direct action of external conditions, and by variations which seem to us in our ignorance to arise spontaneously.
Does such an addition reflect some important change in Darwin’s own perception of his theory? Strikingly enough, Darwin took specific pains to refer these later additions back to the closing sentence of the 1859 version introduction; that “natural selection has been, the main but not the exclusive means of modification”. 97 Why then see ruptures when Darwin himself indicated continuities? From Darwin’s own perspective, nothing had changed: he was simply trying to clarify a point that he had been making since the beginning but one which had been constantly overlooked. It is only from an “ultra-Darwinian” vantage point (one that equates Darwin with natural selection and only with natural selection) that Darwin can be accused of having changed his theory. But even as “Darwin-the-text” was being modified, “Darwin-the-man” seemed to be quite at ease with these changes of inflection in the perception of his theory and the interpretation of his book.

O tal do criador a partir da 2ed [também tem uma questão da partenogenese]

The truth is that Darwin was editing for a theological audience, as is suggested by the transformation of the phrase “natural selection will account for the infinite diversity in structure and function of the mouths of insects” into “natural selection acting on some originally created form will account for”. 102 He also grants pride of place to any hint of support coming from theologians, like Charles Kingsley, 103 and, on the reverse side of the half-title page, he added a third quotation, placed between those from Whewell and Bacon: it comes from Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Revealed Religion, a trusted resource for theologians of the time. With its reference to an “intelligent agent”, it might easily be read as part of a strategy of Darwin’s to mollify religious readers. 104

What does the prism of the six editions reveal?

the “provisional hypothesis of pangenesis”, developed in the 1868 Variation, never found its way into the Origin, apart from one brief mention in [e, 196] that no sooner disappeared again in [f].
On a general level, no full-scale revision of the structure of the argument was ever attempted. The creation of an additional chapter in [f] was aimed only at gathering scattered objections into one single body, while also considerably lightening Chapter IV. As to the evolution of Darwin’s views, while depicting Darwin as an exclusive selectionist is inaccurate, it is hard to claim that Darwin became more and more Lamarckian. Darwin just increasingly stresses the power of variations acting in unison with the power of natural selection. The laws of variation constrain natural selection. They also entail a refutation of any pan-utilitarianism; within the organism, not every structure is necessarily perfectly adapted or useful. Darwin’s lifelong interest for the laws of variation led him to deep consideration of some so-called “Lamarckian” factors, such as the effects of changed conditions of life. Darwin envisioned channels leading from the environment into the organism, such that adaptive change could happen independently of natural selection. As a result, the Origin brings evidence that Darwin was an evolutionary pluralist.
But, as is often the case in Darwinian processes, minute and sometimes imperceptible modifications may have dramatically altered the meaning of the whole. 105 Darwin’s interest in variation led him to put progressively more stress on other factors which “aid” natural selection: the fulcrum of the Origin’s argument shifts gradually from the confines of Chapter IV into the realm of Chapter V. During this process, publications such as 1868’ s The Variation of Animals and Plants show his attempts to gather a considerable amount of reliable raw material in which to place his confidence. It seems that the main incentive for changes was Darwin’s wish to address objections and criticisms that had been brought. However, this shift of focus from natural selection to other means, including the laws of variation, does not equate to a “Lamarckianisation” of his thinking.
[...]
However, it turned out that this shift of emphasis, from the origin of species to the origin of variation, only amplified rather than decreased the difficulties. As a matter of fact, Darwin was never to publish Natural Selection … nor his “second work”, nor indeed the third one.

Which is the best edition of the Origin?

Nota de John Murray defendendo a sexta.
The insistence here on the last edition being the best is clear as day— a position that contradicts reading practices of the post-Mayr era, which favour the first printing over any later ones.
Murray’s words should not, of course, be simply taken at face value. Huge financial interests were involved in his manoeuvre. However, their tone of warning may yet serve as a historical opening of the debate: on what grounds should one consider one version of the Origin to be better than the others?
An edition can be better than others according to various criteria: • Clarity: if it sets forth the argument in a clearer, less convoluted way; • Thoroughness: if it corrects typos and other obvious mistakes; • Contemporaneity: if it provides the reader with new, up-to-date information.
The argument of clarity is key if one considers the Origin to be “one long argument”. 109 On the other hand, the argument of contemporaneity may be unavoidable, given the historical contingency of scientific information: for instance, after fossils of the bird-reptile Archaeopteryx began to be uncovered in the early 1860s, the creature soon found its way into the Origin; the same happened with the concept of mimicry, following the publication of Henry Walter Bates’ 1862 paper on the butterflies of the Amazonian region. 110
Darwin clearly suggests that the argument of contemporaneity might well lead to the argument of thoroughness, since the text of the Origin depends on a state of scientific knowledge as well as on sources of information that may or may not turn out to be fully reliable. The arguments of clarity and contemporaneity may collide on some points, since clarity suggests simplification, while contemporaneity implies additional matter whose bulk may overshadow the general outline of the argument.
The argument of contemporaneity is tangible in those pages where Darwin leans more and more towards dogmatism. I will give but one example: the question of the dawn of civilisation. 111 The topic is cursorily evoked in the first chapter of the first edition: “Mr. Horner’s researches have rendered it in some degree probable that man sufficiently civilized to have manufactured pottery existed in the valley of the Nile thirteen or fourteen thousand years ago”. The reference disappears from the third edition, where it is replaced by a somewhat stronger statement: Since the recent discoveries of flint tools or celts in the superficial deposits of France and England, few geologists will doubt that man, in a sufficiently civilized state to have manufactured weapons, existed at a period extremely remote as measured by years.
The fourth edition reads: “all geologists believe that man in a barbarous condition existed at an enormously remote period”. As for the fifth edition: “all geologists believe that barbarian man existed at an enormously remote period”. We see here how reliance on the very latest sources does not necessarily lead to more accurate statements. Not only does Darwin go from a tentative expression to a confident one, he also introduces a new figure, of a profoundly Victorian bent: “the barbarian man”. In this case, historical generalisation and incorporation of new sources of information did not lead to any “improvement” of the text.
So, is there a best edition that readers should all acknowledge and whose text should prevail over all others? Or are readers left with the confusing maze the several versions entail, thus entitled to freely play one Origin against the other? The idea that Darwin was obsessed with providing a better version of his argument tends to downplay three important factors: a the role of external interventions (such as reviews) in pointing out faults in the Origin’s text; b Darwin himself was constantly editing his text, searching for perfection; c Darwin not only responded to reviews and edited typos, he was also constantly revising his own views and positions.
On the first two factors, readers and critics often constituted strong motivating incentives behind the rewriting process of various passages. Darwin often changed a word or two, suppressed a sentence here, added a development there, sometimes in the wake of some sneering comments or blatant misunderstanding. The third factor is much more central to the issue at stake here, that of several “Darwins” being played against each other.
Ernst Mayr, who played an active role in debates on the “best” edition of the Origin, stresses two extreme interpretations concerning the development of Darwin’s theory of evolution … both of them clearly erroneous […] According to one, Darwin developed his theory in its entirety as soon as his conversion to evolutionism happened. The other extreme is to say that Darwin constantly changed his mind and that later in life he completely abandoned his earlier views. 112
For Mayr, after Darwin started his notebooks on transmutation (1837), he quickly “adopted and rejected a series of theories”, but then “he more or less retained the overall theory he had developed by the 1840s through the rest of his life … without completely reversing himself”. Hence, for Mayr, Darwin’s modifications to the Origin matter little (they concern only secondary points), even
though he also says that Darwin’s statements on evolution in the sixth edition of the Origin (1872) and in the Descent of Man (1871) are remarkably similar to the statements in the essay of 1844 and in the first edition (1859) of the Origin, all contrary claims notwithstanding. 113
So it is perhaps paradoxical that Mayr himself republished the first edition of the Origin, urging readers to come back to the original version, free of the “impurities” of later developments. Ultimately, in light of these contrasting views, readers of the Origin have to make difficult decisions regarding the dialectic of change and continuity in the Darwinian theory for themselves.
Contra Mayr 1982, I suggest it is probably the case that at least parts of the modifications do actually reveal Darwin’s progressive revisions of his own initial position. But, Mayr’s case persisting, if this is true, should we care? Probably the answer is “yes”, if one is a biographer of Darwin or a historian of the development of evolutionary thought. But if one is an evolutionary biologist enquiring into the mechanisms at work in nature, an epistemologist interested only in the emergence of a “Darwinian paradigm”, or a philosopher looking for the meaning of a consistent “Darwinism”, then it is probable that Darwin’s own hesitations are indeed of little import.
As we can see, the question of the best edition of the Origin is subject to diverse evaluations, as it refers us not only to Darwin’s own understanding of his book but also to the expectations of his readers. Some readers— let’s call them the Historicists— are keen to underscore possible changes in Darwin’s own mind; while others— let’s call them the Systematists— are interested only in the systematic aspect of the Darwinian philosophy of nature. These two categories of reader pay varying attention to the discrepancies between “Darwin” the historical man, subject to doubts and imperfections, and what is termed “Darwinism”, i.e. a prescriptive set of expectations on what Darwin’s thought is, should be, or should have been.
The best edition enquiry is therefore a highly debatable issue. Today, it seems to be the Systematists— be they biologists or philosophers— who are massively dominant. The work of historians of science is ambiguous on this point. They have eagerly published Darwin’s papers, from the early notebooks to the long manuscript on species that Darwin was working on when he was interrupted by Wallace’s paper and precipitated into the hasty composition of what would become the Origin. However, many of these historians seem to embrace the idea that what matters most is, in fact, the emergence of Darwin as a consistent selectionist figure, very close to the person dearest to the heart of evolutionary biologists. Few historians have paid attention to the historical changes of the Origin and Peckham’s Variorum edition might well be dubbed “the greatest Darwinian study never read”, in part because of the book’s somewhat unreadable format, but partly also because of a persistent lack of general interest in the history of the book itself. Even fewer scholars have paid attention to the various disputes that arose from misunderstandings between readers referring to these diverging and at times conflicting versions of Darwin’s opus magnum. However, the fact that the Origin did constantly evolve played a major role in the fact that readers of the book ended up pledging their voices to differing views of what Darwin, or rather “their” Darwin, really thought.

2 Diffracting Darwin's title - the prism of translations

Darwin’s title is a mysterious object. It is worth our while to read it with intertextuality in mind. For Gillian Beer, “the title is in polemical contrast with Chambers’s insistence on Vestiges of the natural history of Creation. Vestiges are remnants, surviving fragments of a primordial creative act. Darwin’s enterprise is history, not cosmogony”. 1 Personally, I remember being struck by the imitation game the Origin of Species set off: a series of spin-off titles popped up,
[...]
recent biological literature, Darwin’s title has attracted no fewer commentaries and critics. Ernst Mayr was particularly vocal
[...]
In the 1990s, it became something of a cliché to state that the Origin did not answer the question it itself raised.
[...]
“to prise Darwin’s title out of its self-evidence and look at it afresh” in order to expose its ambiguities." [VER J. Wallace]
Translation

This aspect of our quest into the meanings of Darwin’s theory intersects with the growing field of scholarship known as “translation studies in science”, what David N. Livingstone has called the “geographies of reading”, emerging from the recent understanding that “thoughts routinely travel the world in textual form”. 14 [Dealing with Darwin. Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution. p4] As Nicolaas Rupke has put it, mapping the geographies of textual reception discloses “the constitutive significance of place in the production of the various meanings that became attached to even a single work”. 15[“A geography of enlightenment: the critical reception of Alexander von Humboldt’s Mexico work”] This new emphasis on the spatiality of knowledge focuses heavily on various cultural preoccupations. For instance, French and German reviews of Alexander von Humboldt’s Essai politique sur le Royaume de la Nouvelle-Espagne focused on his contribution to an accurate cartography of Mexico, while British ones dwelt more on the aspect of commercial strategies. 16 Similarly, the conclusions of a lifelong opponent to Darwin’s theory, such as John McCrady (1831– 1881), may have had their source in, for example, support of slavery in South Carolina and the Confederate states, while the lectures William Travers (1819– 1903) gave on Darwin in New Zealand are coloured by the idea that Darwinian evolution explains the triumph of white colonial settlements, etc. 17 In this light, each reading of the Origin emerges as “shaped by the cultural politics of [its] interpretive community”, as Livingstone phrased it. Geographies of knowledge show how “the coming together of texts and readers … is a moment of creativity in which meaning is made and remade”, 18 but the interpretations they result in tend to pass through the lens of social or political agendas. The wonderful project of “locating” theories, or the “interweaving of place, politics and rhetoric”, often delivers the message that the reception of scientific ideas is subject to distinct ideological or cultural determinisms.
In contrast to the above methods for introducing place and time into the history of science, the present chapter focuses on languages: I want to show how the challenge of translating English words into other languages helped shape the reception of Darwin’s ideas. In travelling, the Origin did not only encounter new cultures: it had to be reframed within new conceptual spaces, which in turn led to a range of conceptual interpretations. 19 Usually, this is where scholars roll out variations on the Italian paronomasia Traddutore, traditore (translator, traitor). This has been especially the case in the French example, with the works of Clémence Royer who was blamed for many mis-readings and biased interpretations. 20 [See especially Conry 1974 and more recently, Prum 2014. On Royer, Harvey 1997 is much more balanced and accurate than Conry’s. See also Fraisse 2002.] My own claim is that, far from “polluting” the original meaning of the text, these translations actually generate more clarity as to what Darwin’s title actually means. I dubbed this “the Dogmatix miracle”, in reference to Obélix’s little white dog in the English translation of the comic book Astérix le Gaulois. 21 Having to render the name of the dog “Idéfix”, an original pun on the French expression idée fixe (fixed idea or obsession), the translators came up with “Dogmatix”. The English name is probably even better than the French original, since it not only preserves the meaning of the original pun but even adds to it, by combining the reference to the doggedness (and “dogginess”!) of the character with the allusion to the notion of dogmatism. This example perfectly illustrates how translations are often able to preserve all the assets of the original word or phrase and then even surpass it. It is my contention that the translations of the Origin performed just such “Dogmatix miracles”: preserving the meaning of Darwin’s original wording while also adding new clarity to it by disentangling the range of meanings contained in the original English terms.
Far from being the occasion to mete out more lukewarm platitudes on “traduttore, traditore”, closely examining the translations proposed for the title of Darwin’s Origin creates a prism that reveals just how difficult it is to grasp the book’s true nature as regards, notably: the pertinence of the question it poses (the origin of species), the signification of what is taken to be its central concept (natural selection), and the manner in which the latter is connected to the struggle for existence. The simple act of examining how the title has been translated illuminates a whole host of what would otherwise be hidden interpretation problems. It can even alter our impression of the work as whole.

Translation Prism

translation prism reveals new dimensions that were enclosed within it; a new terrain full of discrepancy and controversy unfolds.
Filosofia do título. Cada tradutor alemão usa uma palavra diferente. Na frança:

We can see that, while Moulinié’s translation may be, word for word, closer to the original, it still grants itself some liberty: for example, it omits the reference to “favoured races”, thereby highlighting the “struggle for existence”, which it treats as being practically equivalent to the origin of species. More radical in their divergence, the translations proposed by Royer forego the concept of natural selection and introduce the notion of “lois de progrès” (laws of progress) in 1862, and then “lois de transformation” in 1866.

A partir daqui vai termo a termo. Começando com Origin

Although the French and Italians contented themselves with the term “origine”, it may be that this apparently commodious solution actually obscured some genuine problems. These can be drawn to the surface in two ways. First, by noting that the term “origine” has been used as a French and Italian translation for other key English terms, such as “descent”. And, second, by looking to what the title became in languages where a cognate term like “origine” was not an option. When it comes to translating “origin”, the German language proves itself a convenient prism for diffracting the spectrum of colours hidden within the white light of the title On the Origin of Species. Indeed, in German a real work of translation was required (in that an equivalent had to be found within a distinct lexical system) in the absence of a simple transliteration option: the choices made throw light on what the question of origin fundamentally determines.
Georg Bronn proposed Entstehung for the first German translation, a work he undertook using the second English edition of the Origin (1860). 25 The term Entstehung denotes the process of some thing appearing, and this can in turn be retro-translated by terms like emergence or appearance, as opposed to vergehen (pass away, vanish). In translating “origin” by Entstehung, there is a shift from the “origin” of species to their “mode of emergence”. Is this the same thing?
Whatever advantage this term may have is best measured against its potential competitors, notably the term Ursprung that is also to be found in the literature on Darwin. 26 Ursprung denotes the source, the starting point, the originating point (contributed by the prefix Ur-). Victor Carus, the second German translator of Darwin’s work, tasked with correcting Bronn’s version, proposed a modification of the title which would replace Entstehung with Ursprung. Other sources inform us that Darwin was not satisfied with Bronn’s translation, so one would tend to trust Carus and acquiesce to his interpretation of the title. Indeed, Darwin himself confessed that Ursprung might well be a better term than Entstehung: however, on the very same point, he remained strictly perfunctory and, in fact, categorically forbade the new term to be used, so as not, he claimed, to bewilder the public by presenting them with the same book under different titles. 27 But, behind the pretext of wishing to avoid confusing the “public” by having two titles for the one book, was Darwin perhaps not just improvising an indirect, though polite, argument for refusing Carus’ proposition, one which he may have deemed to be simply incorrect? The intransigence with which he rejected Ursprung seems to indicate a difference of opinion that goes beyond simple circumstantial concerns. Following this view, Ursprung would not be the correct translation for origin and Entstehung must be seen as the preferred choice, whatever qualities or faults Bronn’s translation may have besides, and this before any consideration of the theoretical twists to which it subjects Darwin’s text.
The search for the primordial “source” does not cover the full depth of the word “origin”. The verb “to originate” points primarily to a mode of production, an action with a certain power, an efficient cause. This point is decisive if we are to discern whether the book does or does not provide an answer to the question its title poses: if “origin” is Ursprung, primary source, then the question being asked bears first on primordial ancestors (original prototypes, the very first progenitors of life on earth), and then, from that point, on the genealogical order of derivation linking the extinct forms unearthed by palaeontology to the present forms discovered by natural history. If, on the other hand, “origin” is Entstehung, then the question no longer bears on the origin of life or the genealogical tree but on the very mechanism or process at work within nature itself. Within the foregoing view, Darwin’s book would be seen to show how natural selection and the struggle for existence “produce” species, how these two concepts “originate” species, in the sense of efficiently producing them. Retro-translating from this interpretation back to English, Origin of Species might more properly be rendered as the Production or Formation of species.
This difference in meaning, seemingly trivial, nevertheless becomes quite apparent as one follows the trail of the various versions and retro-versions that were to appear. For instance, the French translation of a German work makes several references to a book by Darwin entitled Formation des espèces: this undoubtedly results from “origin” being translated into German as Entstehung and then this being translated into French as Formation, by either a very uninformed or perhaps very conceptually perceptive translator. 28 Another French book praises the title of the Darwinian opus— a title which in itself is “une révélation anticipée”— which the author cites as, “Production des espèces à la faveur de la sélection naturelle ou à la faveur de la conservation des races, accomplies dans la lutte pour l’existence”. 29
This short overview of the various meanings of the term origin, as evidenced by the variety of translations both in German or French, confirms Gillian Beer’s suggestion that the title has to be read in full, precisely because its ordinary shortened form, The Origin of Species, “changes ‘origin’ from a process into a place or substantive”. 30 Translations teach us that the shortened title Origin of Species has a tendency to turn Entstehung into Ursprung for German ears, Production or Formation into Origine for French ones.

of Species

In the foregoing perspective, the book’s professed aim would be to see how species are produced, Darwin claiming to reveal the origin of species, translated to French as espèces, to Italian as specie, and to German, most often, as Arten (more so than Species). Darwin’s initial idea was to speak of “the origin of species and varieties”. But his readers immediately raised objections of all sorts as Darwin complained to Murray: quote
[...]
the concept of species is doubly problematic, on the one hand because its meaning (its definition) is obscure, even without considering the difficulties of its translation, and also because, on the other hand, pairing it with “origin” seems to create an oxymoron. Even if we knew exactly what origin was and what species was, the meaning of the compound form “origin of species” would still not be in any way clear. The ontological status of species has been a debated matter up to now: Darwin’s work is often presented as being contradictory with species stability, leading to a form of “received view” that Darwin supported “species nominalism”, but others have endeavoured to show that Darwin supported the reality of species taxa.33 [Especially Ghiselin 1969, p. 89. Stamos 2007 aims to refute this “standard view” of Darwin’s “species nominalism”. Beatty 1985 (p. 266) emphasised the strategic aspects of Darwin’s reasoning on species, especially the fact that the Origin was addressed to naturalists.]
[...]
“I look at the term species, as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other”. 44 / In this, Darwin confirms the indefinable nature of species, and his declarations are often interpreted as pointing towards a lack of solidity in the general nature of species itself.
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Independently of what Darwin may have actually thought of species, the nominalist interpretation of his work was for a long time commonplace.
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Paradoxically, nominalism leaves the title devoid of any pertinence: why concern oneself with the origin of species if the concept of species in itself isn’t actually any thing at all? In other words, if species is a non-evolutionary concept, and if, conversely, the mutation of forms is incompatible with the existence of species, then the Darwinian position, at least as it is presented in the title, runs the very real risk of being nonsensical. It would then have to be admitted that the term “species” was to be understood only in the common sense of “what the naturalists or ordinary language habitually distinguish as different species”, regardless of what the real ontological status of the concept of species, or its actual definition, or even definability, may be. This is the final lesson that Darwin seems to draw: that by adopting his ideas, the naturalists “shall at least be freed from the vain search for the undiscovered and undiscoverable essence of the term species”. 53 Despite this, the term “species” can still be used as a practical entity allowing for the description of natural phenomena.

By means of

This inconspicuous word “means” seems fairly harmless, but it has provoked its fair share of questions. Is it a simple connecting word, just like the “through natural selection” Darwin used in his first intended title? Or is it a specific point whose interpretation is of primary importance, as Samuel Butler in particular suggested in his Evolution Old and New (1879)? When Mr. Darwin says that natural selection is the most important “means” of modification, I am not sure that I understand what he wishes to imply by the word “means”. I do not see how the fact that those animals which are best fitted for the conditions of their existence commonly survive in the struggle for life, can be called in any special sense a “means” of modification. “Means” is a dangerous word; it slips too easily into “cause”. We have seen Mr. Darwin himself say that Buffon did not enter on “the causes or means” of modification, as though these two words were synonymous, or nearly so. Nevertheless, the use of the word “means” here enables Mr. Darwin to speak of Natural Selection as if it were an active cause (which he constantly does), and yet to avoid expressly maintaining that it is a cause of modification. 55[butler]

natural selection

This preference made her a suspect of all manner of intentions. It could even be considered that her use of the term “election” contained an element of heresy: in Darwinian territory, the “elected” are not the object of supernatural divine grace but are simply the best equipped in the “concurrence vitale (vital competition)”— the phrase Royer used to render “struggle for life”.
In terms of the book’s reception, everything played out over the fact that the term “élection” carries a more spiritualist signification than the term “sélection”; in choosing this term, Royer brought an “intelligence” into Darwin’s thinking, introducing an imposter into the very framework of the Origin. 58 Owing to the same cause, Darwin was exposed to certain unfair criticisms, like those of Pierre Flourens, the permanent secretary of the Académie des Sciences, who accused Darwin of “personifying nature”. Even more so than “sélection”, “élection” relates to conscious and deliberate choice, even a certain measure of arbitration.
[...]
the English term “selection” carries just as much risk of personification as the French “élection”,
[...]
Flourens, in this case, was only pointing at a difference between the French and English language and blaming Darwin (not Royer) for the faults of his own concept. Eventually, Royer did nevertheless switch “élection” for “sélection” in the second edition of her translation, although not without expressing her deep aversion to the term.
We have to ask whether Royer was to blame when choosing to use “élection” rather than “sélection”. In other words, would it have been viable for her, in 1862, to translate “natural selection” with the French “sélection naturelle”? 62 [hoquet 2013] The substantive “selection” could easily have been transliterated into French. But the issues are not the same with the verb “to select” and its derived adjective form “selected”. In English, election and selection form etymological twins, or a doublet, directly modelled on the Latin: the verb eligere (electus) means to tear or dig out, and seligere (selectus) means to choose and put together, as is explained in any etymological dictionary (see Table 2.1). But, strikingly enough, although the term eligo had been directly translated into the very common French verb élire, there was no direct equivalent for seligo, and the derived adjective selectus was traditionally translated as choisi. There was no French verb available for expressing “to select”. Accordingly, the easy solution was to render “to select” as “choisir” (to choose). This solution was retained by later translators of the Origin, such as Jean-Jacques Moulinié and Edmond Barbier. 63 However, this choice still entails the following problem: when a French reader encounters “choisir” in Darwin’s text, there will be no immediate mental connection to the operation of “selection”. Furthermore, choisir is a very common verb and therefore loses the technical dimension of “selection”. This is why Moulinié occasionally resorted to neologisms. For instance, in the “Introduction” to the Origin, he translated Darwin’s expression “naturally selected” as “naturellement conservé ou sélecté”, but in the next sentence, “selected variety” becomes “variété ainsi épargnée [saved/ rescued]”. 64 As for Barbier, he simply avoided the verb and adjective forms as much as possible: his translations of the same two passages are “être l’objet d’une sélection naturelle” and “variété objet de la sélection”. 65
A young zoologist of invertebrates from Geneva, René Edouard Claparède (1832– 1871), suggested that “élection” and the verb “élire” were an easy way to stay close to the English terms selection, to select, and selected, without the need for neologisms. 66 Claparède’s initial suggestion was taken up by Clémence Royer in the first French edition of the Origin. Given the absence of any exact equivalent for selection/ to select, the élection/ élire solution does appear to be quite an elegant translation. 67 [miles 1989] “Élection” might sound strange in the context of natural processes, but it is precisely because of this reason that it may have conveyed something of the technical dimension of the English term. Above all, it comes equipped with an equivalent family of words for the derived forms of to select (selective, selected). It seems likely that the foregoing lexical problem was reason enough in itself for Royer to choose “élection”. Other attempts were made, but all proved unsatisfactory. Some suggested that the Latin verb seligere could be transcribed directly into French as “séliger”. 68 Royer herself suggested that she may have been amenable to the neologism sélire. It would have sounded elegant, but it would also have been perplexing. The worst choice, or so Royer claims, would have been the ugly and ill-formed “sélectionner”. 69 The term “choisir”, retained by Barbier, precludes description of a neutral process of “selection” and, moreover, loses any proximity with to select and selection: precisely where Darwin had introduced the idea of an unconscious selection, it introduces the idea of some consciousness directing the process. For Royer, the affair was decided: one either had to decide to systematically translate to select with the neologism “sélire” (and not with choisir), or else return, as she did in the end, to speaking of élection naturelle in order to benefit from the flexibility offered by the French verb élire.
Before undertaking his German translation of the Origin, Bronn first wrote a review of it in 1860. There, he proposed “die Wahl der Lebens-Weise” as a translation for natural selection: turning it, literally, into “the choice of lifestyle (mode of life)”. 70 The presence of the word “Wahl” translated the idea of a choice (rather than a selection), but even disregarding this aspect, it is clearly not the same as “natural selection”. For Bronn, this expression simply conveyed a way of acknowledging that varieties are produced by differences in modes of nutrition, environments, and climates, as well as in many other factors. This is why Darwin complained heavily about this distortion of his views, and in compliance with Darwin’s wishes, Bronn then proposed the translation natürliche Züchtung. The term Züchtung denotes both breeding and cultivation: to wit, it is adequate for describing the procedures applied to domestic species, though without making explicit the intervention of a choice.
But other translations were still possible. Georg Seidlitz instead proposed Naturauslese, which does evoke a “sorting” but leaves aside the explicit reference to breeding. As for Ludwig Büchner, he preferred to translate selection by Auswahl, a still more neutral term merely denoting a choice between several possibilities. What did he disapprove of in Züchtung, which seems to have the advantage of denoting “breeding (or cultivation)”? Büchner’s French translator suggested that Bronn’s Züchtung would imply the idea of an improvement or an amendment: in that case, Bronn would be translating natural selection as “natural amendment”. 71 But can we really criticise him for this when Darwin’s own suggestions went as far as Adelung, “ennobling”? In the new German translation, corrected by Victor Carus, Bronn’s Züchtung became Zuchtwahl, a way of allying the two elements, domestication (Zucht) and choice (Wahl).
The inherent ambiguity of Darwin’s own terminology turns on him as soon as it needs to be translated: every translation demands an interpretation, insofar as there exists no term in any other language which precisely matches the conceptual articulation of the original English. The solution, then, would seem to be to transcribe the “foreign” term into the target language: this is exactly what the French Darwinians ended up doing (by replacing élection with sélection), followed in turn by their German counterparts (with the expression Selektionstheorie). Since all translating implies interpretation, the meaning of “natural selection”, which is in no way self-evident, was fated to be lost or displaced in translation. To avoid this, there was ultimately no choice but to settle for transliteration. From this perspective, it is absolutely legitimate to regret that Bronn’s and others’ choices convey a stowaway Lamarckism under the guise of “habits” where Darwin had placed only an analogy with the practices of breeders.

Or the preservation

But besides the question of whether translations can ever avoid importing parasitic significations, translations may well reveal the inherent difficulty of communicating the Darwinian conceptual lexicon into another language. Indeed, it would be foolish to think that “natural selection” is in itself clear to native Anglophone ears; Darwin’s own editor, John Murray bemoaned the choice. Darwin, shocked, defended his expression, which was “constantly used in all works on breeding”, although he did have to promise that he would complete the title with some subtext. He suggested, “through natural selection or the preservation of favoured races”. 72 Darwin acknowledged that the term was particularly difficult to understand and even stated that it was its very unintelligibility that made it appealing. 73
Hence, while each translation proposal unlocks a different interpretative path of the Darwinian theory— none of them divorced from the very terms in which it was initially laid out— it would be wrong to think that the original version of the book is free of interpretative conflicts and that the English terms do not hide their own ambiguities which could hinder proper understanding of the Darwinian system. This is encapsulated in the fact that the book’s title expounds on the expression “by means of natural selection” by adding the word “preservation”. The title of the book specifies that selection signifies preservation, perpetuation, conservation (Erhaltung). The Origin explicitly states that the term natural selection was adopted only “for the sake of brevity” to denote “this principle of preservation”, and in several letters from 1860 Darwin hints at regret over the choice of “natural selection”, saying he should instead have spoken of “natural preservation”. 74
But shifting from selection to preservation of modifications has many implications. If the originality and meaning of the Darwinian theory ultimately resides in the concept of natural selection, if, moreover, its meaning is not immediately evident but demands a certain amount of elaboration, then this is enough to explain how many of Darwin’s readers were left with the impression that he had merely given a new name to something long recognised. It explains and justifies, for example, Armand de Quatrefages saying of himself, “although without making use of the word, I have long professed the thing”. 75 In this view, Darwin merely gave a new name to what was already known and, above, “the word” Quatrefages evokes comes from Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle’s aphorism stating that “nature is at war”. The paradox is that the term selection, if it be re-interpreted as “war”, becomes almost flat, unfit for rendering what the interpretation says of it; conversely, selection, taken literally, runs the apparent risk of attributing a figurative “intelligent being role” to nature itself. Between flattening and overburdening, “selection” is forever problematic and Quatrefages proposed substituting it for the term “elimination”, a word he deemed to be more precise. Another problem with Quatrefages equating Darwin’s selection with De Candolle’s war is that Darwin explicitly distinguished the two in his private notebooks. In an entry dated 28 September 1838, he writes: “Even the energetic language of Malthus DeCandoelle does not convey the warring of the species as inference from Malthus”. 76 Quite paradoxically, Malthusian metaphors are more “war-like” than Candolle’s own use of the word “war”!
Finally, perhaps Darwin’s introduction of the selection concept is of no great importance, if indeed it is not the first time “at least part of the role it carries out in the general harmonies of the world” was understood. However, natural selection as elimination leaves us with no explanation for the genuinely creative processes in nature. As for the fact that this “elimination” paradoxically produces “harmonies”, this, scoffed Quatrefages, is a lesson we had already been given in La Fontaine’s fables. 77
If natural selection is preservation, then it must be understood as preservation of what? Through this shift from selection to preservation of modifications, Darwin is seen to be changing direction: from the origin of species to the origin of variations. He finds himself necessarily guided towards a reflection on what is preserved. Hooker and Lyell, for instance, remarked that the term “natural selection” is not complete and they recommended the expression “variation and natural selection”. For Lyell, to speak of natural selection as if it acts alone, neglecting to mention variations, was the same as assigning to it more work than it can do and the not carefully guarding against confounding it with the creative power to which “variation” and something far higher than mere variation viz. the capacity of ascending in the scale of being, must belong. 78

Of favoured races

The term “races” has attracted a lot of scholarly attention, since it seems to drag the whole debate on human evolution, ape ancestry, slavery, and racism into the Darwinian domain. 80 Reading the book through its title, as we are doing in the present chapter, we may want to further analyse Darwin’s use of the term “race” and see whether or not it involves the human angle. Throughout the Origin, though notably in the first chapter, Darwin uses the term “races” many times, mostly in reference to garden plants or domestic animal breeds. The term “races” is often associated with the adjectives “domestic” or, although rarer, “geographical”. My feeling is that his use of the term is as a synonym of “breeds”, sometimes with taxonomical innuendoes, especially when the term is combined with others like “sub-species”, “hereditary varieties” or “individuals”. 81 Darwin maintains this use throughout his book. However, it is true that in three specific occurrences the term “races” is explicitly applied in relation to humans. 82 Hence, Darwin’s use of the term “races” does not provide us with a clear-cut answer to the well-worn issue of whether or not the Origin was actually about “man”.
How does the question break down when passed through the translation prism? In languages like French or German, “race” or “Rasse” is the most general term employed to describe domestic animal or plant “breeds”. Hence, “races” is much more present in French or German translations than in the original English version. A quick word count reveals that the term “races” appears less than 50 times in the first edition of the English Origin, about 125 times in Bronn’s German translation, and reaching an impressive 230 times in Royer’s French version. 83 This difference of occurrences is chiefly explained by the fact that when Darwin writes “breeds” or even at times “kinds”, the German version reads “Rassen” and the French version reads “races”. 84 The Dutch version, by Tiberius Cornelius Winkler, also reaches a high count of “rassen” (about 275 occurrences) since he often uses the term as a translation of “varieties”. 85 This very broad and loose use of the term “races” in languages other than English may have produced the effect of importing the concern for the evolution of human races into the Origin.
In stark contrast to this, one can conclude that Darwin’s use of the term “race” was rather reasonable and restrictive: he used it mostly to designate domestic breeds, which explains the never-ending debates among Anglophone scholars over Darwin’s attitude towards humans in the Origin. However, translations of his text added stress and even extended the consequences his thinking had for humans. By the mere effect of translation, the presence of the “race” question was amplified exponentially to spread throughout the book. Other textual effects (like Royer’s preface) also strengthened the impression that the Origin was actually a book about human races.

In the struggle for life

In Italian, the expression “la lotta per l’esistenza” is disconcerting on the ear, 95 and “lutte pour l’existence” sounds in no way natural in French. Claparède, who introduced the latter, expressed his regret at employing “such a barbarous expression”. Clarifying this, he said: Strictly speaking, it is the combat beings bring against each other in order to battle over their existence. Expressions like combat de la vie (combat of life) or lutte de l’existence (struggle of existence) just do not carry this meaning. 96
But it should be noted that the term is no more natural in English: Theophilus Parsons speaks of it with hesitation: “Therefore there must be a competition, or as [Darwin] phrases it, a ‘struggle for life’ ”. Parsons never employs the expression without the protection of these scare quotes. 97 Studies carried out on the Russian intellectual reception of the Origin have shown that the expression struggle for existence “was at best imprecise and confusing; at worst, and this was much more common, fallacious and offensive”. 98
To avoid this compound form that irritated French ears, offended Russian scholars, and was ultimately just as disconcerting in English as it was in Italian, Clémence Royer proposed a vibrant and illustrative translation: “la concurrence vitale” (the vital competition). But what does this version suggest? Given that it is not a literal translation, what does it add to Darwin’s text? Whereas struggle indicates adversity or rivalry, competition primarily indicates a parallelism: the term seems to indicate several individuals concomitantly engaged in the career of life. Nevertheless, it can be noted that where struggle may describe both organisms struggling amongst themselves (dogs who are hungry) as well as sole individuals confronting a hostile environment (the plant in need of water at the edge of the desert), “competition” immediately suggests the idea of obtaining some reward or prize. Both “struggle” and “competition” alike bring a certain emphasis to the “relationships of mutual dependence” that individuals maintain both with each other and with their environment: but where “struggle” may include a form of conatus, or a simple tendency to persevere in existence despite adversity, “competition” insists more directly on the very relational nature of survival: only one seed in a million reaches maturity. Where the “struggle for existence” includes the relation to inert elements and rare resources (water, nutrition, etc.), vital competition reinterprets these as relations of rivalry, “the banquet of life … ever too cramped to allow for all living creatures to be seated”. 99
Adolphe d’Archiac, a French geologist, proposed to replace Royer’s “vital competition” with “balance of the vital forces which give rise to the harmony of nature”. 100 But even though Royer did sometimes use the term “harmonie” to translate the English “adaptation”, this is still a far cry from making “l’harmonie de la nature” the central lesson of Darwinism, if by “harmonie” one means balance and status quo. Rather, as she put it in the 1862 French title, Darwinism appeared to her to be a theory of “progress”. More than just “favoured races”— which would at times be interpreted as perfecting (Vervollkommnung) instead of in terms of simple advantages (Begünstigung)—(Begünstigung)— Royer gives a general hypothesis on the nature of Darwin’s philosophy. She speaks of natural selection as a “pouvoir intelligent”, an angle shored up by some few instances of a “perfecting” vocabulary in the Origin, or by the fact that Darwin spoke of the “unerring skill” of natural selection. 101 According to Royer, progress is a conclusion logically deduced from the book itself. French readers of Royer’s translation went on to echo this considerable inflection, which they unquestioningly attributed to Darwin himself. 102 Darwin did, however, succeed in having Royer remove the concept of “progress” from the subtitle of the second French edition, although this did not prevent the Darwinian theory being lauded by an editor of Civiltà cattolica as “la teorica del progresso”. 103

Up to this point, we have taken for granted that natural selection is the same as “the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life” and that, consequently, natural selection is defined as a dividing blade, a process that sorts out the “races”. This is how the title was principally understood in the nineteenth century. The second interpretation would establish an equivalence, not between natural selection and preservation of favoured races, but rather between the entire first part of the title and the entire second part of the title, i.e. between the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and the Preservation of Favoured Races. This would boil down to saying that species have an ontological or taxonomical status equivalent to that of “races” (i.e. varieties); that the production of species (rather than natural selection) is nothing other than the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for existence. The second reading is supported by present day philosophers of biology such as Jean Gayon: This title can be understood in at least two ways. The first suggests that natural selection involves “the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life”, and thus consists of the selection of races. The second (which was clearly Darwin’s) suggests that species, which cannot be distinguished by any absolute criterion from “races” (or “varieties”), are the result of a process of modification by “natural selection”. 104 In this reading, difficult terms are deflated, separated from tendentious interpretations: the term “races” is simply equated with “incipient species”; the term “preservation”, with its toxic hints of elimination, is not associated with natural selection (a creative, non-eliminative process), but to the overall mechanism of the origination of species. Hence, Gayon’s interpretation of the central, balancing “or” between the two halves of Darwin’s title undoubtedly solves many difficulties for modern day interpreters. However, in spite of its conceptual clarity and theoretical beauty, this interpretation of the “or” cannot be said to be “clearly Darwin’s own”, since we have seen that Darwin’s own comments in his correspondence and in the various phrasings and rewritings of the Origin, all lean in the same direction: preservation is an equivalent of selection.

Conclusão

Concluding this analysis, we see that concentrated into the title alone there is a powerful dose of ambiguity and contention. Nineteenth century readers endlessly wondered whether Darwin had really articulated the right problem, and whether he had attacked it from the right angle. Although some did acknowledge Darwin’s virtue in having posed an important question, this was sometimes just another tactic for casting his method into doubt and coaxing him towards other wordings, other answers, other problems. As for the solutions he delivered, criticism of these was, for all intents and purposes, universal. None seem to have grasped that Darwin had transformed and shifted the question of origin from a point-source derivation to the mechanisms enabling the efficient production of species (the production of variations, their accumulation and perpetuation). How this reinterpretation of the term “origin” was accounted for would underpin the status accorded to the doctrine of natural selection qua response to the “origin of species” question.
Two points in particular seem to emerge from this. First, natural selection’s mode of operation (interpreted as a dividing blade, as elimination) leaves the question of the genuinely creative process (variation) wide open. Second, it is because readers either reject or disregard the meaning of the term “origin” that they speculate that the 1859 work may have approached the problem from the perspective of a secondary action, whereas the solution would have required a shift to a more fundamental level. In either case, it seems that as soon as the origin of species question has been opened, we find ourselves inevitably redirected towards other questions that the former presupposes (e.g. the origin of variations, the origin of prototypes, the origin of life, etc.), domains for which the Darwinian model of natural selection could be neither a relevant nor a sufficient agent.
Most often, Darwin tended to reconcile opposing views rather than trying to decide between them, as can be seen in the case of “origin as mode of origination” and “origin as source”. Perhaps part of the difficulty lies in the fact that the documentation on breeding that Darwin leaned on tended to conceive of the origin as a prototype and variation as a temporary distancing from this type that nevertheless remained ever at risk of reversion. Despite his best efforts to dissociate himself from this prototype conclusion that the breeders had drawn from their own practices, and despite having criticised them for not seeing that the accumulation of variations from just one type could indeed lead to numerous variants and eventually species, it may still be the case that Darwin never managed to fully free himself from the framework in which these problems were initially set in the sources he drew upon. And this in turn may be the root of the book’s most commonly received criticism: that it simply doesn’t answer the question posed by its title.

3 "One long argument?" Darwin-the-selectionist

"there is not a sentence which has no bearing on whole argument" to Murray
Abstract

This hasty production can be interpreted in two ways. On one hand, it is what makes the
Origin’s argument so concise and pithy: “one long argument”. But, on the other hand, it also accounts for the fact that Darwin had to spend thirteen more years of his life, from 1859 to 1872, editing the book and improving on the communication of his meanings: wavering as to the content of his “view”, yet rigidly opposing special creations.

Lamarck citado no Descent
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Darwin’s methodological argument was not recognised and approved by his “patrons” in scientific methodology.
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Most notably, all throughout the Origin, natural selection is always conspicuously accompanied by the laws of variation.
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Darwin is simply asserting the following point: the only function of natural selection is to preserve and it falls to generation and the laws of variation to actually “produce” new forms.
Eds e lamarck

Butler insightfully documented what he interpreted as signs of panic, or what he calls a true “stampede of my’s”, in the fifth edition (1869) of the Origin. In one chapter of his Luck or Cunning, mysteriously entitled “The Excised ‘My’s’ ”, Butler calculates that Darwin excised no fewer than thirty of the initial forty-five occurrences of “my” from the first edition. Finally, “of the fourteen my’s that were left in 1869, five more were cut out in 1872, and nine only were allowed eventually to remain”. 53 For Butler, the excision of “my’s” plainly signifies that “complaint had early reached Mr. Darwin that the difference between himself and his predecessors was unsubstantial and hard to grasp”. By 1869, it was clear enough to most that Darwin had not paid due tribute to Lamarck and that he could not claim the whole of evolutionary theory as his own. In fact, this “stampede of 1869” may well have been occasioned by the publication in Germany of Haeckel’s History of Creation (1868), in which Lamarck is granted a prominent role. For Butler, readers of the Origin necessarily feel “the hesitating feeble gait of one who fears a pitfall at every step”. This is why comparing the successive editions of the Origin was a duty for any reader of Darwin— or at least so Butler thought. 54
Samuel Butler, meticulously, almost perversely, and with evident perspicuity, counted the “my’s” from one edition to the other. And he noticed a fact that is especially relevant to our investigation into the names and meanings of Darwin’s theory. Darwin, it is now clear, often speaks, at least in the first versions of the Origin, of “my theory” and then shortly afterwards of “descent with modification” in a way that suggests (but does not explicitly state) that the two expressions refer to the same thing. In fact, Butler notes, “I only found one place where Mr Darwin pinned himself down beyond possibility of retreat, however ignominious, by using the words my theory of descent with modification”. This passage is on page 381 of the first edition of the Origin of Species. “Darwin”, Butler mercilessly pursues, only used this direct categorical form of claim in one place; and even here, after it had stood through three editions, two of which had been largely altered, he could stand it no longer, and altered the “my” into “the” in 1866, with the fourth edition of the Origin of Species. This was the only one of the original forty-five my’s that was cut out before the appearance of the fifth edition in 1869, and its excision throws curious light upon the working of Mr Darwin’s mind. The selection of the most categorical my out of the whole forty-five, shows that Mr Darwin knew all about his my’s, and, while seeing reason to remove this, held that the others might very well stand.
Darwin even left “On my view of descent with modification” on page 454 of the first edition. In 1866, Darwin excised “the most technically categorical” of his “my’s”: this first revision betrays the deep uneasiness of mind that would soon lead to the “stampede” of 1869.

the Origin of Species is by no means an easy book to read— if by reading is implied the full comprehension of an author’s meaning”. hUXLEY
NS

Having abandoned natural selection, can one still claim to be a follower of Darwin? Huxley wished to exclude Romanes from Darwin’s legacy. But is it a certainty that, in terms of Darwinian orthodoxy, Romanes matters less than Huxley? While Huxley certainly holds the reputation for being the most devoted and zealous of all Darwinians, it is nevertheless no longer fully clear whether he truly understood the scope of Darwinian theory and, from the sidelines, Romanes’ position has now found its own defenders, even in recent times.
[...]
Upon rereading Darwin in the neo-Darwinian synthesis framework of the 1950s, Ernst Mayr was surprised to discover that when he spoke of “my theory”, Darwin was often referring to evolutionary ideas “in general” and to the theory of natural selection with far less frequency: in fact, on only three occasions: Considering that evolutionary ideas, however vague, were widespread in the middle of the century, it surely appears naïve for Darwin to refer to the concept of evolution no less than ten times as “my theory” (pp. 161, 173, 179, 184, 189, 206, 281, 314, 341, and 454), while his own theory of evolution by natural selection is designated as “my theory” only three times (pp. 199, 201 and 242). 60
Mayr saw this as a sign of “naïvety”, as though Darwin were blind to what his own contribution actually was. Mayr’s concern is understandable: if the Darwinian theory is not the theory of natural selection, but only one among many theories of descent, then it would find itself engulfed in a vast glut of other such theories! Worse still, it may be that Darwin is just a follower of Lamarck and the other evolutionists. 61
Mayr also noted that most of the literature on the impact of Darwinism paid insufficient attention to the variety of theories actually attributed to Darwin and how these continuously changed over time: sometimes evolution as such, sometimes man’s descent from the apes or natural selection. Mayr later clarified his views, explaining that Darwin had “five theories” and urging readers not to approach the “five strands of Darwin’s thought” in the same way, since these “do not constitute an indivisible whole, as was made clear by the fact that so many evolutionists accepted some of [them] but rejected others”. 62 Those five theories are: evolution as such, common descent (evolution from common ancestors), gradualness of evolution, multiplication of species, and natural selection. 63
[60Mayr 1964, p. xxii. 61A third example here could be Stephen Jay Gould’s reaction to Darwin and the Origin. On this, see Gayon 2009b. 62Mayr 1982, pp. 505–510; Mayr 1985. 63See for instance, Mayr 1972, p. 64]
[...]
The accomplishment of the Origin is therefore twofold: on the one hand, it establishes the process of natural selection, and on the other hand, in keeping with a title that announces the origin of species “by means of natural selection”, Darwin frames it as the mechanism underpinning the origination (Entstehung) of species. The first aspect presents a mechanism of remarkable simplicity, but it was the second point— i.e. the actual causal or explanatory power of natural selection— that was to open the floodgates of criticism and praise. In reality, the concept of natural selection hides many difficulties, something the historian of science can get an idea of by consulting either Darwin’s notebooks or the two unpublished manuscripts (from 1842 and 1844) that outline his theory. In them, we find Darwin wondering how variation occurs; whether it is determined that it occurs in response to environmental solicitation, or, in the case that it may be spontaneously produced by the body, then according to what modalities, within which limits, etc. While the existence of natural selection was generally granted, criticism focused on its effectivity, which seemed to be governed by the amplitude of the variations upon which it acted.
[...]
From the second edition on, this was transformed into the slightly more specific, “It may metaphorically be said”. 75 If natural selection is only “metaphorical”, this means, first and foremost, that it cannot be taken literally; there is no intelligent and conscious entity in nature that “selects”. 76 The term “metaphorical” is also testament to the actual origin of the concept itself. The fact that it was borrowed from another field— breeding practices— and translated into the theory of the evolution of species. The importance of the metaphor resides, for Darwin, in the fact that “it brings into connection the production of domestic races by man’s power of selection, and the natural preservation of varieties and species in a state of nature”.
[...]
The concept [of unconscious] holds a complex, analogical relation to artificial selection, one which has been widely discussed in the Darwinian literature. Notably, comparison of the two kinds of selection (artificial and natural) creates the impression that natural selection, just like its artificial counterpart, requires a “selector”. Therefore, positing an “isomorphism of the two selections” was bound to feel the brunt of abundant objection: doesn’t it expose Darwinism to a kind of latent teleology? Darwin speaks of “selection” in much the same way that chemists speak of “affinities”, yet nobody stands up to accuse chemists of attributing subjectivity to molecules. This defence notwithstanding, it was discontent with the term “natural selection” that led Darwin, in the fifth edition of his work and upon a suggestion from Wallace, to introduce “the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest”. 83 However, this newer expression brought with it its own set of problems and, what’s more, is also an ill-fitting name to represent the Darwinian theory.

Descent

by descent can mean “over the course of descent”, i.e. all along the genealogical line that runs from the common ancestor to present forms. But a second interpretation suggests that the change of species occurs “by means” of some specific action called “descent”, the fact of one individual being the “descendant” of another. In the first case, we turn to the depths of time; in the second, to a mechanism still at work in nature. There are also two main ways the word “descent” itself can be employed. On the one hand, when Darwin speaks of a “community of descent”, of “common descent”, or of “propinquity of descent”, he points into the past, indicating a “progenitor”, a common ancestor, a “community of origin”, the foundation of membership to a shared line, i.e. the resemblance between organic creatures. This idea allows him, in Chapter XIII, to account for the natural arrangement of species. But, on the other hand, Darwin evokes the “long course of descent”, the modifications that occur at every “step of descent”, “successive period of descent”, or “long [line] of descent”. These passages use descent in the forward-looking sense. Here, descent points towards the descendants, to generation in its double sense: the production of new individuals and the relationship of succession they occupy with their progenitors.
The term “descent” has proven troublesome for translators. In French, the word “descendance” has been traditionally used, although it has several drawbacks: it lends itself to much lampooning (humans “descending” from monkeys just as monkeys “descend” from the tree, a play on words possible in English also but which was famously caricatured for the front cover of the French satirical magazine La Petite Lune, circa. 1878). Worse still, it presents some genuine conceptual limits. The French “descendance” primarily indicates posterity, whereas the English “descent” also indicates ancestry. Patrick Tort proposed translating “descent” by “filiation”. To establish the “descent of man”, for example, would be to establish the “filiation de l’homme”, to set down a genealogy, to identify ancestors. 66 This interpretation has unquestionable advantages, particularly because it underlines the systematic and palaeontological significance of descent. A French palaeontologist, Paul Gervais, wrote the following in 1859, just before the publication of the Origin: The filiation of the animal species, through time, is only an apparent filiation, or rather it is a succession of specific terms, in many cases at least, and could not be considered to be a genealogical filiation in the manner of the individuals of some same bloodline.
In this, he was rejecting the idea of a genuine “filiation”, preferring instead to speak of “seriation” to denote “the obvious rapports we observe between the specific forms that represent and seem to perpetuate the same natural group over several successive epochs of the same geological period or over different epochs”. 67 Darwin, on the other hand, maintained the idea of genuine “filiation”.
[...]
Darwin often employs the terms descent and origin as equivalents: to give the origin of species is, simply, to say that species are the modified descendants of other species. 69 The theory of descent is a theory of origin, in its double sense of source (the relation of progenitors to descendants) and efficient cause (the producing mechanism).

Diagram e genealogia

What is extremely striking in the diagram is the fact that it illustrates a genealogical mechanism rather than, strictly speaking, a genealogy. The diagram is striking for the fact that no form of application accompanies it. Darwin makes no attempt at depicting a genealogical lineage anywhere in his book. This decision not to directly represent lines of descent was made long before, ever since his reading of Robert E. Chambers’ Vestiges of Creation: “I will not specify any genealogies— much too little known at present”. 87 This constant reference haunts Darwin’s thought: in publishing the Origin, he must not fall victim to the mistakes inherent to Vestiges.
[....]
"I have found it difficult, when looking at any two species, to avoid picturing to myself, forms directly intermediate between them […] [But, this is] a wholly false view; we should always look for forms intermediate between each species and a common but unknown progenitor."
[...]
What must be remembered is the distinction drawn between the two meanings of “origin”: Darwin’s diagram describes origin as a mechanism of supervenience (Entstehung) but does not lead us to origin as a single source (Urpsrung). This aspect of the diagram, although but little highlighted, is nevertheless fruitful and is translated by the way it connects species together. Ludwig Büchner observed that the search for intermediary forms among presently existing forms is not at all a Darwinian one: It is an error, according to Darwin, because the forms currently in existence do not proceed one from the other, but each of them is the result and the last term of a long series of developments. Thus, when one wishes to link two specific forms, it is not a direct intermediary that must be found for them, but some common ancestor that is unknown to us.
[...]
he suggests the idea of a possible transformation and of common ancestry. However, this mere possibility does not suffice, not even if the struggle for existence and natural selection are granted their full potentiality. Readers of the Origin could not help but conclude that the Darwinian argument was missing something.
[...]
The diagram is criticised for providing no concrete application whatsoever, and for not employing data from taxonomy; further-more, much criticism was levelled at Darwin’s constant use of fictitious examples. These fictions are all the more decisive for understanding what Darwin was attempting with the Origin that they constitute the very core of a general criticism claiming Darwin’s masterpiece to be a mere accumulation of hypotheses rather than a work of science. [...] "the best I could give".
[...]
Whenever the diagram of Chapter IV does get mentioned in comments and reviews of the Origin, it is to compare it to linguists’ diagrams. 97 The comparison always confers superiority upon the latter. The advantage with linguistic genealogies is that they involve proven relations between entities whose traces we do have. Darwin’s diagram, on the other hand, is judged to be purely hypothetical. With a view on the works of linguists, Darwin’s diagram was interpreted as an Urpsrung rather than an Entstehung: Darwin’s search for the mechanism was deemed secondary to the linking up of groups; the logic of the common ancestor was interpreted in terms of missing links. This led to pushing into the background the particular mechanism that Darwin highlights. Darwin’s theory was being re-interpreted as merely a theory of development from a single germ, or as a theory of variation.

PART II Darwin-the-Variationist

“other means of modification” had also been involved in the origin of species. This is especially clear in what Darwin states in a “most conspicuous position”, at the end of the introduction to the first edition of the Origin. 1 Darwin always remained firm on this point. He never claimed that natural selection was the alpha and omega of evolution. This provided ample ground for various readings of the Origin to emerge, with readers like G. Romanes claiming to be the true heirs of Darwin against the “ultra” Darwinian views of Wallace or Weismann. The Darwin looking for “other means” may be called “Lamarckian” insofar as he was mobilised to counter selectionist accounts of evolution. Usually, “Lamarckian” evolution describes a theory where the strengthening or weakening of parts of the body is transmitted to the offspring and progressively raised to the rank of a specific feature. Lately, the Origin of Species has even been described as “The origin of species by means of use-inheritance”. 2 [Waller 2002]
The efficiency of natural selection as the “means” for the origin of species was contested by some readers. Romanes, for one, understood that natural selection explains not the origin of species but merely the origin of adaptations. If this were truly the case, what would be an appropriate answer to the question of the origin of species: a question that Darwin perspicuously put to the fore, but left unanswered?
The Darwinian system can be defined as the non-random survival of random hereditary variations. Variation is the harbour from which Darwin sets sail. This is only to be expected from a work that treats origin as an Entstehung, a mechanism of origination. If Darwin’s theory is the theory of “descent with modification”, then just how modification supervenes in lineages— by means of variations produced during reproduction— is an essential axis of examination. Darwin’s theory provides the basis for an important programme of research: on the origin of variations. This point is especially clear in the conclusion of the Origin (Chapter XIV) when Darwin explains what should be sought for by future generations: not an experimental programme to test whether natural selection really does operate in the wild, but a programme fixed “on the laws of variation”. Variation is Darwin’s prime target when referring to “a grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry”.

4 Darwin-the-Epicurean. Chance and laws of variation

In contrast to “chance variation”, the vast majority of Darwin’s contemporaries and readers insisted upon the lawfulness of variation. Enemies of chance would often quote Darwin’s own admission that the expression “mere chance” is nothing more than a make-do, a vague manner of speaking of our ignorance as regards true causes. 4 They concluded that Epicureanism is impossible and turned Darwin into the discoverer of a new field of phenomena whose laws awaited only to be uncovered.
how one and the same variation could arise simultaneously in numerous individuals.

Mivart brought up “the incompetency of ‘natural selection’ to account for the incipient stages of useful structures” and structural co-adaptations between two interdependent individuals: variations would have to simultaneously affect the milk producing mammary in the mother as well as the suction and digestion organs in the offspring. 6 But, as early as 1860, Richard Owen was asking “if certain bounds to the variability of specific characters be a law in nature”, or if “unlimited variability by ‘natural selection’ be a law”. 7

Theodor Eimer and Leo S. Berg, both of whom bemoaned the exaggerated place the Darwinian system dedicated to chance variation.
[...]
Chance, then, is just the name that covers all unknown causes of variation. So, it turns out that the characteristics which qualify Darwinian variation as random do not exclude it from being governed by a certain causality. Undeterminedness may only be a veil for ignorance: it accompanies the progress of science and positively reinforces the space implicitly defined by the (provisional?) limits of our understanding.
[...]
can we go from this tendency to vary to the tendency of variation to follow certain lines?

The fifth edition of the Origin attempts to shed some light on this opposition between directed variation (centripetal, reversing) and free or undetermined variation (centrifugal, diffuse), indicating the possibility of variations affecting a whole population. In a rewritten passage of Chapter V, Darwin specifies that the direct action of a changed condition of life will lead to either indefinite or definite results. When the direct action of the conditions produces indefinite results, “the organisation seems to become plastic, and we have much fluctuating variability”; but, when the results are definite, “all, or nearly all the individuals become modified in the same way”. 23 The “tendency to vary” is essential to the Darwinian perspective, because Darwin sees in it the real explanation for specific differences, the vera causa affirmation of the parental community, as opposed to the theory of independent creations. 24 Throughout Chapter V, Darwin affirms the necessity of moving beyond randomness by seeking the causes and laws of variation. However, since he also affirms that variation is most clearly manifest in domestication, breeding lots provided him with a particularly pertinent setting for the study of this phenomenon. Based on this, Darwin was able to attribute diverse causes to variation: a direct or indirect effect of the conditions of life, habit, use and disuse, correlation of growth, compensation or balance.

"my necessary work is leading me to believe rather more in the direct action of physical conditions. I presume I regret it, because it lessens the glory of Natural selection, and is so confoundedly doubtful”. 28
Variation’s non-random character would disarm the explanatory virtue of natural selection in two different ways. On the one hand, if variation is neither undetermined nor limitless, if, on the contrary, it imposes strict boundaries, then this reduces the scope of natural selection; it finds itself confined within certain such boundaries. On the other hand, if variation is not random, but follows determined directions, then this reduces natural selection’s breadth and seems to channel it in certain directions only.
Finally, what relationship can be established between Darwin’s Origin and lawfulness (Gesetzmässigkeit)? An American defender of Darwin, Chauncey Wright, got himself quite worked up over the recurrence of this question, the flip side of the Epicurean dispute. 29 We are in the nineteenth century, he insisted on reminding people; nobody contests the importance of causal determinations any more! If Darwin is accused of Epicureanism, it is because his readers are searching for laws. However, either they must consider Darwin’s system to be the dominion of chance, in which case the discovery of laws, far from extending Darwin’s work, will instead lead to the total subversion of Darwinian thought, now torn asunder from its foundations; or else, on the contrary, they will have to integrate Darwin into the project of searching for laws (such as natural selection), in which case he cannot be an Epicurean. Thus, by proposing other laws for explaining the theory of evolution, Darwin’s successors claim to do nothing other than extend or complete a scientific edifice which, far from being set in stone, calls for the discovery of other lawful relationships and connections. If scientists must search for laws, then natural selection does not suffice and Darwin will have to be overtaken on the very path he himself marked out. Darwin did advance a law (natural selection), but he also left important pages of natural science blank, leaving room for “chance” i.e. ignorance, especially in all that involves the origin of the fittest or the origin of variations. This is why his work must be completed by a search for the laws of variation.
[...]
But, from the point of view of those who were advancing new laws, natural selection suffered from being only a local law, an ad hoc principle, explaining order only in the organic world. And yet the inorganic world, where natural selection has no dominion, does not lack order. It would, perhaps, be therefore more fitting to explain all organic phenomena by means of the inorganic (principle of reduction) or, at the very least, to see what portion of organic phenomena can be explained using the laws of the inorganic. In order to avoid accusations of Epicureanism, Darwin’s project could be redefined as the search for natural laws and, through this new extension, could be reoriented. In particular, the search for the laws of variation implied no longer evoking chance but rather determined variation. As Huxley notes: “Darwin has left the causes of variation and the question whether it is limited or directed by external conditions perfectly open”.

5 Darwin-the-Teleologist. Are all variations useful?

Two step mechanism

Darwin clearly differentiates between the two levels: the elaboration of raw material level (variability and its blind laws) and the more fundamental level of the edifice’s construction (natural selection’s use of these raw fragments). This is why, “Over all these causes of Change I am convinced that the accumulative action of Selection, whether applied methodically and more quickly, or unconsciously and more slowly, but more efficiently, is by far the predominant Power”. 4
In this same sense, the botanist Carl Nägeli affirms that Darwinian variation is undetermined (unbestimmt) but that this in itself does not justify labelling its world view as Epicurean; all the more so that Darwin’s theory accounts for utility on a second level. Nägeli reads the Origin as a theory of “usefulness” (Nützlichkeittheorie) by distinguishing it from teleology (Zweckmässigkeit). 5 Since variations are produced purely randomly, and not for their utility, since, therefore, it is only after the fact that chance variations prove to be useful, it is thus quite impossible to identify any form of teleology.
A similar interpretation is given by both Thomas H. Huxley and August Weismann. Both were opposed to the hypothesis of creations, which takes everything to be entirely teleologically led (zweckmässig). But they also opposed the transmutational hypothesis, which allows for structures that have no function.
[...]
This classical reading would later be taken up by the disciples of the Modern Synthesis theory. Ernst Mayr, for instance, distinguishes the blind chance, single-step Epicurean model (which he deems to be non-Darwinian) from the two-step process which explains adaptations by means of the fortuitous or calamitous sorting of phenotypes. 8 Elliott Sober has even suggested that only creationists advance the caricature associating evolution and randomness. In other words, they have a tendency to read the Origin as though it were an Epicurean theory, something that it is not. 9 The random or undetermined nature of variation is no obstacle to the action of natural selection, if by the latter we mean a certain ordering that assures the production of what is useful. As Weismann very expressively put it in 1868: “It is therefore the action of the struggle for existence upon the variability of species, that is to say, natural selection, which occasions the origin of new races”.
[...]
Indeed, several authors conclude that Darwin uses chance to explain everything and therefore neglects to consider any principle of utility or law; they make an Epicurean of Darwin. Others, in contrast, associate the Origin with a plea for utility in nature and take quite improbable paths to arrive at denying chance any role within Darwin’s conceptions; they make a teleologist of Darwin. The former disregard and the latter underline that variation itself is not produced by chance but that, as Darwin had indicated in Chapter V, it is subject to laws. Both of these readings favour just one of the Origin’s two principles, each to the detriment of the other. It could be said that, after a fashion, these interpretations fail to grasp the particular combination of chance and utility proposed within the Darwinian schema (reconstituted above). Thus, theirs would be more accurately termed as misinterpretations. However, they still hold interest as interpretative prisms: they distract us from the stated word of Darwin’s arguments, relegate natural selection to a subordinate role, and attempt to add more meat (i.e. “other means of modification”) to the bones.
[...]
In contrast to the figure of Darwin-the-Epicurean stands the figure of Darwin-the-Teleologist. Such interpretations of the Origin leave the random dimension of variation completely to one side, instead insisting on the principle of utility which ultimately governs the Darwinian process of evolution. As an example, Albert von Kölliker tends to deny chance its role, placing Darwin to the side of the teleologists— a view that is corrected by both Thomas Huxley and Carl Nägeli. A similar kind of reasoning is displayed by the Duke of Argyll, whose aim was to study “the reign of law”. On the one hand, the Duke insists heavily on the way Darwin draws on ends-focused arguments, notably in his description of orchids; on the other hand, he also reminds us that chance is not a positive theory of Darwin’s but (in keeping with Darwin’s own terms) just a word cast over an ignorance. Both of these authors (Kölliker and Argyll) advance the image of Darwin-the-Teleologist and banish the concept of random variation from what can legitimately be taken for the core theory of the Origin.

Kolliker

Today, Huxley’s reading has prevailed against Kölliker’s, although Kölliker’s argument has also been given new life by James G. Lennox as well as through the critical analysis of Michael Ruse. 24 Indeed, the interpretation of Darwin as a teleologist is not merely some bizarre thesis linked to Kölliker’s flawed understanding of the Origin.
Even its efficiency sees itself significantly attenuated between the first edition, where it “succeeds” in reducing the parts, and the sixth edition, where, losing its status as independent agent, it only “tends to” reduce.

Argyll

These reflections [of Argyll] on the role of utility within the economy of the Darwinian system bring to light that Darwinian variation is not just some anatomical modification; it unfolds within a general ecology of relations. It could happen that purely neutral variations (neither useful nor useless) be produced, but natural selection would not apply to them and they would, therefore, from the theory’s perspective, be as though inexistent. In this, we re-encounter the basis for Kölliker’s objection: that Darwin’s world view is teleological because, ultimately, it accounts only for useful variations. For the mechanism of natural selection to be operational, the variation must necessarily involve some value and this value must lead to some adaptation. Thus, Darwin’s oversight is twofold: not only does he not account for the origin of variations (natural selection doesn’t originate anything), but even among the variations produced (originated through potential laws which he does not speak of), he pays attention only to those that are more or less useful.

Darwin-the-Physico-theologian

Our order to know an intention, one has to question the one to which this intention has been attributed, or hear him speak his mind— events such as never occur in natural phenomena. 32 Candolle aptly noted an ambiguity in the English lexicon: the words Purpose and End “have two contradictory the words Purpose and End “have two contradictory meanings”, suggesting either a “premeditated goal”, or “an effect, a cause, a result”. Probably, he surmised, translators did not pay enough attention to this difficulty and this may be the cause of “a confusion of ideas”. Words entail a necessary vagueness, and this is why Candolle urged Darwin to avoid any expression that might suggest the supposition of intentions in nature, if he was going to pursue causes and effects in nature methodically.
[...]
Other readers of Darwin also came away with a teleological reading of the Origin. In the marginalia to Royer’s translation, French palaeontologist Albert Gaudry notes: Everything that is said on natural selection [in Royer’s translation: élection naturelle] proves the direct intervention of the creator [words crossed out by Gaudry] of God.… Without this intervention, all [those pages] have no meaning.… Reading this book proves God’s continual action.
[...]
Darwin’s emphasis on “wonderful contrivances” brings teleology back into nature with force, allowing Asa Gray to claim that “natural selection is not inconsistent with natural theology”. 38 Darwin is a kind of teleologist as he acknowledges design and contrivances in nature, and also because his interpretation of organic forms leans heavily on a principle of usefulness. In the Origin, Darwin’s enemy is not so much the Bridgewater treatises as special creationism. Darwin opposes his view to special creations, but his theory of the modification of species by laws of descent is susceptible to being interpreted as new terrain for physico-theology, as C. Royer, A. Grant, and A. Gray all suggested. All claimed the existence of a physico-theology that was truly Darwinian, even though Darwin had no intention to produce any such thing. Physico-theology is not synonymous with the theory of special creations. It refers only to any kind of inference from natural facts to the Creator; it is a theological discourse grounded in scientific results (whatever they may be). In the kind of natural theology attributed to Darwin, God had no foreknowledge of the particular forms that life would take: everything is operated by the designed laws of nature, not by brute force and the proof of God’s existence can be based on the apparent perfection resulting from the blind, cruel, severe, yet lawful and designed, elimination of imperfections.
By broaching “contrivances”, especially in his Orchids, Darwin set himself on a slippery slope that would inescapably veer from teleology to theology. The two questions should nonetheless be treated distinctly. Teleology deals with utility and adaptation in organisms and theological assumptions traditionally come attached to it. But even without teleology in the classical sense of design (intended order and perfect adaptation of means to ends), the Darwinian framework served as the grounding for a new kind of natural theology where the selection of useful structures was understood as a law of progress.

Utility

The various readings we have seen should not be rejected as mere “misreadings”. They are all perfectly grounded in Darwin’s text, as Alphonse de Candolle noted in his letters to the great man himself. The reason Darwin can be bent equally well to both Epicurean and teleological interpretations is that his text presents a certain number of ambiguities.
[...]
while the reinterpretation of beauty on the basis of blind mechanisms argues in favour of Epicureanism, the existence of laws of progress, by contrast, grounds the idea of a teleological Darwin.
Chapter IV entirely extends these same lines, once again evoking “the beauty and infinite complexity of the coadaptations between all organic beings”. 42 The vocabulary employed here is awash with words like better (“ infinitely better adapted”, “better adapted forms”, a place “better filled by some modification”), improved (modified and improved; to improve still further; highly improved), perfected (modified and perfected); all culminating in, “nature’s productions … should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship”. 43 Natural selection always preserves what is “advantageous”, “favourable”, “profitable”: on the other hand, “we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed”. 44 Relating this back to the diagram from Chapter IV, we would say that, yes, at some time t, all creatures occupy the same horizontal, all are equally adapted; but if we then compare the creatures from time t with those from time t– 1, then a gap or distance created by a process of perfecting becomes apparent.
Darwin even speaks of a “general law of good being” present in nature, resulting, for example, from the necessary intercrossing of individuals. 45 In several passages of Chapter IV he mentions “the natural economy”, the “polity” of nature, i.e. its rational and infinitely wise order. 46 He underlines the manner in which natural selection modifies organisms in order that “we should then have places in the economy of nature which would assuredly be better filled up”: “natural selection will always tend to preserve all the individuals varying in the right direction, though in different degrees, so as better to fill up the unoccupied place”. 47 Here we see a direction in variation and an efficiency in the laws governing nature, both guaranteed by natural selection, both inscribed at the heart of Chapter IV.
The issue around the utility of characters is just as widely debated. In an addition to the fifth edition, Darwin seems to extend the utility of organs (and, thereby, the dominion of natural selection) when he states: No one will maintain that we as yet know the uses of all the parts of any one plant, or the functions of each cell in any one organ. Five or six years ago, endless peculiarities of structure in the flowers of orchids, great ridges and crests, and the relative positions of the various parts would have been considered as useless morphological differences; but now we know that they are of great service, and must have been under the dominion of natural selection. 48
But this passage is wiped from the sixth edition and replaced by a passage in Chapter VII where Darwin confronts the objection that “many characters appear to be of no service whatever to their possessors, and therefore cannot have been influenced through natural selection”. 49 Darwin acknowledges the strength of the objection and deploys a full arsenal of responses to it: prudence is no longer (as it was in the fifth edition) a matter of abstaining from the conclusion that certain parts are useless, but, quite to the contrary, a matter of no longer hastily forming judgements of utility; laws of correlation, and “laws of growth” in general, create a mutual pressure on development and fulfil a direct action of the conditions of life. Darwin seems here to be leaning further and further towards the idea that all structures have utility.
We have already analysed how another passage from Chapter VI is just as much a source of ambiguity and dispute between Kölliker and Huxley. 50 In this passage, Darwin ultimately admits there no seeming uselessness and, though he may acknowledge the apparent absence of direct use, this is only in order to better redeploy utility at different levels of special use, present or past. Thus, here, Darwin is clearly stating that all structures are governed by a principle of utility.
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The non-purposive character of Darwinian variation is clearly established, notably in the last sentence of Chapter V where it is stated that, “whatever the cause may be of each slight difference in the offspring from their parents— and a cause for each must exist”, natural selection accumulates “such differences, when beneficial to the individual”. 52 But, in this, Darwin establishes a very close link between natural selection and utility— and this is why his system is sometimes interpreted as a teleological system or a system of progress.

Uselessness

Darwin does, however, try to embrace uselessness within his view, or at least provisionally; the idea of laws of correlation between variations allows for the reach of nature’s lawfulness to be extended without having to subject everything to the dominion of natural selection. Above all, it allows us to explain the formation of useless organs (or organs whose utility is provisionally undetermined). Darwin seems to have accepted one exception to the rule of organ utility: correlation between characteristics dispenses with the obligation for each of them to be directly useful. No concession, however, is extended for the case of “free” beauty.
Darwin himself evokes the existence of utterly useless organs in the recap chapter to the Descent of Man. These are structures, which as far as we can judge with our little knowledge, are not now of any service to [Man], nor have been so during any former period of his existence, either in relation to his general conditions of life, or of one sex to the other. Such structures cannot be accounted for by any form of selection, or by the inherited effects of the use and disuse of parts. 53
The “correlation of growth” idea allows Darwin to include characters of the organism which appear to be useless; in doing this, he favours internal laws over the external environment, laws of variation over the efficiency of natural selection.
The utility of a structure or character is, moreover, open to debate. First, an organism is not to be considered in isolation but only in relation with other individuals (sexual partners specifically). Second, organs are also not to be considered in isolation, but only in relation to other organs within a general structure. In both cases, it seems that we do not possess the necessary criteria to guarantee a measure of the usefulness or uselessness of a given character.
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none [of these parts] is useful in and of itself; it has value only within the hypothesis of correlative propriety; hence, neither [part] offers an advantage in the struggle for existence unless the corresponding disposition of the other part is supposed as already granted.… We are thus forced to admit the rigorously parallel advancement of both modifications. 55 Here, Darwin dives straight into the abyss of the unthinkable, endeavouring to get around the objection of uselessness, even harmfulness: he appeals for prudence in declarations of utility and uselessness, recalling that nature, more insightful than us, can identify an advantage where the human eye may discern nothing at all; he also indicates, in contrast, that the “utility” of a character is not measured only in terms of the immediate benefit to its individual possessor, but may constitute some reproductive advantage (i.e. that the individual will produce a greater number of descendants). A verdict of uselessness is therefore always suspect, since utility can be hidden or relative. In other words, we cannot identify what does or does not contribute to “fitness”.
Finally, the question of “useless” characteristics comes down to the objection of beauty and its place in nature. If beauty has no utility for the individual, then it can find no explanation within natural selection, it’s just something left over in the organism, awaiting some natural reason. If, however, beauty is harmful to the individual, then its existence actually contravenes natural selection. In both cases, the idea of beauty existing in nature independently of any utilitarian consideration may be seen as an opening for Providence and physical theology.

Progress

“direction”, if not to say “progress”, to evolution. This aspect was very clearly put forward by Darwin’s first French translator Clémence Royer, who interpreted the Origin as an exposé of the “laws of progress”. Such a reading directly contradicts the extremely clear position that Darwin had laid out in an important passage of Chapter IV where he refutes progressive development. 60 But one can just as easily draw differing conclusions from other passages of the Origin where Darwin mentions that “we have reason to believe that such low beings change or become modified less quickly than the high”. 61 The fact that he does not avoid the opposition between “high” and “low” organisms indicates an admission of hierarchy between the different forms of life, something which, problematically, opens out onto the idea of “progress” in nature.
Many readers of the Origin, whether they believe themselves to be supporting or refuting it, orient themselves towards the laws of variation to the detriment of natural selection which is in each instance distanced, disqualified, or downplayed. The value of the two-step process is contested and all interest is shifted to the production of variations, the indispensable material upon which natural selection operates. Regardless of whether Darwin supports a theory where it is blind chance or inflexible laws which produce variations, in either case natural selection has no power to produce them: it risks becoming nothing more than a destructive agent, creating nothing. Its powers would be limited to sanction and severance, but as for the origin of variations (the inherently creative or originating phase of the process), here it would be entirely impotent.
To the standard image of a selectionist Darwin we have seen the contrasted figures of Darwin-the-Epicurean and Darwin-the-Teleologist. Exploring this here involves no claim to speaking the truth about “Darwinism”, nor any attempt to crumble its unity into a multitude of perspectives. It is simply a matter of acknowledging that different readings of Darwin were indeed explored, readings whose pertinence can be contested, but which inarguably focus our attention on certain, specific aspects of Darwin’s text, notably the ambiguous place accorded to utility, to progress, and to beauty within his system. Further still, some of these readings even claimed allegiance to Darwin’s very own thinking, all the while radically contesting certain fundamental postulates of the classical two-step presentation of Darwinism. In reading Eimer, Berg, Kölliker, Argyll, or Royer and Gray, we see just how plausible it is to understand the arguments of randomness and utility as being incompatible and to then deploy them one against the other.

6 Darwin-the-Lamarckian and the other "means of modification"

Chap. V

This general neglect of Chapter V might be explained by a number of reasons. Either readers don’t know what place to give it within the economy of the book, or else the themes it discusses seem precariously Lamarckian. 2
[1The treatment of Chapter V in the two Cambridge Companions devoted to Darwin and his masterpiece is quite revealing here. Richards and Ruse’s Companion (2009) strangely breaks with its step by step reading of the Origin by suddenly jumping from David Kohn’s focus on divergence (commenting chapter IV) to A.J. Lustig’s difficulties (dealing with Chapters VI and VII), or with Robert Olby’s paper on variation, which only cursorily evokes Chapter V. Hodge and Radick’s Companion (2009) offers a better treatment with Kenneth Waters’ presentation of the Origin’s various “arguments”, dealing with Chapter V as a challenge to the idea of “one long argument”. However, Waters remains unclear as to what to actually do with Chapter V itself: see especially Waters 2009, table on p. 125.
2 A good example of complete rejection of Chapter V can be found in Bates and Humphrey (1957, p. 165), which provides readers with excerpts of chapters of the Origin: “Chapter V of the Origin, dealing with the ‘Laws of Variation’, has been omitted entirely because the development of the science of genetics puts this subject in a quite different perspective from the one it had in Darwin’s day”. A case of embarrassment caused by Chapter V can be documented in Reznick 2010 (pp. 102–103): “Because of Darwin’s lack of understanding of inheritance, however, many portions of this chapter are archaic. For the sake of brevity, I will present synopses of only some parts of the chapter”.]
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The massive presence of these Lamarckian or orthogenetic themes in Chapter V explains why today’s Darwinians brush it aside, as though it were purely incidental to the economy of the book; as though Darwin allowing room for Lamarckian mechanisms was a kind of afterthought and that they could easily be removed from the infrastructure of the system without bringing it tumbling down, since the real agency in Darwin’s theory belongs not to the laws of variation but to natural selection.
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Among these “laws”, various so-called “Lamarckian” factors are studied. Most often, their direct role is reduced to a minimum, with all the most important effects being ascribed to natural selection. What Darwin calls “Correlation of growth” is also connected to natural selection with a principle relating to a general economy of resources. Darwin does his best to give several rules of variation, notably the rule stating that, “A part developed in any species in an extraordinary degree or manner, in comparison with the same part in allied species, tends to be highly variable”. 4 Although repeatedly insisting that this proposition is “a rule of high generality”, Darwin never sticks to his word on the matter and instead constantly returns to how natural selection can explain it.
That Chapter V is subordinate to the themes of Chapter IV (i.e. that the laws of variation are subordinate to natural selection) is unquestionable. Each and every theme called upon in Chapter V is systematically offset by the action of natural selection. When Darwin questions the respective roles of natural selection and the conditions of life, he concludes that the latter play only an indirect role (through their effects on the reproductive system, i.e. as a cause of variability) whereas the accumulative action of natural selection is the real manufacturer of characteristics. 5 Similarly, cases of use and disuse (wingless or blind animals) and laws of correlation of growth are connected to the action of natural selection.
Nevertheless, Chapter V is unique in its emphasis on variation and the laws of variation. With respect to each of these laws, Darwin constantly reaffirms the fact that descent with modification (the theory of the unknown common ancestor) proposes a “vera causa”, in contrast to “the ordinary view of each species having been independently created”, a view which must presume imaginary or unknown causes. 6 Darwin especially develops these points in relation to the bluish colour of pigeon plumage, though he also mentions the stripes found in the equine family, something he sees as a primitive characteristic: “not even a stripe of colour appears from what would commonly be called an accident”. 7 He adds that descent with modification is linked to the emergence of a “generative variability” and that both can be produced through either sexual or asexual reproduction. 8
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Traces of Lamarckism can be infused into the very heart of Darwin’s system, as, for instance, when his German translator, H.G. Bronn, initially chose to render natural selection as “die Wahl der Lebens-Weise” (or the choice of a way of life). 11 In the face of competition, certain individuals are forced to adopt modifications to their lifestyles, making this newly chosen “way of life” “the most fruitful and general cause of production of varieties”. For Bronn, the over-abundance of offspring leads not to eliminations but to reconversions, not to suppressions but to reorientations. Instead of struggling for the same habitats or resources, individuals expand the range of those habitats and resources traditionally exploited by their ancestors. By interpreting this “choice of lifestyle” as a form of sympatric speciation through divergence of characteristics and habits, Bronn’s expression falls in line with an idea Darwin denoted using an expression borrowed from Milne-Edwards: “division of labour”, a principle permitting improved allocation of a region’s resources, in turn enabling the region to accommodate a larger number of forms. Bronn’s was therefore a constructive interpretation of natural selection, where competition pushes individuals along the path of alternative habits, and in this he avoided the risk of interpreting natural selection as a crude dividing blade; his interpretation indicates how nature invents by working on the margins.
But Bronn’s choice can also be interpreted in a different manner. Now, rather than the (primary) modification prompting the choice in lifestyle, it is the choice in lifestyle that modifies the organism. Understood in this way, Darwinian natural selection becomes a concept of use and disuse. Like Lamarck’s “habits”, Bronn’s Wahl der Lebens-Weise would explain differentiation of forms through the continuous action of differences in lifestyle, with these in turn leading to differences between the faculties. Darwin, of course, was adamantly averse to this translation, whose Lamarckian accents he denounced in no uncertain terms. Inquiring into other possible equivalents for his “natural selection” (beginning with Adelung, “ennobling, would or perhaps be too metaphorical” 12), he shifted the search towards the vocabulary of breeders. But on the case of Bronn’s initial translation of natural selection, we see how easily Darwin’s thinking can be tainted by Lamarckian overtones.

Other means of modification

This statement, illuminating the “by means of natural selection” from the book’s title, is not found hidden in the correspondence; it is not a confession dragged out of Darwin, neither is it a concession ceded in some later edition of one of his books in order to satisfy his detractors. It is situated, in plain sight, right at the beginning of the Origin, just as the Introduction comes to a close. The passage was present in 1859 and remained there through all subsequent editions, undergoing only the most minor of changes, and finally being augmented by a long comment in the sixth edition where Darwin bemoans precisely the fact that no one has paid any attention to his warnings. 14 After more than ten years of debate around the Origin, Darwin judged it necessary to revisit the statement, this time hammering his message out unequivocally and with not just a little exasperation. 15
Here we see Darwin insisting on the fact that his readers have persisted in refusing to see one point he had underlined: by acknowledging the existence of a gap between natural selection as main factor and natural selection as exclusive factor in the modification of species, he had intentionally allowed room for other mechanisms. Now he is led to denounce this widespread error of interpretation which totally ignores his cautions. He also communicates his hope that the foreseeable future will see the error corrected. The naturalist mechanism of natural selection does constitute an essential grounding point of what Darwinism necessarily evokes. Darwin himself, however, seemed eager to get beyond an overly narrow selectionism.
Many other of Darwin’s texts reinforce the lesson to be drawn from these earlier extracts. In The Descent of Man (1871) he declares, by way of repentance: “I probably attributed too much to the action of natural selection or the survival of the fittest”, before clarifying that he had two distinct objects in view, firstly, to shew that species had not been separately created, and secondly, that natural selection had been the chief agent of change, though largely aided by the inherited effects of habit, and slightly by the direct action of the surrounding conditions. 16
Such passages have been given quite contradictory interpretations. Even among recent historians and philosophers, similar disagreement can be found. To take three emblematic examples, James Moore thinks Darwin’s theory still stood in the sixth edition, though “neither so elegantly nor impressively as before”; 17 Robert Young suggests a “useful exaggeration” that the book should have been re-titled “on the origin of species by means of natural selection and all sorts of other things”. 18 As for Jean Gayon, he cites both passages from the 1859 introduction and the addition to the sixth edition, as supporting Darwin’s belief in the paramount power of natural selection. In Gayon’s view, when in the final chapter of the last edition of the Origin of Species (1872) Darwin “states that he had not changed his opinion as to the respective roles of natural selection and of other factors involved in the modification of species, repeating the formulation used in the introduction to the first edition”, this means that he was reiterating his support of natural selection. 19
But other readers have identified the same words as displays of Darwin’s remorse; a stack of proof establishing that Darwin did indeed regret every turn of phrase he may have employed that tended to give exclusive privilege to natural selection. 20 In this framework, these passages become so many weapons for those dubious of the magnitude of natural selection’s role; weapons forged from Darwin’s own words, thus ably equipping them to pit Darwin against Darwin. Or, more specifically, to pit Darwin against the authority of the pure or radical selectionists claiming to be the sole heirs to the Master, notably Wallace and Weismann. Countering derivations that redefined Darwinism as pure selectionism, the Darwin of 1872 looked to later developments in science hoping they might definitively resolve the issue. A certain number of his savant readers, such as Alphonse de Candolle, also appealed for others to “distinguish the theory of the derivation of forms from the necessary fact of the selection of these forms once they have been produced”. 21
Conversely, such deviations of Darwinian doctrine, despite their source in Darwin’s own words, were totally rejected by the radical Darwinians, who declared that this was blatant “Lamarckisation” at work, if not actually Darwin’s own still latent “self-Lamarckisation”. The role the term “Lamarckism” played in this debate was as the correlate and logical opposite of “pure Darwinism”. It is the question mark over various factors (those irreducible to natural selection; use and disuse, influence of exterior circumstances) and their place within the theoretical structure of Darwinism.

Wallacism

The second reading corresponds to Wallace’s strategy of purification (and absorption) of Darwinism, the paroxysm of which was the publication of his book Darwinism (1889).
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Wallace drives the point in deeper, interpreting Darwin in the direction of a pure selectionism which, in fact, far overshoots his stated position: quote
Wallace’s proclaimed “Darwinism” is intended to carry Darwin to the logical conclusion of his own thought, a conclusion to which Darwin himself did not come and never would have asserted. From the end of the Origin’s introduction, Wallace keeps only the statement which makes natural selection the “main” agent. Wallace’s intention was to return to a strict Darwinism that declares the agency of natural selection in the formation of the species loud and clear, to the exclusion of all other principles. In particular, “Mr. Darwin has shown that, in the distribution and modification of species, the biological is of more importance than the physical environment, the struggle with other organisms being often more severe than that with the forces of nature”: on such a basis, making any room at all for the influence of the environment is simply ruled out. 24
Conversely, this same statement from Darwin can lend itself to another interpretation entirely, simply by placing the accent on the second half of it: this second interpretation would lead to endless reminders that natural selection was not the exclusive agent. And, just such an interpretation was upheld both by Darwin’s opponents, like St. G. Mivart, and by self-confessed Darwinians like George Romanes.
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Coining the terms “neo-Darwinism” and “ultra-Darwinism”, with which he labelled Wallace and Weismann’s thought, Romanes was extremely attentive to studying the various Darwinian legacies in their full plurality, particularly when it came to the place of natural selection among the causes of organic evolution. His views, insofar as they conflicted with Wallace’s, led to diverging definitions of Darwinism, a fact analysed by Fern Elsdon-Baker. 26
Romanes broke a Darwinian taboo by boldly asking whether natural selection was the only, or even the main cause underpinning the origin of species. For him, Darwin’s answer to this question was at once “distinct and unequivocal”: “He stoutly resisted the doctrine that natural selection was to be regarded as the only cause of organic evolution”. Romanes shored up this answer by asserting the importance of “Lamarckian factors”. 27 For Romanes, Darwin’s selectionist posterity hardens and deforms the Darwinian legacy, “whether the misrepresentation be due to any unfavorable bias against one side of his teaching, or to sheer carelessness in the reading of his books”. In this, not only do the Neo-Darwinians strain the teachings of Darwin; they positively reverse those teachings— representing as anti-Darwinian the whole of one side of Darwin’s system, and calling those who continue to accept that system in its entirety by the name “Lamarckians”. 28
In particular, Wallace is accused of obscuring certain parts of Darwin’s text. Defending the exclusive agency of natural selection is not a Darwinian trait but a Wallacian one. Explaining organic evolution through natural selection alone is a conceivable theoretical position, though there is no justification for attaching Darwin’s name to it: the thrust of such a position is instead to “out-Darwin Darwin” and would thus be much better served by the label Wallacism. It is in this that, for Romanes, the “ultra-Darwinians” deform Darwin29 and are thus absolutely comparable to another, symmetrical endeavour to out-do Darwin; namely the one attempted by the American neo-Lamarckians. Romanes reads Darwin as an invitation to go beyond natural selection by searching for the other “means of modification” and, by this, opening a programme of critical study. This would conclude with either the rejection or the reassignment of the relationships between natural and the origin of species.
To explain the origin of species is to understand how the transformation occurs from distinct but interfertile varieties to distinct and mutually infertile species. From the time of the Origin’s first publication, and right up until today, readers have wondered whether Darwin’s work actually answers the question raised by its title, taken to be the question of speciation (i.e. concerning the mechanisms that prevent species from reproducing with each other).
One of the criteria distinguishing species from variety is the interfertility of individuals from within one species and the sterility of crossings from without. Therefore, the distinction between species and variety must reside in a certain reproductive isolation. If, furthermore, the idea that varieties are incipient species be accepted, then a certain porousness between species and variety must be admitted. The real lesson in Darwin would then be that species are nothing more than pronounced varieties, on the one hand, and nascent genera on the other. But how does a species (which, in principle, is only a variety) find itself reproductively isolated from others? Such an interpretation hints at re-framing the origin of species question as the speciation question. On the basis of this understanding of the origin of species, readers often state that the book does not answer iits own question.
If species really are only “marked” varieties (separated by a barrier of sterility), then explaining the origin of species (taken to mean speciation) just is a case of explaining how this barrier of sterility came about. Within the Darwinian framework, this equates to establishing whether natural selection and, more generally, descent with modification can actually produce this inter-species barrier. Yet Darwin says almost nothing of this. This difficulty has been called “Mr. Romanes’ paradox”.

Wagner

In the post-Darwinian literature, the Munich professor Moritz Wagner (1813– 1887) was both praised for putting forward the idea of geographic isolation as an important factor in speciation and also blamed for combining it with his own peculiar conception of variations. In particular, Wagner thought that migration and subsequent isolation would trigger increased variability among individuals. 37 A passionate reader of the Origin of Species, Wagner concluded that Darwin’s natural selection belonged to the programme nineteenth century naturalists had set themselves: the search for simple laws. Wagner himself thought he was simply extending this programme when he proposed not a simple phenomenon of migration, but rather a law of migration constituting the necessary condition for natural selection. 38 Observing the laws that assure the distribution of organisms, Wagner noticed “mysterious phenomena” whose causes remained unknown to him, particularly in cases concerning the habitat of several animal species. When a barrier as flimsy as a narrow river can separate two varieties of beetle, for example, it is difficult to imagine any Providence who would have assigned each variety its own habitat through specific acts. Likewise, when tall mountains act as borders between species, the climatic causes cannot explain those facts which remain, on the whole, out of the reach of Darwinism’s three fundamental ideas: individual mutability; transmission of novel characteristics through descent; and conservation and reinforcement of these characteristics in a certain direction over generations— all effected through the struggle for existence. This is why Wagner, without turning to the action of exterior conditions, and without relating it to the competition between organisms, aimed to complete Darwinism with a new natural law. His contribution to the theory of the origin of species took the shape of a “law of the migration (Migrationsgesetz) of organisms”, exceptional for its simplicity: “Like all natural laws or causes of phenomena, this law is remarkable for its simplicity, for it is based on the two most powerful impulses [Trieben] of all living beings, viz. self-preservation and reproduction”.
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Wagner’s intention is to show how natural selection and the law of migration are very closely tied: migration allows natural selection to originate species. Without the isolation produced by migration, variations would be lost and species would not originate.
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The point of contention with Wagner involves isolation and its modalities: is it merely useful? Or, as Wagner suggests, is it genuinely necessary? For Darwin, species originate on the wide continental expanses. 41 For Wagner, origination requires migration, not strictly speaking an “isolation” (in the sense where a population finds itself trapped on an island, isola), but rather a separation or segregation: with populations migrating, variations find themselves de facto separated, with no need for natural selection to play its role of eliminating and sifting.

Romanes

Romanes maintains that the theory of the origin of species by means of natural selection falls down at three major hurdles: 1 The sterility of inter-species breedings: why does the origin of species lead to the mutual sterility of individuals belonging to different species whereas simple variation, generally speaking, remains compatible with inter-fertility? The origin of variations: why does the same useful variation emerge simultaneously in a large number of individuals? 3 The characteristics defining species; they are so tiny that their utility must be questioned.
These three objections question the relation between species and selection by differentiating two levels, one morphological (anatomical difference) and one physiological (reproductive barrier). For Romanes, the difference between species is of the same morphological magnitude as the difference between two varieties, yet the first forms an insuperable physiological barrier between two forms that may be anatomically similar to each other. Furthermore, the difference between species is neither the simple difference between two varieties nor the change of body plan that characterises differences of genus or class.
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For Romanes, the marks that differentiate species are not useful variations and therefore escape natural selection. Consequently, natural selection cannot originate species More strictly speaking, natural selection is, in fact, a theory of the origin of adaptations, whatever their nature (morphological, physiological, psychological) or taxonomical level (genus, family, order, class …) may be.
Romanes claims not to attack natural selection but instead says that he defines its characteristics and functions and, thereby, dismisses “misnomers”. If natural selection does explain the origin of adaptations, and not the origin of species, then other factors must be found to explain the latter. In Darwin’s case these are use and disuse, correlative variation, and sexual selection; in Wagner’s case, it is the law of migration that must be included. Romanes presents “an additional factor” to explain the formation of specific types, something he names “the Prevention of Intercrossing with Parent Forms, or the Evolution of Species by Independent Variation”, or again “physiological selection, or segregation of the fit”, whose role it is to complete “natural selection, or survival of the fittest”. 48
Romanes’ position on natural selection and its influence is exactly symmetrical to that held by, for example, the botanist Carl Nägeli.
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In light of all of the above, the nature of “Mr. Romanes’ paradox” should be clear. Romanes is a major figure of Darwinism, despite denying natural selection’s role as the means behind the origin of species. How can this be possible? Giving the Romanes paradox its due consideration, must we then admit the existence of “Darwinians” who refuse to see natural selection as the origin of species?
Romanes’ conference in May 1886 provoked numerous reactions. Many came away understanding his message to mean that natural selection originated nothing, especially not species. 50 Others saw it as a healthy purging of Darwinism. 51 Romanes made it clear that he did not wish to question natural selection’s pertinence, but rather to simply localise its utility. The originality of his position is in the distinction he makes between two domains: origin (or “genesis”) of adaptations and origin of species. The mechanical theory of natural selection does not originate species. Although “it has hitherto been entangled on account of its having been made to ‘pose’ as such”, it is in fact “a theory of the genesis of adaptive structures and instincts”. 52 But can one, having so narrowly localised the action of natural selection, still claim to be “Darwinian”? Romanes thinks it absolutely consistent and even reiterates the point: “natural selection ought not in strictness to be regarded as a theory of the origin of species, but rather as a theory of the development of adaptive modifications”.
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On this point, the botanist W.T. Thiselton-Dyer railed against Romanes and his ambiguities: it is too often ignored that this theory is found in a work whose title is not just “On the Origin of species”, but “On the Origin of species by means of natural selection”. This is a clear statement of intent from the book’s author. Yet, had Romanes not just asserted that natural selection originated not species but adaptations? Thiselton-Dyer’s protest to this consisted in saying that, by tearing the relation between natural selection and the origin of species out of Darwinism, Romanes removes its very substance.
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Another bone of contention concerns the adaptive (or non-adaptive) character of specific differences. Romanes defends physiological selection through various arguments, notably the “argument from the inutility of specific differences”: “why is it that apparently useless structures occur in such profusion among species, in much less profusion among genera, and scarcely at all among families, orders, and classes?” 60 If natural selection explains the origin of species, then this implies that specific differences are adaptive. Yet, in the majority of cases, they are not; this reduces the action of natural selection to only those (rare) cases where these specific differences are adaptive. Everything hangs on affirming whether differences in species are adaptive or not, or in other words, whether they are useful to any kind of degree or are otherwise utterly useless.
This is the line that separates Romanes from his opponents. For Wallace, “Romanes makes a great deal of the alleged ‘inutility of specific characters’ ”, but “there is no proof worthy of the name that specific characters are frequently useless”; 61 for Thiselton-Dyer, if the inutility of
specific features is established, then Romanes has “inflict[ ed] a deadly blow on the Darwinian theory, the very essence of which is that specific differences must be advantageous”. 62 Darwin drew the “conclusion that all specific differences in plants are probably adaptive”. Of this, Thiselton-Dyer thinks “it seems only a reasonable induction, the validity of which is strengthened every day by fresh observation”. 63
It turns out, then, that the difference between Romanes and Darwin is not just in the detail but constitutes, in fact, a divergence of method, almost of scientific mindset: Darwin proceeded by naturalist method, through the patient accumulation of facts, but Romanes, “on the other hand, frames a theory which looks pretty enough on paper, and then, but not till then, looks about for facts to support it”. 64 Romanes advanced no proof for variations leading to sterility with the parental form yet maintaining fertility within the variety, which would indeed be a highly improbable case. In the end, even Romanes’ terminology is fallacious, since what it refers to as “physiological selection” would more fittingly be called “reproductive isolation”; as for the expression “segregation of the fit”, it seems quite unsuitable for referring to the variations “of an unuseful kind” that are Romanes’ focus. As for the “indifferent” variations; “correlated variation does give rise to a large classification of non-significant characters”. 65
Such debates were not aimed at determining who was for or against Darwin; rather, they sought to establish who was genuinely Darwinian. What is it to be faithful to Darwin? In arriving at a response, various versions battle it out. Romanes pokes fun at the multiple accusations: “unsustained generalizations” that he has “shrivel[ ed] up the Darwinian theory to very small dimensions” alongside claims that he has “roundly denied it altogether”. 66
When Thiselton-Dyer accuses him of drawing out a “strained” interpretation of Darwin’s writings, Romanes throws the accusation back by demanding to know: who is purifying Darwin? Over and over again— and more and more emphatically the later the editions of his works— Mr. Darwin insists that he does not regard natural selection as the only agent which has been concerned in the origination of species, and therefore concludes— to quote only one additional passage from among many to the same effect: No doubt the definite action of changed conditions, and the various causes of modification, lately specified, have all produced an effect, probably a great effect, independently of any advantage thus gained. 67
Romanes recalls Darwin’s complaint of “steady misrepresentation” 68 on this very point. And yet it is still this very doctrine, affirming that natural selection alone rules all, a doctrine the man himself constantly rejected, that posterity has chosen to call “pure Darwinism”. Even though Darwin refused the doctrine of pan-utilitarianism in a section of Chapter VI (“ Utilitarian doctrine how far true”), Wallace describes it as “a necessary deduction from the theory of natural selection”. 69 It is this same pan-utilitarian doctrine again that Weismann’s school prioritised and which provided the foundation for Thiselton-Dyer’s objections against physiological selection.
The concept of physiological selection claims to fill the gaps in Darwin’s system, necessarily bringing about a reconfiguration of “Darwinism” itself: it exposes how species originate, through sterility between the species and the variety that follows from this; precisely, this is what “M. Romanes’ theory provides and what Darwin’s theory did not give”. 70 Natural selection exists and its role is important; it is what builds wings. But it is not down to natural selection to differentiate two species of swallow. From Romanes’ perspective, natural selection is a theory of adaptations. Rather than being a theory of species, it underpins the origin of genera, families, orders: physiological selection, on the other hand, thanks to its focus on the inter-species reproductive barrier, could lay claim to the title of “theory of the origin of species”.

Hartmann

natural selection explains adaptations or physiologically useful characters but does not account for a set of purely morphological characteristics, whether these be devoid of utility or even outright harmful. [it needs auxiliary principles].
The first two— influence of exterior circumstances and effects of use and disuse— concern the causes of variation (the material natural selection shapes); the next two— sexual selection and correlation of variations— concern the explanation of useless or harmful characteristics (left unexplained by natural selection). These four principles function as a body of secondary hypotheses developed by Darwin in the Origin: some (e.g. sexual selection) corroborate natural selection, others (e.g. correlation of growth) complement it. Their purpose is to explain the facts of variation and of inadaptation. In principle, they act upon a different domain to selection and don’t at all affect the value of this concept: their purpose is only to complete or confirm it. Nevertheless, the paradox of the “auxiliary principles” is that, arriving as a reinforcement to natural selection, they actually end up draining it of its content.
The theory of natural selection, the pillar of the system, seems undone from the inside, and doubly so: first, by the fact that variability is not the result of chance but answers to laws; and, second, by the fact that the forms of living organisms are not fully legible through the lenses of only adaptation and utility, leaving room for inutility, if not to say, potentially at least, harm. This constitutes a criticism of the Darwinian agent (natural selection disposes of forms) through study, in parallel, of the material of agency (variation proposes forms) and the product of agency (the structures which are set down). In this framework, the intervention of other factors, far from propping up the Darwinian system, would result in a weakening of the very core of natural selection and the theory of a coherent, gradual transformism along with it.
[...]
Within this dimension of auxiliary principles, we find an important element in support of our general hypothesis of a Darwin that can always be played against himself. The auxiliary principles do not conflict with Darwin; they are taken from within the Origin and Darwin’s other works themselves. They are employed a posteriori to undo Darwinism from the inside, draining it of its substance. In the name of the laws of variation that Darwin decided to seek, they suggest the impossibility of random variability and, through this, they empty natural selection of both the variations that drove it and its effective power to shape the lines of evolution. The auxiliary principles weaken natural selection even as they profess to flesh it out.
[...]
In this way, the theory of transmutation by natural selection (understood as a gradual mechanism) is reinterpreted as one form of the theory of descent, of which the theories of development make up the rest. In its Darwinian form, the theory of descent postulates that organic forms are related to each other through bonds of filiation; but among the theories of descent, beyond natural selection alone, we must also count the Entwicklung theories, i.e. theories of heterogeneous generation which advance that forms metamorphose into each other without natural selection playing any role. Finally, the “ideal kinship” between types must be accounted for in order to arrive at the full schema of the “theory of organic evolution”. In reality, Hartmann wanted to show how the auxiliary principles, as well as the importance of heredity and variability, guided Darwin from a strictly mechanical procedure (selection’s sieve) to “an internal law of evolution or development”, suggested in particular by the existence of organs which do not follow the principle of utility as well as by the refutation of ran domness entailed by affirming laws of correlation.

Conclusão

It is notable that many of Darwin’s opponents (including Hartmann) did not radically reject natural selection, some even granted it a place within their theories. They just didn’t accord it the same “origin” role that Darwin had. The same judgement can even be extended to include certain of Darwin’s defenders (Romanes for instance), so that the idea of an opposition between “Darwinians” and “anti-Darwinians” loses much of its clarity and force. Instead of an “eclipse of Darwinism”, what we have is the blossoming of diverse Darwinisms, mutual rivals, each playing Darwin against Darwin in their own particular way.
For many readers of the Origin, species originate through the establishment of a physiological, interfertility barrier— a phenomenon that twentieth-century biologists called “speciation”. However, Darwin leaves this outside of his analysis. Can it then be said that “natural selection” explains the origin of species? or does it explain something else, such as the origin of adaptations and large body plans? It falls to others to propose principles that will account for the interspecies barrier: “law of migration” (Wagner), “physiological selection” (Romanes), and so on. Do these complementary principles reinforce Darwin’s stance? Or do they drain it of its substance? If natural selection cannot be said to be the actual “origin of species”, for as long as it does not account for interspecific barriers, then it accounts only for the “origin of adaptations”. Was this really what Darwin had in sight?
A similar question arises from within the Origin itself. Besides natural selection, Darwin develops several auxiliary principles whose supposed purpose is to reinforce the defensive walls of his core idea: these are the principles of sexual selection, correlation of growth, etc. By admitting these principles in order to account for apparently useless characteristics, Darwin opens the door to other modes of evolution. No longer proceeding through the gradual accumulation of differences produced over the course of sexual generation but through laws of internal development, evolution might also be effected through simple metamorphosis, or as a psychological force, perhaps even a metaphysical principle.

Part III

Radical origins. Darwin-the-cosmologist.

Metaphysical project of the Origin

7 "Mystery of mysteries" The temptation of origin

Positivismo

History of science has also studied how Auguste Comte’s thought may have indirectly constituted a significant element in Darwin’s reflections on the nature of science. In reality, Darwin had most likely read only a review of Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive that was published in the July 1838 edition of the Edinburgh Review. 21 From there to affirming that this reading, albeit at a crucial moment in the evolution of Darwin’s theory, may have influenced the formulation of his own ideas might seem excessive. The review indicates the importance of experimentation, using individuals removed from their natural state and placed into artificial conditions— a point which may stir our attention in the direction of artificial selection and breeders’ experiments. Furthermore, Comte, inspired by the Laplacian model, insists on the importance of numerical verification, something which may well be significant when we consider natural selection’s debt to Malthus, who Darwin would go on to read the following October. But more significantly still, in this same review Comte is presented as rejecting the notion that science is the search for causes. Yet it certainly seems that Darwin, with his theory of natural selection, would precisely claim to provide the causes of certain phenomena. How, in that case, could Comte have been an epistemological model for him? In point of fact, everything depends on what is meant by “cause”.
In mid-August, just after he had read the review of Comte’s work, Darwin wrote: In my speculations, must not go back to first stock of all animals, but merely to classes where types exist, for if so, it will be necessary to show how the first eye is formed,— how one nerve becomes sensitive to light … which is impossible. 22
Darwin’s theory works just like Laplace’s. The latter explained the origin of the solar system by referring to an initial nebula, without obliging himself to go back any further. Darwin provides a principle, evolution by descent with modifications, but he does not claim to give the origin of life. And yet this is exactly what would be demanded of his theory. The review of Comte’s work may well have comforted Darwin in the idea that one could in fact turn away from the notion of an origin of origin.
[...]
Origin (as distinct from beginning), therefore, appears to lie definitively outside of science: unthinkable, it seems to be inaccessible to our understanding because it is outside of time, outside of experience.
[...]
The exclusion of origin, a foregone conclusion within positivism, affected how the Origin was received, particularly in France. As Émile Littré put it: all absolute questions, that is those questions whose affair is the origin and end of things, are beyond the sphere of human knowledge and, as a consequence, are no longer able to guide minds in their research, men in their conduct, or societies in their development. The origin of things, we were not there; the end of things, we are not there; thus we have no way of knowing either this origin or this end. 25
Faced with this impossibility of attaining to the origin, men have turned to supernatural causes. From this point of view, the decision to abandon inquiry into origin emerges as the sine qua non condition of scientific progress. Positivism’s claim was to have struck barren all research efforts in the direction of origin, and Paul Broca also signalled a point where “scientific research thus makes way, following the nature of minds, for philosophical doubt or for belief”. 26
Yet the Darwinian theory took upon itself to seize the origin problem and to run it back as far as it could, back to the origin of the first monad. But it too would rapidly meet its limits: “the cause of the first movement from unorganised matter to the state of organised matter, being beyond both explanation and hypothesis, lies outside the furthest limit of what can be known”. Thus, the origin question brings us face to face with the question of what limits must be assigned to scientific knowledge and, continues Broca, “Darwin’s hypothesis on the origin of
species is not an essential part of anthropology but is inseparable from research into the origins of man, or rather the human type”. A coalition formed of the positivists and Cuvier’s disciples (including Broca) rose up in opposition to Lorenz Oken’s Naturphilosophie and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s anatomical philosophy. All parties claimed to be “the school of facts”, “the territory of fact, of empiricism, and of observation”, and all agreed in declaring the origin of species question to be a transcendent one. Nevertheless, this question had not spoken its last word and would not lie low for long. For example, in 1869 Ludwig Büchner claimed that “all Geoffroy’s opinions, then preconceived [i.e., in 1830]”, were fully “justified today”. 27
[...]
Whatever Auguste Comte’s definitive thought on the subject may have been, the warning recommending that science turn its back on the origin question could only serve as a guide to those undertaking specific research. For all others, according to Dally, the origin problem is necessary and “this is why an indulgent welcome, free of all systematic hostility, must be extended to every scientific attempt aimed at shedding light on a question whose solution, true or false, but accepted, has gained rule over the intellectual world”. 30 Dally, therefore, does not go along with the restrictive vision of our knowledge of origins, such as that presented by Broca. Instead, he proposes to restore the genuinely Comtean spirit. Consequently, in order “to combat an abused quotation” (by which he means Littré’s, cited above), he recalls that for Littré “inaccessible does not mean empty or non-existent”: “It is an ocean which crashes upon our shore and for which we have neither boat nor sail, though seeing it clearly is as salutary as it is wonderful”. 31 In this, he sees a beautiful invitation to investigate the origin problem, not to push it away. If science was meant to forbid itself from all research into origins, it “would have abdicated in favour of just any cosmogony, even if, as we saw, it was of an absurdity that would derange the commonest of senses”. The cosmogonies of his contemporary astronomers had been separated from any attempt at primordial explanation and from any conception which would take the universe as a whole for its object. Thus, they were fully aligned with the Kantian, positivist, and inductivist bans, and this is the sense in which the origin problem is scientific: “The universe, in its phenomenality, is a set of dynamic and plastic conversions, having neither beginning nor final term”. Consequently, Dally proposed redefining the “metaphysical” level of questioning by distinguishing between the origin (knowable) and the cause (metaphysical). As a result, the epistemic ban finds itself either displaced or rolled back to another level: Of causes, we know nothing; a purely metaphysical notion carries no proof; it leans on no necessity, moreover it leads to no negation. Of origins, on the other hand, we know much and can affirm that, in the natural order, phenomena are but an undefined sequence of transformations. But keep oneself from concluding, because these forces transform themselves, that they are reducible to each other. 32
Origins are taken to be beginnings, always locatable in the order of phenomena. We uphold a definitive relationship with origin, allowing us a certain way of knowing or conserving it as an object that can be legitimately scientific. However, we have no relationship with the cause, no more than we have access to what constitutes the substratum of phenomena (matter or spirit, or matter and force): “these terms refer to pure abstractions which [can] no longer play any role in science”.
[...]
The demand imposed on Darwin was to provide answers to two questions he had not raised: the origin of life and the origin of man.

8 "Originally breathed" or on the origin of life

Royer

Royer, in her translation of this passage, renders the Darwinian pairing “progenitors/ prototype” with the opposition of “types primitifs/ prototype”. 6 In doing this, she reinforces the text’s coherency around the origin question (the “primitif”) but, by the same token, she also introduces a significant interpretative bias. The Darwinian term “progenitors” recurs frequently in the Origin, where it refers to ancestors, those who give birth to (and precede) an individual in a lineage. Therefore, “progenitors” have nothing specifically “typical” or “archetypical” about them, they are just the point from which descent proceeds. But who were the first progenitors? Darwin alludes to this in the final pages, and this is where many begin their reading of him.

Originlaidade

instead of being perceived as an originality, the origin of species is judged as, in essence, nothing more than a variation on a canonical literary theme: a sole animal and a sole plant at the origin of all others.

Critica de Buchner e outros

On the side of the popular materialists, Ludwig Büchner was particularly harsh: Darwin— and this is a defective side of his doctrine— either didn’t have the courage, or else didn’t have the logic, to pursue and carry his idea of a common origin for all beings to its final and extreme consequences. He stops at four or five primordial forms or root couples for the animal kingdom, as many for the vegetable kingdom, and he admits that, at the origin, in the mists of time, these types were called into existence by the creator. 11
Others, by contrast, accuse him of being excessively bold. Flourens, for example, said: I see, first of all, that his system has no beginning. The obligatory beginning of every system, which integrally constructs beings, is spontaneous generation. Whether we try to fend it off or not: all systems of this sort begin through spontaneous generation or else lead to it.
Here, Darwin is believed to have climbed back from ancestor to ancestor, without end: In natural history, there are only two possible origins: either spontaneous generation, or the hand of God. Choose. Mr. Darwin writes a book on the origin of species, and, in this book, what lacks is, precisely, the origin of species. 12
Flourens mocks Darwin pitilessly: he arrived too late, into a century where spontaneous generation was no longer a credible belief. Lamarck, in comparison, was happy to find refuge for his transformism in the faulty doctrine of spontaneous generation. But now that “spontaneous generation is not”, only one of the two possible origins for all living beings remains: the hand of God.

Bronn

In his reading of the Origin, Bronn moved aside the origin of species question and took a step beyond it with his radical decision to investigate the origin of life and the origin of variations. 21 Interpreting Origin as Entstehung, Bronn proposed an etiological programme to Darwin— Ursache rather than Ursprung— in which natural selection (reinterpreted, as we saw earlier, as Wahl der Lebens-Weise) plays a decisive role as “the richest and most general cause”.
Bronn analysed the logic of the Darwinian system: carried to its logical conclusion, it implies that “all plants and all animals stem from [herrühren] a single prototype” and, therefore, that all forms can be connected back to four or five progenitors (Stamm-Individuen). Once the existence of several “primordial types [Urtypen]” has been admitted (whether this be ten, five, three, or even two), a creation is necessary. But if there were only a single, unique prototype, then the organic world could have its origin in a primordial goo, such as Priestley’s “green matter”. Experiments on spontaneous generation seemed, to Bronn, to be crucial for the status of Darwin’s theory, not to mention the fact that they would strike right at the problem of sex in nature. If “organism species” could be spawned, in certain conditions, without the need for organic germs, then Darwin’s theory “would receive the greatest support possible, in the shortest possible time”, on condition that the “direct origin [direkten Entstehung]” of organic matter from some inorganic elements be demonstrated. Conversely, for as long as these two points (generation without germs, production of organic from inorganic) were not established, the Darwinian theory would always have need of recourse to a “creative force”. And once one act of creation has been admitted, why not admit thousands of them? Likewise, for Bronn, anyone adopting Darwin’s views is backed into admitting two corollary hypotheses: not just the idea of progressive development but also, inevitably, the idea of “things having a primary beginning”. Bronn asks Darwin’s Origin to prove the possibility of using inorganic matter to produce organic matter “endowed with a cellular structure” and, further still, to prove that from this matter “the seeds and eggs of the inferior organism species” may be obtained. If science were to produce such results (which does not seem beyond all possibility), then it could “cease to have recourse to personal acts of creation which have no place inside the laws of nature”. Bronn did not attack Darwinian theory for not being demonstrable; as it stood, proofs and refutations were not forthcoming, and, in the meantime, there were those who believed in it and those who did not. 22 However, he accused Darwinian theory of barely carrying our understanding forward at all: it remains “all the more implausible for the reason that it does not lead us to the solution of the great problem of creation”. It leaves the only problem that really matters outside of its field, the origin of life, untouched. The intervention of even one creation is a fatal sprain for the system’s general construction; the wedge stabilising the system is ever at risk of becoming an edge which, if fully jammed in, could bring the whole system tumbling down. Thus, it is not at all incidental that the broader origin of life question should cross paths with Darwin’s own.
Darwin’s is not the only theory to have known such inflection; it can be seen that the same processes were also applied to the domains of cellular theory and organic chemistry. Ultimately, for Bronn, the question of the origin of living forms ties in, first, with the theory of descent through the omnipresence of the cell in the make-up of organisms and, second, with the synthesis of organic compounds from inert elements. 23 Spontaneous generation must be specified as part of the problem of producing a cellular structure, of producing organic from inorganic, and also as part of the possibility that this path may produce species or, in other words, organisms which can reproduce through germs. Leaning on cellular theory, Bronn asserted that there is nothing surprising about the development of all specific forms from some few prototypical ones: we see it happening with our own eyes, since a unique being is manufactured during the embryonic and foetal life phases, beginning from just a single cell. 24 But this merely makes the problem more acute and its solution more urgent: "there can be no light shed for as long as the origin of life is not explained".

Protótipos

Armand de Quatrefages used prototypes to measure the respective advantages and disadvantages of Lamarck’s and Darwin’s theories. The former supposed the constant production of elementary organisms which then evolve towards more elaborate stages; the latter, manifesting a certain “wise restraint”, supposed initial prototypes which he then had evolve through slow derivation. The Lamarckian system is in absolute need of ongoing spontaneous generation, whereas Darwin quarantines this question to the sole origin of prototypes, with respect to which he exercises a restraint whose implications are deserving of analysis. Darwin does not go as far back as Lamarck: in other words, he doesn’t in any way attempt to explain the existence of his prototype, a reservation he has been universally chastised for: “He was criticised for leaving his theory incomplete, for not holding fast to what the title of his book had promised, backing away from the question of first origin”. Quatrefages, on the other hand, praised this attitude: “Every man has the right to personally decide on the limits where his knowledge shall end. Furthermore, Darwin’s declaration concerning spontaneous generation abounds with good measure and sense. Here, his is the language of the genuine savant”. 31 Quatrefages is not asserting that spontaneous generation is impossible. More so, his remarks stress that it is neither refuted nor demonstrated, if not in fact being irrefutable and indemonstrable. On such an issue, it is better to admit ignorance. In contrast, when Lamarck’s theory is confronted with the primordial blind spot of spontaneous generation, it loses its very foundation: it emerges lacking the starting point of all its transformations. Darwin, however, “by refusing to explain the origin of life, by taking the living being as a primitive fact, thereby escapes all such difficulty”. Of course, removing spontaneous generation to outside the domain of natural phenomena does not therefore resolve the mystery. But the strength of Darwin’s system is that it allows the unknown to roam free, something that makes it compatible with a variety of hypotheses.
[...]
is not the specificity of a natural cause, as opposed to a miraculous one, that it arises steadily, constantly, repeatedly? In such a perspective, we can no longer make sense of life appearing only once on earth. If life appeared in a non-miraculous manner, then it can’t have happened just once, but rather many times. This, in turn, calls for an investigation into the number of individuals initially representing the prototype.
This question gave rise to a polemic among French readers of Darwin: Clémence Royer, denying the single ancestor, supported the view of multiple primary organisms produced by natural causes; 32 Eugène Dally opposed the idea that the earth might have functioned as a miraculous and incomprehensible “universal matrix”. Royer’s position, that the earth had produced several seeds at a certain point of its history, turns out to fit quite nicely with the intervention of some supernatural power in nature, “intervening here and there in its creation, in accordance with its mysterious fancies”. 33 Likewise, opponents of Darwin, such as Hyacinthe de Valroger, commented with sarcasm on the origin of these prototypes and all such materialist speculations around the origin of life:
[...]
Royer’s polygenism, invoked in order to naturalise the miraculous origin of the first seeds, can only lead to a multiplication of miracles the result of which is to render the whole explanation suspect.
Consequently, in terms of both the origin of seeds and the number of prototypes (two intimately interwoven questions), Darwin’s ideas began to be overtaken, which in itself can be understood as either their accomplishment or their relegation. The origin of prototypes authorises three kinds of transformism: polygenic (Royer), oligogenic (Darwin), or monogenic. The difference between these three kinds boils down to the number of seeds initially supposed. 35 The theory that supposes life to have a natural origin, making natural products of living beings, leads to the supposition of multiple centres of organisation: the very logic of the Origin would then lead to a polygenism.
[...]
appears that although readers of the Origin may mention or recall ideas that are original to the Darwinian system (struggle for existence, natural selection), the fundamental framework of Darwinian thought finds itself transposed to a general schema of derivation from prototype: the Darwinian question of the Entstehung is interpreted as an Ursprung. In such an approach, “Darwinism” is relegated to being little more than a rival theory to Lamarckism, located entirely on the same level of explanation. By shifting Darwin’s work from the origin of species to the origin of prototypes, his readers reformulated his intention and constantly held him up against the logical necessity of his own system, whether this was to extract an argument in favour of spontaneous generation or, on the contrary, to refute it in the name of Pasteurism. Through this, Darwin’s views are assimilated into the great expanse of theories on the transmutation of prototypes.
[...]
Admittedly, all of these debates around the Origin rather than directly on its content, did not occur without having some impact on certain of Darwin’s formulations and on the manner in which he was read.
Introducing the breath of the Creator was one such important effect. This variant has been much criticised and, commenting it in 1863, Darwin said: Your reviewer sneers with justice at my use of the “Pentateuchal terms”, “of one primordial form into which life was first breathed”: in a purely scientific work I ought perhaps not to have used such terms; but they well serve to confess that our ignorance is as profound on the origin of life as on the origin of force or matter.
[...]
Valroger relentlessly criticises the language Darwin employs in talking about God: “most frequently, his language attributes the Creator with the processes, methods, and habits of horticulturists, breeders, masters of stud farms, the members of a Pigeon’s club!” He is particularly critical of Darwin’s use of expressions where the terms “intelligent power” and “natural selection” are put together or near each other. This shifting of terrain, from the origin of species to the origin of prototypes, provokes a complete reconfiguration of the text, where God becomes the true origin and the very term “natural selection”, by its proximity to “artificial selection”, appears base and profane.

Mudança teórica no Variation

Several significant shifts are implied by the move from the first to the second of these two versions. Darwin introduces a broad, unspecified general “selection” (which includes artificial selection) to replace the “natural selection” present in the initial version. The second version also involves placing preservation and survival on the same level, as well as shifting from “modification of structure” to the general question of the origin of variations. According to Bastian, these modifications show that Darwin did not properly differentiate between these two joint roles of natural selection, as both the dividing blade that merely conserves and also the genuine producer of novelty.
[...]
the agent (natural selection) is constantly related back to the material (variability) and Darwin finds himself constantly dragged from the origin of species to the origin of variations.

9 "Light will be thrown" or on the origin of mankind

“One great difficulty to my mind in the way of your theory is the fact of the existence of Man”. So wrote the naturalist and clergyman Leonard Jenyns [...] But Darwin’s account is contested and many have been increasingly vocal in asserting that “the origin of mankind” is, in actual fact, present throughout and weaved into the Origin, notably on the issue of sexual selection. This dispute can only arise because Darwin’s readers paid little or no attention to Darwin’s reserve. Just as we saw with the origin of prototypes, here again, in reflecting on the origin of mankind, it is another mere fragment of a sentence that has been seized upon: the promise that “light will be thrown” has been so often quoted and commented on that the very importance of the Darwinian theory itself seems almost to hang on the implications it has for the origin of man— or, as Jenyns abruptly phrased it, that “[ man] is to be considered a modified and no doubt greatly improved orang!” “Light will be thrown”: these few words from the Origin would go on to blacken a thousand pages. Darwin himself published The Descent of Man in 1871 and, even before that, many important publications had already begun defining the field of what would later become Darwinian anthropology.
Man in Origin

In truth, the question of “man” seems utterly absent from the Origin. The brief abstract Darwin sent to Harvard botanist Asa Gray on 5 September 1857, made no mention of sexual selection or human evolution.
Gillian Beer, for one, spoke of Darwin’s “tactical” avoidance of the topic, and this represents the standard view on the question. 5 Darwin was personally convinced that selection, be it natural or sexual, had worked on humans, but he had resolved not to publish about it. Thus, at the very least, Darwin may have indulged in alluding to the topic but not developing it. 6 He had already settled his mind on this question when, working on his “big book”, he stated to A.R. Wallace: “I think I shall avoid whole subject, as so surrounded with prejudices: though I fully admit that it is the highest and most interesting problem for the naturalist”. 7 Darwin clearly had personal opinions regarding the issue. To Leonard Jenyns, he had written in January 1860: With respect to man, I am very far from wishing to obtrude my belief; but I thought it dishonest to quite conceal my opinion. Of course it is open to everyone to believe that man appeared by separate miracle, though I do not myself see the necessity or probability. 8
However, this standard account has been challenged in different ways. First, Adrian Desmond and James Moore have claimed that, although mostly absent from the Origin, the human question had always been central to Darwin from the inception of his project. In their view, when Darwin writes in the Origin the doctrine of the origin of our several domestic races from several aboriginal stocks, has been carried to an absurd extreme by some authors. They believe that every race which breeds true, let the distinctive characters be ever so slight, has had its wild prototype, 9
he explicitly refers to pigeons but secretly has humans on his mind, or so they argue. In fact, Darwin’s initial manuscript devoted a certain number of passages to the question of human origins, but the topic was later dropped when Darwin wrote his “Abstract”— the Origin— thus occasionally drifting away “from its sacred cause”. 10
But another objection to the standard view was raised by Carl Bajema in the Journal of the History of Biology in 1988. The famous passage on “light will be thrown”, he claimed, did not mean that Darwin would not refer to man, thus sparking a debate among Darwin scholars. 11 Humans, Bajema showed, are actually present in the Origin: Darwin often refers to “uncivilised man”, to “savages”, to “savage races of man”, even to what a “savage” may have known or may think today when looking at a ship. 12 Here, it may be wise to distinguish between references to human cultural evolution and what would be an actual evolutionary treatment of the human species and its origins. 13
However, it could be added that, in another passage of the Origin, Darwin mentioned specifically that “some little light can apparently be thrown on the origin” of “the differences between the races of man, which are so strongly marked […] chiefly through sexual selection of a particular kind, but without here entering on copious details my reasoning would appear frivolous”. 14 Those considerations on humankind into the Origin are of great importance, but of limited scope and size. It is quite clear that, as Peter Bowler noted, “by the time Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859, no one could be in any doubt as to the implications of applying the theory of evolution to mankind”. 15 But it is also striking that the “origin of mankind” question never became prominent within the Origin. As we saw in our first chapter, the Origin changed a lot and grew by about one third from 1859 to 1872, but it was by no means ever intended to absorb Darwin’s opinions on every possible topic, even though this may have been eagerly wished for by his readers. 16
To focus the origin question on humankind is to sell short the originality of Darwin’s method. Where the naturalists of old were scholars whose only preoccupation was humankind, Darwin sparked a revolution by placing animals at the fore. 17 The question of origin, first formulated with languages and civilisations in mind, had now been extended to include biological species. In a way, we back-pedal towards anthropocentrism by demanding that Darwin provide the origin of man, as if the origin of species should not be decided generally but only in strict accordance with the specific issues implied by our own species.

Descent

At the time he wrote the Origin, Darwin already knew how to deal with the question of humans (by means of sexual selection), but he never gave full devel-opment to his views on this question in the Origin. 18 In fact, it seems that Darwin never even planned to devote an entire book to "man"
[...]
Cross-referencing between the two texts, Descent and Origin, deepens rather than resolves the problem of Darwin’s own doctrinal coherence. Yvette Conry, in particular, has identified in the divide between the two books: “the shift, in the text itself, from Darwin to Darwinism, from a scientific theory to an ideological investment”. She investigates the phenomenon of “extra-scientific hijacking” and the way in which “a myth comes to replace a science”. 21 Conry’s interpretation enables us to highlight absolutely decisive conceptual inflections. In particular, she makes visible a clear epistemological reorientation of natural selection; a simple “principle” in the Origin, tasked with summing up and coordinating the facts of individual variation and the geometrical rates of population growth, by the Descent it has become an “inflexible law” functioning as a “law of progress”. In another important inflection, the positivity of artificial selection is seen to increase from one text to the next; its analogical and instructional role within the Origin is injected to take on a reinforced function in the Descent, whereby “civilised” is identified with “domesticated”. Conry’s results are enlightening. One could, nevertheless, choose to hold fast to the separation between an ideal or perfect “Darwinism” and Darwin the man, historically contingent and necessarily imperfect. By giving up on readings of Darwin that pick out only what corresponds to the ideal of “Darwinism”, by agreeing to read him in a manner respectful of the actual words he communicated to us, the question would certainly take a different turn.
Conry describes the relation between the Descent and the Origin as one of ideological application and epistemological decline. However, with the same interpretative logic, other conclusions can be reached. Where Conry sees methodological reorientation and ideological drift, others, such as Clémence Royer, draw quite the opposite conclusions. The same interpretative postulates— the decision to extract the logic from the system rather than reading what Darwin wrote— saw Royer rejoicing at the publication of the Descent. Whereas Conry endeavours to pull pure “Darwinism” away from its envelope of social interpretation, Royer rushed avidly to exact its social lessons. And yet both seemed to suggest that even Darwin had not understood himself.

Poligenismo e monogenismo

At first, the problem of the “origin of mankind” refers to the origin of a hypothetical ancestry common to men and the anthropoid apes, as well as the origin of our relation to the gorilla, the chimpanzee, and the orangutan.
[...]
a contemporary commented. Before Darwin’s book appeared, defenders of a primitive unity of human races were considered to be backward relics, removed from all scientific progress. Now, it is held to be beyond doubt that apes and men share a common ancestor of an intermediary form. 29
As for Huxley, he attributes Darwin with the discovery of a way of reconciling and combining all that is good in the Monogenistic and the Polygenistic schools […] It is true that Mr. Darwin has not, in so many words, applied his views to ethnology; but even he who “runs and reads” the Origin of Species can hardly fail to do so; and, furthermore, Mr. Wallace and M. Pouchet have recently treated of ethnological questions from this point of view. 30

Social

As Auguste Laugel explained in 1868, the human mind is so drawn to Darwinian theory because it recognises that, if the theory be true, then it must apply to man as well as animals. This is precisely what drove enthusiastic disciples and fervent critics alike to overstep Darwin’s own “prudent reserve” and “enigmatic silence”: they “pushed the system to its very last logical consequences and, upon their faith, a great number of souls believe these consequences to be damaging to our species, detrimental to our greatness and our dignity”. 32
That the origin of mankind be so fundamental is because the very foundations of morality and the nature of human intelligence rest upon it. Some wish to deny “Darwinism” in order to save morality, while others envision the sacrifice of morality upon the altar of Darwinian fervour. Those who attempt to dissociate the two problems are few and far between.
Wallace

above all, Wallace concludes that natural selection cannot produce variations which would be in any sense injurious to the individual “on their first appearance”; such variations “could not possibly have been produced by natural selection. Neither could any specially developed organ have been so produced if it had been merely useless to him, or if its use were not proportionate to its degree of development”. 37 Such cases as these would prove that some other law, or some other power, then natural selection had been at work.

fact that the highest forms of civilisation have appeared in temperate climates. [Jevons]

10 Darwin-the-Darwinist, or the quest for systematic coherency

I call these attempts “radical readings of Darwin”: “radical readings” force some unexpected consistency into Darwin’s own words, ideas, texts, often going against the grain of Darwin’s acknowledged and published claims. They turn Darwin into a Darwinist. We have seen just such radical readings in the previous chapters, on the issues of life and humankind. Radical readings can support views that supporters of “Darwin-the-Selectionist” would identify as authentically Darwinian; but other radical readings can produce views that panselectionists would call monstrously “pseudo-Darwinian”, even “Lamarckian” views. Clémence Royer, for instance, is just such a radical reader of Darwin when she develops her views on what would today be called “Social Darwinism”. The search for “radical coherence” is one way of reading Darwin, just like “limited relevance” might be another. A.R. Wallace, although a radical selectionist for non-human species, considered the human mental powers to lie beyond the reach of natural selection and, therefore, strongly opposed supporters of “radical coherence”. The “radical coherence” strategy can be claimed by both supporters of Darwin (they say they are merely extending his views) and by adversaries (who try only to identify monstrous consequences of Darwin’s views). Another point for consideration is that Darwin was not himself a “radical”, in the sense that he did not look for “maximum logical coherence”: his strategy in the Origin of Species was clearly to de-emphasise any radical consequence some may have wished to draw from his book. Typically, he deemed as irrelevant such issues as the origin of human psychological powers or the origin of life. 2 These he carefully avoided in the Origin of Species (although they are broached in the notebooks and private letters).
The aim of this chapter is to examine the relation between the Origin and certain religious, social, and political controversies through the optic of the doctrinal coherency or supposed unity of the general system of “Darwinism”. Read from this perspective, it appears that the unity of “Darwinism”, taken as a coherent vision of the world, possesses a certain “amphiboly” in the sense that the coherency of Darwin’s Origin has implications that point in two different directions. On the one hand, unified Darwinism is an atheist system, a reductionist naturalism; but, on the other, its unity acts as a sign of harmony between our intellectual faculties and the structures of the world. When one considers both sides of the problem, the coexistence of the two arguments translates an agreement between theory and reality, which, in turn, acts as a guarantee of the divine rationality present within nature itself. This Darwinian amphiboly— where the unity of Darwinism is cast either as atheist henchman or as divine guarantee— explains how the system’s unity and coherency can be just as easily mobilised by the materialist school (who call upon it as a healthy cure against superstition) as by the spiritualist school (who read in it the traces of Providence).
For its radical readers, “Darwinism” cannot be a local theory, it has to become a general theory since Darwin’s question itself demands that its broader implications be sought out. First, it was Darwin himself who began the trend by pushing his arguments to their final term, referring to the origin of species, when he could just as well (in keeping with the opinion found amongst his contemporaries) have considered the diversification of species into (intra-species) varieties. In a nutshell, the movement towards the generalisation and systematisation of the Darwinian theory into a Darwinist system is there, in embryonic form, in the very title and goal of Darwin’s book.
The very project of the Origin of Species, as formulated in its title and presented again in its closing pages, calls for a radical and coherent approach.
Moreover, “Darwinism” makes itself an integral part of the search for that unique law which would rule over both the organic and the inorganic; so, in this too, it presents itself as a system that does not suffer limits and that demands a global approach. Such radicalism was already apparent in Robert Chambers’ Vestiges, wherein the author underlined the reach held by the rule of law in the universe: “the whole appears complete on one principle”. 5 For Chambers, law formed space, law made it into “theatres of existence for plants and animals”; then law developed “sensation, disposition, intellect”. For Chambers, two great comprehensive laws, gravitation and development, rule over two departments, the inorganic and the organic; both fields may even be “only branches of one still more comprehensive law, the expression of a unity, flowing immediately from the One who is First and Last”. Hence the unity between the domains of being is reflected in the progress of science towards the unity of a comprehensive law, the very expression of divinity. Scholars are invited, not to touch the essence of the organising force, but to ask themselves what it might actually be, to apprehend each of its manifestations and then to coordinate them.
[...]
"Evolution is not maintend consciously and in its logical integrity" Huxley
[..]
In short, the coherency can be understood either forwards or backwards, both in actuality and potentiality: what Darwinism presents in fact, and what it could do if it were pushed. In other words, there is a Darwinism-in-fact (found in the pluralist maze of Darwin’s works) and a Darwinism-in-principle (extrapolated from Darwin’s theories or statements). If Darwinism is to be understood descriptively and normatively then its theoretical coherency is at once the coherency of the inductive edifice Darwin proposed (the way he encompasses and relates different fields) and also the coherency of the possible uses and extensions of the theory, beyond their author’s explicit statements and into other domains, other uses which he had not envisaged at the time and which are proposed as if it were on his behalf. There is what Darwin consented to and there is what he allows for; the two go hand in hand, although both have been the objects of extremely vigorous disputes. As Clémence Royer put it, “There are short-sighted minds and there are far-sighted ones”. The short-sighted are microscopes who see only a point, although they do so better than others; the far-sighted are telescopes which embrace everything. Royer saw herself as a member of the latter family of minds, unifying rather than analysing, those “who believe that everything touches everything and that there is not one question of pure science which does not have logical consequences in the facts and practices of earthly things”. 17 Refusing any distinction between science, philosophy, religion, and politics, Royer stood proudly behind the hypothetical character of her statements: “Far more than Mr. Darwin, I admit to deserving the reproach of having dared many hypotheses. It is my belief that while waiting for theories, hypotheses have their own use, in that they prepare the way”. 18 To certain followers of Darwin who contested the consequences she claimed to have deduced from his system, she replied: “We acknowledge people even their freedom to lack logic”.
One point is certain: everyone made free use of Darwin and everyone laid claim to his authority. To the third edition of the Origin (1861), Darwin added “an historical sketch on the recent progress of opinion on the origin of species”; so much energy had been poured into finding “precursors” that, finally, he could no longer ignore it. Might the very principles of the system pre-date the use Darwin proposed? If Darwin himself was not the first to formulate or employ them, then what was his specific contribution? Darwin would be neither the contributor of new facts nor even the discoverer of new laws, but the one who perceived the full scope of the principle of natural selection and ensured it would be given the broadest application. Yes, William Charles Wells and Patrick Matthew may have caught a glimpse at the same principle as the Darwinian system (natural selection) but they didn’t measure its consequences, nor did they show its applications to a particular problem (the origin of species). 19 From this perspective, Darwin’s value would reside in the coherency he brought to a set of facts, enabling them to be related and re-read.
Moreover, Darwinism’s unity would also account for Darwin’s superiority, placing him above the attempts of Alfred Russel Wallace, natural selection’s co-discoverer. According to Quatrefages, for example, Darwin “embraced the problem both in its entirety and in its details”, whereas Wallace dealt only with “a small number of points in special memoirs which never reach[ ed] a wide audience”: “Not seeking to resolve all the questions posed by the theory, [Wallace] met neither as many nor as serious difficulties as his eminent emulator [Darwin]”. 20 Darwin’s strength was in bringing out the general theory. It was also his weakness. Paradoxically, according to Quatrefages, by giving only precise case studies Wallace comes across “over and over again as more precise and more logical” than Darwin. Darwin, who provides the general theory, often resorts to images and metaphors that he was criticised for; Wallace, on the other hand, reduces selection to its essence (immediate and personal utility) and therefore appears as a rigorous and thoroughgoing Darwinian, or at least he did until the publication of his ideas on the origin of humans.
[...]
In parallel to the debates around natural selection (its primary or derived status, its fundamental or secondary role, its factual or hypothetical status), there also occurred, among Darwin’s readers, a generalisation in the status of selection itself— what we call its declination. 21 Discussion evoked not only natural selection but also sexual selection (Darwin), histonal selection (Roux), germinal selection (Weismann), physiological selection (Romanes), and social selection (Vacher de Lapouge). The Americans also added organic selection (or orthoplasy) and functional selection. This declination movement might seem an extension to the movement Darwin had initiated, since natural selection is conceived of by analogy with artificial selection and since Darwin had opened the doorway to such extension in 1859 when he added on the idea of sexual selection.
If we recast “Darwinism” according the logic of its maximal extension, then anyone claiming to apply Darwin’s logic, viz. the concept of selection, to new fields that Darwin had not himself envisaged can now declare themselves to be de facto Darwinians. The logic of extension finds itself augmented by the principle of declination, which both multiplies the kinds of selection at work and matches natural selection to complementary concepts, modelled as auxiliary principles. Declined according to specific domains and shifted away from the origin of species towards the history of societies, the selectionist hypothesis was now entering densely occupied territory. For Vacher de Lapouge or Stanley Jevons, working within “Darwinian” sociology or history, the idea of a social selection is like an “antidote” to humanity’s general history, whether this be of the Scottish or Comtean positivism variety.
This pan-selectionism, or proliferation of selections, belongs to the most radical of possible Darwinisms. So much so that this ultra-Darwinism, with its over-multiplication of the kinds of selection, risks losing the very spirit of Darwin’s natural selection. Weismann, for example, is accused of having out-Darwined Darwin. To ultra-Darwinise is to de-Darwinise, it would seem. The proliferation of selections is then reinforced by a proliferation of “struggles for existence”. Wilhelm Roux’s histonal selection, for example, consists in affirming that there is a struggle for existence between the different parts of the organism: the primary formation of the individual becomes a locus where several struggles take place. The identification of selections operating on different levels ends up blurring any difference between the organic and the inorganic, and Leopold Pfaundler, to take but one example, even advanced a struggle for existence between molecules. 22 This dissolving of natural selection through the multiplication of other selections and their assimilation with “struggles for existence” had the result of stripping Darwin of his claim to paternity over his own concept. Examined in this diffracted light, Darwin’s natural selection would contain barely anything that went beyond Augustin Pyramus de Candolle’s “nature at war”.
[...]
We have emphasised the importance of the title— Origin of Species— in post-Darwinian debates. Richard Owen and Theodor Eimer retained Darwin’s question but changed the answer to it. In the minds of his most vehement critics, however, Darwin had given a bad answer to an already bad question. Edward Drinker Cope proposed to deal with the Origin of Genera (rather than Species) and he even substituted the “survival” with “the origin of the fittest”. But, above all, through these changes of title Cope claimed to go deeper than natural selection in order to shed light on “the development of variation”, and instead address the level selection itself is subject to: “it must first wait for the development of variation, and then, after securing the survival of the best, wait again for the best to project its own variations for selection”. 25 The specific criticism levelled at Darwin’s work is the disproportion between the stated ambition of its title, the tool proposed for resolving it, and the overall project it would have been necessary to adopt to arrive at it. In this regard, Cope laments the fact that, when it comes to evolution, two distinct types of problem are constantly confused: proofs of evolution’s factuality, something Darwin convincingly established through his relentless struggle against the old orthodoxy of independent creations, and proofs about the nature of the laws of evolutionary progress, a point which, according to Cope, was widely disregarded and regarding which some elements of a response had only recently been gathered together.
[...]
From the scientific perspective, that Darwin signposted a first level of the mechanism is already one mountain overcome: popular opinion may see no progress in it, clamouring for Darwin to tell us more, to tell us everything (the origin of life or of man), but from the point of view of science, Darwin has achieved much. First, by refining an important mechanism he introduced to biological science; then, and most importantly, by presiding over the natural sciences like a major general whose work gathered together all the facts and then set them marching along together, rank and file. Such alterations of “the origin of species” began with the very first reactions to Darwin and, in truth, have carried on unabated ever since.

Conclusion. Darwinism or Darwin diffracted

From this contrast (Royer’s “consistent” reading vs that of the Modern Synthesis), it is clear that not all “radical” readings of the Origin agree on what the philosophical upshots of Darwin’s work actually are. By all appearances, Darwin was not himself a supporter of “maximum logical coherence”; his strategy in the Origin was clearly to de-emphasise any radical consequence readers might wish to draw from his book. Typically, issues like the origin of human psychological powers or the origin of life were deemed irrelevant and carefully avoided in the Origin. In searching for logical coherence, and in spite of Darwin’s own claims, his readers may be led, depending on their personal or political inclinations, to conclusions of pan-selectionism or laws of variations, to social competition or to universal harmony.
In contrast with the strategy of “radical coherence”, other readers favoured a “limited relevance” view of Darwin. A.R. Wallace, for instance, although a radical selectionist regarding non-human species, considered human mental powers to lie beyond the reach of natural selection. For this very reason, he strongly opposed the supporters of “logical coherence”. Both strategies— “logical coherence” and “limited relevance”— could be equally sustained by supporters of Darwin (claiming in this that they were merely applying Darwin’s principles and carefully following his own caveats), and by his adversaries (attempting to lay bare the monstrous consequences of Darwin’s views, if not striving to avoid them at all costs).
[...]
First, I refuse the psychological aspect of Darwin’s “hesitating” or “feeble gait”. This book is not much concerned with Darwin-the-man: it is not a biography. 3 Its focus is on Darwin-the-texts. It is not even about Darwin’s readers; it is not a sociological study of the contrasting receptions Darwin received. 4 It is about how the Origin has been read. This book adds its voice to the idea that masterpieces and major texts like the Origin are inevitably infested with ambiguities, and that, precisely, these ambiguities are an asset to the book’s reception. The Origin’s success was partially due to the fact that so many different readers, with such a variety of possible agendas, could claim the Origin as their own and find in it support for their own theoretical projects.
Not only did Darwin hesitate over what he meant by this or that issue, or over how he should best express his views, not only did he change his mind several times in response to the criticisms addressed to him or the objections that were raised, he also found himself constantly face to face with the fact that words were an imperfect medium for his views, with the fact that science has to make use of metaphors and analogies in order to be understood. In a more radical approach, the development of Darwin’s thinking reveals that what he had in mind did not become clear until he found a specific phrase for it. Words are a necessary element in the process of building science. Darwin used “picking” in his first notebooks, then he devised “natural selection” in keeping with the work of British breeders. Consequently, his readers had to get to grips with the term, the concept, the theory that was borne by this expression. Should it be faulted for being a metaphor, a personification of nature? Should it be replaced by other (better?) words like “preservation” or “survival of the fittest”? Words were of crucial importance to the fate of Darwin’s theory: from discussing the relevance of the book’s title to questioning the measure to which he answered it; from the search for “other means of modification” to enquiry into the laws of variation; from the raising of “origin” and “mystery” questions to the settling (or not) of these same questions by proposing “natural selection” as a mechanism for transformation; from considering that “species” are natural units in nature to envisioning that natural entities exist only in the form of individuals; from interpreting “races” as referring mostly to humans or as a general term for animal and plant breeds.
Second, what may be retrospectively perceived as “hesitations” within Darwin’s text, may also hide deep effects of historical distortion. Whatever Darwin was actually occupied with from 1838 to 1859, it remains a bewildering source of puzzlement, in spite of all that we have learned. Layers of theoretical changes in science, layers of interpretations, layers of conceptual mutations, all place us at an astronomical distance from Darwin’s actual aims and endeavours. The way evolutionary biology works today could barely be more different from what Darwin was doing in 1859: our mathematical tools are different, our concepts of inheritance are different (as we now speak of heredity, genes or genomes— all terms unknown to Darwin), even our concept of selection is not the same. In geology, Darwin’s worldview owed much to his friend and colleague Charles Lyell and his uniformitarian conceptions. Darwin’s analysis of the fossil record was indexed to the geology of his time: he knew nothing of plate tectonics; he lived in a world where the principal geological problem was the changing relation between the levels of land and sea: land masses were constantly, slowly, and cyclically shifting up and down, with alternate movements of elevation (uplifting) and subsidence (sinking). The historical lesson to be drawn here is that Darwin, relative to us today, is not a contemporary, despite the feeling of proximity some biologists may be persuaded they have to his work. 5
I believe that what may sometimes be perceived as Darwin hesitating is due mostly to our own biases when looking back at him through time. The main bias I have identified, which therefore constitutes one of the major claims this book makes, is that Darwin was not only interested in showing the importance of natural selection, the characteristics of variation and the origins of variability were also some of his major concerns. Darwin was not only seeking experimental demonstration of natural selection, he was also deeply involved in enquiring into the laws of variation. This mattered to him, and even more so to his readers who obsessively returned to the question. Ultimately, “Darwinians” and “anti-Darwinians” alike all attributed some greater or smaller role to natural selection; but they also all maintained that space must be made for variation.
Judged according to the Origin, the “Darwinism” of the first “Darwinians” appears to represent the search for the laws of generation, of growth, and of heredity— what can be called sensu lato Variation— just as well as it represents the theory of the natural selection of these same variations. This first Darwinism is of interest precisely because it straddles both of these domains: in the Origin, the theory of natural selection, propped up by the analogy with artificial selection, is combined with reflection on the variability produced by sexual reproduction. Darwin had noted this point as early as 1837, in the opening pages of his Notebook B, entitled “Zoonomia”, i.e. search for the laws of life.
Lamarck dnv

Of course, this does not mean that Darwin should be considered a “Lamarckian”. But it is worth here to highlight the paradoxes that a certain type of historiography, keen to draw clean-cut distinctions and clear oppositions between grand systems, can lead to. “Lamarckian” mechanisms of heredity do appear in Darwin’s text, albeit without playing the central role they do for true “Lamarckians”. Still, their mere presence is enough to trouble the neat dichotomy that opposes Darwinism and Lamarckism. By the same measure, the presence of these same mechanisms weakens, if not outright defeats, any “eclipse of Darwinism” narrative. This notion, put forward by Julian Huxley in 1942 and presented in a volume promoting the “modern Darwinian synthesis” in biology (a mantel since taken up by Peter Bowler), suggests the idea that a clearly identifiable Darwinism was born in 1859: this subsequently became polluted, was prevented from developing, and finally ended up, at the beginning of the twentieth century, submerged under a wave of hostile theories that led to its virtual disappearance. 7 This famous “eclipse of Darwinism” account invites us to observe what has been called “Darwinism’s struggle for existence” against rival theories, in a fight to the absolute death of extinction. 8 Undoubtedly, very real hostility was displayed towards that Darwinism which, at the beginning of the twentieth century, seemed little more than a dead doctrine fit only for the annals of history. The Origin was deemed wanting on the concept of natural selection, for which experimental grounding was demanded. The book now also lacked a satisfactory theory of variation, having apparently been supplanted on this point by the recent theory of mutation. If there really was an “eclipse of Darwinism” then its cause was that the characteristics of variation (the limits of its range, the constraints weighing on its direction, its continuous or discrete nature, etc.) seemed to hamper the very efficiency of natural selection itself. Whatever the case may be, this “eclipse”, even if it did occur, certainly did not involve the Darwinism that we know today, for the simple reason that this had not yet been established as such.
The biology of the twentieth century breathed new and invigorating life into the On the Origin of Species question. The concept of natural selection was now reinterpreted as being genuinely creative (a “composer of symphonies”), but what was at stake for the modern synthesis authors of the 1930s and 40s was whether or not the book’s title fit its content. Looming on the horizon now appeared the “species problem”. Where the nineteenth century had predominantly debated over variation, modern biology isolated “speciation” as a major aspect of evolution.

Sum up

As presented in the twentieth century, the history of Darwinism is summed up as a double engagement: one badly posed question (viz., that of inheritance) to which Darwin believed he had an answer (pangenesis or inheritance of acquired characters), but with respect to which he spent his whole life as if in waiting for a better solution (genetics, which lay buried and dormant in Mendel’s 1865 memoirs); and another question which Darwin was right to pose (the species, or speciation, question) but to which he gave no answer because he never came to an explanation of how the inter-species sterility barrier emerges, and because, more importantly still, one effect of his theory was that it made the question itself disappear (draining species of its essence). In other words, the history of biology, as the twentieth century has written it, evokes an engagement Darwin needed not attend to (the species) and an engagement he should have seen to without even knowing he had committed himself to it (the gene and models of particular inheritance). Thus, the slippery problem of Darwin’s title continued to thrash throughout the work of the twentieth century Neo-Darwinians.
If there really is no great divide between Darwinians and non-Darwinians, if being Darwinian can mean so many different things and encompass so many disparities, then the very idea of a Darwinian (or indeed a non-Darwinian) revolution simply dissolves. Or perhaps, as Michael Ruse invites us to think, 10 we must be more precise on the matter: there was a real “revolution”, in the sense that the contemporary debate did reconfigure itself to revolve around the Origin, and this revolution was of course “Darwinian”, in the sense that the reference to Darwin became the very core of the issue. But there was no “Darwinian revolution” if what we mean by this is a paradigm shift or some “us against them” struggle between two distinctly defined tribes. Just like Darwin did in the Origin, we too will have to content ourselves with opposing the very general idea of descent with modification to the very general idea of special creations.
So, what is the ultimate meaning of the Darwinian revolution? After the publication of the Origin, as several historians have shown, people were convinced of the fact of evolution. They were even convinced that something like natural selection occurred in nature. 11 They did doubt, however, that natural selection was the proper answer to the question of the origin of species; they pondered over the extent to which natural selection could causally explain the fact of evolution. To put it plainly, the “revolution” was not a “Darwinian” one, in the sense the Modern Synthesis gave to this term in the twentieth century. Even people like T.H. Huxley and J.D. Hooker were never fully won over by “natural selection”.
However, a “revolution” was taking place, in the sense that everyone’s attention was turned to the question of the nature of species and their immutability. Furthermore, this revolution was undoubtedly “Darwinian”— this point has been already mentioned but needs to be stressed again and again— in the sense that the Origin was the key go-to reference of the debate. Darwin’s book was widely read and cited, either as a general argument in favour of species transformation over time, or as a source of evidence for issues of a smaller scale. It was either cited as a whole or else quoted from selectively. It was treated as a monument and milestone of biological research, marshalling the great domains of natural history, or else it was referenced as though it were a mass of tiny facts, a sort of encyclopaedic summary of what was known at the time.
What Revisiting the Origin of Species argues is that the Origin lends itself to an irreducible plurality of interpretations of Darwin. Indeed, it is home to a plurality of Darwins: not only Darwin-the-Lamarckian, but also Darwin-the-Epicurean, Darwin-the-Teleologist, Darwin-the-Social-Darwinist, Darwin-the-Physico-theologian, to name but a few. This plurality of Darwins exists even to this day. There is Darwin-the-Enlightenment-thinker, replete with mechanistic reflections, as well as Darwin-the-German-Romantic with his vitalistic views; 12 we have Darwin-the-Cambridge-student, his mind overrun with Paley’s ideas of a providential order, and Darwin-the-Scottish-naturalist playing with radical themes of species transformism; 13 we even have Darwin-the-racist, father of eugenic thinking, and Darwin-the-abolitionist, fierce opponent of slavery and brother to all mankind. All of these Darwins are “true” and all can be traced through the interwoven riddle of Darwin’s texts, both the published and the manuscripts, in all their different versions, stages of elaboration, and various editions.

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