Beer 1990; Beer 2009

 TRANSLATION OR TRANSFORMATION? 1990

• Visão negativa de trad
• I shall emphasize interchange rather than origins and transformation rather than translation. Scientific and literary discourses overlap, but unstably. Victorian writers, scientific and literary, held to the ideal of the ‘mother-tongue’; in our own time the variety of professional and personal dialects is emphasised instead. Yet the expectation lingers that it should be possible to translate stably from one to another. This expectation may prove unrealistic. 81
• we never can quite securely translate from one professional or social group to another the intensity, or vacuity, of terms. 83
• Literature cannot, even if it would, take on the task of technical translator when scientists find themselves from time to time in the dilemma that their scrupulousness has sustained agreed meaning but rendered their knowledge and purpose inscrutable to others beyond the trained circle. 89
• Várias leituras: "in language, we inhabit multiple, often contradictory, epistemologies at the same time, all the time" 82
• The ‘vagueness’ in natural language in Heisenberg’s terms is a result of multivocality, the way in which a single word may cover a broad range of significations. From among these, the most needed meaning of the moment will be sharply held in focus while the rest remain in shadow. The shadowing, but not evanishing, of counter-significations is a sought effect in much literature, an effect that often dramatizes the re-emergence of repressed senses. 87
• One of the primary functions of technical language is to keep non-professionals out. There are good reasons for this desire. The closed readership enables precise conceptual exchange and continuance. The sustained achievement of agreed meaning may, however, be at the cost of effective secrecy, even, at worst, of mandarin enclosure. 88 [representação do laboratório como lugar hermético] 88
• Fortunately, however, language, even technical language, is potentially transgressive. As soon as terms get outside the interactive eyes of co-workers, unregarded senses loom up. In Darwin’s plots I demonstrated the effects of this phenomenon by analysing some of the contradictory significances that Darwin’s writing acquired in broader Victorian culture. So, for example, Darwin reserves the word ‘race’ in a discussion in The origin of species to the cultivation of cabbages, but cannot corral it long in that garden-plot (21). 88-9
• Lingua mãe
• In the case of English the ‘mother-tongue’ was idealized as the English of past literature above all. Scientific writers in the Victorian period were immersed in the general language of the tribe, yet needed to formulate their own stable professional dialects with which to communicate with each other. By that means they would be able to change the level of description so as to engage with new theoretical and technical questions. They would also limit the range of possible interpretation, and, it was their hope, misinterpretation. But they were reluctant to allow writing on scientific issues to remain on the linguistic periphery. They thus claimed congruity with poetry, perceived as the authoritative utterance within current language. 
• Victorian middle and upper class language was formed by what we might call a parental diad: not only the mother-tongue but the father-tongue shaped the dominant educational ideology. Classical languages played a central role in the education system, a system reserved almost entirely for boys until the late 19th century and taught to them by men. The practice of Victorian scientists of citing classical writing in their work serves several functions: some social, some illustrative , some argumentative. Such allusion effortlessly claimed gender and class community with a selected band of readers; it implied a benign continuity for scientific enquiries with the imaginative past of human society; it could figure the tension between objectivity and affect. 82-3
• scientific discourse claims authority from a revivified common tongue 89
• internationalism 94
• "Words are also subect to onotlogical decay" [...] We live, therefore, in a variety of conflicted epistemologies. Scientific workers strive to contain their procedures within a single epistemological frame, but cannot exempt them from further and other construals. 83
• the authority of language misleads once terms are received as ‘physical truths’ 
• [ver carta de Faraday a maxwell]: translating them out of their hieroglyphics, that we also might work upon them by experiment’ 86
• Divulgação > "powerful tradition of re-imagined science" 84
• I am sure that working scientists flinch at some of the simplifications and misprisions that result, since at some point algebra must begin, but the spirited leap of enquiry generated both by the works of high popularization and by translation for the screen means that scientific work at present enters the concourse of interpretation rapidly and powerfully. 85
• Scientific material does not have clear boundaries once it has entered literature. Once scientific arguments and ideas are read outside the genre of the scientific paper and the institution of thescientific journal, change has already begun. Genres establish their own conditions which alter the significance of ideas expressed within them. When concepts enter different genres they do not remain intact. Readerships, moreover, are composed not only of individuals but of individuals reading within a genre. So, for example, those whose profession happens to be science do not read novels or poems simply as scientists but as readers newly formed by the possibilities of the genre within which their reading is engaged. The readerships implied by the forms and language of novels and poems are more various than those implied by scientific papers. 
• Yet, although each genre establishes expectations, these expectations cannot be enforced. No genre can preclude the reader’s invocation of other knowledge, other questions, than those manifestly indicated by the text. Such other knowledge, other questions, lie latent in the work’s terms and forms, waiting for the apt and inappropriate reader. There is therefore always the possibility of a vacillation of meaning, a chording of significance, that will break through generic constraints, whether the genre be that of poem, drama, novel, scientific paper. 90-1
• Conclusão
• At present we are again in a moment when scientists are accepting the risks of uncontrolled reception. Writing that had initially sought and required the autonomy of the specialist group is now rapidly and copiously re-interpreted by wider and diversified groups of writers and readers. Literature also, like scientific activity, is now very consciously working across an international system of intertextuality with novels and plays from many countries rapidly translated into English. This further extends the degree to which the English language bears the determining forces of many, and various, communities. 
• Such free reception is not likely to leave scientific problems intact within the expository terms already established by scientists. Rather, the transformed materials of scientific writing become involved in social and artistic questioning. That questioning is enacted sometimes at the level of semantics, sometimes of form or of broken story. Transformations and imbalances reveal as much as congruities. Such enquiry must not be subordinated to current demands in our society for pre-determined relevance, nor can its success be measured by discovering identity between the different domains.The questioning of meaning in (and across) science and literature needs to be sustained without seeking always reconciliation. 97

• Outros livros que falam sobre linguagem e darwin Hyman e Bulhof

DARWIN'S PLOTS 3ED - BEER 2009

Preface to the second edition

• The Descent is also a much less tractable, or attractive, book for the modern reader. It is by far the most culturally dependent of Darwin’s works, drawing for its evidence and affirmations on the works of ethnographers, race-theorists, and primatologists of the 1860s, themselves often affected by Darwin. xxiv

Introduction

• Reading The Origin is an act which involves you in a narrative experience. The experience may seem to diverse readers to be tragic (as postulated by Jacques Barzun) or comic (as Dwight Culler argues) but it is always subjective and literary 3
• Divulgação
• they shared a literary, non-mathematical discourse which was readily available to readers without a scientific training. Their texts could be read very much as literary texts. In our own century scientific ideas tend to reach us by a process of extrapolation and translation. Non-scientists do not expect to be able to follow the mathematical condensations of meaning in scientific journals, and major theories are more often presented as theorems than as discourse. We unselfconsciously use the term ‘layman’ to describe the relationship of a non-scientist to the body of scientific knowledge. The suggestion of a priestly class and of reserved, hermetic knowledge goes mostly unremarked. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, it was possible for a reader to turn to the primary works of scientists as they appeared, and to respond directly to the arguments advanced. Moreover, scientists themselves in their texts drew openly upon literary, historical and philosophical material as part of their arguments: Lyell, for example, uses extensively the fifteenth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in his account of proto-geology, Bernard cites Goethe repeatedly, and – as has often been remarked – Darwin’s crucial insight into the mechanism of evolutionary change derived directly from his reading of Malthus’s essay On Population. What has gone unremarked is that it derived also from his reading of the one book he never left behind during his expeditions from the Beagle: The Poetical Works of John Milton.11 The traffic, then, was two-way. Because of the shared discourse not only ideas but metaphors, myths, and narrative patterns could move rapidly and freely to and fro between scientists and non-scientists: though not without frequent creative misprision. 4-5
• evolutionary theory had particular implications for narrative and for the composition of fiction 5
• Descent
• the ‘ascent’ or the ‘descent’ of man may follow the same route but the terms suggest very diverse evaluations of the experience. The optimistic ‘progressive’ reading of development can never expunge that other insistence that extinction is more probable than progress, that the individual life span is never a sufficient register for change or for the accomplishment of desire, an insistence which has led one recent critic to characterise Darwinian theory as a myth of death. 6
• Leituras
• "They include 'more than the maker of them at the time knew'" 7
• Narrativa darwiniana
• Darwinian theory takes up elements from older orders and particularly from recurrent mythic themes such as transformation and metamorphosis. It retains the idea of natura naturans, or the Great Mother, in its figuring of Nature. It rearranges the elements of creation myths, for example substituting the ocean for the garden but retaining the idea of the ‘single progenitor’ – though now an uncouth progenitor hard to acknowledge as kin. It foregrounds the concept of kin – and aroused many of the same dreads as fairy-tale in its insistence on the obligations of kinship, and the interdependence between beauty and beast. 7
• Darwinian theory has, then, an extraordinary hermeneutic potential – the power to yield a great number of significant and various meanings. In the course of this study I shall show how differing individual and cultural needs have produced deeply felt, satisfying, but contradictory interpretations of its elements. It is, therefore, important at the outset to emphasise that it cannot be made to mean everything. [...] Darwinian theory, on the contrary, excludes or suppresses certain orderings of experience. It has no place for stasis. It debars return. It does not countenance absolute replication (cloning is its contrary), pure invariant cycle, or constant equilibrium. Nor – except for the extinction of particular species – does it allow either interruption or conclusion. 8
• The term ‘evolution’ only gradually acquired dominance. In French the word ‘transformisme’ for a long time supplied its place. ‘Transformisme’ emphasises the activity not only of process but of transformation. Transformation was at once the most verifiable and the most magical aspect of evolutionary ideas. Transformation within the single life span presents some of the most amazing observable phenomena of nature. Whereas ‘transformisme’ need not imply a progressive pattern to experience, the Development Hypothesis did suggest progress and improvement. Transformation might involve either progression or retrogression, and could give almost as much emphasis to the possibilities of degeneration as to those of improvement. What it could not fully include was the idea of extinction, since transformation suggests a constant process more like that of thermodynamics. Indeed it is striking that both theories share the emphasis upon process and transformation despite the divergence of their emphasis when it comes to the matter of order and confusion. Evolutionary theory appeared to propose a more and more complex ordering, while the second law of thermodynamics emphasises the tendency of energy systems towards disorder. 11
• Derrida and Macherey share a fascinated repudiation of ‘origins’ and of that centripetal search for total coherence which is in itself a tribute to the surviving power of such organisations. The all-inclusiveness of evolutionary theory is the quality that attracts Frye, because it holds out the promise of system. Evolution has within itself the concomitant ideas of development and energy, and has loosely acquired those of improvement and progress. 14

1 'Pleasure like a tragedy': imagination and the material world

• Children stories 25
• loss of aesthetic powers 26
• Darwin’s romantic materialism which resulted in a desire to substantiate metaphor, to convert analogy into real affinity, should be understood as part of a profound imaginative longing shared by a great number of his contemporaries. Materialism was not simply an abstraction. Its emphasis upon natural forms and upon organisms could comfort as well as disturb. The palpable, the particular, became not only evidence, but ideal. 37
• Darwin adapted from Lyell the metaphor of etymology as a representation of descent and change.21 So language for Darwin has a ‘real affinity’ with his theory. The physical world provides its own languagesystem which may be scanned, interpreted, and read into full accord with natural order. But ‘reading’ does not imply only the interpretation of single words and sentences. It implies narrative order and diverse relations between material and period of telling, sujet and fabula. 39
• Style
• Darwin’s is not an austere Descartian style. There are few lean sentences in The Origin of Species. [...] His son remarks that his style is ‘direct and clear’. Though there is some truth in this, the effect does not derive from actual ordering of the sentences, which is often tortuous. Rather it derives from the frequent intervention of the first person and from what Francis Darwin calls the ‘courteous and conciliatory tone towards his reader’ 34
• Divulgação, síntese
• The common language of scientific prose and literary prose at this period allowed rapid movement of ideas and metaphors to take place. It is clear that in The Origin Darwin was writing not only to the confraternity of scientists but with the assumption that his work would be readable by any educated reader. And ‘educated reader’ here must imply not simply a level of literacy but a level of shared cultural assumption and shared cultural controversy.
• The profusion and variety of the world is brought together in one place to be displayed, controlled, and categorised 42

2 Fit and misfitting: anthropomorphism and the natural order

• Método
• My method pays close attention to Darwin’s language. He did not invent laws. He described them. Indeed, it was essential to his project that it should be accepted not as invention, but description. His work is, therefore, conditional upon the means of description: that is upon language. And his description is necessarily conditioned by the assumptions and beliefs condensed in the various kinds of discourse active at the time he was writing. Though the events of the natural world are language-free, language controls our apprehension of knowledge, and is itself determined by current historical conditions and by the order implicit in syntax, grammar, and other rhetorical properties such as metaphor, as well as by the selective intensity of individual experience. Even despite the mathematisation of science, discourse can never be expunged from scientific enquiry. And nor, perhaps, can narrative. What particular kinds of story did Darwin’s theory tell? What plots did it privilege? Did it invent new ones? And how were they received? 46
• Divulgação
• If Darwin had been writing in a way which barred access to his work except for equal specialists, his writing would be far less problematic (and far less important in its impact). But because Darwin was writing in a style accessible to a broad readership – and, also, crucially, because such a style was a more usual one for a scientist to adopt than it now would be – his words encompass a broad spectrum of meaning without his analysing them. For scientists working in the same area, words like ‘man’, like ‘race’, like ‘contrivance’, would be severely and effectually contained by the context of published debate using the same terms. But for readers approaching such terminology without an active experimental involvement in day-to-day scientific procedure, the terms could expand their parameters to draw on other shared assumptions. The implicit contractual recognition that one is reading a natural-historical work, not a theological text, not a novel, could be assumed to exercise some powers of exclusion. But the areas of exclusion would be shifting in a culture that set so much store by relations between the different branches of learning and on application to active life. Moreover the diverse discourses of natural theology, aesthetics, technology, housewifery all provide referents for a word like ‘contrivance’. So we have no need to assume, as Morse Peckham does in ‘Darwinism and Darwinisticism’, that his general readers are simply misreading.7 Neither need we infer that Darwin is offering a single covert sub-text. Nor indeed should we take it for granted that there is an over and under text, or even a main plot and a sub-plot. The manifest and the latent are not fixed levels of text; they shift and change places according to who is reading and when. By this I do not imply a sentimental indeterminacy: Darwin was writing a polemical book, designed to persuade and convince his readers of ‘my view of things’. He had a specific end in view, but he also had a very great delight in and respect for the comparative method in evidence. He culled his examples from a whole range of scientific specialisms: geology, botany, physiology, animal husbandry, natural history (about then becoming ‘biology’), cell-theory. And he further used analogy and metaphor to elucidate morphological resemblances within the natural order. The conditions of his thinking, over the twenty years during which he brooded before publication, made for completeness, thoroughness and an expanding grasp of the implications of his ideas. The conditions of his writing made for compression, for imaginative zeal, and for rapid summary. 47
• Major problems with language: 47-8
• Language is anthropocentric. It places man at the centre of signification
• Language always includes agency, and agency and intention are frequentyly impossible to distinguish in language. [no creator, but creation]
• Natural history was still umbued with natural theology
• addresing himslef towards a general readership as well as to his confraternity of scientists.
• Mudanças
• We can see the problem of escaping from creationist language very exactly in the changes Darwin made through several editions to passages in which the question of originating forces is unavoidable. Sometimes he makes small emendations which shift into a more openly metaphoric, even misfitting, language: ‘since the first creature . . . was created’ becomes ‘since the first organic beings appeared on the stage’ (Peckham: 757). In the conclusion one sentence in the first edition runs thus: ‘Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed.’ The passive ‘was breathed’ evades the problem. In the second edition he briefly and somewhat surprisingly reinstates the Creator. The sentence now ends, ‘into which life was first breathed by the Creator’. In the third edition he changes the whole sentence considerably
• The sentence ends without raising the question of the beginning of life itself. It is concerned with descent and it specifies and privileges the explanatory and active powers of ‘the principle of natural selection with divergence of character’. As he had earlier written, ‘It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the “plan of creation”, “unity of design”, etc, and to think that we have given an explanation when we have only restated a fact’ (453). In such examples we see Darwin’s persisting struggle to reach explanations which can extend the scope of enquiry, rather than resting within the circle of assumption. 48-9
• Divulgação novamente
• One of Darwin’s own concerns was to demonstrate as far as possible the accord between scientific usage and common speech. His interest in etymology established language-history as a more than metaphorical instance of kinships hidden through descent and dissemination.10 An aspect of his insistence on congruities, and branchings, was his desire to substantise or substantiate metaphor wherever this could be done. He needs to establish ways in which language may be authenticated by natural order, so that his own discourse and argumentation may be ‘naturalised’, and so moved beyond dispute: ‘Our classifications will come to be, as far as they can be so made, genealogies; and will then truly give what may be called the plan of creation’ (456). ‘The terms used by naturalists of affinity, relationship, community of type, paternity, morphology, adaptive characters, rudimentary and aborted organs, etc., will cease to be metaphorical, and will have a plain signification’ (456). This search for ‘plain signification’, as for ‘one primordial form’, is the counter-ideal which leads him into a labyrinth of connection, interrelation, and extension.11 49
• [...]
• Since this paragraph opens the discussion, the non-technical range of senses for ‘inhabitant’, ‘native’, and ‘foreigner’ can thrive before the more precise use is established later. Darwin’s argument in that initiating discussion allows room for contrary readings: native inhabitants are not fully developed and thus will inevitably be taken over by colonisers; native inhabitants lack perfection only in that they do not have the means to resist foreign intruders. 51
• Sociologizar a biologia e biologizar a sociedade
• One outcome of the emphasis on analogy, and equally of the implied kinship and equivalence between man and other forms of life, was that Darwin still tends to use an anthropomorphic biology, despite his distrust of anthropocentrism. Plants and animals in this mode of description appear as the dominant term with mankind serving as a means of explication. However, as Marx also suggests, the effect is to reproduce in the mode of explanation the structures of relationship in Victorian society. 
• Darwin was alert to some of the colonising impulses in his society and did not seek merely to naturalise or neutralise them by likening them to events in nature. One striking example of this is his resistance to the idea that slave-making could be an instinct. 52
• [...]
• Darwin had initially in the ‘Big Book’ used the Hobbesian phrase ‘the war of nature’ and had quoted Hobbes directly. His later substitution of the word ‘struggle’ was an attempt to move away from the human into a word which lacked the organised force of war and expressed instead the interpenetration of energies.17 Moreover, in his account of the ‘struggle for existence’ he insists on using the term in a ‘large and metaphorical sense’ and he takes trouble to articulate the varying senses in which he uses it, and to grade the degrees of fictive or metaphoric appropriateness the term possesses. One may argue that his trouble went for nothing, since so many of his contemporaries ignored such velleities and approximated ‘the struggle for existence’ to Spencer’s ‘survival of the fittest’. Marx’s brief critique is striking for the clarity with which he discriminates the social analogy underlying Darwin’s description of the natural order. Darwin, however, did take considerable pains – not always successfully – to avoid legitimating current social order by naturalising it. 52-3
• biological anthropomorphism [....] One problem he faced was the tendency of readers to personify natural selection and to see it as an active, intentionalist force 62 [Darwin’s answer is to point out the metaphorical nature of language in other scientific proposition 63]
• Man
• determining absence in the argument of the origin of species 53
• the avoidance of the topic of man is, according to Darwin, tactical in a worldly sense. He feared that he would injure the success of his book if he ‘paraded, without giving any evidence, my conviction with respect to his origin’. Yet it is manifest from the reception of the book that the exclusion of any discussion of man did not prevent his readers immediately seeing its implications for ‘the origin of man and his history’. Many indeed appear simply to have ignored the lack of open reference to man and to have grasped the argument forthwith as centrally concerned with man’s descent. In doing this, of course, they were manifesting again precisely the overweening pride which Darwin saw as typical of man’s ordering of experience. 54
• An act of will by the reader was required to restore him to his centrality. This transaction in itself problematised the centrality of man to the natural order. The absence of any reference to man as the crowning achievement of the natural and supernatural order made the text subversive: it was – as at some level it must have been known to be – deeply disquieting. 54
• Despite his decision to exclude man from his discussion, the tendency of Darwin’s argument is to range man alongside all other forms of life. The multi-vocal nature of metaphor allows him to express, without insisting on, kinship. Moreover, man is a familiar in The Origin though concealed in its interstices. The activities of planting crops and breeding selected animals allow Darwin to transpose and extend these concepts into the idea of ‘natural selection’. Genealogy, with its insistence on ‘breeding’ and ‘inheritance’, provides another node of meaning between the values and organisation of his own society and those which he infers to be general in the natural order beyond man. The absence of any reference to man as the crowning achievement of the natural and supernatural order made the text disquieting; but the entire absence of man as a point of reference or a point of conclusion would have rendered it nihilistic. 56
• Is the sub-text of The Origin simply unavoidably full of human reference (because cast in human language) or is it knowingly, even strategically, so? And if so, to what ends? 57
• One of the most disquieting aspects of Darwinian theory was that it muddied descent, and brought into question the privileged ‘purity’ of the ‘great family’. In terms of the class organisation of his time this is clearly a deeply unpalatable view. Without his analysing or needing to analyse his reasons, therefore, there seem to have been as good social as there were religious reasons for Darwin to attempt to conceal man in the interstices of his text – or to permit him almost to escape beyond its parameters. 
• The emphasis upon kinship changed the status of words such as ‘inhabitants’ or ‘beings’ into a far more egalitarian form: ‘When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled’ (458). Lineage escapes from class and then from kind: ‘We possess no pedigrees or armorial bearings; and we have to discover and trace the many diverging lines of descent in our natural genealogies, by characters of any kind which have long been inherited’ (456–7). 57-8
• relativism 55
• deep community 58
• Filosofia do título
• The usual shortened form The Origin of Species disguises the element of narrative in the title and changes ‘origin’ from a process into a place or substantive. The full title reads, ‘On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life’. 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. ‘I have nothing to do with the origin of the primary mental powers, any more than I have with that of life itself’ (234). [...] He is interested in initiation, but he is interested in it not as completed ceremony, rather as indefatigable process. So the emphasis in his title is on means, ‘by means of Natural Selection’. ‘On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection’ is in a very precise sense a narrative, because what it describes cannot be correctly described except through the medium of time. [...] Darwin rejected the idea of a stable or static world, and would not accept equilibrium as a sufficient description of the relationship between the forces of change and continuance.[...] Darwin came to see that his own sub-title suggested too inert a procedure and made space for a preserver: he changed ‘the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life’ to ‘the survival of favoured races in the struggle for life’ [???] in later editions. 58-9
• Originating is an activity, not an authority. And deviation, not truth to type, is the creartive principle. 59
• Sobre o uso de primeira pessoa
• In this passage writer and reader are held in comradeship by that initiating ‘we’; individuality and community are, equally, promised; continuity is assured, affirmation and hope – something rhetorically both beyond and just short of certainty – are expressed; and history and fullest community are conjoined. 60
• The tone of a single man speaking, the presenter of the evidence, the creator of the theory, is a necessary counterpoise to that speculative extension back through time and change which is also crucial to the argument. And the emphasis upon sense experience, particularly colour and touch, means that our medium of experience is not simply necessarily, but warmly, human. 61
• Personalização
• Since English is an ungendered language one need only add a ‘his’ or ‘hers’ to turn a word into a personification. With personification enters intention. Darwin expands further on the problem of intention which lurks in all language, drawing as it does upon human experience and human ordering of experience. 63
• in the early editions natural selection cannot avoid a personified presence in his text.25 [...] In later editions Darwin attempts to deconstruct the mythological personage Nature – sometimes equating her with natural selection, sometimes with the complexity of interpenetrating laws. 64
• Metáfora das cunhas (ver Gruber e Colp)
• like all Darwin’s major metaphors, ‘wedging’ holds in equipoise contradictory or divergent implications, signifying equally holding, splitting, stabilising and destabilising. Problems inherent in the anthropomorphic tendency of metaphor can be seen in the particular relationship between Darwin’s image of wedging and of Nature 65
• The drive towards actualisation has created an image so grotesque, so disturbingly figurative of violence, in which the barriers between earth and body have so far vanished that the wedge image has become shockingly sadistic in a way that effaces its argumentative usefulness. Emotionally, it does correspond to Darwin’s most sombre sense of the individual within the natural order, but the progressive condensations of language over the various versions have here resulted in an image of uncontrollably intense and repellent anthropomorphism. That last sentence of the paragraph is excised in all future editions. 66
• Maladaptation. Potentiallity, not fiixed. Relativism of judgment. Provisional. 68

3 Analogy, metaphor and narrative in the Origin

• How far did Darwin figure himself as creating what he describes?
• The ‘great facts’ which Darwin perceived were expressed through a profusion of example and through a profusion of metaphor; they demanded an imaginative reordering of experience. 95
• He wishes simply to record orders which in no way depend upon him. But because of his highly charged imaginative language and the need to invent fresh terms and to forge new metaphorical connections, he appears to undertake an individual creative act. 96

4 Darwinian myths

• fears that decadence may be an energy as strong as development, and extinction a fate more probable than progress. 135

7 Descent and sexual selection: women in narrative

• SS
• The intersection of evolutionary theory and social, psychological and medical theory therefore became newly important. The bonds between biology and sociology are drawn close in the concept of sexual selection. It began to be asked what emotions, values, and reflex actions help the individual and the race to survive. Did transmitted qualities make specific the character of diverse cultures and races? What was the role of women, whose progenitive powers physically transmitted the race? How did relations between men and women subserve generation and development? 196
• Despite his suggestion in this passage that ‘in civilised nations women have free or almost free choice’, he makes it explicit elsewhere throughout The Descent that, in contrast to all other species (where the female most commonly holds the power of selection), among humankind the male dominates choice. This reversal creates crucial difficulties: ‘Man is more powerful in body and mind than woman, and in the savage state he keeps her in a far more abject state of bondage than does the male of any other animal: therefore it is not surprising that he should have gained the power of selection’ (911). Again, though he pays homage to the ‘mental charms’ of women, he gives primacy to beauty: even the chapter in which these words appear is subtitled ‘On the effects of the continued selection of women according to a different standard of beauty in each race’. The emphasis on beauty in the concept of sexual selection opened the debate into the domain of aesthetics as well. 197
• Normative beauty 198
• Darwin
• the contradictions, social, psychological, and biological in the man/woman relationship and its identification with genetic succession became crucial to their rereading of traditional fictional topics. Rewriting and resisting are as important as assimilating in creating fictional energy and their relationship to Darwin’s work fed both charges. Darwin’s reversal of the common order in making man the selector drew attention to the social constituents in human descent as opposed to other species. 199
• For Darwin love-intrigues and the marriage market involve the future of the human race. It is this brooding on generation and extinction beyond the lot of the individual which freights such topics with new weight and new resistances. The transfer from ontogeny to phylogeny, the paralleling of individual development to species-development, proves again to be an imaginative resource extraordinarily rich in tragic potential. Both George Eliot and Hardy emphasise the discordance between a woman’s individuality and her progenerative role. 199
• The idea of sexual selection made for a complex confusion of biological and social determinants in descent, transmission, and sex-roles. Maudsley argues that the ‘affective’ and ‘reproductive’ elements in woman’s makeup are necessarily stronger than in man’s. Darwin says: ‘It is generally admitted that with woman the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man; but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilisation’ (858). Both of them, however, acknowledge that women’s education currently reinforces what they see as natural properties. 200
• Thomson
• for Spencer, the development of woman is early arrested by procreative functions. In short, Darwin’s man is as it were an evolved woman, and Spencer’s woman an arrested man 200
• Patriarcado
• Darwin’s emphasis upon the single progenitor had, as Lewes pointed out in his 1868 Fortnightly articles, certainly theistic and possibly patriarchal remnants of ideas in it. As we saw earlier, Lewes preferred the idea of a germinal membrane covering all the earth. 208

9 Darwin and the consciousness of others

• To him [Romanes], the overlap of emotional states between other life-forms and humankind was the strongest evidence for the working of intelligence throughout the animate world: he cites as universal animal experience ‘fear, surprise, affection, pugnacity, curiosity, jealousy, anger, play, sympathy, emulation, pride, resentment, emotion of the beautiful, grief, hate, cruelty, benevolence, revenge, rage, shame, regret, deceitfulness, emotion of the ludicrous. 243
• One way beyond the constrictions of human language is to explore the potential for awareness in other life-forms. What shape does intent take elsewhere in organic life and what kinds of consciousness may this imply? 244
• Different minds; other senses; thinking beings: thus he clusters and fans out without hierarchy the properties of all inhabitants, past and present, of the living world. The final demurring phrase is crucial to his mode of thinking too: ‘although hard to draw the line’, the line between senses and consciousness, between thinking and instinct, sentience and reason. Natural Selection described an assemblage of massively slow unmanaged processes. It submitted the profuse possibilities of hyperproductive life to a process of sorting by survival and the production of progeny. But at the same time the vehicle of change in Darwin’s theory was always the individual organism. The study of organisms must include behaviour, and include also the relations between individual organisms, which Darwin saw as the most profound of all relations. 
• Consciousness is a conflicted term: it implies the capacity for choice and also the capacity for reflection. It promises action and also complex inter-action. How do we as humans gain access to the reflective process in other life-forms? Human language, with its inevitably human preoccupations and points of reference, may make it more or less impossible to penetrate other modes of awareness. When Darwin writes of a climbing plant that ‘It thus drags itself onwards by an insensibly slow, alternate movement’ the ‘insensibly’ refers to the observer’s incapacity to measure the process rather than to any insensibility on the part of the plant. 244-5
• Darwin on man
• It is extremely doubtful, he asserts in the Descent, that ‘the formation of general concepts’ and ‘self-consciousness’ are ‘peculiar to man’. Darwin’s fascination with these questions can be tracked from the time of the Beagle voyage through his early notebooks of the 1830s right through to the end of his life. Indeed, the notebooks already explore questions that will become public in his writing only thirty or even forty years later: issues to do with the expression of the emotions, child development, the capacity of animals for abstraction, the place of dreams in consciousness ‘Dreams do not go back to childhood’ (Darwin on Man, 269) but ‘in the failings from old age, they [ideas] constantly do’. 247
• I spoke earlier of the entwining of observation, experiment, and empathy in Darwin’s argumentative methods. In his later work, particularly the Descent of Man, he struggles with the issue of how to argue from other people’s observations. The anecdotal method, which gathers many examples from a range of correspondents, many of them unknown personally to the writer, becomes both the charm and the trap of Romanes’s work, which follows some of Darwin’s methods. We learn more about Victorian social organisation and ideals of behaviour than about animal organisation from some of Romanes’s, and indeed Darwin’s, examples. This is where empathy becomes anthropomorphism. 251
• Happy ending for snails 252