DARWINISMO/DESCENT - Young 1985, Radick 2009, Cohen 2010, Sober 2011, Veuille 2010/2015, Delisle 2017, Brooks 2021, Ruse 2024, Sober 2024, Ariew 2024, Veuille 2024, Ceccarelli, Esposito e Delisle 2024, Esposito 2024/B, Ceccarelli 2024/B, La Vergata 2024, Delisle 2024, Caso 2024

YOUNG 1985

Anyone wishing to take Darwin's mature views outside the context of natural theology has a lot of explaining to do, from the frontispiece quotations to many of the forms of reasoning and rhetoric in the Origin. Darwin was meticulous in his revision, as is obvious from Peckham's variorum edition (Origin 1959). Why would Darwin fail to remove forms of address and reasoning if they had become odious to him? 615
In a related set of distinctions, Greta Jones (1980) has also set about separating the scientist Darwin from the ideologue, and both of those from Social Darwinism. As I see it, both Huxley and Darwin were expressing commonly held positions that were relatively progressive for their time, but relatively shocking to our eyes. I'm thinking, for example, of what Huxley had to say about blacks and women. I jhall quote this, as well as passages from Darwin, in some detail, in the hope that these striking examples will destroy onceand for all the notion thatit's possible todistinguish sharply the scientist from the ideologue. 616
Huxley abolicionista racista, também misógino 617 e Darwin sendo problemático nas páginas 133-5, 142-3, 618

This essay illustrates the principle that the science/ideology distinction is at any point a contingent resolution of historical forces, playing its own ideological role. The more ostensibly pure the science, the deeper one often has to look in order to demonstrate this principle. It is therefore easier in the case of, say, a Spencer or a Chambers than a Darwin or a Lyell. 617-8
......
I have quoted at length these passages from Huxley and Darwin to show the inseparability of so-called Darwinism from so-called Social Darwinism and, congruent with that, between science and ideology. Anyone wishing to separate the scientific from the social from the theological will have to contend with these passages in these men's work. And anyone wishing to confine Darwin's Social Darwinism to his post-Origin work will have to contend with Silvan Schweber's claim: "To the best of my knowledge the M and N notebooks contain the first presentation of an evolutionary view of society based on an evolutionary view of nature" (1977, p. 232).
Would-be separators of Darwin the biological scientist from Darwin the Social Darwinist would also be likely to stumble over passages from the E Notebook; the projected Chapter 6 of Natural Selection ("Theory Applied to the Races of Man"); the marginal annotations in Darwin's own books on the races of man; a letter to Lyell in 1859 that applied natural selection and the effects of inherited mental exercise as follows: "I look at this process as now going on with the races of man; the less intellectual races being exterminated" (LL 2: 211). These evidences of continuity, along with many more, have been set forth in John Greene's convincing essay on "Darwin as a Social Evolutionist" (1981a, pp. 95-127). This complements his earlier essay on "Biology and Social Theory in the 19th Century" (1981, pp. 60- 94), and both invite us to broaden and deepen our views on the mutual constitutiveness of scientific and social thought.
Turning now to Social Darwinism per se, my first point is that there is no such clearly separable thing. There was, however, a movement that was concerned chiefly with the interpretation of evolutionary ideas in the social context. It was a Malthusianism buttressed by the law of the history of life. It was based on a conception of the imbalance between human instincts and needs on the one hand, and human industry and nature's bounty on the other. It was not always pessimistic, but it was never very pleasant. Moreover, it was almost always associated with concepts of social hierarchy and mobility via competition.
My own conception of Social Darwinism is that it was an attitude toward nature with common elements, usually including Malthusianism, a belief in the science of social laws, and a belief that nature decreed extreme inequalities that most thought would lead to progress. Social Darwinists usually invoked some version of the survival of the fittest, although there were differing views about what the fittest were fit for. 620-1

Lyell wrote that "In the universal struggle for existence, the right of the strongest eventually prevails" (Young 1969, p. 129). The concept of struggle is very common in the Principles (see Young 1969, p. 129, n. 76). In a way that is echoed in the last passage from the Descent, Malthus himself said: "Had population and food increased in the same ratio, it is probable that man might never have emerged from the savage state"(Maithus 1798, p. 364). 621

It appears, then, that it was the removal of Malthus's idea of 'moral restraint', and an emphasis on the concept of 'population pressure' which left a natural law about plants and animals, that characterized Darwin's interpretation. He was, in effect, reverting to the purity of the inescapable dilemma of Malthus's first edition. It is 'the strong law of necessity'; which Malthus emphasizes repeatedly in both editions, even though in the second it lies side by side with the partial palliative of'moral restraint'. References with this deterministic basis appear in tens of places in both editions and might themselves have influenced Darwin's application of the principle to man . . . (Young i%9, p. 129)

I go on to point out that Lyell's Principles of Geology was the work that most influenced Darwin and that there are innumerable references there to the struggle for existence.
I have no quarrel with Mayr's claim that "the role of Malthus was very much that of a crystal tossed into a saturated fluid" (1982b, p. 493), nor with Schweber, who says, "It seems to me that the Notebooks support the view that Darwin was struck with the numerical and deterministic aspects of the Malthusian statement" (1977, p. 296). Schweber also says,

How much we attribute to the Malthusian insight is to a certain extent a reflection of our proclivities. My own reading is that the Malthusian statement gave Darwin the quantitative element he needed to make the theory meet the standards of theories in the natural sciences, (p. 303) 634

Pessimismo e otimismo

Of course, Social Darwinism was, one might say, a broad church. A very optimistic interpretation was put on it in the writings of Darwin; the same was true of Spencer's rendering of it, just as was the use to which it was put in Social Darwinist ideas of the American robber barons. There is perpetually an undertone, however, as there was in Malthus, another note, a sense of pessimism. .... The doctrine of this broad church, then, conveyed both optimism and pessimism — both a concept of progress and a fatalism about its parameters and its pace. But more important of all, it rooted social ideas in biological ideas. The point I'm making is that biological ideas have to be seen as constituted by, evoked by, and following an agenda set by, larger social forces that determine the tempo, the mode, the mood, and the meaning of nature. 622

Efeitos contemporâneos

These texts provide the current analogy to the nineteenth-century debate, more evidence that the relationship between so-called purely biological and so-called purely ideological ideas, books, and concepts is one that can't be sorted out at all easily. We find that levels and concepts intermingle and that it is from society that we derive our conceptions of nature. These conceptions are in turn inextricably intermingled with our conceptions of human nature. It is, after all, the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection that made conceptions of nature, living nature, and human nature part of a single framework of ideas. It is also in the age of Darwinism that we live in our attempts to formulate a single science. 626 > sociobiolgoy and other nonsense 627-8

Representação da natureza

There is nature apart from human values, priorities, and perceptions, to be sure. But as far as we know it — as far as we characterize it, have research programs, put questions to nature, and have criteria of acceptable answers — we do so in inescapably anthropocentric and anthropomorphic terms (Young 1973c, 1982c). Somy rejection of SocialDarwinists' characterizationof nature is not in the service of avoiding illegitimate extrapolations in favor of nature "as it is". Nature is as we characterize it, and extrapolations are as inescapable as the humanocentric relationship with nature in the first place.
The issue is how we characterize and work out the humanity and/as nature — that is, the humanity and nature, and the humanity as nature — relationship. I want to treat it as a transformative process of human labor. This is as true of knowledge as it is of any other form of human industry. 629
......
If we try to look at Darwinism and Darwinism-as-social in this way, the basis for humanity is not biology, genes, instincts, the givenness of our species in an evolutionary sense: not body, not mind, but the concept of person, and that concept is ontologically primitive. There's a parallel ontologically primitive concept that promises to resolve the nature/culture dualism: labor. Labor is neither nature nor culture, but their matrix.
It is at this point that my historiographic argument about how we should think about Darwin, Darwinism, and the debate about the place of humanity in nature — as the nineteenth century called it, the debate on "man's place in nature" — has to be recontextualized and connected up with the points I've been making here about the concepts of industry, the concept of a person, and of labor. Historiography has to be reintegrated into a new conception of what we mean by humanity, a conception that is not based on nature/culture, body/mind, animal/human dualisms.
This would give us a notion of humanity — and secondarily of biology — that is not fatalistic, pessimistic, reifying, and scientistic. I would like to think that it is a progressive and optimistic historiography, one without blinkers, as opposed to the historiography of much of what I've come to think of as the Darwin industry, which is very much a historiography whose distinctions and whose narrowness of perspective makes it a historiography of the status quo. 630
Reduction of nature by Marx and Engels e a diferença entre sociedade e natureza. 631
...
I find it ironic that the work of David Kohn, which Mayr acidly contrasts with my own, concludes, "The work of one recent commentator, Robert M. Young, stands out as nearly definitive" (Mayr 1982, p. 492; Kohn 1980, p. 142). Kohn proceeds to characterize the relationship in terms with which I wholly agree (pp. 142 sqq.). This agreement relates to my opposition to attempts to demarcate Darwin's thinking sharply from ideological connections with his age. De Beer and Schweber are also at pains to stress that "internal factors" are sufficient to account for Darwin's concept of natural selection. In varying degrees, they are keen to separate Darwin's originality and thinking from the age — dramatically so in the cases of De Beer and Mayr, less so in that of Schweber, and not at all in the case of Kohn. The wider and deeper claim, which some are rejecting, is that the history of science is part of history; that science is part of culture, not above it, or an alternative to it; that science is the embodiment of the values of the epoch. 634-5

Whiggismo e positivismo

Reference was made to "primary Whiggism", in which it is claimed that the past leads to the present without any space for the contemporary context of issues, without any consideration of the "losers in history". The concept of "secondary Whiggism" was mentioned and also criticized. It is the belief that a scientist's immature views lead only to his or her mature views. In both cases the retrospect wipes out the integrity and the texture of the prospect. Whiggism also implies that people don't hold clear views until they hold the views we remember them for. Secondary Whiggism, on the other hand, has a tendency to underemphasize people's mature work and can succumb to the temptation of disappearing without trace into the minutiae of someone's "immature" thought processes.
We can go on with this sort of thinking and produce a notion of "tertiary Whiggism", which ignores other figures in the period and our hero's real situation vis-a-vis fame and fortune. A tertiary Whig could leave out the eminence of a Buckland in the geology of the 1830s and could fail to take seriously the Bridgewater Treatises. Carrying on, a "quarternary Whiggism" could privilege topics and issues we consider important and ignore, for example, the role of phrenology in the debate on man's place in nature. 634-5
...
With Whiggism goes positivism. Primary positivism treats facts as decontextualized from their matrix of meanings and values. Secondary positivism does not take our hero and his theory out of the context of the scientific community of his time. No, these are meticulously considered, as are all nuances and contemporary meanings of theories and concepts, no matter how they have been treated by subsequent history. But, the secondary positivist draws a sharp boundary around the professional community of contemporary scientists. The secondary positivist also treats all connections as contextual and ignores immanent, structural or epochal causality. Therefore, for example, if there is sufficient evidence in the texts to explain an influence, no consideration is given to the possibility that other ambient forces might be at work in the intellectual formation of a scientist 636

I think the science of history was and should be much richer than the history of science seems to be making it. 636
Conclusão

When I say Darwinismis social, I mean it in two senses. First, in Darwin's own work there was never a clear separation of his biological research and thinking on the one hand, and its origins in and extrapolation to social evolution or Social Darwinism on the other. I don't find that conclusion very interesting, except as a stick with which to beat positivists and Whigs of the higher orders. Second, science is social. Of course we can disappear into the texts, but we must ask ourselves what counts as a text. These were people who read and contributed to Victorian periodicals and who lived in places that must befor us texts, forexample, Shrewsbury, Edinburgh, Cambridge, the Beagle, London, Down. In the same way that a machine and Victorian Manchester are "texts" for the social and economic historian, these locations are texts for a Darwin scholar. These determinations are efficacious, and no amount of reading Darwin's reading lists and marginal annotations will get us exhaustively through the determinations of Darwin's thinking, however much we might welcome the interpretation of marginal notes done by, for example, Gillian Beer, Jim Moore, John Greene, and the mentor of us all, Sydney Smith.
Darwinism is social because science is. And of all science the theory that links humanity to the history of nature is likely to be most so. Those who wish to find sciences furthest from society should go to the haven of mathematics and physics, but alas, even there, there are polluters such as Hodgkin and Forman to show the social constitution of the issues in those esoteric disciplines.
....
The connection between these two points is very important. It is because science is not above history that no clear separation can be made between Darwin's Darwinism and Darwin's Social Darwinism. That Darwin was a Social Darwinist is not news, however often it is conveniently forgotten. The point about that is a deeper one: the search for the neat, isolable influence or cleavage plane is a search for a will o' the wisp. It is a positivist search, and positivism was a historical movement in the nineteenth century just as physicalism in the philosophy of science was in the 1940s-1960s, with its search for a decontextualized neutral observation language. I fear that Darwin studies are lapsing into a positivism about the origins, originality, and unequivocalness of Darwin's theory.
I have no quarrel with people who wish to pursue the most detailed studies of Darwinian texts. I wish only to challenge their doing so in a way that fails to connect with other dimensions of the determination of scientific, intellectual, and cultural phenomena. It is important to point out which questions a given social formation wants — through its science — to pursue. This broader question extends from the most general features of its philosophy of nature and society to its most mundane facts. At the most general level a given socioeconomic order — a mode of production — constitutes and is constituted bya world view, whichincludes aframework of assumptions and methods about what is known, what is discoverable, what it wants to discover, and how to set about discovering it. At an intermediate level certain sorts of issues preoccupy investigators at a given phase in the development of the mode of production, reflecting, in more or less mediated ways, the contradictions of that period. In the eighteenth century it was classification. In the mid-nineteenth century it was origins — the historicity of genesis of earth, life, mind, and society. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was structures and functions in the psychological and social sciences with particular emphasis on stability, systems, and equilibria. In our own time it is mechanisms and abilities — the least elements and their recombination to suit specified needs. 637-8

RADICK 2009

Radick discute os vínculos sociais e seu nível de influencia na formulação da Seleção Natural e em seu autor;

Segundo o autor, existem duas teses acerca da sociologia da formulação da Seleção Natural:

Tese da independência: Essa tese versa que o contexto vitoriano apenas acelerou a formulação da teoria, mas que dado o devido tempo, ela seria formulada em qualquer outro contexto inevitavelmente. Por essa teoria temos que a teoria de Darwin é uma verdade natural que seria percebida a qualquer um que acumulasse observações o suficiente do mundo natural;
Tese da inseparabilidade: Nesse ponto de vista temos que a teoria é produto do contexto social de Darwin e que não teria surgido da mesma forma.

Radick afirma que os três principais pontos da vida de Darwin que o levaram a formular a teoria foram: 1) Sua crença na transmutação das espécies; 2) As analogias e comparações entre a seleção artificial e natural; e 3) a epifania ocorrida após a leitura de Malthus;

Radick questiona:

"But suppose Darwin had not been immersed in Malthusian conversations in London, and had never happened upon Malthus’ Essay. He might then have continued working on his earlier theory of adaptive species formations. In Darwin’s view at that time, this non-Malthusian theory, while evidentially problematic, did conform to the vera causa ideal. Perhaps he would eventually have published that theory. Or perhaps he would have judged the problems to be so severe that he would have given up on it, and abandoned theorising about species origins altogether."

Radick tenta resolver a questão levantada pelo fato de Wallace ter chegado a uma mesma conclusão que Darwin, o que deveria confirmar a tese de independência. Dois argumentos são usados para isso: Um versa que talvez ambas as teorias não fossem tão iguais assim, porém o autor não delonga esse argumento frente ao fato das reações de Darwin e seus amigos. O melhor argumento do autor versa que, embora as diferenças da classe social fossem grandes, ambos os naturalistas estavam inseridos na cultura vitoriana e portanto suas ideias são produtos do mesmo contexto social. Para mim esses argumentos são fracos, uma vez que o próprio Darwin mostra que muitos antes dele chegaram perto da teoria em seu esboço histórico, o contexto vitoriano não era tão vital ao meu ver, mas sim a organização sócio-científica, definida por Latour, das Centrais de Cálculo que começou a acontecer a partir das Grandes Navegações;

O autor discute o conceito de adaptação utilizado por Darwin como algo mais mecanista, uma visão derivade de Paley segundo Radick, para Darwin as diversas adaptações de um ser são como mecanismos. Radick aborda esse conceito frente as duas teses:

"We might conclude that, thanks to events that brought British natural theology into being, and Darwin into contact with this tradition, Darwin came to recognise what adaptations truly are – the as-if engineered contrivances of natural selection. That recognition would have come sooner or later, since the kind is part of the pre-social order of nature. How the British came to recognise it had no influence on the kind itself. To that extent, the kind is independent of its historical matrix. Or we might conclude, on the contrary, that history, not nature, made the kind what it is. The theory of natural selection assumes a view of organisms and their parts that is peculiar to a time and place. The Darwinian kind ‘adaptation’ is inseparable from Britain in the age of complex machines and counter-revolutionary theology. Other histories produced, and continue to produce, alternative ways of sorting the traits of organisms, ways no more or less in keeping with what we observe. Adaptation is not a natural kind, but a social construct." [grifos meus].

Mais uma vez, considero o argumento de Radick um tanto forçado. A analogia feita para definir um conceito natural será baseada na vivência social de quem a está fazendo, mas acredito que a teoria que deveria explicar os conceitos naturais não deveria mudar de acordo com a ótica na qual está se olhando a natureza. Tenho ciência de que esse meu pensamento não está muito claro, talvez tenha a oportunidade de refiná-lo no futuro;

O autor tece diversos argumentos e analisa os motivos de Darwin ter adotado a ideia de Malthus para sua teoria, deixando claro sua preferência pela tese da inseparablidade;

O autor faz um comentário interessante sobre a mudança na estrutura do campo científico que estaria ocorrendo na época:

"When Lyell published his three volumes of vera causa geology in the 1830s, the character of the sciences in Britain was beginning to change in a fundamental way. At that time, Anglican clerics alone held the small number of scientific posts at the two ancient universities, Oxford and Cambridge, that dominated the elite life of the nation. Church, state and science thus enjoyed strong institutional links. However, thanks especially to Scottish dissatisfactions and to movements within the Whig party – now reaching out to groups in dissent from Anglican doctrine – those links were coming to be increasingly contested. [...] Lyell [...] saw his books as an attempt to expunge biblical religion from geology. [...] According to Lyell, a scientific, vera causa geology did not admit the existence of catastrophes, the likes of which had never been observed. Lyell’s reforms struck at the English elite and their complacencies. If the reforms succeeded, the views of the cleric-geologists would cease to count as scientific explanations. Just as important, the cleric-geologists, beholden to the Church of England for their livelihoods, would cease to count as men of science."

COHEN 2010

Mulheres na pré-história.

If women had a place in these representations, it was often inspired by stereotypic visions, either as wild fancies of sexual violence, referring to the presumed barbarity of these primitive times, or as the canonical model of the traditional monogamous family, in which women had as an only role to look after children and wait at home for the return of the conquering males. 159

A partir do sec 20 aprecem muitca cultura material representando mulheres. 159
Darwin e escolha feminista

Darwin first observed that some anatomical features characterize one gender in particular: these features have a significance which seems to be related to reproductive choices. Sexual selection explains for example the coloured feathers and bright singing of male birds, and the fact that in many animal species, the head of the male often carried antlers or horns: these ornaments have a double role, as they allow them to enter in competition with other males to conquer females. Indeed, in most animal species, females choose males for mating and reproducing, the male being more adorned than the female, who often remains bleaker ... But Darwin limits the pre-eminence of woman's choice tot he most anceint - or most primitive - period of our evolutionary history.160

Escolha feminina mais importante no barbarismo primitivo. "women are not in quite so abject a state in relation to marriage as has often been supposed" 161
Aumento das características femininas por escolha consciente 161
Efeitos últimos

sexual selection could, in time, embellish the whole species — but in different ways within distinct human groups: for human choices, Darwin adds, cannot be separated from cultural specificities, and different beauty ‘‘canons’’ are at work in specific cultures, reflecting particular tastes in different social groups. Therefore, aesthetic choices increase the differences from one group to another: sexual selection could well be the origin of diversification of human groups in races [1, chap. VII; I, XX: 572–585]. ‘‘I conclude that of all the causes which have led to the difference in external appearance between the races of Man. . . Sexual Selection has been the most efficient’’ [1, chap. XX: 606]. 162
In what he called ‘‘savage tribes’’, by promiscuity, which has as a consequence that sexuality is not the result of a choice; by infanticide of girls which exists in a number of ‘‘primitive’’ societies, or by early arranged marriages which make the choice impossible, and more generally, by the slavery in which certain primitive societies hold women. In civilized peoples, advantages such as fortune and social position take over the selection of reproductive capacity or even of beauty: women tend to select in the choice of their mates not blunt strength, but other criteria. ... seems to approve of Galton 162

Preconceitos

If Darwin’s own attitude towards women seems to reveal respect and intellectual esteem, it is clear that some of his views on women colored his scientific insights. ‘‘The female is less eager than the male’’, he wrote, ‘‘She is coy’’, and when she takes part in choosing a mate, she chooses ‘‘not the male which is most attractive to her, but the one which is least distasteful’’ 162
Read as an anatomical statement, it can be interpreted as a reference to neoteny, stressing the fact that human beings are juvenile-looking descendants of their more apish ancestors, women then being more ‘‘paedomorphic’’ than men, and therefore more highly ‘‘evolved’’ than them [22]. However Darwin’s remark mainly refers here to common knowledge (‘‘it is said to be. . .’’) and to the moral code of a society in which woman is indeed considered not as a responsible adult, but as an intermediary between Man and Child, a constantly dependant being who needs the custody of a father or a husband [23]. Similarly, the ‘‘conformation of the skull’’, which according to the physical anthropology of the time is a measure of intelligence [24], also makes woman an ‘‘intermediary’’ between Man and Child. While he exposed his ideas on sexual selection, Darwin thus repeated a number of cliche´s on the characteristics of each sex: what is a distinctive feature of woman (what has been selected by men) is beauty, reproductive capacity, and psychological qualities such as affection, attention to children — while strength, intelligence and creativity are male attributes. This is, according to Darwin, the ‘‘natural’’ role of women. He argues for example that only men are intelligent, creative, and capable of learning, and that it would be hard to obtain similar results in women. To modify those features by education, Darwin wrote to American student Caroline Kennard in January 1882 [25], would require a very long time of learning. Moreover, Darwin added, ‘‘we may suspect that the easy education of our children, not to mention the happiness of our homes, would in this case greatly suffer’’. 162

Matriarquia central na antropologia da época de Darwin. Até pré Descent. Depois some. Boas e Lévi-Strauss dizem que a humanidade não é linearmente redutível (crítica a etnografia). Feministas entram a partir dos anos 1970 163 Houve um retorno ao centro nos anos 1990, mas as críticas valeram. 164
Conclusão

Accounting for the details of human evolution, Darwin put forward the concept of sexual selection, preferring perhaps to give place here to a less brutal process than natural selection. If his demonstration sometimes carried the prejudices of his time regarding gender differences, he was the first who took into account, in his view of evolution, the importance of sexual choices, and who insisted on the evolutionary role women may have played at the dawn of humanity. Thus, he opened the space for a rich reflection which after him was developed in anthropological and palaeo-anthropological studies. Indeed, after him, his works inspired a wide array of orientations taken by reflexions on these issues. ... referring to Darwin, sociobiologists systematically reduce human social and cultural behavior to reproductive strategies. However we should remember that Darwin himself was reluctant to such generalizations. He saw that many factors limited the role and efficiency of sexual selection in human societies, criticizing in advance these reductionist approaches and speculations that have become current in our time. 164

SOBER 2011

Darwin's setting aside of the problem of explaining uneven sex ratios is doubly odd, given that his data include many species of that sort (Orzack 2001, 169–70) and given also that the theory he proposes does apply, as he later notes, to the case of uneven sex ratio. Darwin (1871, 318) then states his argument for why “natural selection will always tend, though sometimes inefficiently, to equalise the relative numbers of the two sexes”
Excess >

these unpaired individuals are what Darwin means by “excess.” It is the assumption of monogamy that entails that some individuals must fail to reproduce if the sex ratio is uneven (Edwards 1998). .... His point seems to be that selection will reduce a very extreme degree of female bias to one that is more modest if polygyny is the mating scheme in place.

The idea that monogamy, sex ratio, and the different mortality rates of males and females are causally linked and the observation that human sex ratio is slightly male biased at birth were familiar to Darwin before he developed his theory of evolution.
He conceives of the problem in terms of selection within a single population, not in terms of competitions among groups > best sex ration strategy a mother can follow > fitness by grandchildren > If mating is strictly monogamous and the next generation is female biased, then the mom who produces only sons will do best.
Descent 2ed

In the second edition of Descent of Man, Darwin (1874, 267–68) retracts his analysis and substitutes a disclaimer—“I formerly thought that when a tendency to produce the two sexes in equal numbers was advantageous to the species, it would follow from natural selection, but I now see that the whole problem is so intricate that it is safer to leave its solution to the future.” He admits that although there are circumstances in which one sex ratio or another would be advantageous to the species, “in no case, as far as we can see, would an inherited tendency to produce both sexes in equal numbers or to produce one sex in excess, be a direct advantage or disadvantage to certain individuals more than to others; … and therefore a tendency of this kind could not be gained through natural selection.” Is Darwin here insisting that a selective explanation must appeal to individual selection only? Or was he merely noting that individual and group selection both require that some individuals must benefit if a trait is to evolve? This is a point that I discussed in §2.6 in connection with what Darwin says about hybrid sterility. But even if Darwin is demanding that the evolution of sex ratio be explained without invoking group selection, it isn't clear why this led him to doubt his earlier argument. His argument from monogamy is an individual selection argument.
Darwin does not state his reasons for retracting, but chapter 20 of Descent of Man provides some facts that may have given him pause. Darwin (1871, 361–62) says that although orangs are monogamous, gorillas, chimps, and baboons are not. And the same holds of many human beings, present and past
,,,,
Darwin's explanation in the first edition is that monogamy leads an even sex ratio to evolve, while polygyny leads a female-biased sex ratio to evolve. If there are polygynous species with even sex ratios, this is a puzzle for his account.
Why are such species a problem for Darwin's hypothesis? It isn't that his first-edition theory says that monogamous species always evolve an even sex ratio and that polygynous species always evolve a female-biased sex ratio (more on this later). Darwin's concern may have been that his theory requires the right chronological order. If an even sex ratio evolved in a lineage as an adaptive response to monogamy, then monogamy must have been present before the even sex ratio evolved. Observing various contemporary species that have even sex ratios without being monogamous may have led Darwin to suspect that monogamy did not precede the evolution of even sex ratios in ancestral lineages. This line of thought follows the logic of tree thinking by using the character states found at the tips of a phylogeny to make inferences about the character states of the ancestors that exist in the tree's interior (§1.6).
Darwin's data may have told him that his theory is off the mark. But there is a deeper flaw in his reasoning, whether he realized it or not. This was discovered by Carl Düsing.

Düsing

Edwards (1998, 2000) and Seger and Stubblefield see Düsing as putting into mathematical language the ideas that Darwin (1871) had thought through only qualitatively. I see a difference in substance. Where Darwin (1871) explains even sex ratio as an adaptive response to monogamy, Düsing's explanation does without the assumption of monogamy. Düsing is explicit that we need to consider three generations: (1) the parental generation, (2) the generation of offspring, and (3) the generation of grandoffspring.
....
Düsing saw that this does not matter: “Whilst the female sex shows a much greater constancy in the strength of reproduction, the widest variation may occur in the case of the male individuals. But in our calculation it is not a matter of how far any extremes deviate, but what the average number of offspring is, and this number is of the same magnitude for male and female individuals at normal [i.e., even] sex ratios” (translated in Edwards 2000). Here Düsing underscores his earlier remark that “it is true that in each individual case [the number of offspring produced] is subject to considerable variation, but if one wants to illustrate and calculate the total effect in an example one must naturally use the average number.”
When there is monogamy, Darwin and Düsing both think of natural selection as “aiming” at an even sex ratio at reproductive age. If males die more frequently than females before reproductive age, both Darwin and Düsing can make sense of the fact that there is a male-biased sex ratio at birth. But Darwin and Düsing part ways over polygynous species that have even sex ratios at reproductive age; these are a problem for Darwin, but not for Düsing. On the other hand, an uneven sex ratio at reproductive age is a problem for Düsing, whereas Darwin's argument makes room for uneven sex ratios when there is polygyny.
Darwin and Düsing disagree, but who is right? In fact, Düsing uncovered an error in Darwin's reasoning. .... To determine whether selection favors one trait over another,you can't focus exclusively on the worst-case scenario for each. The average performance of each trait is what matters. Suppose there is polygyny and mating groups have one male and three females, with each fertilized female producing five offspring.
;;;;;
In a polygynous population with an even sex ratio and p =1/3, there is no selection that favors the production of one sex over the other. Polygyny does not cause a female-biased sex ratio to evolve. Darwin and Düsing analyzed the case of polygyny differently, and it
was Düsing who obtained the correct solution. What about monogamy? The two theorists agree that an even sex ratio will evolve, but they disagree about the reason why. Darwin thinks this happens because there is monogamy; Düsing thinks that an even sex ratio evolves because each offspring has one mother and one father; monogamy has nothing to do with it. For Darwin, monogamy and polygyny are different; for Düsing, they are the same. Darwin's reasoning about sex ratio focused exclusively on individuals who fail to mate, Düsing's on the average individual in each sex. Düsing was a better Darwinian than Darwin.

Natural selection may reduce the rates of mortality that each sex experiences between independence and maturity, but this isn't relevant to how natural selection affects the mix of sons and daughters that parents produce. For Fisher, selection for sex ratio should be understood in terms of a prediction concerning the sex ratio that obtains at the age of independence, not the sex ratio that obtains at reproductive age. From the point of view of Fisher's argument, Darwin and Düsing both addressed the wrong question. ... Hamilton asked the same three-generation
question that Darwin, Düsing, and Fisher posed, but he got a different answer. Suppose each host is parasitized by a single fertilized female.
Conclusão

Let's apply this view of testing to Darwin's (1871) hypothesis about monogamy and polygyny. As explained in §3.4, Darwin's hypothesis is flawed if the process he is describing is one of individual selection. But the hypothesis can be understood in terms of group selection; given a mating scheme, the sex ratio will affect how productive a population will be. The model now makes sense, but this does not mean that it is true. To test it, we can use the format represented in (figure 3.5. Since testing is contrastive (§3.1), we need to decide what alternative hypothesis Darwin's conjecture is to be tested against. A natural choice is the null hypothesis that says that sex ratio and monogamy/polygyny are not causally related. Darwin's hypothesis predicts that monogamy and even sex ratio should be positively associated, and that polygyny and female bias should be so as well. The alternative hypothesis predicts that the association is zero. It does not refute Darwin's hypothesis thatsome species are polygynous and have even sex ratios and that some are monogamous and have female-biased sex ratios. Differences in frequencies are what matter.9 There are further details about how this test should be structured,10 but it isn't necessary to spell them out here, since the main point is this: the models that currently comprise evolutionary sex ratio theory can be tested by observing breeding structures and sex ratios (as well as other biological variables) in different populations.11
What explanation does creationism have to offer of the different sex ratios we see in nature? In fact, creationists don't have a theory about this. What they have is just the one-sentence remark “This was God's will,” which can be appended to any observation you happen to make.

Também em Sober 2007 In Riskin

VEUILLE 2010

Descent comparado aos outros

. His book is truly original. For instance, Huxley’s book [3] was a presentation of pure facts showing that the chimpanzee and the gorilla are closer to humans than are any other species. It is famous for its illustrations presenting series of skulls, hands and feet, placed side by side to allow readers to determine for themselves which species is closer to which. It contains the oft-imitated figure presenting the complete skeletons a gibbon, an orang-outang, a chimpanzee, and a gorilla standing in queue with dangling arms following the skeleton of a man facing the same direction. Similarly, what has survived of Haeckel’s Natural History of Creation is a genealogical tree stemming from the primeval ‘‘monere’’ to races of man, with lateral branchings leading to the other organisms: a tree loaded with meanings, quite the opposite of Huxley’s devotion to pure facts.
The difference between Darwin’s book and the former two is a matter of mechanisms. Already, the Origin was nowhere devoted to comparing species according to their homologous parts (as in Huxley) or in trying to visualize the tree of life (as in Haeckel). The Origin was actually not interested in the origin of life. Its sole illustration showed the simplest of all diagrams: a schematic tree so designed as to link intraspecific variation to interspecific divergence (the basis of natural selection), and which could represent any organic form. Like the Origin, Darwin’s Descent is based on mechanisms. This is why it has survived. Huxley’s and Haeckel’s books are known nowadays mostly by historians, while Darwin’s book is still inspiring for contemporary research, as some ideas in it can be experimentally tested. 146

Mechanisms

It involves two mechanisms. The first is Darwin’s pangenesis hypothesis, now known to be wrong, .... The second is sexual selection, a mechanism which he already had in mind in his sketch of 1844, but which he had never developed extensively since. Mechanisms matter in evolutionary theory, since different mechanisms can lead to different outcomes (Fig. 1). But here we meet a controversial point: should we conclude that, for Darwin, humans deserve a special law of evolution?
....
In this, the Descent is not so much the continuation of the Origin, as it is of the Variation. Darwin’s inspiration for his Descent owes much to his Variation, both for the mechanism of inheritance, and for the similarity between artificial selection and mate choice. Thus, in the Descent, there is an intermingling of the fact that Darwin eventually extends the subject of the Origin to mankind, with the fact that he is defending a substantially different view of the contribution of hereditary mechanisms to evolutionary mechanisms. 147

Livro

Two books > first descriptive part

Then another book begins, a pure marvel, as Darwin stops reviewing the writings of his contemporaries to review the sexual habits of the whole animal kingdom, from molluscs to primates. 147

Origin and Descent and Lamarckism

Historians have emphasized that the successive editions of the Origin show a trend towards an increased role for the law of use and disuse. This is why the different evolutionary mechanisms in the Descent are an important testimony of Darwin’s ultimate state of mind. It contains two definitions of mechanisms. Firstly, Darwin summarizes his pangenesis hypothesis straightforwardly
...
This mode of inheritance belongs to what tradition has called ‘‘Lamarckian inheritance’’, even though it was never so precisely discussed and cautiously presented as by Darwin himself. This theory was criticized because although a lost organ would be unable to send off gemmules, mutilations are not hereditary. Skipping from mutilations to more ordinary variations, the positive aspect of pangenesis was to provide an explanation for the existence of quantitative variability in most species. Some variations are innovative, unlike mutilations. A popular view, which Darwin held, was that they originate through the law of use and disuse. While pangenesis does not in itself assume the mechanism of development by use and disuse, it constitutes a hereditary mechanism which can make it a significant factor in a theory of adaptation.
...
He notices that heredity involves two elements, "the transmission and the development of characters".
....
According to the Descent, use and disuse account for the origin of altruistic behaviour and moral sense. These adaptations are useful to the group, but not to individuals taken singly. In a social species, however, communication develops these functions through sympathy and common approval, so they become altogether beneficial to individuals and to the group, and thus are retained and propagated by natural selection acting at the scale of the
whole group. This could be called ‘‘social-Lamarckianism’’ 148
...
Usage was never the only basis of heredity in Darwin’s thought. He also admitted that adverse environmental conditions could increase variability. Likewise, he admitted that large-scale abnormalities, or ‘‘sports’’, could appear, and be selected by breeders.
....
Like the initial concept of natural selection, which it mimics so well, mate choice would look as if it contradicted any realistic evidence of inheritance until the eventual introduction of genetics into evolutionary theory in 1930. 149

Intra e intersex

The point that has attracted little attention from historians is that the architecture of
the explanation is completely different between the two kinds of sexual selection. Intrasexual selection does not differ in its mechanism from natural selection, and is
compatible with use and disuse. Intersexual selection, like artificial selection, is never reducible to use and disuse. It excludes it. 149

Between the first and the second edition of the Descent, Darwin’s point of view evolved from a firm opinion which was relatively close to Fisher’s one, to a doubtful opinion which seems further away from that of modern biology.
In the first edition, the supplementary subchapter on the proportional numbers of the two sexes includes a final part ‘‘on the power of natural selection to regulate the proportional numbers of the sexes, and general fertility’’. In it, Darwin posits very clearly that if a species produces an excess of one sex, those individuals producing fewer individuals of the ‘‘superfluous and useless’’ sex, ‘‘supposing the actual number of the offspring to remain constant’’, would necessarily produce more of the other sex, ‘‘and would therefore be more productive’’. He is worried by the question of polygamy in some species, a fact which he
ascribes to the limits of the power of natural selection, but which does not look sufficient to him to rule out his explanation. 150
....
The title of this part of the text is less affirmative in the second edition of the Descent, having been changed to ‘‘the proportion of the sexes in relation to sexual selection’’. Nothing is left of the text of the first edition. It has been replaced by an examination of the subject in several human populations. Its most prominent element is a numerical example based on the case of the Todias, a people from India characterized by the infanticide of female infants, and an excess of males in the population. Darwin attempts to show that sex-biased infanticide tends to bias the sex-ratio at birth. Following the reasoning of Colonel Marshall, he considers the imaginary case where females would vary for the sex of their progeny. As shown in Table 2a, he reasons as though each female had six offspring, and these were comprised of either six males, or six females, or three males and three females. He also assumes that two thirds of the female offspring are killed by infanticide. He thus ends up with three females and nine males, who will reproduce. Since most of the surviving individuals originate from male-biased families, he concludes that the number of males will increase in the population.[...]
This reasoning is fallacious, since it does not take into account the fact that each child has a parent of each sex. Therefore, the number of matings effected by females, as a whole, is the same as it is for males, as a whole. This means that each of the three females, taken individually, is three times more fertile than each of the nine males, taken individually.
....
This blunder of Darwin is apparent in the context of 20th century mathematical models of population growth, which show clearly that ‘‘Darwinian fitness’’ involves both survival and fertility [9]. But this is not enough for an explanation, since we have seen that fertility was clearly accounted for in the first edition, and that Darwin had been able to produce the correct line of reasoning about its contribution to determining sex ratios. In the second edition, despite the large number of individuals being killed, Darwin never uses the expression ‘‘selection’’. Instead, he refers to ‘‘families with a tendency to produce sons’’ or ‘‘daughters’’. How do these opposite tendencies coexist within blending inheritance? Darwin certainly did not expect blending inheritance between males and females to produce intersexuals! Thus he must have assumed some unexpressed mechanism for how the confrontation of the gemmules transmitted by the two sexes to the egg determine either a male or a female. Yet of this we have no idea. The least we can say is that Darwin did not possess the theoretical cues for solving the issue. This seems to be a case where Darwin’s conclusions on the mechanisms of inheritance led his theory into a dead end.
Ultimately, he will be unable to identify the forces acting on sex-ratios. In giving up, he seems to refer to the first edition of his book when he admits:

‘‘I formerly thought that when a tendency to produce the two sexes in equal numbers was advantageous to the species, it would follow from natural selection, but I now see that the whole problem is so intricate that it is safer to leave its solution for the future’’. [1,2nd edt. Vol. 2]

Here, Darwin is caught in the act of confusing the advantage to the species with the advantage to the individual. While his theory proves that the adaptation of organisms may follow from a material cause, natural selection, he seems to exclude that the best solution for the individual might be distinct from the best solution for the species.
We judge this from the comfortable viewpoint of modern thinking, influenced by Mayr’s distinction between ‘‘ultimate’’ and ‘‘proximate’’ factors in Darwinian evolution. This is a modern construction. The two levels are necessarily entwined in the framework of pangenesis. However, the words used by Darwin indicate that he himself made a distinction between the ‘‘provisional hypothesis’’ of pangenesis and the ‘‘theory’’ of natural selection. The evolutionary mechanism and the hereditary mechanism did not have the same status even though their parts overlapped. The fact that Darwin insisted on keeping selection as the prevailing mechanism in this process could confuse his readers.
The theory of sexual selection fell into neglect in its time for reasons which are different from the criticisms of modern evolutionary genetics. Like many authors of his time, Darwin could have restrained himself to describing facts. He had written wonderful pages on the achievements of sexual selection in animals. But being the demanding naturalist that he was, the evidence of intuition was not enough for him, and he was ready to weaken the
consistency of his theory by examining the ultimate consequences of his hypotheses, as exemplified in the case of sex-ratio. 151-2

Conclusão

The mechanisms envisioned by Darwin in the Descent are costless under some circumstances, that is, they require no reproductive excess. Thus, evolution through use and disuse is costless as long as evolutionary novelty is created at the stage in which the organism adapts to its environment through development, provided that the new characters are simply passed on to the next generation through pangenesis. However, Darwin does not exclude that natural selection may be acting ‘‘in the same direction’’. Likewise, sexual selection is costless when it consists only in an assortment of mates depending on a pre-existing differential fertility. These mechanisms may have looked closer to the experience of everyday life than the ‘‘law of the battle’’ to readers of Darwin. Of these two mechanisms, the first seems to have been exclusively designed for mankind, as it was framed in terms of some sort of social Lamarckianism, which allowed that moral traits developed within the group by mutual approval, then became hereditary. It relied necessarily on Lamarckian inheritance, and therefore was later ruled out by genetics. The second mechanism, sexual selection, is thought of as universal under its two modalities. Intrasexual selection is nothing other than natural selection applied to the male sex only, with the peculiarity that the success is not in survival, but in reproduction. Thus, its theoretical basis shows the same strengths and weaknesses as natural selection theory. Sexual choice is different, since it does not lend itself to heredity through ‘‘use and disuse’’, and since the underlying female aesthetic sense remains obscure. However, sexual dimorphism, and the extravagant appearance of males in some species, are so striking that the idea of sexual selection could only reappear once Mendelian genetics had cleared away the inconsistencies in Darwin’s reasoning.
Darwin never confused the evolutionary mechanisms based on selection with the hereditary mechanism, pangenesis, which he merely thought to be ‘‘provisionally’’ the most likely hypothesis to explain known facts of heredity. The overlap of the two mechanisms in explaining a single process may have looked confusing, but he maintained their distinctness throughout, and the selective explanation always prevailed in his writing. The reevaluation of Lamarckian inheritance in Darwin’s late works preluded a weakening of his theory which lasted until the rediscovery of natural selection around 1930. These dark ages were presented by Julian Huxley as the ‘‘eclipse of Darwinism’’ [38], an expression that became a reference in history of science [39]. The eclipse was actually not so much that of ‘‘Darwinism’’ itself, as this evasive word was used by a variety of doctrines. It was the eclipse of natural selection theory. But the maintenance of the concept in Darwin’s works allowed it to be rediscovered by contemporary science. 155

VEUILLE 2015

IN HOQUET 2015 CURRENT PERSPECTIVES ON SEXUAL SELECTION

O início

It was not until 1984 that Sober mentioned that Darwin had published the same conclusion as Fisher in the—usually non-widely read—first edition of The Descent of man (1871) and that nobody could have ever suspected his talented contribution to the subject since he deleted it from the second and last edition (1874) of the book. Sober (2007) presents it as a “retractation”. It was also observed that Darwin’s first enunciation of this principle had been discussed in the interim meantime, and even put by Carl Düsing (1884) in form of a mathematical model (Edwards 2000) which Fisher could hardly have ignored (Edwards 1998). I will also raise the issue of density-dependent selection, a model predicting that rules of intraspecific competition change with population level. It appears in evolutionary biology in the 1970s but is clearly addressed, a century earlier, in the same section of the first edition of The Descent of Man.
This section of the book is strange in many ways. Firstly it consists in a “supplement” inserted in the middle of the book (pp. 300–320 of a work of 828 pages). Second, Darwin there appears to be very different from the prudent and methodical writer we are accustomed to reading. He hardly refers to facts and switches from one subject to another in the order they occur to him in successive reflections. Third, as said before, he there opens a window on a variety of subjects, and will shut it after only 3 years with no real explanation. 46

Two kinds of sexual selection (sexual struggle and secual choice) 47
First theory

Since sexual selection did not eliminate individuals through death, the simplest way to explain competition for access to mating was to imagine that one sex was limiting, thus the other was limited. The matching of male and female numbers in most species contradicted this explanation. Darwin found a solution, which appears in the two editions of The Descent of Man. If sexual choice is linked to an ability to leave a more vigorous progeny, then the first individuals to mate will still have an advantage over the others, even though the later would eventually be able to mate. This solution assumes a reward in both sexes.

Such females, if they select the more attractive, and at the same time vigorous males, will rear a larger number of offspring than the retarded females, which must pair with the less vigorous and less attractive males. So it will be if the more vigorous males select the more attractive and at the same time healthy and vigorous females; and this will especially hold good if the male defends the female, and aids in providing food for the young. The advantage thus gained by the more vigorous pairs in rearing a larger number of offspring has apparently sufficed to render sexual selection efficient. (Darwin 1871, p. 271)

Darwin was somewhat satisfied with his reasoning, as shown by the fact that he mentions it as a mechanism acting both in humans and in the other animals, but he was not fully satisfied. In birds, this hypothesis was flying in the face of facts. Sexual dimorphism, which obviously proceeds from sexual selection, is at its pinnacle in birds, suggesting an asymmetry between the sexes, whereas this mechanism suggests the contrary. Darwin apparently doubted that he held the whole answer and maintained that a biased sex ratio would have been a better solution. But with its value being desperately even in most species, he admitted his disappointment:

A large preponderance in number of the males over the females would be still more efficient; whether the preponderance was only occasional and local, or permanent: whether it occurs at birth, or subsequently from the greater destruction of the females; or whether it indirectly followed from the practice of polygamy. (Darwin 1871)

And the question recurred: why is extreme sexual dimorphism not associated with unbalanced sex ratios?

A numerical preponderance of males would be eminently favourable to the action of sexual selection. Nevertheless especially birds, which are strictly monogamous, display strongly marked secondary sexual characters; whilst some few animals, which are polygamous, are not thus characterised. (Darwin 1871, p. 266)

Thus Darwin was led to address a new question: Why do males and females almost universally match in number? This led him to consider the action of natural selection on the sex ratio. Note that he considered sex ratio as a potential prerequisite of sexual selection, not as a consequence of it. Therefore, its value had to pertain to another cause than sexual selection itself, and he assumed it resulted from some as yet unidentified, yet universal, form of natural selection. 48-9

Current

To conclude on this technical part, we see that the current explanation of sex ratio evolution is in terms of genetic relatedness, even though a valid explanation may be put in terms of “access of individuals to mating” in the general case of an equal contribution of both sexes to their offspring (“diploidy”). 53

Düsing

Düsing’s work on the statistics of sex ratio was widely known by those interested in quantitative biology (see the letter of Alphonse de Candolle to Francis Galton2, 29 Sept. 1885) and his regulatory theory of sex ratio was known by those interested in research on heredity at the turn of the century (e.g. Thomson 1908). At a time when the relationship between the transmission and the development of characters was frequently obscured by the belief in the inheritance of acquired characters, some readers however misinterpreted his claim that sex ratio is regulated through factors like developmental time, the age of the parents etc., which were understood as primary causes rather than proximate factors, rendering his conclusions unreadable to most (see Delage 1895, p. 346), and Düsing’s work was forgotten. Moreover research on this subject at the turn of the twentieth century went into a new direction, in parallel with investigations into the causes of heredity. It mostly involved cytological, embryological and experimental evidence. During this period, known as the “eclipse of Darwinism” (Huxley 1942; Bowler 1983), several schools—internalists, externalists and hereditarians according to Maienschein (1984)—drove an
important debate on sex ratio.
In the twentieth century the theory of sex ratio evolution became widely known with the return to Darwin initiated by Fisher’s Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930). 53-4
....
To my knowledge, Darwin’s brilliant insight in the first edition of The Descent of Man was first recognised by Sober (1984). The history of the misunderstanding was documented by Sober (1984, 2007) and Edwards (1998, 2000), who also rediscovered Düsing’s model, along with the long yet interrupted concern of a number of scientists around the proportion of sexes since the eighteenth century, which began with a debate about the role of providence in generation. Many people are still surprised to read the first edition of Darwin’s book and to discover his priority4 [I was myself unware of previous work on the subject when discussed it (Veuille 2010)]. 54-5

Theory

Darwin remarks that in a species with an excess of males, an advantage can be obtained by parents in two different ways: (a) one is to produce the same number of offspring in different proportions (fewer sons and more daughters); (b) the other is to produce fewer sons without increasing the number of daughters, and use the energy so spared to produce more vigorous daughters. These will be more fertile, thus this excess will still be advantageous to the parent. In other words their progeny can be more fertile either because it is more numerous or because it is more vigorous. [...]
This conclusion has been overlooked by readers of Darwin, probably because he presents it as though the decisive reason to choose between the two models would be the advantage to the species. If evolution was leading parents to reproduce according to solution (a), “our supposed species, he says, would by this process be rendered (..) more productive; and this would in many cases be far from an advantage” (Darwin 1871, p. 316). But the alternative (b) mechanism so put forward decreases crowding and offspring mortality in the population as a whole. Presenting evolution as acting for the “good of the species” was usual in biology until the first half of the twentieth century, but fell in disrepute after the mid-1960s (Williams 1966)5. Another counterintuitive aspect in Darwin is that he seems to believe that if females are more numerous than males, they will remain unfertilized. This is “the assumption of monogamy that entails that some individuals must fail to reproduce if the sex ratio is uneven” (Sober 2007; Edwards 1998). Its corollary would be that the general fertility of the population would increase if the sex ratio is even. In modern language, the assumption that unmated females would fail to reproduce would be correct in strictly monogamous species where no “extra-pair copulations” occur6, but a modern ecologist would expect this to be rare in nature. This does not ruin Darwin’s sex ratio evolution model, but only his belief that an uneven sex ratio would decrease population fertility. Another idea of Darwin that may look strange to us is the kind of mutations he envisions: geneticists of the twentieth century would hardly believe that in a species with separate sexes the same phenotype could simultaneously lower the number of sons and increase the fertility of daughters.
Put in its historical context, and with its own approximations (which are in no way more extravagant than some models frequently used in population genetics textbooks nowadays) the principle eventually put forward by Darwin was mechanistic. Finally, the important conclusion remains that, as early as 1871, Darwin understood that the same reproductive effort of a parent could act either on the proportions of sons and daughters, or on the reproductive potential of each kind of offspring. In other words, he considered like Fisher that the controlling factor of sex ratio evolution was not simply the number, but the energy put in the progeny of either sex. This at least justifies that the title of Darwin’s paragraph on this question is not simply: On the power of natural selection to regulate the proportional numbers of the sexes. but On the power of natural selection to regulate the proportional numbers of the sexes, and general fertility (my emphasis). 56-7

General fertility

While Darwin as a naturalist could not admit that species may not be adapted to their environment, he reacted in accordance with his scientific principles by seeking a purely mechanistic explanation. In so doing, he was led to test the consistency of evolutionary theory: since evolution results from competition between individuals, how can it bring about mechanisms regulating population numbers? In other words, can it be advantageous for an individual to limit its own reproduction? At first glance this would seem to be a contradiction, since, while population decrease might be advantageous to all, it would not seem to be in the interest of an individual to limit its own progeny. Thus, seemingly, this behaviour cannot evolve. 57
Darwin’s explanation is purely verbal, but is very clear on the issue.

The offspring indeed of the less fertile parents would partake of one great advantage; for under the supposed condition of severe competition, when all were pressed for food, it is extremely probable that those individuals which from some variation in their constitution produced fewer eggs or young, would produce them of greater size or vigour; and the adults reared from such eggs or young would manifestly have the best chance of surviving, and would inherit a tendency towards lessened fertility. (Darwin 1871, p. 319)

And he concludes the chapter:

By these steps, and by no other ones a far as I can see, natural selection under the above conditions of severe competition for food, would lead to the formation of a new race less fertile, but better adapted for survival, than the parent-race. (Darwin 1871, p. 320)

The explanation is clear and valid. It does not rely on the good of the species. Maybe we should refrain from judging Darwin’s expressions in the framework of our contemporary debates. Our disputes over group versus individual selection cannot be compared to the opposition he was facing in his time. Of the generations of naturalists trained in the belief that an almighty providence had adjusted species to their function in the bosom of universal harmony, he had been the first to envision the power of blind material causes, and to put forward the challenging idea that they were responsible for the equilibrium of nature. It was legitimate to reflect back and question in the words of his potential detractors whether all this would not result in an endless race to produce more and more offspring leading to a demographic collapse, and to give the Darwinian answer. 58

There are relatively few changes in Darwin’s thinking. He has been said to have progressively changed his views about inheritance between the first (1859) and the sixth Darwin (1872) and final edition of the Origin of Species, even though there are merely minor modifications. The “provisional hypothesis of pangenesis” which he put forward in 1868 is thought to have made him a proponent of “use and disuse” mechanisms of heredity. The desire of the evolutionary synthesis community to revive a mythical genuine Darwinism as expressed in the facsimile publication of the first edition of the Origin of Species (Mayr 1964), showed that his opinion had not changed so much7 [In this facsimile edition, the editor introduced 30 new entries to “Lamarck J-B” in the index. Only two of them actually referred to pages where Darwin mentioned the name of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. In the other 28 pages he candidly discussed the inheritance of acquired characters, weighting its positive and negative value]. There is no retractation on variation in Darwin.
The biggest of all changes in Darwin’s thought is about the “proportions of the sexes”. This is actually the deepest revision he ever made in his work8 [It is also the largest modification of The Descent of Man. Of the 554 pages devoted to sexual selection, 67 are on “principles of sexual selection”. Thus the section of the book on mechanisms is relatively short, compared to empirical sections where he describes secondary sexual characters in the whole animal kingdom. In the “principles” chapter some changes are found between the two editions. In “the male generally more modified than females", he adds 59 lines to explain why males tend to vary more than females. In "laws of inheritance", he adds 23 lines to discuss the presence of female-linked traits in males (e.g. nipples in male mammals). The section on sex ratio stability is presented as a “supplement” of 21 pages, of which 16 are a discussion on various estimates of the sex ratio in different species, and 5 are on the action of natural selection on it. In the 16 pages of discussion he adds 55 lines in the subsection on “sex ratio in man” to discuss the larger mortality of illegitimate male infants. Finally, in the part where he presents his sex ratio evolution theory, he deletes everything (169 lines) and replaces it by a discussion bearing exclusively on infanticide in humans (253 lines).]. It is abrupt. It happens in 3 years. He gives up a former hypothesis without any explanation. Moreover, this change is hidden. The second edition of the book opens with a list of the changes made to the first edition, and this change is concealed behind the understatement “excess of males perhaps sometimes determined by selection”.
He actually deletes all of this section and replaces it with a discussion bearing exclusively on infanticide in humans, attempting to explain that infanticide results in an innate bias in sex ratio (see Veuille 2010). The title of this subsection is also less promising, since the once enthused “On the power of natural selection to regulate the proportional numbers of the sexes, and general fertility” is replaced by the more cautious “The proportion of the sexes in relation to natural selection”, which sounds like a question mark and actually leads to a disappointing conclusion:

I formerly thought that when a tendency to produce the two sexes in equal numbers was advantageous to the species, it would follow from natural selection, but I now see that the whole problem is so intricate that it is safer to leave its solution for the future. (Darwin 1874, print. 1882 vol II, p. 260)

The only evolutionary mechanism put forward is inspired by a fragment of Colonel Marshall’s account published the year before on infanticide in the Todas of India. In short, an imaginary model assumes that if only one third of females survive infanticide before reproduction, this practice will create a bias in the sex ratio of the population, eventually favouring the birth of males. This is obviously the opposite of the principles he had put forward 3 years earlier: the sex ratio on which natural selection is expected to act is the sex ratio at the age of reproduction. A larger mortality of females in childhood would result in a bias in the operational sex ratio, eliciting a regulatory mechanism in favour of female births. We are thus caught in a contradiction. In this second edition, nothing is left of his earlier hypothesis, and it is not alluded to, except for the concluding words cited above. Likewise, Darwin’s theory on general fertility, which was a consequence of his theory of sex ratio evolution is dropped, probably because it is no longer appropriate, being thought of as a consequence of his sex ratio theory. 58-60

Inheritance [e trad]

Why did Darwin suppress sex ratio evolution from his work? It would be of little help to try to understand what is meant when he says that the problem is too “intricate” to be dealt with. This is an understatement. Another question is why he published this hypothesis in the first edition, since it is probably one of the rare instances in his work where he published a reasoning, however brilliant, without a solid body of supporting facts. This also cannot be answered. We can just remark that in both editions the question arises in a “supplement”, as though Darwin was just mentioning speculations which should not weaken the whole book.
But can we ourselves, from our perspective as contemporary scientists, say why he failed? There has been one misunderstanding from the very beginning. The mechanism of heredity he had in mind was probably not compatible with the hypothesis he was trying to clarify.
Thus a question to address is what Darwin meant by “variation”. He made a difference between the origin of variations and the fact that some of them did not eventually survive life conditions whereas others did. This is the main difference between him and what will be called “Lamarckian” theories of evolution at the end of the nineteenth century. For Lamarckian schools, the origin of variation was also the mechanism of evolutionary change. Despite this, both schools—Darwin and most of the Lamarckians—shared general views on the mechanism of biological inheritance: the use or disuse of organs generated small quantitative changes during development, and these changes became hereditary. They were the raw material of evolution. These ideas were rather loosely written in Lamarck, who was a naturalist from another generation. They were more clearly presented later. Prosper Lucas’s (1847, 1850) two-volume treatise on Hérédité gave a new meaning to the French word ( hérédité: the social transmission of goods, estates and titles): that of biological transmission. In accordance with the ideas of French psychiatrists, his conception was that variations were pathological with respect to the normal state. Herbert Spencer (1867) was the first to present a version of Lamarckian inheritance in which variations were the normal state. “Variation is co-extensive with heredity” he said in a brilliant formula, while extending the new meaning of the French word to its English equivalent, “heredity”9 [In his translation of Darwin’s Origin of Species, Hoquet (2013, pub. Seuil, Paris) translates Darwin’s “inheritance” by “héritage”, thus avoiding using “hérédité”]. Darwin hardly ever had any strong conception of biological inheritance until he examined the question thoroughly and wrote a treatise on the subject. This was “Variation in Plant and Animals under Domestication” (Darwin 1868). In it he prudently put forward the provisional hypothesis of “pangenesis”, which is summarized in the theoretical chapter on sexual selection of The Descent of Man
In the sexual selection section of The Descent of Man (which represents about one half of the book), Darwin describes and discusses secondary characters throughout the whole animal kingdom, and often refers to a series of empirical laws, which are broadly inferred from the phenomena of heredity, concerning characters limited to sex or to a special part of the life cycle. That he considered these laws as provisional is shown by his frequent reference to the “unknown laws of variation”.
From the point of view of Lamarckians, their conception was more logical than Darwin’s. If variations were acquired as a mechanism of active adaptation of individuals during the developmental process, they were adapted from the outset, and no further selection was necessary. Darwin believed that developmental variation and natural selection often went the same way, but he nevertheless retained selection as the endpoint of the evolutionary process. Nowhere is it more visible than in the case of sexual choice, since females select variability among males in a way that can sometimes decrease the survival of the later:

It is evident that the brilliant colours, top-knots, fine plumes, &c., of many male birds cannot have been acquired as a protection; indeed they sometimes lead to danger. That they are not due to the direct and definite action of the conditions of life, we may feel assured, because the females have been exposed to the same conditions, and yet often differ from the males to an extreme degree. (Darwin 1871, p. 234)

Like breeders, females selected variation as a raw material that was enhanced by variations in the conditions of life, but which they used to their own profit.
Darwin frequently made an implicit assumption which was rarely expressed since it was then widely admitted: it is the idea of “blending inheritance”, whereby the offspring were thought to be intermediate between their parents, as though they were a mix of them. This mistake was swept away only in 1900 with the advent of Mendelism and its principle of segregation of characters, whereby meiotic reduction precedes the union of haploid gametes, these being mere random drawings of the parental alleles. With Mendelism, heredity is particulate (genes are distinct entities) and transmission is semi-conservative between each parent and their common offspring. It may be blending inheritance, rather than the assumption of monogamy, which Darwin had in mind when referring so often to the characteristics of “certain pairs”. In which case his trouble must have been at its deepest, since one can hardly figure out a mechanism whereby sex-determination would ensue from a mix of the parents, not to speak of use and disuse.60-1

Conclusão

Darwin apparently assumed that some pairs had a “tendency” to produce some proportion of the sexes, in which case strong recurrent selection would have been required to counterbalance blending effects. There are reasons to believe that he was deeply embarrassed. For instance, sex-biased infanticide (the focus of the new chapter in the second edition of The Descent of Man) cannot lead to a heritable tendency of survivors to generate more of the unaffected sex, since our heredity is not influenced by the death of our fellow conspecifics. On the contrary, if juveniles are killed in one sex, this will become the rarer sex at maturity, and, according to Darwin’s first edition of The Descent of Man, producing this sex will be advantageous to the parents. But Darwin endorsed Colonel Marshall’s suggestion that female infanticide in the Todas led to a surplus of male births in the population. It would be interesting to understand why he made this mistake, which he had not made 3 years earlier. The “unknown laws of variation” seemed to offer no way for an evolution of sex ratio through natural selection in the schemes he could envision. He must have felt as if in a labyrinth. Darwin also knew that polygamy could not by itself bias the sex ratio, and very cleverly cites the example of horses:

Hardly any animal has been rendered so highly polygamous as our English race-horse, and we shall immediately see that their male and female offspring are almost equal in number. (Darwin 1871, p. 303)

It is not surprising that he withdrew his account on the proportions of the sexes and general fertility. The ways of nature seemed unknowable.
As noted by Sober (2007), “Darwin does not state his reasons for retracting”. Maybe we will never know. Neither will we probably ever know why he once decided to publish a hypothesis which, however perceptive it may look today, and however “Darwinian” it may seem for our Darwinian culture, must have been very difficult to conceive in his time. It is only a marvel for us that he published it, letting us admire how deep his proper reflection could go towards solving some of the most complex issues of evolutionary biology, at least as temporary hypotheses. Moreover, he did not simply retract, though we may be too inclined to see it in such terms because we are more attentive to how far he was from us than to the difficulties of research at a time when experimental biology was in its infancy. He deleted his former chapter, but also added a longer one on infanticide in humans. He says why he chose this subject: because there are more data in humans, and because “there is reason to suspect that in some cases man has by selection indirectly influenced his own sex-producing power”. This was probably an illusion, but one to tell us something of his method. Being disappointed by his hypothesis, he was trying to gather new data, in search of firm ground. 62
....
The wanderings of his thought in the second edition of The Descent of Man suggest he himself had difficulties to follow the thread of his analyses. We don’t know what he had on mind when he withdrew his chapter, but he was surely wise to do so. We are only happy that he had not come to this conclusion immediately.

DELISLE 2017

IN DESLISLE 2017 DARWINIAN TRADITION IN CONTEXT

Centenário 1959

First, a tradition was launched that reflected upon the historiography of Darwin studies dubbed the “Darwin industry”
Second, intellectual bridges were sought to connect Darwin himself with the Evolutionary Synthesis
Third, analyses appeared exploring the explanatory structure of the Darwinian theory of evolution 134

Argumento que li por cima falando que determinadas seções do Origin são muito inconsistentes entre si. Não li com a maior atenção, mas parece meio controvertido.

The reader willing to go beyond Darwin’s rhetoric encounters a book displaying at least five independent sets of issues or pictures. While some are squarely incompatible with one another, others are less than clearly related to each other:

1. Life forms being caught up in complex web of reproductive networks at low taxonomic levels and from which it is difficult to segregate.
2. Natural selection being a wild and brute force overrunning the pattern-process of divergence through a directional ascent of taxonomic levels and evolutionary grades, thus blurring the homology–analogy distinction and overstressing the “Conditions of Existence” (natural selection) over the “Unity of Type” (descent).
3. Evolution being at a standstill and lacking in novelties, as seen in the paleontological annals, with a past that falls entirely under the purview of today’s biological variability or disparity.
4. The negation of the strong contingency thesis in an attempt to calibrate explanatory variables along a symmetrical-proportional ideal explanatory model, with some variables being treated as irrefutable (divergence and gradualismgradation), others being more or less flexible (taxonomic level, geological timeframe, geographical distance, and selective pressure), still others being highly conjectural (deriving icebergs, sunken land, authority arguments).
5. Explanatory tensions, inconsistencies, and contradictions generated by an attempted synthesis between fields like systematics, morphology, embryology, and comparative anatomy. In Darwin’s hands, those fields were deprived of the necessary conceptual flexibility to accommodate in full evolutionary contingency.

The extreme pluralism encountered in the Origin should be taken in account when Darwin scholars are reflecting upon the changes of the Darwinian movement over time. We need to be careful not to envision Darwin’s contribution as being reducible to a sort of neat, compact, and abstract theoretical construct, especially when considering that such an abstraction is largely erected upon Darwin’s own rhetoric. To confine Darwin’s Darwinism to selective pressures acting on small variations at low taxonomic levels—a process extrapolated to higher taxonomic levels through the divergence pattern—falls short of what is actually contained in the Origin.

Mais divergências no pós darwin.
A inutilidade do rótulo

Confronted with such diffused and diversified intellectual strands among darwinians, the question of “what Darwinism is” becomes ever more challenging. The issue is not only to make sense of what has changed within Darwinism over the years, a vexing question if there is one. Even more problematic is the issue of what unites darwinians both across time and in contemporaneity (see also Hull 1985). As proposed elsewhere (Delisle 2009a, b: 377–393), the pluralism among darwinians is so significant that it may be best to classify them as working in distinct research programs and traditions. .... Building on a previous proposal and now going beyond it (Delisle 2011a, b), it seems to me that “Darwinism” as a label has outlived its utility, inasmuch as it acts like a blanket, cloaking fundamental issues instead of revealing them. 157
By discarding “Darwinism,” natural selection can be set apart from other relevant explanatory components in evolutionary biology, allowing evolutionists to freely relate to it or contribute to it, including Darwin himself. 158

Implicaçõies para o eclipse do darwinismo, do endurecimento e na síntese da síntese.

BROOKS 2021

For good and for ill, it [Descent] was a catalyst for the rapid development of scientific studies of sex differences, sexualities and sexual behaviours that flourished through the later decades of the 19th century and early decades of the 20th (Sulloway, 1979; Bauer, 2012; Hamlin, 2014). 324
Freud e o Hirschfield celebraram o livro. 324
Dezernas de artigos sobre diversidade sexual na natureza e críticas sobre a recusa anterior a isso. 324
Suspeita que Grant foi homossexual. Especulações quanto a FitzRoy e Erasmus e Haeckel (que contribuiu com Hirschfield). Martineau era bem liberal 325-6 Interpretações sobre Darwin

Richards (2017) elucidates how Darwin’s laboured, stereotyped and highly problematic descriptions of aggressive males and fussy females in Descent reflected hegemonic Victorian gender and sexual roles for an appreciative bourgeois readership. Dawson (2007) looks more generally at the stiflingly censorious culture within which Darwin shaped his evolutionism, including the draconian legal and social restrictions that 19th-century naturalists faced when discussing sex-related subjects in print. Building on my earlier research relating to approaches adopted toward sex variations in 19th-century science (Brooks, 2009, 2012, 2015, 2019), this historical review focuses on how, in such a deeply bigoted intellectual environment, Darwin negotiated intersexualities, transformations of sex and non-heteronormative sexual behaviours.
The union of a female animal with a male for the sole purpose of producing offspring, preferably without the complications of promiscuity, undoubtedly constituted Darwin’s idyllic vision of sexual reproduction. Notwithstanding, the number of sexual unions he lauded as succeeding in achieving this ideal are remarkably small. His writings are replete with what he described, pejoratively so, as developmental misfits, reproductive failures and evolutionary sexual throwbacks. The various rhetorical and conceptual strategies by which Darwin assimilated, willingly or inadvertently, variations in sex anatomy, physiology, psychology and behaviour within his naturalistic vision of organic evolution – indubitably the flip side of his eminently influential sexology – deserve greater attention from historians and scientists alike, as they provide valuable insights into his methods and the sexual mores of Victorian science more generally, the troubled legacies of which continue to shape the pursuit of evolutionary biology today. 326

Termos e preconceitos

The concepts of ‘homosexuality’ and ‘heterosexuality’, and the binary construct of sexualities they represent, were barely known in Britain during his lifetime, but Darwin nonetheless deployed a broad array of terms and concepts relating to all manner of bodies, minds and sexual behaviours, human and non-human, that lay outside of his idealized description of sexual selection. Terms he used include ‘hermaphrodite’, ‘latent instincts’, ‘utter licentiousness’, ‘extreme sensuality’, ‘promiscuity’, ‘vice’, ‘unnatural crimes’, ‘immorality’ and ‘vitiated instincts’. Responding to his ideas and writings, others, including personal correspondents and critics, deployed other terms such as ‘unnatural love’, ‘grosser copartneries’, ‘paiderastia’, ‘sodomy’, ‘profound moral corruption’, ‘nameless crimes’, ‘gross profligacy’ and ‘hideous sexual criminality’.
Such judgement-laden appellations reflect a complex matrix of concepts for theorizing sex variations in humans and non-human animals that were prevalent in Victorian Britain. The idea that ‘vice’, for example, could act as a check to population already had considerable pedigree by the time Darwin was writing. His greatest inspiration, the English cleric and scholar Thomas Robert Malthus, had been clear in what it constituted: ‘Promiscuous intercourse, unnatural passions, violations of the marriage bed, and improper arts to conceal the consequences of irregular connexions’; in other words, adultery, sodomy (which traditionally referred to anal sex and bestiality), non-procreative sex within marriage and abortion/infanticide (Malthus, 1803: 11). 326

Efeitos

Darwin’s hierarchical model of female and male corporeal and psychological development was deeply entrenched in a broader schema of sex physiology that was not only discussed at great length across medicoscientific genres in Victorian Britain and beyond, but which was, to a significant degree, wrought from observations of intersexualities, transformations of sex and non-reproductive sexual behaviours in human and non-human animal subjects. It was these, generally regarded as the anomalies and curiosities of sex, that raised questions in scientific minds, prompted new theories and discoveries and which, ultimately, engendered a new, modernist sexological science 326

Hunter um dos primeiros a abordar o sexo e chea a propriedades sexuais secundárias, um prerequisito para Darwin 327
Darwin chega ao hermafroditismo. Knox em 1828 já defende o embrião hermafrodita. Yarrell e aves 327
Darwin nos notebooks até o Variation

The appearance of the characteristics of one sex in the other resonated with Darwin’s interest in ‘abortive’ (redundant) organs, among which he included the clitoris and the male breast. Darwin’s evolving argument held that such structures could be accounted for by those organs existing in a rudimentary state in all foetuses, their full growth in one sex, and their inhibited growth in the other, being a circumstance of foetal development. If this could be demonstrated for certain, Darwin wrote, then it would be a ‘splendid argument’ to account for the phenomenon of the appearance of male feathers and spurs in certain individual female birds; i.e. that such feathers and spurs existed in a rudimentary state in all female birds (Barrett et al., 1987: 307). 327
Across several further entries in his notebooks, Darwin extended the principle of essential hermaphroditism to mammals, including humans. For example, he freely remarked that ‘[e]very man & woman is hermaphrodite’ (Barrett et al., 1987: 384). .... He owed much to Hunter on this score, and seemingly little to Knox, but he also moved beyond Hunter’s classic papers on sex development in birds and the freemartin as he attempted to formulate a wider theory of adaptations, ‘abortive’ organs and sex physiology .... the potential malleability of sex characteristics could be extended from the anatomical and physiological to the psychological and behavioural. For example, he stated that, just as the secondary sexual characters of one sex lay dormant in the other sex, he considered the same to be true of instincts, reiterating his conviction that all animals were essentially dual-sexed. .... . In every female all the secondary male characters, and in every male all the secondary female characters, apparently exist in a latent state, ready to be evolved under certain conditions’ (Darwin, 1868, vol. 2: 51). 327-8

No descent não dá esse passo. Quanto ao hermafroditismo: 329

In Descent, Darwin forwarded the view that hermaphroditism was not only the primitive foetal condition but was also the primordial condition of the remotest ancestor of humanity: ‘It has long been known that in the vertebrate kingdom one sex bears rudiments of various accessory parts, appertaining to the reproductive system, which properly belong to the opposite sex; and it has now been ascertained that at a very early embryonic period both sexes possess true male and female glands. Hence some extremely remote progenitor of the whole vertebrate kingdom appears to have been hermaphrodite or androgynous’ (Darwin, 1871, vol. 1: 207). In mammals, those rudimentary ‘accessory parts’ that could be found in one sex but which more obviously belonged to the other, Darwin specified the rudiments of the uterus and its adjacent passage in the prostatic vesicle, the rudiments of the mammae and the occurrence among some male marsupials of a rudimentary marsupial sack. He wrote nothing of the clitoris, only adding that ‘[o]ther analogous facts could be added’ (Darwin, 1871, vol. 1: 208). The occurrence of these rudimentary structures posed a singular difficulty .... organs proper to both sexes ... improbable. 329

Darwin parece ignorar os cachorros de Swinhoe. Também faz uso de outras estratégias para não falar do assunto 330
Teoria da degeneração 330, 332
Preconceito inteferindo na CC

Some evidently faced intense personal, social and institutional barriers when their observations confronted them with sexual behaviours that, in humans, had long been deemed ‘unnatural’ and which were heavily proscribed legally and socially. 330
Caso dos besouros de Kerville, penguins de Levick, e das causas naturais de Selous 330-2 e Dagg 341

Havellock e Ellis darwinistas que apoiavam a causa 332 Urichs mais ainda, também Oscar wilde 337-8

inherent potential of Darwin’s evolutionism to disrupt hegemonic gender and sexual norms in ways that Darwin himself did not intend, even in non-elitist contexts 337

Darwin wrote: ‘The hatred of indecency, which appears to us so natural as to be thought innate, and which is so valuable an aid to chastity, is a modern virtue, appertaining exclusively, as Sir G. Staunton remarks, to civilised life. This is shewn by the ancient religious rites of various nations, by the drawings on the walls of Pompeii, and by the practices of many savages’ 333
Povos civilizados eram homoafetivos 334 Downfall

He stated: ‘If the various checks [ … ] do not prevent the reckless, the vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men, the nation will retrograde, as has occurred too often in the history of the world’ (Darwin, 1871, vol. 1: 177). Cautioning that ‘progress is no invariable rule’, he wrote that a nation that had acquired advantageous characteristics (in the case of the ancient Greeks, high intellect) could still perish ‘from failing in other characters’ 335

Conclusão da coisa e mudança no descent

Ultimately, Darwin held a different view, and had a different agenda, than the anthropologists on the subject of non-human animal sexual behaviour. He ascribed considerable powers of aesthetic sense and moral faculties to the higher animals and, ultimately, the power of choice in sexual partners. He required a deeper and more nuanced model of the development of kinship systems than the anthropologists provided, and one that did not begin with a primeval state of indiscriminate promiscuity. To help his cause he pulled together what literature he knew of relating to the social and mating habits of infrahuman primates in an effort to demonstrate that the jealousy exhibited by certain apes and monkeys would have ensured that primitive, non-human stages of monogamy and polygamy preceded that of human, ‘savage’ promiscuity. 336
...
McLennan was not convinced by Darwin’s attempt to situate infrahuman stages of monogamy and polygamy prior to a primordial stage of promiscuity. There is no known response by Darwin relating to McLennan’s remarks on paiderastia, although the two men continued to maintain a friendly correspondence. However, the episode may have been a contributing factor to the emendations that Darwin made to his text in the second edition of Descent, published in November 1874, in which he bolstered his comments relating to the role of jealousy in the social and sexual relations of infrahuman primates. He was nonetheless still left with the ‘unnatural crimes’, ‘licentiousness’ and ‘promiscuity’ of ‘savages’, and the possibility of their appearance in higher stages of civilization, a situation that remained a moot point in his evolutionism and eugenics. 337

Interpertações

Morris argues that Darwin’s concept of natural selection contained elements that were more challenging to hegemonic Victorian values, which revered purposiveness, productivity and conformity. Among these, the idea that fitness was not an inherent quality but dependent upon changing environmental conditions, the similarly disconcerting notion that evolution is nondirectional and the necessity of random variations within a population to evolutionary change conjoined to render natural selection problematic for prevailing gender and sexual norms 337
Kaye, powerful female and non interested in sex people 338
Davis (2010: 135–185) has also explored the queer potentialities of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, providing a useful survey of the complex, and eminently queer, arena of Victorian physiological aesthetics. As ever, Darwin ostensibly maintained a heteronormative standpoint on the evolution of beauty, but the prospect of males appreciating male beauty, and females female beauty, or at least a credible biological explanation of how and why they would not, remained unelucidated in his writings. The inherent potential for Darwin’s evolutionism to accommodate sex variations also played out dramatically with relation to the subject of checks to population growth, 338

Mivart e a critica a George. Unrestrained licentiousness. 340

Charles Darwin threatened to break off ties with Murray if he did not publish a response written by George Darwin; this Murray did but only alongside a reply (a ‘miserable shabby equivocating rejoinder’ according to Charles Darwin), again anonymous, by Mivart (Darwin, 2015: 587). George Darwin maintained that his remarks on the encouragement of vice as a check to population appeared in a historical sketch and did not represent his own view. Moreover, he denied that ‘there is any thought or word in my essay which could in any way lend itself to the support of the nameless crimes here referred to’ (G. Darwin & [Mivart], 1874: 587). For his part, Mivart accepted George Darwin’s disclaimer but nonetheless stood his ground. George Darwin’s historical sketch, he wrote, was not accompanied by any expression of disapproval or condemnation and, in fact, formed part of a wider discussion of how the personal liberty of individuals in the matter of marriage might be curtailed in the name of evolution, a matter on which George Darwin was passionate in his approval. Mivart pointed attention to a juvenile comment made by George Darwin that if a divorce were granted on grounds of insanity or idiocy, the afflicted party would suffer in no other respect than anyone who was forced to abandon a career on grounds of ill health should they recover thereafter. Would such a person be expected to lead a life of continency? George Darwin might not assert or even intend as much, Mivart wrote, but the ‘encouragement of vice’ was nonetheless implicit in the ‘oppressive laws’ he advocated. Furthermore, Mivart expressly denied that he had directly charged George Darwin with defending the ‘sexual criminality of Pagan days’, pointing out that he had levied the charge against the school to which he belonged and not any individual (G. Darwin & [Mivart], 1874: 589).
The quarrel, in print and in private correspondence, went on for months. Throughout, nobody explicitly denied that the new evolutionism could potentially be used to offer scientific credibility to all manner of non-heteronormative sex variations, including intersexualities, sex transformations and nonreproductive sexual behaviours. The whole dispute was predicated on insinuation and name calling. Living up to his historical reputation as Charles Darwin’s ‘bulldog’, Thomas Henry Huxley entered the fray on the Darwins’ behalf in January 1875 with some stinging anti-Catholic barbs. ‘Unless I err,’ he wrote of Mivart in the Academy, ‘he is good enough to include me among the members of that school whose speculations are to bring back among us the gross profligacy of Imperial Rome’. After slamming Mivart’s ‘misrepresentation and falsification’ (‘the favourite weapons of Jesuitical Rome’), Huxley lamented the anonymity of Mivart’s attack, ‘the natural culmination of which is not the profligacy of a Nero or of a Commodus, but the secret poisonings of the Papal Borgias’ (Huxley, 1875: all quotations 17). Both Charles Darwin and Huxley broke off all relations with Mivart, Huxley even going so far as to blackball Mivart’s attempt to join the prestigious Athenaeum Club.

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IN VEUILLE 2024

RUSE 2024

10.4324/9781003405313-1

Progresso

“The theory of natural selection … implies no necessary tendency to progression”; nevertheless, “I grant there will generally be a tendency to advance in complexity of organisation” (letter to Charles Lyell, October 11, 1859; Darwin 1985–1987:344). This might give the appearance of progress. I am sure that Darwin, the good Victorian, did think there was progress up to Englishman – but he realized that this is a personal judgment not one implied by his theory

Raça

“nor is the difference slight … in intellect, between a savage who does not use any abstract terms, and a Newton or Shakespeare” (Darwin 1871, 1, 57).

Most savages are utterly indifferent to the sufferings of strangers, or even delight in witnessing them. It is well known that the women andchildren of the North-American Indians aided in torturing their enemies. Some savages take a horrid pleasure in cruelty to animals, and humanity with them is an unknown virtue. (1, 94)

Not just thought processes but bodily abilities too. .... “Many savages are in the same condition as when first discovered several centuries ago. As Mr. Bagehot has remarked, we are apt to look at progress as the normal rule in human society; but history refutes this” (1, 166). Not much of a rebel.

Mulheres

Charles Darwin makes his position clear:

As with animals of all classes, so with man, the distinctive characters of the male sex are not fully developed until he is nearly mature; and if emasculated they never appear. The beard, for instance, is a secondary sexual character, and male children are beardless, though at an early age they have abundant hair on their heads. It is probably due to the rather late appearance in life of the successive variations, by which man acquired his masculine characters, that they are transmitted to the male sex alone. Male and female children resemble each other closely, like the young of so many other animals in which the adult sexes differ; they likewise resemble the mature female much more closely, than the mature male. The female, however, ultimately assumes certaindistinctive characters, and in the formation of her skull, is said to be intermediate between the child and the man. (Darwin 1871, 2, 317)

Even when women seem to be ahead of men, it turns out to be a mixed blessing.

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 civilization. (2, 326–327)

Homessexualidade

The primeval ancestor of all animals was both male and female. To this day, as Darwin wrote in a private notebook, all human beings show the traces of both sexes – “every man and woman is hermaphrodite”
....
Continuing, in his post-Origin book The Variation of Plants and Animals Under Domestication (1868), Darwin acknowledged cross-sex behavior and extended it to humans – after discussing birds and mammals, he allowed “we see something of an analogous behaviour in the human species” (2, 51). And he made clear that he extended this observation to sexual behavior. By the time of the Descent, Darwin simply had to accept that homosexual behavior was something that would occur in the human species. But he didn’t want to say so overtly, and he certainly didn’t want to allow that such behavior, presumably natural in some sense, was going on among civilized folk today and that it was acceptable. So, as we have seen, he came up with a good Victorian solution. It’s all the fault of the savages!
Starting, slowly at first, to move to the present, expectedly, Darwin’s reticence fooled no one. One of his correspondents noted that it is more than savages who indulge in homosexual activities. It was to be found in Ancient Greece.

I know no more instructive fact – disagreeable as it is, it is of high scientific interest – than that one practice (to denote it by the general term I have been using), paiderastia, in many countries became systematised. Thus in Greece the relation between a man and his youthful lover was constituted by a form of marriage after contract between the relatives on both sides. (Darwin 1985, 22, 56; letter from John McLennan, February 3, 1874)

Darwin's theory suggests that homosexual behavior is natural > Selous. Freud Stressed that having a homosexual orientation is perfectly natural.

SOBER 2024

10.4324/9781003405313-9

Darwin is a historian’s dream come true. He corresponded widely, keeping copies of his own letters and the letters he received. He preserved his detailed notebooks and his books, the latter of which contain lots of interesting marginalia. This is why it is so frustrating to not be able to hear from the horse’s mouth why he changed his mind about sex ratio. Darwin presents an interesting theory in the first edition of Descent of Man, but withdraws it in the second. He does not explain why he did so in the second edition, nor does he explain his withdrawal in any other document I have been able to find.
He justifies this narrowing by saying that uneven sex ratios are rare, thereby disregarding his own data and also disregarding the fact that his own model applies to uneven sex ratios. .... Darwin’s idea that there are “excess” or “useless” individuals when the sex ratio is unequal seems to be premised on the assumption of monogamy. .... Darwin invoked group selection to explain the barbed stingers of honeybees, sterile workers in the social insects, and human altruism in times of war .... I say “tend” because Darwin isn’t saying that selection ensures that monogamous species always have even sex ratios and that polygynous are always female-biased. His idea is that mating schemes affect the probabilities of sex ratios
Creationism > equality of number of sexes > monogamy > Paley after Arbuthnot

The Arbuthnot/Paley story includes God, mating scheme and sex ratio. Darwin substituted natural selection for God. In the creationist story, God wants us to be monogamous, and God also wants the sex ratio to be slightly male biased at birth, so that there are equal numbers of males and females at maturity. The fact of the matter, though, is that human populations are sometimes monogamous and sometimes polygynous, so some of what we observe is against God’s will. For Darwin, it is the fact of monogamy that leads natural selection to produce an even sex ratio and the fact of polygyny that leads natural selection to produce a female-biased sex ratio. There is no wanting in his story, and a fortiori no unfulfilled wanting. Darwin’s model provides no account for why some species are monogamous while others are polygynous.

Explicação críptica para troca de modelo

I formerly thought that when a tendency to produce the two sexes in equal numbers was advantageous to the species, it would follow from natural selection, but I now see that the whole problem is so intricate that it is safer to leave its solution to the future.

Duas hipóteses: even sex ratios evolve because of monogamy.

A parsimonious reconstruction of those ancestral character states entails that monogamy appeared well after an even sex ratio was in place in the lineage (represented by a broken line) leading to present day human beings, who are both monogamous and polygynous.

My second suggestion as to why Darwin came to reject his first edition model of sex ratio evolution concerns his focus on “excess” members of the majority sex. These excess individuals are worst-case scenarios for the parental pairs that produce them. Yet, Darwin sometimes recognizes that focusing on the worst-case scenario is a mistake. ... Darwin after 1871 may have sensed that there is something fishy in his focus on “excess” individuals.

I think this second explanation of Darwin’s change of heart is less compelling than the one I mentioned first. Darwin repeatedly uses phylogenetic reasoning and chronological order to evaluate hypotheses about what natural selection has achieved; he does not harp on the importance of looking at a trait’s average effect nearly as often. Not that Darwin needs to have rejected his model of sex ratio evolution for a single reason. For discussion of how Darwin’s thinking about the principle of use and disuse clouded his judgment about his first edition model, see Veuille (2010, p. 151).

Historiography of sex ratio theory

Anthony Edwards (1998) suggests that Fisher was merely repeating what Darwin had already said in the first edition of Descent of Man and that Fisher read the 2nd edition of Descent of Man, not the 1st, and so he was unaware of Darwin’s model. ... In any event, I submit that Darwin’s argument is substantively different from Düsing’s. I also submit that Fisher did something more than use Düsing’s model without crediting it to him. ... Neither Fisher nor Düsing addressed the problem of explaining female-biased sex ratios. Darwin took a stab at that problem

ARIEW 2024

10.4324/9781003405313-10

His reports of dyscalculia (like in the passage cited in the epigraph) have misled commentators into thinking that he could not have possibly applied mathematical reasoning to develop his ideas about evolution. The consequences are not good for his posterity
Darwin conhecia Quetelet

Three and a half decades later Darwin again referred to Quetelet’s views on human sex ratios; but on this occasion he did more than report on Quetelet’s conclusions, he applied a statistical technique that Quetelet pioneered. Let’s call it “the method of group differences”.3 It involvesinferring causal differences between human groups from different group averages in large data sets of human features. Quetelet showcased the technique in his work on human sex ratios that Darwin referenced back in 1838. Children born from parents of the same age tend to exhibit a 1:1 male to female sex ratio while children born from relatively older fathers (which represented the vast majority of human matings) tended to skew toward male births. It is reasonable to infer, Quetelet concluded, that relative age of marriage is an important cause for sex production in humans.
In the second edition of the Descent of Man Darwin reports Quetelet’s conclusion (though he attributes the theory to “Dr. Faye” and relegates references to Quetelet to footnotes). More importantly, Darwin himself applies the method of group differences to “trace out the complication of causes” and settle a question about whether organisms themselves, by selection, could “tend to modify the sex-producing power of the species” (1874, 259). Darwin includes the statistical analysis of the sex ratio data in the second but not the first edition of the Descent of Man. Why?
In the first edition (1871) Darwin proclaims that “natural selection will always tend, though sometimes inefficiently, to equalise the relative number of the two sexes” (1871, 318). But in the second edition Darwin retracts his conclusion: I formerly thought that when a tendency to produce the two sexes in equal numbers was advantageous to the species, it would follow from natural selection, but I now see that the whole problem is so intricate that it is safer to leave its solution for the future. (1874, 259)4
Michel Veuille (2015) describes Darwin’s new position a “contradiction” to Darwin’s previous views. Elliott Sober (2011) calls the retraction a mistake and Darwin’s reasons for it “a mystery”. However, Darwin’s retraction is not mysterious. The argument in the first edition is based largely on conjecture, analogies and untested assumptions about the power of natural selection to alter sex-producing powers (Veuille 2024, in this volume alsonotes that Darwin’s treatment in this discussion is “exclusively deductive”). Darwin jettisons these arguments in the second edition and replaces them with empirical arguments based upon data collected in the wild which, among other things, tests Darwin’s previously held assumption that natural selection alters sex ratios. Darwin concludes that natural selection does indeed have the power to alter sex ratios, though “indirectly” (255). Nevertheless, Darwin finds no conclusive evidence in the data that natural selection always tends to equalize the sexes.
..... . I’m not going to argue that Darwin was a brilliant mathematician. He wasn’t, as his autobiographical remarks support. But Darwin didn’t need to be a brilliant mathematician to apply his statistical techniques to his investigations of sex ratio skews. There are no mathematical equations used in Quetelet’s or Darwin’s application of the method of group differences.

No descent

inequality of sexes provides no selective advantage to a group. Any such inequality, then, must be due to non-selective causes. In such cases, Darwin asks, “Could the sexes be equalised through natural selection?” (316). Darwin’s answer is yes (“we may feel sure”) and he offers two scenarios, both involving populations which initially consist of an excess of one sex over another.5 In one scenario, the overall population continues to increase in numbers and, in the other, the overall population remains constant. Neither can be sustained over the course of generations because they are susceptible against variants that are “subjected to the least waste of organized matter and force”, and in both scenarios, the variant is at advantage, hence, natural selection directly or indirectly favors the equality of sexes.

Mudança

Darwin’s argument is almost entirely based upon thought experiments ranging over hypothetical scenarios. ..... So, it is no wonder that Darwin felt compelled to eliminate the entire section and replace it in the second edition with an analysis of real-world statistical data of sex ratios. In the second edition Darwin’s intent was to test a speculative generalization with a well-supported one. The problem is, as Darwin reports in the second edition, he failed to find sufficient empirical evidence; in fact, he found evidence to the contrary. Hence, his retraction.

Na segunda edição

Darwin’s revisions in the second edition are significant because they mark a shift in his methods for theory confirmation. As opposed to relying on thought experiments, he sought evidence from real-world population data on whether natural selection is responsible for the sex-producing powers of a species. For the retraction Darwin depended on data drawn from human demographic and the statistical “method of group differences” to analyze them. Ultimately, he found insufficient evidence that sex ratios are inherited, that human preferences (including sexual selection) can alter sexproducing powers of the species, and that equalization among humans would confer advantages in the battle for life.
This is key to understanding Darwin’s retraction – the extensive human data did not support his previous conclusion that natural selection tends to equalize the sexes. For one, it did not account for the curious, but robust finding in human demography that there exists a world-wide sex ratio toward boy births (103 to 100). Darwin’s argument for his retraction in the second edition is made clear when we consider that (as opposed to thefirst edition’s version of the “supplement”) Darwin is using the additional data collected on “man” as a basis for his reasoning

Explicação

To understand why Darwin is interested in variation in group averages some historical background is in order. For early Natural theologists, the sex ratio skew toward male births was evidence for the existence of a populationlevel natural law imposed by a benevolent God. Arbuthnot argued that sex ratios skewed in favor of males were arranged by God to compensate for young men killed in war and at sea (Hacking 1990, 21). Demographer Johann Peter Süssmilch argued that the skewed sex ratio taken in conjunction with a higher mortality rate among men provided a perfectbalance of sexes at the time of marriage, thus facilitating the great goal of human activity, maximal population increase (Porter 1986, 50). Yet, soon demographers revealed a multitude of such aggregate laws among humans including stable death rates, birth rates, population growth rates. In 1827 Quetelet and André Guerry discovered frightful stable regularities in a variety of non-benevolent features of humans, including regional crime rates (27 years of stable crime rates in Paris), divorce rates, suicide rates and jury conviction rates. If divine intervention is not a suitable explanation for non-benevolent statistical constancy, what is?
For advocates of Quetelet’s “social physics” the presence of stable averages in the population data was evidence of a persistence of causes – as opposed to divine causes – that reveal themselves in the aggregate10 statistical data. Stable averages are what we should expect to see if individuals in a population share some common causal feature, even if these features aren’t experienced by all individuals or aren’t experienced all in the same way. Quetelet coined the term “average man” – based upon the law of large numbers – to capture the idea. This is the basis of what we’ve been calling the “method of group differences”. Different group averages revealed in very large samples suggest real causal differences between groups.

Darwin re-reports Quetelet no Descent

This is an instance of the method of group differences in action. If there is no change in the averages between groups, then, the factors that distinguish the groups (polygamy, monogamy) are not causal developmental factors in the trait in question (sex ratios). In the supplement, Darwin is constantly looking for evidence that sex ratio can be altered by selection. In the second edition he hones in on data revealing the grim fact that a large disproportion of males are still born or die in the infant years

Síntese até agora

Recall in the first edition, Darwin’s thought experiments both begin with populational variants that produce fewer excess of one sex over another which, as a result of their hypothetical advantage, either lead to an overall increase in population numbers or a corresponding decrease in the alternative sex. Argument from sexual selection in the second edition also begins with a population that contains fewer excess of males over females, yet the argument strategy is entirely different. Darwin is trying to find the best explanation for a fact grounded in actual human demographic data that “the excess of male over female births is less when they are illegitimate than when legitimate”. Rather than assuming the existence of a proximate cause that confers reproductive advantage, Darwin seeks a plausible proximate explanation that best fits a range of biological and social facts, including the disproportion of male still births (from the English and French demographic data) and the social pressures on women carrying illegitimate children. Only then does Darwin offer his sexual selection explanation as a speculation.

Mais mudança

Perhaps Darwin’s most significant revision of the second edition was to eliminate the entire section “On the Power of Natural Selection to regulate the proportional Numbers of the Sexes, and General Fertility” which contained the thought experiments and famous conclusion about natural selection always favoring the unity of sexes. Darwin replaced it with a newsection, “The proportion of the sexes in relation to natural selection” (1760 words) with the primary objective whether humans – through a variety of social practices – have altered “his own sex-producing power” (255).
The revised section is a continuation of Darwin’s strategy in the “supplement” to try to confirm selection hypotheses against real statistical data. The revised section contains several distinct arguments. To demonstrate that humans can by selection influence is sex-producing powers it must be shown that the feature is both inherited and that variants have an advantage in the battle for life. Darwin divides the section accordingly. The first half evaluates two arguments, one by analogy, one from sex ratio data collected among tribes, which purportedly show that the sex-producing power is inherited. Darwin will ultimately conclude that the statistical data is insufficient to confirm them. In the second half Darwin evaluates the evidence that possessing a sex-altering capacity would provide an advantage, first to human communities that possess it, second to individuals. Darwin concludes in this section that given all the various attempts to “trace out the complication of causes” presented in both the supplement and the present section, there is not enough evidence to confirm or disconfirm a selective advantage to either human community or individuals. Darwin compares the human case with that of the paradigmatic cases among non-human animals where either group selection or individual selection best explains the preponderance of one sex over another. Except for tribes where defense is paramount, there are no cases where humans provide the clear-cut evidence of selection favoring disproportionate numbers of either sex. And, this ultimately provides him sufficient reason for his retraction. ...... Darwin’s evaluation is that while the argument by analogy provides some “reason to suspect that in some cases” humans can by selection alter its own sex-producing power, “I have very little evidence on this head”

Conclusão

We have a fairly comprehensive answer to the “mystery” of Darwin’s retraction in the second edition of the Descent of Man. Darwin’s previous claim – that natural selection always favors equality of sexes – was based on thought experiments without actual evidence of natural selection favoring equality of the sexes. In the second edition Darwin put his claim to the test against actual empirical evidence drawn primarily from human demographic data on sex ratio skews for a range of populations. In the end, Darwin finds no conclusive evidence. In fact, the preponderance of evidence among humans is that there exists a world-wide sex ratio toward male births. Among the likely proximate causes of the human skew that Darwin surveys, including Quetelet’s relative age of marriage and female infanticide among certain tribes, he finds no conclusive evidence that the feature is inherited or would present a selective advantage (either by group or individual selection). So, more than finding reasons to dismiss his previous claims about selection favoring equalization, Darwin in therevision finds no conclusive reasons to believe that selection favors the production of any particular ratio.
......
Fisher’s neglect of Darwin’s published statistical work is unfortunate. He missed out on an opportunity to highlight the several occasions where Darwin applied statistical methodology to advance his ideas about evolution.
In the first, Darwin applied simple calculations (the “rule of three”) over plant data on ratios of species to genera to predict whether a genus with few species is growing by speciation or shrinking by extinction. The work was instrumental to his idea in the Origin of Species (Darwin 1859) that the economy of nature is dynamic, with constant cycles of extinction and adaptive speciation. In turn it helped him construct his principle of divergence to explain the process of speciation.
For the second instance, I discuss Darwin’s (1873) letter to Nature, where Darwin provides a speculative answer to the question, how it is possible for rudimentary structure (like that of the males of certain Cirripedes) to evolve? To answer, Darwin modeled trait variation according to what was “known from the researchers of Quetelet on the height of man” that the variations of biological features are distributed according to the astronomer’s law of error. With Darwin’s statistical model of trait variation, he anticipated Fisher’s contributions to the twentieth-century modern synthesis.
In this chapter I expounded upon a third instance where Darwin applied statistical analysis of human sex ratios (including applications of the method of group differences) to disconfirm and retract his previously held conviction that natural selection always tends to equalize the sexes.

VEUILLE 2024

10.4324/9781003405313-11

Effects of cosanguinity, experiments in flowering plants, George's calculations of consaguinity > very substantial research project that counts amongst the most time-consuming investigations into heredity of the nineteent century.
Resumo do ocorrido

Darwin’s so-called “sex ratio” theory (using modern words). The question includes the evolution of the numerical balance between males and females, as shown and discussed by Sober (1984, 2011). It also includes the differential investment (using modern words) of males and females into their progeny and considers the possibility for natural selection to establish mechanisms regulating population numbers (Veuille 2015). This point was published as a short six pages comment inthe first edition of The Descent of Man (Darwin 1871). It was deleted in the second edition of the book (Darwin 1874) and replaced by a paragraph apparently contradicting it (Veuille 2010).

Herança

Until the nineteenth century, “inheritance” (in English) and “hérédité” (in French) designated the legal possibility to transmit real estate and aristocratic titles. The biological transmission was not considered, except when it was thought to involve deviations from normality, like “degeneration” or “hereditary monstrosities”. ... "sad heredity"
Herbert Spencer (1864) gave variation a positive meaning when coining the word “heredity” (Weekley 1921) as a synonym for biological inheritance. A positive view of variation is also pervading in Darwin’s work. For both authors, variation is a prerequisite for evolutionary change.

A complete picture of Darwin’s views must include his belief that environmental changes disturbed the reproductive system, generating variations that were not necessarily derived from usage (Olby 2009). These indirect effects of life conditions on variation, as opposed to the direct effects mediated by development (Winther 2000), explained that domestic(2) species, which underwent environmental changes, were more likely to vary, and hence, to evolve through selection.
Given his ignorance of hereditary mechanisms, a large part of Darwin’s Variation is devoted to circumscribing them by their alleged properties. This approach is exemplified by Darwin’s list of the five “hows” .... Note that in the second edition, the number of “how” amounts to seven. Two new “hows” insist on graft-hybrids and the similarity between generation and regeneration.
efeitos de telegony
In the course of these experiments, his attention was drawn to the effects of inbreeding by a serendipitous observation. ..... The wonder was that the deficiencies appeared from the first generation of inbreeding, and at a quantifiable scale. > proxies for "fitness" e inbreeding depression.
Marriage consaguinity and prejudice

The nearly universal effects of inbreeding being established in plants, Darwin moved on to study their effect in animals, especially humans for which population statistics on marriages were available. Marriage between close relatives was very common, due to the sedentary lifestyle in rural areas and to rules of marriage amongst the wealthy. The family tree of the Wedgwoods, to which Darwin belonged, was a famous example of this (Figure 11.3). Charles had himself married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood. Three of Emma’s brothers married their first cousin or double first cousin. Charles did hesitate for some time before deciding to marry, but he made no difficulties in marrying a first cousin.
Marriage within his family has often been emphasised by his biographers as a motivation for his interest in inbreeding. Darwin was concerned about the health of his children and his potential responsibility for their illnesses, but his main concern was not consanguinity, but rather the possibility that his poor health may be heritable. As Ruse (2010) remarks, Darwin was worrying about sexuality before he proposed to and married his cousin. Even though this is a retrospective testimony, it is worth noting that Darwin mentions that when he began his work on self and crossfertilization, the point looked irrelevant: No instance was known with animals of any evil appearing in a single generation from the closest possible interbreeding, that is between brothers and sisters. (Darwin 1878, 8)
The Darwins knew in advance that marriage amongst first cousins was far less serious than self-fertilization, in which an individual fertilizes itself since cousins are more distantly related to each other than an individual is to itself. So the dramatic effects observed in plants could hardly be generalized to animals. Indeed the figures obtained in humans were less conclusive than had been anticipated.
Darwin remained interested in the topic for many years. It was systematically discussed in all the editions of the Origin. He first refers to his experiments in plants in the 4th edition (Darwin 1866, 296) and subsequently considers the effects of inbreeding to be a demonstrated fact. In the 6th edition of the Origin, he concludes: I have made so many experiments and collected so many facts, showing on the one hand that an occasional cross with a distinct individual or variety increases the vigour and fertility of the offspring, and on the other hand that very close interbreeding lessens their vigour and fertility, that I cannot doubt the correctness of this conclusion. (Darwin 1872, 236)
Despite continuity, it is apparent that Darwin was struck for years with the effects of inbreeding in plants until he eventually concluded that the effects in humans were almost negligible. This is the opinion of Bittles (2009), who notes that Darwin changed the title of his book on orchids between the 1862 and the 1877 editions, by removing “the good effects of intercrossing”. He attributes this to a re-evaluation of the ill-effects ofinbreeding on the ground of the findings of George, and their enthusiastic welcome by Francis Galton. The later publicly commented on the results of his cousins before the Statistical Society as showing that: they had undoubtedly swept away, to some extent, an exaggerated opinion which was current as to evil resulting from first-cousin marriages. (Cited by Bittles 2009, 1456)
Darwin’s change of mind on consanguinity was a change of appraisal rather than a reversal of opinion. ........ However, this was a minimal account of his discovery. His results showed that the evil of inbreeding begins at the first generation of self-fertilization (Figure 11.2). But Darwin downplayed his results and insisted that this was a non-obligatory condition at each generation and that many species can self-fertilize. There were reasons to think so: since plants do not move, a new colonist being established in an isolated area can only fertilize itself to propagate, as an alternative to finding no mate. This applies to cirripeds, the animal group he knew best, in which individuals are attached to the substrate.
We now know that recurrent self-fertilization results in cleansing the genome of deleterious mutations, thus increasing tolerance to inbreeding.But indeed, Darwin now admitted that inbreeding was not deleterious in itself. It was the mere expression of a lack of diversity in the habits of the parents. ........ Darwin had been sticking all the time to his preconceived idea that the ultimate cause of sex was to regenerate the stock by diversifying parental origins. Given the importance of his discoveries, this was a step backwards
The system he had imagined to account for the existence of sex was safe, but Darwin was pushing it into a dead end. The evils of inbreeding were not the cause of sex. On the contrary, they were a by-product of a hidden character of heredity to be revealed later on by Mendelian genetics: diploidy. Unknowingly, he was inverting the cause and the effect.

Darwin finds a first solution: sexual selection is possible in a population of even sex ratio if the best females mate with the best males, according to some utility criterion. However, its applicability to birds is doubtful, since Darwin also believes that females choose males, not on a utility criterion, but on aesthetic preferences. Such traits are no advantage to the offspring in the struggle for life. Finally, Darwin finds that the question to be addressed first is why the two sexes are about equal in number. This is not a result of sexual selection, so there should be some natural selection explanation to account for it (Veuille 2015).
Darwin tackles this question at the end of a supplement to the sexual selection chapter of the first edition of The Descent of Man (Darwin 1871). This discussion “On the power of natural selection to regulate the proportional numbers of the sexes, and general fertility” is exclusively deductive, as opposed to most of Darwin’s writings, which always involve some empirical examples. This may be the reason that it is published at the end of a supplement since Darwin hates deductions that cannot be checked by facts. ..... Sex is not hereditary, but sex ratio is, and Darwin assumes that parents have a hereditary tendency to produce sons and daughters in a predetermined proportion.
As a first step, he thinks that if one sex is less numerous than the other, it is at advantage for mating since one member of each sex is involved in each pair ..... As a second step, Darwin argues that in such a population, there will be more mating pairs. .... As a third step, Darwin understands that this also provides a mechanism of evolution of population control
A hypothesis about darwins retraction on sex ratio

In the second edition (1874) Darwin deletes the whole discussion and replaces it with a discussion mostly concerned with sex ratio in relation to infanticide in three human populations: the Todas from the Nilgiri Mountains in India, the Maori from New Zealand and Hawaiian populations from the Sandwich Islands. In the three cases, Darwin notes an excess of male births, in the context of female infanticide. Darwin does not show a clear link between the two phenomena but presents a reasoning attributed to Col. Marshall, who reports the case of the Todas. Marshall imagines a condition where infanticide kills two-thirds of female infants.
,,,,,
If Darwin’s interpretation in the first edition had been a premonition of Fisher’s sex ratio model, that is if we admit that two parents, and only two, contribute to each offspring, then being a female is advantageous, and the number of females should increase in the population (Veuille 2010). The fact that Darwin’s conclusion is the opposite suggests that he does not reason the way we believe he does, that is the way we do.
Let’s take Marshall’s example of Todas women having on average three husbands, and let’s suppose a woman has three children. Can she have onechild with each husband, or, can several husbands be the fathers for each child? Today, we can admit only the first case, and since an average woman is consequently three times more fertile than a man, the tendency is for sex ratio to increase the proportion of daughters (Figure 11.4, middle). Clearly, Darwin doesn’t think so. Strange as it looks, he admits the second case.This agrees with his conclusion that the bias strengthens in favor of male births. This also agrees with his constant belief that a first mate leaves an imprint in the female’s body and affects the heredity of a child with a second mate. It is constitutive of pangenesis. It explains that Darwin was wrong in 1874, and incidentally, it cast doubts on whether he was right in 1871.
In 1871 Darwin presented a theory without facts. In 1874 he presents facts without a theory. In each version, the scope is limited to a special case. Why he did it is a mystery, since he finally concludes that he leaves the solution of the problem to the future.
I believe he dropped his explanation of 1871 because it lacked generality in the framework of his wrong hypotheses about inheritance, and that considering polyandry with telegony in 1874 was not leading to any prediction on the value of the sex ratio. Other contributions to this volume point out that a complete understanding of Darwin’s retraction should consider levels of selection (Grafen, 2024), the incompatibility of the phylogeny of human’s closest relatives with Darwin’s hypotheses (Sober, 2024), and the discussions held for many years on the statistics of sex ratio and their significance (Ariew, 2024), yet none of these three contextual aspects explains why Darwin changed his scope from monogamy to polyandry between the two versions.

Conclusão

An early weakness of his view was the belief that heredity only involves the transmission of traits from parents to offspring. He was unprepared to encounter traits that, although biologically determined, have no heritability. Inbreeding depression appears in the first generation of inbreeding in the offspring of a pair that did not show it. It also disappears in the first generation of outcrossing between two inbred lines that did show it. This only makes sense to someone who knows the segregation of Mendelian factors. The trait of the parent predicts nothing of the trait of the progeny. Only the type of mating determines the fate of the offspring. Darwin had observed this in Linaria, then in many plant families, and understood that it was an important discovery. After more than a decade, however, he reverted to his belief that outbreeding was the hereditary reflection of diversity in the parental environment, in which he saw the cause of sex. He was encouraged to think so by plants looking indifferent to inbreeding like common peas or sweet peas. In so doing, Darwin reversed the causal relationship: he made the evils of inbreeding (or what he interpreted as inbreeding) the cause of crossing, whereas they were merely its consequences.
Another weakness was the belief that a former mating with a male leaves an imprint on a female’s future offspring. By thinking in terms of strictly monogamous parental pairs, he had a wonderful insight into the evolution of sex ratio, and also into what we call today parental investment, lifehistory traits, and frequency-dependent population regulation. But as soon as he lifted the constraint of monogamy and tried to generalize, he got lost.
Could he have come to the conclusion that only one male parent contributed offspring to a polyandrous female? Certainly not. The “effect of the male element on the mother form” had been evoked throughout his books as a cornerstone of his vision of heredity.

-----------------------

IN DELISLE, ESPOSITO & CECCARELLI 2024

CECCARELLI, ESPOSITO & DELISLE 2024

Labels such as “Darwinism” and “Lamarckism,” for example, were long uncritically believed to hold a heuristic value and exploited by scholars to put some order in the disputes between scientists, creating somewhat archetypical conceptual systems whose borders are, however, highly mutable. At the same time, they have served a dual purpose: delineating distinct research traditions and unifying research and institutional networks. Since the late nineteenth century, evolutionary biology frequently saw scientists grappling with the task of accurately labeling their work and rejecting labels perceived as problematic. These efforts were often instrumental in defining the parameters of research programs, establishing and consolidating schools of thought, as well as efficiently marginalizing inconvenient ideas. 4

ESPOSITO 2024

Abordagem reformista e radical para os Darwin studies

The reformist option corresponds to what Kuhn calls “normal science.” > Darwin paradigmatic story 10 > Disturbingly religious 11

they start with an accepted, familiar idea; they go backwards to its source, minimize oppositions to it, and present us with a coherent history of its triumph. Such an approach can be suitable for clear exposition, but it is essentially a form of fiction or novel” 14

There is a visible eagerness to revise the assumption that sees any history of evolutionary thought as rooted in Darwin. 11

Religious

The Origin, as a volume of single authorship, maintains a stronger plot line and features fewer inconsistencies than the Bible; but Darwin and the Good Lord do share the common trait of saying something about nearly everything. Wrenched from context and divorced from a crucial assessment by relative frequency, a Darwinian statement can be found to support almost any position, even the most un-Darwinian. . .Since Darwin prevails as the patron saint of our profession, and since everyone wants such a preeminent authority on his side, a lamentable tradition has arisen for appropriating single Darwinian statements as defenses for particular views that either bear no relation to Darwin’s own concerns, or that even confute the general tenor of his work. . .(Gould 2002, p. 148) 17

CECCARELLI 2024

Unificação

The endeavor to establish parallels between biological sciences and physics, along with the pursuit of identifying general laws in biology, gained prominence within the epistemological culture of determinism and methodological uniformitarianism. The concept of nomic spatiotemporal invariance (Haufe 2015), asserting that the laws of nature remain consistent over time and that one could generalize retrodictions about the past based on what we observe in the present, served as a foundational methodology in the nineteenth century. 20
The need to conform to the epistemological standards of physics appears clearly from the works of several evolutionists between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries 21

Contrário veio com Mayr e a unificação da autonomia da biologia de Mayr 22
Interessante para o programa de recepção

As shown by Johnson (2020), Darwin’s effort to claim originality and emphasize the explanatory superiority of his theory over rival ones indirectly shows how varied was the theoretical panorama of evolutionary studies during the mid-nineteenth century. 22

Darwinismo enquanto selecionismo

According to Mayr, the more appropriate name for the Modern Synthesis should be simply “Darwinism,” as it did not introduce revolutionary changes to Darwin’s theory. Instead, it enhanced it with a more robust understanding of speciation and eliminated the concept of soft inheritance, which was included in Darwin’s original theory. 23-4
....
It is however worth wondering what it means for “selectionism” to be the core of Darwinism. If by core we mean, precisely, an essential component of the explanans of the Darwinian evolutionary theory, it must be noted that Darwin used natural selection as the primary agent responsible for the adaptation of organisms, as a complementary and auxiliary agent capable of reinforcing alternative mechanisms (i.e., use and disuse), and that he dismissed it to make sense of some specific evolutionary patterns (Delisle 2021, pp. 95–97). Darwin zealously considered natural selection as his most precious contribution to the debate on species transformation (Johnson 2020); however, especially in his late works, he consistently relied on pluralistic accounts of organic change, to the extent that scholars would employ his “pluralism” against those attempting to equate Darwinism solely with selectionism.
Presumably, the association between Darwinism and selectionism emerged from regarding natural selection as the most original contribution of Darwin to the nineteenth-century debate on species transformation. This view has however diverted attention from the theoretical and historical complexity of Darwinian theory. Darwin’s theory had a complex and multilayered structure. Not only is it trivial to consider it “a unitary entity” (Mayr 1985, pp. 755–772, 755), but it also displays a significant diachronic change. Over the course of the years, Darwin refined his “long argument” by incorporating insights from his peers, assimilating criticisms, and broadening the scope of his analysis. The study of his personal writings, correspondence, and publications reveals several changes of opinion on themes such as the endorsement of gradualism, the role of geographic isolation in speciation, and the use-inheritance hypothesis. Over time, scholars have feasted upon such theoretical and historical complexity, dissecting specific theoretical components, extrapolated from various stages of Darwin’s intellectual development, which aligned with contemporary theoretical models. As Barzun (1958, p. 75) provocatively argued, “Darwin’s hedging and self-contradiction – enabled an unscrupulous reader to choose his texts from the Origin of Species or the Descent of Man with almost the same ease of accommodation to his purpose as if he had chosen from the Bible.” 24
....
These two levels, the Darwinians and Darwinism, are undoubtedly interconnected, yet there seems to be a weak causal nexus between them. In the aftermath of the publication of the Origin, scientists actively defended Darwin’s ideas without necessarily embracing all its tenets. Conversely, scholars who accepted the major principles of Darwin’s proposal did not automatically affiliate themselves with the label “Darwinians.” Figures like Thomas H. Huxley and George Mivart shared similar criticisms against Darwin’s theory, particularly regarding the belief in gradualism and the creative power of natural selection (Ivi, 797). Despite this, they have gone down in history as two distinctly antithetic figures: Huxley, known as Darwin’s bulldog and the foremost advocate of Darwinism in the Victorian Age, and, on the opposing front, Mivart, the scientist who articulated some of the most biting criticisms of natural selection, eventually becoming a prominent antiDarwinian figure. The history of post-Darwinian debates on the theory of evolution is replete with authors whose embrace or rejection of “Darwinism” was often driven more by ideological and philosophical commitments than purely scientific considerations (Ceccarelli 2021). 25

Conclusão

inclination toward non reductionism 26
Determining whether we are still in a Darwinian age or not—assuming a true “Darwinian era” ever existed—is however an issue that probably conceals a further key question, at least from a meta-historical perspective: why do we feel so compelled to invoke Darwin? The development of scientific theories and ideas follows intricate paths, some branching from the contributions of a few great scientists. The trajectory of theoretical proposals involves debates, reframing, criticism, misconceptions, adjustments, censorship, fanaticism, and various other dynamics that characterize scientific practices within their social and cultural complexities. While exploring the coherence that might qualify a system as “Darwinian,” we should probably inquire about the purpose of keeping these labels alive besides the possible continuities and discontinuities between two or more conceptual systems. As historian Jacques Roger (1985) noted, physics has drawn upon the legacies of Newton and, more recently, Einstein, yet we seldom encounter terms like “Newtonism” or “Einsteinism.” Paradoxical as it may seem, the history of the term “Darwinism” resembles much more that of eponyms such as “Marxism,” due to the philosophical and ideological implications that profoundly marked its resonance in the scientific and general audience. Since the debate that followed the publication of the Origin, the term condensed several layers of meaning, turning Darwin’s theory into many “Darwinisms.” 27

LA VERGATA 2024

Darwinismos

Who is an “absolute and pure Darwinian?” Huxley also asked on another occasion, and he replied: “I doubt if I can ever have seen one alive” (Huxley 1893–1894, p. 474). The very Wallace who coined the term “Darwinism” admitted to being “more Darwinian than Darwin himself.” No wonder there were several streams in Darwinism from the outset, and even “Darwinians” disputed among themselves.
The progress of studies on Darwin and Darwinism has now clarified that there were few “true” Darwinians. Both as a scientific theory and as a view of nature, Darwinism meant different things to different people, and many self-styled Darwinians were only superficially so. Not a few of them did not fully accept natural selection as the main mechanism of evolution, or had troubles with, for instance, Darwin’s gradualism, or chance variations. We should not wonder at this. The history of scientific ideas is only simple in retrospect, or from the point of view of those who have an axe to grind, or scientists-historians who adopt self-serving narratives to prove that they are on the right side of science and history. There is no via regia to truth, whatever you mean by the word “truth.” 35
....
As John Greene (1971) argued, Darwin’s theory did not emerge as a response to the crisis of one paradigm and did not replace one paradigm.2 Biology was pluralistic before and after Darwin. It makes little sense to describe the debates which followed 1859 as a for-or-against fight between two opposing teams. Darwinism was a multifaceted collective movement. Hull (1974, pp. 388, 391, 398) remarked that “Darwinism was many things to many people,” and he went as far as to say that “in many instances, Darwin was a comparatively minor figure in the movement termed ‘Darwinism’ [...] A scientist could be a Darwinist without accepting natural selection as the major evolutionary mechanism.” It is, therefore, extremely difficult to capture an “essence” of Darwinism (Hull 1985).3 In his review of British periodical press from 1859 to 1872, Alvar Ellegård (1958, rept. 1990, p. 334) had written: “Though it was chiefly the Natural Selection theory which made the Descent doctrine scientifically acceptable, popular Evolutionism has by and large remained at the pre-Darwinian, unscientific stage.” 36

Darwin’s theory of “variation by natural selection” was losing ground in Britain at the same time as evolution was gaining ground. 36 > Mr. Darwin has won a victory, not for himself, but for Lamarck. .... “nonDarwinian revolution” (Bowler 1988)..... dispose of the label “Darwinism” altogether. 37
“Darwinism” and “Darwinisticism.” .... Evolutionary metaphysic 37
“More and more studies show that the development of evolutionary biology was never organized around a central and dominant narrative called Darwinism, as currently defined” (Delisle 2021a, p. 6). 37 ..... it hardly affected a still widespread tendency to read what preceded, and particularly what followed, 1859 as if everything rotated around an allegedly identifiable “Darwinism.” .... They are de facto essentialist 38
The confusion surrounding the term “Darwinism” cannot be eliminated by a semantic rectification, or by defining it for the umpteenth time. It is too late. “Darwinism” is not a technical term. 38-9
Those misunderstandings helped spread the notion, and, as a matter of fact, fueled further debates on it and its mechanisms

Unfortunately, Mayr goes on to say, Darwin “jumped from the frying pan into the fire” when he adopted Spencer’s term “survival of the fittest,” because “this new metaphor suggested circular reasoning.” Some comments on this statement are in point: (1) Darwin adopted Spencer’s term on Wallace’s extensively argued advice exactly in order to avoid misunderstandings by demetaphorizing his concept and replace it with a “mere description of the fact.” (2) A historian must not merely register the fact, but ask why Wallace made his suggestion and why Darwin accepted it. (3) The circularity of “survival of the fittest” has been amply discussed, and good reasons have been given for rejecting the charge (Sober 1984a, b). (4) One cannot help perceiving in Mayr’s sentence a holdover of the old habit of dumping on poor Spencer the responsibility for social Darwinism (incidentally, another historiographic category which has been, and is being, deconstructed). (5) “Survival of the fittest” was far from “unfortunate” (in the neutral sense of the word), as it was used by many biologists not only when applying Darwinism to social matters, but also when doing biological research (before semantic confusion was eliminated, of course). .... why and how metaphors were “misinterpreted,” and misinterpreted in different ways. Mayr is not quite right when he uses the word “confusion” in order to suggest, rather surreptitiously, what might (or should?) have been clearly seen but was not.

Creative confusion

To give an instance of “confusion,” let us consider the fate of Darwin’s metaphors of “struggle for existence” (or “struggle for life,” as he used both) and “natural selection.” We shall see that much “confusion” arose as a consequence of attempts to clear up ambiguity. “Struggle for life” and “struggle for existence” became immensely popular after 1859. They were used by supporters as well as by critics, in an enormous quantity of writings, scientific, philosophical, political, social, and literary. But not everyone meant the same thing, quite the contrary. As Gillian Beer (1985, p. 9) remarked, “the unused, or uncontrolled, elements in metaphors such as ‘the struggle for existence’ take on a life of their own. They surpass their status in the text and generate further ideas and ideologies.” Such was the case not only with laypersons using a fashionable catchphrase whenever it seemed suitable for their purposes. A number of authors, including respected scientists and intellectuals, translated Darwin’s phrases into their own conceptual language and built ideas, theories, and doctrines upon their translations.
“Struggle for existence,” which is more appropriately described as a bundle of interweaving metaphors, referred to too many things for it to be mastered critically in all its meanings and implications. Darwin’s phrase met with a number of different reactions, especially, but not exclusively, with regard to human evolution. They ranged from its acceptance as a commonplace to rejecting it as a gloomy denial of the goodness of nature. Some simply misunderstood what Darwin tried to convey. While some authors, popularizers as well as scientists, took it in a narrowly literal sense (in spite of Darwin’s warning), others tried to disentangle it, or to translate it in terms of their own image of nature. As a result, it was easier for many people to reject it as a whole or to accept it as a “magical word” (Haeckel’s phrase) than to take advantage of its polysemy.
When taken in the literal (or “gladiatorial,” as Huxley put it) sense, the expression generated emotional, as well as scientific and philosophical, reactions.6[ I have tried to emphasize that in many cases moral factors, although often implicit, played an important role in the reception of Darwin’s theory] It dismayed some readers, adding to their aversion to evolution, while it delighted others, who welcomed it as a confirmation that nature is a theater of struggle and strife. Misunderstandings and distortions (I use these words for brevity’s sake) were due to the most various reasons: scientific, philosophical, ideological, social, and political. Interestingly, and contrary to what might have been expected, they were not limited to Darwin’s critics, but were also widespread among many who described themselves, or have been usually considered, as Darwinians. As a result, they did not invariably lead to a rejection of Darwin’s theory. On the contrary, in some cases they favored its acceptance. In some hands the metaphor withered and dried up. In others the attempt to disentangle the different meanings that Darwin had condensed in one phrase, to revise it or to apply it to new fields generated new investigations. As a term describing the ecological context of evolution, it suffered from objections leveled against natural selection.
...
This raises some big questions: Were misunderstandings due to the ambiguity of
Darwin’s metaphor in a time when mathematics had not yet laid its neutral, objective
hands on natural history? Are scientists, as scientists, per se fully able to understand
the scientific works they read, or are supposed to read, and upon which they ground
their own research? Are they always “scientific” when speaking of science? Like all
human beings, they, too, are liable to prejudices, not to mention the influence of
disciplinary traditions, different schools of thought, and ideological biases.
As I said, there was a positive side to this mess: disagreements as well as false
agreements, restrictions as well as extensions of Darwin’s metaphors, even
misunderstandings opened the way to further investigations. “Confusion” can be
creative.
Darwinism is social .... Bellon (2021, p. 40) seems to me to go a little too far when he says: “None of Darwin’s contemporaries evaluated natural selection purely on intellectual grounds.”7 To be sure, scientific theories are social constructions, as they are built upon the work of others, and are “true” to the extent that they are accepted by a community of experts. But this does not explain why there were so many differences, indeed so many different misunderstandings, not only among people using Darwin’s struggle in political and social discourse, but also among scientists sharing his general theory of evolution by natural selection. 43
The very reading of Darwin’s metaphor was social, in the sense that it was influenced by the readers’ frame of mind, tacit assumptions, disciplinary training, and so on. Spectacles are put on before you start reading, and “ideology,” or cultural biases, or mental dispositions, or intellectual leanings—call them whatever you like—work in shaping them. 44

Science is still something different that cannot be reduce to political debates 43
Struggles and selections

Darwin tried but ... On the one hand, superficial objections did not cease. On the other hand, a real hunt for definitions, sub-definitions, qualifications, and classifications of the various forms of natural selection was opened. As a result, like I said, a proliferation of struggles was accompanied by a proliferation of selections. 45
Traduções

A debate took place in France on whether to use lutte pour la vie (or pour l’existence) or concurrence vitale, and élection or sélection naturelle (which latter prevailed in the end). In the German-speaking world, many expressions were used at the same time. Even Germany’s prophet of Darwinism, Ernst Haeckel, acknowledged that Darwin’s phrase “struggle for life” “had not been well chosen in many respects, and its meaning could perhaps be more precisely conveyed by “interaction (Wechselwirkung) between organisms, and their necessary competition for the more or less indispensable necessities of existence (Mitbewerbung der Organismen um die mehr oder weniger unentbehrlichen Lebensbedürfnisse).” Darwin himself, Haeckel said, occasionally used the term in a metaphorical sense that “pollutes its purity and leads to misunderstandings” (Haeckel 1866, pp. 238–239).12 In illustrating its applications he mixed proper and improper examples. Improper examples were those which referred to struggle against the environment, in which, as Darwin himself recognized, we should instead speak of “dependence of the organism on specific conditions.” In such cases, observed Haeckel, in ordinary language we would say that living beings struggle with hunger, thirst, and so forth, but even if we admit that this is struggle, it acts in these cases by adapting organisms to the state of necessity, not by selecting them. We can therefore speak of a “real struggle for existence only if many organisms struggle among themselves for food, water, etc. So the real struggle for existence can only be a competition (Wettkampf) between the many organisms which compete (ringen) in order to satisfy their own vital needs.”13 Haeckel’s distinctions confirmed Ludwig Büchner’s distinction between “active struggle” and “passive struggle” for survival: “The struggle can be both active and passive, as it is fought at times against competing organisms, at times against the ravages of nature.” Both competition (Concurrenz oder Mitbewerbung) between single individuals and the restrictedness of external conditions of existence and the struggle (Kampf oder Ringen) for existence that derives from it intervene to prevent and contain the extraordinary fertility and multiplication of organisms (Büchner 1879, p. 43; see also 52–53). In his unrelenting drive for precision, Haeckel (1866, p. 231) managed to use four different renderings of “struggle for life” in the space of a few lines: “Der Kampf ums Dasein oder das Ringen um die Existenz oder die Mitbewerbung um das Leben, am passendsten vielleicht als Wettkampf um die Lebensbedürfnisse zu bezeichnen,” which I can awkwardly try to translate as “The struggle for life, or striving for existence, or competition for life, which should perhaps more adequately characterized as battle over vital needs”. . .
The first translator of the Origin, the respected geologist Heinrich Georg Bronn, initially came up with a rather bizarre Wahl der Lebensweise (literally: choice of way of life). A more accurate translation, approved by Darwin, appeared in 1867. Its author, the zoologist Julius Victor Carus, used natürliche Zuchtwahl (Kelly 1981, pp. 30–31). However, the literature in German teemed with alternative forms: natürliche Auserwahlung, natürliche Auslese, natürliche Auswahl, Auslese der Natur. The zoologist Georg Seidlitz carefully distinguished between Naturzüchtung and Naturauslese, but at a certain point either felt unsatisfied or loosened control and wrote natürliche Zuchtwahl (Seidlitz 1871, p. 210, note 28). Here as ever, Haeckel beat all of them, able as he was to use three synonyms in a very short space: “Diese Auslese der Besten, d.h. die Auswahl der am meisten Begünstigten zur Naturzucht” (Haeckel 1866, vol. 2, p. 232; approximate translation: “This selection of the best, that is, sorting the most favoured by nature’s choice”). Similarly, to him the fittest were variously die Begünstigsten, die Tüchtigsten, die Fähigsten, die Passendsten (or Passenderen), when not simply and curtly die Besten, “the best.” 45-6

Várias seleções diferentes a patir do século XX 46-8 no less anthropomorphic, and had no lesse moral implications, than "struggle" 49 > When seeing this list, one understands, and to some extent sympathizes with, those scientists-historians who bypassed such complications and invented a via regia from Darwin to the Synthesis.

Darwin’s multifaceted metaphors branched out in a variety of struggles and selections, which were often contrasted to analogous classifications by other authors. Confusion was fed by attempts to bring order by substituting one term with another or by articulating concepts in sub-concepts and sub-sub-concepts—which had a snowballing effect. Yet this very confusion demonstrates that the complexity of the Darwinian concepts of struggle and selection had set something important in motion. It was a time of creative turmoil in the history of biology. The churning out of neologisms — generally ephemeral — is evidence of the ferment of ideas. Darwin had undoubtedly opened the door, which led to unpredictable developments, including what a posteriori could be described as dead ends. 58
Who decides where the border is between “updating,” “reforming,” “transforming,” “revolutionizing,” and “disrupting”? Here again, defending one’s own image of Darwin and “Darwinism” amounts to defending one’s own stance in ongoing debates, and, after all, one’s own view of what evolutionary biology is and should do. I allow myself to make an easy prediction: future historians will show that no two members of the the above teams exactly agreed on the reasons for ranging in the same team 60

Two cultures

“scientist” and “humanist” historiographies of evolutionary biology. Scientists and historians see history differently. Scientists “often conceive history of science as a strategic tool for clarifying the conceptual issues haunting contemporary science.” Scientist historiography has frequently used history for underpinning particular scientific options (i.e., in Mayr’s or Gould’s historiographies, different though they are) and is based on a linear narrative emphasizing great figures, core concepts, and foundations. On the contrary, in the humanist historiography Darwinism seems to have no essence: the cognitive system we call Darwinism would be whatever “Darwinians” think it is, or was, within a given timeframe. 61
....
In order not to write triumphalist stories (which are useless and, in the end, uninteresting), historians must pay attention not only to the discoveries that have fruitfully become part of the growth of knowledge, not only to the theories that still form the basis of our current knowledge of the world. They should also take a serious interest in those objects, experiments, and theories that have been excluded from present scientific discourse, set aside or thrown away, and, so to speak, consigned to oblivion. They take into consideration not only the history written by the winners, but also that of the defeated. .... In a sense, the history of science ends up making the history of precisely that which is not science, or, in other words, it must study what science forgets in order to be science. 62
I am afraid they basically are irreconcilable 75

Textbook hide history in their updates > uncreative fiction 63-4
the most presentist of present-day philosophers will be a subject for future historians 71
Conclusão

After a long debate, an end was put to the belief in the inheritance of acquired characters (or “soft inheritance”) and in “blending” inheritance. Far from endangering the role of natural selection, this led to emphasizing its power (its “omnipotence” in Weismann’s language), whereas Darwin regretted in subsequent editions of the Origin that he had overemphasized it. The meaning of “chance variations” was revised, and the search for the mechanisms producing them is still going on. The more one gets into the box, the more the problem of the relation between chance and necessity, to use Jacques Monod’s famous phrase, is pushed forward. The problem is open whether and to what extent there are constraints on the role of selection, whether it acts at different levels, and what lies between genes and fully developed organisms. Darwin must not made into an icon or patron saint,45 as those do who, whatever happens, just keep repeating that “he was right.” To reassure them, the historian says that what that saint set in motion has been, and will go on, producing miracles, until other, by now unpredictable, developments and events will change the whole scenery. Darwin’s theory has also been a general framework—but not a merely general framework—within which to work as long as natural selection, however qualified and reformulated, remains its core notion. 74

DELISLE 2024

Darwinismos

1. Darwinism, broadly conceived, does not represent a dominant intellectual thread running throughout the twentieth century, considering that it interacted and fused in significant ways with other research entities running in parallel, thus blurring its separateness in intellectual space and time and making its isolation from other such entities impossible (Caso 2024; Ceccarelli 2021, 2024b; Delisle 2008, 2009a, b, 2011, 2017a, b; Dolbeault 2024; La Vergata 2024; Levit and Hossfeld 2006, 2011, 2017; Wagner 2024).
2. The notion that natural selection is at the causal and explanatory core of Darwinism is not supported by recent analyses, on the grounds that many “Darwinians” like Darwin himself, Julian S. Huxley, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ernst Mayr, and Bernhard Rensch do not fully subscribe to the “mechanism-centric” view claimed by the traditional historiography (Delisle 2019, 2021b; Delisle and Tierney 2022; Van der Meer 2021; see also La Vergata 2024 for other evolutionists).
3. Neo-Darwinism (in the guise of the Modern Synthesis) in the 1930–1960 period constitutes a confused reality for two related reasons: (a) several attempts at a synthesis were made before, during, and after; and (b) the so-called Modern Synthesis largely failed at the conceptual level under the weight of its inherent pluralism, confining it to a sociological attempt (Adams 2021, 2024; Baedke et al. 2024; Cain 2009; Ceccarelli 2021; Delisle 2008, 2009a, 2017a; Largent 2009; Levit et al. 2008; Ochoa 2021, 2024; Smocovitis 1999). 166

Disposing of the label “Darwinism”altogether, we suggest, will help remove one obstacle on our way to better understanding the nature of evolutionary biology. 241

ESPOSITO 2024B

Deconstructing myths

for Mayr, the history of evolutionary thought (HET onward) was mainly the history of emancipation from the ancient yoke of ideological stability. The historian’s task was thus to grasp how such an emancipation happened and how Darwin succeeded in the feat despite the inertia of millenary prejudices. 444
First, the Aristotelian view did not coincide with the whole Greek view. Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics was only an option among others, even in the ancient world. And second, the notion of eidos and, therefore, the supposed Aristotelian essentialism, were not what Mayr assumed it to be 447 ... the Platonic and Aristotelian “essentialism” story was primarily manufactured by Mayr between 1953 and 1968 and then uncritically accepted by many other scholars .... Then the notion of Aristotelian essentialism cannot be used to distinguish a pre-Darwinian from a post-Darwinian world. 448

Lucrécio Caro > perspectiva atomica, sem criador, ideterminismo, n~~ao teleologia, não é perfeito, etc. 452
post darwinian historiography 472

CECCARELLI 2024B

Darwin celebrity 510
This chapter argues that: (a) the perception of Darwin has changed in 1909, 1959, and 2009; (b) what we understand as “Darwinism” has undergone significant changes, as the demarcation between “Darwinian” and “non-Darwinian” theories of evolution has shifted multiple times over the years; (b) evolutionary biologists have long been concerned to identify what belongs in the “Darwinian” research tradition and what does not; (c) The image of Darwin has attained a nearly unparalleled iconic status, emerging as a symbol of laicism and serving as a reference point for scientific agendas and the secularized culture; (d) “siding with Darwin” has often represented a key strategy for evolutionary biologists. Quite understandably, this last assertion could easily be regarded as trivial or even slightly opportunistic, as one may argue that the reason evolutionary biologists sided with Darwin is simply that Darwin’s theory, or at least some of its main explanatory components, had proven correct. 511
1909

“Eclipse of Darwinism” (Huxley 1942, Bowler 1983), a highly evocative expression that has, however, met increasing criticism in the last few years (Largent 2009; Meulendijks 2021). 512
...
At first glance, such historical accounts would contribute to substantiating the idea that, between the 1880s and the 1910s, evolutionists were steering away from Darwin’s research agenda, eclipsing his legacy. Upon closer examination, however, Darwinism continued to be largely understood—and employed—as an “umbrella term” (Richmond 2006), with biologists often seizing the occasion to add grist to their mill, striving to find legitimacy through the reinterpretation of Darwin’s work. This was even more manifest when scholars publicly tackled divisive scientific issues such as the inheritance of acquired characteristics. ... Despite its many detractors, in the early twentieth century, the IAC still represented a major factor for those who strove to preserve the role of the environment in initiating variations (Gliboff 2011, p. 51). On this point, the fact that Darwin had advocated a view of biological inheritance that encompassed the IAC, and even proposed a mechanism (that of pangenesis) to account for the transmission of somatic modifications to the germ cells, became a bone of contention for many evolutionists. 514
...
Darwin’s hypothesis of pangenesis received several objections regarding lack of experimental evidence (Galton 1870).
...
During the 1909 celebrations, scholars often engaged with Darwin’s attitude toward the IAC and Lamarckism. ... openly addressed Darwin’s views on the “Lamarckian” factors, substantiating the already popular claim that would long affect historiography, according to which Darwin had become increasingly Lamarckian over the years.7 [7On this point, Johnson noted that Darwin’s correspondence contains seemingly conflicting statements. As far as the Origin of the Species is concerned, Johnson argues that Darwin repeated that the use-inheritance mechanism assisted in some modification, but had a relatively minor role “both in terms of how often it is mentioned” and its “relative importance next to other causes” (Johnson 2015, pp. 165, 173).]. .... To substantiate this thesis, Schwalbe quoted the well-known passage of the letter Darwin sent to Moritz Wagner on October 12th, 1876: “In my opinion the greatest error which I have committed, has been not allowing sufficient weight to the direct action of the environment, i.e. food, climate, etc. independently of natural selection.”9 Schwalbe then remarked that had Darwin been able to publish a new edition of The Descent of Man, he would have probably emphasized the role of external conditions in the formation of human races and dismissed the influence of sexual selection on the origin of bodily characteristics. Schwalbe’s analysis tended to conflate Darwin’s understanding of the influence of external conditions on evolution with Lamarckism tout court. 515
Darwin seemed to be referring to what he used to call “undefined variations” elicited by the environment, a concept that he had discussed in the fifth edition of The Origin of Species (1869). This concept differed greatly from Lamarck’s theory of adaptive change (Johnson 2015, p. 180) 516
...
For scholars committed either to the neo-Darwinian or neo-Lamarckian cause, Darwin’s changes of mind and reflections on the action of the environment often led to diametrically opposed interpretations. August Weismann tended to downgrade Darwin’s endorsement of the “Lamarckian principle.” In his contribution to the volume Darwin and the Modern Science, he stated that Darwin was “not fully convinced of the transmissibility of acquired characters” (Weismann 1910, p. 22). Ernst Haeckel openly contested this interpretation in 1909. Like many other nineteenth-century advocates of neo-Lamarckism, he thought Darwin had increased a role for use-inheritance throughout the years (Johnson 2020, p. 178) and strove to bring to the fore the conceptual and theoretical continuities between Lamarckism and Darwinism. On this point, Haeckel devoted his commemorative speech delivered at the Volkshause of Jena on February 12th, 1909, to both Darwin’s and Lamarck’s evolutionary views, examining their differences and their shared tenets. As he wrote to biologist Wilhelm Breitenbach on November 19th, 1908, the event was meant to be a “Darwin-Lamarck celebration.”10 On that occasion, Haeckel affirmed that Darwin, though having different mental dispositions and following different methodological and epistemological paths, had drawn similar conclusions to those of Lamarck, which came to represent the cornerstone of the modern doctrine of evolution (Haeckel 1909, p. 10). The two “pioneering masters” indeed shared the same goal, that of demonstrating the “natural unity” of the world. Lamarck had outlined the “magnificent edifice” of the theory of evolution, a portentous scaffolding that allowed scientists to understand the monistic nature of natural phenomena. The halls of this edifice, however, were mostly empty. It was Darwin who filled the vast spaces of the “monistic museum” erected by Lamarck with “thousands of illustrative objects,” meticulously collected and empowered his explanatory system with the theory of natural selection (Ibid., pp. 11–12). Redrawing the Boundaries of Darwinism: Addressing Darwin’s Endorsement. . . 516-7
Haeckel’s contribution to the volume Darwin and the Modern Science turned out to be even more forthright about Weismann’s allegation, indicating that Weismann’s thesis on the separation between germplasm and somatoplasm was not backed up by valid evidence .... Haeckel then went on to remark that Darwin was just as convinced as Lamarck of the transmission of acquired characters (“transformative inheritance” in Haeckel’s lexicon) and its importance in the scheme of evolution. Darwin himself, Haeckel pointed out, had made clear that the IAC was an essential component of his theory, which blatantly collided with Weismann’s account. “I had the good fortune,” Haeckel wrote, “to visit Darwin at Down three times and discuss with him the main principles of his system, and on each occasion we were fully agreed as to the incalculable importance of what I call transformative inheritance” (Haeckel 1910, p. 140). Darwin’s endorsement of “transformative inheritance” totally undermined the very concept of “neo-Darwinism” advocated by Weismann, according to which sexual reproduction (amphimixis) was the only source of variability. By dismissing the transmission of acquired characters, the so-called neo-Darwinians were in “express contradiction to the fundamental principles of Darwin and Lamarck” (Ibid.). Neither the label “neo-Darwinism” nor “ultra-Darwinism” (Romanes 1888) had a sound historical and conceptual foundation since the belief in the “omnipotence of natural selection was not shared by Darwin himself” (Haeckel 1910, p. 140). Natural selection had to be taken in conjunction with Lamarck’s transformism, with which it was “in complete harmony” (Ibid., p. 141).
...
To scholars like Haeckel, the IAC was part and parcel of Darwin’s explanatory framework, which had encompassed—and significantly improved— many of Lamarck’s insights. Neo-Darwinians were thus misappropriating Darwin’s scientific legacy, fabricating research traditions to consolidate a new research agenda. To some extent, by emphasizing the historical inconsistency of the very label of neo-Darwinism, Haeckel was attempting to cut the cord between Darwin and his self-proclaimed pupils, while at the same time claiming that his view of evolution well preserved the fundamental principles exposed by Darwin.
To the critics of the IAC and the advocates of neo-Darwinism, Darwin’s understanding of the mechanisms of inheritance deserved further critical questioning. In his contribution to the American celebration, British zoologist Edward Poulton remarked that Darwin’s views on the effects of external conditions widely differed from standard transformism as well as from neo-Lamarckism. Darwin had died a few years before Weismann’s theory of germplasm continuity, which Poulton considered “the greatest change in evolutionary thought since the publication of the Origin” (Poulton 1909, p. 34). Like many of his contemporaries, Darwin was inclined to consider the transmission of acquired characters as a rather standard mechanism of heredity. Arguably, Darwin was led to several mistakes by “following the Lamarckian theory” (Ibid., p. 35), not the least of which was his interpretation of modern humans’ feelings and facial expression patterns as inherited habits originally acquired by our ancestors.11 Despite these naïve views of inherited habits, Darwin had devised a hypothesis, that of pangenesis, which appeared a far more reasonable way to account for the IAC compared to the ideas circulating at the time 518
...
Poulton’s reading of pangenesis well exemplifies an attitude that would long characterize the way scientists engaged with Darwin’s legacy retrospectively, which consisted of finding merits and positive implications even in those ideas that would be rejected. To Poulton, Darwin’s view of heredity wrongly assumed that the somatoplasm could affect the germplasm, yet it entailed a corpuscular understanding of inheritance and steered away from the obscure analogy between heredity and memory. 519

1959

Centrality of darwinism e darwinian industry 519
emphasize Darwin's belief in adaptionism and the omnipotence of selection ... founding father 520
mythic narrative of Darwin’s legacy, emphasizing how evolution was “the explanatory framework that unified the field of biology,” whose theoretical building had been erected on the foundations laid by Darwin 520
foco na descontinuidade > huxley: no longer need – and no longer can – think in terms of Lamarckism, or of so-called orthogenetic evolution – some inner urge, some elan vital that makes organisms evolve as they do. 520
Within this context, Darwin’s endorsement of the IAC was often stigmatized and regarded as an embarrassing but forgivable mistake. Following on a well-established narrative, Huxley himself pointed out that Darwin, despite having harshly criticized Lamarck’s views of purposive adaptation in the 1840s, had attached more importance to the effects of the conditions of life and use and disuse in the later editions of the Origin of Species. It was this “Lamarckian error” with which “present-day biologists most often reproach Darwin” (Huxley 1960, p. 14). There were, however, several extenuating circumstances to be considered. Above all, Darwin’s mistake had to be seen against the background of nineteenth-century views of biological heredity, most notably the idea of blending inheritance. To Huxley, in a context where the fusion of parental characters was deemed to swamp out favorable individual variations to the extent of potentially jeopardizing the action of natural selection, Darwin ascribed greater importance to the IAC as he needed to provide for “sources of more abundant variation” (Ibid., 14–15) 520-1
To biologist Cyril Bibby (1960, p. 170), Darlington’s argument consisted of three main points: Darwin’s failure to recognize pre-existent evolutionary traditions and relate his ideas with that of other scholars; his late application of the evolutionary theory to humans; and the fact that, in his late years, he modified his theory to cope with criticism “smuggling” Lamarckian inheritance as an alternative to natural selection. ... To biologist Cyril Bibby (1960, p. 170), Darlington’s argument consisted of three main points: Darwin’s failure to recognize pre-existent evolutionary traditions and relate his ideas with that of other scholars; his late application of the evolutionary theory to humans; and the fact that, in his late years, he modified his theory to cope with criticism “smuggling” Lamarckian inheritance as an alternative to natural selection. ... To Darlington, it was Fleeming Jenkin’s argument from bending heredity that pushed Darwin to devise a “new theory” of evolution which openly endorsed that variations could be directed by the action of the environment ... Several years after the publication of Darwin’s Place in History, Ernst Mayr would point out that many historians had endorsed Darlington’s claim that Darwin fell back on the IAC as a result of Jenkin’s argument of blending inheritance. > Admittedly, Darwin in his later years conceded a little more influence to soft inheritance than he had in 1859, but it never became a major component of his interpretation. Whenever he compared the contribution to evolutionary change made by the inheritance of acquired characters to that made by natural selection, he always made it quite clear that he continued to consider selection as the decisively important factor. (Mayr 1982, pp. 692–693) 522-4
.....
Darwin’s endorsement of the IAC was simply a response to a pressing theoretical
need in a phase when the idea that the environment could elicit hereditable
modifications was nothing more than a commonsensical view. With all its explanatory and empirical limitations, the hypothesis of pangenesis was a forced option that
showed yet again how Darwin was always a step ahead of other naturalists. 524

2009

often ready to dismiss the old-fashioned narrative of Lamarckian-vs-Darwinian evolution by normalizing Darwin’s much-discussed endorsement of soft inheritance, which now served to vindicate Darwin’s longforgotten pluralistic view of evolution against the gene-centered versions of Darwinism that had become dominant through the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis. ... "Lamarckism" came to present a derogatory term depois de Kammarer e Lysenko 527
“the Darwin of pangenesis fits uneasily in scientists’ history of science, much more comfortably in historians’ history of science.” .... The historical narratives evolutionary biologists provided on the occasion of Darwin’s celebrations exemplify the concept of “science-history,” which, starting from the 1960s, historians of science have often stigmatized as “Whiggish history” or “Presentism” (Debus 1971; Brush 1995). It is by emphasizing scientists’ retrospective—or even instrumental—interpretation of the past that historians of science have indeed demanded the autonomy of their discipline, contributing to the establishment and professionalization of a new academic field. The dichotomy between Whiggism and contextualism has somehow weakened over the years, as it did in the historiography of evolutionary biology. Several historians, epistemologists and evolutionary biologists have highlighted that a history of evolutionism informed to present-day problems is often desirable (Hull 1979) and that retrospective valorization is impossible to eradicate, both for scientists and for historians. If a substantial difference between “science histories” and “humanist histories” exists, this can hardly be reduced to the presence or lack of “presentism” (Esposito 2021, p. 31). By the very fact of posing some questions and selecting certain materials and sources, historians make choices and thus can never be considered as detached observers (Bachelard 1968; Koyré 1973; Junker 1996). At the same time, there are different ways historians can look to the present. As Stephen G. Brush (1995, p. 200) noted, one thing is the “present-minded” historian, whose questions about the past are “inspired by concerns of the present.” Another thing is “presentism,” which leads historians to give answers that are “distorted by those concerns.” Scientists’ and historians’ accounts follow different modes and are arguably informed to different questions and purposes, yet they seem profoundly intertwined. Between the 1970s and the 1980s, the development of a new scholarship on the history of evolutionary biology, which saw historians rethinking the contribution of non-orthodox evolutionary traditions (Bowler 2017, p. 214), went hand-in-hand with the emergence of a new theoretical scenario whereby biologists sought to expand the category of Darwinism. Although they may not pursue the same goals, scientists and historians both contribute to co-constructing a network of knowledge whose hubs are deeply interconnected. 532-3

Labels

Labels such as Darwinism and Lamarckism, the editors stressed, had to be seen beyond their long-standing dichotomic understanding, as they denoted evolving research agendas. From a historical, theoretical, and epistemological perspective, scholars could actually recognize the “little similarity between Lamarck’s descriptions of the subtle fluids that lead to the transformations of organisms during the vast epochs of time and modern ideas” and contemporary research on “the inheritance of epigenetic variations and the evolution of self-organizing structures” (Ibid.). 529

This use of labels such as “Lamarckism” and “neo-Lamarckism” has often come under criticism. 529

CASO 2024

In the specific case of Darwin’s work, works such as Darwin contre Darwin (2009), by Thierry Hoquet, remind us how relevant a translation can be in interpreting Darwin’s ideas, to the point of differing radically from what was initially proposed in the original work, without claiming that there could be a “correct” way of interpreting Darwin 544

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