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    The Origin of Species
    The Origin of Species
    The Origin of Species
    Ebook572 pages14 hours

    The Origin of Species

    By Charles Darwin and Jeff Wallace

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    With an Introduction by Jeff Wallace.

    'A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die...'.

    Darwin's theory of natural selection issued a profound challenge to orthodox thought and belief: no being or species has been specifically created; all are locked into a pitiless struggle for existence, with extinction looming for those not fitted for the task.

    Yet The Origin of Species (1859) is also a humane and inspirational vision of ecological interrelatedness, revealing the complex mutual interdependencies between animal and plant life, climate and physical environment, and - by implication - within the human world.

    Written for the general reader, in a style which combines the rigour of science with the subtlety of literature, The Origin of Species remains one of the founding documents of the modern age.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWordsworth Editions
    Release dateDec 1, 2012
    ISBN9781848704787
    Author

    Charles Darwin

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    Reviews for The Origin of Species

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    • 5/5
      Charles Darwin was born at Shrewsbury, England in 1809, the son of a doctor, and grandson of Erasmus Darwin, the author of "The Botanic Garden". He compiled proof and documentation for explanations about living and nonliving things which exist. He begins with a simple, irrefutable, persuasive observation: "When we look to the individuals of the same variety or sub-variety of our older cultivated plants and animals, one of the first points which strikes us, is, that they generally differ much more from each other, than do the individuals of any one species or variety in a state of nature. When we reflect on the vast diversity of the plants and animals which have been cultivated, and which have varied during all ages under the most different climates and treatment, I think we are driven to conclude that this greater variability is simply due to our domestic productions having been raised under conditions of life not so uniform as, and somewhat different from, those to which the parent-species have been exposed under nature."While this 1909 work has been challenged, the proof remains. Critics also remain, but they have not "read" even the first sentence of this work. It remains fact, not theory. Not speculation.
    • 5/5
      Darwin wrote that , "When the views entertained in this volume on the origin of species, or when analogous views are generally admitted, we can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history".With the advantages of hindsight we can see that this was an understatement. The book has had an enormous impact , probably appearing in the indexes of more recent academic publications than any other 19th century text.To answer the question of why, the reason is no doubt the same as when it was first published in 1859. His discovery combines simplicity with great explanatory power in an area of critical interest, namely the natural world and our place in it. In contrast to the texts of today there are no formulas and only one diagram. The chapters have quick summaries and the whole thing has an easy flowing discursive style that is very accessible despite being a distillate of a large amount of widely differing knowledge. He starts by looking at selection under domestication (i.e. not in nature) of animals, with special reference to the pigeon, showing how desired characteristics can be chosen by the breeder. In this respect after a discussion about pigeons and pigeon breeding in general, he can quote the skilled breeder Sir John Sebright as saying that, "he would produce any given feather in three years, but it would take him six years to obtain a head or a beak". He goes on to extend the idea of selection to the natural state where nature takes the place of the breeder in selecting which variants breed successfully and which do not. The controller is not now the breeder with the feather or beak that he wants but rather the environment itself. Nature allows certain birds to reproduce that have the optimum colouring to avoid predators or attract mates or a beak type that best fits the most common functions. The idea is developed in the chapters entitled Struggle for Existence and Natural Selection . As he puts it: "In the case of every species, many different checks, acting at different periods of life, and during different seasons or years, probably come into play; some one check or some few being generally the most potent, but all concurring in determining the average number or even the existence of the species". There are many examples with studies of special cases such as isolation, intercrossing, convergence and divergence of characteristics, and the competition between individuals and varieties of the same species. He clearly states that the environment is the guide : "...the structure of every organic being is related, in the most essential yet often hidden manner, to that of all other organic beings, with which it comes into competition for food or residence, or from which it has to escape, or on which it preys".He speculates on the characteristics of variation without knowing of Mendels identification of particles (genes from each parent that could be dominant or recessive). Mendel only published in 1866 with his work not being rediscovered until 1900 so Darwin leaves this as somewhat of a grey area. He observes variation and catalogues it stating that it changes in small increments over time and is subject to selection pressure.He is the first critic of his own work, highlighting for example the patchiness of the geological record :"Why does not every collection of fossil remains afford plain evidence of the gradation and mutation of forms of life?" In the event these problems are being tackled a century later reinforcing his insight of any organ or instinct arriving at it's present state through many graduated steps.The high scientific reputation and social position of Darwin (needed to launch his ideas successfully) is covered in an excellent new biography by Janet Browne entitled Voyaging.
    • 3/5
      evolution has gone through many changes since darwin's original writing, but it is always good to go back to the source. darwin may not have been the first person to conceive of evolution, but he was the first to delineate it in such a complete form.
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed reading the book that is the foundation of evolutionary biology, and it's fascinating to see what we used to believe and how far we've come.
    • 4/5
      Facsimile of first edition, with "An Historical Sketch" and "Glossary" from sixth edition.
    • 4/5
      Easily the most difficult part of the book is Victorian logorrhea. The concepts are familiar enough to the interested not to be difficult any longer although I can imagine at the time that the average Joe would have had a tough time deciding, at best, what to believe and what not and, at worst, just railing against the book for its unpardonable blasphemy. Interestingly, Darwin seems to have had some trouble with math and elephants, and confirmed this issue on the internet. Also, on page 363 of this edition, Darwin, as best I can gather, seems to think that during an ice age the ocean will rise. Where did he think the water would come from for the ice? Advanced and certainly more developed thinking than Wallace had put together though both rather simultaneously developed the theory. A theory that saw its time a-coming. Very important book that is worth the wade through.
    • 5/5
      OK, so maybe the book is a difficult read, as many Victorian books are. The language may strike a modern reader as a bit arcane, and the sheer length and breadth of the work may be staggering to those used to getting their information in short, pithy bits. Still, let's be honest. This is THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, and it completely revolutionized biology, so I think the least one can do is give it 5 stars (since that is all that's allowable). To anyone who really reads this book, it should be impossible to continue to parrot the popular canard that there is no evidence for evolution. In the days before DNA, and when hominid fossils were still fairly sparse, and we knew very little about the microscopic world, Darwin was able to compile an impressive array of evidence, most of it while sitting in his own library at Down House in England. This book is rightly considered a classic, not just for its style, but for its substance.
    • 5/5
      I'm super glad to read this book - it was really enjoyable!One of the things I was struck by Darwin's writing was that it was eminently readable and was basically constructed as an essay with a prodigious amount of evidence lined up to back up the arguments made. I am impressed by his clarity in articulation that make his communication and message conveyable despite requisite nuance.The heart of this particular book is that animals and plants vary - that they are mutable over time via human control (i.e. breeding) but also do so naturally, and that selection pressures are the mechanism, and that over time variability, heredity, and selection are the underlying principles of evolution.It was quite clear that he was conscious of possible detractors - on both scientific and creationist grounds. And he readily admits that readers who simply are not already convinced of things like the vast age of the earth etc. are just not going to agree because of things like the imperfection of the geological record (which is still true, though some gaps have since been filled). This is still true today even with the accumulated knowledge of paleontology and geology due to (willful?) ignorance and/or disbelief regarding how fossils and rocks are aged.Aside from the assembly, synthesis, and description of a vast array of fascinating facts and evidence, was the ability to put forth a complicated argument fairly succinctly and then address potential detractions head on. What surprised me was that some of the things that he addressed were *still* being used as arguments against evolution of species via natural selection! For example I heard arguments by some espousing Intelligent Design talking about how the eye was something too complicated to have arisen or be selected for -- but Darwin addressed this fairly well (I thought!), noting several species that either had intermediate forms or uses for eyes and light sensitivity. The point being that for all the recent hubabaloo, we appear to be going around the same merry-go-round back and forth regarding whether or not we buy into this explanation of the natural world, without making much progress over the course of a century and a half.If you feel at all invested in the argument over evolution one way or the other, my feeling is that it's at least worth reading Darwin's original works rather than getting into a lather about bullet points that are only a poor shadow of their context.
    • 5/5
      On the Origin of Species is one of the most influential and fact-proven books of all-time. Unfortunately, some people don't think so and want to discredit Charles Darwin's work. However, facts and reason will prevail.
    • 4/5
      Decry or applaud it, there's no question this work has had a profound effect not just on science, but the culture at large. What I wouldn't read this book for is the science, or in an effort to either defend or refute the argument for evolution. The core of Darwin's argument certainly is still what was taught in my Catholic high school biology class (taught by a nun). In a nutshell, the theory is that given there are wide-ranging subtle Variations among organisms, the Malthusian Struggle for Existence causes by means of Natural Selection of the inheritable traits that are the best Adaptations to the environment the Origin of Species or as Darwin calls it, the "theory of descent with modification."But, after all, this book is now over 150 years old. Science is about explaining natural phenomenon and correcting mistakes through observation, experimentation and falsification--not dogma--and so is always a moving target. I know that. But I still raised an eyebrow when in the first chapter of the book Darwin said he believed the "most frequent cause of variability" was caused by the experiences of the parents before conception--such as cows' udders being larger in countries where they're milked because the habit of milking by itself alters in the reproductive organs what is inherited by the next generation. WTF Darwin? When Darwin first propounded his theory of evolution (a word never used in the book by the way) through natural selection, Mendel had yet to discover the basic principles of genetics in his experiments with peas and Watson and Crick had yet to unravel the structure of DNA. Nor was continental drift known and understood, so there were notable gaps in Darwin's reasoning that has since been filled. Stephen Jay Gould, one of the staunchest defenders and popularizers of evolution is famous within science particularly for where he differs from Darwin. Darwin thought changes in species were very gradual. Gould favors "punctuated equilibrium" where there are rapid changes followed by long periods of stability. That's why scientists today talk of the "theory of evolution," not of "Darwinism" as if a scientific principle is an unchanging creed and Origin of Species scripture.So, the book is dated and filled with lots of details I'm sure are just plain wrong and might be onerous to unlearn. That does make me reluctant to give this book top marks despite its profound impact. Someone interested in modern evolutionary science would be better off picking up a copy of a book by Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan (although by now I suppose his very readable Dragons of Eden is dated) or Stephen Jay Gould. So, was there no value in reading On the Origin of Species? I wouldn't say that. It's surprisingly readable--or at least understandable. There are definitely dry passages that were a slog to get through, my eyes glazing over as Darwin gave example after exhaustive example to make his points. However, I couldn't help but be impressed by the knowledge of nature shown by his wide-ranging examples from every continent from ants and bees and algae to pigeons to zebras. Given the way he cited various authorities and spoke about his own experiments, I definitely felt that here was a master generalist and enthusiast on nature. Moreover Darwin does have a gift for metaphor and illustrative examples. I was particularly taken by his explanation of "inter-crossing" and the function of sex in creating biological diversity. I also was struck by how cautious and civil in tone Darwin is in his arguments, devoting an entire chapter on what he saw could be the flaws and holes in his theory--particularly the issues of transitions between species and intermediate forms. Bottom line? Arguably this specific book had as much influence on the literature and politics of the next century as Freud or Marx, so I think there is historical value in reading this, preferably in the first edition (which is what I read) that exploded upon the world in 1859.
    • 4/5
      It is only fair that I divide my review into two parts: Writing and Content:Writing: Darwin is obviously writing from a different century. With complex syntax and extensive vocabulary, both scientific and non, his writing is dense, convoluted and so very boring. Even if one makes allowances for the difference in writing styles, I still find his writing to drag on and on. Darwin stated he wrote this work for the masses, and I grant that he gave it a valiant effort, however much he failed.Content: Brilliant. From someone who was raised (and remains) a believer in Creationism, I have to say his work is logical, scientific, and well-thought out. He answered well many of the main arguments against his ideas. He mentioned many experiments conducted to further study his findings, and mentioned many works by contemporary naturalist that he drew on to reach his conclusion. As someone trained in the sciences, this does much to improve my thoughts about his ideas. Despite what many people say - Evolutionist and Creationist alike - Darwin's work is factual and logical, and demands serious consideration from anyone claiming to want to know the truth. While I have not reconciled my belief in a creator-God and the evidence of evolution, reading Darwin is a start for me and I recommend it as a start for anyone wishing to find the truth.
    • 5/5
      One of the most important scientific works ever written and a very impressive achievement.Darwin discusses his theory of the origin of species in a groundbreaking work that changed biology forever. I was very impressed with the way he expounds his theory. The novel takes you by the hand and explains different reasons why he believes this theory to be correct step by step. His work abounds in examples and evidence gathered by himself and other scientists, making it a very comprehensive and exhaustive work.Aside from discussing evidence in favour of his theory, Darwin also discusses many counterarguments. Some he refutes immediately, often with copious evidence, but others remain standing, even at the end of the book. Somehow, I actually rather liked this about him: he has a theory, he believes it to be true, but he is still aware that there are things that are problematic and isn't afraid to discuss them. It shows Darwin in a way that is simultaneously strong and convincing, as well as modest and almost fragile.Darwin was fully aware that there were problematic aspects to his theory - most notably the lack of genetic knowledge in his day - but still makes a convincing case based on the evidence he had available. He was also very much aware that people would disagree with his theory, which has made his discussion of facts very rigorous. He knew people would try to counter it, and spends a lot of time debunking any possible arguments they might give.I think for a person in our time it is somewhat difficult to truly comprehend the importance of Darwin's achievement. By now, evolutionary theory is so accepted that it is hard to imagine people ever believed otherwise. Reading Darwin's book you wonder that nobody saw this before - and some of the scientists in his own days felt the same way! Sure, there had been other theories and Wallace was proposing the same theory, so there definitely had been prior developments making this the logical next step, but it still remains an amazing thing that this book was written.A great work that anybody with an interest in biology and evolution should read.
    • 2/5
      I'm an enthusiast of evolutionary biology and I appreciate Darwin's enormous contribution to our understanding of the natural world. But somehow the Origin of Species wasn't very interesting to read. Maybe it's because most of what Darwin says has so thoroughly diffused itself into modern science that there's little new to find here.
    • 5/5
      What can one really say about this book?I found that this book, like most scientific books, well documented and referenced. The discussion related to domestication set the tone for much of the rest of the book by laying the ground work that most people know and believe but why do people doubt the rest of the book?I read this book due to the fact that many have made amazing claims about it and it has been clear that they had not read the book....Now that I have I can say that they did not.This should be required reading.
    • 4/5
      I recommend reading of this book because of the importance of it. When Charles Darwin published this in 1859 it rocked the English speaking world. Up to that point the religious idea of creation was unquestionably accepted. Religion held a lot of power over people and their lives. Then this book came out, and it put into question all that the English world held dear about God and creation. I don't know if any piece of literature has had such a profound affect on society and its beliefs. When I read it, I thought that it might be boring because of the scope of the work, but it's actually not boring because it's simply and plainly written. Remember the whole theory of evolution originated from this one work.
    • 5/5
      This isn't a book you'd read for fun, but for understanding and enrichment. Personally, I found it edifying to understand Darwin's thinking. In his younger days, he had traveled much of the world, and was primarily employed in collecting specimens from each region he visited. Over the years, he connected with farmers to discuss how different plants and animals were bred for certain traits. He catalogued the variations in species he would find in different areas having different "conditions of life". He studied and experimented as to how seeds, eggs, larvae, and adult creatures could travel from one place to another. He looked into the geological record and the fossil remains of creatures now extinct. He studies the embryos of plants and animals, and found that embryos of creatures of the same class had the same appearance and features, regardless of how different these creatures came to appear as adults. From a lifetime's study of all these factors, he came up with a unified theory of natural selection. In brief, that a creature's offspring will vary minutely in each generation, and that these miniscule variations give advantages to some and disadvantages to others. The most successful of these variations are passed on.
    • 5/5
      It's been criticized as unscientific, evil, and dry. I found it quite impressive. Though there are places where the detail might be too much for the casual reader, it is a very solid scientific work. He presents a hypothesis, shows significant supporting evidence, and defends it against the most common criticisms. It is not possible to prove that everything started from something simpler but it is now hard to refute that the natural process of natural selection is working on today's species. He leads his argument by showing the effectiveness that domestic breeders have achieved in altering species and guiding that process. Other highlights either new to me or especially interesting: the uniformity gained by consistent inter-crossing, the underlying ability of genetics to allow breakthrough changes and yet also to maintain uniformity, the complexity of larger areas in producing stronger more adaptable species, the effect of geographic changes (elevation, land forms, glaciers) on migration of living species and archival of fossil record, that fossils tend only to be saved during subsidence so only that direction of change is recorded, the species do not reappear once extinct (this seems to be in refutation of Lamarck), the phrase "grain in balance" to show the impact of small differences in the competition for survival, that it is the other species more than anything that determines a given organisms ability to survive in an area. Imagine his chart demonstrating how branching might work if he had had a PC at the time.
    • 4/5
      A handsome boxed cover edition by the Heritage Press of one of the landmark works of science. I read the book in college and while now I remember only the broad outlines of Darwin's ideas, I was impressed with the clarity of his presentation of the evidence and the theory that arose from it. I have this book already in an earlier 1906 edition. I just couldn't resist this edition I found at an estate sale, because of the lovely wood engravings throughout the book by Paul Landacre. He is a favorite artist of mine; his "Sultry Day" print hangs in my living room.
    • 4/5
      Not what I was expecting at all.Here we have a very readable if thorough going explanation of his theory of descent with modification through variation and natural selection. I have seen comments such as dry and stodgy but did not find this to be the case to any great extent.I must confess to skimming a total of about three pages out of nearly five hundred. I did this because I had already got the point and he was listing in minute detail the implications of this or that on his famous "tree of life diagram" a to a' etc. etc.Apart from the exposition of such a simple theory the two main things I enjoyed most about the book were as follows;Firstly, just how much evidence in favour of evolution he did not have an inkling about. He bases his theory on how it explains the geographical distribution of life on the earth, variation, fertility, vestigial organs, eyes on cave dwellers, webbed feet on mountain ducks etc. It is therefore surprising just how much he got right and how little has since been shown to be wrong. Remember he had no idea of DNA or the molecular side of reproduction at all and yet he predicts a good deal of it.Secondly, his forays into experiment. Ranging from the counting of plant species in cleared ground, measuring and comparison of greyhound and bulldog puppies and adult dogs, to the immersal of seeds in sea-water and so on.The book is written for the lay audience and should be accessible, with a little patience, to most.Despite what many Creationists have told me there is nothing I could find about the origin of life, support for the Nazi's, reasons in favour of the Holocaust or the futility of existence at all.
    • 5/5
      Important foundation for knowledge. An interesting read for me the summer after 8th grade.
    • 4/5
      Example after example for the explanation of life and how it has evolved. From plants to animals and everything in between. How climate and geography plays a role in the evolutionary process. He goes into many details that can be lengthy but overall a good representation of different species and their origin.
    • 4/5
      There were significantly less pigeons than I expected. And a lot more pigeons. A LOT more. Thoroughly readable given its age and audience. Not too bad.
    • 5/5
      This remains one of my favourite books (not science books, but books in general) of all time. It is definitely worth while to get this edition. Others are sometimes abridged, or maybe taken from one of Darwin's earlier editions. The great thing about the final edition is that Darwin was able to explain things more clearly, by responding to the criticisms of the prior editions.Everyone should read this book. The thought process, and the simplicity of it all, makes the theory of natural selection one of the greatest scientific theories to date.
    • 2/5
      I marked this as 'Read' which isn't wholly true. If there was a 'Kinda, Sorta, Read' button I would have clicked that. Wow, I'm in awe of anyone who did read this cover to cover. Kudos to you, kudos to you.
    • 5/5
      It's very discursive. You can almost hear Darwin pulling up a chair to the fireplace to discuss this idea he's had. And he's thought about it a lot.It's also very cleverly written, starting with something the reader knows about (the human breeding of pigeons) then expanding slowly from that to the new stuff, but returning to that base whenever Darwin needs a clear, easy-to-understand example.It's a complete refutation of the 'one great man makes a giant leap for human understanding' way of looking at scientific progress, with Darwin being very careful to say where and who he has got information from and whose ideas he's building on (even if he's retested as much of the info as he can and tested his theories as best as he can). He's also a lot nicer about his fellow scientists than a look of books today are.I like that Darwin states the parts where his theory might not explain everything, and that he uses observation to try to plug those gaps.He might have been able to cover more detail in the book if he stopped apologising for the amount of stuff he couldn't put in.Looking backwards from what we know now, it's amazing how close Darwin gets to being right about most of it, and a lot of his uncertainties could only have been cleared up once genes and sequencing were discovered.There's a couple of points where he wanders down paths that turned out to be dead ends (recapitulation theory is bunk) and we've still not got a 'how' of instincts, but given the information Darwin had to work with, he's right more than he's wrong.It's pretty much a must read for scientists, and it's reasonably accessible to non-scientists, and a fairly straight-forward read once you've got used to certain Victorian writing quirks.Definitely worth reading.
    • 4/5
      It's amazing to me how much Darwin got right in this book, and also all that he got wrong.
    • 2/5
      The journey of Charles Darwin on the H.M.S. Beagle and his reports, discoveries and observations relating to natural science and evolution. Fairly interesting for a book on science even though it is rather dated. The stir it caused in the mid 1800s no longer carries the same groundbreaking impact.
    • 5/5
      This is a wonderful and very readable book that truly changed the way we look at the world. It sold out on the day it was published in 1859 and created both friends and enemies of the theories discussed still to this day. There have been modifications of Darwin's theory of the origin of species (notably the Mendellian synthesis that incorporated genetics into the theory), but it stands to this day as the foundation of our understanding of the evolution. Surprisingly the only time evolution is mentioned is in the last paragraph of the book.This is a good book for anyone who once to read a classic text of science.
    • 2/5
      Quite stunning in its way - but surely in need of an update in the light of genetics, DNA and plate techtonics. Not that the conclusions need to be changed, just that te argument becomes easier. That said, in the absence of knowledge on those points: that's what makes for the stunning.
    • 5/5
      To begin with, a note on the edition. This Barnes & Noble Classics series version is based on the first edition of The Origin of Species, which is actually nice for a couple of reasons. First, it allows the reader to experience the book as it originally appeared. This is not only interesting historically, but a nearly unmitigated virtue because of the second reason: The core content of the book remained essentially the same throughout the later revisions Darwin made in his lifetime, but such changes as he did make were for the most part unnecessary or even (in retrospect) unfortunate---mainly minor concessions to skeptics (religious and otherwise) and to the Lamarckian theory of evolution (as opposed to natural selection as the basic mechanism driving evolutionary change).That said, there are several things to say about the book itself. First, it is extremely readable. Modern audiences (especially those educated in the American government schools, which almost certainly failed to introduce them to this material) might be intimidated by the prospect of tackling a somewhat technical scientific volume of this size written a century and a half ago. Those who attempt it, however, will be pleasantly surprised to find that Darwin's presentation is extremely clear and intelligible, at times even beautiful. This admirable writing style is in large part due to his scientific method, which leads me to the book's next great virtue.Darwin's approach is primarily inductive---that is, he was not some armchair philosopher abstractly theorizing off in an ivory tower somewhere, as one might suspect from the photograph of him as a bearded old man with which we are usually presented. In other words, evolution is not "just a theory," precisely because Darwin was not just a theorist. Rather, Darwin gathered massive amounts of evidence on his Beagle voyage, and continued to accumulate ever more (with the help of his scientific colleagues in various related disciplines) for decades before he felt ready to publish his theory (and he still felt rushed into it). (Indeed, for anyone interested in the philosophy of science, or in epistemology in general, On the Origin of Species should be the textbook case of scientific induction.) Darwin then presents all of this evidence to us piece by piece, building up his case from the ground, as it were, and in effect recreating his own line of thinking for his reader making it incredibly easy to follow his case.Which brings us to the third point: What kinds of evidence does Darwin draw on? Intriguingly, Darwin did not begin his career as a biologist aiming to solve the species question. He boarded the Beagle as a brilliant amateur natural scientist generally with an inclination toward geology. Perhaps this is why he was able to draw so widely on various fields in making his case for evolution when that question did become his main interest. From Lyell's theories and his own geological observations, Darwin concluded that the period of time available actually allowed for a very (previously unthinkably) slow process of evolution. From this geological perspective, he naturally was able to look at various pieces of evidence more directly bearing on the species question, such as the fossil record and (more importantly) the geographical distribution of species. After the Beagle voyage, he was able to conduct experiments in many other areas (and correspond with colleagues about the results of their experiments), including artificial selection (Darwin's pigeons being the most famous example of this) which became important as an analogy for the process of natural selection; the means of the geographical distribution and isolation of species (including seeing whether seeds can germinate after extended periods of submersion in salt water or passing through the digestive tracts of birds); and even the sex lives of barnacles. All of these experiments are described at some length in The Origin of Species.But Darwin, ever the scientist, was in fact cautious not to overstep the limits of what he could prove. The Origin of Species contains an excellent chapter anticipating and answering possible objections to his theory, and acknowledging its shortcomings. For instance, Darwin acknowledges that the fossil record at the time did not tend to show gradual progression from one species to another, and offers an explanation as to why the fossil record might be so incomplete. He also acknowledges that while he found the evidence for evolution by means of natural selection to be overwhelming, he did not know the actual physical, biological mechanism by which this takes place (as genes had not been discovered and the discipline of genetics created at that time), but he does briefly mention a hypothesis that was actually sort of on the right track. In fact, in all of these weak areas, subsequent history has borne Darwin and his theory out remarkably well.And finally, in addition to being a masterpiece of scientific thought, The Origin of Species is also a work of, at times, almost poetic beauty, and deserves praise for its literary merit. After presenting or indicating all the evidence in a specific area throughout each section, Darwin ends each chapter by summing it up in an eloquent statement naming the general principle to be derived from this vast array of specific evidence, often employing an apt and evocative metaphor. The most famous of these passages is of course the one with which he concludes the book: "Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."You cannot legitimately consider yourself an educated person if you haven't read this wonderful book, and yet a shockingly small percentage of Americans (including even those who claim to believe in evolution) have read it. But you will find that to do so is not a chore, but one of life's great pleasures.

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    The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin

    The Origin of Species

    Charles Darwin

    with an Introduction by

    Jeff Wallace

    WORDSWORTH CLASSICS

    OF WORLD LITERATURE

    The Origin of Species first published

    by Wordsworth Editions Limited in 1998

    Published as an ePublication 2013

    ISBN 978 1 84870 478 7

    Introduction © Jeff Wallace 1998

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    Introduction

    Born in 1809 to Susannah, daughter of the Potteries industrial magnate Josiah Wedgwood, and Robert Darwin, wealthy Shropshire doctor and son of the colourful, free-thinking poet-scientist and physician Erasmus Darwin, Charles Robert Darwin cuts an initially unlikely figure as a revolutionary scientist. He belonged securely to the English gentry, albeit on the Whiggish, entrepreneurial and Dissenting side, and, after a relatively undistinguished career at Shrewsbury School, seemed set to follow in the paternal line when sent to Edinburgh University to study medicine. Two years later, in 1827, he was beginning a degree in divinity at Cambridge, his father having aborted his son’s diffident progress as a medic in favour of the more solid and sobering prospect of the Anglican Church. Darwin seemed at the time more attached to field sports than to his profession, and a rural ministry looked like the traditional safe haven for a drifting, privileged young gentleman. The seeds of Darwin’s true passion for natural history had, however, already been sown; in Edinburgh, as a member of the student-led Plinian Society, he was thrown into a world of radical materialist debate, and influenced in particular by Robert Grant, an evolutionist thinker and expert on marine invertebrates whom he accompanied on field trips and emulated in initial tentative observations and researches on sponges. These influences were enriched and deepened at Cambridge, where his own researches into plant and insect life were extended. He accompanied Adam Sedgwick, renowned professor of geology, on an expedition to North Wales, which cemented his own geological expertise; but most importantly, he became a close associate of the Rev. John Henslow, professor of botany, whose enthusiasm for all aspects of his work transmitted itself to Darwin. Henslow might also have stood for Darwin as a model of the Victorian clergyman-naturalist – that is, of the fertile, symbiotic relationship which could exist between the ministry of a small parish and the prosecution of one’s scientific researches. However, before Darwin could secure himself such a living, Henslow had recommended him as naturalist and companion to Captain James Fitzroy on the HMS Beagle expedition to the Southern hemisphere. The effects of the trip were to be all-consuming, in more ways than one.

    Between 1831 and 1836, Darwin’s position as naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle gave him an acquaintance with what seemed a wholly different world of nature; his scientific excursion into South American lands became a formative experience, exerting a deep and lasting influence on his imaginative envisioning of nature and decisively shaping the bold explanatory mechanism which came to fruition, over twenty years later, in The Origin of Species (1859). As he noted in the journal which became The Voyage of the ‘Beagle’ (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, 1997): ‘How great would be the desire in every admirer of nature to behold, if such were possible, the scenery of another planet! yet to every person in Europe, it may be truly said, that at the distance of only a few degrees from his native soil, the glories of another world are opened to him.’

    In this light, readers new to the Origin, possibly the most revolutionary work of the modern scientific imagination, may be surprised at the outset to find themselves thrust into the world of mid-nineteenth century British pigeon fanciers. Darwin’s attempt to elucidate his theories to an educated but sceptical general readership begins, as it were, at home; his first chapter suggests that the actions of domestic breeders, in selecting over a number of generations the most favoured variations of their charges, can help us to understand how nature as a whole is in a state of continuous change. The reason for this opening gambit may be, pedagogically, clear: begin with the familiar. There remains, however, a sense in which the Origin begins, not with the London Pigeon Clubs, but with the primeval rainforests of Brazil and the volcanic islands of the Galapagos Archipelago. Readers thus soon find themselves continually shuttled to and fro across the distance between the ‘familiar’ and the ‘other’, the domestic and the exotic, in a text which seems to disdain the very boundary lines between such distinctions. With bewildering and unpredictable variation, we encounter the women-eating barbarians of Tierra del Fuego; the small Asiatic cockroach; the thickened stems of the common and Swedish turnip; the climbing hooks used by the trailing bamboo of the Malay Archipelago; the egg-carrying folds of skin of pedunculated cirripedes; the northern and southern downs of the Weald; the sedimented beds of the mouth of the Mississippi during the glacial period. Darwin’s task, at once scientifically central to his work and yet only to be achieved through a vivid and creative use of language, is to make strange or ‘astonishing’ the detail of the close and familiar natural world, and to bring the most extraordinary facets of the alien and unknown within the realm of common understanding. His success, in a text whose fascination is undiminished if not growing as we enter the peculiar concerns of the millenium, lies ultimately in indicating that these contrasting worlds are in fact one world. What, then, is the central theory to which this effort is dedicated?

    In its usual abbreviated title, The Origin of Species may be misleading to the modern reader. It would be more accurate, if a touch less enticing, to have named the book after the massive ongoing work of which it was a fairly hastily-written abstract: Natural Selection. For the Origin is Darwin’s explanation of his theory of natural selection. The principle underpinning this theory is that no species is immutable; all have evolved, and are continuing to evolve, over vast periods of time. This challenged the pervasive, creationist view of species as specially and separately created by Divine edict; nature, for Darwin, was a continuum, which made possible the speculation that ‘animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number’, or even – though he hedged his bets here – that ‘probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed’

    Darwin was not, of course, the first to realise that things, fundamentally, change. A philosophical tradition can be traced back at least to the early Greek philosopher Heraclitus’ conception of the world in a perpetual state of flux or ‘fire’. Nor was he the first, in his own time, to put forward a ‘transformist’ or ‘transmutational’ theory from within natural history: as the ‘Historical Sketch’ added to the third edition of the Origin (and reprinted in this volume) indicates, the first half of the nineteenth century had seen the development of such a tradition of thought, and Darwin clearly saw himself within it. But his explanation of the means of change was what made the Origin unique. ‘Natural selection’ is defined as ‘the preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations’, where ‘preservation’ refers to the process by which stronger or ‘fitter’ organisms, equipped with useful variations however minute in proportion, are more likely to be able to survive and reproduce their kind than their weaker counterparts. Thus, over countless generations, species ‘change’, in the sense that those fitter entities have gradually displaced – or are continually displacing – those which are less able to generate and which therefore, in the natural course of things, become extinct. Darwin’s esteemed pigeon-fanciers follow a weaker, ‘artificial’ version of this selection process; a good breeder allows only his most perfect specimens to breed, discarding others. But ‘man can act only on external and visible characters’, whereas nature ‘can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life’; the superior powers of natural selection are almost inestimable:

    It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving, and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages . . .

    The theory is held in place by a number of necessary factors. First, there is that ‘one primordial form’, the origin of ‘life’ itself, with which Darwin insisted his work had ‘nothing to do’. Then there is slowness, the ungraspable ‘lapse of time’ or what we now call ‘deep time’, through which the origin became diversified into a multiplicity of natural forms eventually embracing such organs of complexity and apparent ‘perfection’ as the human eye. In the venerable early nineteenth-century tradition of ‘natural theology’, formulated in William Paley’s work of the same name (1802) and subsequently enshrined in the variously-authored Bridgewater Treatises, phenomena such as the eye were explained by the concept of omnipotent design: they were products of God’s will unfolding in nature. Challenge came in the form of Charles Lyell’s three-volume Principles of Geology (1830–33), whose ‘uni-formitarian’ or gradualist theory of geological mutation seemed to demolish the Biblical earth-span of 6,000 years, replacing it with that ‘incomprehensibly vast’ period required for the evolution of such complex forms. Nor was it enough, claimed Darwin, simply to read Lyell and other treatises on rock formation in order to appreciate the immensity of deep evolutionary time: ‘A man must for years examine for himself great piles of superimposed strata, and watch the sea at work grinding down old rocks and making fresh sediment, before he can hope to comprehend anything of the lapse of time, the monuments of which we see around us.’

    The process of selection was also confirmed by a consideration of what nature might look like in its absence. Essentially, more are born than can survive: on the principle of ‘geometrical increase’, if all individuals and their variously-numerous eggs and seeds could survive and reproduce unchecked, the earth would soon be overwhelmed – ‘covered’, in fact, ‘by the progeny of a single pair’, so that even the ponderous elephant, which in Darwin’s estimation produces three pairs of young in a sixty-year span, would give rise to a population of fifteen million by the end of the fifth century of its existence. To make this natural economy viable, a ‘struggle for existence’ was integral. Here, as with his pigeon fanciers, Darwin paradoxically used a ‘weak’ example from the human domain to illustrate the far stronger natural principle; in this case, controversially, the work of Thomas Malthus, whose Essay on Population (1798) insisted that human population would always exceed its means of subsistence unless subject to limiting interventions of a natural or consciously human kind. The struggle for existence was ‘the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms’ (51); with only so many places in nature to go round, natural selection in this sense could be seen to capitalise on any modification in conditions – from the introduction of a single tree in an area, to epidemic or long-term climatic change – in order to effect the necessary principle of destruction; for ‘extinction and natural selection . . . go hand in hand’.

    Finally, natural selection depends upon variation itself. For all that Darwin’s theory seems to offer an explanation of the multifarious dynamism of the living world, it nevertheless reflects only on the logical outcomes of variation, and does not, or could not, account for individual variation. To use one of the text’s own hypothetical illustrations: if a wolf, which preys on various animals through craft, strength and speed, should inhabit a region in which its swiftest prey, the deer, for some reason increases in its numbers at a time of dearth, and when other prey decrease in numbers, then we can assume that ‘the swiftest and slimmest wolves would have the best chance of surviving, and so be preserved or selected’; but what causes one wolf to be swifter and slimmer than its neighbour or, perhaps more to the point, than its parents, in the first place? As Darwin was obliged to confess, ‘our ignorance of the laws of variation’ – and, by implication, of the closely-related laws of heredity – ‘is profound’. The looming presence of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, one of his renowned transformist predecessors, is enough to indicate how far the issues of variation and heredity mattered to Darwin, and how important it was for him to wrestle with them in Chapter V of the Origin.

    In Philosophie Zoologique (1809), Lamarck had first articulated his theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Through use and habit, individual organisms could, it was claimed, not only modify their own constitutions in order to respond to the particular demands of their environment, but also pass on these improvements to their offspring. Elongated features are often those invoked to illustrate Lamarckianism, perhaps because of their direct visual appeal: the neck of the giraffe, the legs of the wading bird. Lamarck thus believed in an evolutionary gradualism which, like natural selection, undermined the fixity of species; yet his work also allowed for the spontaneous generation of new forms, and was rooted in a teleological model of aspiration and improvement which was, arguably, as metaphysical as speciesism itself. It has been argued that ‘Lamarck’s account of evolutionary process is still the popular one’. [1]

    Darwin’s notebooks of the 1840s suggest that he had little time for these aspects of Lamarck’s work, and in the ‘Laws of Variation’ chapter of the Origin we find him ranging over alternative ways of accounting for the ‘plastic condition’ of offspring: the susceptibility of the reproductive system to changes in the condition of life; or the principle of correlation of growth, whereby slight variations necessarily enact other kinds of structural change. On the other hand, returning to his pigeon fanciers, the practice of breeding under domestication leaves Darwin in ‘little doubt’ that ‘use in our domestic animals strengthens and enlarges certain parts, and disuse diminishes them; and that such modifications are inherited.’ It is intriguing to see Darwin, throughout the chapter, returning to and playing around the margins of habit and the ‘strong principles’ of inheritance; and the extent to which he leant upon variations of Lamarckianism continues to be a subject of debate amongst Darwin commentators. What remains clear is that, if natural selection is at some level predicated upon a degree of variation, however minute, between offspring and parent, then it needs to have some explanatory mechanism for the transference, and transformation, of material implicit in the process of reproduction. We would now call this mechanism ‘genetic’ – a word, and a science, which was in 1859 unavailable for Darwin to use. Following the work of Gregor Mendel, a Bohemian Augustinian monk, who laid the basis of this science in 1865 (not to find recognition until the beginning of this century), and as the day approaches when we will be able to map the hereditary template of the whole human organism, it behoves us to enrich our reading of the Origin today with our knowledge of genetics.

    In their vibrant biography, Adrian Desmond and James Moore have drawn attention to the curious pathology attending Darwin’s adult life. As he began, post-Beagle, to work through his reflections on transmutation, he was beset by migraines, which left him ‘writhing on his sick bed, fearing persecution’; in the end, ‘a third of his working life was spent doubled up, trembling, vomiting, and dowsing himself in icy water’. The inner turmoil and conflicts which accompanied the growing recognition of how far his ideas were at odds with orthodox Christian doctrine are evident in the progress towards the Origin itself. Having begun the Transmutation notebooks in 1837, Darwin had by 1844 completed two versions of a preliminary sketch. Neither, however, saw the light of day, and he pressed on with the publication of decidedly less controversial research, such as his work on the structure and location of coral reefs, and on barnacles, whilst fermenting in secret, or in close correspondence, his more incendiary theoretical reflections. The notebooks and letters of this period are punctuated with fears and admissions: he feels he has devoted his life to a ‘phantasy’, that it is like confessing a ‘murder’; ‘oh you Materialist’, he mockingly berates himself. By the 1850s, the research has turned into a massive ongoing book, Natural Selection, defensively amassing its evidence with such painstaking slowness that entry into the public domain must have seemed a distant possibility. But, famously, Darwin’s hand was forced, his reticence broken, by events outside himself.

    Alfred Russell Wallace, a young socialist naturalist collecting and researching in the Malay Archipelago, had been communicating with Darwin, and sending him specimens. He had also sketched out his own theories of the evolutionary mechanism, which Darwin, recognizing their similarity to his own, had complacently encouraged Wallace to develop. On 18 June 1858, a twenty-page letter arrived from Wallace, containing – in effect – an outline of the theory of natural selection. Incapable of acting dishonourably, Darwin proposed to help gain due public recognition for Wallace’s work, while having to confront the painful truth that his own dilatory perfectionism had led to him being upstaged. In consultation with Charles Lyell and the botanist Joseph Hooker, a delicate compromise was reached: Wallace’s letter and relevant extracts from Darwin’s work were read together at a meeting of the Linnean Society in London on 1 July 1858. Darwin’s absence was due to the death of his infant son, Charles, from scarlet fever. Yet, at this traumatic time, it was evident that he needed now to publish his work, and with haste. Between a family vacation on the Isle of Wight, rest and hydropathy treatment at Moor Park in Surrey, and home, Darwin wrote the Origin within the space of ten months, and mostly from memory. The book was published by John Murray in November 1859, and sold out so quickly that a second edition was immediately planned.

    Darwin’s own characterisation of his text as ‘one long argument’ confirms our experience of it as a multi-hued, multi-layered piece of writing – always meticulous, sometimes dull, but more often vivid and impassioned in its techniques of rhetorical persuasion. Aware of the myriad ‘difficulties’ in proving his theory – the apparent absence of transitional forms in nature, or the incompleteness of the geological record, to name but two of the most substantial – it sometimes seems that Darwin is more interested in declaring obstacles than in removing them. The Origin argues with itself, or rather with an imaginary interlocutor – ‘he who believes in separate and innumerable acts of creation’ – who is always on hand to put the necessary, creationist counter-argument. Yet the appearance of such unimpeachable honesty is, of course, always likely to impress the reader in Darwin’s favour. Moreover, when the creationist interlocutor is faced with explaining the persistence of evolved but obsolete characteristics on the principles of design, such as the webbed feet of upland geese, or the woodpecker which lives on the treeless plains of La Plata, we realise how that particular rhetorical strategy can work to Darwin’s advantage.

    The recent work of Gillian Beer on Darwin underlines the point that the scientist is in some crucial respects as dependent upon language as any other producer of knowledge. [3] Language embodies knowledge, and knowledge is power; but language is also a notoriously slippery and treacherous medium, always threatening to signify more, or less, or simply something other than that which we are struggling to say. Even ‘natural selection’ itself is a case in point, as this key quotation again illustrates:

    It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving, and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.

    Linguistically, ‘selection’ implies an element of conscious choice; someone or something has to do the selecting, especially when the process combines with verbs such as ‘scrutinising’, ‘rejecting’, ‘preserving’, ‘adding up’ and ‘working’. Were it not for the easy-to-miss term ‘insensibly’, or the slightly constraining ‘It may be said that’, the reader could be forgiven for assuming that Darwin in this passage wished to attribute a creative Design to the process, even though the whole drift of his work was to deny such metaphysical intervention. Moreover, at this point in Darwin’s prose, ‘natural selection’ emerges seamlessly from a more familiar way of speaking about ‘nature’s’ agency; that is, from the gendered discourse in which nature is the feminine, nurturing mother, who ‘selects’ only for the good of ‘the being which she tends’ (my emphasis): ‘Every selected character is fully exercised by her; and the being is placed under well-suited conditions of life’.

    Can we conclude here that Darwin was not fully in control of the language he was using ? Or, that the elements of agency in ‘selection’ and ‘nature’ helped him to assuage the orthodox reader whilst sneaking his real theories in under their cover ? The reality was more likely a complex fusion of the two, proceeding from the fact that language inevitably presents the world in anthropomorphic, or human-centred, terms. ‘I should premise,’ he insists at one point, ‘that I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny’. Like ‘natural selection’, ‘struggle for existence’ is a metaphor; it is as if nature selects, or as if every creature perpetually struggles for its livelihood. Patterns of mutual dependence, and the operation of ‘struggle’ at a far more abstract level than simply the competition of two particular animals for a piece of territory, considerably modify the meaning of the metaphor. However, it was precisely that ‘large and metaphorical’ sense which made the Origin ripe for the kind of misunderstanding or creative appropriation that Darwin, in the five revised editions which followed the one we reproduce here, sought to limit and control. [4]

    Today, ‘Darwinism’ and ‘Darwinian’ have entered into our common vocabulary. To read the Origin is therefore to grasp an opportunity to estimate how closely that common understanding relates to its supposed source. For it may be that the mark of any great theory is found as much in the extent of its abuse as in its use; and there is much in ‘Darwinism’ and ‘Darwinian’ that we may not easily find in Darwin. Take, for example, this articulation of the general ‘Darwinian’ principle

    that natural selection is continually trying to economise in every part of the organisation. If under changed conditions of life a structure before useful becomes less useful, any diminution, however slight, in its development, will be seized on by natural selection, for it will profit the individual not to have its nutriment wasted in building up an useless structure.

    Thus decontextualised, it would be easy to read ‘organisation’ here in our habitual sense of a commercial company, even though the corporate body in question is an ‘individual’ life. In a very fundamental sense, the Origin is a work of economics, of nature-as-economy; and our recent history, embracing the rise of free-market neo-liberalism in the 1980s and, after the collapse of Soviet state communism, the apparently widespread acceptance of capitalist economic relations, can dispose us to read the text as if it were a confirmation that this particular socio-economic order is more ‘natural’ than others. Without suggesting that the language of the Origin has been the language of the modern boardroom, it seems undeniable that the tropes of new right managerialism – the streamlining and rationalising, in order to create leaner and fitter organisations capable of competing in a ruthless business world in which the strongest survive and the weakest go to the wall – have taken their colouring from a natural selection which ‘will always succeed in the long run in reducing and saving every part of the organisation, as soon as it is rendered superfluous’. What might not any business give for a touch of what Darwin called ‘the most wonderful of all known instincts’, that of the hive-bee?

    . . . natural selection having by slow degrees, more and more perfectly, led the bees to sweep equal spheres at a given distance from each other in a double layer, and to build up and excavate the wax along the planes of intersection. The bees, of course, no more knowing that they swept their spheres at one particular distance from each other, than they know what are the several angles of the hexagonal prisms and of the basal rhombic plates. The motive power of the process of natural selection having been the economy of wax; that individual swarm which wasted least honey in the secretion of the wax, having succeeded best, and having transmitted by inheritance its newly acquired economical instinct to new swarms, which in their turn will have had the best chance of succeeding in the struggle for existence.

    At stake here is of course the legitimacy of drawing, with such ease, parallels between the natural and the human world. Was not Darwin a naturalist? Can’t we therefore leave his science alone, resisting the temptation to map his theories onto human behaviour, whether individual or social? By the end of the nineteenth century, it had become clear that the answer to these questions was a complex negative. ‘Social Darwinism’ infiltrated and informed the development of new human sciences such as anthropology, proposing an evolutionary, hierarchical and conflictual model of the development of racial ‘types’ which went hand-in-hand with the rise of nation-states and the necessity of imperial expansion. Francis Galton’s work on hereditary intelligence, sparked by his reading of the Origin, gave rise to the movement of eugenics or ‘racial hygiene’, based on a principle of socio-biological engineering by which the weak (read ‘poor’, working class or racially ‘inferior’) are discouraged from reproduction while the strong (read prosperous and powerful) are encouraged. [5] After achieving some small measure of influence in British politics in the years leading up to the First World War, eugenics in a scientific sense seemed to fall into universal discredit. Yet world history in the twentieth century bears the terrible marks issuing from theories of racial superiority, and the principles of eugenics seem continually to haunt our most advanced scientific research. The progress of the Human Genome project has already been punctuated by anxious discussion about the potential for eugenic manipulation, and will undoubtedly elicit more such debate before its completion in the relatively near future.

    In this light, the argument that Darwin was ‘much too humane a man’ to endorse Social Darwinist appropriations of his name and work is, whilst probably true, almost beside the point: [6] a text as fertile in metaphor and suggestion as the Origin could never be tied down to its author’s essentially humanitarian intentions. Moreover, the appropriateness of the Origin to the free-market capitalism of our immediate past acts as a reminder that, for some, natural selection was itself a product of such historical vectors in their time and place of initial ascendancy: that is, of mid-Victorian Britain. On this view, Darwin’s science is an instance of a supremely confident bourgeoisie, at the helm of the world’s first industrial nation, and seeing in nature an image of its own thrift and ceaseless energy; natural selection is as much an expression of bourgeois, liberal capitalism, as it is a tool to be used by such an ideology. Recalling the Darwin family’s close associations with the Wedgwoods, the appropriateness of Malthus to Darwin’s developing work may seem little cause for surprise. It also looks like an eloquent coincidence that accompanying the Origin on Murray’s 1859 list was that landmark of individualistic entrepreneurialism, Samuel Smiles’s Self Help.

    Yet, if politics is at issue, the Origin can be seen to point, equally, in another direction. In Paraguay, a ‘certain fly’, which lays its eggs in the navels of wild horses, cattle and dogs, is more numerous than the insectivorous birds which prey upon it, and which in their turn are preyed upon by hawks and other hunters; if the fly were to decrease in numbers, the horses, cattle and dogs would increase, which would alter the vegetation, which would in turn affect insects, and the insectivorous birds, and so on ‘in ever-increasing circles of complexity’. In England, cats hunt mice, and field-mice destroy the combs and nests of humble-bees, which are the only bees capable of fertilising the common red clover; hence, ‘it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district!’. This may be ‘the great battle of life’; but it is also a demonstration of that ‘web of complex relations’ which binds together ‘plants and animals, most remote in the scale of nature’ – in other words, of the ‘mutual relations of all organic beings’, so profound in their reach that the very structure of each being is a function of ‘all other organic beings, with which it comes into competition for food or residence, or from which it has to escape, or on which it preys’.

    The Origin is never more striking than in these moments of reflection upon the extraordinary interdependencies which characterise ecosystems. We are reminded also that the ecological groundwork of the text, laid on the Beagle voyage, lies in the domain of biogeography, the study of the spatial distribution of life forms. [7] As Darwin explains in the Origin’s opening statement, ‘certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America’ had puzzled and preoccupied him throughout the voyage. Chapters XI and XII elaborate on the problems. The sea creatures of the east and west coasts of South and Central America were almost totally distinct, despite being separated only by the narrow isthmus of Panama; conversely, plants inhabiting the mountain peaks of America and Europe could be identical. There seemed to be no easy way of accounting for, on the one hand, the vast differences between living forms inhabiting very similar climates or latitudes in close proximity, and, on the other, the relative similarities between forms living in different continents.

    The concept which unlocks these enigmas is migration. Organic communities or ecosystems have more or less permeable boundaries, either allowing or restricting immigration and emigration. We glimpse here another fascinating niche of Darwinian research: that into the means by which seeds might be dispersed across oceans. Some readers might decide to skip Darwin’s statistical conclusions (Joseph Hooker’s children teased him about the unreadability of these sections); yet there is a compelling mixture of the mundane and the lyrical in his account of earth adhering to the feet of birds – ‘in one instance I removed twenty-two grains of dry argillaceous earth from one foot of a partridge, and in this earth there was a pebble quite as large as the seed of a vetch’ – and in his invitation to ‘reflect for a moment on the millions of quails which annually cross the Mediterranean; and can we doubt that the earth adhering to their feet would sometimes include a few minute seeds?’. Alternating with this mode of analysis, migration also requires an understanding of geological processes occurring through climatic changes over vast periods of time. From seeds in the feet of birds, therefore, Darwin’s perspective moves within a few pages to the Glacial Period, and the shifting locations of arctic and temperate beings as they respond to cooling and warming, resulting in the curious isolation of some in distant but parallel locations.

    The point of such painstaking work on migration was this: however unimaginably complex are the forces at work within a natural economy, that community is always a closed physical system. Convenient though it might sometimes seem to posit the special or metaphysical creation of the same species at different points on the globe, there is always an adequate physical explanation, if we are prepared to look hard enough, just as natural selection is always an adequate explanation of the complexity of any living organism. Darwin sets about his task of re-educating our vision, of helping us to see afresh the world in all its complex mutual interrelatedness, with the firm if paradoxical belief that reason ought to ‘conquer’ imagination – a version, undoubtedly, of the old maxim that truth is stranger and more wondrous than fiction. By implication if not by explicit statement, then, his is a godless universe, in which the checks and balances of the natural economy are indeed all we have; the concept of the ‘Creator’ as it appears in the Origin is clearly under as much semantic strain as the undermining of it caused physical strain to Darwin himself. But there are versions or interpretations of this economy: the ruthless competitive struggle; the mutually-interdependent community. [8] Eschewing any possibility of divine intervention, any complacently benign or sentimentalised mediation, Darwin nevertheless believed that change for the good was possible, and that it could be found in the very source of evolutionary theory itself – human intelligence.

    The great deafening silence or structuring absence in The Origin of Species is the human animal. Readers will look in vain for speculations on our descent from the apes; the credit for the extension of the natural selection debate into such controversies should in the first instance go to Darwin’s fiery colleague and disciple, T. H. Huxley. Darwin allowed himself to foresee a ‘considerable revolution in natural history’ as a result of the Origin’s publication, with a boldness still somewhat arresting in relation to the text as a whole; but that ‘Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’ remained the only direct reference to humanity. Then again, this was scarcely needed: the public furore which immediately surrounded the Origin showed that evolutionary debate was always a debate about human origins. The recent work of the historian Alfred W. Crosby has also suggested how far Darwin’s perceptions of the natural world on the Beagle voyage would have been inseparable from an awareness of human intervention. [9] Crosby’s thesis is that European imperialism of the nineteenth century had a crucial biological dimension as well as political, economic and cultural; human colonisation involved, whether by chance or design, the importation of flora and fauna from the Old World to the New. Such forms invariably prevailed over their indigenous competitors, effecting a subtle and fundamental means of making over the colonised in the image of their masters, and thereby facilitating the order and control essential for imperial hegemony. ‘From the extraordinary manner in which European productions have recently spread over New Zealand,’ writes Darwin in the Origin, ‘and have seized on places which must have been previously occupied, we may believe, if all the animals and plants of Great Britain were set free in New Zealand, that in the course of time a multitude of British forms would become thoroughly naturalised there, and would exterminate many of the natives.’

    Darwin could not have remained indifferent to the deep interlinking of biological and political imperialism in his time. In many ways committed to, and a product of, the Western bourgeois enlightenment, he nevertheless knew, from first-hand experience, that the sustainability of a rich diversity of life on earth was incompatible with a project which sought to use its knowledge and power to dominate and subdue. ‘Man’s place in nature’, the keynote of much educated debate in the late nineteenth century, was indeed crucial; the endowments of language and high in-telligence, through which a godlike power to intervene and design seemed possible, nevertheless did not divorce humans from the natural world: they remained an elaborate accident of its complex evolution, a part of its continuum. At our present juncture, when the importance of contesting imperialistic attitudes to nature seems ever more urgent, and as we attempt to take stock of the economic and political imperatives of our immediate past, The Origin of Species, with its passionate and intense sympathies, open and in-clusive approach to all phenomena, and its seemingly inexhaustible range of applications and concerns, provides a model of the ecological knowledge we continue to need.

    Jeff Wallace

    University of Glamorgan

    Notes to the Introduction

    1 Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, p. 25, Ark, London 1985.

    2 Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin, p. xviii, Michael Joseph, London 1991.

    3 See e.g. Beer, Darwin’s Plots, and Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1996.

    4 See Robert Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s place in Victorian culture, Cambridge University Press, 1985; especially chapter 4, ‘Darwin’s metaphor: does nature select?’

    5 See e.g. Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences, Julian Friedmann Publishers, London 1979; Frank Mort, ‘Health and Hygiene: The Edwardian State and Medico-Moral Politics’, in eds Jane Beckett and Deborah Cherry, The Edwardian Era, pp. 26–33, Phaidon Press and Barbican Art Gallery, Oxford and London 1987.

    6 Raymond Williams, ‘Social Darwinism’, in Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays, p. 89, Verso, London 1980.

    7 See e.g. Michael Ghiselin, The Triumph of the Darwinian Method, Chapter 2, ‘Biogeography and Evolution’, University of Chicago Press, 1984.

    8 For an example of a strong critique of the capitalist appropriation of natural selection, proposing instead that e.g. ‘sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle’, see the key work of the Russian anarchist writer, Petr Kropotkin: Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, 1914 (reprinted by Porter Sargent Publishers Inc., Boston, Mass.).

    9 Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, Cambridge University Press, 1986.

    Further Reading

    David Amigoni and Jeff Wallace (eds), Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays, Manchester University Press, 1995

    Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Ark, London 1985

    Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, Cambridge University Press, 1986

    Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin, Michael Joseph, London 1991

    Michael T. Ghiselin, The Triumph of the Darwinian Method, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 1984

    Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1990

    Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

    Steve Jones, The Language of the Genes: Biology, History and the Evolutionary Future, Flamingo, London 1994

    Ernst Mayr, One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1993

    Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood, Harvard University Press, 1989

    Note on the Text

    The text reprinted here is the first (November 1859) edition, fully entitled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Darwin produced five revised editions, the sixth and final edition being published in February 1872. The first edition has been chosen for its clarity and directness, as well as for its historical significance – Darwin’s first attempt at explaining his theory to the world at large. Subsequent editions incorporated responses to various criticisms, and across the fourth, fifth and sixth editions, the text became much expanded. These later editions include detailed responses to specific critiques, and could thus be said to be less clearly orientated towards the general reader; commentators also seem largely to agree that they are neither so elegant nor so attractive as the first edition. However, Darwin did add two apparatuses of great value to the general reader, which are reproduced here: the ‘Historical Sketch of the Progress of Opinion on the Origin of Species’ (added to the third edition, April 1861), which attempted to place the text within a prior tradition of evolutionary thought; and the Glossary, added to the sixth edition, which was also the first edition to be re-set and re-priced for a popular market.

    For the most part we have followed Darwin’s capitalisation, spelling and punctuation. A few minor alterations have been made in the interests of clarity.

    The Origin of Species

    Author’s Introduction

    When on board HMS Beagle, as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species – that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers. On my return home, it occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made out on this question by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it. After five years’ work I allowed myself to speculate on the subject, and drew up some short notes; these I enlarged in 1844 into a sketch of the conclusions, which then seemed to me probable: from that period to the present day I have steadily pursued the same object. I hope that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision.

    My work is now nearly finished; but as it will take me two or three more years to complete it, and as my health is far from strong, I have been urged to publish this Abstract. I have more especially been induced to do this, as Mr Wallace, who is now studying the natural history of the Malay archipelago, has arrived at almost exactly the same general conclusions that I have on the origin of species. Last year he sent to me a memoir on this subject, with a request that I would forward it to Sir Charles Lyell, who sent it to the Linnean Society, and it is published in the third volume of the Journal of that Society. Sir C. Lyell and Dr Hooker, who both knew of my work – the latter having read my sketch of 1844 – honoured me by thinking it advisable to publish, with Mr Wallace’s excellent memoir, some brief extracts from my manuscripts.

    This Abstract, which I now publish, must necessarily be imperfect. I cannot here give references and authorities for my several statements; and I must trust to the reader reposing some confidence in my accuracy. No doubt errors will have crept in, though I hope I have always been cautious in trusting to good authorities alone. I can here give only the general conclusions at which I have arrived, with a few facts in illustration, but which, I hope, in most cases will suffice. No one can feel more sensible than I do of the necessity of hereafter publishing in detail all the facts, with references, on which my conclusions have been grounded; and I hope in a future work to do this. For I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived. A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question; and this cannot possibly be here done.

    I much regret that want of space prevents my having the satisfaction of acknowledging the generous assistance which I have received from very many naturalists, some of them personally unknown to me. I cannot, however, let this opportunity pass without expressing my deep obligations to Dr Hooker, who for the last fifteen years has aided me in every possible way by his large stores of knowledge and his excellent judgment.

    In considering the Origin of Species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist, reflecting on the mutual affinities of organic beings, on their embryological relations, their geographical distribution, geological succession, and other such facts, might come to the conclusion that each species had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species. Nevertheless, such a conclusion, even if well founded, would be unsatisfactory, until it could be shown how the innumerable species inhabiting this world have been modified, so as to acquire that perfection of structure and coadaptation which most justly excites our admiration. Naturalists continually refer to external conditions, such as climate, food, etc., as the only possible cause of variation. In one very limited sense, as we shall hereafter see, this may be true; but it is preposterous to attribute to mere external conditions, the structure, for instance, of the woodpecker, with its feet, tail, beak, and tongue, so admirably adapted to catch insects under the bark of trees. In the case of the mistletoe, which draws its nourishment from certain trees, which has seeds that must be transported by certain birds, and which has flowers with separate sexes absolutely requiring the agency of certain insects to bring pollen from one flower to the other, it is equally preposterous to account for the structure of this parasite, with its relations to several distinct organic beings, by the effects of external conditions, or of habit, or of the volition of the plant itself.

    The author of Vestiges of Creation would, I presume, say that, after a certain unknown number of generations, some bird had given birth to a woodpecker, and some plant to the mistletoe, and that these had been produced perfect as we now see them; but this assumption seems to me to be no explanation, for it leaves the case of the coadaptations of organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life, untouched and unexplained.

    It is, therefore, of the highest importance to gain a clear insight into the means of modification and coadaptation. At the commencement of my observations it seemed to me probable that a careful study of domesticated animals and of cultivated plants would offer the best chance of making out this obscure problem. Nor have I been disappointed; in this and in all other perplexing cases I have invariably found that our knowledge, imperfect though it be, of variation under domestication, afforded the best and safest clue. I may venture to express my conviction of the high value of such studies, although they have been very commonly neglected by naturalists.

    From these considerations, I shall devote the first chapter of this Abstract to Variation under Domestication. We shall thus see that a large amount of hereditary modification is at least possible; and, what is equally or more important, we shall see how great is the power of man in accumulating by his Selection successive slight variations. I will then pass on to the variability of species in a state of nature; but I shall, unfortunately, be compelled to treat this subject far too briefly, as it can be treated properly only by giving long catalogues of facts. We shall, however, be enabled to discuss what circumstances are most favourable to variation. In the next chapter the Struggle for Existence amongst all organic beings throughout the world, which inevitably follows from their high geometrical powers of increase, will be treated of. This is the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms. As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.

    This fundamental subject of Natural Selection will be treated at some length in the fourth chapter; and we shall then see how Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life, and induces what I have called Divergence of Character. In the next chapter I shall discuss the complex and little known laws of variation and of correlation of growth. In the four succeeding chapters, the most apparent and gravest difficulties on the theory will be given: namely,

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