WhenVestiges of the Natural History of Creation, the anonymous evolutionary work which caused such a furore in mid-Victorian England, was published towards the close of 1844, Richard Owen, by then well-entrenched as the ‘British Cuvier’, received a complementary copy and addressed a letter to the author. This letter and how it should be interpreted have recently become the subject of historical debate, and this paper is directed at resolving the controversy. The question of Owen's attitude to theVestigesargument is central to (...) the larger historical problem of the views of this leading British morphologist and palaeontologist on the contentious issue of the ‘secondary causes’ of species. Owen wrote so little directly on this subject prior to 1858, that the letter in question, together with his two letters of 1848 to the rationalist publisher John Chapman, and the controversial conclusion to hisOn the Nature of Limbs(1849), constitute the major evidence that Owen in this period subscribed to a naturalistic theory of organic change. On the basis of this evidence, historians of biology have generally concurred with Owen's biographer grandson that Owen had a ‘certain leaning towards the theories enunciated by Robert Chambers [the Vestiges' author]’, but that his ‘official’ anti-transmutationist stance of the 1840s did not permit full public expression of his own views. As Ruse most recently summed up this historical consensus: Owen in the 1840s was ‘moving down a path not completely dissimilar from that followed by Chambers’, and he ‘tried to have matters two ways, praisingVestigesto its author and condemning it to its critics’. (shrink)

1990 marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's first major scientific theory. The paper, first presented by Darwin to the Geological Society of London on 7 March 1838, was entitled ‘On the Connexion of Certain Volcanic Phenomena and on the Formation of Mountain-Chains and the Effects of Continental Elevations.’ The paper was a remarkable attempt to develop a global tectonic synthesis. It was the culmination of a period of intensive geological activity by Darwin – then twenty-nine – (...) who had returned from the Beagle voyage only eighteen months previously. The present article reviews the development of Darwin's views, their impact upon his contemporaries, their role in shaping his later views on the origin of species, and their significance in scientific theory-making. It draws, in part, on Darwin's unpublished geological notes and jottings. This paper, and the papers by Sandra Herbert and James Secord that accompany it, were delivered at a symposium which I organized at the Geological Society of London on 31 October 1988 to mark the 150th anniversary of the reading of Darwin's paper. (shrink)

Darwin is well known for his wondrously ambiguous rhetoric. The author who used an ‘entangled bank’ as his metaphor for Nature and its complex relationships built up the substance of his text from a corresponding entanglement of unresolved theoretical relations. Ambiguous positions, arguments that seem to fold in on themselves, vacillations, contradictions, and pluralities of explanation suffuse Darwin's science and its constituent metascience. The Origin abounds in ambiguities with regard to the technical features of evolutionary biology. But the domain of (...) ambiguity I wish to address is Darwin's metaphysical stance. I want to approach the question of Darwin and secularization through what might be called the trope of ambiguity. My principle concern is with the origins of that ambiguity. These lie in the conflicting cultural and ideological resources Darwin used to construct the theory of natural selection. (shrink)

The "Darwinian revolution" remains an acceptable phrase to describe the change in thought brought about by the theory of evolution, provided that the revolution is seen as occurring over an extended period of time. The decades from the 1790s through the 1850s are at the focus of this article. Emphasis is placed on the issue of species extinction and on generational shifts in opinion.

On occasion Charles Darwin can seem our scientific contemporary, for the subjects he engaged remain engaging today, but in his role as author he belongs to the past. It is not customary today for scientists to write book after book, as Darwin did, or for these books to serve as the primary vehicle of scientific communication. For Darwin, however, the book was central. He wrote at least eighteen, depending on what one counts; in hisAutobiographyhe entitled the section describing his most (...) important work ‘An account how several books arose’; and in his personal Journal, begun in August 1838 after he had come to a mature sense of himself, he organized entries around his books. A characteristic entry is that for 1846: ‘Oct. 1st. Finished last proof of my Geolog. Observ. on S. America; This volume, including Paper in Geolog. Journal on the Falkland Islands took me 18 & 1/2 months:–’. Further, almost always he had a book under way: when one was complete, the next was begun. He called them the milestones to his life. (shrink)

Following Michael Bartholomew's study of ‘Lyell and Evolution’ in 1973, scholars have become increasingly interested in the response of gentlemen geologists to Lamarckism during the reign of William IV (1830–7). Bartholomew contended that Charles Lyell was ‘alone in scenting the danger’ for man of using transmutation to explain fossil progression, and that he reacted to the threat of bestialisation by restructuring palaeontology along safe non-progressionist lines. Like his Anglican contemporaries, Lyell was concerned to prove that man was no transformed ape, (...) and that morals were not the better part of brute instinct. Dov Ospovat has subsequently suggested that Lyell's theory of climate was equally an attempt to thwart the transformists and ‘preserve man's unique status in creation’. In other words, Lyell's biology and geology were inextricably related inPrinciples of Geologyand his ideology affected his science as a whole. Finally, Pietro Corsi has identified the Continental materialists who most probably alerted Lyell to the danger, intimating that a conservative British response became imperative when Lyell ‘saw signs of the diffusion of transformism in England itself, where it could even form an unholy alliance with prevailing progressionist and directionalist interpretations of the history of life on earth’. (shrink)

Much has happened in the Darwin field since the _Correspondence_ began publishing in 1985. This overview of historiography suggests that the richness of the letters generates fresh scholarly questions and that Darwin, paradoxically, is becoming progressively deconstructed as a key figure in the history of science.

This essay traces the interlinked origins of two concepts found in Charles Darwin's writings: "unconscious selection," and sexual selection as applied to humanity's anatomical race distinctions. Unconscious selection constituted a significant elaboration of Darwin's artificial selection analogy. As originally conceived in his theoretical notebooks, that analogy had focused exclusively on what Darwin later would call "methodical selection," the calculated production of desired changes in domestic breeds. By contrast, unconscious selection produced its results unintentionally and at a much slower pace. Inspiration (...) for this concept likely came from Darwin's early reading of works on both animal breeding and physical ethnology. Texts in these fields described the slow and unplanned divergence of anatomical types, whether animal or human, under the guidance of contrasting ideals of physical perfection. These readings, it is argued, also led Darwin to his theory of sexual selection as applied to race, a theme he discussed mainly in his book The Descent of Man (1871). There Darwin described how the racial version of sexual selection operated on the same principle as unconscious selection. He thereby effectively reunited these kindred concepts. (shrink)

This essay traces the interlinked origins of two concepts found in Charles Darwin's writings: "unconscious selection," and sexual selection as applied to humanity's anatomical race distinctions. Unconscious selection constituted a significant elaboration of Darwin's artificial selection analogy. As originally conceived in his theoretical notebooks, that analogy had focused exclusively on what Darwin later would call "methodical selection," the calculated production of desired changes in domestic breeds. By contrast, unconscious selection produced its results unintentionally and at a much slower pace. Inspiration (...) for this concept likely came from Darwin's early reading of works on both animal breeding and physical ethnology. Texts in these fields described the slow and unplanned divergence of anatomical types, whether animal or human, under the guidance of contrasting ideals of physical perfection. These readings, it is argued, also led Darwin to his theory of sexual selection as applied to race, a theme he discussed mainly in his book The Descent of Man. There Darwin described how the racial version of sexual selection operated on the same principle as unconscious selection. He thereby effectively reunited these kindred concepts. (shrink)