Abstract

Darwin's physicalist orientation reacts to a long-standing vitalistic mode of thought of idealistic morphology and should be assessed by taking other 19th and 20th centuries biological schools of thought into account – trends that each emphasised different modes of explanation, such as mechanicism, physicalism, holism, neo-vitalism, organismic biology and pan-psychism. Darwin's acceptance of “universal laws of nature” is consonant with Leyll's view of invariant natural laws , but at the same time, owing to their tendency towards change, living entities are considered to be without constant structures – an outcome of Darwin's nominalist understanding of living entities. Nominalism provides a starting point both for modern historicism and for Darwin's adherence to a nominalistic view of living entities. In the light of the fossil record, the issue of constancy and change is discussed with a focus on Gould's claim that the basic theory of natural selection offers no statement about general progress and therefore does not supply a mechanism in terms of which an overall advance might be expected. Darwin's physicalistic orientation in 1859 made it problematic for him to claim that he has accounted for evolution in the truly biological sense of the word