On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, by Charles Darwin, M.A. (1859). Long Victorian titles summed up whole books. Darwin seldom used the term evolution; he spoke of “descent with modification” via natural selection. Useful variations, struggling for existence over time, produce new species.
Darwin’s understanding of how living things develop remains central to the life sciences, from the study of the deep past to that of today’s mutating viruses. It’s also led, sadly, to vast quantities of regrettable social theory and pseudo-science.
Why did Origins appear a full twenty years after the less controversial Voyage? For one thing, Darwin worried that he would upset people. (He was right; he still does.) Copernicus had long since removed the earth from the center of our solar system.
Now man would cease to be the cynosure for whose benefit plants and animals were created by an anthropomorphic god. It took Darwin another eleven years to publicly acknowledge (The Descent of Man, 1871) that not only were species not made for man, but that man was just another species, a product of a universal process.
Also, he needed more evidence. He could trace descent with modification, and the process of natural selection (and artificial selection through plant and animal breeding). His two page depiction of the elaborate branching of genera and species (Origin, Ch. IV) is perhaps the most influential diagram ever. But why did variation take place and how was it transmitted across generations?
Unknown to Darwin, Mendel’s cross-bred plants and mathematics demonstrated the existence of genes, but his work was little known before the 1900s. And he couldn’t see genes, much less map their chemical structure.
It took the big science of the 1950s, its modern labs and collaborating and competing teams of researchers (and genius) to clarify the mechanisms of Darwinian evolution (see James D. Watson, The Double Helix).
Genetics and greater knowledge of the deep past (e,g, the great dying of the dinosaurs following a big meteor strike 65 million years ago) have complicated Darwinian evolution. Stephen J. Gould’s essays (try Ever Since Darwin) and Steve Jones’s Almost Like a Whale will help the reader.
David R. Jones is shifting to political science for his next column.
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