On the Origin of Species
On the Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin
THE LITERARY WORK
An essay on the question of how species develop; published in London in 1859.
SYNOPSIS
Positing a mechanism called “natural selection” for the evolution of new species from old. On the Origin ot’ Species accounts for the presence of every species on earth through two simple principles: variation and selection.
Events in History at the Time of the Essay
The most influential scientific writer of the nineteenth century, Charles Robert Darwin (1809-82) sought a quiet life in rural Kent, where he was nonetheless plagued by gastrointestinal troubles, likely due to a tropical disease but undoubtedly exacerbated by worry. Charles was born to a wealthy Whig family, who had, after a couple of generations of vocal liberalism and Unitarian dissent, settled down into “Anglican respectability” (Desmond and Moore p. 19). Infinitely more interested in natural history than medicine (for which his family originally sent him to the University of Edinburgh) or divinity (for which he read at Cambridge University), Darwin put other pursuits on hold and accepted the post of naturalist and companion to Captain Fitzroy of the HMS Beagle. The voyage was decisive. Darwin spent five years on the Beagle (1831-36), exploring the world and gathering enough material to keep him busy for decades to come. Darwin’s books enjoyed tremendous success. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), together with its predecessor On the Origin of Species, is considered the keystone of Darwin’s work. Even his first book, which we now know as The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), was a dazzling success. But it took Darwin 20 years, after becoming convinced of the truth of its central ideas, to publish On the Origin of Species. He was fully sensitive to the potentially disturbing nature of his own work and to the social and familial upheavals it would ferment. Only the independent discovery of natural selection by another naturalist, Alfred Russel
Wallace, finally drove Darwin to publish “the book that shook the world” (Mayr, p. vii).
Events in History at the Time of the Essay
Economics and industry
Darwin observes in On the Origin of Species that “the struggle for existence” is “the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdom” (Darwin, On the Origin of Species, p. 63). He refers there to the sociological and economic principles put forth by Thomas Robert Malthus in his Essay on Population (1798), which Darwin read in 1838. Arguing that population, unchecked, always increases faster than its food supply, Malthus paints a grim picture of the miseries attendant on human overpopulation. These arguments take on particular poignancy in light of certain economic shifts of the mid-nineteenth century. In 1831, the year that Darwin sets off on the Beagle, the national census revealed 24 million people in Britain. This astonishing figure meant that the population had doubled in only 30 years. Meanwhile, the food supply began to look insufficient. Since 1815, the Corn Laws had protected agricultural interests in England by keeping up the price of domestic corn (a term that referred to grains such as wheat, barley, and oats rather than the American on-the-cob variety) and preventing the import of cheaper corn from abroad. Manufacturers, who wished to open up what came to be called “free trade” and to secure lower food prices for workers and higher profits for themselves, began to agitate for the repeal of the Corn Laws. In the end, however, what finally brought about their repeal was very bad weather. The year 1845 witnessed nearly incessant rains. Bad crops at home and potato famine in Ireland, which drove over a million Irish out of the country in search of food, painted an all-too-vivid picture of Malthusian scarcity. In 1846, parliament passed a three-year plan to lift the Corn Laws—a decision that may have had more symbolic than economic impact. The price of corn remained relatively unchanged, but the repeal of the Corn Laws made it clear that popular agitation could effectively bring about governmental change and that England was no longer the predominantly agrarian state it had once been.
Industry had come to stay, and the mid-nineteenth century was the era for many to enjoy it— in particular, the many who belonged to the burgeoning middle class. England thrived on its industrial progress, dominating the world’s coal, cotton goods, and steel markets. With economic success abroad came considerable changes at home, including the migration of hundreds of thousands of workers into cities such as London and Manchester. The rapid increase in urban populations and industry strained resources of food and raw materials. Apparently abundance and scarcity went hand in hand.
Religion, reform, and natural theology
By the early nineteenth century, the Church of England (the Anglican Church) had dominated the religious and, in many ways, the political life of the country for centuries. Indeed, anyone attending Oxford or Cambridge had to swear to the “Thirty-nine Articles of the Anglican Faith.” Dissenters, that is, protestants who did not belong to the Anglican Church, were thus barred from university education and from virtually all positions of power within England. But the period during which Darwin researched and wrote witnessed considerable change in the position of the Church and in official religious tolerance. In 1837, the year after Darwin returned from his voyage on the Beagle, the Registration Act lifted the Anglican monopoly on performing marriages, burials, and baptisms. The Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 had made it possible for Catholics to hold office, and by 1862 even Oxford and Cambridge—the last bastions of Anglican-only higher education—were admitting Dissenters.
Meanwhile, there was considerable variety of opinion within the Church. By no means did all Anglicans subscribe to the literal truth of the Bible. Nor was all religious thought easily separable from scientific thought. During the first half of the nineteenth century, natural theology, based on the conviction that man could and should come to know God through reason and the senses, was at the height of its popularity in England. While still at Cambridge, Darwin read William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802), in which Paley laid out his famous version of the “argument from design.” Just as the workings of a watch imply a watchmaker, he argued, the complexity of creation attests to the presence of a creator. And if Paley’s work was starting to look a bit dated towards mid-century, a series of eight works published in the 1830s, known as the “Bridgewater Treatises,” reinvigorated the argument from design. Indeed, Darwin draws one of the epigraphs for On the Origin of Species from William Whewell’s treatise: “But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this—we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws” (Whewell in Origin, p. ii).
Dinosaurs, embryos, and women
In 1842, Sir Richard Owen coined the term “Dinosaria” in order to distinguish Megalosaurus, Iguanadon, and Hylaeosaurus from other ancient reptiles. Arguing that these were higher-order reptiles than the ones that succeeded them, Owen proposed the category in part to argue against the progressive implications of early evolutionary theory. His notion of the “archetype” proposed a “primal” pattern on which all vertebrates were based, a static pattern that could not change or evolve. Opposed to Owen’s static view of species were many early evolutionists like Herbert Spencer and T. H. Huxley. Among the evolutionists was Ernst Haeckel, who is responsible for the phrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” His is the most famous articulation of the theory known as “parallelism,” which connects the stages of development of the individual (ontogeny) with the stages of development of the species (phylogeny) or, for non-evolutionists, connects the stages of development of the individual with the hierarchical rungs of a static scale of being. Parallelism implied that as a person developed to adulthood, he or she went through all the lower stages of life, spending some time (usually as an embryo) in a fish stage, a reptile stage, and so on.
From the flip side, parallelism (or “recapitulation” as the theory is sometimes called) implied that the more youthful an individual seemed, the less evolved that individual was. Thus, recapitulation was often used to argue for hierarchical relations among humans. Not only children, but also non-whites and women (because, like children, they were smaller than men and lacked facial hair), were often taken to be less evolved than white men. In this way, evolutionary theory was used to reinforce social structures already in place. The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed a considerable constriction in the role of women, who were increasingly thought of as “angels in the home” for whom both public life and sex drives seemed inappropriate and incongruous. This view of women, as well as a confidence in women’s good taste, is reflected in Darwin’s theory of sexual selection (proposed in the Origin, but not explored at length until the Descent). Throughout the animal kingdom, vigorous and active males pursue relatively passive females, who nonetheless contribute to the strength and beauty of their species by choosing always the best and brightest among their suitors.
THE GREAT EXHIBITION AND THE CRYSTRAL PALACE
In 1851, England seemed to be in a fine position indeed. It was wealthy and powerful, the center of a mighty empire. In fact, the world had not seen such an empire since the famous Roman one. Many took the opening of the Great Exhibition held in London’s Hyde Park that year to be a sign of the might as well as the right of all things British. An international showcase of arts and manufactures, the Great Exhibition was the first world’s fair in history, it opened on May 1 in the giant Crystal Palace, built of glass and iron and designed for the occasion by Joseph Paxton. The edifice itself inspired reverence and awe as well as a sense that industrial capitalism and progressive reform would lead to enduring national success. In essence, the dazzling spectacle secured an admiring nation’s commitment to science. Six million people visited the Crystal Palace, witnessing its enormous engines, tropical plants, and artwork before it was disassembled in 1852 and taken to Sydenham in South London. Darwin enjoyed this new site rather more than he had enjoyed the original exhibition. Here the Palace was rebuilt with beautiful gardens and ornamental lakes, and here Richard Owen erected his life-size concrete dinosaurs, which still stand.
Wars abroad, unrest at home
Readers of On the Origin of Species will find it suffused with the language of war. Indeed, just one paragraph from the section on sexual selection yields a long list of war words: shield, sword, spear, battle, weapons, courage and victory. This may seem out of step for a country enjoying an extended domestic peace, but war could not be too far from the consciousness of the English at almost any time during the nineteenth century. Though the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 brought considerable relief, the war left Britain extremely sensitive to the possibilate of revolution. The upper classes especially if Suede were anxious to avoid the kind of horrors that had taken place just over the channel in the French Revolution of 1789. A series of revolutions in Austria, Germany, Italy, and France in 1848 fueled the fear of class uprisings. Indeed, the Reform Bills of 1832, 1867, and 1884-85 can be understood as part of the attempt to rectify peacefully some of the class grievances settled so violently on the European continent. Designed to reapportion representation in Parliament in order to accommodate the growth of industrial cities in the north and designed also to extend the vote to a much larger number of people (male householders), these acts were revolutionary in that they allowed the middle classes to share power with the upper classes. Indeed, the acts can be said to mark the emergence of a new species of citizenry.
Though legislative reform kept life relatively peaceful at home, colonial interests led to trouble abroad. Fearful of Russian designs on India, Britain fought, along with France and Austria, in what was known as the Crimean War (1854-56); the goal was to keep Turkey out of Russian control. Though successful, the war was poorly run and evoked considerable public criticism. Moreover, the Indian Mutiny of 1857, though quickly suppressed, suggested that Indian nationalists would not always tolerate British rule and the westernization of Indian culture. Thus, the events of the 1850s would not only keep the fact of war before the eyes of the British, they would also begin to unsettle confidence in the dominance and permanence of the British empire. On the Origin of Species it self would reproduce the ambivalence of its culture, serving at once to foster and to assuage the anxieties attached to ideas of empire in Britain, even as that empire reached unprecedented heights.
The Essay in Focus
Contents summary
Though Darwin modestly terms its 500 pages and 14 chapters an “Abstract,” the Origin is a rich piece of writing that reveals a mastery of a wide array of Victorian sciences, including botany, zoology, anatomy, paleontology, and geology. In London, Darwin was admitted to two clubs for pigeon fanciers, and a practical dimension infuses his writing. It displays a vast knowledge of the everyday experience of breeders and farmers, whose accounts furnish many of Darwin’s examples throughout the Origin. These permeate the first chapter, “Variation under Domestication,” in which Darwin eases his readership into an understanding of his radical view of nature through an extremely familiar, analogous case. If we wish to understand the variation and modification of species in nature, Darwin reasons, our knowledge of “variation under domestication” must be “the best and safest clue” (Origin, p. 4). He cites (to name a few) the Italian greyhound, the Spanish pointer, and the Blenheim spaniel; the Ribs ton-pippin apple and the Codlin apple; and a dazzling array of pigeons—the English carrier, the runt, the pouter, the barb, the short-faced tumbler, the Jacobin, the trumpeter, the laugher, and the fantail. Darwin thus paints a picture of the rich variety among domestic productions. But though the breeders who are his sources maintain almost indignantly that each domestic breed stems from a unique wild species, Darwin argues that even very distinct breeds descend from common wild ancestors. Indeed, it is from the very plasticity of form that breeders observe, from their capacity to select consciously or unconsciously for desired traits and to breed out undesirable ones, and from their ability to substantially alter a breed this way, that Darwin becomes convinced—and convinces his reader— of his two central ideas: first, individuals of a breed or species exhibit a range of differences or variations; and second, these individual differences, when selectively accumulated over the course of many generations, form the basis of larger differences, such as those that distinguish the prize Hereford from the wild longhorn. Thus, “nature gives successive variations; man adds them up in certain directions useful to him” (Origin, p. 30). In other words, nature provides variety; man selects and breeds for those variations that he deems desirable.
Darwin then reasons by analogy. What man can do, nature can do better. Of course, for selection to occur, there must be something to select; there must be variation. Thus, Darwin devotes his second chapter to “Variation under Nature.” It is here that his concern with the individual distinguishes him from the “systematists” who precede him. The same differences that other works on natural history gloss over in order to present a coherent picture of a “type” become Darwin’s central obsession. “These differences blend into each other in an insensible series; and a series impresses the mind with an actual passage” (Origin, p. 51). In this way, Darwin suggests that we can infer from the varietycurrently visible in nature, a series of changes that have taken place over time.
It remains for the next chapter, “Struggle for Existence” to posit a mechanism that can explain how species arise in nature. Here, Darwin elaborates a complex “economy of nature” in which both individuals and species compete for resources that, at some time or another, will be in-sufficiently abundant. The term “Struggle for Existence” often evokes a rather bloody picture— two carnivores fighting over the same piece of meat, or what Alfred, Lord Tennyson described as “Nature red in tooth and claw” in his poem In Memoriam (Tennyson, 56.15; also in WLAIT 4: British and Irish Literature and Its Times). But Darwin’s chapter concerns something much larger and more metaphorical, “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” (Origin, p. 62). It is here that Darwin first coins the term “natural selection,” the subject of Chapter 4 and the keystone of Darwin’s theory. “Natural selection”—a term intended to evoke the analogy to “man’s power of selection”—is the process through which variations, however slight, that give an individual an advantage in the struggle for existence will accumulate (Origin, p. 61). Advantaged individuals will have more success in leaving progeny, who, in turn, may enjoy similar advantages and reproduce successfully, and so on, until small variations add up to large ones, individual differences yield new varieties, and varieties yield new species. Thus nature, like man, selects for profitable variations.
In Chapter 5, “Laws of Variation,” Darwin connects the rich variety in nature established in earlier chapters to his theory of natural selection. It is here that he begins to address “the ordinary view of each species having been independently created,” a view which he finds completely inadequate in explaining either the visible variations within species or the similarities between species (Origin, p. 155).
The chapters that follow address many of the difficulties associated with this theory. Chapters 6-8 take up a series of troubling questions; Chapters 9-12 consider the challenges (to and from natural selection) of geology, paleontology and geography; and Chapter 13 returns to the difficulties of classification, with a view to explaining these difficulties by the theory of descent with modification. Why, Darwin asks and answers, if species develop out of other species, don’t we see more intermediate gradations that connect disparate but related forms through a complete spectrum of forms in between? Why do species appear so well defined? How can we believe that natural selection produces small and insignificant as well as vital and complex structures within a species? How does natural selection explain the development of complex instinctual behaviors— such as those that result in the elaborate social structures of certain ants or the exquisite architecture of the hive-bee’s cell?
The first of these questions points to a recurring emphasis in these chapters: the close relation between natural selection and extinction. We don’t see more intermediate forms in nature, Darwin argues in Chapter 4, precisely because the success of the species that we do observe implies their success over those species or varieties with whom they have competed in the struggle for existence. Species, he argues, are more likely to compete with, and therefore lead to the extinction of, species like themselves. Thus, competition leads to diversification in nature. So competition explains why species appear distinct in nature; however, it fails to explain why we do not see more transitional forms among extinct species. Darwin returns to this question—which is the challenge posed by geology and paleontology to the theory of natural selection—in chapters 9 and 10. With extreme care, he enumerates the multiple causes that have conjoined to make the fossil record extremely imperfect and full of gaps through which species have come and gone without leaving a trace.
Finally, following two chapters on geographical distribution, Darwin revisits the major points of On the Origin of Species. In this final chapter, he comes to consider the reasons why so many naturalists and geologists have clung to the view that species are immutable, even though variation within species is everywhere evident and clear distinctions cannot be drawn between species and well-marked varieties. In addressing this question, he addresses nothing less than the question of how science, indeed thought, works. Anticipating “the load of prejudice by which this subject is overwhelmed,” Darwin—perhaps inadvertently—evokes the interpretive nature of what we call facts, which nevertheless take shape only in light of the theories through which we view them (Origin, p. 482). He leaves it predominantly to the future to embrace his theory, and predicts an impact almost as great as the one On the Origin of Species has turned out to have. Winding up the treatise, Darwin ends with a sense of awe inspired by the view of nature he has articulated. He finds in this view a grandeur all its own that from the simple beginnings of a few or only one species “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved” (Origin, p. 490).
Evolution and empire
A great deal of the fascination with On the Origin of Species comes from the fact that while producing a brilliant and influential work of science, Darwin reveals how much he is a man of his times. However much his theories may be separated from their social applications, his language speaks to an audience deeply concerned about the endurance of the empire.
There can be no doubt that when Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, the British empire was strong and growing stronger. The essay—like much of the science that preceded it— carried the potential to shatter this confidence. In particular, the fear of extinction wrought by Victorian paleontology and inseparable (as Darwin emphasizes) from natural selection, suggested that species—even apparently powerful species like the dinosaurs—could and very likely would eventually die out. Since Victorians often confounded the concepts of species, race, and nation, the fear of extinction readily spilled over into a fear of racial or national decline. For the reader looking for reassurance that Great Britain did indeed rule the waves and would continue to do so, the essay provides plenty of material. Certainly, any sufficiently devout nationalist will find a source of pride in the assertion that “the whole body of English racehorses have come to surpass in fleetness and size the parent Arab stock” (Origin, p. 35). Within the struggle for existence, the practice of forcibly occupying another nation can look quite natural, “for in all countries, the natives have been so far conquered by naturalised productions [species who are not indigenous], that they have allowed foreigners to take firm possession of the land” (Origin, p. 83 sic). Also, in spite of the frightening facts of the fossil record, natural selection implies for Darwin that “forms of life which are now dominant tend to become still more dominant” (Origin, p. 59). In a way that seems to reinforce the rightness and even the inevitability of the imperial project (or class divisions, or gender disparity, according to the inclinations of the reader), Darwin develops a mechanism that explains how “the forms of life throughout the universe become divided into groups subordinate to groups” (Origin, p. 59).
Nonetheless, not all colonial practices were viewed equally within England. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the question of colonialism was hardly separable from the question of slavery. England officially ended its slave trade in 1807 (though this proved rather hard to enforce) and in 1834, Parliament put into effect a bill that would abolish slavery throughout the British empire. The abolitionist sentiment that effected these changes remained strong in England for the three succeeding decades during which slavery remained legal in the United States. In light of the prevailing sentiment, it is surprising that, at least on the face of things, On the Origin of Species seems to treat slavery as quite natural— instinctual, if only in ants. On closer inspection, however, Darwin’s discussion of the slavemaking instinct reads like a cautionary tale. These re-markable ants have so developed this instinct, so thoroughly established the division of labor, that “The males and fertile females do no work. The workers or sterile females, though most energetic and courageous in capturing slaves, do no other work” (Origin, p. 219). They no longer can. The slave making ants live in a state of abject dependence on their slaves. Indeed, “so utterly helpless are the masters” that when shut up without a slave, “they could not even feed themselves and many perished of hunger” (Origin, p. 219). Thus though On the Origin of Species implicitly offers reassurances about the endurance of empire, it also portends evil for those who would carry such power too far. Its complex (sometimes seemingly contradictory) implications, moreover, anticipate the wide array of uses to which Darwin’s theories would eventually be put under the very broad rubric of “Social Darwinism.”
Sources and literary context
By the middle of the nineteenth century, evolutionary ideas suffused Victorian popular and scientific thought. No well-read and educated Victorian (including Darwin) could have been unfamiliar with the best-loved, most-read, and most-quoted work of mid-Victorian literature: Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memriam , a consolatory poem written in memory of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam that articulated many of the broader fears and hopes of its moment (also in WLAYTA: British and Irish Literature and Its Times). The poem raises, and in many ways resolves some of the anxieties wrought by the same sciences that influenced Darwin. Though Darwin was critical of Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (published anonymously in 1844), Tennyson was fascinated. Chambers’s book helped him reconcile his belief in God’s love with his perception of nature’s violence. In his poem he attempts to resolve the clash between evolutionary and Christian thought by developing a narrative of evolutionary progress that links the ape and tiger up through man to the divine itself. His poem indicates how thoroughly evolutionary ideas were already in the air while Darwin was writing (often in distressing ways, as in the perception of nature’s violence mentioned above).
Moreover, Darwin was not the first scientist to develop a theory of evolution. His particular contribution was to posit a compelling mechanism—natural selection—to explain the process through which species could evolve. There were quite a few scientific theories of evolution in place before Darwin started writing. One of these was the work of Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, a poet and physician, whose Zoònomia (1794) Darwin had read with enthusiasm as a teenager. Erasmus Darwin believed in the mutability of species, in the possibility of adaptation and variation in organisms, and in the importance of such changes for individual and species survival. Though influenced by these ideas, his grandson Charles did not embrace them or their implications wholesale. Yet Charles Darwin was no doubt disposed to be relatively sympathetic to some of the ideas of Lamarckian evolution when he encountered these first at Edinburgh. Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, best known for his Philosophie zoologiue (1809), posited a dynamic scale of nature in which organisms progressed up the scale of nature, becoming more and more complex because of the gradual accumulation of adaptations over many generations. Though Darwin would reject certain well-known Lamarckian ideas, such as spontaneous generation and the inheritance of characteristics acquired by an individual during its lifetime, On the Origin of Species would also adopt many important aspects of Lamarckian evolution, such as the possibility of transformation (or “transmutation”) of species as well as the incredible long time scales required to make such changes. The controversy surrounding such works, moreover, may have influenced Darwin’s decision whether and when to publish. Intrigued by such early evolutionary writings, he was nevertheless rather nervous lest his own ideas meet with similar rejection, and this nervousness accounts, in part, for his waiting so long to publish On the Origin of Species.
It was not, however, only the evolutionary sciences that influenced Darwin’s thinking. In the 1830s, when Darwin was still very much a junior member of the scientific community, two schools of thought dominated and divided geological thinking. “Uniformitarians” contended that geological processes of the past were of the same kind and operated in the same degree as the processes now operating. “Catastrophists,” on the other hand, depicted the earth’s past as punctuated by violent and rapid upheavals, like volcanoes and floods, which would account for the changes in landscape and living forms indicated by the fossil record. Though Darwin’s early training was steeped in catastrophism, he read Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology while on board the Beagle. Lyell’s book was perhaps the foremost articulation of uniformitarian principles, and it not only shaped much of Darwin’s geological thinking while on board the Beagle, but also laid the foundational premises necessary to develop the concepts he would eventually put forth in On the Origin of Species. In advocating the uniform nature of geological processes, Lyell emphasized a steady state view of the earth in which decay and formation are perpetually in process, a view that implied no particular progression or direction in terrestrial events, a view which would enable a scientist to explain the phenomena of the past by observing the events and causes of the present.
Reception and impact
The first edition of On the Origin of Species sold out the day it was published (November 24, 1859). A second edition, with very slight changes, was released just a month later (December 28). These changes, Darwin’s first hurried response to some of the religious objections to the first edition, were clearly intended to make God more visible in his theory. In spite of such gestures to render On the Origin of Species compatible with religious thought, the most vehement resistance to Darwin’s ideas came from religious thinkers—scientists among them. They objected on two counts. First, there were objections to the insufficient space left by natural selection for the intervention of God in the form of creation or miracles, and second, there were objections to the essay’s failure to maintain a special place for humanity in the order of things. Though Darwin does attempt to address the first objection, he makes little mention of humankind (except as breeders) in the essay at all, saving that discussion for The Descent of Man. Actually, the disturbing closeness of humans to apes had already crept into British thought (indeed had been there for more than a century), and the essay’s readers immediately picked up on its implications for the “monkey question.” Perhaps the most famous clash over this question was the 1860 debate between the Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley—an extremely vocal proponent of Darwinism, whose enthusiasm earned him the nickname “Darwin’s bulldog.”
The response to On the Origin of Spades, however, was by no means limited to a simple clash between science and religion. Even religious opinion was divided. While some found the essay deeply offensive, other religious readers saw in it evidence of the richness and complexity of God’s methods. Scientific readers were similarly divided. Undoubtedly, the essay marked a complete shift in the status of evolution in the scientific community. Earlier evolutionary theories were always on the fringes of biological thought; Darwin brought evolution to the center. Certainly by 1875, probably by 1865, virtually every British biologist was an evolutionist. Nonetheless, there remained considerable dissension regarding the mechanism of evolution, as evolutionists debated whether natural selection could do all that Darwin claimed. Even those who accepted that natural selection could accumulate small changes in visible ways debated whether these could ever be significant enough to yield new species. Outside of biology, perhaps the most vocal scientific opponents of Darwinism were the physicists, especially William Thomson, Lord Kelvin. The laws of thermodynamics, articulated and popularized at just about this time, put a limit on the age of the earth and sun that was far too short to accommodate the very long time scales required by evolutionary theory. Not until the discovery of radiation at the turn of the century did it look like the sun could endure long enough for evolution to make sense to physicists.
Darwin’s ideas were also widely rejected and widely accepted by the general public. Needless to say, many Victorian readers objected to Darwinism for religious reasons. However, many found it quite satisfying to apply Darwinian principles to the social sphere. Such ideas, known collectively as “social Darwinism,” could be used to argue for the rightness of extreme laissez-faire economics or for English imperialism, based on the notion that competition would insure that the best—people, class, nation—would rise above the rest. Extrapolating from Darwin, people modified his line of thought; to some, it implied progress (rather than just change, which was Darwin’s more modest focus). Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who began to develop an evolutionary model of society even before the publication of On theOrigin of Species, was responsible for articulating many of the doctrines of social Darwinism. Indeed, it was Spencer who coined the term “survival of the fittest”—a term often associated with Darwin, who was eventually sufficiently influenced by Spencer’s work to include this term in the fifth edition (1869) of On the Origin of Species. In spite of the fact that most of Darwin’s twentieth-century fans would like to clear him of all charges of social Darwinism, he was rather divided on the subject himself, sometimes rejecting the notion that his ideas could be applied to social situations (as when he was accused of having proven that might makes right), sometimes worrying that modern social and medical practice (such as vaccination) were actually preserving the unfit. But whether accepted or rejected, Darwin’s ideas found their way into virtually every area of Victorian thought, from race, empire, economics, politics, and religion to sexuality, childrearing, birth control, music, medicine and architecture. Certainly his ideas greatly affected the literature of the age, influencing works as varied as George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72; in WLAIT 3: British and Irish Literature and Its Times), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), and Virginia Woolfs The Voyage Out (1915) (Eliot’s and Stevenson’s works also in WLAIT 4: British and Irish Literature and Its Times).
—Barri Gold
For More Information
Beer, Gillian. “Introduction.” The Origin of Species. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
____. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London: Ark, 1985.
Dale, Peter Allen. In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the Victorian Age. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. A facsimile of the first edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Desmond, Adrian, and James Moore. Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist. New York: Norton, 1991.
Levine, George. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Lightman, Bernard, ed. Victorian Science in Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Mayr, Ernst. “Introduction.” On the Origin of Species. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Ruse, Michael. The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
Tennyson, Alfred. In Memoriam. Ed. Robert H. Ross. New York: Norton, 1973.