Man can act only on external and visible characters: nature cares nothing for appearances, except in so far as they may be useful to any being. She can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life. Man selects only for his own good; Nature only for that of the being which she tends…. Can we wonder, then, that nature’s productions should be far “truer” in character than man’s productions; that they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship? A recent article in the New York Times (July 15, 2008) was entitled “Let’s get rid of Darwinism.” It was written by Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist and the author of a best-selling evolutionary book (Judson, 2002). In that article, Judson wrote, “I’d like to abolish the insidious terms Darwinism, Darwinist, and Darwinian. They suggest a false narrowness to the field of modern evolutionary biology, as though it was the brainchild of a single person 150 years ago, rather than a vast, complex and evolving subject to which many other great figures have contributed…. Obessively focusing on Darwin, perpetually asking whether he was right about this or that, implies that the discovery of something he didn’t think of or know about somehow undermines or threatens the whole enterprise of evolutionary biology today.” The term Darwinism also “suggests that Darwin was the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, of evolutionary biology, and that the subject hasn’t changed much in the 150 years since the publication of The Origin.” Judson went on to suggest that constantly using terms such as Darwinism and Darwinian is rather like calling all of modern aeronautical engineering “Wrightism” after the Wright brothers, or referring to all fixed-wing aircraft as “Wrightian” planes. Similar sentiments were expressed by another well-known biologist, Carl Safina, in a New York Times article (Feb. 10, 2009), entitled “Darwinism must die so that evolution may live.” Darwin added the phrase "by the Creator" from the 1860 second edition onwards, so that the ultimate sentence begins "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one". [174] Structure, style, and themes [ edit ] Nature and structure of Darwin's argument [ edit ] Within a day or two of formulating this teleological argument, Darwin opened up his N Notebook, in which he began constructing his theory of human moral evolution. As the above passages indicate, he considered moral behavior to be a species of social instinct. One difficulty he recognized immediately was that the social instincts benefited not their carriers but their recipients. This meant that his new device of natural selection would not appear to provide their account, which is probably why Darwin initially relied on the inheritance of acquired habit to explain these innate behaviors. Darwin would apply his device of natural selection to explicate moral behavior only after he had solved a significant problem that threatened to overturn his entire theory—or at least he so judged. In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." [191]

More detail was given in Darwin's 1868 book on The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, which tried to explain heredity through his hypothesis of pangenesis. Although Darwin had privately questioned blending inheritance, he struggled with the theoretical difficulty that novel individual variations would tend to blend into a population. However, inherited variation could be seen, [138] and Darwin's concept of selection working on a population with a range of small variations was workable. [139] It was not until the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s that a model of heredity became completely integrated with a model of variation. [140] This modern evolutionary synthesis had been dubbed Neo Darwinian Evolution because it encompasses Charles Darwin's theories of evolution with Gregor Mendel's theories of genetic inheritance. [141] Difficulties for the theory [ edit ] In late September 1838, he started reading Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population with its statistical argument that human populations, if unrestrained, breed beyond their means and struggle to survive. Darwin related this to the struggle for existence among wildlife and botanist de Candolle's "warring of the species" in plants; he immediately envisioned "a force like a hundred thousand wedges" pushing well-adapted variations into "gaps in the economy of nature", so that the survivors would pass on their form and abilities, and unfavourable variations would be destroyed. [31] [32] [33] By December 1838, he had noted a similarity between the act of breeders selecting traits and a Malthusian Nature selecting among variants thrown up by "chance" so that "every part of newly acquired structure is fully practical and perfected". [34]

Its work: Access The Orange of Species: Darwin’s Classic Work. Now with More Citrus! by Charles Darwin EPUB KINDLE PDF EBOOK involved in revolutionary Chinese politics (Jin 2019a). 3.2 The Professional Reception of Darwin’s Theory The book was written for non-specialist readers and attracted widespread interest upon its publication. Darwin was already highly regarded as a scientist, so his findings were taken seriously and the evidence he presented generated scientific, philosophical, and religious discussion. The debate over the book contributed to the campaign by T.H. Huxley and his fellow members of the X Club to secularise science by promoting scientific naturalism. Within two decades, there was widespread scientific agreement that evolution, with a branching pattern of common descent, had occurred, but scientists were slow to give natural selection the significance that Darwin thought appropriate. During " the eclipse of Darwinism" from the 1880s to the 1930s, various other mechanisms of evolution were given more credit. With the development of the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s, Darwin's concept of evolutionary adaptation through natural selection became central to modern evolutionary theory, and it has now become the unifying concept of the life sciences. But to this progressivist and cheerful British view, there appeared one salient objection: the Irish. Richard Rathbone Greg, a Scotts political theorist who was an advocate of the new Darwinian theory, pointed out in an article published 3 years before The Descent, that natural selection had been thrown out of gear. He mounted an argument that Darwin took extremely seriously. Greg, the dour Scotsman, wrote: On the Origin of Species (or, more completely, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life) [3] is a work of scientific literature by Charles Darwin that is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology; it was published on 24 November 1859. [4] Darwin's book introduced the scientific theory that populations evolve over the course of generations through a process of natural selection. The book presented a body of evidence that the diversity of life arose by common descent through a branching pattern of evolution. Darwin included evidence that he had collected on the Beagle expedition in the 1830s and his subsequent findings from research, correspondence, and experimentation. [5]

When the views entertained in this volume on the origin of species, or when analogous views are generally admitted, we can dimly forsee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history.' In Chapter 16, Robert Richards presents a revisionary argument that seems likely to be highly controversial. Using excerpts from Darwin’s writings, Richards makes a case that “Darwin’s theory originally re-infused nature with moral purpose and employed teleological means of doing so,” and that “Darwinian evolution had the goal of reaching a fixed end, namely man as a moral creature.” These conclusions fly in the face of conventional wisdom, which holds that Darwin’s elucidation of natural selection was philosophically as well as scientifically revolutionary precisely because it banished the necessity for invoking ultimate purpose or goal-directedness in biological evolution. Nevertheless, Richards contends that many of Darwin’s writings are infused with teleological statements, and that to dismiss these, or to rationalize them as rhetorical devices (for example, if Darwin was trying to assuage Victorian readers) is unwarranted. Richards bolsters this argument by tracing various of Darwin’s ideas to his early life, and how these concepts eventually played into the construction of Darwin’s theory. Thus, Richards interprets many of Darwin’s writings as consistent with notions of evolutionary purpose and biological progress. It will be interesting to monitor the responses of other evolutionary historians to this provocative suggestion.

Evolutionism within and beyond Darwin

Darwin’s place in human thought could hardly have been predicted from the fortunes of that young boy who went to Edinburgh Medical School at age 16, following in the footsteps of his famous grandfather Erasmus Darwin, his father Robert Waring Darwin, and his older brother Erasmus. However, his prospects were not golden. In his Autobiography, Darwin recounts the attitude of that distant self, and his father’s own estimation of his son’s abilities: In Chapter II, Darwin specifies that the distinction between species and varieties is arbitrary, with experts disagreeing and changing their decisions when new forms were found. He concludes that "a well-marked variety may be justly called an incipient species" and that "species are only strongly marked and permanent varieties". [121] He argues for the ubiquity of variation in nature. [122] Historians have noted that naturalists had long been aware that the individuals of a species differed from one another, but had generally considered such variations to be limited and unimportant deviations from the archetype of each species, that archetype being a fixed ideal in the mind of God. Darwin and Wallace made variation among individuals of the same species central to understanding the natural world. [117] Struggle for existence, natural selection, and divergence [ edit ] Yet the bare bones of his theory of evolution are only part of what shapes this book. Darwin also communicates the obstacles he had to overcome to ensure its success and to turn it into what it became: a foundational text of the biological sciences that influenced all sorts of other disciplines, including anthropology, religious studies, and the Classics. Creationism and evolution There were serious scientific objections to the process of natural selection as the key mechanism of evolution, including Carl Nägeli's insistence that a trivial characteristic with no adaptive advantage could not be developed by selection. Darwin conceded that these could be linked to adaptive characteristics. His estimate that the age of the Earth allowed gradual evolution was disputed by William Thomson (later awarded the title Lord Kelvin), who calculated that it had cooled in less than 100 million years. Darwin accepted blending inheritance, but Fleeming Jenkin calculated that as it mixed traits, natural selection could not accumulate useful traits. Darwin tried to meet these objections in the fifth edition. Mivart supported directed evolution, and compiled scientific and religious objections to natural selection. In response, Darwin made considerable changes to the sixth edition. The problems of the age of the Earth and heredity were only resolved in the 20th century. [89] [236] From his early transmutation notebooks in the late 1830s onwards, Darwin considered human evolution as part of the natural processes he was investigating, [187] and rejected divine intervention. [188] In 1856, his "big book on species" titled Natural Selection was to include a "note on Man", but when Wallace enquired in December 1857, Darwin replied; "You ask whether I shall discuss 'man';—I think I shall avoid whole subject, as so surrounded with prejudices, though I fully admit that it is the highest & most interesting problem for the naturalist." [189] [190]

The danger of Darwin’s ideas resides in the extraordinary way he used rather traditional conceptions. The usual assumption is that Darwin killed those barren virgins of teleology and of purpose, scorned moral interpretations of nature, and strode into the modern world escorting the stylish concepts of modern materialism and secularism. I believe, on the contrary, that Darwin’s theory preserved nature’s moral purpose and used teleological means of doing so. Darwinian evolution had the goal of reaching a fixed end, namely man as a moral creature. This is something Darwin implied in the peroration at the end of the Origin, when in justifying the death and destruction wrought by natural selection, he contended that “the most exalted object we are capable of conceiving” is “the production of the higher animals” (Darwin, 1859, p. 490). To understand Darwin’s place in history, I think we must first consider what his theory actually entailed.The model by which Darwin attempted to explain to himself the operations of natural selection was that of a very powerful, intelligent being that manifested “forethought” and prescience, as well as moral concern, for the creatures over which it tended. Thus, as Darwin initially conceived natural selection, it hardly functioned in a mechanical or machine-like way; rather, it acted as an intelligent and moral force. I might have adduced for this same purpose the differences between the races of man, which are so strongly marked; I may add that some little light can apparently be thrown on the origin of these differences, chiefly through sexual selection of a particular kind, but without here entering on copious details my reasoning would appear frivolous." [200]