Uplift Native American Stories. Add to Bookshelf. Jun 29, ISBN Add to Cart. Buy from Other Retailers:. Paperback —. Also by Charles Darwin. See all books by Charles Darwin. About Charles Darwin Charles Robert Darwin was born in in Shrewsbury, England, to a wealthy intellectual family, his grandfather being the famous physician Erasmus Darwin. Product Details. Inspired by Your Browsing History. The Origins of Virtue. The Beak of the Finch.
Jonathan Weiner. Edward J. A Natural History of the Senses. Diane Ackerman. The Origin of Species. Charles Darwin. On the Origin of Species. Scatter, Adapt, and Remember. Annalee Newitz. New Atlantis and Selections from the Sylva Sylvarum. Francis Bacon. What Darwin Really Said. Benjamin Farrington. Shakespeare After All.
Marjorie Garber. A History of Reading. He also tackled difficult problems that continue to spark debate today, such as the evolution of minds and of moral beliefs. If these traits are selected by the female, they can develop to extremes over the course of time—at which point they may hamper, rather than aid in, survival.
For example, an overly-colorful tail could attract predators. But the other part of the theory, in which females appear to have the power of choice by selecting from among an array of prospective males, struck many as a radical notion.
For humans, however, Darwin switched it up; in our own species, he argued, it was the male that did the choosing. Did the various races emerge independently of one another? The Society supported the Confederacy in the U. This is where sexual selection comes in. Darwin argued that differing judgements of attractiveness held the key; he believed that men of one tribe or group were naturally most attracted to members of their own tribe.
Even so, some of his ideas—like the notion of Africans being attracted to Africans—struck his contemporaries as too radical. Another, more historical, approach interprets his methodology in the context of accepted canons of scientific explanation found in Victorian discussions of the period Ruse b; Waters ; Hull ; Lewens ; Ruse ; Lennox ; Hodge b. The degree to which Darwin did in fact draw from the available methodological discussions of his contemporaries—John Herschel, William Whewell, John Stuart Mill—is not fully clear from available documentary sources.
The claim most readily documented, and defended particularly by M. This was to be the goal of scientific explanation. William Whewell — , whose three-volume History of the Inductive Sciences Darwin read with care after his return from his round-the-world voyage. In a restatement of this principle in a revised edition of his Philosophy of Inductive Science published only a year before the Origin , Whewell argued that. Whewell These ingredients are then assembled together in chapter four into a remarkable synthesis that rapidly extends the claims by generalization to cover the full range of life, both in time and in space.
By the end of that chapter, the reader would be presented with a remarkably comprehensive theory of the relations of living forms, and the mode of their origin, both in the present and in the past history of the planet.
Opening with a pair of chapters that draw upon the art-nature analogy developed in the manuscripts, Darwin framed the argument with an account of the probable origin of domestic animals, and by inference, of domesticated plants Theunissen These forms are presumed to have arisen through the action of human selection on the slight variations existing between individuals within the same species. This denotes the selection practiced even by aboriginal peoples who simply seek to maintain the integrity of a breed by preserving the best forms.
The domestic breeding analogy is, however, more than a decorative rhetorical strategy. It repeatedly functions for Darwin as the principal empirical example to which he could appeal at several places in the text as a means of visualizing the working of natural selection in nature, and this appeal remains intact through the six editions of the Origin.
The focus of the second chapter introduces another important issue. It is in this chapter that Darwin most explicitly develops his own position on the nature of organic species in relation to his theory of descent. This still forms a topic of extensive discussion in the literature see species and Darwinism , this encyclopedia; Mallet ; Hodge b; R. Richards ; Wilkins ; Stamos ; Sloan , His sometimes contradictory statements on this issue—alternating between overt denials of the reality of species in some places, and clear affirmation of the reality of species in others—have been seen by some scholars as an intentional rhetorical strategy Stamos ; Beatty This distinction was utilized selectively by Darwin.
This creative conflation also led to many confusions about how Darwin actually did conceive of species and species change in time Sloan Darwin addresses the species question by raising the problems caused by natural variation in the practical discrimination of taxa at the species and varietal levels.
For example, natural variation is employed by Darwin in chapter two of the Origin to break down the distinction between species and varieties as these concepts were commonly employed in the practical taxonomic literature. Drawing also on the tradition of species realism developed within the Buffonian tradition, Darwin also affirmed that species and varieties are defined by common descent and material relations of interbreeding.
Varieties are not simply the formal taxonomic subdivisions of a natural species as conceived in the Linnaean tradition. This subtly transformed the issue of local variation and adaptation to circumstances into a primary ingredient for historical evolutionary change. The conclusions to be drawn from this argument were, however, only to be revealed in chapter four of the text. It now becomes a general principle governing all of organic life.
Thus the organisms comprising food itself would also be included. Through this universalization, the controls on population becomes only in the extreme case grounded directly on the traditional Malthusian limitations of food and space. Normal controls are instead exerted through a complex network of relationships of species acting one on another in predator-prey, parasite-host, and food-web relations. The abundance of red clover in England Darwin sees as dependent on the numbers of pollinating humble bees which are controlled by mice, and these are controlled by the number of cats, making cats the determinants of clover abundance.
The abundance of Scotch Firs is limited by the number of cattle, to cite two examples employed by Darwin Origin 72— This recognition of complex species-species interactions as the primary means of population control also prevents one from reading the Origin as a simple extension of British political economy and the competition embedded in Victorian industrialization to the natural world.
With the ingredients of the first three chapters in place, Darwin was positioned to assemble these together in his culminating fourth chapter on natural selection. In this long discussion, Darwin develops the main exposition of his central theoretical concept. It is not clear, for example, whether Darwin conceives of natural selection as an efficient or as a final cause; whether it is an emergent result of other causes; or if it is a simple description of the working together of several independent causal factors without its own causal status.
When Darwin elaborated on this concept in chapter four of the first edition, he continued to describe natural selection in language suggesting that it involved intentional selection, continuing the strong art-nature parallel found in the manuscripts.
For example:. As man can produce and certainly has produced a great result by his methodical and unconscious means of selection, what may not nature effect? 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. Every selected character is fully exercised by her; and the being is placed under well-suited conditions of life.
Origin The manuscript history behind such passages prevents the simple discounting of these statements as mere rhetorical imagery. Criticisms that quickly developed over the overt intentionality embedded in such passages, however, led Darwin to revise the argument in editions beginning with the third edition of The conceptual synthesis of chapter four also introduced discussions of such matters as the conditions under which natural selection most optimally worked, the role of isolation, the causes of the extinction of species, and the principle of divergence.
One prominent way Darwin captured the complexity of this process is reflected in the single diagram to appear in all the editions of the Origin Velasco In this illustration was summarized the image of gradual change from common ancestral points, the depiction of the frequent extinction of most lineages, the general tendency of populations to diverge and fragment under the pressure of population increase, and a way of envisioning relations of taxonomic affinity to time.
It also depicted the persistence of some forms that are unchanged over long geological periods in which stable conditions prevail. Figure: Tree of life diagram from Origin of Species Origin between pages and The diagram can thus be applied to relationships between all levels of the Linnaean hierarchy with the vertical coordinates representing potentially vast expanses of time, and the horizontal coordinates the degree of taxonomic divergence over time.
In a very few pages of argument, the diagram was generalized to represent the most extensive group relations, encompassing the whole of geological time. This could suggest a naturalistic origin of original forms either by material emergence, or through the action of a vitalistic power of life.
It could also be read as implying the action of a supernatural cause. Conceptual space was thereby created for a reading of the Origin by some contemporaries, notably by the Harvard botanist Asa Gray —88 , as compatible with traditional natural theology Gray ; Lennox The sweep of the theoretical generalization that closed the natural selection chapter, one restated even more generally in the final paragraph of the book, required Darwin to deal with several obvious objections to the theory that would occupy him through the numerous revisions of the text between and Anticipating at first publication several obvious lines of objection, Darwin devoted much of the text of the original Origin to offering a solution in advance to predictable difficulties.
As Darwin outlined these main lines of objection, they included first the apparent absence of numerous slight gradations between species, both in the present and in the fossil record, of the kind that would seem to be predictable from the gradualist workings of the theory chps. Second, the existence of organs and structures of extreme complexity, such as the vertebrate eye, structures that had since the writings of Galen in Hellenistic antiquity served as a mainstay of the argument for external teleological design, needed some plausible explanation chp.
Third, the evolution of the elaborate instincts of animals and the puzzling problem of the evolution of social insects that developed sterile neuter castes, proved to be a particularly difficult issue for Darwin in the manuscript phase of his work and needed some account chp.
As a fourth major issue needing attention, the traditional distinction between natural species defined by interfertility, and artificial species defined by morphological differences, first dealt with in Chapter Two, required an additional chapter of analysis in which he sought to undermine the absolute character of the interbreeding criterion as a sign of fixed natural species chp.
As a fifth topic, in chapter ten, Darwin developed his position on the fossil record. At issue was whether the known fossil record displays a gradual progression of forms from simple to complex, as might be argued by Lamarckian transformists, or whether it supported the claim for the persistence of major groups throughout the record as might be held by someone endorsing the tradition of Cuvier see the entry on evolutionary thought before Darwin , Section 4. Darwin defended the progressionist view in this chapter.
To each of the lines of objection to his theory, Darwin offered his contemporaries plausible, if not for many critics compelling, replies Hull For reasons related both to the condensed and summary form of public presentation, and also as a reflection of the bold conceptual sweep of the theory, the primary argument of the Origin could not gain its force from the data presented by the book itself.
To deal with the question of the vertebrate eye in chapter six, for example, Darwin offered a few speculations on how such a structure could have developed by the gradual selection upon the rudimentary eyes of invertebrates.
But the primary solution offered was the ability of his theory to draw together in its total argument numerous lines of inquiry that would not otherwise receive a coherent explanation. In such a case one would. The long-standing issues of species origins, if not the ultimate origins of life, as well as the causes of their extinction, had been brought within the domain of naturalistic explanation.
This provided a context in which some could read Darwin as supplying additional support for the belief in an optimistic historical development of life under teleological guidance with the promise of ultimate historical redemption. Such readings also rendered the Origin seemingly compatible with the progressive evolutionism of Herbert Spencer —; see the entry on Herbert Spencer. Studies of non-Western receptions is a newer area in Darwin studies.
Three examples—France, Germany, and China—can be elaborated upon. Hilaire against Cuvier Gayon ; entry on evolutionary thought before Darwin , 4. Darwin was, as a consequence, viewed as endorsing rejected science by leading figures of French science. On the other hand, the Comtean three stages view of history, with its claim about the historical transcendence of speculative and metaphysical periods of science by a final period of experimental science governed by determinate laws, placed Darwinism in a metaphysical phase of speculative nature philosophy, as captured in the above quotation from Claude Bernard.
Richards , , ; Gliboff , ; Mullen More than any other individual, Haeckel made Darwinismus a major player in the polarized political and religious disputes of Bismarckian Germany R. Richards Through his polemical writings, such as the Natural History of Creation , Anthropogeny , and Riddle of the Universe —99 , Haeckel advocated a materialist monism in the name of Darwin, and used this as a stick with which to beat traditional religion. Beginning in with a partial translation by Ma Junwu — , a Chinese scientist, trained in chemistry and metallurgy in Japan and Germany, the early chapters of the Origin itself were made available to a Chinese audience.
This group can usually be distinguished from lay interpreters who may not have made distinctions between the views of Lamarck, Chambers, Schelling, Spencer, and Darwin on the historical development of life. But this only gives a crude instrument of analysis.
The case of Ernst Haeckel displays this imprecision. He was a leading professor of zoology at an important German university Jena , and he formed a generation of scientific workers in embryology and natural history who had major impact on the history of the life sciences. Richards chp. Darwin himself feared a similar reception, and he recognized the substantial challenge facing him in convincing this group and the larger community of scientific specialists with which he interacted and corresponded widely.
With this group he was only partially successful. Of central importance in analyzing this complex professional reception was the role assigned to normal individual variation and its causes. Darwin, however, left the specific causes of this variation unspecified beyond some effect of the environment on the sexual organs. As critics focused their attacks on the claim that such micro-differences between individuals could be accumulated over time without natural limits, Darwin began a series of modifications and revisions of the theory through a back and forth dialogue with his critics that can be followed by revisions to the text of the Origin.
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