Abstract
The nature and operation of natural selection are conveyed in the Origin of Species by two famous metaphors, whose history in Charles Darwin’s consciousness form the substance of this paper.1
Many friends and colleagues have contributed to this paper in a variety of ways. I wish to acknowledge the insight of my student Ronald Settle, and the help, criticism, and support of my colleagues in the Drew University Graduate School Sarah Henry-Corrington and Robert Ready, and of fellow students of science and culture Gillian Beer, Howard Gruber, Robert Richards and Jim Secord. I owe especial thanks to Ralph Colp and Jim Moore.
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Darwin, C.,On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, facsimile of 1st edn. (1859) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964).
Keynes, R. D. (ed.), Charles Darwin’s ‘Beagle’ Diary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Burkhardt, F. and Smith, S. (eds.), The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, v. 1, 1985.
Secord, J. A., ‘The discovery of a vocation: Darwin’s early geology’. Brit. J. Hist. Sci. 24:134–142, 1991.
Cams, C. G., ‘Nine letters on landscape painting’, in E. G. Holt (ed.), From the Classicists to the Impressionists: A Documentary History of Art and Architecture in the 19th Century (New York: NYU Press, 1966), p. 84.
Rupke, N. A., ‘Caves, fossils and the history of the earth’, in A. Cunningham and N. Jardine (eds.), Romanticism and the Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 254.
Darwin, C., Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle… from 1832 to 1836 (London: 1839).
See Pointon, M. R., Milton and English Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970).
Cams, C. G. in Holt, op. cit., pp. 89, 92–3.
Colp, R., Darwinian Recollections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), in preparation.
Kohn, D. (ed.) ‘Notebook D’, in P. H. Barrett, P. J. Gautrey, S. Herbert, D. Kohn and S. Smith (eds.), Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844 (Ithaca: British Museum (Natural History) and Cornell University Press, 1987).
Hodge, M. J. S. and Kohn, D., ‘The immediate origins of natural selection’, in D. Kohn (ed.), The Darwinian Heritage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 193–196.
Mayr notes Darwin began as a typologist and that even after 1838 typology remained an important component of his thinking. Mayr, E., One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 79. Mayr’s observation is illustrated by the maturation of the wedge metaphor. Only in Natural Selection, written after the decade-long study of barnacle and pigeon variation has the shift to individuals taken place: ‘Nature may be compared to a surface covered with ten-thou sand wedges, many of the same shape representing different species, all packed closely together and all driven in by incessant blows’: Here we have each wedge an individual and each wedge with its unique species shape. The quarryman’s wedge has faded, and Darwin is considering wedges of many shapes and sizes. So we are dealing with populations of wedge species. Even here the variability of the individual shapes is not specified. So as Mayr suggests, in some sense the shift to populational thinking is never total. To some historians Mayr’s terminology of populational versus typoplogical ‘thinking’ may seem to reveal an anachronistic commitment to an essentialist history of antonomous ideas. Yet Darwin clearly participates in the larger historical transition that really concerns Mayr. Thus, for a modern evolutionist such as Mayr, by 1857 Darwin’s ‘thinking’ — here meaning his imagery — was implicitly populational while in 1838 it was not. Given Darwin’s argument with its explicit use of variation, how else would one interpret individual wedges but as variable individuals? Yet it is also implicitly typological. A true Mayrian Darwin should never have written ‘many of the same shape representing different species’. The issue never gets beyond the implicit. He will always reside in the contradictory zone of implicitly ‘typological’ and implicitly ‘populational’ thinking. But the contradiction is not Darwin’s. It arises because history probably doesn’t operate in the way Mayr assumes it does: as a march of developing ‘thinkings’. But, I suggest we should be grateful to Mayr for his Whiggish categorical distinction between typological and population thinking. He gives us, and himself employs very effectively, a hermeneutic that helps clarify Darwin’s intentions.
Gruber, H. E., ‘Aspects of scientific discovery: aesthetics and cognition’, Reality Club 5, in press, attempts to systematize the aesthetic process of creative scientists. In part his model is based on his own deep study of Darwin. But he suggests that ‘For creative scientists the use of a relatively free literary form may be one good way to get some ideas said provisionally, unhampered by the demands of scientific discipline’ MS p. 18. He is referring to the ‘Beagle’ Diary as a narrative medium. As we see here the process of ‘playing’ may be very deep and have very concrete pay off.
Beer, G., “The face of nature”: Anthropomorphic elements in the language of The Origin of Species’, in L. Jordonova (ed.), Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature (London: Free Association Books, 1986), p. 236 discusses an analogous phenom enon in the 1857 version where Darwin’s use of similes such as ‘may be compared to’, representing’, and ‘we may suppose’ dilutes ‘the elaboration and immediacy of experience’.
Kohn, D., ‘Darwin’s ambiguity: The secularization of biological meaning’, Brit. J. Hist. Sci. 22: 234, 1989.
Moore, J. R., ‘Of love and death: “Why Darwin gave up Christianity”’, in J. R. Moore (ed.), History, Humanity and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Novak, B., Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
Gould, S. J., ‘The wheel of fortune and the wedge of progress’, Nat. Hist. 3: 14–16, 1989.
Beer, op. cit., 1986, p. 233 aptly summarizes the important wider claims in Colp, R., ‘Charles Darwin’s vision of organic nature’, New York State Journal of Medicine 79: 1627, 1979: ‘Colp speculates on the sexual and unconscious significance of wedging for Darwin. He links its appearance in Darwin’s thought to his imminent marriage and also to his feelings towards his Wedgwood relations, and he considers that it may have come to symbolize Darwin’s assertion of himself in the areas of work, sex, money, and resistance to opposition’.
As Beer, op. cit., p. 228 notes, “In the first edition of The Origin both nature and natural selection have grammatically the function of agents”. Natural Selection after all is the analogue of Artificial Selection, which implies a breeder -” As Beer further notes: Darwin endows natural selection ‘with latent activity’. Variation causes, generation multiplies, but natural selection ‘picks out with unerring skill’. The implication of an active and external agent is far stronger in the long run”. In this regard also note (Beer p. 231): The sense of a brooding presence [in the Origin, 1st edn] was perhaps reinforced by the way in which he distinguished the gender of nature and natural selection. Nature is always ‘she’ whereas natural selection is neuter — the neuter becomes a form of sex, sexless force.’ Perhaps it is Darwin’s own sexuality that is masked as a ‘sexless force’. Although Beer does not go as far as Colp in asserting Darwin’s self identification in/with the wedging metaphor, having clearly deciphered that natural selection is an agency, with implied personification, and possessor of a sexless (neuter) gender — she clearly recognizes a personal agency in the ‘wedger’ when she speaks of ‘the implied presence of a figure wielding a hammer’.
Cf. Beer, op. cit., p. 237: ‘The wedge imagery is here [Origin] summarized and placed in apposition to Nature — not ‘the economy of Nature’, or ‘the surface’ but ‘the face of Nature’.
See Beer, op. cit., pp. 232–3 for Victorian scientific and literary expressions of nature as feminine. Note that feminizing Nature serves Darwin’s secularizing naturalistic strategy by distinguishing ‘her’ from God.
Beer, op. cit., p. 234.
Colp, R., ‘Charles Darwin’s “insufferable grief”’, Free Associations 9: 7–44, 1987; Bowlby, J., Charles Darwin: a New Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).
Moore, op. cit., 1989, pp. 220–222
Burkhardt, F. and Smith, S. (eds.), The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), vol. 5, pp. 540–542, ‘Charles Darwin’s memorial of Anne Elizabeth Darwin’; olp, op. cit., 1987; Darwin Papers, Cambridge University Library, DAR 210.13).
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Kohn, D. (1996). The Aesthetic Construction of Darwin’s Theory. In: Tauber, A.I. (eds) The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 182. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1786-6_2
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