William Clowes — printer. See all related overviews in Oxford Reference ». An abbreviated name for the most famous book by Charles Darwin that documented the phenomenon of evolution and elaborated a theory to explain its mechanism.
The first edition was published in , and no biological treatise written before or since has produced an impact upon society equal to it. The 1, copies of the first edition were sold out the first day. The Origin went through six editions, the last in Subjects: Science and technology — Life Sciences. Darwin was well-versed in the zoological and botanical literature of the day. He was well aware that it had the potential to redefine the foundations of biology.
Yet before they could do so, they had to be accepted as fact. To ensure this he evoked the power of the factual itself. Ultimately Darwin was successful. Even though these days creationism is witnessing a revival in some circles, no serious student of biology would doubt that the origin of species including the human species is grounded in exactly those evolutionary forces Darwin described.
In particular, during the latter part of the 19th century, all sorts of theories emerged seeking to apply the concept of evolution elsewhere. The ideological point of this mode of explanation is easily discerned: Evolutionism here fed into ideas of European superiority, domination, and colonialism. Moreover, ideas about racial superiority lacked any scientific basis and were not shared by Darwin.
Quite the contrary: his insights into the common biological foundations of all humanity made Darwin a strong supporter of abolitionism the doctrine advocating for the abolition of slavery. Social Darwinism ultimately came to an end because it was unsupported by science. These days, cultures of the past and present are no longer set against each other but appreciated in their own right, without seeking to establish a hierarchy between them.
Yet evolutionary theory is still going strong in disciplines such as computer science, medicine, and agriculture. In medicine, the looming catastrophe of widespread antibiotic resistance is fundamentally an evolutionary problem: by overusing antibiotics, we have inadvertently favoured those rare bacteria that can withstand our drugs.
To prevent a decidedly bleak future where antibiotics are useless, researchers are increasingly using evolutionary theory to develop new ways of preventing resistance. Darwin's book immediately attracted attention and controversy, not only from the scientific community, but also from the general public, who were ignited by the social and religious implications of the theory.
Darwin eventually produced six editions of this book. In time, a growing understanding of genetics and of the fact that genes inherited from both parents remain distinct entities - even if the characteristics of parents appear to blend in their children - explained how natural selection could work and helped vindicate Darwin's proposal.
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.
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