Andrew's Wiki
Origin Species

• pre 1858: all sorts of naturalists posit different ideas that prefigure natural selection
• 1858: Read papers about the topic to the Linnaeus Society
• 1859: Origin of Species published
  • What does Darwin offer? The mechanism by which the development of species works
• 1871: Descent of Man published

Principal Ideas

• Species not immutable
  • Species not created spontaneously
  • Not created by God (natural law only, not miracle)
• Changes don’t just occur because of environmental changes
• Species develop by natural selection
  • Organism has new characteristic
    • Just inherited, then preserved (not deliberately created)
  • New characteristic gives it an “edge” over the others
  • Therefore can reproduce more
  • Therefore passes on the trait
• He does call it specifically “survival of the fittest!”
  • “The preservation of favorable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called Natural Selection, or Survival of the Fittest.”
• Species diversify to succeed
  • Can’t overlap with existing species b/c of competition
  • Novelty is at a premium
• Other types of selection
  • Mutual selection (each species helps another)
  • Sexual selection (what makes one male hotter than another?)

Significance to Victorian Culture

• Crisis of faith: God isn’t running the show
  • It’s not about intention or about affection
  • Pure, blind struggle
• Utilitarianism
  • “Nature…cares nothing for appearances, except in so far as they are useful.”
• Emphasis on destruction and competition
  • Extinction is very important here (geology) for proving his theory
  • Apocalyptic! Scary! Grim!
  • Species most alike one another will compete the most
    • You destroy the ones closest to you (“will press hardest on its nearest kindred”)
• Extremity
  • The world is getting more and more diverse
  • The middle, the intermediate, will die off
    • Why vote the safe route? It’s either radical or conservative
  • Justifies specialization
    • Each organ has its job, each animal its specific niche
  • Lower forms will never die off
    • “Gee, you mean we’ll always have the poor around?”
• The world is getting weirder and weirder
  • To survive, you have to have something new to offer
  • Only the oddballs will survive
  • The world is constantly getting more variety (in type, not number)
• Relativity
  • Today’s species can be tomorrow’s genus or order
  • You can’t really judge whether one species is more “specialized” than another
    • A worm is just as complicated as a human being (awesome!)
  • Organization is great, but over-organization makes you delicate
    • Generally, you want more specialization, but sometimes, it makes your body weak and difficult to protect
    • Effete European civilization, over-delicate and weak
• Anti-progress
  • We can’t judge what’s good and bad in the long run
    • How do we know we’re actually well evolved?
  • The simple might actually be better evolved
    • But we want to be better than everyone else! You’re taking that confidence away from me!
  • “Survival of the fittest does not necessarily include progressive development.”
    • Humans, especially the European (!), may be _over_developed
  • “In some few cases there has been what we must call retrogression of organization.”
• Uncertainty
  • Today’s hot species might die off tomorrow
  • Will humanity die off?
  • “But which groups will ultimately prevail, no man can predict.”
  • “We have no facts to guide us, speculation on the subject is almost useless.”

Style

• Preface admits that these ideas are community, collaborative
• There’s not enough space to prove everything!
  • Too much information for too little time
• Necessity of providing endless examples
  • ”...treated properly only by giving long catalogues of facts.”
• Can’t get away from personifying Nature
  • Hard to get away from the whole God idea (anthropomorphic force)
    • “So again is it difficult to avoid personifying the word Nature; but I mean by nature, only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws….”
    • The personification is “just a metaphor” “needed for brevity”
  • Complains about “so imperfect is our view” and nature “silently and insensibly working” and “as far as our ignorance permits”
    • It’s like he’s still using religious language and sacred attitude
• “The polity of nature”
  • Nature acts like a good governor