The Orange of Species: Darwin's Classic Work. Now with More Citrus!

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The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiples like rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scott, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late, and leave few behind him. Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts—and in a dozen generations five-sixths of the population would be Celts, but five-sixths of the property, of the power, of the intellect, would belong to the one-sixth of Saxons that remained. In the eternal “struggle for existence,” it would be the inferior and less favoured race that had prevailed—and prevailed by virtue not of its good qualities but of its faults. It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us ... Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. [173] 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. 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? 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.

Every species is fertile enough that if all offspring survived to reproduce, the population would grow (fact). In December 1831, he joined the Beagle expedition as a gentleman naturalist and geologist. He read Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology and from the first stop ashore, at St. Jago, found Lyell's uniformitarianism a key to the geological history of landscapes. Darwin discovered fossils resembling huge armadillos, and noted the geographical distribution of modern species in hope of finding their "centre of creation". [21] The three Fuegian missionaries the expedition returned to Tierra del Fuego were friendly and civilised, yet to Darwin their relatives on the island seemed "miserable, degraded savages", [22] and he no longer saw an unbridgeable gap between humans and animals. [23] As the Beagle neared England in 1836, he noted that species might not be fixed. [24] [25] The conceit that nature is working for “the improvement of each organic being” is repeated several more times throughout the Origin (1859, pp. 149, 194, 201, and 489). Despite the ravages of natural selection, the nature that appears in Darwin’s theory nonetheless expresses compassion and altruistic concern—and thus hardly acts as a mechanical, indifferent force.

All the foregoing rules and aids and difficulties in classification are explained, if I do not greatly deceive myself, on the view that the natural system is founded on descent with modification; that the characters which naturalists consider as showing true affinity between any two or more species, are those which have been inherited from a common parent, and, in so far, all true classification is genealogical; that community of descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking,... [168] The Orange of Species: Darwin’s Classic Work. Now with More Citrus! Charles Darwin Audiobook Online history” ( Origin 1859: 488). 3. The Reception of the Origin 3.1 The Popular Reception of Darwin’s Theory

Social Darwinism ultimately came to an end because it was unsupported by science. At the same time, ideas about cultural evolution fell out of fashion, as did ideas about allegedly “primitive” societies. 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.Most are familiar with the trajectory of Darwin’s career, but to set the context of his work, let me briefly fill in the broad outlines of his early life. In Chapter 13, Francisco Ayala describes a fundamental discrepancy between Darwin’s scientific methodology and how Darwin portrayed his methods to the general public. The version for public consumption emphasized how Darwin proceeded on the principles of Baconian induction, which at that time were favored by British philosophers such as John Stuart Mill. Under this approach, facts are collected wholesale—presumably without the bias of preconceived notions—and broader biological principles eventually emerge. The actual methods of Darwin, Ayala contends, were far different from this depiction, falling instead squarely within a hypothetico-deductive framework. The latter scientific method has two steps: the formulation of one or more conjectures or hypotheses about the natural world; and the design and implementation of critical empirical tests of whether deductions derived from each hypothesis are consistent with real-world observations. In support of his contention that Darwin consistently used the hypothetico-deductive method, Ayala cites examples from Darwin’s work and even uses some of Darwin’s own words, such as “How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service.” Ayala speculates on why Darwin sometimes pretended to be a Baconian inductivist when in fact he mostly practiced what today would be considered modern hypothesis-driven deductive science. a b c The book's full original title was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. In the 1872 sixth edition, "On" was omitted, so the full title is The origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. This edition is usually known as The Origin of Species. The 6th is Darwin's final edition; there w