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

Product Information

In Chapter II, Darwin specifies that the distinction between species and varieties is arbitrary, with experts disagreeing and changing their decisions when new forms were found. He concludes that "a well-marked variety may be justly called an incipient species" and that "species are only strongly marked and permanent varieties". [121] He argues for the ubiquity of variation in nature. [122] Historians have noted that naturalists had long been aware that the individuals of a species differed from one another, but had generally considered such variations to be limited and unimportant deviations from the archetype of each species, that archetype being a fixed ideal in the mind of God. Darwin and Wallace made variation among individuals of the same species central to understanding the natural world. [117] Struggle for existence, natural selection, and divergence [ edit ]

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] 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. At the end of the Origin, Darwin as well imagines an “entangled bank, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth” (1859, p. 489). He wishes his reader to reflect that these very different forms have been produced by laws acting on them, the chief of which is natural selection, the struggle for life. Darwin then concludes:

Darwin today

Historians have remarked that here Darwin anticipated the modern concept of an ecological niche. [128] He did not suggest that every favourable variation must be selected, nor that the favoured animals were better or higher, but merely more adapted to their surroundings. Yet the bare bones of his theory of evolution are only part of what shapes this book. Darwin also communicates the obstacles he had to overcome to ensure its success and to turn it into what it became: a foundational text of the biological sciences that influenced all sorts of other disciplines, including anthropology, religious studies, and the Classics. Creationism and evolution Natural theology was not a unified doctrine, and while some such as Louis Agassiz were strongly opposed to the ideas in the book, others sought a reconciliation in which evolution was seen as purposeful. [240] In the Church of England, some liberal clergymen interpreted natural selection as an instrument of God's design, with the cleric Charles Kingsley seeing it as "just as noble a conception of Deity". [244] [245] In the second edition of January 1860, Darwin quoted Kingsley as "a celebrated cleric", and added the phrase "by the Creator" to the closing sentence, which from then on read "life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one". [174] While some commentators have taken this as a concession to religion that Darwin later regretted, [84] Darwin's view at the time was of God creating life through the laws of nature, [246] [247] and even in the first edition there are several references to "creation". [248] Darwin discusses morphology, including the importance of homologous structures. He says, "What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include the same bones, in the same relative positions?" This made no sense under doctrines of independent creation of species, as even Richard Owen had admitted, but the "explanation is manifest on the theory of the natural selection of successive slight modifications" showing common descent. [169] He notes that animals of the same class often have extremely similar embryos. Darwin discusses rudimentary organs, such as the wings of flightless birds and the rudiments of pelvis and leg bones found in some snakes. He remarks that some rudimentary organs, such as teeth in baleen whales, are found only in embryonic stages. [170] These factors also supported his theory of descent with modification. [31] Concluding remarks [ edit ] When Darwin published The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex twelve years later, he said that he had not gone into detail on human evolution in the Origin as he thought that would "only add to the prejudices against my views". He had not completely avoided the topic: [201]

BOOK THE ORANGE OF SPECIES: DARWIN’S CLASSIC WORK. NOW WITH MORE CITRUS! by CHARLES DARWIN OVERVIEW ] 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. 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. Charles Darwin’s 1837 sketch, his first diagram of an evolutionary tree from his First Notebook on Transmutation of Species. Wikimedia CommonsDarwin himself was not against the idea of a divine creator. Rather, he sought to situate the scientific reading of the world within a religious worldview. In the book’s conclusion he states: “I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed by the Creator.”