A brief introduction to the life of Charles Darwin and his discovery of the causal role of natural selection in explaining evolutionary change. The effect of the publication of Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, the long delay and the publication in 1859 of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

This is a myth that is ‘good in parts.’ T. H. Huxley certainly emerged as the leading defender of the Origin of Species against critics who believed that organic forms are designed – directly or indirectly – by God. But this does not mean that he accepted natural selection as a complete explanation of how evolution works. The theory suited his naturalistic ideology because it was based solely on observable processes. From the start, though, Huxley cautioned that Darwin needed to show how artificial selection could produce a new species and (more importantly) that he was wrong to rule out the possibility of new characters appearing by abrupt saltations. The latter point is the key to a basic difference between their worldviews. As a morphologist Huxley was not convinced that the fundamental structure of each type could be the accumulated product of a series of small adaptive modifications. He eventually suggested that forces internal to the organism might play a role in directing variation – a position not far removed from that of anti-Darwinians such as Mivart.

This chapter discusses Darwin’s lifelong interest in unconscious agency and instinct. Darwin typically treats instinct as a rational action that has become habitual and thus heritable; instinct embodies a cognitive process that does not know itself as such. His discussion of instinct is thus connected to other moments in his work where he uses the term ‘unconscious’; his treatment of previous taxonomists of species as unconsciously providing evidence for species transmutation, and his discussion of unconscious selection as an analogy for the effect of aesthetic preference in sexual selection. Darwin’s unconscious anticipates Freud’s as the embodiment of human agency in biological history.

John Gould’s father was a gardener. A very, very good one – good enough to be head of the Royal Gardens at Windsor. John apprenticed, too, becoming a gardener in his own right at Ripley Castle, Yorkshire, in 1825. As good as he was at flowers and trees, birds became young John Gould’s true passion early in life. Like John Edmonstone, John Gould (1804–1881) adopted Charles Waterton’s preservation techniques that kept taxidermied bird feathers crisp and vibrant for decades (some still exist in museums today), and he began to employ the technique to make extra cash. He sold preserved birds and their eggs to fancy Eton schoolboys near his father’s work. His collecting side-hustle soon landed him a professional post: curator and preserver of the new Zoological Society of London. They paid him £100 a year, a respectable sum for an uneducated son of a gardener, though not enough to make him Charles Darwin’s social equal (Darwin initially received a £400 annual allowance from his father plus £10,000 as a wedding present).

Darwin claimed that On the Origin of Species, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was only an “abstract” of that much longer book he had begun to write in 1856, after his irreverent meeting with J. D. Hooker, T. H. Huxley, and T. V. Wollaston, and Lyell’s exasperated encouragement in May. But he never completed that larger book. Instead, he worked on plants and pigeons and collected information through surveys from other naturalists and professional specimen hunters like Alfred Russel Wallace for the better part of a decade.

For all their scientific prowess and public renown, there is no comparable Lyell-ism, Faraday-ism, Einstein-ism, Curie-ism, Hawking-ism, or deGrasse-Tyson-ism. So, there must be something even more powerful than scientific ideas alone caught in the net of this ism attached to Darwin. And whatever the term meant, it’s fair to say that Darwinism frightened Bryan.

Historian Everett Mendelsohn was intrigued. In the middle of writing a review of an annual survey of academic publications in the History of Science, he marveled that an article in that volume contained almost 40 pages’ worth of references to works on Darwin published in just the years between 1959 and 1963. Almost 200 works published in a handful of years – no single figure in the history of science commanded such an impressive academic following. Yet Mendelsohn noted that, paradoxically, no one had written a proper biography of Darwin by 1965. Oh sure, there was commentary. Lots of commentary. But so many of the authors were retired biologists who had a tendency toward hagiography or, the opposite, with axes to grind.

Meeting the “White Raja of Sarawak” in Singapore in 1853 had been a stroke of luck. Honestly, it could have been a major turning point in what had been an unlucky career so far for 30-year-old collector Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) (Figure 4.1). But the steep, rocky, sweaty climb up Borneo’s Mt. Serembu (also known as Bung Moan or Bukit Peninjau) in the last week of December 1855 wasn’t exactly what Wallace expected. His eyeglasses fogged in the humidity. Bamboo taller than buildings crowded the narrow path. Near the top, the rainforest finally parted. But it revealed neither a temple nor some sort of massive colonial complex with all the trappings of empire worthy of a “raja.” Instead, there leaned a modest, very un-colonial-ruler-like white cabin. When he saw it, Wallace literally called it “rude.”

Charles Darwin spent nearly the whole of his writing career attempting to convince his colleagues, the general public, and, by extension, you and me, that change occurs gradually. Tiny slivers of difference accumulate over time like grains of sand in a vast hourglass. Change happens, in other words. It’s painfully slow, but it’s inevitable. By implication, two organisms that look different enough to us to be classified as separate species share, many tens of thousands or even millions of generations back, the same ancestors. (Inbreeding means we don’t even need to go back quite that many generations to demonstrate overlap, but you get the point.) But change that gradual means, as Darwin himself well recognized, that looking for “missing links” would be a pretty silly errand. Differences between one generation and the next look to our eyes just like common variation. It’s one grain falling from the top of the hourglass to the bottom. You can’t perceive the change. You would have to go back in time to find the very first individuals who possessed a particular trait – bat-like wings, say, or human-ish hands – and then, turning to their parents, you would see something almost identical.

Transmutation. “Evolutio,” if you wanted to be fancy and Italian about it. Whatever you want to call it, the grand unrolling of one type into another, connecting all living things into a single tree of life was all the rage among the society gentlemen. James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, an influential Scottish judge in the 1700s, had said shocking things about it. Monboddo’s metaphysics separated humans from brutes by only the thinnest slice of cognition. And imagine how he scandalized the chattering classes when, according to rumor anyway, he suggested perhaps tails even lingered, dangling from the spinal cords of the underdeveloped. They called him an “eccentric,” a fusty, argumentative judge and a voracious reader. Perhaps too learned – genius and madness, you know.

The Good News finally snagged him. In late September 1881, he was near the end, bedridden, languishing in a soft purple robe, still able to read, though he always preferred to be read to. Lady Hope entered the drawing room at the top of the stairs quietly, respectfully, as the golden hour gently illuminated corn fields and English oak forests through his picturesque bay window. The faintest crown of white hair encircled his head in the late afternoon light; the rest was wizardly beard (Figure 6.1). Lady Hope, the well-known evangelist, was visiting the Darwins, and she approached the old scientist cautiously. But she needn’t have. In his wrinkled hands he held the Bible, open to the New Testament Epistle of Hebrews. “The Royal Book,” Darwin called it, serenely, mentioning a few favored passages.

The stone is still there in the garden. That’s what gets me. It’s not the house itself – houses decay slowly and can be preserved pretty easily, especially in Britain where even an eighteenth-century country house is not “old.” It’s not even the tree behind the house, alive when Charles Darwin still lived in his Down House, now propped up by guywires against inevitable collapse as a kind of totem of the great naturalist’s existence. If you leave the rear exit, the one that takes you to Darwin’s preserved greenhouse and the stunning flora on a pretty path lined in that particular English way of making the perfectly manicured seem somehow “natural,” you might glance to the left and see behind a small iron fence a one-foot-wide stone. A round mill stone or pottery wheel, it was, or appears to have been.

For as long as scientists have been studying biological evolution, there have been critics heckling them from the sidelines. We discuss some historical aspects of this problem, some personal experiences of the author, and we set up the discussions to come.

From the very outset Darwin’s extensive use of metaphor in the Origin has proved controversial, with some people thinking Darwin was thereby committed to ascribing intentions or even consciousness to nature, and others fearing that readers would be misled into thinking that he was. Also, some have argued (e.g. Gillian Beer) that Darwin should be regarded as much as a poet as a scientist. We argue that, on the contrary, his metaphors have a substantively scientific role, and do real work in the development of his argument. Firstly, as Darwin himself stresses, ‘such metaphorical expressions… are almost necessary for brevity’. Secondly, they provide a method for forming new concepts (as in the case of ‘struggle’). Thirdly, and, most significantly, the use of metaphor enables Darwin to explore further the analogy between NS and AS and directly compare the achievements of human breeding and those of the struggle for existence.

There are conditions satisfied by successful analogical arguments which Darwin’s argument satisfies. Darwin first establishes that breeding practices are an analogical model of the struggle for existence in the wild: just as humans discriminate in favour of animals and plants with desirable traits, so the struggle for existence discriminates in favour of creatures with traits best enabling them to cope with that struggle. Domestic breeding creates new varieties because it is systematic – there will be a tendency always to discriminate in favour of the same set of traits. The struggle for existence will have the same systematic tendency to favour certain traits at the expense of others. Therefore it is possible for it also to create new varieties. Darwin now alternates the analogy and its proportionality: if natural selection (NS) is to new wild varieties as artificial selection (AS) is to new domesticated varieties, then NS is to AS as new wild varieties are to new domesticated varieties. Thus if NS is a massively more efficient selector than AS, and the greater the cause, the greater the effect, then, a fortiori, NS should produce not only new varieties but new species.