Our task here is to address four authors who have given different accounts of Darwin’s argument from ours: Richard A. Richards; Peter Gildenhuys; James Lennox; and D. Graham Burnett. Viewing analogical argumentation as hopelessly unclassy, each has sought to save Darwin’s reputation by denying that he founded his theory of natural selection on an analogical argument, and by offering alternative, non-analogical readings of Darwin’s argumentation. For Lennox, Darwin met the adequacy requirement of the vera causa tradition not through analogy but through speculative conjectures: “Darwinian thought experiments,” Lennox calls them. For Richards, the Origin should be read as an experimental report, in which artificial selection is the cause of new domesticated varieties that periodically go feral, allowing us, as the varieties return to the wild state, to observe the effects of natural selection in action. Explaining why these revisionist accounts cannot be accepted will confirm our explicit views about analogical argumentation, and some implicit ones about relating texts and contexts.

Here, we focus on two factors that contribute to a paper’s fitness: novelty and publicity. By measuring the novelty of the ideas shared in a paper, we can explore the link between the originality of the research and its impact. Since new ideas are typically snythesized from existing knowledge, we can assess the novelty of an idea by looking at the number domains from which researchers sourced their ideas and how expected or unexpected the combination of domains are. Evidence shows that rare combinations in scientific publications or inventions are associated with high impact. Yet novel ideas are riskier than conventional ones, frequently resulting in failure. Research indicates that scientists tend to be biased against novelty, making unconventional work more difficult to get off the ground. In order to mitigate risk while maximizing novelty, scientists must balance novelty with conventionality. We then look at the role that publicity plays in amplifying a paper’s impact. We find that publicity, whether good or bad, always boosts a paper’s citation counts, indicating that, even in science, it’s better to receive negative attention than no attention at all.