On November 24, 1859, the English naturalist Charles Robert Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life . In that book (Darwin 1859), he argued that all organisms, living and dead, were produced by a long, slow, natural process, from a very few original organisms. He called the process “natural selection,” later giving it the alternative name of “the survival of the fittest.” This first chapter is devoted to presenting (without critical comment) the argument of the Origin, very much with an eye to the place and role of natural selection. As a preliminary, it should be noted that the Origin, for all it is one of the landmark works in the history of science, was written in a remarkably “user-friendly” manner. It is not technical, the arguments are straightforward, the illustrative examples are relevant and easy to grasp, the mathematics is at a minimum, meaning non-existent. Do not be deceived. The Origin is also a very carefully structured piece of work (Ruse 1979a). Darwin knew exactly what he was doing when he set pen to paper.

Now we come to the elephant in the room. Darwin’s theory was incomplete. When the theory was completed, would natural selection prove to be that effective? Although he threw in a lot of assorted, presumed-relevant facts, no one, starting with Darwin, had much idea about the nature of variation – how it comes, what form it takes, how regular it is. And, without this knowledge, given that natural selection supposedly works on this variation, it is hard to make definite judgments about its effectiveness; especially since Darwin stressed that, although variation has causes, it is random in the sense of not appearing according to need. When he was not pushing the Lamarckian alternative, he was adamant that it is selection alone that is responsible for adaptation.

Turn now to those who think natural selection is vastly overrated as a cause of evolutionary change. It is at best a clean-up process after the real creative work has been done. It is little surprise that these critics come from within the organismic model, implicitly or explicitly. At the scientific level, we have encountered already the most (and properly) distinguished of them all, the American population geneticist Sewall Wright. Remember his “shifting balance theory,” where the key lay in genetic drift, as gene levels fluctuated randomly in small subpopulations, and then, when new adaptive features appeared, the subpopulations rejoined the larger group (probably the species), and through a form of group selection the new feature spread through the whole group. This is highly Spencerian – infused with a solid dose of Bergsonian vitalism – as equilibrium is disturbed and then regained at a higher level, part of an overall progressive process, presumably ending in humankind.

A little arbitrarily, but not entirely without reason, let us take 1959, the 100th anniversary of the Origin, as the date when the Darwinian paradigm finally came into its own. Natural selection and Mendelian genetics, now rapidly becoming molecular genetics, gave the explanation of the tree of life. If we continue to think in Kuhnian terms, what now of normal science? We should expect to see the subbranches of the consilience come into their own, as practitioners moved forward, theoretically, experimentally, and in nature, raising and solving their problems. And in major respects we do see exactly this.

In 1866, Thomas Hardy, raised a sincere member of the Church of England, wrote his sonnet “Hap.” It expressed the anxiety about – “fear of” is not too strong a term – the world into which natural selection has pitched us. No longer can we rely on a Good God to care for us, to suffer for us, to make possible eternal life. In the non-progressive world of Darwinian evolution, all is meaningless.

Among the many books authored by Peter Bowler, the eminent historian of evolutionary biology, three stand out: The Eclipse of Darwinism (1983); The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (1988); and Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World without Darwin (2013). Bluntly, he says: “there is now a substantial body of literature to convince anyone that the part of Darwin’s theory now recognized as important by biologists had comparatively little impact on late nineteenth century thought” (Bowler 1988, ix). I cannot say Bowler is entirely wrong. Indeed, in The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw (1979), I contributed to this “body of literature,” and my book was quite openly a synthesis of the state of Darwinian play in the second half of the nineteenth century. But is this the end of the story, and if it is, why is it the end of the story? Today, as Bowler also recognizes, we accept the finding of natural selection as a major scientific achievement, up there with relativity theory. Let us pick up on this paradox.

Natural selection. I am an evolutionist, which means that, to understand the present, we must dig into the past. That holds for culture as much as for biology. So, taking my own advice, where do we end up? Or, more precisely, where do we start off? As always, when dealing with Western culture, we begin with the Greeks, Plato and Aristotle. Neither of them was an evolutionist. Indeed, rather like the Buddhists, they believed that the (physical) world is eternal: no beginning, no end. But they did have much to say of great interest to our inquiry.

Time to pull back and get a little more conceptual. We need to ask some penetrating questions about the nature, the scope, the truth-value of natural selection. Finding answers, the quest begins in the past. Charles Darwin was a graduate of the University of Cambridge. The greatest British scientist of them all, Isaac Newton, was also a graduate of the University of Cambridge, and his spirit, his achievements, his reputation, infused every discussion about science, including about the life sciences. In his Principia, Newton started with his three laws of motion, together with his law of gravitational attraction, and then went on to infer, deductively, the pertinent terrestrial laws, those of Galileo, and the pertinent celestial laws, those of Copernicus affirming the heliocentric nature of the Universe and those of later thinkers, especially Kepler on planetary motion. It was a given that the ambitious young Charles Darwin would want to show Kant dead wrong. There could be a Newton of the blade of grass, and that Newton was going to be Charles Darwin.

When a new cause is introduced into science, as often as not it is accepted without trouble. Few, if any, had worries about the Watson–Crick double helix and the subsequent working out of the genetic code. Genetics was put on a molecular causal basis. However, it is not uncommon for there to be opposition. Huygens’ wave theory of light was an outsider for nearly two centuries. Sometimes worries are ongoing. One doubts that, as long as there are those interested in mental health, Freud’s Oedipus Complex is going to be happily accepted by all. There have been, continue to be, and probably always will be disputes, often bitter, about its causal status. As we have seen, natural selection did not have an altogether easy birth. But as time went by, things seem to have improved. Newton and Leibniz all over again.