The origin of species by means of natural selection, or The preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life / Charles Darwin ; edited with an introduction by J.W. Burrow.

  • Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882.
Date:
1968
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The origin of species by means of natural selection, or The preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life / Charles Darwin ; edited with an introduction by J.W. Burrow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    editor's introduction stood to carry immediate conviction to any qualified scientist not blinded by prejudice. Yet this was far from being the case. Much hind-sighted amusement has been derived from the pro¬ nouncement of the unfortunate Thomas Bell, President of the Linnaean Society, who, in his presidential address in 1858, the year in which Darwin's and Alfred Wallace's papers on the origin of species by natural selection were read to the society, declared that the past year 'has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, the department of science in which they occur'. Yet after reading Darwin's short paper - part of which is reproduced in The Origin on pp. 116 ff. - one finds the President's remark, if still obtuse, at least understandable. In confirmation one can take the case of Darwin's friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker, who knew of Darwin's theory long before the general public, who answered his queries and read his drafts, but who was not finally converted until after the publication of The Origin, The impact of Darwin's argument, as МШ noted, was cumulative rather than immediate. For all that, and for all its lack of challenging epigrams. The Origin is a profoundly polemical work, though it is not parti¬ cularly polemical in manner. Its tone is in a sense defensive; Darwin was not in the position of a scientist who announces a theory confirmed by striking experiments. He was trying to show that it was possible that transmutation of species had occurred and that natural selection, the preservation by the en¬ vironment of specially well adapted variations, was a possible explanation, and that these explanations fitted the facts better than any others. He was not in a position to demonstrate con¬ clusively that evolution had occurred, or that it had occurred I by natural selection. Moreover he knew, of course, that he was touching an intensely sensitive subject - one which affected some of the most cherished ideas of his contemporaries: the Ï truth of the Bible; the superintending providence of God in the natural world; and the unique and privileged position of the human race as the centre and raison d*être of the creation. Darwin's tone throughout is mild, unprovocative and muted by the desire not to give unnecessary offence, though never to the 15