The Origin of Species (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Darwin [12]
The world Darwin opens up for the reader is almost endlessly diverse and strange and not subject to traditional interpretation, and the wonder is both that it could have been developed without intention, and that Darwin could have found a way to imagine it. The “nature” thus imagined is more astonishingly resourceful than Paley’s “designer” had been thought to make it, and Darwin’s language offers it to us not in a kind of cynical celebration of the dismissal of spirit from the world, but in a spirit of love and admiration: “When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled” (pp. 383-384). Nature is not bursting with intention and meaning, but The Origin of Species is.
The Argument
What then does The Origin of Species mean? For much of the Western world it means that humans are related to apes; it means that God did not have a hand in the creation of species or in the workings of nature; it means that all things are in flux; it means that nature is governed by a rule of “survival of the fittest”; it means that it’s a dog-eat-dog world; it means that time stretches back inconceivably far, and that in stretching into the future it is aimed at no place in particular—it has no aim.
But Origin, remember, says nothing about the development of humankind except that it will “throw light” on the question; it does not investigate the ultimate beginning of things but confines itself to the question of how modern species developed; “survival of the fittest” was not Darwin’s phrase, but Herbert Spencer‘s, and it doesn’t appear in the first edition of Origin; the idea of “nature red in tooth and claw” is Tennyson’s, not Darwin‘s, and indeed Darwin’s world is as full of mutual dependencies as of war, extermination, and violence.
The cultural significance of Darwin’s work is endlessly debatable, but the outlines of his basic argument are indisputably clear and extraordinarily simple. As David Sloan Wilson has put it, “Darwin’s theory is so simple that it can be explained in a single paragraph, but its implications are so profound that the study of life was transformed.”9 And anyone who wants to talk about Darwin needs to disentangle the various popular, tendentious, or ideologically driven conceptions of his thought from his fundamentally simple argument. Here it is, in a nutshell: ( 1 ) Organisms produce observable individual variations from their fundamental genetic inheritances; (2) these variations are inheritable; (3) their perpetuation through heritability is largely determined by their usefulness in adapting the organism to its environment—in increasing its opportunity to survive and reproduce. This is not, of course, Darwin’s language, and the simple ideas require a great deal of elaboration. But adaptive evolution by natural selection is built on these three conditions.
Origin, as Darwin says, is “one long argument,” and that argument begins in the first chapter by establishing the possibility of the transformation of organisms through inheritance—the clearest example of this is through “variation under domestication.” In chapter I, Darwin shows that all domestic animals produce variations and that breeders, watching closely, can select the animals with the most pronounced variation in the direction they want, and breed them so that in generation after generation the chosen variation grows more pronounced. Over the course of time, then, the variations can become so extreme that it is difficult even for breeders to believe that the various forms of, say, pigeons, or of dogs, can possibly be descended from the same species.