The Origin of Species (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Darwin [16]
If during the long course of ages and under varying conditions of life, organic beings vary at all in the several parts of their organisation, and I think this cannot be disputed; if there be, owing to the high geometrical powers of increase of each species, at some age, season, or year, a severe struggle for life, and this certainly cannot be disputed; then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their conditions of existence, causing an infinite diversity in structure, constitution, and habits, to be advantageous to them, I think it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variation ever had occurred useful to each being’s own welfare, in the same way as so many variations have occurred useful to man. But if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterised will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offspring similarly characterised. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection (pp. 111-112).
This is Darwin’s argument: variations, heritability, the right conditions for selection. It is airtight and, given the elements he claims to be indisputable, it is indisputable. It stands or falls, he argues, according to the “balance of evidence” that he educes in the rest of the book. People have been battling over this evidence and producing more ever since the publication of the book. But the book, as one of the most interesting and important in the history of Western culture, remains open to us, figures in our language and our way of thinking and imagining, and—seen in the light of the long cultural disputes and enormous scientific advances of the last 150 years—offers us a vision of nature that is tough, unsentimental, and respectful and loving, a vision from which we still have much to learn.
George Levine is Kenneth Burke Professor of English Literature at Rutgers University, and Director of the University’s Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture. He has written extensively about Victorian literature and culture, and has for a long time focused attention on Darwin and the relations between science and literature, particularly in his Darwin and the Novelists. He has written and edited many books, on subjects ranging from Frankenstein to the works of Thomas Pynchon. Most recently, he has edited The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot and written a study of Victorian scientific thought and literature, Dying to Know. His earlier volume, The Realistic Imagination, which focuses on the development of the English novel in the nineteenth century, also connects it with science. His most Darwinian and most personal book, Lifebirds, is his volume of birding memoirs, illustrated by his wife, Marge. He is currently at work on a second book on Darwin and the way his thought has been used and misused.
Notes to the Introduction
1. This is the title of Darwin’s first edition, the one we have used in preparing this volume. The work went through six editions during Darwin’s lifetime; starting with the second edition, Darwin removed “On” from the title.
2. Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).
3. Gillian Beer, “Darwin’s Reading and the Fictions of Development,” in David Kohn, ed., The Darwinian Heritage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 543-588; see particularly pp. 554-557.
4. For a splendid discussion of the cultural impact of Vestiges, with some discussion of Darwin, see James Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
5. See Morse Peckham, ed., The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: A Variorum Text (Philadelphia: