The Origin of Species (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Darwin [248]
2 (p. 11) My work is now nearly finished; but as it will take me two or three more years to complete it, and as my health is far from strong, I have been urged to publish this Abstract: The Origin of Species was intended to be an abstract of the “big book” Darwin had begun working on in 1854. In 1858, when the book was half-completed, Alfred Russel Wallace sent Darwin an essay that independently described natural selection. Pressured by Wallace’s paper, Darwin wrote the “Abstract” in eight months. The first two chapters of his “big book” were published as The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), and the rest was not published until 1975, in an edition edited by R. C. Stauffer, Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection, Being the Second Part of His Big Species Book Written from 1856 to 1858.
3 (p. 13) The author of the ‘Vestiges of Creation’: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) was published anonymously and remained anonymous for many years, despite its enormous popularity. The author, Scottish publisher and author Robert Chambers, was not a scientist; but his daring book provoked great controversy and the sort of hostility from scientists that Darwin dreaded. Here Darwin uses Chambers’s evolutionary argument as a foil to his own, emphasizing Chambers’s failure to understand the complexity of interaction among organisms and between organisms and their environment.
4 (p. 13) I have invariably found that our knowledge, imperfect though it be, of variation under domestication, afforded the best and safest clue [to the means of modification and coadaptation]: Wallace, among others, believed that variation under domestication could not be taken as analogous to variation in nature; but Darwin saw that the fact of variation unprovoked by the environment and unexplained was essential to his overall argument, and he thus began his book with the chapter “Variation under Domestication.”
5 (p. 15) I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification: Note that Darwin does not, like his modern followers, claim that natural selection accounts for all adaptation and change. In fact, Darwin allowed the possibility of some influence from the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
6 (p. 20) some slight amount of change may, I think, be attributed to the direct action of the conditions of life—as, in some cases, increased size from amount of food, ... and perhaps the thickness of fur from climate: This is one of the places where Darwin allows something other than what we would call “genetic” factors to be recognized as causing variation. The “effect of use,” as Darwin calls it in the following paragraph, is an idea quite Lamarckian (see the introduction, p. xxxi) and ultimately incompatible with the theory of natural selection.
7 (p. 20) There are many laws regulating variation, some few of which can be dimly seen, and will be hereafter briefly mentioned: Darwin could not have known anything about DNA or genetics, and thus for him the “laws regulating variation” were unknown. He assumed that there were laws and tried to avoid the idea that variations were merely the result of chance, as this would have meant that his theory of evolution was based on “chance.” However, this is exactly how he was read by many thinkers and writers: English novelist Thomas Hardy’s pessimism, for example, is built on the notion that the world is indeed governed by chance, by “crass casualty” (see Hardy’s poem “Hap”).
8 (p. 35) The key is man’s power of accumulative selection: nature gives successive variations; man adds them up in certain directions useful to him: This sentence offers a stunningly