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of perfection attained under nature: This passage is valuably explicit in its argument against “perfection.” Darwin’s theory does not allow perfection, for the world he describes is always changing and the niches in nature are reconfigured by those changes. The variations in the organisms as they fill those niches can be “perfect” only in the sense that under present conditions they work. Interpretations of Darwin that use him to project some ultimate perfection, some “telos” to which all the endless changes point, are contradicted by passages like this one. Here Darwin characteristically uses the word “perfect” but qualifies it: “Perfect” functions here to mean as good as necessary, better than its competition, in the particular contexts they inhabit. Nature allows no greater perfection.

21 (p. 227) Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links?: The popular notion of the “missing link” derives from this argument. One of the primary criticisms of Darwin’s theory has always been that no form has been found that is intermediate between ape and human. Here Darwin anticipates that argument and explains why finding such a form would be unlikely. It is important to remember that, based on his theory, humans are not descended from apes but from some earlier form from which both apes and humans are descended.

22 (p. 249) all the most eminent palœontologists ... and all our greatest geologists... have ... maintained the immutability of species. But I have reason to believe that one great authority, Sir Charles Lyell, from further reflexion entertains grave doubts on this subject: Although Lyell was a loyal friend of Darwin, and was persuaded in some way by the arguments of Origin, it took him a very long time before he would be willing to endorse publicly evolution by natural selection. Darwin was constantly disappointed by Lyell’s unwillingness to give wholehearted support to the theory. Lyell’s Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863) struggles to include the human race in the theory of “transmutation,” but does so in a waffling way. In Principles of Geology ( 1830), Lyell had gone out of his way to attack the idea of evolution, at least as Lamarck argued it. In The Antiquity of Man (1863) Lyell desperately attempts to hold on to traditional religion, and he cites approvingly American botanist Asa Gray, who, Lyell says, argues that “there is no tendency in the doctrine of Variation and Natural Selection to weaken the foundations of Natural Theology.”

23 (p. 269) each new species is formed by having had some advantage in the struggle for life over other and preceding forms: Darwin here addresses directly the question of “progress.” His theory has been most often taken to imply that the world is constantly moving “progressively,” a view that has been used to give scientific sanction to the idea of the superiority of what have been called the most advanced races. What Darwin argues here needs to be read in full context: He claims that more recent races are “higher” than earlier ones, but only if they all live “under a nearly similar climate.” For Darwin, progress is always relative to particular geographic and climatic conditions, although it is clear that in his The Descent of Man he was committed to the idea of human progress.

24 (p. 284) This view of the relation of species in one region to those in another, does not differ much ... from that lately advanced in an ingenious paper by Mr. Wallace, in which he concludes, that “every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species”: Alfred Russel Wallace may legitimately be described as the codiscoverer of natural selection. It was his paper that finally provoked Darwin, with the advice of his friends, to announce his commitment to evolution by natural selection, and to write the “Abstract” that became Origin (see note 2, above). Wallace’s paper was read before the Linnaean Society with other materials that demonstrated Darwin’s priority in the discovery. The