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By Root 1658 0

and the almost overwhelming accumulation of details deployed in support; but it is deceptively simple. No book with so clear and well argued a position has been so variously interpreted and so widely misunderstood; few have been as difficult for its readers fully to absorb. The simple argument is so fundamentally anti-intuitive that even now, after 150 years, it has been difficult not to distort it in directions more comfortably consistent with readers’ assumptions about the way the world is. Reading the book remains an adventure, and the activity of imagining Darwin’s prolific, diverse, and often very beautiful world continues to be an exciting challenge to one’s tacit assumptions about the way the world works.

The Origin of Species is not only a fundamental work in the history of science; it is a unique book in the history of English literature. There are few as important. That Darwin was a great scientist everyone knows, but it is not immediately obvious that he was a great writer as well. Yet no writer of the nineteenth century had to struggle more strenuously with the limits of language, none was more imaginatively and creatively metaphorical, few were more influential in shaping other writers’ imagination of the world: none had a more significant and lasting effect on Western culture.

Great artists transform the language of their culture, and one can hear those transformations in the very language that we speak. It is hard for any English speaker to get through a day without, consciously or not, invoking Shakespeare. Although Darwin’s book does not echo in our language with Shakespeare’s kind of proverbial richness, our language, as well as our conceptions of what the world is like, owe much to Origin. In order to describe nature governed by the processes of descent by modification through natural selection, Darwin had to fight against a language that by its nature denied the idea. Nouns, for example, declare the firmly defined and permanent boundaries of things; but in Darwin’s world there are no permanent boundaries and virtually every organism varies through time. Identity is determined in part by similarities of things within a class, and Darwin’s efforts were to show that, while there are indeed similarities, there tend always to be differences—variations—that make the identity questionable. Moreover, he sets everything from rocks to barnacles to birds and mammals in motion, and everything is detectably marked with the vestiges, scars, and incrustations of history. History comes to account for differences and to determine identity, and history marks all things as transient. Darwin’s theory makes the present a living museum—although he is careful himself to indicate that it is “a poor collection made at hazard and at rare intervals” (p. 382)—revealing the past where it can and making explanation of life possible only as we abandon the idea of permanent identity. We must, he says, “regard every production of nature as one which has had a history” (p. 381 ). Even humans are only comprehensible as a species when one learns their relation to the past.

Darwin, however, chose not to talk about humans in Origin. He didn’t have to, for many telltale marks of prehuman history exist, in, for example, our rudimentary tails; or in men’s nonfunctioning nipples, which bespeak some distant hermaphroditic ancestor. Rather than embodying varying forms of a permanent ideal, each of us is dependent on entangled histories that on the one hand twist back to a remote and still not fully knowable past, and on the other spin forward to an unforeseeable future.

The absence of permanent or ideal boundaries in Darwin’s world entailed for him a constant play of metaphor. Slight variations, subtle shading, vestigial growths, transformations through time, complex entanglements—these all led Darwin to draw heavily on metaphor, usually on organic metaphors like the famous trees and tangled banks, but also on wedges driven into a yielding surface (p. 64), or the geological record as a volume of history (p. 250). Nature is full of transformations