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upon which Darwin could draw as models for his larger vision. The book does its work of transformation primarily through its dominant metaphor, “natural selection,” a figure that embodies what Daniel Dennett has recently called “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.”2 “Natural selection” is a phrase that has been thoroughly naturalized since Darwin’s day; but as his critics and he knew very well, it is a metaphor, employed to perform the dual and almost self-contradictory work of representing what had traditionally been understood as “intention,” in a context from which intention is excluded. The “selection” that nature makes is not conscious; it is not, literally, a “selection” at all. Put without metaphor, it describes a process in which those organisms not adequately adapted to their environments die and those better adapted live. And yet this process produces results that look intentional and designed. Language deceptively pushes toward intention, and Darwin constructs a metaphor that both enacts “intention” and dramatizes its absence.

Of course, Darwin’s immediate concern was not language but nature; he did not write Origin as an epic poem in the tradition of Shakespeare and Milton, poets he had read extensively in his youth. It is not an epic nor is it meant to be a myth, yet his theory inevitably engages the story that Genesis tells and offers us what Gillian Beer, in Darwin’s Plots (see “For Further Reading”) has called “The Remnant of the Mythical.” In effect, it retells the story of humanity’s beginnings, but without God or divine intention. While Darwin danced around theological and ethical questions, hoping to avoid the controversy he knew awaited him, his first readers recognized them immediately.

Although Milton’s Paradise Lost accompanied Darwin on his five-year voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle, where crowded conditions required the most careful selection, so too did Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. Milton’s epic imagination may well have influenced Darwin’s sense of the grandness and complexity of the world, but Lyell taught him that a scientist must view the world as a consequence of natural causes, and of causes now in operation. Gillian Beer has suggested that Milton, inspiring Darwin with a sense of nature’s fecundity and abundance, and Lyell, teaching him how to ask questions of natural phenomena, together helped shape Darwin’s imagination and his science, his imaginative science.3 The grand vision of Milton becomes compatible with the Lyellian view, in which enormous changes depend upon small gradual ones rather than on God’s intervention. It was Lyell who supplied Darwin with the essential notion of geological time, stretching for millions of years, during which the gradual transformations of species into varieties into subspecies into new species could unfold. Lyell insisted that the world as we see it can be explained by a history in which everything we see came to be, not by unique or divine interventions, but as a result of causes now in operation. The new science expelled miracles or acts of divine intervention from adequate descriptions of the way the world is. Darwin’s “Genesis,” his new mythology, would be scientific in exactly this way; Lyell’s was the tradition to which Darwin wanted to contribute.

Darwin was not a crusader against religion but a passionate lover of science, wanting to look at large questions and to track down the answers from the perspective of “secondary causes.” His theory itself was not concerned with ultimate “origins,” despite his book’s title. Its inception is not an attempt to explain absolute beginnings, but assumes that some one or few species were already in place. The question was whether species were permanent entities—as the conventional scientific and religious wisdom of the time asserted—or mutable, and then if they do change, how do they change. As Darwin wrote to Baden Powell, the Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford, and an important commentator on religious subjects, “The only novelty in my work is the attempt to explain how species become modified