Should I Read on the Origin of Species
Darwin on the Origin of Species
A book review
Novelties are enticing to most people: to united states they are only annoying. Nosotros cling to a long-accepted theory, just as we cling to an old arrange of clothes. A new theory, like a new pair of breeches, ("The Atlantic" still affects the older type of under garment,) is sure to have hardfitting places; or even when no particular fault can exist found with the commodity, it oppresses with a sense of full general discomfort. New notions and new styles worry united states, till we get well used to them, which is only by ho-hum degrees.
Wherefore, in Galileo'due south time, we might have helped to proscribe, or to burn had he been stubborn enough to warrant cremation-even the great pioneer of inductive inquiry; although, when we had fairly recovered our composure, and had leisurely excogitated the matter, nosotros might have come to conclude that the new doctrine was better than the sometime one, afterwards all, at least for those who had nothing to unlearn.
Such being our habitual state of mind, it may well exist believed that the perusal of the new book "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection" left an uncomfortable impression, in spite of its plausible and winning ways. We were not wholly unprepared for it, as many of our contemporaries seem to have been. The scientific reading in which we indulge as a relaxation from severer studies had raised dim forebodings. Investigations about the succession of species in time, and their actual geographical distribution over the earth's surface, were leading up from all sides and in diverse ways to the question of their origin. Now and then we encountered a judgement, like Professor Owen's "axiom of the continuous operation of the ordained becoming of living things," which haunted united states of america similar an apparition. For, dim as our conception must needs be as to what such oracular and grandiloquent phrases might really hateful, we felt confident that they presaged no practiced to old beliefs. Foreseeing, notwithstanding deprecating, the coming time of trouble, nosotros however hoped, that, with some repairs and make-shifts, the old views might final out our days. Après nous le deluge. However, not to lag backside the rest of the world, we read the book in which the new theory is promulgated. We took information technology up, like our neighbors, and, every bit was natural, in a somewhat captious frame of listen.
Well, we plant no cause of quarrel with the first chapter. Here the author takes us direct to the barn-m and the kitchen-garden. Like an honorable rural member of our Full general Court, who sat silent until, well-nigh the close of a long session, a bill requiring all swine at large to wear pokes was introduced, when he claimed the privilege of addressing the business firm, on the proper ground that he had been "brought upwardly among the pigs, and knew all about them,"-then we were brought up amongst cows and cabbages; and the lowing of cattle, the cackling of hens, and the cooing of pigeons were sounds native and pleasant to our ears. And so "Variation under Domestication" dealt with familiar subjects in a natural way, and gently introduced "Variation under Nature," which seemed likely enough. Then follows "Struggle for Existence,"— a principle which we experimentally know to be true and cogent,— bringing the comfortable assurance, that man, fifty-fifty upon Leviathan Hobbes'due south theory of society, is no worse than the rest of creation, since all Nature is at war, i species with some other, and the nearer kindred the more internecine,-bringing in thousand-fold confirmation and extension of the Malthusian doctrine, that population tends far to outrun ways of subsistence throughout the animal and vegetable earth, and has to be kept downwardly by abrupt preventive checks; so that non more than than one of a hundred or a 1000 of the individuals whose being is so wonderfully so sedulously provided for ever comes to annihilation, under ordinary circumstances; so the lucky and the strong must prevail, and the weaker and ill-favored must perish;— and then follows, as naturally as one sheep follows another, the affiliate on "Natural Selection," Darwin's cheval de bataille, which is very much the Napoleonic doctrine, that Providence favors the strongest battalions, that, since many more individuals are born than tin can possibly survive, those individuals and those variations which possess whatsoever reward, however slight, over the rest, are in the long run sure to survive, to propagate, and to occupy the express field, to the exclusion or devastation of the weaker brethren. All this we pondered, and could not much object to. In fact, we began to contract a liking for a system which at the offset illustrates the advantages of good breeding, and which makes the most "of every brute'southward best."
Could nosotros "allow past-gones be by-gones," and, outset now, go along improving and diversifying for the futurity past natural selection,— could nosotros fifty-fifty take upwards the theory at the introduction of the really existing species, nosotros should be well content, and and then perhaps would most naturalists be. It is by no means hard to believe that varieties are incipient or possible species, when we encounter what trouble naturalists, especially botanists, have to distinguish between them,— one regarding as a true species what another regards as a variety; when the progress of knowledge increases, rather than diminishes, the number of hundred-to-one instances; and when there is less agreement than ever among naturalists as to what the footing is in Nature upon which our, thought of species reposes, or how the discussion is practically to exist divers. Indeed, when we consider the endless disputes of naturalists and ethnologists over the human being races, every bit to whether they vest to one species or to more, and if to more, whether to three, or v, or fifty, we tin inappreciably assistance fancying that both may be right,— or rather, that the unihumanitarians would take been correct several thousand years agone, and the multihumanitarians volition be a few thousand years later; while at present the safe thing to say is, that, probably, 'there is some truth on both sides. "Natural pick," Darwin remarks, "leads to deviation of character; for more living beings can be supported on the same expanse the more they diverge in structure, habits, and constitution," (a principle which, by the way, is paralleled and illustrated by the diversification of human labor,) and also leads to much extinction of intermediate or unimproved forms. At present, though this divergence may "steadily tend to increase," yet this is evidently a tiresome process in Nature, and liable to much counteraction wherever homo does not interpose, and then not likely to 'work much harm for the future. And if natural selection, with artificial to help information technology, will produce amend animals and amend men than the present, and fit them better to "the weather of existence," why, let it work, say we, to the pinnacle of its bent. In that location is still room enough for improvement. Only allow us hope that information technology always works for adept: if not, the divergent lines on Darwin's diagram of transmutation made easy ominously show what modest deviations from the straight path may come to in the end.
The prospect of the future, accordingly, is on the whole pleasant and encouraging. Information technology is just the backward glance, the gaze up the long vista of the past, that reveals anything alarming. Hither the lines converge every bit they recede into the geological ages, and point to conclusions which, upon the theory, are inevitable, but by no means welcome. The very first step backwards makes the Negro and the Hottentot our claret-relations; — non that reason or Scripture objects to that, though pride may. The next suggests a closer association of our ancestors of the olden time with "our poor relations" of the quadrumanous family than we like to acknowledge. Fortunately, nonetheless,— fifty-fifty if we must account for him scientifically,-homo with his ii feet stands upon a foundation of his own. Intermediate links between the Bimana and the Quadrumana are defective altogether; so that, put the genealogy of the brutes upon what basis you will, the four-handed races will not serve for our forerunners;— at least, not until some monkey, alive or fossil, is producible with neat-toes, instead of thumbs, upon his nether extremities; or until some lucky 'geologist turns up the bones of his ancestor and prototype in France or England, who was so busy "napping the chuckie-stanes" and chipping out flint knives and arrow-beads in the time of the drift, very many ages ago,-earlier the British Channel existed, says Lyell,1— and until these men of the olden fourth dimension are shown to have worn their peachy-toes in a divergent and thumblike style. That would be evidence indeed: only until some testimony of the sort is produced, we must needs believe in the separate and special creation of man, however information technology may have been with the lower animals and with plants.
No doubt, the full development and symmetry of Darwin's hypothesis strongly suggest the development of the man no less than the lower animal races out of some simple primordial brute,— that all are equally "lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited."
But, as the author speaks disrespectfully of spontaneous generation, and accepts a supernatural beginning of life on earth, in some form or forms of existence which included potentially all that have since existed and are yet to exist, he is thereby not warranted to extend his inferences across the evidence or the fair probability. There seems equally great likelihood that ane special origination should be followed past another upon fitting occasion, (such every bit the introduction of man,) every bit that one form should be transmuted into some other upon plumbing fixtures occasion, as, for example, in the succession of species which differ from each other only in some details. To compare small things with great in a homely illustration: man alters from fourth dimension to time his instruments or machines, as new circumstances or conditions may require and his wit suggest. Minor alterations and improvements he adds to the machine he possesses: he adapts a new rig or a new rudder to an former gunkhole: this answers to variation. If boats could engender, the variations would doubtless exist propagated, similar those of domestic cattle. In course of time the onetime ones would be worn out or wrecked; the best sorts would exist chosen for each detail employ, and farther improved upon, and so the primordial gunkhole be developed into the scow, the skiff, the sloop, and other species of water-arts and crafts, the very diversification, as well as the successive improvements, entailing the disappearance of many intermediate forms, less adjusted to any 1 particular purpose; wherefore these become slowly out of utilize, and go extinct species: this is natural pick. Now permit a great and important advance be made, like that of steam-navigation: hither, though the engine might be added to the old vessel, nevertheless the wiser and therefore the actual way is to brand afresh vessel on a modified plan: this may answer to specific cosmos. Anyhow, the one does not necessarily exclude the other. Variation and natural selection may play their part, and then may specific creation as well. Why not?
This leads u.s.a. to ask for the reasons which call for this new theory of transmutation. The beginning of things must needs lie in obscurity, beyond the bounds of proof, though within those of conjecture or of analogical inference. Why not hold fast to the customary view, that all species were directly, instead of indirectly, created after their respective kinds, as we now behold them,-and that in a manner which, passing our comprehension, nosotros intuitively refer to the supernatural? Why this continual striving subsequently "the unattained and dim,"— these anxious endeavors, particularly of late years, by naturalists and philosophers of various schools and different tendencies, to penetrate what one of them calls "the mystery of mysteries," the origin of species? To this, in general, sufficient respond may be constitute in the activity of the human being intellect, "the delirious yet divine desire to know," stimulated as it has been past its own success in unveiling the laws and processes of inorganic Nature,-in the fact that the chief triumphs of our age in physical science accept consisted in tracing connections where none were known before, in reducing heterogeneous phenomena to a common crusade or origin, in a manner quite analogous to that of the reduction of supposed independently originated species to a common ultimate origin,-thus, and in diverse other ways, largely and legitimately extending the domain of secondary causes. Surely the scientific listen of an historic period which contemplates the solar system as evolved from a common, revolving, fluid mass,— which, through experimental inquiry, has come to regard low-cal, estrus, electricity, magnetism, chemic affinity, and mechanical power as varieties or derivative and convertible forms of one force, instead of contained species,— which has brought the so-called simple kinds of matter, such as the metals, into kindred groups, and raised the question, whether the members of each grouping may not exist mere varieties of ane species,- and which speculates steadily in the direction of the ultimate unity of matter, of a sort of prototype or simple chemical element which may be to the ordinary species of matter what the protozoa or component cells of an organism are to the higher sorts of animals and plants,— the mind of such an age cannot be expected to let the former belief well-nigh species pass unquestioned. It volition heighten the question, how the various sorts of plants and animals came to be as they are and where they are, and will allow that the whole research transcends its powers only when all endeavors have failed. Granting the origin to exist supernatural, or miraculous even, will not arrest the inquiry. All real origination, the philosophers will say, is supernatural; their very question is, whether we have yet gone back to the origin, and tin affirm that the nowadays forms of plants and animals are the primordial, the miraculously created ones. And even if they admit that, they volition still inquire into the order of the phenomena, into the grade of the miracle. You might likewise wait the child to grow upwards content with what it is told about the advent of its infant blood brother. Indeed, to learn that the new-comer is the gift of God, far from lulling enquiry, only stimulates speculation as to how the precious souvenir was bestowed. That questioning kid is begetter to the human,- is philosopher in curt-wearing apparel.
Since, then, questions about the origin of species volition be raised, and have been raised,— and since the theorizings, however unlike in particulars, all proceed upon the notion that one species of plant or animate being is somehow derived from another, that the different sorts which now flourish are lineal (or unlineal) descendants of other and before sorts,— information technology now concerns u.s.a. to ask, What are the grounds in Nature, the admitted facts, which suggest hypotheses of derivation, in some shape or other? Reasons there must be, and plausible ones, for the persistent recurrence of theories upon this genetic ground. A report of Darwin'southward book, and a general glance at the present land of the natural sciences, enable us to get together the following as perhaps the most suggestive and influential. Nosotros can only enumerate them here, without much indication of their detail begetting. There is,-
1. The general fact of variability; the patent fact, that all species vary more or less; that domesticated plants and animals, being in conditions favorable to the production and preservation of varieties, are apt to vary widely; and that by interbreeding, whatsoever variety may exist fixed into a race, that is, into a multifariousness which comes true from seed. Many such races, it is immune, differ from each other in structure and advent every bit widely equally do many admitted species; and information technology is practically very difficult, perhaps impossible, to draw a clear line between races and species. Witness the human races, for instance. Wild species also vary, perhaps most as widely as those of domestication, though in different ways. Some of them appear to vary little, others moderately, others immoderately, to the dandy bewilderment of systematic botanists and zoologists, and their increasing disagreement as to whether diverse forms shall be held to be original species or marked varieties. Moreover, the degree to which the descendants of the same stock, varying in different directions, may at length diverge is unknown. All we know is, that varieties are themselves variable, and that very diverse forms have been educed from one stock.
ii. Species of the same genus are not distinguished from each other by equal amounts of divergence. There is diversity in this respect analogous to that of the varieties of a polymorphous species, some of them slight, others extreme. And in big genera the unequal resemblance shows itself in the clustering of the species around several types or central species, like satellites around their respective planets. Obviously suggestive this of the hypothesis that they were satellites, non thrown off by revolution, similar the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and our own solitary moon, merely gradually and peacefully discrete by divergent variation. That such closely related species may be only varieties of higher grade, earlier origin, or more than favored evolution, is not a very violent assumption. Anyhow, it was a supposition sure to exist made.
3. The actual geographical distribution of species upon the earth's surface tends to suggest the same notion. For, equally a general matter, all or most of the species of a peculiar genus or other type are grouped in the same country, or occupy continuous, proximate, or accessible areas. So well does this rule agree, then general is the implication that kindred species are or were associated geographically, that most trustworthy naturalists, quite gratis from hypotheses of transmutation, are constantly inferring former geographical continuity betwixt parts of the world now widely disjoined, in order to account thereby for the generic similarities amongst their inhabitants. All the same no scientific explanation has been offered to account for the geographical clan of kindred species, except the hypothesis of a mutual origin.
4. Here the fact of the antiquity of cosmos, and in particular of the present kinds of the earth'southward inhabitants, or of a large part of them, comes in to rebut the objection, that there has non been fourth dimension enough for any marked diversification of living things through divergent variation,— not fourth dimension plenty for varieties to accept diverged into what we call species.
And so long as the existing species of plants and animals were thought to have originated a few thousand years ago and without predecessors, in that location was no room for a theory of derivation of one sort from another, nor time enough even to business relationship for the institution of the races which are generally believed to take diverged from a common stock. Not that five or six 1000 years was a brusk allowance for this; but because some of our familiar domesticated varieties of grain, of fowls, and of other animals, were pictured and mummified by the old Egyptians more than than half that number of years ago, if not much earlier. Indeed, possibly the strongest argument for the original plurality of human being species was drawn from the identification of some of the present races of men upon these early historical monuments and records.
But this very extension of the current chronology, if we may rely upon the archaeologists, removes the difficulty by opening up a longer vista. So does the discovery in Europe of remains and implements of pre-historic races of men to whom the utilise of metals was unknown,— men of the rock age, equally the Scandinavian archaeologists designate them. And now, "axes and knives of flint, apparently wrought past homo skill, are plant in beds of the migrate at Amiens, (also in other places, both in France and England,) associated with the bones of extinct species of animals." These implements, indeed, were noticed twenty years agone; at a place in Suffolk they have been exhumed from fourth dimension to time for more than a century; but the full confirmation, the recognition of the age of the eolith in which the implements occur, their abundance, and the appreciation of their bearings upon well-nigh interesting questions, belong to the present time. To complete the connexion of these primitive people with the fossil ages, the French geologists, we are told, take now "plant these axes in Picardy associated with remains of Elephas primigenius, Rhinoceros tichorhinus, Equus fossilis, and an extinct species of Bos."two In plain language, these workers in flint lived in the fourth dimension of the mammoth, of a rhinoceros now extinct, and along with horses and cattle different whatever now existing,— specifically different, as naturalists say, from those with which man is now associated. Their connection with existing man races may perhaps be traced through the intervening people of the stone historic period, who were succeeded by the people of the statuary age, and these past workers in atomic number 26.3 Now, various evidence carries dorsum the existence of many of the nowadays lower species of animals, and probably of a larger number of plants, to the aforementioned drift catamenia. All agree that this was very many thousand years ago. Agassiz tells u.s.a. that the same species of polyps which are at present building coral walls effectually the nowadays peninsula of Florida actually made that peninsula, and have been edifice in that location for centuries which must be reckoned by thousands.
5. The overlapping of existing and extinct, species, and the seemingly gradual transition of the life of the drift flow into that of the nowadays, may be turned to the same business relationship. Mammoths, mastodons, and Irish elks, now extinct, must accept lived down to man, if non almost to historic times. Perhaps the last dodo did not long outlast his huge New Zealand kindred. The auroch, in one case the companion of mammoths, however survives, but apparently owes his present and precarious being to man'due south intendance. Now, nothing that we know of forbids the hypothesis that some new species take been independently and supernaturally created inside the period which other species have survived. It may even be believed that man was created in the days of the mammoth, became extinct, and was recreated at a afterward date. But why non say the same of the auroch, gimmicky both of the one-time man and of the new? Still it is more natural, if not inevitable, to infer, that, if the aurochs of that olden 'time were the ancestors of the aurochs of the Lithuanian forests, so as well were the men of that age if men they were— the ancestors of the present human races. And so, whoever concludes that these primitive makers of rude flint axes and knives were the ancestors of the meliorate workmen of the succeeding stone age, and these over again of the succeeding artificers in brass and fe, will also he probable to suppose that the Equus and Bos of that fourth dimension were the remote progenitors of our own horses and cattle. In all candor nosotros must at to the lowest degree concede that such considerations suggest a genetic descent from the drift period down to the present, and allow time enough— if time is of any account— for variation and natural pick to piece of work out some appreciable results in the style of divergence into races or fifty-fifty into so-called species. Whatsoever might take been idea, when geological time was supposed to exist separated from the nowadays era past a clear line, it is certain that a gradual replacement of old forms past new ones is strongly suggestive of some mode of origination which may all the same be operative. When species, similar individuals, were found to die out one by i, and apparently to come up in ane by one, a theory for what Owen sonorously calls "the continuous performance of the ordained condign of living things" could not exist far off.
That all such theories should take the form of a derivation of the new from the quondam seems to be inevitable, perchance from our inability to excogitate of any other line of secondary causes, in this connection. Owen himself is plain in travail with some transmutation theory of his own conceiving, which may all the same see the calorie-free, although Darwin's came start to the nascence. Different as the two theories will probably be in particulars, they cannot fail to exhibit that central resemblance in this respect which betokens a customs of origin, a common foundation on the full general facts and the obvious suggestions of mod science. Indeed,- to turn the point of a taking simile directed confronting Darwin,— the difference between the Darwinian and the Owenian hypotheses may, after all, be only that between homoeopathic and heroic doses of the same drug.
If theories of derivation could only stop here, content with explaining the diversification and succession of species between the tertiary flow and the present time, through natural agencies or secondary causes notwithstanding in operation, we fancy they would not exist generally or violently objected to by the savans of the present day. But it is hard, if not impossible, to detect a stopping-identify. Some of the facts or accustomed conclusions already referred to, and several others, of a more full general graphic symbol, which must exist taken into the account, impel the theory onward with accumulated force. Vires (non to say virus) acquirit eundo. The theory hitches on wonderfully well to LyeIl's uniformitarian theory in geology,- that the thing that has been is the matter that is and shall be,— that the natural operations now going on will account for all geological changes in a repose and easy way, only requite the fourth dimension plenty, so connecting the present and the proximate with the farthest past by virtually ephemeral gradations,- a view which finds large and increasing, if not general, acceptance in concrete geology, and of which Darwin's theory is the natural complement.
And then the Darwinian theory, once getting a foothold, marches boldly on, follows the supposed virtually ancestors of our present species further and notwithstanding farther back into the dim by, and ends with an analogical inference which "makes the whole globe kin." Every bit we said at the get-go, this consequence discomposes us. Several features of the theory have an uncanny wait. They may evidence to be innocent: but their first aspect is suspicious, and high authorities pronounce the whole thing to be positively mischievous.
In this dilemma we are going to take advice. Following the bent of our prejudices, and hoping to fortify these by new and strong arguments, we are going now to read the primary reviews which undertake to annihilate the theory ;— with what event our readers shall be duly informed.
Meanwhile, we call attention to the fact, that the Appletons have just brought out a 2d and revised edition of Mr. Darwin's book, with numerous corrections, important additions, and a preface, all prepared past the author for this edition, in advance of a new English edition.
Cease NOTES:
1. Vide Proceedings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1859, and London Athenaeum, passim. Information technology appears to be conceded that these "celts" or rock knives are bogus productions, and of the age of the mammoth, the fossil rhinoceros, etc.
2. Encounter Correspondence of M. Nicklès, in American Periodical of Scientific discipline and Arts, for March, 1860.
iii Run into Morlet, Some General Views on Archaeology, in American Journal of Science and Arts, for January, 1860, translated from Bulletin de in Société Vaudoise, 1859.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1860/07/darwin-on-the-origin-of-species/304152/
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