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May not be posted online without written permission of W. M. Schaffer, Univ. AZ., Tucson, AZ.

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Evolution: Its History and its Content. II. Before The Origin.

"You will at once perceive," continued Professor Ichthyosaurus, "that the skull before us belonged to some of the lower order of animals; the teeth are very insignifi-cant, the power of the jaws trifling, and altogether it seems wonderful how the creature could have procured food.” – Cartoon by H. de la Beche lampooning Charles

Lyell’s non-progressionism.


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Readings. Burkhardt, R. W. 2013. Lamarck, evolution, and the inher-itance of acquired characters. Genetics.194: 793-805. Corsi, P. 1997. Celebrating Lamarck. Pp. 51-61. In, Laurent, G. (ed.) Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Edition du CTHS. Paris. Johnston, I. 2000. Some Non-Scientific Observations on the Importance of Darwin. Lecture delivered at Malaspina Univer-sity-College, Nanaimo, BC on October 1, 1998. Richards, R. J. 1983. Why Darwin delayed, or interesting problems and models in the history of science. J. Hist. Behav-ioral Sci. 19: 45-53. Van Wyhe, J. 2007. Mind the gap: Did Darwin avoid publish-ing his theory for many years? Notes Rec. R. Soc. 61: 177-205.

http://www.pendlynxhare.com/449/Lamarck/Burkhardt%202013.pdf

http://www.pendlynxhare.com/449/Lamarck/Burkhardt%202013.pdf

http://www.pendlynxhare.com/449/Lamarck/Corsi%20-%20Celebrating%20Lamarck.pdf

http://www.pendlynxhare.com/449/Opinion/Johnston%20on%20Darwinism.htm

http://www.pendlynxhare.com/449/Opinion/Johnston%20on%20Darwinism.htm

http://www.pendlynxhare.com/449/Darwin/Richards%20-%20Why%20Darwin%20Delayed.pdf

http://www.pendlynxhare.com/449/Darwin/Richards%20-%20Why%20Darwin%20Delayed.pdf

http://www.pendlynxhare.com/449/van%20Wyhe%20-%20Did%20Darwin%20Delay.pdf

http://www.pendlynxhare.com/449/van%20Wyhe%20-%20Did%20Darwin%20Delay.pdf


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Darwin had Many Predecessors.

Linnaeus – New species by hybridization.

Buffon – homology, definition of species and their origin by “degeneration”. Evolution and the age of the earth.

Erasmus Darwin – wove evolution into poetry, thereby inspiring Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s observation that “Darwinizing was all surface and no content …”, i.e., unbridled speculation.” [Quoted by Stott (2003, 135)]

Goethe – serial homology in plants.

Lamarck – The first evolutionist.

E. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire – “Unity of type”; abnormal development.

Robert Chambers –Vestiges of the Natural History of Cre-ation. Law of Development.

Alfred Russel Wallace – co-discoverer of natural selection (1858). Independently enumerated “Darwin’s “facts”; ar-gued that they were necessitated by DwM.

Figure 2.1. Erasmus Darwin’s bookplate bore the motto, “E conchis omnia” – “all from shells”.


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Buffon (1707-1788).

Georges-Louis Leclerc (1707-1788) later the Comte de Buf-fon (Count of Buffon, Buffon being a French commune).

As discussed by Farber (1972), Bowler (1978) and Mayr (1982), Buffon’s remarks about species, “generation” and “degeneration” are

1. Scattered through his voluminous writings, principally His-

toire Naturelle, whose 36 volumes were published over a period of 40 years (1749-1788).

2. Often contradictory: a. His ideas developed over an extended period of time

(Farber, 1972), and b. He may have purposefully muddied the waters to avoid

or at least mitigate ecclesiastical condemnation.

Regarding the last:

1. In 1751, he was compelled to retract fourteen “reprehen-sible statements” and to declare his belief in the infallibil-ity of scripture with regard to the origin of the earth and its biota.


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2. Here is the letter he received on 15 January: “Sir, “We have been informed, by someone among us on your behalf; that when you learned that the Natural History, of which you are the author, was one of the works chosen by order of the Faculty of Theology to be examined and censured because it contained principles and maxims that are not in accordance with those of Religion, you declared to him that you did not have the intention of dissociating yourself from it [the accusation] and that you were prepared to satisfy the Faculty in regard to each of the arti-cles it found reprehensible in your work; we cannot, Sir, praise you enough for such a Christian resolution, and in order to put you in a position to carry it out, we are sending you the statements taken from your book that seemed to us to be contrary to the be-liefs of the Church.” [Bonnefoi, 1997, 187-188].

3. On 12 March, Buffon recanted:

“As for the theory of the earth and planet formation, he stated that he believed ‘very firmly all that is told in the Scriptures about Cre-ation, both as to the order of time and the circumstances of the facts,’ and had presented his theory ‘only as a pure philosophical supposition.’ His hypocrisy was enormous, but as Buffon himself said, ‘It is better to be humble than hung.’ ” [Bonnefoi, 1997, 188]


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Such tribulations notwithstanding, Buffon was able to work in a lot. Consider the following:

1. Unity of Vertebrate Body Plan (Homology):

“There exists … a primitive and general design, which … conveys the idea of an original plan upon which the whole has been con-ceived and executed. When, for example, the parts constituting the body of a horse, which seems to differ so widely from that of man, are compared in detail with the human frame, instead of being struck with the difference, we are astonished at the singular and almost perfect resemblance. … it is only by the number of these bones, which may be regarded as accessory, and by the prolonging, contracting, or junction of others, that the skeleton of a horse differs from the skeleton of a man.” [Buffon, 1781 (1812 ed.) IV, 160-161]

2. Vestigial Organs. “… let us examine separately some parts which are essential to the figure of animals, as the ribs: These we find in man, in all quadrupeds, in birds, in fishes, and the vestiges of them are ap-parent even in the shell of the turtle …” [op. cit., 161]

3. Variations on a Common Theme. “From these facts we may judge, whether … the Supreme Being, in creating animals, employed only one idea, and, at the same


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time, diversified it in every possible manner, to give men an op-portunity of admiring equally the magnificence of the execution and the simplicity of the design?”1 [op. cit., 162]

4. Some Families Products by Nature.2 “In this view, not only the horse and ass, but man, monkeys, quadrupeds, and every species of animal, may be considered as one family. But from this are we warranted to conclude, that, in this great and numerous family, which were brought into existence by the Almighty alone, there are lesser families conceived by Na-ture, and produced by time, of which some should only consist of two individuals, as the horse and ass, others of several individuals, as the weasel, the ferret, the mar-tin, the pole-cat, &c … ? If these families really existed, they could only be produced by the mixture and successive variation and degeneration of the primary species:” [op. cit,, 162-163]

1 Note the defensive use of the question mark here and below 2 A hundred years later, Wallace (1858) would argue that the existence of

“true varieties” could only be explained that all had been so produced.

Figure 2.2. Relationships among cats as imagined by Buffon. From Bowler (2003).


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5. Universal Common Descent. “And, if it be once admitted that there are families among plants and animals, that the ass belongs to the family of the horse, and differs from him only by degeneration; with equal propriety may be it be concluded, that the monkey belongs to the family of man; that the monkey is a man degenerated; that man and the monkey have sprung from a common stock, like the horse and ass; that each family, either among animals or vegetables, has been de-rived from the same origin; and even that all animated beings have proceeded from a single species, which, in the course of ages, has produced, by improving and degenerating, all the dif-ferent races that now exist.” [op cit., 163, emphasis added]

6. Which possibility he then firmly rejected.

“ … we cannot demonstrate, that the formation of a new species, by means of degeneration, exceeds the powers of Nature; yet the number of improbabilities attending such a supposition, renders it totally incredible: For, if one species could be produced by the degeneration of another … this metamorphosis could only have been effected by a long succession of almost imperceptible de-grees. Between the horse and ass, there must have been many intermediate animals … . What is become of these intermedi-ate beings? Why are their representatives and descendants now extinguished? Why should the two extremes alone exist?” [3]

3 Darwin and Wallace are generally crediting with proposing an answer – the extermination of generalist ancestors by their divergent and more capable


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“We may, therefore, without hesitation, pronounce the ass to be an Ass, and not a degenerated horse ….” [op. cit., 170, em-phasis added]

Buffon’s vacillations are not surprising given the tenor of the times (Darnton, 1984; Stott, 2012, Ch. 7) previously alluded to: 1. Police surveillance (Figs. 2.2, 2.3); burning of heretical /

seditious books; imprisonment of authors / publishers.

2. As a result, politically incorrect ideas often a. Presented as hypothetical / fantastical conjectures that

the reader could consider or reject as he wished. 4

b. Privately circulated / published posthumously, e.g., D’Alembert’s Dream (Diderot); Telliamed (from the au-thor’s name, de Maillet, spelled in reverse).

descendants. But see Lamarck (1809, pp. 170-171) who advanced the same argument in the case of man's extermination of his less derived an-cestors.

4 Telliamed, for example, presents its geological and evolutionary conjectures

as a series of conversations between and Indian philosopher and a mission-ary. Even so, it wasn’t published until ten years after its author’s death and then only after having been toned down. See Stott (2012) RE Diderot (1713-84) and de Maillet (1656-1738).


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Figure 2.3. Police inspector Joseph d’Hemery kept extensive records on 501 French authors from 1748-1753 (reign of Louis XV). Repro-duced from Darnton (1974) who characterized d’Hemery’s activities as “information gathering in the age of absolutism”.


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Figure 2.4. Fiche de police d'Arouet de Voltaire. Reproduced from BnF (http://classes.bnf.fr/livre/grand/625.htm).


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In the course of his writings, Buffon 1. Defined species in terms reproductive isolation. 2. Ascribed degeneration to climate and domestication.

3. Emphasized

a. Post-dispersal degenera-

tion of i. European quadrupeds

reaching NA

ii. Siberian mammoths reaching India & Africa.

b. Domestication – origin of

domestic breeds;

4. Produced the first phyloge-netic network (dogs).

5. Estimated earth’s antiquity experimentally.5

5 Buffon heated iron spheres of different diameter, measured the rates at which they cooled and extrapolated to a ball the size of the earth. He ob-tained ages as high as 10 million years, but contented himself with publish-ing a more modest figure of 75,000 years (Bonnefoi, 997,409ff; also Powell,

Figure 2.5. Dispersal and de-generation of elephants as im-agined by Buffon.


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Mayr (1982) assessed the impact of Buffon’s writings thus:

“Histoire Naturelle …was read … by every educated person in Europe. It is no exaggeration to claim that virtually all of the well-known writers … were Buffonians … [p. 330] “It makes no difference which of the authors in the second half of the eighteenth centaury one reads, their discussions are … merely commentaries on Buffon’s work. Except for Aristotle and Darwin, there has been no other student of organisms who has had as far-reaching an influence.” [p. 336] “… Buffon was not an evolutionist, and yet he was the father of evolutionism.[6] He was the first person to discuss a large number of evolutionary problems that … had not been raised by anyone …. Even though Buffon rejected evolutionary explanations, he brought them to the attention of the scientific world.” [p. 335]

2001, Ch.1), which calculation the Syyndic (head) and Deputies of the Fac-ulty of Theology found “reprehensible” (above).

6 As noted above, Buffon rejected universal common descent because of the

absence of intermediates between well-defined species. Mayr (1982) addi-tionally notes that Buffon also maintained that degeneration was incapable of producing reproductive isolation and hence new species.


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Among the problems that Buf-fon brought to the table was the nature of species, which he defined in terms of repro-duction:

“… Buffon treated species as a historical entity, one that was inti-mately related to the development of the earth's surface … A spe-cies, therefore … was a succes-sion of genetically related beings [i.e., a lineage] that differenti-ated in time.” [Farber, 1972, 284; Emphasis added]

This linkage “provided a viable alternate to the Genesis account of the origin and history of the world. The totally secular nature of his work was greatly appreciated by the men who were launching a full scale attack on traditional orthodoxy in Europe … [and] heavily criti-cized by theologians.” [op. cit. p. 283]

Figure 2.6. Buffon imagined that species first appeared in northern Eurasia (first part of the globe to cool) and then dispersed southwards & “de-generated” in response to cli-matic change. Biotic change thus driven by environmental change, a thoroughly modern concept, although the influ-ence of climate is today con-sidered to be via natural se-lection and therefore indirect.


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Lamarck (1744-1829). The First Evolutionist.

1. Philosophie Zoologique (Lamarck, 1809)

“Conclusion Accepted Up Until Today: Nature (or its author), in creating the animals, anticipated all the possible sorts of circum-stances in which they would have to live and gave to each spe-cies a fixed organic structure … which forces each species to live in those places and climates where it is located.” “My Personal Conclusion: Nature, by producing in succession all the animal species and beginning with … the simplest, gradually made the organic structure more complicated; as these animals generally spread out into all the habitable regions of the world, from the influence of the circumstances which each species en-countered, it acquired the habits which we know in it and the mod-ifications in its parts which observation reveals …” [p. 126]

2. Lamarck Revisited (Mayr, 1972):

“All others before him had discussed evolution en passant … He was the first author to devote an entire book primarily to the presentation of a theory of organic evolution. He was the first to present the entire system of animals as a product of evolution.” [p. 61]


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Figure 2.7a. Phylogenetic descent according to Lamarck in Philos-ophie Zoologolique (1809). Infusoria (protists and small inverte-brates), polyps (cnidarians) and radiaria (also protists) form one group. All other animals descend from worms.


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Figure 2.7b. Phylogenetic descent in Histoire Naturelle des Animaux sans Vertèbres (1815). Two ladders and a third group (vertebrates) are imagined: “Articules,” descending from primitive worms (vers) and leading to arthropods, annelids, etc.; “Inarticules”, from “infusoria” (unicells) and leading to mollusks. Note the independent acquisition of “sensibility”, but not intelligence. Acéphales and Épizoaires refer to intestinal worms and ectoparasites respectively. See Gould (2001) for discussion.


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Inheritance of Acquired Characters (IAC). 1. In textbooks, “Lamarckism” equated with IAC & frequently

contrasted with Darwin’s “more scientific” views. 2. Rubbish – inheritance via use and disuse was widely ac-

cepted by “many naturalists” who, as the geologist, Charles Lyell (1836) would later write, wished “to dis-pense, as far as possible, with the repeated intervention of a First Cause”.7

3. And recall The Origin’s famous concluding paragraph:

"These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with repro-duction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Var-iability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms.” [Emphasis added]

7 Nor was this inclination confined to naturalists. In D’Alembert’s Dream, Di-derot (1769) has one of his protagonists remark that “The original structure alters itself or perfects itself according to necessity or habitual functions. We walk and work so little, and we think so much, that I wouldn’t deny the pos-sibility that man might finish up as nothing but a head.” – shades of G. B. Shaw and Back to Methuselah.


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4. Indeed, Darwin had a continuing interest in inherited injuries and the effects of use and disuse.

a. To a correspondent, he wrote 10 years after publishing

The Origin: ”Is the scar on your son's leg on the same side and on exactly the same spot where you were wounded?” [Letter to J. Jen-ner Weir8. 18 April, 1868, DCP-2168]

b. Responding to a critic who accused him of enshrining

NS as the sole evolutionary driver, he declared that

“… no one has brought forward so many observations on the effects of the use and disuse of parts, as I have done in my ‘Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication’; and these observations were made for this special object. I have likewise there adduced a considerable body of facts, showing the di-rect action of external conditions on organisms; though no doubt since my books were published much has been learnt on this head.” [Darwin, 1880. Emphasis added.]

c. Pangenesis”, Darwin’s theory of inheritance proposed

to account, among other things, for IAC (Lecture IV).

8 John Jenner Weir (1822-1894), an English naturalist who corresponded ex-tensively with Darwin from 1868 to 1881. According to the Darwin Corre-spondence Project, sixty-four letters passed between the two, most of which centered on “facts” gleaned from the study of natural history,


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Pairing Darwin and Lamarck as competing protagonists historically inaccurate.

1. True – Darwin had little use for his predecessor:

“Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a `tendency to pro-gression,' `adaptations from the slow willing of animals,' etc.!" [Let-ter of 11 January, 1844 to Joseph Hooker DCP-729]

2. But long before Darwin published his ideas on species,

Lamarck had already gone to a pauper’s grave, widely re-garded in England as a crank.

3. What Darwin confronted in 1859, was not an antagonist, but a consensus to which friends and colleagues sub-scribed almost to a man.

a. Fixity of Species. b. Special Creation.

4. The legacy of Paley and Cuvier9, the latter transmitted to the English by Kirby, Buckland10 and Lyell.

9 Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), the father of vertebrate paleontology. 10 William Buckland (1784-1856), catastrophist and disciple of Cuvier, reluc-

tantly led, in large measure by his own investigations, to the reality of “deep time.” See below.


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Lamarck Damned by Posterity. Why?

Politics and Religion.

1. In England, French evolu-tionists closely identi-fied with Jacobin mate-rialism and the Terror.

2. According to Kirby11

“Lamarck’s great error is mate-rialism. He seems to have no faith in anything but body, at-tributing everything to a physi-cal … cause. Even when … he admits the being of a God he employs the whole strength of his intellect to prove that he had nothing to do with the works of creation.” [Kirby, 1835, I, 7]

3. Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus was likewise ridiculed by

the anti-Jacobin press (Figure 2.10).

11 William Kirby (1759-1850) was an early British entomologist. Quotation

from On the History, Habits and Instincts of Animals. Pickering, London, 7th of 8 treatises commissioned by the Earl of Bridgewater to celebrate “the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation”.

Figure 2.8 Platypus eggs. So horrified were the English by Jacobin excess, that the Royal Navy was instructed to prevent specimens of the egg-laying platypus from falling into the hands of French sci-entists (Johnston, 1998).


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Figure 2.9. By the Lethean stream. Toads flee the cave as Truth’s light strikes the mask of Reason from the Jacobin’s face and incinerates his tombs of malevolance: Defamation, Libels, Sedition, Abuse, Ignorance, Anarchy and Atheism. Approving seraphim bear the symbols of the British establishment: cross, crown and the scales of justice. The caption reads “ A peep into the Cave of Jacobinism – Magna eƒt Veritas et Prævalebit”. (Note the “long s”.) Etching by J. Gillray, (Frontpiece of the Anti-Jacobin Review, 1 Sep. 1798). From http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitLarge/mw62486/A-peep-into-the-cave-of-Jacobinism.

http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitLarge/mw62486/A-peep-into-the-cave-of-Jacobinism

http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitLarge/mw62486/A-peep-into-the-cave-of-Jacobinism


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Figure 2.10. Detail from “A Charm for Democracy, Reviewed, Ana-lysed, & Destroyed …”, trumpeting the demise of the Analytical Re-view – “Fallen never to rise again’” (bottom right corner). The picture was published by the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine on 1 Feb-ruary 1799. The Analytical Review was viewed by its detractors as a forum for radical ideas – see Luisa Calé, 2006. “Periodical perso-nae: Pseudonyms, authorship and the imagined community of Jo-seph Priestley’s Theological Repository”. 19: Interdisciplinary Stud-ies in the Long Nineteenth Century. 3 (www.19.bbk.ac.uk). Note the references to Erasmus Darwin (Zoonomia and The Loves of Plants): “Darwin’s topsy turvy Plants and Animals Destruction” to the left of the tailed piper.

http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/


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Language. 1. Lamarck was misrepresented as urging that animals

changed their form by force of will.

“The hypothesis of Lamarck – that progressive changes in spe-cies have been produced by the attempts of animals to increase the development of their own organs … has been repeatedly and easily refuted …” [Wallace (1858), his contribution to the Darwin-Wallace paper (Lecture III)]

2. Actually, Lamarck wrote of animal’s needs – besoins –

that influenced behavior and induced heritable varia-tion, i.e., inheritance of acquired characters.

3. But “needs” became “desires” in translation, and La-marck, a peddler of medieval vitalism.

Spontaneous Generation. 1. Lamarck believed that the simplest life forms were con-

tinuously created.

2. “We must be on our guard not to tread in the footsteps of the natural-ists of the middle ages, who believed the doctrine of spontaneous generation to be applicable to all those parts of the animal and vege-table kingdoms which they least understood …” [ Lyell, Principles of Geology. Vol. 2, p. 21]


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L’esprit de System.12

“… so intimately did he identify himself with his systems, and such was his desire that they be propagated … even his greatest and most useful works appeared in his own eyes merely as slight acces-sories … .” Cuvier (1835) [Emphasis added]

False assumptions.

“M. de Lamarck reproduced this theory of Life in all the zoological works …; and whatever interest these works may have excited …, no one conceived their systematic part sufficiently dangerous to be made the subject of attack. It was left undisturbed … because every one [sic] could perceive that, independently of many errors in the details, it likewise rested on two arbitrary suppositions; the one, that it is the seminal vapour [13] which organizes the embryo; the other, that efforts and desires may engender organs. A system established on such foundations may amuse the imagination of a poet; a meta-physician may derive from it an entirely new series of systems; but it cannot for a moment bear the examination of any one [sic] who has dissected a hand, a viscus, or even a feather.” [op. cit.]

12 Recall Bacon’s Idols of the Theater. 13 The reference is to preformism (e.g., little man in a sperm cell – Lecture V),

which, while solving the problem of co-adaptation, eliminated all possibility of transmutation (Sloan 2014, 12 ff).


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Crackpot Theories of Chemistry & Meteorology.

“Thus, while Lavoisier was creating … a new [stoichiometric14] chemistry founded on … experiments, M. de Lamarck, without doing an experiment, … imagined that he had discov-ered another[15], which he did not hesitate to set in opposition to the former, although nearly the whole of Europe had received it with the warmest approbation.” [op. cit.]

““In order to demonstrate this theory [mete-orology] in some measure by facts, and to attract the attention of the public to it, M. de Lamarck … print[ed] almanacs for eleven years successively, announcing the probable state of the temperature for each day; but it may be said that the weather took pleasure in exposing his fallacies.” [op. cit.]

14 Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) emphasized conservation of mass, e.g., 𝐶𝐻4 + 𝑂2 → 2𝐻2𝑂 + 𝐶𝑂2, thereby anticipating today’s atomic theory.

15 Lamarck chemical views looked backwards – fire, water, air earth – causing

him to believe that “the new, experimental chemistry of Lavoisier was a step in the wrong direction.” (Burkhardt, 1996, 69-71; also, 2013, 799).

Figure 2.11. Lamarck and the daughter who cared for him when he was old, blind and destitute. “Posterity,” she assured him, “will avenge you.”


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No evidence for mutability.

“… some naturalists rely a great deal on the thousands of centuries which they add up with the stroke of a pen. But in such matters we can hardly judge what a lengthy time would produce, except by multiplying mentally what a lesser time produces. I have therefore sought to col-lect the oldest documents on the structures of animals.” “We can easily distinguish there [in Roman pictures of Egyptian animals] the ibis, vulture, owl, falcon, … even the hippopotamus. In the … monuments engraved in the important book on Egypt [16] we see ... the algazel [Oryx]”. “My knowledgeable colleague, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, impressed with the importance of this research, has taken care to collect in the tombs and temples of … Egypt as many animal mummies as he could. He brought back embalmed cats, ibises, birds of prey, dogs, monkeys, crocodiles, … . We certainly do not observe more differences between these creatures and those which we see today than between human mummies and today's human skeletons.” [Cuvier, 1825].

16 Ian Johnston (2009), translator of the version of Cuvier’s (1825) Discours quoted here, tells us that “The important book on Egypt … is the massive work of scholarship initially carried out … as part of the French military expedition to Egypt … . The military expedition was a failure, but the work completed by French scientists and published in a number of volumes from 1809 onwards was enormously popular and influential.”


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Cuvier’s Éloge. 1. Pietro Corsi, a leading Lamarck scholar, maintains

(1997; 2005; 2012) that the view of Lamarck as isolated from mainstream early 19th century science traces to Cuvier’s Éloge de Lamarck from which several of the preceding quotes are taken.

2. Reviewing the remarks of some half dozen historians who had gone before him, Corsi observes that almost all their views

“have their uncritical origin in only one source [the Éloge], sometimes unknown to the authors themselves … . The thesis of Lamarck's isolation can only be maintained if one ignores the rich … debates on natural history that took place between 1790 and 1859, or if one accepts Cuvier's funeral commemoration of La-marck at face value – [Corsi, 1997, 7; emphasis added]

3. Cuvier to the contrary, Corsi argues that

“during the 1810s and especially the 1820s Lamarck’s doctrines were respectfully discussed by [numerous] individual authors … [and] at the beginning of the 1830s, by authoritative and respected geologists … as well as in Scottish and English scientific circles.” [Corsi, 2012a, 5]


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4. Corsi’s reference to “Scot-tish and English scientific circles” significant.

a. By 1825, when Darwin ar-

rived at Edinburgh, La-marckism had leapt the Channel.

b. Along with E. Geoffroy’s philosophical anatomy, Lamarck became associ-ated with anti-establish-ment radicalism (Desmond, 1989)

5. Establishment pushback was furious and orchestrated.

a. Short-term, the campaign a success;

b. Evolution’s acceptance postponed 50+years, though by the late 1840s it was certainly “in the air” (Lecture V).

c. Long-term, it hardly mattered.

i. Evolution became the accepted paradigm. ii. The non-scientific component of the pre-Darwin anti-

evolution consensus became apparent.

Figure 2.12. Signatures of Andrew Combe and Thomas Hodgkin, Englsh physicians who attended Lamarck's lec-tures in 1818 and 1822. Re-produced from Bange, R. and P. Corsi. Pupils of Lamarck.

http://www.lamarck.cnrs.fr/auditeurs/presentation.php?lang=en


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The Lamarckian Balance of Nature.

Lamarck’s Motivation. 1. Species intergrade; their distinctness illusory.

2. Transmutation the only alternative to extinction.

“I am doubtful, whether the means adopted by nature to ensure the preservation of species or races have been so inadequate that entire races are now extinct or lost.” (Lamarck, 1809, p. 44) 17

3. Necessity of evolution (op. cit., p. 127).

a. Geology teaches that conditions change.

b. If organisms adapted, which they most certainly

are, they cannot be the result of a single creation. c. Instead, they must evolve – recall Buffon.

4. Years later, Darwin, having been led to conclusions “not widely different” from Lamarck’s, would see in natural selection, an alternate mechanism whereby such adjustments might be accomplished (Letter of 11 January, 1844 to J. D. Hooker DCP-729).

17 See also Burkhardt (1972) and discussion of “Ohio animal” below.


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Massive Parallelism.

“… all the organized bodies [18] … are true productions of nature, wrought successively throughout long periods of time. “… [N]ature began, and still begins by fashioning the simplest of orga-nized bodies, and it is these alone which she fashions immediately, that is to say, only the rudiments …

“[W]ith the help of time … all of those [organized bodies] which now exist have imperceptibly been fashioned such as we see them.” [La-marck, 1809, p. 40, emphasis added]

1. According to Figure 2.13,

a. Today’s worms descended from yesterday’s monads.

b. Today’s most highly evolved species descended from

the oldest monads.

18 In today’s parlance, “organisms”.

Figure 2.13. Lamarck is gen-erally portrayed as imagining massive parallelism; Darwin and Wallace, dichotomous branching.


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2. By extrapolation, australopithecines should be alive to-day and on the way to becoming human, even as man-kind itself continues to evolve.

3. Interestingly, and to the contrary, Lamarck argued (op. cit., 170-173) that human ancestors exterminated coe-val pre-human ancestors / competitors, which a. Amounts to natural selection among populations or

races.

b. Accounts for gaps of affinity (p. 171) in the same way, i.e., the extinction of imperfect ancestors by more perfect descendants, that Darwin and Wallace would conjecture 50 years later.

c. Is consistent with phylogenetic branching (Figures 2.7a

and 2.7b), the necessity of which Lamarck came to rec-ognize by the time he got round to writing the Philoso-phie – see Gould (2001).

d. Suggests that the conventional distinctions between

Darwin and Lamarck at least partially replaceable by one of degree.


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Two Opposing Evolutionary Forces.

1. Le Pouvoir de la Vie, la force qui tend sans cesse ȧ com-poser l'organisation – the inherent tendency of life to increase in complexity and sophistication.

Result is increasing complexity “in the arrangement of the main groups,” though “not in that of species, nor always even of genera” (Lamarck, 1809, 58).

2. Local Adaptation, l’influence des circonstances, pro-

duces branching in what would otherwise have been a single sequence.

a. For “sensible” and “intelligent” organisms, this is the

point at which besoins (needs) and sentiments interieur (inner urges) and the inheritance of acquired characters enter the argument, i.e., as the mechanism by which adaptation is achieved.

b. In which regard, Lamarck argued that needs altered behavior and that behavior, via use and disuse, in-duced anatomical change.

c. But thanks to Cuvier, Lamarck’s views came to English

readers as animals changing their form by force of will, e.g., wading birds’ webbed feet – which was taken as evidence of supreme foolishness.


34

3. Lamarck’s critics also observed that inner urges don’t work for non-sentient species.

“Is it not strange that the author, of such a book as the ‘Animaux sans Vertèbres,’ should have written that insects, which never see their eggs, should will (and plants, their seeds) to be of particular forms, so as to become attached to particular objects.” [Letter of 10-11 November, 1844 to J. D. Hooker JCP-789]

4. In fact, Lamarck wrote that environmental factors, specif-

ically, “ponderable” fluids (colloids, cytoplasm) and “sub-tle fluids” (heat, electricity) controlled development. a. At the time, electricity and heat were viewed as fluids.

b. This allowed for direct action of the environment on

non-sentient organisms, i.e., via effect on said fluids.

5. Initially, Lamarck believed the tendency to progress to be preeminent. Later (Lamarck, 1820), he reversed himself completely:

“This [effect of environmental conditions] is … a cause whose power is absolute, superior even to nature, since it regulates all nature’s acts … This cause resides in the power that circum-stances have to … change continually the laws that she [Nature] would have followed without these circumstances …” [Quoted by Gould 2001. Emphasis added]


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Regarding l’influence des circonstances. 1. As noted above, IAC widely accepted in Lamarck’s day.

2. But as Burkhardt observed

“Lamarck’s innovation with respect to the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters was not in the formulation of the idea as such but instead in his claim—unlike the views of Le Roy and others—that the inheritance of acquired characters was an agent of unlimited change.” [Burkhardt, 2013, 797, emphasis added]

3. Burkhardt also addressed an issue that would later be-

devil Charles Darwin (Lecture IV). a. The problem being the swamping effect that results

when individuals having responded adaptively to envi-ronmental challenge bred with unmodified conspecifics.

b. Lamarck’s solution (like Darwin’s) being that although blending to be expected when unlike individuals bred,

”individuals … exposed to the same new environmental circum-stances …would respond the same way and be modified in the same way.” [loc. cit.]

4. Later, of course, inheritance proved to be particulate.


36

Figure 2.14. Evolution according to Lamarck. Increasing complex-ity results from the inherent “Power of Life”; adaptation to local en-vironments (Conditions of Life), from changing patterns of use and disuse consequent to an animal’s needs (besoins). For insensate organisms, such as polyps and plants, direct environmental induc-tion via “subtle fluids” generates adaptive novelty.


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Georges Cuvier (1769-1832).

Celebrated anatomist and vertebrate paleontologist.19

1. Politically adroit, the most powerful scientist in France.

2. A dyed-in-the-wool empiricist who despised theorizing.

Advocated

1. Fixity of species.

2. Reality of extinction.

3. Global catastrophes that exterminated whole biotas.

Following Napoleon’s downfall, Cuvier associated himself with the reassertion of religious authority.

19 Among Cuvier’s more notable achievements was his “Principle of Determi-nation,” which often, but not always, allows for the reconstruction of verte-brate fossils from fragmentary remains. “The entirety of an organic being,” he wrote (1825, p. 41), “forms a coordinated whole, a unique and closed system, in which the parts mutually correspond and work together in the same specific action through a reciprocal relationship. None of these parts can change without the others changing as well. Consequently, each of them, taken separately, points to and reveals all the others. … Starting with each of them, the person who possesses rationally the laws of the organic economy could reconstruct the entire animal.” [Emphasis added]


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Revolutionary Upheavals of the Globe.

Cuvier believed that progress in pale-ontology made non-extinction unten-able. Also that

1. Living species hadn’t changed since

antiquity.

2. No evidence that fossil species had evolved into those now alive.

3. No fossil intermediates.

Catastrophism: Extinction the result of recurrent “revolutions” – i.e., of forces not operative today. “… it is vain for someone to seek in the forces which affect the surface of the earth today causes sufficient to produce the upheavals and catastrophes whose traces the earth's surface shows us. … “Such forces explain nothing, because no slow action could have pro-duced these sudden effects. Thus, whether there was a gradual dimi-nution of the waters, whether the sea carried solid material in all direc-tions, whether the temperature of the earth decreased or increased,

Figure 2.15. Baron Cu-vier. Founder of verte-brate paleontology; po-litically adroit; the most powerful scientist in Europe.


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none of these has overturned the strata, enclosed in ice large quadru-peds with their flesh and pelt, put on dry land shell fish still as well preserved today as if they had been caught while still alive, or finally destroyed entire species and genera.” [Cuvier, 1825, pp. 21-22]

Revolutions Several & Abrupt – Genesis Flood the last.20

“I am of the opinion … that if there is something confirmed by geology, it is that the surface of our world has been the victim of a great and sudden upheaval, whose date cannot go back much beyond five or six thousand years, that this revolutionary upheaval pushed down the countries where human beings and the species of animals best known to us today previously used to live and made them disappear, that it, by contrast, made dry land of the bottom of the most recent sea and from it created the countries now inhabited, that since this revolution the small number of individuals which it spared have spread out and propagated throughout the territories recently made dry land, and con-sequently that it is only since this time that our societies have resumed a progressive development, formed institutions, raised monuments, collected facts about nature, and put together scientific systems.” [Cu-vier, 1825, p. 108]

20 While advocating the reality (as evidenced by diverse cultural traditions) of a universal Flood, Cuvier steered clear of direct appeals to religion in his published remarks. However, as discussed by Corsi (1988, pp. 180-185), the notes of one of his students suggest he was not so restrained in lecture.


40

“But these countries inhabited today … had already been inhabited previously, if not by human beings, at least by terrestrial animals. Con-sequently, at least one previous revolution had put them under water. And if one can judge by the different orders of animals whose remains we have found, they had perhaps undergone up to two or three erup-tions of the sea.“ [ibid., Emphasis added]

Regarding Transmutation.

As noted above, no evidence of change since the days of Pharaoh and ancient Rome.

Lamarck’s counter:

i. Conditions in the Nile valley hadn’t changed since the days of the Pharaohs.

“… the position and climate of Egypt are still very nearly what they were in those times. Now the birds which live there, being still in the-same conditions as they were formerly, could not possibly have been forced into a change of habits.” [Lamarck, 1809, p. 42]

2. Apparent stability of nature illusory.

“… every man who has any habit of reflection and at the same time of observing the monuments of nature's antiquity will easily


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appreciate the import of a duration of two or three thousand years in comparison with it “Hence we may be sure that this appearance of stability of the things in nature will by the vulgar always be taken for reality; be-cause people in general judge everything with reference to them-selves.” [Ibid. Emphasis added]

All of which was true, if a trifle condescending.

But in the case of the Nile Valley, 1. Fixity of species makes same prediction without in-

voking an unimaginably ancient earth.

2. Moreover, as Lyell would later inquire rhetorically,

“But why, we ask, have other individuals of these species retained the same characters in so many different quarters of the globe, where the climate and many other conditions are so varied?” [Principles, v. 2, 31]


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The Ohio Animal – Extinction in NA.

Mammoth (Mammuthus) and Mastodon (Mammut) bones

1. Collected in pre-Revolutionary America;

2. Sent to London & Paris for study by European naturalists.

Responding to American fur trader and politician, George Croghan, who had sent him mastodon tusks and teeth, Ben Franklin, then in London, observed that

“The tusks agree with those of the African and Asiatic elephant in being nearly-of the same form and texture, … . But the grinders differ, being full of knobs, like the grinders of a carnivorous animal21; when those of the elephant, who eats only vegetables, are almost smooth. But then we know of no other animal with tusks like an elephant, to whom such grinders might belong.” [Letter of 5 August, 1767]

In short, mastodon fossils violated Cuvier’s later to be ar-ticulated Principle of Determination.

Distribution also a problem: Contemporary elephants not found in cold environments.

21 A year later, Franklin reversed himself, as well he should, given the nature of carnivore dentitions, and observed that “Knobs might be as useful to grind the small Branches of Trees, as to chaw Flesh.” [Simpson, 1942, 146]


43

Figure 2.16. “Exhuming the First American Mastodon". Painting by Ameri-can artist-naturalist, Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827), who directed the excavation near Montgomery, New York and later memorialized the event in oil.


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And there was extinction. Were the animals still alive?

1. Rejecting extinction, French naturalist, Daubenton22, be-lieved mastodon fossils the remains of different animals – elephants (femurs, tusks) and hippopotami (molars).

22 Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton (1716 – 1800), naturalist and contributor to Diderot’s Encyclopédie.

Figure 2.17. Big Bone Lick in northern Kentucky was a source of mammoth and mastodon fossils in pre-Revolutionary America. The “Ohio animal”, so named because of the nearby Ohio River,

was the first fully articulated North American fossil skeleton.

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/title/B.html


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2. Franklin too rejected extinction. He believed mastodon teeth a variation on the elephant pattern.

3. Thomas Jefferson a. Imagined that the beasts might still live and charged

Lewis and Clark to look for them.

b. “It may be asked,” he wrote,

“why I insert the mammoth [mastodon in a list of animals common to Europe and America], as if it still existed? I ask in return, why I should omit it …? Such is the economy of nature, that no instance can be produced, of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken. To add to this, the … testimony of the Indians, that this animal still exists in the northern and western parts of America, would be adding the light of a taper to that of the meridian [midday] sun. [Quoted by Simpson (1942, 150). Emphasis added]

c. As emphasized by Simpson (1942), 18th century belief in non-extinction ubiquitous.


46

Cuvier, who did believe in extinction, eventually solved the problem.

1. The NA fossils represented two species: One elephant-

like (mammoth); the other different (mastodon)

2. Both herbivorous. a. Mammoth cheek teeth were elephant-like, with trans-

verse ridges – useful for grinding grass.

b. Mastodon “grinders” had prominent cusps useful for tearing leaves and branches.

3. The claim that mastodon

tusks and teeth repre-sented the comingled re-mains of two species there-fore erroneous.

4. Both species cold-adapted.

5. Both extinct.

Figure 2.18. Mastodon (left) and mammoth (right) molars compared.


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Cuvier among the English.

1. Consistent with Cuvier’s upheavals were Buckland’s investigation of Pleistocene cave fossils.

2. Most famous was a hyena den in Kirkdale cave.

3. Evidence of occupancy in-cluded a. Gnawed condition of the

bones within.

b. Coprolites identical to the feces of living hyenas;

c. Food species

i. Too large to have been swept into the cave by rising waters.

ii. Disarticulated bodies

could only have been dragged in by scavengers.

Figure 2.19. Top. Famous car-toon, imagining Buckland enter-ing the antediluvian Hyena den in Kirkdale cave. From Wikipe-dia. Bottom. Fossils recovered therefrom. From Whitby Muse-um online.

https://whitbymuseum.org.uk/whats-here/collections/fossils/kirkdale-cave/

https://whitbymuseum.org.uk/whats-here/collections/fossils/kirkdale-cave/


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All of which provoked evangelical wrath (Supplement II.)

In contrast, geologists, most Anglican clerics, attempted to reconcile Genesis and the emerging geological time scale. 1. Gap Creation: Interval of millions /

billions of years between 1st two days of Creation.

2. Day-Age Creationism: Each of the six days of Genesis >> 24 hours.

3. Improper translation of Genesis.

Catastrophism gained currency:

1. Multiple creations corresponding to the geological time periods.

2. Multiple extirpations: a. The last sometimes identified with the Genesis Flood. b. Some versions postulated interregnums between each

extirpation and the creation that followed.

3. Replaced18th century uniformitarianism of James Hutton, soon to be revived by Charles Lyell.

Figure 2.20. Gap Cre-ation places the geo-logic time scale be-tween the 1st and 2nd days of Creation.


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4. Buckland’s own changing views mirrored evolving geo-logical opinion.

5. Regarding the extirpation of what is now called Pleisto-cene megafauna. a. Buckland initially argued that

i. The sudden disappearance of terrestrial quadru-

peds followed “a violent inundation, which overwhelmed … the northern hemisphere” [Buckland, 1835, I, 94]

ii. “superficial [diluvium] beds of gravel, clay and sand … pro-

duced by this great irruption of water” (ibid.)

b. Later suggested that this most recent catastrophe i. “the last of the many geological revolutions that have been

caused by violent irruptions of water” [loc cit ., 95]

ii. But not to be identified with the Flood because the former gradual and of too short duration.

iii. In which regard, his views diverged from those of

Cuvier (1813) who based his opinion on tradition of a Flood-like catastrophe in multiple cultures.


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c. But by 1838, Special Cre-ationist Louis Agassiz had convinced Buckland that the “diluvium” was i. The residuum,23 gener-

ally referred to as “mo-raine,” of continental ice sheets.

ii. Not the leftovers of wa-

tery irruptions.

In sum: Eiseley’s paleonto-logical ladder into the past (Lecture I) led to

1. Acceptance of the realities of

a. Deep time and

b. Biotas long extinct.

2. But not of transmutation.

23 I.e., “a mass of debris, carried by glaciers and forming ridges and mounds when deposited.” (Dictionary.com).

Figure 2.21. Different kinds of moraine23 produced by advanc-ing and retreating ice sheets.


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Of course, the reality of extinction necessitated the contin-uing origination of new species, which necessity inspired more than a little obfuscation. 1. Thus Herschel24 writing to Lyell:

“I allude to that mystery of mysteries the replacement of extinct spe-cies by others. … [I]n this, as in all his other works we are led by all analogy to suppose that he [the Creator] operates through a se-ries of intermediate causes & that in consequence, the origination of fresh species, could it ever come under our cognizance would be found to be a natural in contradistinction to a miraculous process …” [Letter of 20 February, 1836 reprinted by Cannon (1961). See also note added to Herschel, 1867,12)]

2. Likewise, Lyell’s more candid admission to Whewell in a

letter of 7 March, 1837.

“If I had stated … the possibility of the … origin of fresh species being a natural, in contradiction to a miraculous process, I should have raised a host of prejudices against me, which are unfortunately opposed at every step to any philosopher who attempts to address the public on these mysterious subjects.” [K. Lyell, 1881, II, 5. Emphasis added.]

24 Regarding Herschel, W. F. Cannon (1961,301) wrote as follows: “As the son of the great William Herschel and as a brilliant astronomer in his own right, John F. W. Herschel was not merely the most famous scientist in England: he was looked up to very much as though he were a god.”


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Lamarck among the English.25

The people who would later give the world “Wipers” for “Ypres” didn’t read French.

Even among Britain’s Oxbridge dons, opinion of Lamarck derived largely from Vol. II of Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-33).

His principal objections to the Frenchman as follows:

1. Paucity of evidence. “It is evident, that if some well authenticated facts could have been adduced to establish one complete step in the process of transformation, such as the appearance, in individuals descend-ing from a common stock, of a sense or organ entirely new, and a complete disappearance of some other enjoyed by their pro-genitors, that time alone might then be supposed sufficient to bring about any amount of metamorphosis.” [Principles. v. 2. p. 8. Emphasis added]

a. Would later level the same complaint against Darwin.

b. The argument persists as “God in the gaps.”

25 Title adapted from David Hull’s (1974) essay, “Lamarck Among the Anglos”.


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2. Mechanism implausible. The proposition that habits be-get organs “staggering and absurd.”26

“… when Lamarck talks ‘of the efforts of internal sentiment,’ ‘the

influence of subtle fluids,’ and the ‘acts of organization,’ as causes whereby animals and plants may acquire new organs, he gives us names for things, and … resorts to fictions, as ideal as the ‘plastic virtue,’ and other phantoms of the middle ages.” [Principles. v. 2. P. 8. Emphasis added]

3. Rejected Lamarck’s claim that species intergrade.

“… our new acquisitions consist, more and more … of specimens brought from foreign … countries. A large proportion have never even been seen alive by scientific inquirers. … what is usually the state of our information? A single specimen, perhaps, of a dried plant, or a stuffed bird or a quadruped; a shell without the soft part of the animal; an insect in one stage … . Such infor-mation may enable us to separate species which stand at a con-siderable distance from each other; but we have no reason to ex-pect but difficulty and ambiguity, if we attempt, from such imper-fect opportunities, to obtain distinctive marks for defining the char-acters of species, which are closely related.” [Principles. Vol. 2, p. 22]

26 Lyell’s notebooks (Wilson,1970) and correspondence reveal that it was mu-tability, as opposed to mechanism, that was the principal sticking point,


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4. Rejected Lamarck’s belief that “extinct” species, rather than perishing, had instead evolved into new ones as a practical matter. Instead Lyell proposed what he called the Principle of Preoccupancy. c. Hypothetical Example.

“So a tract of salt-water becomes fresh by passing through every intermediate degree of brackishness, still the marine molluscs will never be permitted to be gradually metamor-phosed into fluviatile [i.e., freshwater] species; because long before any such transformation can take place by slow and insensible degrees, other tribes, which delight in brackish or fresh-water, will avail themselves of the change in the fluid, and will, each in their turn, monopolize the space.” [Princi-ples of Geology, Vol. 2, p. 174]

d. I.e., species no longer suited to their environment by virtue of altered conditions will be exterminated by im-migrants already adapted to the new circumstances.

e. This will occur long before the original species can evolve adaptions appropriate to new circumstances, i.e., superior descendants don’t replace inferior ances-tors, because they don’t have time to evolve.


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f. In short,

“It is idle to dispute about the abstract possibility of the conver-sion of one species into another, when there are known causes so much more active in their nature, which must always inter-vene and prevent the actual accomplishment of such conver-sions. A faint image of the certain doom of a species less fitted to struggle … with a more vigorous species, is presented by the extirpation of savage tribes of men by the advancing colony of some civilized nation.” [Principles. Vol. 2. Pp. 174-175]


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Lyell’s Theory of Special Creation (TSC).

An alternative to transmutation [Principles, v. 2, p. 23)]: 1. Variation limited.

“ … the organization of individuals is capable of being modified to a limited extent by … external causes;”

“ … there are fixed limits beyond which the descendants from common parents can never deviate from a certain type;”

2. Transmission of variations limited.

“… these modifications are, to a certain extent, transmissible to their offspring;”

3. Each species has a unique origin and retains its dis-

tinctness.

“… each species springs from one original stock, and can never be permanently confounded, by intermixing with the progeny of any other stock ;”

4. Extinction.

“ … each species shall endure for a considerable period of time.”


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Lyell realized that continuing extinction necessitates con-tinuing origination if life is to persist.

1. But he estimated that species come into existence too in-

frequently for their origination to be observed.27 “… and taking this [estimate of extinction rates] as a rude ap-proximation to a general standard, it would require more than eight thousand years before it would come to the turn of this conspicuous class [Mammalia] to lose one of their number even in a region of the dimensions of Europe. “It is easy, therefore, to conceive, that … in countries, for example, of the size of England and France, periods of much greater dura-tion must elapse before it would be possible to authenticate the first appearance of one of the larger plants and animals ...” [Princi-ples, v. 2, pp.182-183. Emphasis added]

2. Mechanism of origination therefore unspecified.

a. A true cause not assignable. b. “Creation” a placeholder for ignorance.

c. Hence “that mystery of mysteries.”

27 Even today, the observation, e.g., Grant and Grant (2009), of species in statu nascendi an occasion for excitement.


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Inferences. 1. Intraspecific variation tied to environment and foresight

of the Author of Nature.

2. Regarding domestic productions. a. Man selects the most plastic species for domestication;

these varieties nonetheless manifest limits to variation. b. No tendency, contra Lamarck, of feral populations to re-

vert to ancestral state. c. Domestic species cannot survive in nature. Out-com-

peted by more fertile wild types – anticipates D-W.

3. No hybridization in the wild. Hybridity would anyway re-sult in deterioration, not progression.28 “In the universal struggle for existence, the right of the strongest eventually prevails; and the strength and durability of a race de-pends mainly on its prolificness, [fertility] in which hybrids are acknowledged to be deficient.” [Principles. Vol. 2, p. 56]

28 This was another swipe at Lamarck. Lyell’s remarks notwithstanding, inter-est in this question persisted – e.g., Mendel’s crossing experiments were motivated thereby. Especially, “allopolyploidy” is today an acknowledged speciation mechanism – see any introductory biology text.


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4. Progress in the fossil record apparent – man’s recent appearance sole exception. “… in the monuments … of more remote [pre-Tertiary] eras … there are as yet discovered few fluviatile, and perhaps no lacus-trine formations [deposited in rivers and lakes], and, there-fore, scarcely any means of ob-taining an insight into the zoology of the then existing continents.” [Principles. Vol. 2, p. 60]

5. Man. a. Distinct from other pri-

mates.

b. Primate intelligence overrated; elephants smarter. c. Human variability unexceptional – i.e., a single species.

6. Recent embryological discoveries indicative of Geof-

froy’s “unity of plan” in vertebrates, but not transmutation.

Figure 2.22. Lower jaws of Jurassic mammals. Mesozoic mammals had been known since the early 1800s, but the remains were few and frag-mentary. The discovery of nu-merous Purbeck (SE Eng-land) fossils in 1856 reinvigor-ated Lyell’s belief that animals manifesting “higher” grades of organization had existed in all the geological periods. See Wilson (1971) for discussion. From Nicholson (1897, 254).


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Regarding the Lyell’s claim for the competitive inferiority of hybrids: 1. Struggle for existence among species widely recognized.

2. Extensiveness of intraspecific variability, especially in the

wild, unappreciated.

3. Darwin got the idea of intraspecific competition, and hence superiority of improved forms, from domestic breeding.

4. Wallace got the same idea from his fieldwork in Malaysia which involved the collection of multiple individuals from each population studied – see Fagan (2007) for compari-son of Darwin and Wallace in the field.


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Going the “Whole Orang”.

Lamarck: Man descended from orangutan-like29 ancestor.

Lyell’s lawyerly response: Referring to the use by indige-nous peoples of orangutans to gather fruits –

“We leave it to the Lamarckians … to explain why those same sav-ages of Borneo have not themselves acquired, by dint of longing for many generations for the power of climbing trees, the elongated arms of the orang, or even the prehensile tails of some American monkeys.” [Principles, v 2, p. 47]

Lyell’s refutation reflective of deep misgivings regarding the moral implications of evolution. “I have long seen most clearly”, he wrote Darwin,

“that if any concession is made, all that you claim ... will follow. It is this which has made me so long hesitate, always feeling that the case of Man … and of other animals, … is one and the same, and that if a "vera causa" be admitted for one, instead of a purely unknown and imaginary one, such as the word "Creation," all the consequences must follow.” [Letter of 18 March, 1859. Emphasis added].

29 The term “orang” and variants thereof was used to describe both the Asiatic orangutan (Pongo) and the African chimpanzee (Pan).


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And later, a kick to the Darwinian gut: “As to Lamarck, … I remember that it was the conclusion he came to about man that fortified me thirty years ago against the great im-pression that his arguments at first made on my mind … When I came to the conclusion that after all Lamarck was going to be shown right, that we must ‘go the whole orang,’ I re-read his book, and re-membering when it was written, I felt I had done him injustice.” – [Letter to Darwin of 15 March, 1863. Emphasis added].


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Uniformity.

Lyell substituted “uniformity” for Cuvier’s catastrophism. 1. “Uniformitarianism” was really four distinct postulates

(Gould, 1987). a. Uniformity of law. b. Uniformity of process – “the present is the key to the

past”30 c. Uniformity of rate – gradualism. d. Uniformity of state – non-progressionism.

i. Sophistication of extinct species could be (and was)

used to argue against transmutation, which was as-sociated with Lamarckian progress – Power of Life.

“It appears also that some of these ancient saurian approxi-mated more nearly in their organization to the type of living mammalia than do any of the reptiles now living.” [Princi-ples (6th ed.), Vol. 1. P. 235]

30 Archibald Geikie’s (1905. The Founders of Geology. (2nd edition). MacMil-lan, London, p. 299) famous encapsulation of James Hutton’s uniformitarian geology from which Lyell drew inspiration.


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Figure 2.23. Top. Megalosaurus, a theropod dinosaur de-scribed by William Buckland as reconstructed in the 1850s (left) and today (right), Bottom. Narwhales “tusk-ing.” The tusk (found almost exclusively in males) is an elongated canine.


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ii. Change cyclic, not directional.

“Then might those genera of animals return … The huge Iguanodon might reappear in the woods, and the ichthyo-saur in the sea, while the pterodactyle might flit again through umbrageous groves of tree-ferns. Coral reefs might be prolonged beyond the Arctic Circle, where the whale and the narwal now abound.” [Principles. Vol. 1, p. 123]

2. Only uniformity of law survives. As to the others:

a. Uniformity of process: Reality of low frequency events, e.g., bolide impacts, now admitted, i.e., the present is not the key to the past.

b. Uniformity of rate (gradualism): Violated by adap-tive radiations, mass extinctions, punctuated equilib-ria, etc.

c. Uniformity of state (non-progressionism).

i. Widely rejected even in Lyell’s time and certainly today if we look at characters such as numbers of cell types.

ii. Hence, the Prof. Ichthyosaurus cartoon – see

Wilson (1971); Hallam (1998).


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Figure 2.25. Increasing numbers of cell types over the past 4 billion years. From Hedges et al. (2004).

Figure 2.24. Frequency vs. magnitude of bolide impacts. What is an on-going process on long time scales, is a unique catastrophic event on shorter ones.


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Voyage Round the World.

Darwin brought with him aboard HMS Beagle a copy of Vol. I of the Principles and picked up a copy of Vol. II in Montevideo.

He became a “transformist” either during the final months of his voyage or shortly thereafter.

It has been suggested that Lyell inadvertently precipi-tated Darwin’s conversion.

Figure 2.25. Itinerary of HMS Beagle, on which Darwin served as ship’s naturalist from 1831-1836. From http://www.brunette.brucity.be/PEGASE/darwin/enbeagl2.htm.

http://www.brunette.brucity.be/PEGASE/darwin/enbeagl2.htm


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“Substantial evidence indicates that Darwin was a special cre-ationist when he read the second volume of Lyell’s Principles and remained a special creationist for a good long time there-after. What Lyell did … was to set out clearly and forcefully the species problem that Darwin eventually solved.” [Hull, 1984, p. xlv)]

Lyellian uniformitarianism was indeed a cornerstone of Darwin’s worldview – “Natura non facit saltūs”31 – e.g., his theory of coral reef formation (Darwin, 1842). But – 1. The journey from special Creation to mutability entailed

more than the solution to an open problem. a. There was the shadow of Lamarck and the con-

tempt with which Darwin’s scientific contemporaries viewed mutability.

b. Going over to “the dark side” entailed the prospect of opposing the views of those contemporaries, who, not to put too fine a point on it, were actively promoting his career – Lyell, in particular.

2. To suggest that such considerations did not weigh

heavily on the mind of the young Darwin is to strain credulity.

31 Literally “Nature doesn’t make jumps.” Think “factory”; “saltar” (Spanish).


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The Galapagos: Crucible of Evolution.

The Archipelago. 1. Remote - About 600 miles

west of SA.

2. Islands small (13 main; 6 smaller) and arid.

3. Of recent volcanic origin (5-10 Mya): “every height crowned with its crater and the boundaries of most lava flows still distinct.” – (Dar-win, 1845, p. 378).

The Biota. 1. Large fraction of the biota endemics. About half of the

birds; 1/3 of the plants.

2. “Specialties” include: tortoises (14 subspecies); marine iguanas; (Darwin’s) finches.

3. Tortoises, finches, etc., manifest inter-island variabil-ity at subspecific, specific and generic level.

Figure 2.26. Map of the east-central Pacific showing Cocos Island and the Galapagos.


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Figure 2.27. Marine iguanas are unique to the Galapagos. As the name suggests they spend much of their time in the water. The species is herbivorous feeding on marine algae. Underwater feed-ing is limited by heat loss to the environment. As a result, small individuals forage principally in shallow water, while large individu-als, by virtue of the lower body surface to volume ratios, are able to dive to depths of up to 30 feet. Like sea birds, marine iguanas possess nasal salt glands that allow them to filter and excrete salt ingested while feeding.


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Figure 2.28. Galapagos tortoise, Geochelone nigra, is the world’s largest tortoise and another Galapagaean endemic with at least a dozen subspecies. “The inhabitants,” Darwin (1845) wrote, “state that they can distinguish the tortoises from the different islands; and that they differ not only in size, but in other characters. Captain Porter has described those from Charles and from the nearest is-land to it, namely, Hood Island, as having their shells in front thick and turned up like a Spanish saddle, whilst the tortoises from James Island are rounder, blacker, and have a better taste when cooked.” [p. 394]


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The Finches.

1. 14+ closely related species.

2. All descended from a single South American species ~ 3 Mya.

3. Nondescript. Distinguisha-

ble by bill size / shape.

4. Bills range from finch-like (Geospiza) to warbler-like (Certhidea).

5. Diets varied. a. Heavy billed Geospiza

specialize on seeds;

b. Others eat seeds, insects, buds, flowers, pulp, etc.

c. Camarhynchus pallidus (woodpecker finch) an ecologi-cal vicar – probes for insects with a spine or twig.

Paradigmatic example of diet-morphology correlation.

Figure 2.22. Woodpecker finch with its stick.

Figure 2.29. Bill size and shape in Darwin’s finches. 1. Large ground finch. 2. Medium ground finch. 3. Small tree finch. 4. Warbler finch. From Lack, D. 1947. Darwin’s Finches.


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From Darwin’s Journal and Remarks (1839):

“The natural history of this archipelago is very remarkable: it seems to be a little world within itself; the greater number of its inhabitants, both vegetable and animal, being found nowhere else.” [pp. 454-455] “… the organic beings found on this archipelago are peculiar to it; yet their general form strongly partakes of an American character. … This similarity of type … would be explained, according to the views of some authors, by saying that the creative power had acted according to the same law over a wide area.” [p. 474]

From Journal of Researches (1845):

1. Regarding the islands. “The natural history of these islands is eminently curious, and well deserves attention. Most of the organic productions are aboriginal creations, found nowhere else; there is even a difference between the inhabitants of the different islands; yet all show a marked rela-tionship with those of America, though separated from that continent by an open space of ocean, between 500 and 600 miles in width. The archipelago is a little world within itself, or rather a satellite at-tached to America, whence it has derived a few stray colonists, and has received the general character of its indigenous productions. Considering the small size of these islands, we feel the more aston-ished at the number of their aboriginal beings, and at their confined


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range. Seeing every height crowned with its crater, and the bound-aries of most of the lava-streams still distinct, we are led to believe that within a period, geologically recent, the unbroken ocean was here spread out. Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact—that mystery of myster-ies—the first appearance of new beings on this earth.” [pp. 377-378. Emphasis added]

2. The Finches.

“Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, inti-mately related group of birds [the finches], one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.” [p. 380. Empha-sis added]

3. Sources of Wonder. “The distribution of the tenants of this archipelago would not be nearly so wonderful, if, for instance, one island had a mocking-thrush, and a second island some other quite distinct genus;—if one island had its genus of lizard, and a second island another dis-tinct genus, or none whatever;—or if the different islands were in-habited, not by representative species of the same genera of plants, but by totally different genera … But it is the circumstance, that several of the islands possess their own species of the tortoise,


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mocking-thrush, finches, and numerous plants, these species hav-ing the same general habits, occupying analogous situations, and obviously filling the same place in the natural economy of this ar-chipelago, that strikes me with wonder. “Reviewing the facts here given, one is astonished at the amount of creative force … displayed on these small, barren, and rocky is-lands; and still more so, at its diverse yet analogous action on points so near each other. “ [pp. 397-398. Emphasis added]

4. These and other hints of Darwin’s conversion to transmu-

tation a. Not to be found in the 1839 edition (Gruber, 1981).

b. Reflect his reluctance to go public with his solution to

“the mystery of mysteries”.


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Myth of the Finches. 1. Contrary to popular lore, The Origin does not reference

the finches – which would appear somewhat odd given the aforementioned passages in the Journal of Re-searches.

2. 1st edition of The Origin does contain two references to “finches”, but neither are to Galapagos finches.

3. And there are multiple Galapagos references regarding

a. South American character of the biota overall.

b. High proportion of endemics among both plants and

animals, but not specifically to the finches.

4. In which regard, Sulloway (1982, p. 345 ff) notes that, having mixed birds from different islands, CD used spec-imens collected by shipmates to sort his own, the resulting hodgepodge being inconclusive as to its implications.

5. Regarding high Galapagos endemicity vs. low endemicity on Bermuda, CD suggests [p. 391] that

a. Bermuda along the N-S migratory flyway.

b. Resulting high immigration rates prevent speciation.


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South American Fossils. Law of the Succession of

Types.

“The relationship, though distant, between the Macrauchenia and the Guanaco, between the Toxodon and the Capybara,[32] —the closer rela-tionship between the many extinct Edentata and the living sloths, ant-eaters, and armadillos, … [etc.] are most interesting facts. … This won-derful relationship in the same conti-nent between the dead and the liv-ing, will, I do not doubt, hereafter throw more light on the appearance of organic beings on our earth, and their disappearance from it, than any other class of facts. [op. cit., p. 173]

32 The status of these fossils has long since been revised. Macrauchenia and Toxodon are representatives of extinct groups, Litopterna & Notounuglata (Simpson, 1950), respectively, of South American hoofed mammals, and unrelated to the living guanaco, a camelid, and the capybara, a large ro-dent related to guinea pigs.

Figure 2.30. Top. Living gua-naco, a camelid, observed by Darwin in southern Argentina. Bottom. Macrauchenia, an ex-tinct and unrelated Litoptern.


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Regarding which, he would later write. “On the theory of descent with modification, the great law of the … succession of the same types within the same areas, is at once explained; for the inhabitants of each quarter of the world will ob-viously tend to leave in that quarter … closely allied though in some degree modified descendants.” [Darwin (1859), p. 340]

Extinction.

“It is impossible to reflect on the changed state of the American continent without the deepest astonishment. Formerly it must have swarmed with great monsters: now we find mere pigmies … Since they [the Pleistocene megafauna] lived, no very great change in the form of the land can have taken place. What, then, has exterminated so many species …? The mind at first is irresistibly hurried into the belief of some great catastrophe, but thus to destroy animals, both large and small, in Southern Pata-gonia, in Brazil, … we must shake the entire framework of the globe.…” [p. 173-174. Emphasis added]

1. Darwin rejected a world-wide cataclysm.

a. No evidence,

b. Feral descendants of horses and livestock introduced

by the Spanish abundant on the Pampas.


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2. Also rejected extermination by man. a. Large animals, perhaps.

b. But what about small species that also disappeared?

3. Argued instead that population sizes vary in response to multiple causes, competition, in particular, rarity in-creases the likelihood of extinction.

“To admit that species generally become rare before they be-come extinct—to feel no surprise at the comparative rarity of one species with another, and yet to call in some extraordinary agent and to marvel greatly when a species ceases to exist, appears to me much the same as to admit that sickness in the individual is the prelude to death—to feel no surprise at sickness—but when the sick man dies, to wonder, and to believe that he died through violence.” [p. 176]

4. This uniformitarian view rejected by contemporary

paleontologists who favor catastrophic environ-mental deterioration responsible for mass extinc-tions.

5. In case of SA, early extinctions of archaic species ar-guably due to competition with NA species that moved south following formation of the Isthmus of Panama.


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Timing of Darwin’s Conversion.

Sulloway (1982) maintained that it was the sorting out of his collections by professional systematists after his return that triggered Darwin’s change of mind.

Kohn et al. (2005) cite CD’s Ornithological Notes to support the view that CD converted before return to England.

“The specimens [of mockingbirds] from Chatham & Albermarle Isd appear to be the same; but the other two are different. … When I see these Islands in sight of each other, & [but del.] possessed of but a scanty stock of animals, tenanted by these birds, but slightly differing in structure & filling the same place in Nature, I must suspect they are only varieties.

“The only fact of a similar kind of which I am aware, is the constant | asserted difference — between the wolf-like Fox of East & West Falk-land Islds. — If there is the slightest foundation for these remarks the zoology of Archipelagoes — will be well worth examining; for such facts [would inserted] undermine the stability of Species. [Barlow (1963), p. 262]

Likewise, Brinkman’s (2009) points to Darwin’s South Amer-ican fossils as prompting a pre-return conversion.

Whatever the truth, Darwin’s Beagle experiences key.


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1. From the Autobiography (F. Darwin, 1887): ‘I had been deeply impressed by discovering in the Pampean for-mation great fossil animals covered with armour like that on the existing armadillos; secondly, by the manner in which closely al-lied animals replace one another in proceeding southwards over the Continent; and thirdly, by the South American character of most of the productions of the Galapagos archipelago, and more especially by the manner in which they differ slightly on each is-land of the group; none of the islands appearing to be very an-cient in a geological sense.

‘It was evident that such facts as these … could only be explained on the supposition that species gradually become modified; and the subject haunted me.” [p. 82]

2. And from his personal diary,

“In July opened first note Book [B] on ‘transmutation of Species’. — Had been greatly struck from about month of previous March on character of S. American fossils — & species on Galapagos Archipelago. — These facts origin (especially latter) of all my views” [p. 13 recto33, 1837]

Which would appear to date the time of Darwin’s conversion

to March, 1837, i.e., after the Beagle’s return to England.

33 Right hand page, as opposed to verso.


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Return to England.

Oct. 1836. Beagle in port. Af-ter brief sojourns at home and in Cambridge, Darwin moves to London.

1837.

1. Gives specimens to profes-sional systematists.

2. Opens first (B) transmuta-tion notebook.

1838. Reads Malthus; twigs to NS; opens instincts / be-havior notebooks

1839-1844. Writes three pre-liminary drafts of his theory.

1. 1839. “Outline and draft.”

2. 1842. “Sketch”.

3. 1844. “Essay”

Figure 2.31. Darwin‘s note-books, 1836-1839. The Red Notebook, opened aboard the Beagle, was general purpose. Notebooks A (geology) and B-E, (species) were opened after his return to England. Solid lines represent time periods encompassed by each; dotted lines, uncertainties in dating; dashed lines, division of sub-ject matter. Redrawn from Bar-rett et al. (1987).


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A Fifteen Year Delay. Save for his Principle of Divergence34, Darwin had it all

worked out by 1844.35 Then he hesitated,36

1. Busied himself with other projects. Barnacles, in particu-lar, consumed the bulk of his time from 1846 to 1854.

2. Took friends / correspondents – Hooker, later Asa Gray and Lyell himself – into his confidence, but not prominent naturalists Whewell, Owen and Sedgwick (Richards, 2015) who could have been expected to be hostile.

3. Confined published remarks to hints, e.g., a. Address (1837, 554 #4) on coral reefs to the Geol. Soc.

b. Additions to the 2nd edition of his Journal of Researches

(1845) quoted above.

34 Essentially the idea that ecological opportunity and competition between similar species select for ecological and morphological divergence.

35 See, for example, Schweber (1977) and Eldredge (2005) for discussion of

the continuity as one goes from the Sketch to the Essay to The Origin` both with regard to overall organization and specific passages and phraseology.

36 Possible reasons for the delay are reviewed by Richards (1983) who adds

his own suggestion to the list.

http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=1&itemID=F1647&viewtype=text


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4. Reluctant to a. Be associated with “riot and revolution” (Desmond and

Moore, 1991, 315)

b. Challenge the scientific establishment – recall Sedg-wick’s (1845) review of Vestiges.

5. Ruse (1979), quoted by Richards (1983), puts it thusly.

“Darwin was not an amateur outsider like Chambers. He was part of the scientific network, a product of Cambridge and a close friend of Lyell, and he knew well the dread and the hatred most of the network had for evolutionism … Darwin knew his theory was much better than Chamber’s – “better” in that it more ade-quately answered the problems as then understood [37] – but it was evolutionary and materialistic nonetheless, and it was cer-tainly not going to make its author very popular. Hence the Essay of 1844 went unpublished.” [p. 185]

6. Ruse further references the letter to Hooker in which Dar-win famously observed

“… I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immuta-ble.” [11 January, 1844].

37 For discussion of Darwin’s reaction to Vestiges, see Egerton (1970).


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But was there a delay, i.e., a premeditated setting aside? 1. Van Wyhe (2007) says “no”.

a. Submits “the delay” a recent invention.

b. Disputes #2 and #3 above – claims CD took more col-leagues into his confidence than is usually credited.

c. Whereas Ruse (1979) interprets the reference to “mur-der” in CD’s letter to Hooker as the murder of Christian-ity, van Wyhe considered it an example of “self-effacing humor.”

2. Instead argued that Darwin diverted from writing up his views on species question by other projects (Figure 2.31).

a. Barnacles in particular – which undertaking unexpect-

edly mushroomed from the description of a single spe-cies to four volumes.

b. Not fear of criticism, but concern for enormity of the species project was CD’s principal concern.


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Figure 2.32. Top. Timeline from van Wyhe (2007) who argues that completion of Darwin’s species work was forestalled by commitment to other projects. Bottom. One of the many plates in Darwin’s two volume treatise on living barnacles published from 1851-1854. A companion treatise, also consisting of two volumes, on fossil barna-cles was also.


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3. Regarding CD’s reluctance to tackle species, van Wyhe quotes from an 1855 letter to his cousin, W. D. Fox, to make the point that Darwin found the task daunting: “I forget whether I ever told you what the objects of my present work is,—it is to view all facts that I can master (eheu, eheu[38] how igno-rant I find I am) to see how far they favour or are opposed to the notion that wild species are mutable or immutable: I mean with my utmost power to give all arguments & facts on both sides. I have a number of people helping me in every way, & giving me most valu-able assistance; but I often doubt whether the subject will not quite overpower me.” [Letter of 27 March. DCP-LETT-1656. Em-phasis added]

4. Indeed, Darwin may found the have the prospect daunt-ing. But,

5. What impresses this reader is Darwin’s stated intention “to give all arguments and facts on both sides”, which suggests a reluctance to be seen as advocating the po-sition that would bring grief to a work’s author - even a. To his cousin and close college friend.

b. Though said advocacy the object of past labors, i.e., the

manuscripts of 1842 and 1844.

38 Alas, alas.


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5. Moreover, a. In 1844, things were quite different (Supplement II.3)

i. Opposition to materialism ubiquitous e.g., the reac-

tion to Vestiges (Gillispie, 1951; Lynch, 2000).

ii. For Darwin to have published in favor of transmuta-tion was to risk ostracism by friends who had pro-moted and who were still promoting, his career.

b. Thirteen years later, Darwin still feared his views would

be rejected. To Asa Gray, he recalled that

“the last time I saw my dear old friend Falconer[39], he attacked me most vigorously, but quite kindly, and told me, ‘You will do more harm than any ten Naturalists will do good. I can see that you have already corrupted and half-spoiled Hooker!!’ Now when I see such strong feeling in my oldest friends, you need not won-der that I always expect my views to be received with contempt.” [5 September, 1857. DCP-LETT-2136. Emphasis added]

c. Which would seem to indicate that Darwin did indeed

expect to reap the whirlwind.

39 Hugh Falconer (1808-1865) paleontologist best remembered for his work on the famous Siwalik Hills formation (Miocene - Pleistocene) in India.

http://www.pendlynxhare.com/249/!%20Supplements/Why%20a%20Murder.pdf


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Figure 2.33. Top. The Siwalik Hills extend from Pakistan eastward to Bhutan. Bottom. Life size models of extinct elephants at the Shivalik Fossil Park about 100 miles due north of Delhi.


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That Darwin really intended to “ice the species project for an extended period is supported by the following:

i. He had a “fair copy”40 of the 1844 essay prepared.

ii. He instructed his wife, Emma, in a detailed letter to ar-

range for its publication should he die unexpectedly: “… I have just finished my sketch of my species theory. If, as I believe, my theory in time be accepted even by one competent judge, it will be a considerable step in science. “I therefore write this in case of my sudden death, as my most solemn and last request, which I am sure you will consider the same as if legally entered in my will, that you will devote £400 to its publication, and further, will yourself, or through Hensleigh [Wedgwood, Darwin’s cousin] take trouble in promoting it.” [letter of 5 July 1844, DCP-LETT-761]41

Whatever Darwin’s initial intent, he didn’t return to species until 1856 and then only in response to Lyell’s prodding (Lecture III).

40 “A copy of a document made after final correction” (Dictionary.com). 41 Emma Darwin was deeply religious & troubled by her husband’s views:

“Every thing” [sic ] she wrote him in 1839 “that concerns you concerns me & I should be most unhappy if I thought we did not belong to each other forever.” [Emphasis added]


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Waiting for Lyell. Following publication of The Origin, Darwin anxiously

awaited judgment by his friend, patron and father figure. 1. To Asa Gray, he wrote on 11 November:

“Lyell highly approves of the two Geological chapters … He is nearly a convert to my views ...” [DCP-LETT-2520. Empha-sis added]

2. To Wallace, two days later:

“No one has read it, except Lyell, with whom I have had much cor-respondence. Hooker thinks him a complete convert, but he does not seem so in his letters to me;” [DCP-LETT-2529. Empha-sis added ].

3. On 21 November, Hooker reported that “Lyell, with whom we are staying, is perfectly enchanted, and is absolutely gloating over it”, to which Darwin replied, “I triumph to hear that he continues to approve.” [DCP-LETTS 2539 and 2542].

4. To Huxley, Darwin wrote on 25 November:

“… Exactly fifteen months ago, when I put pen to paper for this volume, I had awful misgivings; … I then fixed in my mind three


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judges, on whose decision I determined mentally to abide. The judges were Lyell, Hooker, and yourself.” [DCP-LETT-2553.

Emphasis added].

5. Huxley and Hooker became enthusiastic converts.

6. Lyell remained ambivalent. “When, as I fully expect,” he wrote Darwin after receiving a preliminary copy

“… a new edition is soon called for, you may here and there insert an actual case to relieve the vast number of abstract propositions.” [Letter of 3 October, 1859. DCP-LETT-2501. Empha-sis added.].

7. To which, Darwin responded somewhat plaintively on 11

October.

“If you admit in ever so little a degree, the explanation which I have given of Embryology, Homology and Classification, you will find it difficult to say: thus far the explanation holds good, but no further; here we must call in `the addition of new creative forces.’ I think you will be driven to reject all or admit all: I fear by your letter it will be the former alternative.” [DCP-LETT-2503. Em-phasis added]


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Pattern vs. Mechanism.

The Darwin-Lyell correspondence on this matter important because it reveals a crucial difference in perspective. 1. For Darwin, the critical points were

a. Mechanism: Substitution of a true cause, natural se-

lection, for mere words: progression, inner urges, etc.

b. Priority: Lack of continuity with Lamarck.

2. Hence, his dismay when Lyell’s later characterized his views as “a modification of Lamarck’s. “Plato, Buffon, my grandfather before Lamarck & others”, Darwin wrote,

“propounded the obvious view that if species were not created separately, they must have descended from other species: & I can see nothing else in common between the Origin & Lamarck. I believe this way of putting the case is very injurious to its ac-ceptance; as it implies necessary progression & closely connects Wallace's & my views with what I consider, after two deliberate readings, as a wretched book [Philosophie Zoologique] & one from which (I well remember my surprise) I gained nothing.” [12-13 March, 1863. DCP-LETT-4038. Emphasis added]


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3. But for Lyell, pattern (DwM), not mechanism (NS), was critical. “…it cannot surely be said,” he wrote

“that the most eminent naturalists have rejected the view of the mutability of species? You do not mean to ignore G. St. Hilaire and Lamarck. As to the latter, you may say, that in regard to ani-mals you substitute natural selection for volition to a certain con-siderable extent, but in his theory of the changes of plants he could not introduce volition; he may, no doubt, have laid an undue comparative stress on changes in physical conditions, and too little on those of contending organisms. He at least was for the universal mutability of species and for a genealogical link be-tween the first and the present.” – Letter to Darwin, 3 Octo-ber, 1859. [DCP-LETT-2501. Emphasis added].

4. In Lakatosian terms, Lyell emphasized the hard core of

evolutionism; Darwin, the auxiliary hypotheses, be-cause, if this author be permitted to hazard, it was he, Darwin, who “discovered” what he judged to be the most important one.

In the event, it was Lyell who would be proved right. The next hundred and fifty years would witness 1. Accumulating evidence for and improving understand-

ing of common descent;

2. A succession of theories to explain it. See Lecture IV.

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