The development of Darwin's theory : natural history, natural theology, and natural selection, 1838-1859 / Dov Ospovat.

  • Ospovat, Dov.
Date:
1995, ©1981
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: The development of Darwin's theory : natural history, natural theology, and natural selection, 1838-1859 / Dov Ospovat. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Notes to pp. 2 2-6 52 Theodor Schwann, Microscopical Researches into the Accordance in the Structure and Growth of Animals and Plants, pp. 187—8. 53 Ibid., p. 187. 54 With respect to geographical distribution, see Darwin's comment in the Origin, p. 346: Neither the similarity nor the dissimilarity of the inhabitants of various regions can be accounted for by their climatal and other physical conditions. Of late, almost every author who has studied the subject has come to this conclusion. On zoologists generally, see Mary P. Winsor, Starfish, Jellyfish, and the Order of Life, pp. 139-41, 177-8. For the pro-GeofFroy attitude in France after 1830, see Appel, The Cuvier- Geoffroy Debate. On von Baer and Milne Edwards, see Chapter 5. 55 [Owen], Generalizations of Comparative Anatomy, p. 80. 56 This first occurred to me as a result of reading David Kohn's study of the transmutation notebooks, where it is argued that Darwin did not give up, but rather modified, the idea of perfect adaptation in the period before he read Malthus: Theories to Work By, pp. 98-^, 104-5, i43- 57 Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, pp. 59, 87. 58 Three of the most important of these have been noted by Sandra Herbert in The Place of Man in the Development of Darwin's Theory of Transmutation, Part 1, pp. 233-6. 59 Nora Barlow, ed., Charles Darwin's Diary of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, p. 383; Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries visited by H.M.S. Beagle, pp. 526-7. 60 DAR 30.i:MS p. 65. 61 DAR 30.2:MS p. 200. 62 DAR 42 (ser. 3):MS p. 2, in geological notes dated February 1835. In an apparently earlier set of notes, Darwin expressed similar ideas on the close relationship between environmental conditions and the organic creation: It would appear to be necessary under similar circumstances, that the landscape should possess the same forms & tints (DAR 30.2:MS p. 156). 63 DAR 42 (ser. 3):MS p. 7, in Reflections on reading my Geological Notes. 64 Ibid., MS p. 10. See also LLD, 1:363. 65 Creation does not bear upon solely adaptation of animals (Nora Barlow, Darwin's Ornithological Notes, p. 277). On Darwin's notebook R.N., from which this passage is quoted, on the dating of the relevant trans- mutationist passages, and on Darwin's adoption of transmutationist views, see Herbert, The Place of Man, Part I, pp. 233-49. 66 Darwin was pleased when Lyell and John Herschel alluded in letters to intermediate causes of the origination of species; but much of his argument against creation in the notebooks was directed toward Lyell's teleological account of the appearance of new forms. Of course Darwin was also opposed to the explicitly nonevolutionary accounts by antiteleol- ogists such as Agassiz. That Darwin's arguments were most often aimed at the teleologists seems not to have been noticed by Neal C. Gillespie, who lumps together a host of different viewpoints under the rubric special creation {Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation, pp. 22-3, 76-81). 241