Darwin’s Originality PeterJ.Bowler
Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection has been hailed as one of the most innovative contributions to modern science. When first proposed in 1859, however, it was widely rejected by his contemporaries, even by those who accepted the general idea of evolution. This article identifies those aspects of Darwin’s work that led him to develop this revolutionary theory, including his studies of biogeography and animal breeding, and his recognition of the role played by the struggle for existence. The publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 is widely supposed to have initiated a revolution both in science and in Western culture. Yet there have been frequent claims that Darwinism was somehow “in the air” at the time, merely waiting for someone to put a few readily available points together in the right way [for instance (1)]. The fact that Alfred Russel Wallace (Fig. 1) independently formulated a theory of natural selection in 1858 is taken as evidence for this position. But Darwin had created the outlines of the theory 20 years earlier, and there were significant dif
ferences between the ways in which he and Wallace formulated their ideas. In this essay, I argue that Darwin was truly original in his thinking, and I support this claim by addressing the related issue of defining just why the theory was so disturbing to his contemporaries. Darwin was certainly not the first to suggest the idea of evolution as an alternative to the creation of species by God. J. B. Lamarck’s theory, published in 1809, had been widely discussed,althoughgenerallyrejected(2–4).Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation of 1844 sparked a debate over the possibility that new species were produced from
pre-existing ones in a progressive sequence leading up to humans ( 5). But if the general idea of evolution was not entirely new, Darwin’s vision of how the process worked certainly was. Although the theory was eventually paralleled by Wallace, Darwin had conceived its basic outline inthelate1830s,afterhisreturnfromthevoyage of H.M.S. Beagle. He worked on it in relative isolationoverthenext20years,untilthearrivalof Wallace’spaperin 1858 precipitatedtheflurryof activity leading to the publication of the Origin. Historians have quarried Darwin’s notebooks and letters to establish the complex process by