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References
See especially The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin, 3 vols. (London: Murray, 1888), II, 29–30, 116–118; and Charles Darwin, More Letters, ed. Francis Darwin and A. C. Steward, 2 vols. (London: Murray, 1903), I, 152.
Wallace himself made a remark about Darwin's superior accomplishment that (regardless of Wallace's opinion) should perhaps also include Darwin's development of the analogy of the breeder: “I have not the love of work, experiment, and detail that was so pre-eminent in Darwin, and without which anything I could have written would never have convinced the world” (Wallace to A. Newton, 3 December 1887), cited in The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, and Selected Letters, ed. Francis Darwin (New York: Dover, 1958), p. 201.
See Wallace to Darwin, 2 July 1866, in Darwin, More Letters, ed. Francis Darwin (New York: Dover, 1958), I, 267; Darwin's reply, 5 July 1866, in Darwin, Life and Letters, III, 45–47; and Darwin's explanation to Hugh Falconer, 1 October 1862, in More Letters, I, 208. Darwin agreed to a reformation of terminology, and the title of the fourth chapter of the Origin was revised in accord with Wallace's suggestion to “Natural Selection; or the Survival of the Fittest,” the latter term coming originally from Herbert Spencer.
Robert Young, “Darwin's Metaphor: Does Nature Select?”, Monist, 55 (1971), esp. pp. 470–490.
John C. Greene, “Reflections on the Progress of Darwin Studies,” J. Hist. Biol., 8 (1975), 269.
See below.
Michael Ruse, “Charles Darwin and Artificial Selection,” J. Hist. Ideas, 36 (1975), esp. p. 350; Sandra Herbert, “Darwin, Malthus, and Selection,” J. Hist. Biol., 4 (1971), 212; Howard E. Gruber, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974), pp. 173–174; Camille Limoges, La Selection naturelle (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1970), p. 76.
Robert Young observes that broader issues are easily overlooked in detailed studies; see his “Historiographic and Ideological Context of the Nineteenth-Century Debate on Man's Place in Nature,” in Changing Perspectives in the History of Science: Essays in Honor of Joseph Needham (London: Heinemann, 1979), pp. 362–363. Also see Dov Ospovat, The Development of Darwin's Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 231.
James Secord, “Darwin and the Breeders,” in The Darwinian Heritage: A Centennial Retrospect, ed. David Kohn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming).
See below, p. 329.
Richard Burkhardt, The Spirit of System (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 77–79.
Georges Buffon, “De la generation,” in Oeuvres, ed. M. A. Richard, 34 vols. (Paris: Delangle, 1827), XIX, 8–10.
J. B. Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy, trans. Hugh Elliot (New York: Hafner, 1963), pp. 109–111.
Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, 5th ed., 4 vols. (London: Murray, 1837), II, 399–402.
Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, 5th ed., 4 vols. (London: Murray, 1837), II, p. 400.
William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences, 3rd ed. (New York: Appleton, 1901), pp. 653–654.
Ruse, “Darwin and Artificial Selection,” p. 349; John Sebright, “The Art of Improving the Breeds of Domestic Animals” (London: John Harding, 1809; Darwin Offprint Collection, no. 63).
The classical notion of techne, or human art, discernible in Hippocratic medicine and developed in natural philosophy by Aristotle, is clearly related to nature and nature's internal ends. Art imitates or completes natural processes; it follows nature's lead. See, for example, Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), III, 3–45. Regarding the goals of the scientific revolution, the major sources are Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (end of Day 1); F. Bacon, New Organon, I; and Descartes, Discourse on Method, pt. 6. See also note 27.
Darwin studied in depth the history of breeding, as is apparent from the background he gives for pigeons and dogs in Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1892). See, for instance I, 214–222, as well as the Origin of Species, Facsimile of the first edition, introd. by Ernst Mayr (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 17–19, 20–28, 33–34. See also James Secord, “Nature's Fancy: Charles Darwin and the Breeding of Pigeons,” Isis, 72 (1981), 182–183.
See the Origin, pp. 61 and 109, where Darwin speaks of art and nature.
See, for example, Francis Bacon, New Organon, I, 66, and New Atlantis, final section.
Norman Kemp Smith, New Studies in the Philosophy of Descartes (London: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 356–357.
John Veitch, ed., The Method, Meditations and Philosophy of Descartes (New York: Tudor Publishing, 1950), p. 188.
Francois Delaporte, Nature's Second Kingdom (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), pp. 80–89.
Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), sec. 65, esp. pp. 19–24 (second part).
J. B. Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy, trans. Hugh Elliot (New York: Hafner, 1963), pp. 201–202; and Georges Cuvier, Le Regne animal (Paris: Deterville, 1817) I, 16–17.
Francois Delaporte, Nature's Second Kingdom (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), pp. 178–179; Hans Jonas, “The Practical Uses of Theory,” in The Phenomenon of Life (New York: Delta, 1966), pp. 188–210; Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), pp. 193, 215; Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, vol. 2, The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1964), p. 78.
See Neal C. Gillespie, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 21.
Cf., for example, (Adam Sedgwick,) “Natural History of Creation,” Edinburgh Rev., 82 (1845), 62, 64.
William Paley, for example, assumes some machinelike account of organic reproduction in Natural Theology (New York: American Tract Society, n.d.); see chap. 1, sec. 4, p. 20.
Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, 5th ed., 4 vols. (London: Murray, 1837), III, 79.
See also David Kohn, “Theories to Work By: Rejected Theories, Reproduction, and Darwin's Path to Natural Selection,” Stud. Hist. Biol., 4 (1980), 98.
Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, 5th ed., 4 vols. (London: Murray, 1837), II, 261.
A note by Darwin as early as 1836 mentions it. See Gruber, Darwin on Man, p. 101; also Darwin, Life and Letters, I, 384, 389, 409; II, 46.
Robert C. Stauffer, ed., Charles Darwin's Natural Selection: Being the Second Part of His Big Species Book Written from 1856 to 1858 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 211. For another link between Darwin's approach to evolution and the mechanist-theological tradition, see below.
Charles Darwin, Notebooks on Transmutation of Species, ed. Gavin de Beer, in Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History), vols. 2 and 3, hereafter referred to as NBT, plus the letters B-E representing the successive notebooks, with page numbers to Darwin's original. Some of the transcriptions have been amended here.
David Kohn, “Theories to Work By: Rejected Theories, Reproduction, and Darwin's Path to Natural Selection,” Stud. Hist. Biol., 4 (1980), pp. 83–87, 113–129.
Ibid., p. 152. The reasoning is not actually “fallacious,” as Kohn calls it; it is simply a different perspective on organic change than we associate with the later Darwin.
Kohn (“Theories to Work By,” p. 137) refers to this stage of the comparison as a “descriptive analogy.”
Ibid., p. 77.
M. J. S. Hodge, “Darwin and Natural Selection: Roles for Methodological Ideals in a Theoretical Innovation,” in Kohn, The Darwinian Heritage.
On p. 8 of Darwin's copy of J. Sebright's “Art of Improving the Breeds of Domestic Animals,” Darwin noted (in pen), “does not take into account loss of desire.” He made similar observations on pp. 10 and 14. Also, on the cover of the pamphlet Darwin remarked about the distinct smells of races and breeds of animals.
Sebright's initial definition of the “art of breeding,” which he says consists in “the selection of males and females, intended to breed together” (p. 5), is not marked by Darwin; Darwin's first marginal marks refer to Sebright's discussion of the “long-in-the-blood” principle of hereditary character (p. 7), which he considered in NBT C. The concern reflected in the other marginalia seems also to be with such relatively natural principles (desire, heredity, the presence of variation). Sebright's general “theoretical” remark on p. 26, that “the alteration which may be made in any breed of animals by selection, can hardly be conceived by those who have not paid some attention to this subject” is not marked by Darwin. Darwin's marginalia in J. Wilkinson's “Remarks on the Improvement of Cattle” (Darwin Offprint Collection, no. 62) indicate roughly the same interest. These markings focus especially on the possibility of perpetuating new characters (for example, pp. 5, 33, 34, 38).
Michael Ruse, “Charles Darwin and Artificial Selection,” J. Hist. Ideas, 36 (1975), pp. 347–349.
Ibid., p. 347.
Sebright, “Art,” p. 14 (Darwins copy). It must be borne in mind that the dating of the marginalia is not so certain as that of the notebooks, which do not reflect this emphasis; this note may even be later than Notebook C, or be an offhand remark — a speculation that we might read in retrospect as a theoretical milestone. In any case, it is noteworthy that the analogies that confronted Darwin in the breeder pamphlets do not compare in scope to the one Darwin would make in NBT E. Sebright appears to make a relatively weak cause in nature correspond to “all the good effects of the most skillful selection” (p. 15). Wilkinson clearly makes the artificial production of a variety by selection an imitative and forced version of nature's process, which he characterizes as a “certain tendency to change.” Man works in his own peculiar way with this “law of nature.” Darwin marks the following sentence with double marginal lines and quotation marks: “The longer also these perfections have been conlinued, the more stability will they have acquired, and the more will they partake of nature itself” (Wilkinson, “Remarks,” p. 5). Wilkinson's idea of selection as an artificial version of nature's way or ways seems to express all that the analogy means to Darwin, too, at this reading.
In Darwin's copy of Sebright's “Observations upon the Instinct of Animals” (London, 1836; Darwin Offprint Collection, no. 64) there is on p. 6 another possible clue to such a gradual conflation of art and nature. Darwin contests the author's distinction of acquired behavior from “instinct”: “This, I think, is error confining instinct to what is implanted only by nature.”
Hodge, “Darwin and Natural Selection,”; Kohn, “Theories to Work By,” pp. 140–147; Gruber, Darwin on Man, pp. 173–174; Herbert, “Darwin, Malthus, and Selection,” p. 127.
Hodge, “Darwin and Natural Selection.”
Ibid.
See above p. 304.
Hodge, “Darwin and Natural Selection.”
Kohn also noticed this (“Theories to Work By,” p. 139).
Hodge, “Darwin and Natural Selection.”
Ruse, “Darwin and Artificial Selection,” p. 350, also deduced this sequence of Darwin's discovery. I suggest below that it liberated Darwin (perhaps excessively) from the constraints of analogical reasoning and hence is an extremely significant episode.
Besides the Origin and its earlier versions, see Darwin's letter to Asa Gray, 5 September 1857, Life and Letters, I. 477–482.
Darwin, Autobiography, p. 42.
Compare, however, David Kohn, “Theories to Work By: Rejected Theories, Reproduction, and Darwin's Path to Natural Selection,” Stud. Hist. Biol., 4 (1980), pp. 137–138.
Darwin, Origin, p. 4.
Darwin, Variation of Plants and Animals, p. 10. This version, which gives an intervening role to Darwin's Malthusian conception, compares favorably with that in his letter to Wallace, 6 April 1859, More Letters, I, 118.
See above.
See Gavin de Beer's notes (3–6) in Darwin's Notebooks on Transmutation, II, 172. Cf., Darwin's notes on John Macculloch's Proofs and Illustrations of the Attributes of God, transcribed as “Essays on Theology and Natural Selection” in Pau Barrett, ed., Metaphysics, Materialism, and the Evolution of Mind: Early Writings of Charles Darwin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 156 (msp. 2): “But are we certain that these are necessary adaptations—may they not be accidental? We have good reason to know that they would not be detrimental accidents, and domesticated variations show us accidents may become hereditary ... if man takes care they are not detrimental.” This passage reaffirms the technological context of perceiving these “accidents” as the alleged source of natural transformation.
Darwin, Origin, p. 131. Sylvan Schweber has shown, in “The Origin of the Origin Revisited,” J. Hist. Biol., 10 (1977), 264–274, that this view of chance was commonly held among nineteenth-century scientists.
Paley, Natural Theology, chap. 26, p. 413, and chap. 5, secs. 2-3, pp. 58–62. The reviewer of the present essay kindly brought Paley's teaching on this point to my attention. Utility and design are related in natural theology, as are nonutility and chance; hence the nonutility of variation must be a significant part of Darwin's understanding of “accidental” variation.
Darwin, Origin, pp. 37, 40, 45, 46.
Hodge, “Darwin and Natural Selection.”
(Youatt,) Cattle: Their Breeds, Management, and Diseases (London: Baldwin & Cradock, 1834), p. 522; Darwin Library copy, read by Darwin 26 March 1840, according to P. Vorzimmer, “Darwin's Reading Notebooks,” J. Hist. Biol., 10 (1977), 123. Related to Darwin's indirect reliance on the unique agricultural progress of his day are his comparisons in the Origin of nature to human industrial improvement. The suggestion that we contemplate “every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen” (p. 486) clearly must be seen in the context of the enthusiasm of Victorians about what the industrial revolution was accomplishing. Yet, just as clearly, the comparison is invalid, since even the progress of invention encouraged by favorable economic environments required the insight and contrivance of existing, natural beings—the inventors—as well as the interest of other existing, natural beings—the consumers. Like Darwin's use of the breeding analogy, this analogy ignores the human agent as part of nature.
Darwin, “Sketch of 1842,” pp. 42–43, and “Essay of 1844,” p. 97, both in Evolution by Natural Selection: Charles Darwin and A. R. Wallace, foreword by Gavin de Beer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958).
Darwin, Origin, pp. 96–103.
Ibid., p. 32.
I do not find the term in the early sketches, where “selection” is Darwin's term. The only uses in the Origin are on pp. 109 and 198. It is noteworthy, perhaps, that the first usage is in the context of Darwin's diminishing the power of art in comparison to that of nature (understood as natural selection), and the term “artificial” might there contribute to that effect.
Darwin, “Sketch of 1842,” p. 45.
Darwin, “Essay of 1844,” pp. 114–116.
Darwin, “Sketch of 1842,” pp. 45–48, and Darwin, “Essay of 1844,” pp. 114–121. In all these early versions Darwin intends that “natural selection” become the ultimate agent, analogical to the breeder, and he always settles on using the term in that way. But the intention, grasped by all who have been influenced by the Origin, is not the same as the argument. Indeed, Darwin improves his presentation of natural selection as the almost omnipotent analogue of the breeder. In the 1857–58 beginning of Darwin's “big book,” for example, he maintains close conceptual ties between the struggle for existence and natural selection, so that they seem at times interchangeable: the struggle for existence appears as a means of selection (Darwin, Natural Selection, p. 175; also see p. 214). This would seem to be as it should, given that the struggle for existence represents manifold organic beings' continual elimination of one another, and exertion of a kind of external pressure. But the need for an agent with superhuman and even supernatural power and control would dictate that natural selection be brought clearly beyond the struggle for existence, and absorb the latter's complexity of power into a single limitless abstraction. That is more how natural selection finally appears in the first edition of the Origin, where some of its last ties to the struggle for existence have been removed (see p. 61).
The only important exception is if human thought is separated from nature, as it is in Cartesian dualism and, indirectly, in Darwin's teaching in the Origin.
Darwin, Origin, pp. 75–76.
Ibid., pp. 73–74.
Darwin's difficulty has been addressed in an interesting article by Erling Eng, “The Confrontation between Reason and Imagination: The Example of Darwin,” Diogenes (1977), 58–67.
See Darwin's “Sketch of 1842,” p. 46; Darwin to Asa Gray, 5 September 1857, Life and Letters, I, 478; Origin, p. 483. Darwin's concern with the extent of his natural mechanism reflects not simply the riskiness in the nineteenth-century context of supposing the evolution of all creatures, but the nineteenth-century need for some evident explanation if the very idea of evolution was to be taken seriously. Darwin tended to enhance his argument by stating the uncertainty of natural selection's power as a doubt of its limits, though the two expressions are not equivalent. See Origin, p. 469; Natural Selection, p. 225.
See, however, Secord, “Nature's Fancy,” p. 185.
Darwin, Origin, p. 36.
Ibid., pp. 34–35.
Cf. Darwin, Variation of Plants and Animals, pp. 38–39.
In Variation of Plants and Animals unconscious selection and the savages' domestic beasts are found together, linking methodological and natural selection.
Darwin, Origin, p. 38.
Ibid., p. 84.
Although it may appear in chap. 4 of the Origin (p. 84) that Darwin is granting some superiority of nature (conceived as natural selection) to art, in his final conclusion (p. 459) he speaks more consistently of nature working “not by means superior to, though analogous with, human reason.”
See Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (London: Murray, 1890), pp. 24–26, 32, 365, 387–388, 474–475. It is much more usual for Darwin in this work to extol the superfluous diversity and aesthetic quality of nature, the elegance and novelty of vegetable forms, and so on; whereas the utilitarian or technological attitude is almost entirely absent. See also Stanley E. Hyman, The Tangled Bank (New York: Atheneum 1962), p. 15. It does not seem that Darwin's feeling for natural beauty ever diminished under the impact of his own theory. See John Campbell, “Nature, Religion, and Emotional Response: A Reconsideration of Darwin's Affective Decline,” Vict. Stud., 18 (1974), 159–174. The theoretical and the aesthetic were probably fused in Darwin's response to living things, as Francis Darwin once suggested, though not ultimately in his explicit scientific teaching. See F. Darwin cited in Charles Darwin and the Voyage of the Beagle, ed. Nora Barlow (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), p. 152.
Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (London: Murray, 1890), p. 83. The term “machinery” reflects, of course, the early modern technological conception of nature preceding Darwin's selectionism. This conception, which nonetheless harmonizes with Darwin's, does not seem of particular interest to him before he has his own technological interpretation of evolution. Again, the tendency of The Voyage of the Beagle is to contrast the “mechanical power” of physical processes and “the agency of the vital laws” (pp. 442, 446–447). In The Voyage Darwin is at a loss for words to express the superiority of nature to artificial conceptions. Even in calling the tropical land a “wild and luxuriant hothouse ... made by Nature for herself” (p. 475), Darwin's point is that this “fail[s] to communicate a just idea of the vegetation.” Darwin's reference in The Voyage to the Galapagos finches, which look as if one species were “taken and modified for different ends” (p. 365), was added in the new edition, after Darwin had sketched his selection theory. See Life and Letters, I, 366.
See note 74.
Darwin, Origin, p. 61.
Ibid., p. 81.
The conflation of cause and effect in the term “natural selection” has a parallel in Darwin's lack of clarity about whether it is an analogy or a metaphor he has produced. He suggests in some places that it is an analogy (Origin, pp. 112, 459; More Letters, I, 152), but insists on metaphor in a later edition of the Origin (Darwin, Origin of Species: Variorum Text, ed. M. Peckham (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1951), p. 165). With respect to effects, Darwin must have aimed at analogy; with respect to causes, he did not develop the analogical correlations but had to remain in the domain of metaphor, making a mechanical nature resemble man.
Darwin, Origin, p. 84.
The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, and Selected Letters, ed. Francis Darwin (New York: Dover, 1958), p. 43.
Ospovat, The Development of Darwin's Theory, pp. 175–176.
Darwin, Origin, p. 112.
Indeed, in his discussion of divergence Darwin glides from the breeder's sphere of influence to nature in general, applying the “principle” of steady divergence in both cases, but without examining the difference in kinds of causes working in art and in the natural realm. Hence the application suffers from the same weakness as Darwin's transition from breeding to nature. Not surprisingly, it is not always clear whether the principle of divergence, like natural selection, is defined as a cause and a power or an effect and a result. Compare the Origin, p. 112 (where Darwin refers to the “principle of divergence, causing differences”), and the more explicit definition (involving hypothetically given diversity that allows a greater quantity of living things) on p. 114.
Darwin, Origin, p. 114.
Ibid., pp. 116, 127.
Ibid., pp. 113–114, 117.
It is interesting that post-Darwinians, such as George. Romanes and John Gulick, found fault with precisely Darwin's attempt at an analogical solution to the problem of divergence, and that they saw the need to supplement natural selection with spontaneous varietal isolation and interspecific infertility. See John E. Lesch, “The Role of Isolation in Evolution,” Isis, 66 (1975), 483–503, esp. pp. 486–487. The criticism implied, for these theorists, a less utilitarian interpretation of evolution and morphology.
Darwin, Early Writings (Barrett, ed.), p. 79. Darwin also observes there that the “life and will of a conferva is not an antagonistic quality to [the] life and mind of man.”
Ibid., p. 95n173.
The observations recorded in the M and N Notebooks on the likeness of human behavior to that of other animals were elaborated especially in Darwin's Descent of Man, 2 vols. (London: Murray, 1871), I, 34–106.
Darwin, Origin, p. 208. Robert J. Richards kindly pointed out to me that this example was adapted by Darwin from William Kirby and William Spence, Introduction to Entomology, 4 vols. (2nd ed., London, 1818).
See Darwin to Hooker, 13 July 1858, Life and Letters, I, 484, and Darwin, Natural Selection, pp. 511–512.
Darwin, Origin, p. 211.
Johann G. Gleditsch, cited in Francois Delaporte, Nature's Second Kingdom (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), p. 107.
Darwin himself saw his “solution” to the problem of evolution as revealing the relative character of adaptation. (See Origin, p. 472, and Autobiography, p. 90.) But he did not see that this logically implies the relativity of his mechanism of change.
Paul Ehrlich and Richard Holm implied that there is something Euclidean (Newtonian?) about the Darwinian view of evolution, which might need revision — something perhaps presumptuously absolute. See their “Patterns and Populations,” Science, 137 (1962), 656–657.
Darwin himself in the Origin does not distinguish the theory of evolution from that of natural selection, which has always made it difficult to consider the ranges of application of the two theories.
Darwin says that flowers were “selected,” but not by the insects (Origin, p. 92). A precedent for this usage on the relation of flowers and insects can be found in his “Notes on the Habits of Bees” (ms. 46.2, Cambridge University Library), where he says that “the tempting cause was increased by natural selection” (9). Dated June 1841, this is one of the earliest references to “natural selection” I have found by Darwin. In early 1840 one finds him referring simply to “selection” — see his copies of Youatt on Cattle and Smith on Dogs. Cf. Limoges, La Selection naturelle, pp. 104–105.
Darwin, Origin, p. 224.
Darwin, Origin: Variorum Text, p. 165.
NBT B, p. 232. On Darwin's post-Cartesian inheritance in zoology, see Edward Manier, The Young Darwin and His Cultural Circle (Boston: D. Reidel, 1978), pp. 56–68.
These are the abbreviated English titles of Descartes's pathbreaking scientific treatises: Le Monde and Traité de l'Homme in Descartes, Oeuvres, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery, 11 vols. (Paris: L. Cerf, 1909).
Neal C. Gillespie, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 67–81.
Darwin, Origin, p. 3. Emphasis added.
See G. Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (New York: Anchor, 1962), p. 312; and Gillespie, Darwin and the Problem of Creation, pp. 67–81.
See Timothy Lenoir's suggestions about the limits of Darwin's context in The Strategy of Life (Boston: D. Reidel, 1982), pp. 3–4, based on Lenoir's study of the widely different German biological tradition.
Ospovat, Development of Darwin's Theory, p. 89.
Darwin, Origin, p. 484. Also see Darwin's account of his priorities and intentions in Descent of Man, I, 152–153.
The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, and Selected Letters, ed. Francis Darwin (New York: Dover, 1958), p. 46.
Ospovat, Development of Darwin's Theory, p. 230.
Ibid., p. 233.
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Cornell, J.F. Analogy and technology in Darwin's vision of nature. J Hist Biol 17, 303–344 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00126367
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00126367