Debates About Life’s Origin and Adaptive Powers in the Early Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In the “Historical Sketch” he published in the third edition of On the Origin of Species (1861), Darwin famously argued that “the great majority of naturalists believe that species are immutable productions and have been separately created.” Commentators have implicitly endorsed this self-serving view since then. In fact, since the last decades of the eighteenth century, writers about nature and practitioners of the “system of nature” genre had engaged in discussions on the origin of life and the limits and extent of its capability to adapt to changing environments. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, several highly popular French encyclopedias and dictionaries published entries devoted to discussing spontaneous generations or the thesis that varieties were incipient species. A handful of such articles endorsing transformism caught Darwin’s attention, though their authors were ignored or snubbed in the “Historical Sketch.”