Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin (1809—1882) was a British naturalist whose On the Origin of Species (1859) transformed the intellectual foundations of biology and medicine. His theory of descent with modification through natural selection did not directly cure anyone or alter clinical practice, but it restructured the intellectual world within which medicine operated. It displaced teleological explanations of living things, catalyzed the debate between vitalism and mechanism, sanctioned a shift from philosophical rationalism to inductive reasoning in medical science, and — in ways Darwin neither intended nor endorsed — provided the vocabulary for eugenics and scientific racism. His influence on medicine was felt less through any single discovery than through the slow, pervasive reorganization of what counted as an explanation in the life sciences.

Darwin and Medicine

Haller observes that the Flexner Report of 1910 ushered in institutional medicine in America, while Darwin’s Origin of Species sanctioned a shift from philosophical rationalism to inductive reasoning (Haller, 1981). The scientific method promoted by Darwin, Claude Bernard, Maudsley, and Flexner burst upon a nonscientific culture unable to accommodate change, leaving the public increasingly mystified by medical tools and techniques (Haller, 1981).

Yet during the early years of the Darwinian controversy (1859–1873), few practitioners had sufficient training in morphology and physiology to defend or question the evidence for evolution (Haller, 1981). Virchow cautioned against the premature dogmatism surrounding Darwin’s theory, fearing the youthful vigor of scientists would transform biology into the same romantic philosophy that had retarded the science of his own generation (Haller, 1981).

Porter observes that Darwin himself was among those besieged by infections and self-administered remedies well into the mid-nineteenth century: “the medicines they took, whether prescribed by doctors or self-administered, did more harm than good and perhaps became the main source of the sickness.”(Porter, 1997) The great theorist of natural selection was, in his own medical life, subject to exactly the kind of therapeutic disorder his contemporaries had not yet learned to correct.

Darwin in His Own Words

The preceding sections draw primarily on secondary scholarship — historians and philosophers reading Darwin through the lens of what followed him. This section lets Darwin speak in his own terms. On the Origin of Species (1859) is not only the founding document of evolutionary biology; it is an argument — sustained, carefully hedged, and occasionally magnificent in its prose. Reading it against the secondary literature reveals both how much the historians have captured and how much the book’s specific claims exceed any summary of them.

The Book’s Opening Frame

The full title of Origin of Species announces the mechanism of change from the first page: natural selection operating through “the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.”(Darwin, 1859) Darwin placed two epigraphs before the introduction. The first, from Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise, located his project within naturalistic theology: events in the material world arise through general laws rather than discrete divine interventions.(Darwin, 1859) The second, from Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, positioned the scientific inquiry as compatible with religious duty: the study of both divine revelation and natural phenomena is not merely permitted but obligatory for the serious mind.(Darwin, 1859) The book that transformed biology began, then, by situating itself within the intellectual tradition it was about to displace.

Darwin was explicit in the Introduction that Origin of Species was an “Abstract” — necessarily imperfect, unable to supply full references or authorities, and dependent on the reader extending “some confidence in my accuracy.”(Darwin, 1859) He proposed that the key to understanding variation lay in domestication: a careful study of domesticated animals and cultivated plants had offered him “the best and safest clue” to the “obscure problem” of coadaptation.(Darwin, 1859) The argument from domestication was not an analogy but a method: it demonstrated that selection could produce dramatic structural change, and therefore that natural processes working over incomprehensibly long periods could produce the diversity of living forms.(Darwin, 1859)

The Introduction also contained one of Darwin’s most direct statements of what his theory could and could not explain. External conditions such as climate and food are sometimes invoked by naturalists as the only cause of variation, but Darwin dismissed this as inadequate: it is “preposterous to attribute to mere external conditions, the structure, for instance, of the woodpecker, with its feet, tail, beak, and tongue, so admirably adapted to catch insects under the bark of trees.”(Darwin, 1859) The woodpecker and the mistletoe required a principle of coadaptation between organisms, not merely between organisms and physical environments.

Variation, Species, and the Mechanism of Change

Darwin opened Origin of Species with a pointed challenge to the concept of species itself. The word, he observed, carries “the unknown element of a distinct act of creation” buried in its standard usage; no definition had yet satisfied all naturalists, and the boundary between species and varieties was contested and ultimately arbitrary.(Darwin, 1859) His Chapter II data made the challenge concrete: 182 British plants ranked as varieties by one authority had been ranked as species by others, and the discrepancy between two standard catalogues of British flora ran to 139 forms.(Darwin, 1859)

Hence I look at individual differences, though of small interest to the systematist, as of high importance for us, as being the first step towards such slight varieties as are barely thought worth recording in works on natural history. And I look at varieties which are in any degree more distinct and permanent, as steps leading to more strongly marked and more permanent varieties; and at these latter, as leading to sub-species, and to species… Hence I believe a well-marked variety may be justly called an incipient species.(Darwin, 1859)

Darwin pressed the point further: the term “species” is “one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety.”(Darwin, 1859) The implication was that the species category, on which creationist taxonomy rested its entire ontological weight, was a human convenience, not a natural fact. Among the most common and widely diffused species — what Darwin called “dominant” species — the process of variation was most active: these produced the most well-marked varieties, and thus the most incipient species.(Darwin, 1859) Species in larger genera varied more and presented more varieties than those in smaller genera, confirming that speciation is an ongoing process rather than a completed act.(Darwin, 1859)

Darwin identified the struggle for existence as derived directly from Malthus, applied to all animal and vegetable kingdoms.(Darwin, 1859) Because more individuals are born than can survive, any profitable variation will be naturally selected.(Darwin, 1859) Darwin corrected the impression that variations arise by chance, insisting instead that each variation has a cause, though largely unknown.(Darwin, 1859) He attributed variability under domestication primarily to disturbance of the reproductive system by changed conditions of life.(Darwin, 1859) The wingless beetles of Madeira illustrate Darwin’s argument: 200 of 550 species lacked functional wings, and 23 of 29 endemic genera shared this condition, because beetles that flew were blown to sea and destroyed while those that stayed were preserved.(Darwin, 1859)

Natural Selection also carries a built-in consequence that Darwin named Divergence of Character: selection almost inevitably causes extinction of the less competitive forms while driving the survivors toward greater structural differentiation.(Darwin, 1859)

The table-of-contents entry for Chapter V (Laws of Variation, pages 138–170) lists topics including effects of external conditions, use and disuse, acclimatisation, correlation of growth, and others, but the chapter body is absent from this file.(Darwin, 1859) Chapter VI on the Difficulties on Theory addressed the most serious objections: the absence of transitional varieties, organs of extreme perfection, and the tension between Unity of Type and Conditions of Existence.(Darwin, 1859)

Darwin notes that specific characters (recently modified) are more variable than generic characters (long-fixed), and that secondary sexual characters show exceptional variability, because natural selection has not yet stabilized them relative to the generic baseline.(Darwin, 1859) He also observes that varieties of one species that enter another species’ habitat often acquire some of that species’ characters in a slight degree, which accords with the view that species are only well-marked and permanent varieties.(Darwin, 1859)

Extinction and the Geological Record

Chapter X on the Geological Succession of Organic Beings addressed the slow and successive appearance of new species, their different rates of change, and the affinities of extinct forms to living ones.(Darwin, 1859) In that chapter he showed that new species appear very slowly and successively, one after another, with the proportion of extinct to new forms becoming more gradual as the evidence accumulates.(Darwin, 1859) Different lineages change at dramatically different rates: the Silurian Lingula differed little from its living counterpart after hundreds of millions of years, while other Silurian molluscs and crustaceans had changed out of recognition.(Darwin, 1859) This variable pace was itself evidence against any law of fixed developmental progress, supporting instead the view that modification depends on contingent competitive pressures.(Darwin, 1859)

One of Darwin’s most memorable formulations describes what the fossil record actually represents:

Each formation, on this view, does not mark a new and complete act of creation, but only an occasional scene, taken almost at hazard, in a slowly changing drama.(Darwin, 1859)

The gradual disappearance of species from the record — one lineage at a time, from different localities over time — contradicted the catastrophist geology that had attributed mass extinctions to divine interventions.(Darwin, 1859) And once a species was gone, it never reappeared in identical form, even if the same conditions returned, because any successor would inevitably inherit different characters from a different progenitor.(Darwin, 1859) The branching tree, Darwin observed, grows only forward: “groups of species follow the same general rules in their appearance and disappearance as do single species,” and a group does not reappear after it has once disappeared.(Darwin, 1859)

Geographical Distribution as Evidence

Chapter XI on Geographical Distribution (pp. 346—382) argued that present distribution cannot be accounted for by differences in physical conditions alone and that the means of dispersal are the explanatory key.(Darwin, 1859) Chapter XII continued that argument with the distinctive case of oceanic islands and the relation of island inhabitants to those of the nearest mainland.(Darwin, 1859) These two chapters gave Darwin some of his most concrete empirical evidence, drawn in part from his own experiments. He suspended a duck’s foot in an aquarium where freshwater snail larvae were hatching and found that the just-hatched shells clung to the foot so firmly they could not be shaken off in air, surviving for twelve to twenty hours — long enough for a bird to travel six or seven hundred miles.(Darwin, 1859) Three tablespoons of pond mud, dried and kept in his study for six months, yielded 537 seedling plants of many kinds.(Darwin, 1859) These were not thought experiments; they were laboratory demonstrations of the dispersal mechanisms that could account for the otherwise inexplicable distribution of freshwater organisms across continents separated by land barriers.

The wide distribution of freshwater organisms had long seemed paradoxical: lakes and river systems are separated by land barriers, and the sea should be an even greater obstacle. Darwin turned this on its head by arguing that freshwater organisms are actually adapted for frequent short migrations between ponds and streams, and that wide dispersal follows from this capacity as a secondary consequence.(Darwin, 1859) Competition in freshwater habitats is less intense than on land, because the number of species occupying any pond is smaller relative to available niches; a colonist from a foreign country therefore stands a better chance of establishing itself in water than on land.(Darwin, 1859) Darwin captured the selective precision of the process with a simple image: “Nature, like a careful gardener, thus takes her seeds from a bed of a particular nature, and drops them in another equally well fitted for them.”(Darwin, 1859)

The larger biogeographic argument cut against the theory of independent creation at each location. Oceanic islands, he noted, support fewer species overall but a disproportionately high share of endemic forms — a pattern that follows directly from occasional long-distance colonization followed by local modification, and is “utterly inexplicable” on the independent-creation theory.(Darwin, 1859) Most telling of all was the affinity of island species to those of the nearest mainland: the species resembled their continental neighbors, not the species of similar environments on distant islands.(Darwin, 1859) The pattern makes no sense if each island was separately stocked at creation; it makes complete sense if the island was colonized from the nearest source and then modified.

Hybridism: Sterility Without Special Endowment

The hybridism chapter addressed one of the standard arguments for the fixity of species: that crosses between true species produce sterile offspring, demonstrating a natural barrier that prevents species from blending back into one another. Darwin accepted the observation but disputed the interpretation.(Darwin, 1859) The prevailing view held that hybrid sterility was a “specially endowed quality” to prevent confusion between species. Darwin argued this was incoherent on his own theory: sterility could not have been acquired by natural selection because it confers no advantage on the hybrid itself.(Darwin, 1859)

Instead, sterility graduates insensibly across a continuous spectrum.(Darwin, 1859) The degree of sterility in crosses is affected by conditions of life, close interbreeding, and artificial manipulation.(Darwin, 1859) Some plants are paradoxically more easily fertilized by pollen from a distinct species than by their own.(Darwin, 1859) Darwin notes that the fertility of varieties seems to make a broad and clear distinction from the sterility of species,(Darwin, 1859) yet his evidence shows that this supposed bright line turns out to be a gradient.(Darwin, 1859)

The Imperfection of the Geological Record

Darwin identified the absence of transitional fossil forms as “the most obvious and gravest objection” to his theory, and he located the explanation in the “extreme imperfection” of the geological record.(Darwin, 1859) The geological record, as he showed using British sedimentary strata totaling over seventy-two thousand feet in depth, accumulated over incomprehensibly vast stretches of time.(Darwin, 1859) Lyell’s Principles of Geology had made the requisite temporal scale available to naturalists, and Darwin credited it directly: anyone who reads Lyell and still cannot accept how vast the past periods of time have been “may at once close this volume.”(Darwin, 1859)

The subtler point was about what transitional forms would look like if found. A fossil intermediate between two living species would not be halfway between them in appearance; it would be intermediate between each species and their common progenitor, which would itself have differed from both.(Darwin, 1859) More fundamentally, Natural Selection was the agent of its own evidentiary destruction: intermediate varieties are “always being exterminated by the more improved forms they link,” so the mechanism that generates new species also systematically eliminates the forms that would document the transition.(Darwin, 1859) Darwin added a further implication: by the logic of his theory, “all living species have been connected with the parent-species of each genus” by gradations no larger than those between living varieties, meaning the total number of intermediate links between all living and extinct species “must have been inconceivably great” — and almost none of them survived in rock.(Darwin, 1859)

Classification, Embryology, and the Natural System

Chapter XIII on Mutual Affinities drew out what Darwin considered the most powerful indirect confirmation of descent with modification: the fact that naturalists had always organised living things in groups subordinate to groups, and had always preferred what they called a “natural system” over arrangements based on single characters, without being able to explain why.(Darwin, 1859) Descent with modification answered the question directly: the natural system is a genealogical system, and classifications built on it work because they track real historical relationships. Extinction was the force that separated and defined taxonomic groups, creating the gaps between them; without extinction, all forms would grade insensibly into one another and classification would be impossible.(Darwin, 1859)

Embryology offered a parallel line of evidence. The laws of embryological development — the striking resemblances between embryos of very different adult forms — are explicable on Darwin’s principle that variations inherited at the corresponding developmental age produce parallel embryonic stages across classes.(Darwin, 1859) The embryo, on this reading, is a better record of ancestry than the adult, because selection acts mainly on adult structures that must compete in the world.

Descent with Modification as the Organizing Idea

Darwin’s own summary of his position, stated in the Introduction and restated in the Recapitulation, was more qualified than his followers typically rendered it. He was “fully convinced that species are not immutable” and that Natural Selection had been “the main but not exclusive means of modification” — the word exclusive doing considerable work.(Darwin, 1859) The theory began, as he recorded, with observations made during the Beagle voyage, particularly the distribution of South American organisms and the geological relations of past and present inhabitants; he had been working on the problem since 1837, and was induced to publish only when Alfred Russel Wallace arrived at the same conclusions independently.(Darwin, 1859)

The force of the argument in Origin of Species lay less in any single proof than in its cumulative weight. Variation under domestication demonstrated that selection could produce dramatic structural change; variation under nature showed that the same processes operated without human direction; hybridism undermined the species boundary; the geological record, imperfect as it was, showed the pattern of appearance, divergence, and extinction that descent with modification predicted; geographical distribution confirmed that affinity followed ancestry rather than environment. Each line of evidence on its own could be disputed. Together, Darwin argued, they were “utterly inexplicable” on any other theory.(Darwin, 1859)

The End of Galenic Teleology

Temkin argues that by 1870, Galenism as a living tradition was over: Galen was handed to classicists and historians, and medicine’s scientific course, driven by positivistic research, left little place for Galen’s thought (Temkin, 1973).

Gotthelf argues that Aristotle’s biological writings should be read as a late-composed, work-in-progress whose teleological and generative concepts anticipate modern biological thinking (Gotthelf, 2012). Darwin himself remarked that Linnaeus and Cuvier were mere schoolboys compared to Aristotle (Gotthelf, 2012). Additionally, Gotthelf contends that Aristotle’s Generation of Animals is structured as “one long argument” (paralleling Darwin’s characterization of Origin of Species), in which the overall aim is to demonstrate that the formal nature of the embryo functions as the primary efficient cause of generation (Gotthelf, 2012).

The Vitalism Debate

Driesch identifies four circumstances that determined mid-to-late 19th-century thought on biology and vitalism: the rise of materialistic metaphysics, Darwinism explaining purposive construction through chance, the law of conservation of energy, and improved microscopic investigation of living structures (Driesch, 1914). Darwinian animal morphology, Driesch argues, produced a “witches’ orgy” of genealogical tree construction because the machine theory of chance eliminated any deeper meaning for zoological form (Driesch, 1914).

Bergson took a different view. The similarity of complex organs — such as the vertebrate and mollusc eye — on independent evolutionary lines was inexplicable by pure mechanism (accidental variation plus selection) or pure Lamarckian adaptation; Bergson argued this pointed to a creative evolutionary force that neither Darwin nor Lamarck had adequately described (Bergson, 1911). Canguilhem, writing from within the French tradition, noted that Darwin’s milieu was primarily biotic — the first milieu an organism inhabits is an entourage of other living beings — making living competition rather than physical environment the driver of evolutionary change (Canguilhem, Georges, 1952/2008).

Darwin and Lamarck

Darwin’s relationship to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was one of selective borrowing rather than clean repudiation. On the Origin of Species (1859) does not dismiss Lamarckian transmutation so much as absorb part of it and reframe the rest. The mechanism Darwin accepted from the Lamarckian tradition was use and disuse: organs strengthened by use are enlarged and strengthened in offspring; organs fallen into disuse diminish across generations.(Darwin, 1859) Darwin treated this as a secondary mechanism that operates alongside natural selection, not the primary driver. In Chapter V on the Laws of Variation, he acknowledged that the direct effects of changed conditions and use or disuse “seem to play an important part in affecting the reproductive system, and in thus inducing variability,” after which natural selection acts on whatever profitable variations result.(Darwin, 1859)

The critical difference between the two theories was not the inheritance of acquired characters — which Darwin accepted in some form, as did nearly all nineteenth-century naturalists — but the mechanism driving change. Lamarck located the cause of transmutation in organisms’ active, needs-driven response to their environments: organisms were modified by their own efforts and those modifications passed forward. Darwin located the cause in differential survival and reproduction across a population: what persisted was not what organisms strove toward but what chance variation had already produced and circumstance had preserved. Natural Selection required no striving, no internal directive force, no progressive tendency toward greater complexity. The epigraph Darwin chose from Whewell for the front matter of Origin of Species expressed the underlying philosophical shift: events in the material world arise not from “insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws.”(Darwin, 1859) Lamarck’s transmutation theory, despite its materialism, retained a directional and adaptive purposiveness that Darwin’s mechanism replaced with population-level differential survival.

Heredity, Eugenics, and Scientific Racism

Darwin endorsed his cousin Francis Galton’s eugenic ideas, writing in The Descent of Man that “genius tends to be inherited” and canonizing Galton’s conclusions (Kevles, Daniel J., 1995). The concept of heredity that made this eugenic discourse possible had not originated with the biologists. Jackson’s survey of the history of genetics notes that heredity was first formulated as a concept by physicians — French alienists in particular — and only then became of central concern for biologists such as Darwin.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) The medical tradition, concerned with the transmission of mental disorders across generations, produced the theoretical vocabulary that Darwin and Galton subsequently extended to physical characteristics and to the population as a whole. Reading Origin of Species had freed Galton from religious guilt; he found in eugenics a secular substitute for religious faith and an obligation to improve the race (Kevles, Daniel J., 1995). Galton challenged Darwin’s pangenesis theory of heredity through rabbit blood-transfusion experiments, proposing instead a “stirp” theory later reinforced by Weismann’s germ plasm theory (Kevles, Daniel J., 1995). His Natural Inheritance (1889) defined heredity quantitatively as the measurable relationship between generations for given characters (Kevles, Daniel J., 1995).

The consequences for medical and racial thought were severe. Haller documents how late nineteenth-century cultural evolutionists treated “evolution” and “progress” as synonymous, projecting a teleological certainty onto Darwin’s non-teleological theory of descent (Haller, 1971). Thomas Huxley argued that Origin of Species effectively ended the monogenist-polygenist controversy by showing that races could be both distinct and share common ancestry (Haller, 1971). Yet Josiah Nott, the leading American polygenist, reluctantly accepted Darwinism after the Civil War while arguing that racial “permanent varieties” remained fixed for practical purposes (Haller, 1971). The period 1859–1900, bounded by Origin of Species and the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws, is the focus of Haller’s examination of American scientific attitudes toward race across multiple disciplines (Haller, 1971).

Herbert Spencer’s position within this development deserves a separate note. Spencer borrowed heavily from travelers’ accounts in constructing his racial and cultural hierarchies in Descriptive Sociology, without subjecting the evidence to rigorous analysis. Darwin, Tylor, and Huxley all took critical distance from Spencer’s method. Huxley argued Spencer had concocted his theory from his “inner consciousness” rather than from empirical evidence, calling him “the most original of thinkers” who had never once verified a single one of his theories from first principles.(Haller, 1971) The distinction mattered: Darwin’s argument rested on accumulated observations and laboratory tests; Spencer’s evolutionary sociology rested on borrowed, unverified narratives.

Darwin and the Bacteriological Revolution

Darwin’s influence on the bacteriological revolution was indirect but real. The publication of a French translation of Origin of Species by Clémence Royer in 1862, with a preface explicitly endorsing materialism and attacking religious authority, politically energized the materialist camp in French science (Geison, 1995). Pasteur, who resisted materialism, nevertheless operated in an intellectual climate that Darwin had reshaped.

Among the sectarian medical traditions, responses to Darwin varied. Not all physiomedicalists, for instance, agreed on the religious basis of vitalism: C. A. Stafford and J. S. Byers argued that Darwin and evolution did not attack the Bible and that vital force should be relegated to private theology rather than medical doctrine (Haller, 1997). Gideon Lincecum, a self-taught practitioner, began practicing allopathic medicine in 1830, then learned botanic medicine from a Choctaw doctor and thereafter carried both allopathic and botanic bags, using whichever system his patients preferred (Haller, 1997).

Darwin in Eclectic Medical Thought

John Milton Scudder, in Specific Diagnosis (1883), integrated Spencer’s essay on Music and Darwin’s observations on animal vocalizations to support his thesis that voice changes are physiological expressions of disease (Scudder, 1883). Scudder also invoked Darwin’s work on the expression of emotions to argue that disease has a “voiceless language” expressed through the muscular system, analogous to the visible expressions of emotion in animals (Scudder, 1883).

Kuhn on Darwin

Thomas Kuhn drew on Darwin to characterize the nature of scientific progress itself. Scientific progress, Kuhn argued, does not approach a truth about nature in a teleological sense; the Darwinian analogy suggests that evolution proceeds from a starting point, not toward a fixed goal (Kuhn, 1962). ## Darwin’s Romantic Biology

Richards argues that Darwin’s conception of nature derived, through several channels, in significant measure from the German Romantic movement, and that his theory therefore “functioned not to suck values out of nature but to recover them for a de-theologized nature.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002) This reading sits against the standard story in which Darwinian evolution evacuates any residual purposiveness from the natural order.

The intellectual genealogy Richards traces runs through Humboldt. Darwin wrote late in life that his “whole course of life is due to having read & reread as a Youth his Personal Narrative.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Humboldt had understood all of nature and nature’s laws to unite in a vast complex of interrelationships, “a Cosmos, or harmoniously ordered whole, which, dimly shadowed forth to the human mind in the primitive ages of the world, is now fully revealed to the maturer intellect of mankind as the result of long and laborious observations.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002) That sense of harmonious interconnection, not the atomistic competition that later readers projected onto Darwin, was the frame through which he first encountered natural history.

Cuvier’s typology of animal structure mediated the same tradition. Cuvier distinguished four fundamental animal plans: the radiata, articulata, mollusca, and vertebrata, and by the 1830s these types had become canonical. Both Darwin and Haeckel accepted the idea that nature exhibited such structural patterns; their theoretical task was to account for them.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) The relationship to Goethe’s archetype concept was contested. Goethe thought of the archetype as containing all its potential variations, visible only to the mind’s eye, while Richard Owen, adapting the concept for British comparative anatomy, treated the type-pattern as merely the minimal common feature shared by all organisms of a group.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Helmholtz drew the genealogy explicitly: Goethe’s theories of morphology “became the established mode of biology in the first half of the century and cleared the way for the triumph of Darwinian science in the second half.” Richards glosses this verdict with a formulation that compresses the relation: evolutionary theory was Goethean morphology running on geological time.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)

That same parallel had been anticipated by Kielmeyer, who set up a threefold correspondence between the developmental history of the earth, the series of organic forms (Organisationenreihe), and the organic stages in individual gestation, becoming convinced that these series would reflect one another. Darwin and Haeckel later arrived at the same structural insight.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)

On social evolution and morality, Richards finds an equally Romantic structure in Darwin’s argument. In Origin of Species, natural selection was said to operate not on individual workers but on the whole hive or community, which would contain workers’ relatives. In the fifth edition Darwin extended this community-selection principle to any assemblage of social animals, including humans.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) The evolution of moral conscience, as Richards reads the Descent of Man, unfolded through four overlapping stages: development of social instincts binding proto-humans together; acquisition of intellect sufficient to recall a social instinct momentarily swamped by a more urgent impulse; language to codify and communicate the needs of others; and finally, habits of attending to those needs.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) The outcome was not Benthamite calculation: human beings, Darwin maintained, “acted spontaneously, impelled by their altruistic instincts, to advance the welfare of others without counting the cost to self,” directing their actions toward the “vigor and health” of the greatest possible number of community members.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)

Richards’s synthesis closes with an image of Darwin’s nature that sets it within the Romantic tradition rather than against it. Darwin’s nature, like that of the German Romantics, exemplified archetypal patterns beneath the wild frenzy of their variations. “These patterns gradually changed not under the aegis of Paley’s God and certainly not as the products of a Victorian stamping press; they arose and altered, rather, through the power of a creative nature (natura naturans)—ever fruitful and rich in possibilities, realizing those possibilities in the best interests of her creatures.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002)

See Also

• Francis Galton
• Eugenics
• Scientific Revolution
• Vitalism
• Scientific Method
• Bacteriology
• Thomas Kuhn
• Germ Theory

Sources

All claims cite evidence cards from:

• Kevles, D.J. (1995). In the Name of Eugenics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Source ID: kevles-eugenics-1995] — Lead authority on eugenics
• Haller, J.S. (1971). Outcasts from Evolution. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. [Source ID: haller-outcasts-from-evolution-1971] — Lead authority on scientific racism
• Kuhn, T.S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Source ID: kuhn-scientificrevolutions-1962]
• Bergson, H. (1911). Creative Evolution. Trans. A. Mitchell. London: Macmillan. [Source ID: bergson-creative-evolution-1911]
• Geison, G.L. (1995). The Private Science of Louis Pasteur. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Source ID: geison-private-science-pasteur-1995]
• Driesch, H. (1914). The History and Theory of Vitalism. London: Macmillan. [Source ID: driesch-historyvitalism-1914]
• Porter, R. (1997). The Greatest Benefit to Mankind. London: HarperCollins. [Source ID: porter-greatestbenefit-1997]
• Temkin, O. (1973). Galenism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. [Source ID: temkin-galenism-1973]
• Gotthelf, A. (2012). Teleology, First Principles, and Scientific Method in Aristotle’s Biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Source ID: gotthelf-teleology-aristotle-2012]
• Canguilhem, G. (2008). Knowledge of Life. Trans. S. Geroulanos & D. Ginsburg. New York: Fordham University Press. [Source ID: canguilhem-knowledgeoflife-2008]
• Haller, J.S. (1981). American Medicine in Transition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. [Source ID: haller-americanmedicine-1981]
• Haller, J.S. (1997). Kindly Medicine. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. [Source ID: haller-kindlymedicine-1997]
• Scudder, J.M. (1883). Specific Diagnosis. Cincinnati: Wilstach, Baldwin. [Source ID: scudder-specific-diagnosis-1883]
• Darwin, C. (1859). On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. London: John Murray. [Source ID: darwin-on-the-origin-1859] — Primary source
• Richards, R.J. (2002). The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Source ID: richards-romanticconception-2002]