Evolution of Darwin

Facsimile. Ca. seventh century, Italy? This manuscript is one of the oldest in the tradition of Materia medica, a pharmacological treatise written by Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides in the first century. Dioscorides’ work was used by the medieval world for centuries. In the sixth century it was translated into Latin. By the ninth century it had been translated into Arabic, Syrian and Hebrew. More than four hundred plants are described in this illustrated herbal, each illustration outlined in red ink. The binding of wooden covers and leather replicates the character of the contemporary binding.

 

Guillaume Rondelet was one of the first of sixteenth century scientists to break with the eighteen-hundred-year-old tradition among natural historians of quoting or commenting on Aristotle’s knowledge of animals and begin the practice of gathering and reporting information gained firsthand. This book contains accurate illustrations of the egg cases and immature eggs of several fish, based upon Rondelet’s own meticulous studies. The work is an example of the change in attitude about science in the sixteenth century.

 

Of all the classical Greek scholars, the most influential was Aristotle. He defined for the first time basic fields of inquiry: logic, physics, political science, economics, psychology, rhetoric, and ethics. In the process, Aristotle also established a method of study which profoundly influenced scholarship for nearly two thousand years. The Organum is a collection of four Aristotelian treatises. This edition is a new and corrected version of an edition done by the learned French humanist Nicolas de Gouchy (ca. 1520-1572). University of Utah copy has widely scattered underscoring or brief neat annotations in an early hand. Printer’s device on title, woodcut initials and headpieces.

 

Englishman John Hill was an apothecary by trade. He collected plants for use in herbal remedies and undertook several large projects in plant classification. The University of Utah copy is signed by past owner Jules Remy, a noted French naturalist and explorer who wrote a history of the Mormons. Sixteen uncolored plates of specimens. Bound in contemporary red morocco, rebacked, corners restored.

 

Jean Lamarck began his career as a botanist in 1778, eventually moving on to the study of zoology. In 1800, he began his study on the variation of species, which would lead him to conclude “…aided by much time and by a slow but constant diversity of circumstances [nature] has gradually brought about…the state of things which we now observe. How grand is this consideration, and especially how remote is it from all that is generally thought on this subject!” While in Paris he became a contributor to the Encyclopedie methodique. Lamarck invented the term “invertebrate,” preferring the title “Professor of Invertebrates” to “Professor of Worms and Insects.” He believed that few species died out, but, instead, went through modification. In spite of his findings, he staunchly placed the authority of the Bible over his own ideas. Of Lamarck, Darwin wrote: “[He] was the first man whose conclusions on the subject excited much attention…he first did the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all changes in the organic, as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition.”

 

Charles Lyell studied geology under naturalist William Buckland. He traveled the English countryside to observe geological formations for himself. Much of the information in Principles, his first book, was based on these observations. The book had a huge influence on Charles Darwin, who took a copy of it with him on the HMS Beagle. Darwin looked at rock formations on this voyage “through Lyell’s eyes,” and Lyell’s information about stratigraphy inspired Darwin to think in terms of geologic time when it came to evolving organisms. After Darwin’s return from the Beagle voyage in October 1836, Lyell invited him to dinner, a meeting that began their close friendship. Throughout this friendship, Lyell rejected the idea of evolution. Darwin was hurt by Lyell’s reserve on the subject but, loyal through and through, said “Considering his age, his former views, and position in society, I think his action has been heroic.”

 

Georges Cuvier, anatomist and paleontologist, did not believe that life forms evolved over time. He believed any change in an organism would upset a natural balance, making it unable to survive. Cuvier classified animals into four branches, each sufficiently different from the other so as to disallow the possibility of any connection due to an evolutionary transformation. Similarities were due to common function, not common ancestry. Cuvier thus repudiated, quite harshly, the theories of contemporaries such as Lamarck. Cuvier’s most fundamental contribution to biology was to establish as fact the extinction of organisms – something that had been theorized by earlier scientists but was rejected still by those who could not believe that God, creator of all things “good” would allow their complete demise. Disappeared species were a matter not of change, said Cuvier, but “…the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some kind of catastrophe.” Cuvier’s classic work was Règne Animal, which first appeared in 1817. It presented the results of his research on the structure of living and fossil animals and was translated into English many times, often with substantial notes and supplementary material as updates became available.

 

The first edition of Vestiges appeared in 1844 in London. More than twenty thousand copies were printed in various editions, including foreign editions, over the next sixteen years. The book caused a stir among naturalists of the day and the sensation it caused helped prepare the public for Darwin’s Origins in 1859. The at-first anonymous author placed evolutionary ideas amidst a broad history of the cosmos. Robert Chambers, an Edinburgh journalist, later revealed to be the author, declared that humans had arisen from monkeys and apes, as part of a progression of improving life-forms. The book became a Victorian best-seller – it quickly became the topic of conversation at soirees throughout Britain. The clergy hated the book and so, too, did many scientists of the day. It was not just bad theology, it was bad science. A review in the April 1845 issue of the North American Review said, “The writer has taken up almost every questionable fact and startling hypothesis, that have been promulgated by…pretenders in science… - he adopts them all, and makes them play an important part in his own magnificent theory, to the exclusion…of the well-credited facts and established doctrines of science.” Darwin’s reaction to Vestiges was mixed and cautionary. He, like other scientists, despaired of its speculation and factual carelessness. Another, younger biologist, Alfred Wallace, was far more receptive and would go on to formulate his own ideas toward theory of evolution. In the end, Darwin gave credit to both Wallace and “Mr. Vestiges” in his On the Origin of Species.

 

Physician Josiah Nott is credited as the first to apply the insect vector theory to yellow fever, a serious health problem in his native South Carolina. He lost four of his own children to the illness. Nott is, however, perhaps better known for his theories on race. Types was his popular thesis on the polygenist theory; that is, the separate origins of races of humans. Based on the work of others writing at the time, Nott credited, in part, his personal observations in medicine as evidence. Nott used his theory to justify slavery, but also as a somewhat startling theological argument, saying that the human race must have descended from many different original pairs. Darwin cited this theory in The Descent of Man, later concluding that there was only one species of humans.

 

Published in the United States one year after the London first edition, on the eve of the Civil War, one American reviewer wrote, “Is it too much to say that, in the good old times, opinions like these would have been strongly redolent of fagot and flame?” It was not until the 1870s that serious opposition to Darwin’s theories about natural selection began to mount in the United States. The argument against them was not scientific, but rather theological, much as it remains to this day.

 

Thomas Huxley was well respected by his peers, in no small part, not in spite of, but because of his quick defense of Darwin. One contemporary reviewer of this work by Huxley wrote in North American Review January 1865, “He has faith in the doctrine of Transmutation of Species; and the instant Mr. Darwin’s book appeared, he published an earnest plea that it might have a fair and respectful hearing.”

 

Scientist and philosopher Thomas Huxley became one of Darwin’s most immediate and vociferous defenders, publishing numerous articles and essays supporting Darwin’s theories on natural selection. Even so, Huxley differed with Darwin on some key points, namely Darwin’s slow, gradual evolution vs. Huxley’s belief in a sudden explosion of new species. Around 1855, Huxley began a series of lectures designed specifically for working-class men, calling them “People’s Lectures.” They were well attended and Huxley enjoyed speaking to these groups very much: “I want the working class to understand that Science and her ways are great facts for them – that physical virtue is the base of all other, and that they are to be clean and temperate and all the rest – not because fellows in black and white ties tell them so, but because there are plain and patent laws which they must obey ‘under penalties.’” The essays contained here were written for “working men.”

 

Thomas Huxley jumped at the chance to defend Darwin. In a letter regarding the publication of Origin of Species, dated November 23, 1859, he wrote, “As for your doctrines I am prepared to go to the Stake if requisite. . . I trust you will not allow yourself to be in any way disgusted or annoyed by the considerable abuse & misrepresentation which unless I greatly mistake is in store for you. . . And as to the curs which will bark and yelp – you must recollect that some of your friends at any rate are endowed with an amount of combativeness which (though you have often & justly rebuked it) may stand you in good stead – I am sharpening up my claws and beak in readiness.” Huxley expanded on Darwin’s theories. He wrote that the visible characteristics of man differed less from the more sophisticated apes than did the latter from the lower members of the same order of primates. Evidence was Huxley’s most important work, offering the first synthesis of the anatomical and embryological evidence of human evolution. The frontispiece is an illustration comparing the skeletons of various apes to that of man.

 

“Man still bears…the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” In Descent Darwin used the word ‘evolution’ (vol. 1, p. 2) for the first time. Darwin reflected on whether humans, like other species, are descended from a pre-existing form and considered the means of homo sapien development. More than a decade after the publication of Origin of Species, Darwin applied his theory of natural selection to the emergence of the human species. He had the benefit of debates that were already under way, and he included these discussions in his theory.

 

In Descent, Darwin presented examples supporting his contention that humans and animals shared cognitive attributes like wonder, curiosity, long-term memory, the ability to focus, the ability to imitate the behavior of others, and the ability to reason. Darwin wrote Expression to refute current speculation that human ability to manifest emotion through a wide variety of facial expressions indicated a species separated from evolutionary concepts. The book was based upon and included a pamphlet Darwin wrote on the topic in 1867. Darwin had done no research on the subject, but included the thinking of many of his peers in his denial of the theory. Edition of seven thousand copies.

 

In this study of the adaptations of plants to impoverished conditions, Darwin described the assimilations for survival purposes, in some cases, as “murderous propensities.” Darwin drew figures 7 and 8, while his sons produced the rest of the drawings. The book was published in a standard binding without inserted advertisements, announcing a print run of three thousand, twenty-seven hundred of which were sold to the book trade. The book was not printed again in Darwin’s lifetime. University of Utah copy inscribed on title-page “From the Author.”

 

Effects is a highly technical and detailed study of natural systems that favored cross-fertilization and the advantages of those mechanisms. Darwin wrote, “…the results…explain, as I believe, the endless and wonderful contrivances for the transportal of pollen from one plant to another of the same species.” Fifteen hundred copies sold in less than two months.

 

Much of the content of Different Forms had been published already in the Journal of the Linnean Society of London and other journals. Like The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation, the work was too technical to draw a large readership. The first edition was a print run of twelve hundred and fifty copies. Only two thousand copies were sold in Darwin’s lifetime. Sales, however, meant nothing to Darwin’s own enthusiasm in the minutiae of his work. In his autobiography, Darwin wrote of this study, “no little discovery of mine ever gave me so much pleasure as the making out the meaning of heterostyled flowers.”

 

This study on phototropism in plants is a continuation of Darwin’s work on climbing plants. Darwin’s son, Francis, contributed to the experiments for this book and helped write it. The book sold fewer copies than any of Darwin’s other books, with a first issue of only fifteen hundred, although the two further issues printed before 1882 consisted of a thousand copies more each.

 

Alfred Russel Wallace corresponded with Charles Darwin for many years. Wallace first contacted Darwin while living in what is now Indonesia, collecting biological specimens and sending them home to England. Wallace, in his travels and studies, had come to a theory of evolution much like the theory that Darwin had been carefully developing for decades. Wallace described his theory as a “struggle for existence.” When Vestiges was first published, Wallace was particularly receptive to many of its ideas regarding the natural world. Vestiges inspired Wallace to collect his own evidence “with a view to the theory of the origin of species.” By 1848 he had saved enough money from his wages as a railroad surveyor to sail for the Amazon. As Wallace began collecting specimens he considered the distribution of species and whether geographic barriers, such as a mountain range or a river, could be a key to their formation. Returning to England in 1852, Wallace’s ship caught fire and sank. His drawings, notes, journals, and specimens were all destroyed. Wallace immediately began another collecting trip in the islands of Southeast Asia. In 1856, he published his first paper on evolution, focusing on the island distribution of closely related species. Darwin encouraged Wallace but cautioned him to work slowly and publish carefully. In 1858, recovering from malaria, Wallace wrote to Darwin, “It occurred to me to ask the question, Why do some die and some live?...it suddenly flashed upon me…in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain – that is, the fittest would survive.” Of his many publications, Island Life is considered Wallace’s finest thinking and writing, treating the causes and influences of glacial processes, and the nature of insular biota.

 

Darwin never lost his early interest in geology. For thirty years, Darwin dug in fields behind his house that had been undisturbed by man for years. He found that substances that had been on the surface of the ground were buried inches beneath the grass. He hypothesized that activity of earthworms was the reason for the upheaval. He used a flat stone, or, as he called it, a “wormstone” to measure the movement of soil due to earthworms. For Darwin, this movement had important implications. A small force, over thousands or millions of years, could have significant impact on the geology of the earth. This book was immensely popular, selling six thousand copies within one year and thirteen thousand before the turn of the century. It sold faster than Origin had.