Download Dov Ospovat. The development of Darwin`s theory

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Dov Ospovat. The Development of Darwin’s Theory: Natural History, Natural
Theology and Natural Selection 1838-1859. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981. 301 pp. $39.50 (Reviewed by SILVAN
S. SCHWEBER)
Dov Ospovat’s death in September 1980 has taken from the community of Darwin
scholars one of its youngest, ablest, and most gifted historians. His book on the development of Charles Darwin’s theory sets standards for scholarship in Darwin studies and
will surely be the point of departure of future researches on the genesis of the Origin.
What his book has done-and admirably so-is to put into sharp relief the contrast
between Darwin’s theory as formulated in the 1839-1844 period and the version
presented in the Origin, particularly with respect to the role of adaptation, the
mechanism of species formation, and how classification is accounted for. The Origin embodied the principle of divergence of character that Darwin had worked out in the period
from September 1854 to September 1856. This principle, which he called “a keystone of
my work,” was succinctly outlined in his famous letter to Asa Gray of September
1857-the one he submitted to the Linnean Society meeting at which Alfred Russel
Wallace’s and his theory were presented by Charles Lye11 and Joseph Dalton Hooker:
Another principle, which may be called the principle of divergence, plays, I believe,
an im ortant part in the origin of species. The same spot will support more life if occupie by very diverse forms. We see this in the many generic forms in a square yard
of turf, and in the plants or insects on any little uniform islet, belonging almost invariably to as many genera and families as species. . . . Now, every organic being,
by propagating so rapidly, may be said to be striving its utmost to increase in
numbers. So it will be with the offspring of any species after it has become diversified into varieties, or subspecies, or true species. And it follows, I think, from the
foregoing facts, that the varying offspring of each species will tr (only few will
succeed) to seize on as many and as diverse places in the economy ofynature as possible. Each new variety of species, when formed, will generally take the place of, and
thus exterminate its less well-fitted parent. This 1 believe to be the origin of the
classification and affinities of organic beings at all times; for organic beings alwa s
seem to branch and sub-branch like the limbs of a tree from a common trunk, t hye
flourishing and diverging twigs destroying the less vigorous-the dead and lost
branches representing extinct genera and families.
This sketch is most imperfect; but in so short a space I cannot make it better.
Your imagination must fill up very wide blanks.
In his book Ospovat has presented a thoroughly researched reconstruction of
Darwin arriving at this principle. He has based himself on the vast number of notes
Darwin wrote out to himself on the specie question dating from 1844 on, and on the
manuscript of Natural Selection which Professor Robert C. Stauffer masterfully edited
in 1975. The latter is the “big species book” Darwin had started working on in
September of 1854 and of which the Origin became an “abstract.”
Although Darwin had been constantly at work “on species” from 1844 on, the task
of preparing a comprehensive account of his theory, designed for presentation to the
scientific community, did not have to be faced until September 1854 when he finished his
work on the barnacles. At that time Darwin reread and studied his Essay of 1844 (the
1839-1844 version of his theory) and all the notes he had amassed since then.
In 1846, upon starting his research on the cirripedes (barnacles), Darwin studied
Henri Milne-Edwards’s paper on classification based on embryonic characters. As his
notes from that period indicate, Milne-Edwards’s work made him aware that he had to
explain the process responsible for the divergence from initially similar embryonic states
according to the affinity of the different adult forms. The tendency in the evolutionary
process to make embryos diverge from one another according to the degree of affinities
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of the adult form was something Darwin had not expected (Ospovat, p. 159). MilneEdwards’s work on classification indicated to Darwin “that divergence could not be the
occasional and accidental result of the diffusion of single species that he [had] described
in the Essay of 1844 but must be rather a universal tendency among organisms”
(Ospovat, p. 173) and thus a general feature of nature.
It is Ospovat’s claim that it was classification that brought Darwin to confront again
the problem of a mechanism for divergence. Divergence had to be faced at a fundamental
level because Darwin had assimilated the work of the morphologists of the second third
of the century who “by combining unity and diversity in a single scheme, . . . produced a
branching conception of organic nature, a developmental conception in which diversity
was seen as proceeding out of an initial unity’’ (p. 116).
By giving classificatory and embryological problems preeminence, Ospovat has
minimized Darwin’s confrontation with the problem of the copiousness and ubiquity of
variations that his work on the cirripedes had indicated. From 1848 on, Darwin viewed
this copiousness as a universal feature on that part of the biological world that
reproduced sexually. It had been apparent to Darwin since the early 1840s, and even
before then, that empirical biogeographical data could be used to incorporate into the
theory variation in large, mundane genera and species, without having to make detailed
assumptions about variations and their heredity in individuals. It was to verify assumptions about the number of species presented by wide-ranging genera in order to draw conclusions about the pattern of divergence that Darwin embarked on his botanical
arithmetics. These statistical investigations have been the focus of Janet Browne’s recent
important work. 1 believe Darwin’s 1854- 1856 theorizing on botanical arithmetic played
a central role in his arriving at the principle of divergence. It also verifies the growing importance of statistics in the first half of the nineteenth century and illustrates the growing
acceptance of statistical laws as explaining phenomena, and conversely of the use of
statistical regularities as the basis of theoretical structures. The statistical nature of the
data was thought to be the result of the complexity of the phenomena investigated, but
more important, the data was taken to represent real effects in nature-that is, the
scatter was not assumed to be errors from which an ideal, typical true measure could be
extracted. Whether one inclines toward Browne’s and David Kohn’s views that Darwin’s
biogeographical arithmetic was central or toward Ospovat’s view that classification was
all important, everyone agrees that once the principle of divergence was in place, Darwin
had a new conception of the evolutionary process. I n this new view the interaction among
organisms-rather than geology and geography-was responsible for new evolutionary
opportunities, and sympatry (that is, speciation without isolation) became the principle
mode of species formation. Natural selection, however, remained the driving mechanism
and the unifying principle of the theory.
What Ospovat has done exceedingly well is to locate Darwin in a broad disciplinary
context, and he thus gives a welcome corrective to some recent Darwin scholarship.
Ospovat gives a particularly clear overview of comparative anatomy, embryology, and
systematics during the first half of the nineteenth century. He also gives a valuable and
insightful account of the influence of the work of the leading practitioners of these disciplines (George Cuvier, Richard Owen, W, B. Carpenter, K. E. von Baer, William
Sharp Macleay. Milne-Edwards, and so forth) on Darwin and where he fits into these
traditions.
What seems somewhat less satisfactory to me is Ospovat’s handling of the broader
context. Although Ospovat is concerned with external factors and a concluding chapter
deals with science as a social process, nonetheless the work comes through as having a
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strong “internalist” bias. I believe part of the reason for this is that Ospovat eschewed
dealing with the psychological dimension of Darwin and seemed unwilling to accept ambivalence and ambiguity on Darwin’s part. Thus, for example, Ospovat adheres to a rigid
interpretation of what “perfect adaptation” meant to Darwin until the 1850s, and
similarly for what “theism” meant to him. Ospovat argues his case well and does offer
evidence-it is the interpretation of that evidence that is at issue.
But these are minor criticisms of an impressive, erudite, and provocative book.
Paul H. Barrett, Donald J. Weinshank, and Timothy T. Gottleber, eds. A Concordance
to Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” First Edition. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981. xv + 834 pp. $38.50 (Reviewed by JOHN L. DAWSON)
This long-awaited and most important reference work provides the scholar with a
citation index to Charles Darwin’s thoughts and writings, as expressed in the first edition
of his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). Reasons for the
use of the first edition rather than any other are advanced by Ernst Mayr in his introduction to the Facsimile of the First Edition (Harvard University Press, 1964), and apply
equally to the choice of that edition as the basis for a concordance.
The editors themselves, in their preface, cite a sample of words and terms that can
easily be studied using the concordance: “selection,” “creation,” “struggle,” “survival,”
“competition,” “hypothesis,” “theory,” “fact,” “truth,” “supposition,” “perhaps,”
“positive,” “perfect,” and “speculate.” Anyone browsing in the concordance will soon
be struck by some combination or juxtaposition of words or ideas, and will be able to
follow trains of thought and trends in ideas through its pages. Such an investigation must
eventually lead to a need to consult relevant portions of the original book, and this is one
of the ways in which the concordance is deficient.
Each “keyword” centered on the page and surrounded by its context is keyed to the
original edition only by its page number. To begin with, it is not clear why the source
page numbers are printed as a group of four digits (there are only 490 pages in the
original) and contain leading zeros (for example, page 27 is represented by 0027). More
important, no indication of the exact whereabouts of the keyword on the page is given.
With thirty-five lines per page of the original, a line number reference for each keyword
(in addition to the page number) would greatly assist in locating the relevant portion of
the page.
Because each of the fourteen chapters concentrates on a particular group of topics,
it would also have been informative to attach a chapter reference to each line of the concordance. To be able to ascertain at a glance that, for example, the word “character” is
not used at all in chapters three and nine but is used once in chapter six and twice in
chapters seven and eleven could trigger an important line of research which the tedium of
hand checking might suppress.
The features most necessary in a good concordance are clarity, comprehensiveness,
adequacy of contexts, and accuracy. This particular concordance is quite clear for a nontypeset book, and the print is sufficiently large for all but concentrated study.
At the beginning of the work is a list of words that have been suppressed in the concordance, together with their frequencies of occurrence. These include the very common
articles “a” (frequency 2462) and “the” (10144) and the conjunctions “and” (4364) and