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The Development of Darwin’s Theory: From Natural Theology to Natural Selection
It is often said that Darwin’s study of nature drove him to atheism. Whereas this might be, in principle, possible, it does not seem to have actually...
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Origin’s Chapter III: The Two Faces of Natural Selection
Chapter III contains several puzzles and unexpected features. The first puzzle regards the chapter’s relationship to Chapter IV: Natural Selection....
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Havelock Ellis, Sexology, and Sexual Selection in Post-Darwinian Evolutionary Biology
This study situates Henry Havelock Ellis’s sexological research within the nineteenth-century evolutionary debates, especially the discussion over...
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Natural Selection in an Imperial Era, 1850–1945
In biological analysis, Darwin’s theory of natural selection gained validation only with Mendel’s work on genetic inheritance, Morgan’s verification...
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The Creativity of Natural Selection? Part II: The Synthesis and Since
This is the second of a two-part essay on the history of debates concerning the creativity of natural selection, from Darwin through the evolutionary...
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David Hume’s “Natural History of Religion” (1757)
Hume’s NHR was the most significant contribution to the Scottish Enlightenment’s study of religion, a constant provocation to his contemporaries, and...
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Birth of Traditional Agriculture: Selection of Man and Nature
Agriculture, as the oldest economic sector, generally makes use of the vitality of living organisms to convert the matters and energy in nature into...
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Origin’s Chapter IV: The Newton of the Blade of Grass
Charles Darwin, the leading evolutionist, introduces and discusses his key mechanism, natural selection, in Chapter IV of his On the Origin of...
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Origin’s Chapter II: Darwin’s Ideas on Variation Under the Lens of Current Evolutionary Genetics
The “long argument” presented in the opening chapter of On the Origin of Species develops steadily. Darwin’s comparison between variation under...
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Origin’s Chapter IX and X: From Old Objections to Novel Explanations: Darwin on the Fossil Record
The ninth and tenth chapters of the Origin mark a profound, if perhaps difficult to detect, shift in the book’s argumentative structure. In the...
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Proving and Circulating the Theory of Natural Selection
This chapter addresses Barber’s and Cape society’s engagement with Darwin’s theories. In the course of time, Barber came to combine Darwin’s theory...
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Darwin’s First Writings: From the Beagle Voyage to His Transmutation Notebooks (1837–1839) and Essay (1844)
This chapter discusses the importance of Charles Darwin’s writing and recording practices both for the development of his ideas about evolution by...
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Darwin and the White Shipwrecked Sailor: Beyond Blending Inheritance and the Jenkin Myth
This paper revisits Fleeming Jenkin’s anonymous review of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species , published in the North British Review in June 1867....
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Origin’s Chapter I: How Breeders Work Their Magic
Darwin begins his “one long argument” not in the natural world of the deep past but – surprisingly and, for some readers, disappointingly – on the...
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“Great as Immensity, Deep as Eternity”: What Could the Grandeur of Life Say About God’s Existence, According to Darwin?
To what extent Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection is compatible with a religious view remains an open question for many, despite being...
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Invasion on So Grand a Scale: Darwin, Lyell, and Invasive Species
The importance of naturalization —the establishment of species introduced into foreign places—to the early development of Darwin’s theory of evolution...
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Macleay’s Choice: Transacting the Natural History Trade in the Nineteenth Century
Much of our knowledge about the nineteenth-century natural history boom resides with the collectors themselves and their collections. We know much...
