Comments on Darwinism

Bold flights of a speculative mind

The Vedas and Puranas serve as foundational texts for Hindu law and spiritual philosophy, with the Puranas being a vast collection of Sanskrit scriptures that encompass a wide range of subjects, particularly mythological stories, legends, and traditional lore. Many of these texts are dedicated to major Hindu deities such as Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma, and Adi Shakti. The Puranic corpus includes 18 principal Puranas and 18 subsidiary Puranas. Among them, the Vishnu Purana holds special significance for its detailed accounts of Lord Vishnu and his incarnations. This research paper presents a comparative study of two distinct worldviews on the origin and development of life: Charles Darwin’s scientific Theory of Evolution and the mythological narrative of Lord Vishnu’s Dashavatara, as outlined in the Vishnu Purana. The Dashavatara describes ten divine incarnations through which Lord Vishnu restores balance and order in the cosmos during different epochs of turmoil and transition. This study explores how Darwin's theory, grounded in natural selection and adaptation—first expounded in his seminal work ‘’On the Origin of Species’’—explains the diversity of species through a gradual, scientifically verifiable process of change over time. Conversely, the Dashavatara presents a theological framework where divine intervention shapes the trajectory of life on Earth. Despite the fundamental differences in approach—one empirical and the other mythological—both narratives trace a developmental sequence beginning with aquatic life and culminating in advanced human forms. In doing so, they offer profound insights into the human understanding of existence, evolution, and cosmic purpose. By examining these two traditions side by side, the paper highlights the intellectual richness and cultural diversity that shape how civilizations have sought to explain the origins and progression of life, be it through science or sacred story.

In 1858 papers were presented on evolution at the Linnean Society in London by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. The following year Darwin's magnum opus was published—On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. With the plethora of publications in recent years on molecular genetics and related matters it is sometimes difficult to appreciate the enormous impact Darwin's work had at the time. Of course, writers on the subject have given much attention to the British Association for Advancement of Science meeting in Oxford the following year with the notorious clash between Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce. But the arguments were rehearsed in different guises over many of the following years. Even today commentaries on the subject by Richard Dawkins and Steve Jones in this country and Steven J Gould in the United States still attract a great deal of understandable attention from both scientists and non-scientists. But perhaps it is not always fully realized and appreciated that at the time nothing was known of the genetic mechanisms by which species could evolve. Though Gregor Mendel's seminal papers on inheritance and the segregation of hereditary factors were presented in 1865 and published the following year his ideas, essential to any in-depth understanding of the origin of species and evolution, remained virtually unknown until 1900. Even then, those who realized their importance in the scheme of things, such as William Bateson, were sometimes misunderstood or disregarded. In his scholarly study, Forsdyke details the thinking among philosophers and scientists around the time of Darwin's publication who attempted to explain the most serious difficulties with Darwin's theory—namely, how could small initial variations lacking any apparent value to the individual (so-called ‘non-adaptive’) lead to the establishment of a new species without being swamped by intercrossing with its neighbours? Having outlined this and related problems, the author singles out for special mention George Romanes (1848-1894). Born in Kingston, Canada (where Forsdyke now lives), in early childhood Romanes accompanied his parents to England and later studied physiology at Cambridge and University College, London. He engaged in research on echinoderms and medusae, for example, and became a close friend of Darwin. Forsdyke here concentrates his attention on Romanes' theory of ‘physiological selection’ which he expounded in 1886, also at the Linnean Society. He proposed that physiological selection, by preventing intercrossing, enables natural selection to promote diversity and thereby evolution, and that sterility of the offspring of crosses between species (such as occurs in the mule, resulting from crossing a horse and donkey) was the natural result of ‘some physiological change having exclusive, reference to the sexual system...’ a concept which in Forsdyke's view anticipated modern developments in genetics. Incidentally the portraits of all three of the main characters in this story (Darwin, Huxley and Romanes) were painted by the Victorian artist John Collier (1850-1934) who married Huxley's two daughters in succession after the first had died. The portraits are reproduced here but not in colour unfortunately. This is a scholarly and very well referenced work. It will certainly appeal to all those with an interest in the thinking of Victorian philosophers and scientists as they struggled to understand how new species could arise and evolve.

Art and evolution

Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection stands as the cornerstone of modern biology. Yet, its formulation and reception occurred against the backdrop of pre-existing evolutionary ideas, most notably Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, often summarized as "use and disuse." This paper provides a comprehensive comparison of these two pivotal theories, examining their core concepts, historical contexts, and crucially, their evaluation in light of modern science. We detail Lamarck's vision of organisms actively adapting through use and disuse of organs, passing these modifications directly to offspring. We contrast this with Darwin's mechanism of natural selection, where heritable variation within populations is acted upon by environmental pressures, leading to differential survival and reproduction. The historical analysis explores the intellectual climate of the 18th and 19th centuries, the influence of Lamarck on Darwin's thinking, and the fierce debates surrounding the publication of On the Origin of Species. Modern scientific evaluation, grounded in genetics, molecular biology, and rigorous experimentation, overwhelmingly supports the core tenets of natural selection as the primary driver of adaptation and evolutionary change. While Lamarckian inheritance, as originally conceived, has been falsified, the paper explores nuances such as epigenetic inheritance and phenotypic plasticity, demonstrating how they differ fundamentally from Lamarckism while enriching our understanding of organism-environment interactions. Ultimately, this comparison highlights the revolutionary nature of Darwin's theory, its enduring explanatory power, and why Lamarck's "use and disuse," despite its historical importance and intuitive appeal, remains relegated to the annals of superseded scientific ideas, save for very specific and limited modern reinterpretations.

The article evaluates how diversity in organisms, a concept that can be traced back to the postulations of evolutionary scientist Charles Darwin, derive from alterations in DNA. A brief overview of Darwin's theories set forth in his book "The Origin of Species" is presented. While Darwin could not explain the force behind variants, the scientist Gregor Mendel later described genetic factors and inheritance patterns. The advents in DNA sequencing and genome mapping are discussed. INSETS: Seeking Variation;STICKLEBACKS ADAPT;Mutations Meet Culture.

Introduction Until the early 1800s, both common and highly educated persons in the Western world believed that all living things were deliberately created according to the general outline found in Genesis (Numbers, Creationism 5; Darwinism Comes 24-48). Jared Diamond argues that often overlooked by both sides in this bitter struggle, forgotten by all but few specialists, is creation science's venerable history, which may offer valuable lessons for our time. From the rise of modern biology in the 1600s until Darwin's day, almost all scientists believed that species were created by God, in part because of the scientists' intellectual heritage, in part because the evidence for different view was still weak. (83) Until the middle of the 1800s, many scientists were active supporters of the various forms of creationism. The term creationism, as used in this article, is the belief that the basic forms of life were intelligently designed by being transcendent to humans (Johnson, Darwin on Trial 3-4). Diamond notes that one of the first of many creation scientists was Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), described as a German Jesuit who wrote some thirty learned books about everything from hieroglyphs to magnets. Like his contemporaries, he regarded Genesis not as metaphor but as fact. Kircher was sure that science could only strengthen the faithful in their beliefs by making clear the ways in which the Lord worked his miracles (83). Beginning primarily with the works of certain prominent philosophers in the late 1700s, the dominant scientific view of scientists on origins slowly changed. As Desmond King-Hele concluded in Erasmus Darwin, After 1794, statements of the principle of natural selection and theories of evolution came fairly thick and fast (75). A crucial event that propelled this change was the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859. Darwin argued that all present and past forms of life evolved over long periods of time without creator's intervention (Pennock 69-70, 312, 334). The Origin took the world by storm, and since then, creationism rapidly lost ground, especially among scientists (Numbers, Creationism 164). By the late 190Os, most prominent scientists embraced some form of biological evolution - first theistic evolution, and later, with few exceptions, naturalism or atheistic evolution (Larson and Witham 313). As Steven Weinberg notes in Dreams of Final Theory, most scientists today do not give any credence to the creation worldview. Only five percent (about 10,000) of all working scientists accept the view that God created the first humans less than 10,000 years ago (Witham 33). Conversely, among conservative Christians, Jews, and Muslims, creationism has remained strong (Morris, The Long War 231; Overman 1-46). Studies consistently find that over half of all persons in America accept strict creationism, and most of the rest accept some form of progressive creationism or theistic evolution (Gallup and Poling 137-38; Bergman, Public Opinions 42-44). About twenty percent of high school teachers hold the creationist worldview, and the number of college professors who accept the creationist label is estimated to be between ten and twenty percent (Bergman, The Attitude 118-23. See also Shankar; Affannato; Buckner; Elgin; Brown; and Clark). Henry Morris notes that one can now find nucleus of genuine creationists on almost every college and university faculty in the country. They tend to be quiet about it or, if vocal, usually [are] persecuted for it, but they are there! Such condition would have been unheard of 40 years ago, when I was almost alone as creationist faculty member in the secular university world, so far as I could determine. (Morris, History of 258) Nineteenth-century ministers often criticized evolution from the pulpit, but relatively few scientists became actively involved in the anti-Darwin movement until the early 1920s. …

The hunt for Precambrian fossils: An abbreviated genealogy of the science

Upon its publication, Origin of Species was critically embraced in Europe and North America. But how did Darwin's theories fare in other regions of the world? Adriana Novoa and Alex Levine offer here a history and interpretation of the reception of Darwinism in Argentina, illuminating the ways culture shapes scientific enterprise. In order to explore how Argentina's particular interests, ambitions, political anxieties, and prejudices shaped scientific research, From Man to Ape focuses on Darwin's use of analogies. Both analogy and metaphor are culturally situated, and by studying scientific activity at Europe's geographical and cultural periphery, Novoa and Levine show that familiar analogies assume unfamiliar and sometimes startling guises in Argentina. The transformation of these analogies in the Argentine context led science - as well as the interaction between science, popular culture, and public policy - in surprising directions. In diverging from European models, Argentine Darwinism reveals a great deal about both Darwinism and science in general. Novel in its approach and its subject, From Man to Ape reveals a new way of understanding Latin American science and its impact on the scientific communities of Europe and North America.

In a 1963 talk on Pollution of Our Environment Rachel Carson drew a close comparison between the reluctance of society in the late twentieth century to embrace the full implications of ecological theory and the resistance in the Victorian era to Darwin's theory of evolution: As I look back through history I find a parallel. I ask you to recall the uproar that followed Charles Darwin's announcement of his theories of evolution. The concept of man's origin from pre-existing forms was hotly and emotionally denied, and the denials came not only from the lay public, but from Darwin's peers in science. Only after many years did the concepts set forth in The Origin of Species become firmly established. Today, it would be hard to find any person of education who would deny the facts of evolution. Yet so many of us deny the obvious corollary: that man is affected by the same environmental influences that control the lives of all the many thousands of other species to which he is related by evolutionary ties (Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson, pp. 244-45).This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

George Gaylord Simpson said in his classic Tempo and Mode in Evolution (1) that paleontologists enjoy special advantages over geneticists on two topics. One general topic, suggested by word tempo, has to do with evolutionary rates. . ., their acceleration and deceleration, conditions of exceptionally slow or rapid evolutions, and phenomena suggestive of inertia and momentum. A group of related problems, implied by word mode, involves the study of way, manner, or pattern of evolution, a study in which is a basic factor, but which embraces considerably more than tempo (pp. xvii-xviii). Simpson's book was self-consciously written in wake of Theodosius Dobzhansky's Genetics and Origin of Species (2). The title of Dobzhansky's book suggested its theme: role of genetics in explaining the origin of species-i.e., a synthesis of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection and maturing science of genetics. In introduction to his book, Simpson averred that an essential part of his study was an attempted synthesis of paleontology and genetics, an effort that pervaded whole book, but was particularly subject of first two chapters, which accounted for nearly half book's pages. Darwin believed that change occurs by natural selection of small individual differences appearing every generation within any species. Singly changes effected by selection are small but, given enough time, great changes can take place. Two of Darwin's most dedicated supporters, Thomas Huxley and Francis Galton, argued instead that evolution occurs by selection of discontinuous variations, or sports; evolution proceeds rapidly by discrete leaps. According to Huxley, if natural selection operates only upon gradual differences among individuals, gaps between existing species and in paleontological record could not be explained. For Galton, evolution was not a smooth and uniform process, but proceeded by jerks, some of which imply considerable organic change. This controversy was continued in latter part of nineteenth century by biometricians Karl Pearson and W. F. R. Weldon, who believed, like Darwin, in primary importance of common individual differences, and by geneticist William Bateson, who maintained primary importance of discontinuous variations. The rediscovery of Mendelian inheritance in 1900 provided what might have been common grounds to resolve conflict. Instead, dispute between biometricians and geneticists extended to continental Europe and to United States. Bateson was champion of Mendelians, many of whom accepted mutation theory proposed by De Vries, and denied that natural selection played a major role in evolution. The biometricians for their part argued that Mendelian characters were sports of little importance to process.

No other scientific theory has had as tremendous an impact on our understanding of the world as Darwin's theory as outlined in his Origin of Species, yet from the very beginning the theory has been subject to controversy. The Evolution of Darwinism, first published in 2004, focuses on three issues of debate - the nature of selection, the nature and scope of adaptation, and the question of evolutionary progress. It traces the varying interpretations to which these issues were subjected from the beginning and the fierce contemporary debates that still rage on and explores their implications for the greatest questions of all: Where we come from, who we are and where we might be heading. Written in a clear and non-technical style, this book will be of use as a textbook for students in the philosophy of science who need to become familiar with the background to the debates about evolution.

Samuel Butler’s Life and Habit and the Modernist Literary CharacterRethinking the Subject through the Everyday Federico Bellini The last decade has seen a veritable resurgence of the theme of habit in philosophical and critical debates. While for decades the preference had been accorded to either the active forces of will and desire or the contingency and abruptness of the Event, thinkers have recently come back to habit from different paths and perspectives (Bennett et al.; Sparrow and Hutchinson; Carlisle). The polarization of attention around the theme of habit almost seems to mirror the veritable explosion of the discourse on habit which took place about two centuries ago. Even though the philosophical reflection on habit can be traced at least as far back as Aristotle it was at the end of the eighteenth century and in the early nineteenth century that the theme of habit, as asserted in the entry habitude of the Encyclopédie Philosophique Universelle, became “a new philosophical challenge” as an effect of “the refusal of innate ideas; the sensualist project deriving the modes of understanding from experience (generally exterior experience); the refusal, finally, of Hume’s category of causality and its reduction to pure habit” (1108; my translation). In France, habit was an extremely popular theme among spiritualist or proto-spiritualist philosophers such as Maine de Biran and Ravaisson, who considered it the bridge between spirit and matter. In Germany, Hegel tackled the problem of habit in The Philosophy of Right, making it the basis of custom on which a true ethical life is grounded. In Italy, reprehensible antisocial habits fell under the magnifying glass of the Turin positivist school and became a pivotal part of Lombroso’s analysis of the criminal mind. In the English speaking world, Samuel Butler (1835–1902) was probably the most original contributor to the debate on habit in the second part of the nineteenth century. He used the notion of habit to challenge Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, conceiving habit as the channel through which unconscious memory can be passed down from one generation to the next, preserved in the experience of the species and its determination to evolve into more complex forms (see Willey). Samuel Butler’s theories have been widely disregarded among professional philosophers, because of his idiosyncratic and counter-intuitive use of the notion [End Page 111] of habit and due to the fact that his arguments have often been seen as amateurish. Nonetheless, several leading twentieth-century thinkers, such as Gregory Bateson and Gilles Deleuze, have repeatedly extolled the visionary power of Butler’s ideas and admitted their debts towards them. Moreover, Butler’s theories of habit were influential among several modernist writers, such as H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Valery Larbaud, and E. M. Forster and they contributed both to these authors’ understanding of the crisis of modern subjectivity and to their attention for the representation of habitual behavior and the everyday. In this paper I intend to demonstrate how Butler’s theory of habit—in particular as it is presented in his seminal work Life and Habit—once it is disentangled from the anti-Darwinian debates on the theory of evolution from which it first emerged, can offer a considerable contribution to the contemporary philosophical debate and allow a better understanding of the history of the idea of habit at the turn of the century. Moreover, I intend to show how the import of these ideas was promptly acknowledge by several modernist writers, who turned to Butler in an effort to investigate the habitual side of life through their characters. In doing so, they were moved by the belief that the modern ethos, as well as the modern idea of subjectivity, could find their proper mode of expression precisely in that previously neglected dimension of life. Butler’s theory of habit stems from the heated late nineteenth-century debate concerning Darwinism and the theory of evolution. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (Willey 70 and ff.) had a pivotal influence on Butler’s life and thought, determining his abandonment of the Christian faith and his conversion to agnosticism. Butler sent his early works to Darwin, who responded kindly and admitted...

Beginning with a discussion of the sources in Darwin's writing for Freud's theory of the hysterical symptom, this essay proceeds to a symptomatic reading of Darwin himself. With reference to "The Origin of Species," "The Descent of Man," and "The Expression of the Emotions," this essay shows that Darwin's theories of involuntary expressive behavior and of aesthetic preference in sexual selection are linked by their role in his understanding of racial difference and also by their reliance on the idea that learned habits can be inherited as instincts, a view often identified with Lamarck. They are thus at once theories of the foreign body and theories that appear as foreigners within the body of Darwin's work.

Although Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould's model of punctuated equilibria generated much debate after its publication in 1972, and was perceived as anti‐Darwinian, it was not. It was a version of paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson's “quantum evolution,” in which rapid, and continuous, change occurs via small populations. The major difference: In punctuated equilibria, species do not continue to change after they emerge, but remain morphologically static. Theories of rapid evolutionary change have always existed as alternatives to a Darwinian model of continuous, usually gradual, change. However, in contrast to punctuated equilibria and quantum evolution, these theories—genetical, morphological, and paleontological—proposed that the origin of species is sudden, and due to processes different from those involved in the survival of species, to which Darwin's theory appears most relevant.