The Darwin Archive

Great things still keep coming from the Darwin archive. Rebecca Stott’s book Darwin and the Barnacles reminds one how much the development of evolutionary theory rested on an infinite capacity for taking pains, on the broadest possible empirical base, and on a willingness to look some very strange facts in the face—the peculiar sexual arrangements of barnacles among them.

Perhaps the chapter on the death of Annie could have been more restrained; we also learn rather more than is necessary about Darwin’s disorders, the water cures, the wet sheets, and so on; but overall Stott’s book is a very well-told tale—and a welcome relief from those crashing bores of neo-Darwinism, D & D, the self-important Sir and the garrulous philosopher. But the most heartening news recently was that Ernst Mayr is not only one hundred years old, but still publishing.

If there’s anyone who still thinks evolution can be summarized in a catchphrase, Mayr’s five elements of the theory as stated in One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Thought (Harvard University Press, 1991) may be useful:

Evolution as such

This is the theory that the world is not constant nor recently created nor perpetually cycling but rather is steadily changing and that organisms are transformed in time.

Common descent

This is the theory that every group of organisms descended from a common ancestor and that all groups of organisms, including animals, plants, and micro-organisms, ultimately go back to a single origin of life on earth.

Multiplication of species

This theory explains the origin of the enormous organic diversity. It postulates that species multiply, either by splitting into daughter species or by “budding”, that is, by the establishment of geographically isolated founder populations that evolve into new species.

Gradualism

According to this theory, evolutionary change takes place through the gradual change of populations and not by the sudden (saltational) production of new individuals that represent a new type.

Natural selection

According to this theory, evolutionary change comes about through the abundant production of genetic variation in every generation. The relatively few individuals who survive, owing to a particularly well-adapted combination of inheritable characters, give rise to the next generation.