In his satirical novel of University life, Changing Places, David Lodge writes of a game played by Professors of English literature, in which each player is challenged to confess that he or she has not read some well known literary work. The players are stunned into silence when one of them confesses to never having read Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Were evolutionary biologists to play a similar game honestly, they would almost all confess that they have not read Darwin’s Origin of Species from beginning to end. Some of the most honest of them would admit to never having even opened the book. Yet Darwin is the most famous biologist who ever lived. Reference is made over and over in both scientific and popular writings to “Darwinism”, “Darwinian evolution”, “Darwin’s theory of evolution”, and “the Darwinian revolution” and he is usually described as the founder of evolutionary biology. In the process of identifying “evolution” with Darwin there has grown up a large body of misunderstanding of the place of the Origin of Species in the history of the idea of evolution, of the role of Darwin’s work in the justification of what came to be called “social Darwinism”, of Darwin’s analysis of the process of organic evolution and, ultimately, a confusion about the meaning of “theory” in science. 

In his satirical novel of University life, Changing Places, David Lodge writes of a game played by Professors of English literature, in which each player is challenged to confess that he or she has not read some well known literary work. The players are stunned into silence when one of them confesses to never having read Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Were evolutionary biologists to play a similar game honestly, they would almost all confess that they have not read Darwin’s Origin of Species from beginning to end. Some of the most honest of them would admit to never having even opened the book. Yet Darwin is the most famous biologist who ever lived. Reference is made over and over in both scientific and popular writings to “Darwinism”, “Darwinian evolution”, “Darwin’s theory of evolution”, and “the Darwinian revolution” and he is usually described as the founder of evolutionary biology. In the process of identifying “evolution” with Darwin there has grown up a large body of misunderstanding of the place of the Origin of Species in the history of the idea of evolution, of the role of Darwin’s work in the justification of what came to be called “social Darwinism”, of Darwin’s analysis of the process of organic evolution and, ultimately, a confusion about the meaning of “theory” in science.

Darwin certainly did not invent the idea that life on earth has evolved from earlier forms that are now extinct and will continue to evolve in the future. The idea of evolution had already become common in Europe since the beginnings of the bourgeois revolution in the eighteenth century. A hundred years before the appearance of the Origin in 1859, Denis Diderot, in his The Dream of d’Alembert has his philosopher ask in his sleep “Who knows what races of animals preceded ours? Who knows what races will succeed ours? Everything passes, everything changes. Only the totality remains.” Tennyson, in his epic poem, In Memoriam asks whether Nature is “careful of the type” and answers:

“So careful of the type?” but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone She cries, “A thousand types are gone; I care for nothing; all shall go.”

Even Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin gave an evolutionary view of the origin of all organisms from “rudiments of form and sense” in his Temple of Nature of 1803. Charles Darwin lived, worked and wrote in an era of rampant evolutionism, an evolutionism that was an intellectual manifestation of the rise of an entrepreneurial bourgeoisie conscious of the social and political revolutions that had brought them to power. So, the mid-nineteenth century English social philosopher Herbert Spencer argued that the best evidence for the truth of organic evolution was that stars, language, political structures, social relations and everything else evolved. Evolution was seen as a universal law of the universe.

It was precisely the popularity of ideas of instability and evolution that led to the buying of every printed copy of the Origin on the day that it was issued.

The usual explication of Darwin’s view of the mechanism underlying evolutionary change as presented in the “Origin” puts very great weight on the role of the competition between organisms for resources in short supply. Such explications place great emphasis on the impact that Darwin’s reading of Malthus had on his idea of natural selection. On this view natural selection operates because organisms tend to increase in number geometrically, while the resources for their maintenance and reproduction are either increasing only arithmetically or not at all. The forms that are more “fit” for the struggle win out and their types increase in the species. This view of the “struggle for existence” is one in which the model is an active physical competition between organisms to determine which of them will win and which lose, as, for example, when two animals fight over a bit of food or two males compete for access to females. It is undoubtedly true that such contests for resources are an important part of the mechanism of natural selection envisioned by Darwin. But he is careful in the Origin to make a broader claim. He writes that

“I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense including dependence of one being on another.. . Two canine animals in a a time of dearth may be truly said to struggle with each other which shall get food and live.
But a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against drought .. .”