On the Origin of Species

In brief

On the Origin of Species makes two claims. Species descend from earlier species, and the main engine of that change is natural selection: small heritable differences that help their bearers survive and breed accumulate over immense time. Charles Darwin published it on 24 November 1859, through John Murray, at fifteen shillings. All the copies available to the trade were taken at Murray’s sale two days earlier.

The two claims had different fates. By about 1880 most scientists accepted descent; few accepted selection as its main cause until genetics came to its rescue in the twentieth century. The book’s lasting merit is less its conclusions than its manners. It states the worst objections to itself, at length, before anyone else has made them. The first edition does this best, which is the argument of this page.

Which edition?

Darwin issued six editions: 1859, 1860, 1861, 1866, 1869 and 1872. Project Gutenberg has three.

eBook 1228 is the first edition of 1859. This page’s chapter links and map go to it, and quotations are from it unless the sixth is named.
eBook 22764 is the second, of 1860.
eBook 2009 is the sixth of 1872, the “Sixth London Edition, with all Additions and Corrections”. It has fifteen chapters to the first’s fourteen, a historical sketch, and a glossary. Its chapter numbers from VII onward are one higher.

The third, fourth and fifth, and a comparison of all six, are free at Darwin Online.

The argument

Darwin himself calls it “one long argument”, and it runs in four moves. Living things vary, and some of the variation is inherited. More are born than can survive: “It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms.” So any inherited edge will tend to be preserved. Over deep time, and with lineages pressed apart by competition, varieties become species. The book’s only diagram, in Chapter IV, shows this branching.

The method is that one hypothesis explains many unrelated classes of fact, which special creation can only list. The recurring question is sharp: “Why, on the theory of Creation, should this be so?” Darwin also says what would sink him: if a complex organ could not have arisen by “numerous, successive, slight modifications”, then “my theory would absolutely break down”.

The word “struggle” needs its caveat, which he gives at once: “I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense”. Much later misuse begins by ignoring that sentence.

The shape of the book

The mechanism, Chapters I to V

Domestic breeding, variation in nature, the struggle, natural selection, and the laws of variation. Darwin admits in Chapter I that “The laws governing inheritance are quite unknown.”

The difficulties, Chapters VI to IX

Here is the book’s boldest stretch: four chapters of objections. The eye comes first. That it arose by selection “seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree”, and those who stop quoting there omit the next sentence, which sets out the gradations that answer it. Then come instinct, hybrid sterility and the missing fossils.

The evidence, Chapters X to XIII

Fossil succession, geographical distribution in two chapters, and classification, embryos and rudimentary organs. The Galápagos matter here as a fact about islands. The famous finches do not: the word appears three times in the book and never of them.

The close, Chapter XIV

Recapitulation, then one sentence on the subject everyone would ask about: “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”

The voice

Darwin writes as a modest correspondent would, all “I think” and “I am well aware”, and the hedging is a weapon. Having conceded so much, he seems unanswerable when he insists. He calls the book an abstract, and “must necessarily be imperfect” was true: it was cut down from a far longer manuscript.

The prose rises only at the end. “It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds”: the passage is usually remembered as the tangled bank, and that is the sixth edition’s wording. The first edition says “entangled”. From worms and birds and bushes, he moves to “There is grandeur in this view of life”, and the last word of every edition is “evolved”.

The weakest sentence in the book is the comfort at the close of Chapter III, that “no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt”. That is Victorian consolation, not observation.

The long delay

Darwin reached the idea in September 1838, after reading Malthus. He wrote a pencil sketch in 1842 and an essay in 1844, and left a letter asking Emma Darwin, “in case of my sudden death”, to pay £400 to have it published. He told Joseph Hooker that year that admitting his view was “like confessing a murder”. Then, from 1846 to 1854, he wrote on barnacles. Twenty-one years separate the idea and the book.

The usual story is fear: Vestiges, published anonymously in 1844, was savaged, and a respectable man with a pious wife kept quiet. John van Wyhe’s 2007 paper “Mind the Gap” rejects this. Darwin told colleagues freely, his letters say he would publish when his other work was finished, and the idea of a secret delay is mainly a modern one. The paper is contested. Van Wyhe seems right about the barnacles, but the murder joke and the £400 suggest that fear was still in the room.

Lyell urged him in 1856 to publish a fragment before he lost priority, and offered the pigeons as a subject. Darwin began instead a full technical treatise, Natural Selection, which never appeared in his lifetime.

Wallace’s letter

On 18 June 1858 a packet reached Down House from Alfred Russel Wallace, a specimen collector in the Malay Archipelago. Its roughly twenty pages described natural selection; Wallace asked that they be passed to Lyell. The covering letter is lost. Wallace later said the idea came during a fever on Ternate; his journal suggests Gilolo. Darwin forwarded it the same day, writing to Lyell that “all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed”.

Darwin wavered over whether he could honourably publish at all. Scarlet fever came to the house and his baby son Charles Waring died on 28 June. He handed the matter to Lyell and Hooker, who sent the papers to the Linnean Society late on 30 June. They were read on 1 July: extracts from Darwin’s 1844 essay and an 1857 letter to Asa Gray, then Wallace’s essay. Neither author was present. Darwin was burying his child; Wallace, months of post away, had not been asked. The president, Thomas Bell, reported the next spring that the year had brought no “striking discoveries”.

Wallace’s consent came after the fact, and procedurally this was an injustice done by friends for a friend. Yet he never complained of it, and the conspiracy theories of the 1980s, in which Darwin stole from him, fail on the shipping schedules. Seventeen months later came the book, which credits him in its Introduction: Wallace “has arrived at almost exactly the same general conclusions”.

Pigeons

Chapter I opens not in nature but among breeders, and Darwin’s reasons were serious. “I have kept every breed which I could purchase or obtain”, he writes, and he managed to “join two of the London Pigeon Clubs”. Pouters, fantails and tumblers differ so much that a score of them, shown as wild birds, would be ranked as “well-defined species”; yet all descend from the rock-pigeon, and breeders made them by choosing. That is selection visible in a human lifetime, and the rest of the book is the claim that nature, with vastly more time, does the same.

Whitwell Elwin, the clergyman Murray asked to read the chapters, saw only the charm. He advised that Darwin write about pigeons instead and set the theory aside for later, since “Every body is interested in pigeons.”

Six editions, several retreats

Darwin answered nearly every critic in print, and the sixth edition has the look of it.

The Creator. The first edition ends with life “originally breathed into a few forms or into one”. From 1860 the sentence reads “breathed by the Creator”. In 1863 he told Hooker he regretted having “truckled to public opinion”. He left the words in.
The bears. The first edition imagines bears swimming with open mouths, “till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale”. The whale is gone from the sixth.
Time. Chapter IX reckons the erosion of the Weald at “three hundred million years”. The figure is gone from the sixth, whose geology chapter gives ground to the physicist William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, and his young Earth.
“Survival of the fittest”. The phrase is Herbert Spencer’s, from 1864. Wallace wrote in 1866 urging it on Darwin to avoid the impression of a chooser. Darwin agreed, used it in 1868, and put it in the fifth edition of 1869: “Mr. Herbert Spencer, of the Survival of the Fittest, is more accurate”. None of the first four has it. He meant suited to local conditions, not strongest.
“Evolution”. The first edition does not use the noun at all. It appears only in the sixth, where it comes eight times, as in “almost all naturalists admit evolution under some form”, the words of a man who has won half his case.
Mivart. A new Chapter VII answers St George Mivart, on how the early stages of an organ could be useful. This addition is an improvement. Exasperation shows in the last chapter: “Great is the power of steady misrepresentation”.

Readers usually assume that later is better, and here it is not. Kelvin’s dating was overturned once radioactivity was understood, so Darwin’s first instinct about deep time was nearer the truth than his revision. Choose the sixth for his replies and the first for his nerve.

Jenkin and Mendel

Selection needs inheritance, and Darwin had no working theory of it. His 1868 attempt, pangenesis, did not survive. The sharpest attack came in June 1867 in an anonymous North British Review article by Fleeming Jenkin, a professor of engineering. A rare favourable variant, he argued, must breed with the common type and be swamped within generations. His showpiece was a white castaway on an island of black people, an example whose racism is part of its logic.

The reasoning assumes that offspring are a mixture of their parents, which is blending inheritance, and the episode is usually told as Jenkin exposing that assumption. What he actually changed was Darwin’s view of single variations: Darwin told Wallace in January 1869 that Jenkin had convinced him individual differences mattered far more than sudden rare ones, and he revised the fifth edition accordingly.

The answer already existed. Gregor Mendel’s paper on peas appeared in Brünn in 1866: heredity comes in units that do not dilute. Mendel owned the 1863 German translation of the Origin and annotated it. Darwin never read Mendel. The tale of an uncut copy of the paper at Down is false, though he did own a handbook that summarised it, the relevant pages unopened. The two ideas were joined only in the modern synthesis, which began with R. A. Fisher’s work from 1918.

Oxford, 1860

On Saturday 30 June 1860, at the British Association meeting in the new University Museum, John Draper of New York read a long paper. In the discussion that followed, with Henslow chairing, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce spoke against Darwin, and Thomas Huxley replied. Darwin was ill at home. It was no formal debate, and no verbatim record exists.

Alfred Newton wrote to his brother that the Bishop asked whether Huxley preferred his descent “on the father’s side or the mother’s side”, and that Huxley would sooner claim kindred with an ape than with a man who so misused his gifts. Hooker wrote to Darwin that Huxley could not make himself heard, and that it was Hooker himself who silenced the Bishop. Balfour Stewart thought the Bishop had the best of it. The polished versions, such as “The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands”, surface decades later.

J. R. Lucas argued in 1979 that it is largely legend; J. Vernon Jensen disputes much of his case. A retort happened and the room was partly with Huxley. The story of science routing religion in one afternoon was built afterwards, by the winners.

Use and abuse

The care here must run both ways. Start with what the Origin does not say. The “Favoured Races” of its subtitle are varieties, cabbages included. It says nothing of human races or policy. “Fittest” is not its word until 1869, and means suited to a place.

Social Darwinism, a label first used in Europe in the late 1870s and made familiar by Richard Hofstadter in 1944, describes ideas that often predate or owe little to Darwin: Malthus and Spencer come first. His half-cousin Francis Galton founded eugenics, which fed compulsory sterilisation in the United States, and Nazi propaganda used the language of struggle. Historians still dispute how direct any line from Darwin to Nazism is.

But The Descent of Man (1871) is not innocent. In it Darwin ranks races on a scale and predicts that “the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world”. He frets that “hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed”, except with man. Then he refuses the conclusion: “Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.” We must therefore bear the cost.

He was a lifelong opponent of slavery, and wrote in The Voyage of the Beagle, “if the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin”. He rejected the policies later done in his name, and lent them a vocabulary and a ranking. Defenders and accusers tend to quote only one half.

How to read it

Read the first edition. Start with the Introduction and Chapters I to IV, then VI and XIV. Return for the geography.
In print. Harvard’s facsimile of the first edition has an introduction by Ernst Mayr, and James Costa’s The Annotated Origin (2009) explains it page by page. Morse Peckham’s variorum of 1959 records the changes across the six.

Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839). The best company of all his books, and the source of his anger about slavery.
Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago (1869). The other discoverer, in the field and at his best.
Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (1995) and The Power of Place (2002). The standard modern life.
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895). Huxley’s student runs the idea forward, and without consolation.