The Reluctant Mr. Darwin Read Online Free PDF

of his time. The comment about species is from his History of the Inductive Sciences , produced in a later intellectual generation and a more rigorous scientific spirit than Paley’s Natural Theology. Other British scientists and philosophers contemporary with Whewell, such as John Herschel and John Stuart Mill, shared that lingering belief in natural kinds, buried beneath their disagreements about scientific method and logic. In France, the eminent comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier proposed a system of animal classification—sorting every species into one of four great embranchements, or groups—that also rested on essentialist assumptions. Finding order within the animal world meant, to Cuvier, reading the evidence in each species for its conformity with an underlying essence, not the clues suggesting change and divergence over time. A philosopher of science from our own era, David Hull, has traced this vein of essentialism in early nineteenth-century biological thinking. Hull concludes: “Seldom in the history of ideas has a scientific theory conflicted so openly with a metaphysical principle as did evolutionary theory with the doctrine of the immutability of species.”
    Darwin had read Herschel, as well as Paley, back at Cambridge. Whewell had been a professor of mineralogy there. Essentialism and natural theology were as thick in the air of Darwin’s world as coal smoke and the scent of horse manure. True, those weren’t the only contemporary perspectives on the natural world. The private medical schools of London and Edinburgh harbored wilder ideas during the 1830s, including some inchoate versions of evolutionary progressivism. But those institutions, which employed some professional anatomists who taught by dissecting human bodies, who lived on their salaries and not on inherited wealth, and who tended toward radical politics, were alien to Darwin, despite the family tradition of doctoring. He had tried medical training himself, in Edinburgh at age sixteen, following the footsteps of his brother (in the shadow of his father), and he hated it. After two years, bored by the lectures and appalled by the bloody operations done without anesthetic, Charles had scooted down to Cambridge for a drier, less gruesome education. While there, at Christ’s College, he had drifted toward clerical ordination, not from any sense of vocation (he wasn’t devout) or Church commitment (he’d descended from Unitarians on his mother’s side and Darwin freethinkers like his father and old Erasmus) but by the least-worst logic that it would allow him to find some respectable niche as a parson-naturalist, after the model of Gilbert White. The Beagle trip had intervened. The ship carried him a long way from Christ’s College but it eventually returned him to the same social context he had left behind, in which many of his scientific teachers, friends, and connections—John Henslow and Adam Sedgwick at Cambridge, Leonard Jenyns, the entomologist Frederick Hope, William Whewell himself—were Anglican clergymen. Even his scientific idol, Charles Lyell, had imbued Principles of Geology with an orthodox view of biological creation. During 1837 and ’38, Darwin began steeling himself to shock and scandalize them all. His view of mutable species directly contradicted their essentialism and all the pious science-flavored theologizing that stood upon it. He poured his dark speculations into the transmutation notebooks while conducting himself outwardly as a clubbable young naturalist on the rise.
    He cut back on his socializing, with apologies about being too busy, then added to his chores and his status by accepting a role as secretary to the Geological Society, under Whewell’s presidency. He finished the manuscript of his Beagle journal (but it couldn’t be published until FitzRoy’s book was ready), and talked his way into another big publishing venture: a lavish compendium to