I feel remiss in admitting, as a science teacher, I have not read On the Origin of Species in its entirety. Like many, unfortunately, my knowledge of Darwin and his work has come from secondary sources, excerpts, and coursework. One of the main points I have learned this summer, thanks to this course and Dr. Magruder, is that one should utilize original sources as much as possible, and for that I am thankful and intend to do so in the future.
Darwin does avoid technical jargon for the most part. He seems to be interested in making his case as easily comprehended as possible, for even the lay person. I think Darwin wanted all people to be able to first of all understand and secondly appreciate the significance of what he had figured out. To me this was the classic case of people around the world slapping their foreheads and asking themselves why they didn't see this themselves. The elegance of Darwin's work is in, in some ways, its simplicity, and its ability to explain and fit into things in such a universal manner.
Darwin, in the first two chapters, is primarily concerned with laying the foundation of natural selection in terms of the variety found in populations, whether in the wild or domesticated. As is his style, he gives example after example to strongly support his idea of variation, even though he was not right on terms of the basis of that variation yet. Of course it wasn't crucial at that point to identify the exact sources of variation, interms of the mechanics of natural selection. That would come later. In the third chapter he gets into the notion of competition between the individuals that conprise a population, especially species and to a lesser extent genera. He is basically saying that there is only so much in the way of resources such as food, space, etc., and it is natural to assume there is only so much to go around. Populations will continue to grow up to these limits as is their normal tendency.
As a contemporary reader, I can put myself in the postion of being one those saying "Why didn't I think of that?". It's like it was all laid out and in retrospect, even reading it in the time of Darwin himself, the sheer elegance and for lack of a better term common sense in putting the pieces of the puzzle together is almost overwhelming. I could see almost a sense of resentment, coupled of course with the excitement of seeing how the parts of the argument flow together to support and construct the overall idea of natural selection.
I feel the most attractive parts of these chapters would be Darwin's patient, but not pandering way of meticulously explaining and correlating all the data and observations as he lays the foundation for the rest of his text. I would say one of the least attractive features is Darwin not necessarily building his theory from the ground up, but piecing it together from previous work and adding in his own. Given this, as Mayr points out in the introduction, Darwin doesn't use footnotes or a bibliography.
As far as how this reading will impact my own teaching, I intend to finish the book as soon as I can, and I feel I can more comfortably and confidently present the ideas of natural selection and evolution to my students in the future, as well as how they originated and developed over time. This is especially important with the current controversy over creationism in the science classroom.
Bibliographic Note:
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (A Facsimile of the First Edition), (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1964). With an introduction by Ernst Mayr, this is arguably the pre-eminent work in biology, outlining Darwin's theory of natural selection. It was published in 1859.
Further Reading Note:
I purchased this copy and intend to read all of it, and I would like to view all of the Collections' holdings of Darwin.
3 comments:
What would be interesting would be a comparison of the science Darwin's peers were producing. How different was his methodology, his approach, and his apparent desire to make his ideas more accessible? The conclusions he drew may seem like a classic 'aha' moment, but of course they were predicated on a lot of groundwork.
Why do you read 'a sense of resentment'? against whom, do you think? (are you anthropomorphizing science? there's nothing wrong with that.) Maybe Darwin was resentful against science for causing him to lose his faith; in his book River Out of Eden, Richard Dawkins mentions how Darwin used the example of an insect that uses a living host to feed on and live within as a macabre creation that "a beneficient and omnipotent God" could not imaginably have designed.
The whole idea of "it's so obvious, why didn't i think of it" hits me all the time, not just with the big genius items. I am a linear thinker and that's a hard to change. Men like Darwin, Einstein, even Galileo, (i know there are modern examples but i am too tired to think of any right now),their brains worked in fundamentally different ways. The latest issue of Wired had a good article on different ways genius can manifest itself. But i digress. Linearly.
Thanks for your continuing comments on my blog, I appreciate it. By resentment, I meant as a person reading Darwin for the first time, and having that feeling of "why didn't I think of that?", but no mean-spiritedness or vindictiveness, just a bit of envy. I think the main thing that set Darwin apart was his exhaustive and numerous examples to support all the components of his idea of natural selection, even though apparently he was not the first to mention it.
This is also further illustration that good science doesn't need to be and shouldn't be "sfoe-horned" into something other than it really is/was.
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