A few mostly connected ideas about On Origin of Species.

I was first struck by the penguin’s introductory note mentioning the first edition’s “superiority” over its subsequent editions as a result of Darwin’s answering challenges which later proved to be irrelevant or incorrect. This was interesting to a scholar of early literature or of cultures which produce “literature” which is chiefly oral. Oral works, of course, are not science—but science works in many ways reminiscent of the “redaction” tradition usually identified with early (oral) epic literature. To put this more plainly: science is a literate literature which reflects in some ways to the ways oral literature is produced—as new tales are spun or fall out of favor, so too does Darwin’s masterpiece shift and evolve, only to be stripped again to its first edition essence by contemporary scholars interested in his original ideas. This relates in what I hope isn’t a terribly convoluted way to the geographic and temporal concerns at play in Darwin’s introduction and first chapter:

Audubon, whose work is self-consciously crafted for a more specialized audience, reads as though it would have much more popular appeal than Darwin’s intensely reflective meditations on the variations of sheep. Audubon always gives readers a sense of movement—even if it is difficult to detect the changes in the focalization of his narratives, it always feels like “1^st person science.” On the Origin, I had always expected, was something of a chronicle of Darwin’s travels aboard the HMS Beagle through the lens of a naturalist coming to understand variation by physical travel. Instead, Darwin seems chiefly disinterested in variation across geography. It is worth noting that very few “places” were actually worth indexing for Darwin—he mentions in chapter one Egypt, Italy, Spain, South Africa, and India but only as passing examples, hardly of enough interest to the reader to provide reference to.

With Darwin’s curious (but not absolute) evasion of the question of “man’s descent” absent from On the Origin of Species I was surprised to find Darwin’s first chapter focuses chiefly on natural selection as dictated by man. Indeed, chapter one seems to mirror the way Darwin will posit natural selection occurs in nature, with man replaced by circumstance and a Malthusian struggle to reproduce and whatever divine inspiration Darwin may later allude to (selection as the more “predominant Power” is revealed to the reader first as a tool by which man shapes creatures into images profitable to him). The effect is interesting, but becomes troubling when Darwin begins comparing the hegemony of man over beast in his native England and in its imperial subjects.

When Darwin looks to analogues of the ancients who may have taken the first steps of human powered “natural” selection outside of Europe, it is interesting to note that the savages mentioned are all members of the periphery of the British Empire. South Africa and India bear mentioning for Darwin precisely because of the relationship being enacted here—the British were, after all, the “husbands” of these indigenous peoples. It is also interesting to note that Darwin’s evidence of the importance of controlled variation among indigenous and European peoples seems to be always expressed in terms of the marketplace—the painstaking care which allows for new domesticated species to develop is only a byproduct of a society’s participation in a complex and increasingly more modern global economic market. At the same time Darwin seems to contend that understanding selection is itself a mark of human evolution predating even history—even the most barbarous of savages or historically remote peoples (such as the British in the middle ages) see it as essential to survival. His comment, then, on the irreversibility of domestication, that is, that domesticated species do not return to their aboriginal or “natural” states if left in those circumstances, seems to be at play for the “domestication” (otherwise known as the knowledge of husbandry and agriculture) of man as well.