Nature's Nature

What (who?) is the agent behind natural selection in On the Origin of Species? Darwin’s continual comparisons of natural selection to artificial selection, performed by “man,” seem to beg this question, as does his phrasing, particularly in chapter 4. Early in his discussion of natural selection, Darwin seems to afford this agency to nature, which is sometimes a proper noun and sometimes not, striking something of a middle course between personification and deification, in that Nature is far more powerful than “man” but not coterminous with the Creator who appears in later chapters. Two paragraphs on p. 82-3 are particularly telling. Darwin begins, “As man can produce and certainly has produced a great result by his methodical and unconscious means of selection, what may not nature effect?” (82). Here nature begins acting. Nature “cares nothing for appearances” (82). While a being, nature is a being above affect, which mars “man’s” ability to select well, instead capable of something like pure rationality thanks to powers of observation that far exceed “man’s.” But while nature doesn’t have affect, in the next sentence, it gets a gender: “She can act on every internal organ” (82). The following sentence makes this gendering more striking; Darwin uses parallelism to compare “man’s” selection to Nature, who seems remarkably selfless: “Man selects only for his own good; Nature only for that of the being which she tends” (83). Darwin compares Nature’s perfect ability to place creatures in suitable conditions to “man’s” attempts to do the same and finds “man” woefully inadequate, running to exclamation points. In comparison, Nature’s works “plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship” (83). Compared to “man,” nature sees more, knows more, selects without bias or affect, and produces better results. Nature may be a “she,” but a “she” characterized by rationality, perfect insight, and cool and unbiased judgment— characteristics not commonly associated with the feminine but deeply connected to the image Darwin is trying to cultivate of scientists in general and himself in particular. Is this, then, the reason for the shift from “it” to “she,” this more-than-personification—projection and cultivation of a scientific persona? For Darwin to admit that he doesn’t have all the answers, must he craft a character who does, who could, were she a talker, fill in the blanks?

But this paragraph is followed another in which our heroine disappears. Natural selection comes on to the scene as an actor in its own right: “natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working” (83). This shift of agents is particularly striking in light of the fact that the sentence immediately preceding this one casts Nature herself as working. Is Nature working at natural selection or is natural selection some other independent being? This slippage continues throughout the rest of the chapter: natural selection acts on p. 86 and 102; nature, on p. 98 and 104. Natural selection gets a new name that seems to privilege nature as actor later in the chapter, when Darwin argues that there is no limit to the amount of change that can be effected “by nature’s power of selection” (104). Rather than a being itself, selection becomes a power nature possesses. But even if the examples seem to resolve themselves in favor of nature as an agent of natural selection, rather than natural selection being a being itself, nature doesn’t always maintain her being. Throughout the text, sometimes things happen in nature, sometimes by nature, sometimes under nature, sometimes through nature—and this list could go on. Is Nature a being? A force? A place? A state? A “polity”? Is Nature both character and setting in the tale of natural selection? Close attention to Darwin’s use of nature, particularly in chapter 4, raises more questions than answers, for me at least, because Darwin uses “nature” and “Nature” interchangeably and in a multitude of phrases and arguments. Is this a moment when reading science like literature exposes gaps in the science (Darwin glossing what he can’t fully explain—what it is that causes variations that can then be selected) or is it unfair to expect clarity of plot and characterization in a science text? To me, these shifts and slippages evidence less sloppy writing than a clash of discourses and the understandings of the world that accompany them. We see the remnants of a romanticized view of nature as feminine, but with a signal difference—she’s calculating, rational, and affectless—alongside the development of a theory of the world that doesn’t require the agency of a powerful being, complicated by the desire to be both readable and convincing and, of course, to aggrandize the role of scientists while bemoaning their limitations at the same time.