Time and Darwin

(I meant to post this before class today but didn’t get a chance to finish the post). If we haven’t yet gotten the sense that species evolve over time slowly, Chapter 6 and 9 make more clear that for Darwin, variation does not occur overnight. In Chapter 4 alone, the word “slow” or variations of the word slow appear 24 times.

I am going to speak about time in Darwin as it is first introduced in Chapter 4. Although the chapter is concerned mainly with natural selection and its performance as a central character in evolution, I am going to think about the interconnectedness of the species by mentioning natural selection sparingly, if that’s possible. This decision may seem to be missing the point entirely, but I want to think more about the form of the text and the construction of Darwin's argument and how it reflects unity or interconnectedness.

Evolution certainly seems like a slow-going process, and the task of collecting evidence over such an expansive time period proves difficult. Darwin refers to the gaps in the geological record not simply as imperfect but an “extreme” imperfection (250). However, when I read the On The Origin of Species, the argument is a consciously constructed one in that words, ideas, meanings, and examples, all relate and repeat throughout: everything seems to fit together despite the gaping holes in the geological record.

I would like to take a brief section from Alex's post to expand on in my own post as this was what I was most interested in when reading Darwin’s chapter on Natural Selection. To practice what I teach in regards to promoting the use of attributive tags, Alex demonstrates how “Darwin’s taxonomical diagram makes clear the interrelatedness of all species; any species (or individual) can be traced to another through a continuum of relatives, even though the number of relatives may be vast.

On page 87, Darwin talks about the sexual selection of not only male roosters, but also an alligator, which is likened to a Native American, male-stag beetles, and carnivorous animals in general. Why would he choose to talk about these seemingly disjointed species in one paragraph? Why construct his argument in this way? Upon first glance and without any context, these animals do not seem to be interrelated. It is clear however upon closer investigation that merely one way to connect these species is through their fights or duels over female counterparts. But why else put these creatures that look extremely different together? It doesn’t seem like the best comparison or does it? When this example is read as a lens into Chapter 6 and 9 it prepares the reader for the idea that each of these animals are somehow and mostly interrelated to one another. Species have common ancestors or “parents” as Darwin refers to them, (that are now extinct and unable to be located due to the incompleteness of the fossil record since preservation is difficult for various reasons), that connect separate species. Parent is in interesting word choice as it makes the relationship appear familial and natural. Maybe one could more easily accept this theory with the rhetoric focusing around close-nit bonds. Just as the process of natural selection is a slow one, Darwin’s writing reflects this attitude as he is slowly introducing his audience to the idea that various animals and some humans aren’t that different after all.

The charts in chapter 4 only add to the relationships between time and interconnectedness. Even if I haven’t studied graphs and charts since high school, the graphs once again demonstrate how species can be and largely are connected. The tree -like structure not only invokes the idea of multiple roots emanating from a more unified source but maybe more accurately the lines are branches that intertwine and interconnect while evolving, in this case over thousands of years. Although the graph is meant to be frozen in time and immovable on the page, it it as if the lines are slowly moving, and the branches are still slowly expanding. The vagueness of the chart permits this kind of interpretation: that it can still apply today.

If we return to the graphs on 112-113, what would happen if the natural form of the graph was altered? Instead of Darwin drawing his graphs as tree-like, what would happen if the entities were all separate (not connected) and looked more like strands of grass? There are competing theories that supposed that plants and animals seemed to have simply materialized without having any common ancestors, an idea which Darwin was responding to. Henry Adams speaks at length on the figure of the Pteraspsis, a shark-like animal that appears and then disappears without any discernable ancestor or predecessor in The Education.

To think about evolution and variations of animals in tens of thousands of years emphasizes the slowness of “progress.” Darwin again talks about evolution’s speed in Tuesdays reading when he explains that “new varieties are very slowly formed, for variation is a very slow process, and natural selection can do nothing until favorable variations chance to occur, and until a place in the natural polity of the country can be better filled by some modification of some one or more of its inhabitants” This section is of central importance for numerous reasons: his use of the word “very” twice in one sentence only reinforces the idea that natural section moves at an incredibly slow rate. Also, it introduces us again to the idea of chance. But what other ways does time function? or how does the idea of linear time more generally affect/frame Darwin's arguments.