charles_darwin

2
CHARLES DARWIN AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
believed transmutation could not and never had occurred. The species
were fixed: the same number and type existed at the present
time as had existed one or two thousand years earlier. Each species
had appeared or been created at a fixed point in time. Most likely, so
the thinking went, all species had been created at the same time.
Special creation and the fixity of the species, as these ideas were
called, were the standard explanations in the Western world for
the origin and existence of life on Earth until the late-nineteenth
century.
It may have been the traditional view of the origin of life, but
the plausibility of the fixity of the species had also been challenged.
Was it really possible for thousands of years to have passed and organic
life to remain exactly the same? Had nothing changed? To answer
these two questions ‘‘yes’’ seemed to defy logic. Thinkers as far
back as the Ancient Greeks discussed the merits of the theory. As
Darwin noted in his Historical Sketch at the beginning of The Origin
of Species, Aristotle (B.C.E. 384–322) wrote in one of his best-known
books that, ‘‘In cases where a coincidence created a combination
which seems as though it might have been arranged on purpose, the
creatures, it is urged, having been suitably formed by the operation
of chance, survived; otherwise they perished, and still perish....’’ 2
Darwin, who was told about the statement by the British philologist
Claire Grece (1831–1905), latched on to the fact that Aristotle recognized
that some change occurred in nature. 3 In fact, Darwin had
misunderstood Aristotle: Aristotle was quoting a philosopher with
whom he disagreed. Aristotle was no proponent of evolution. He was
better known for his theory of ‘‘The Great Chain of Being,’’ the idea
that living organisms could be organized from the simplest to most
complex and that no organism could change its place in this ladder
of progression.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the fixity of the species
was a major problem in science. Geologists and paleontologists
had discovered fossils of animals and plants but could not find contemporary
living examples of these organisms. Scientists such as
Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), who worked on classifying the species,
grouping similar and related species into families and subfamilies,
calculated that some species were extinct. Perhaps it was stretching
credulity to argue that all life on Earth remained as it had been six
thousand years before. 4
In the 1830s, the authors of the Bridgewater Treatises tried to
counter challenges to the fixity of species idea by arguing that God
allowed a ‘‘useful and purposeful decline’’ in nature. The publication
costs of these books were paid for by the Reverend Francis Henry