charles_darwin

44
CHARLES DARWIN AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
organic life on Earth. The idea that dogs had always been dogs or
that apple trees had always grown from apple seeds made sense
based on the available evidence. There were records dating back to
the ancient Greeks and Romans that listed the species of plants and
animals common at that time: those lists matched the flora and fauna
of the seventeenth century. Other records from ancient civilizations,
such as the Egyptians, contained drawings of recognizable species of
cats, dogs, and birds. Obviously then, so the thinking went, the species
had not changed over thousands of years.
Doubts about the fixity of species had a long history. Greek philosophers
such as Anaximander of Miletus (ca. 610–ca. 546) and
Empedocles (ca. 492–432) argued that animals mutated and became
extinct. By the seventeenth century, the standard explanation for the
extinction and mutation of animals was catastrophism. Cuvier
actually coined the term in the nineteenth century to describe a cataclysmic
or large-scale geological event, but the idea was not new.
Some scientists thought there had been only one catastrophe: the
flood mentioned in the biblical book of Genesis. Noah had saved a
pair of each type of animal in the ark: the animals not saved died in
the flood and became extinct. In his book Recherches sur les ossements
fossils de quadrupedes: ou l’on retablit les caracteres de plusieurs
especes d’animaux que les revolutions du globe paroissent avoir detruites
(1812), Cuvier argued that there had been several catastrophes in
the Earth’s history. The catastrophes accounted for the large number
of fossils being found by amateur and professional geologists in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 2
Cuvier’s explanation made sense, but it did not quell the debate
about origins. The wealth of information found by professional and
amateur scientists did not seem compatible with a theory of catastrophism
whether there was one or several floods. Commenting on the
recently settled continent of America, Sir Thomas Browne (1605–
1682), a British physician, wondered in 1635 why the horse, a
‘‘necessary creature,’’ did not exist there. 3 And in the next two centuries,
naturalists discovered a number of animals—some useful or
harmless, some not—in America that did not exist in Europe, Africa,
and Asia. Catastrophism was not a satisfactory explanation for such
particular and continent-specific development of various species.
In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after the
widespread dissemination of Darwin’s ideas, some writers blamed
seventeenth-century naturalists such as John Ray (1627–1705) for
what they called the ‘‘doctrine’’ of the fixity of species. Vernon Faithfull
Storr (1869–1940), a British theologian and philosopher, suggested
that Ray had tried to do scientifically what John Milton had done