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This paper revisits Fleeming Jenkin's anonymous review of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, published in the North British Review in June 1867. This review is usually revered for its impact on Darwin's theory of descent with modification. Its classical interpretation states that Jenkin, a Professor of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, made a compelling case against natural selection based on the fact of "blending inheritance" and the "swamping" of advantageous variations. Those themes, however, are strikingly absent from Jenkin's text. They were later read into Jenkin's text by scholars trying to explain how Darwinian selection was reconciled with Mendelian genes and the birth of the Modern Synthesis. While many scholars have tried to measure Jenkin's effect on Darwin, the value of the 1867 review remains unclear. This paper re-examines its content and concludes that Jenkin's "able review" was in fact written by an engineer whose competencies in biology were very low. Focusing on the figure of the shipwrecked white sailor isolated on an island inhabited by Black people, this paper also underlines the racial assumptions behind Jenkin's review. "Blending inheritance" is thus a theme linked to theoretical reworkings on the question of race and skin colors, taking its root in Galton's typology of heredity. Darwin was probably mostly unimpressed by Jenkin's review. The problems raised by the review were not so much "blending inheritance" and "swamping" but a conundrum of problems related to the effects of intercrossing on variation and reversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This publication introduces the preface by Sergey Rachinsky, a profeccor of the Moscow University, to the book of Charles Darwin «On the Origin of Species». Rachinsky is best known in Russia as an educator and the founder of the school in Tatevo, Tver Oblast, and also as a founder of the temperance society in Tatevo. But in his correspondence Rachinsky repeatedly touches on religious and philosophical matters. For example, he gets into an argument with people like Vasily Rozanov and Leo Tolstoy. In addition, Rachinsky left some religious and philosophical works that are still in manuscript. This unpublished work was written in the 1882. Rachinsky touched upon the issues related to Darwin's theory of natural selection. Some of them had been raised before by his famous Russuan contemporaries, such as Nikolay Strakhov, Dmitry Pisarev, Kliment Timiryazev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Konstantin Pobedonostsev. By the time that the preface was written, disputes over Darwin had been going on more than two decades. Disputes were related not only to «On the Origin of Species», but also to Darwin's later works. At the beginning of the preface Rachinsky commends the theory of natural selection which had proposed a general law of classification of living beings. The main body of the preface is devoted to Darwin's attempt to incorporate human into a genealogical tree of animal species. Rachinsky points out that Charles Darwin tried to gather some animal's characteristics and to work out the image not merely of a human being but of a Christian. Rachinsky calls it “a futile exercise”. He indicates that the inner human world has no precedent in the animal kingdom and believes that it is a miracle. Citing the principle of energy conservation as an example, and aims to show that “a miracle” exists in this theory. At the end of the preface author points out that Darwin's theory is applicable in some areas of science and it has no any contradictions with Christianity. He also points out to critics of this thesis that Church poses no restrictions to the exploration of nature.

The interim between Darwin's first publication of the theory of natural selection (The Origin of Species, 1859) and his extended application of it to human development (The Descent of Man, 1871) corresponds with the reign of sensation fiction, a genre built upon older gothic tropes but imbricated with cultural and scientific modernization. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas, a novel that straddles generic and national literature categories, typifies the sensation era's uneasy awareness of not only similarity but interdependence across boundaries. While eschewing typical sensation engagement with technology such as trains and telegrams, Uncle Silas reflects theories of species transmutation and particularly Darwin's Origin, which posited a malleability of seemingly distinct categories through species interaction and environmental influence. The plot of Uncle Silas centers on dislocation and efforts to fortify self‐identity and reestablish security. Le Fanu's narrator‐protagonist, the orphaned English or Anglo‐Irish heiress Maud Ruthyn, practices bodily self‐regulation and careful discernment to shore up boundaries of nationality and class that sustain her hereditary privilege. She stabilizes her class, national, and gender identity through rational revulsion from her French governess and implicitly Irish cousin. Narrator‐protagonist Maud resolutely positions Englishness against foreignness and humanity against animality, but these categorical divisions, which she enforces as a character in the novel's imagined world, are exposed as false by her narration. Uncle Silas presents unregulated animal appetites as threatening to rational community governance, but it also implies that our bestial shared capacity for pain, which crosses boundaries of nationality, class, and even species, enables ethical response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theoretical strenghts of Charles Darwin’s argument in the Origin of Species In the last 160 years, evolutionary biology has witnessed a considerable expansion in its theoretical structure and the wealth of empirical evidence to its support. In this paper I analyse the evidence presented in The origin of species (1859), with the aim of arguing for some specific theses in the philosophy of science, namely: (1) that the employment of a diverse array of methods, as well as of (2) a diverse array of evidence provides the theory with scientific robustness; (3) that explanation and prediction are both important for the success of the theory; (4) that laws are not necessary to confer evolutionary biology the status of science; (5) that crucial experiments are not possible in this domain.

A meeting of the Linnean Society of London held on the evening of 1 July 1858 is famous for being the occasion of the first public announcement of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. This declaration was completed by publication of On the Origin of Species in the following year. The present analysis rebuffs this interpretation, in that the material read and subsequently published did not promote a theory of evolution, let alone the Origin theory. It did promote natural selection, a theory of organic change; however, a theory of evolution requires, in addition, a theory of how both the organic and physical components of the world behave and interact (i.e. a world-view theory). A first announcement of a theory of evolution also requires some promotion of the likelihood that new species will result. The Origin world view and species transmutation as an outcome are both largely absent from the contributions. Hence, Bell's much maligned Presidential address might need re-assessment. Curiously, the published title almost denies species transmutation. The present paper undertakes detailed inspection of this meeting; it supports a re-assessment of its customary interpretation in the history of biological science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) is one of the most brilliant minds in the history of science. This article proposes philatelic iconography to offer a didactic description of his life and work. The images are analyzed and related to relevant aspects of our character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Darwin’s claim about natural selection is reconstructed as an empirical claim about a causal connection leading from the match of the physiology of an individual and its environment to leaving surviving progeny. Variations in this match, Darwin claims, cause differences in the survival of the progeny. Modern concepts of fitness focus the survival side of this chain. Therefore, the assumption that evolutionary theory wants to explain reproductive success in terms of a modern concept of fitness has given rise to the so-called tautology problem. It is shown that the tautology problem reappears in the treatment of fitness proxies in today’s experimental evolutionary biology when these proxies are considered to indicate fitness only. Taking Darwin’s empirical claim seriously suggests, by contrast, that fitness proxies are first of all measures of the match between organism and environment, which I call the organism’s ‘fittedness’. At the same time, they are indeed related to reproductive success. Thus looking in both directions, at fitness and at fittedness, they are janiform. Acknowledging this situation not only allows for rejection of the tautology objection, but also for integration of Darwin’s argument into current evolutionary biology. It is suggested that this helps reframe and alleviate the dispute between the Modern Synthesis and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rosaceae, a large plant family of more than 3,000 species, consists of many economically important fruit and ornamental crops, including peach, apple, strawberry, raspberry, cherry, and rose. These horticultural crops are not only important economic drivers in many regions of the world, but also major sources of human nutrition. Additionally, due to the diversity of fruit types in Rosaceae, this plant family offers excellent opportunities for investigations into fleshy fruit diversity, evolution, and development. With the development of high-throughput sequencing technologies and computational tools, an increasing number of high-quality genomes and transcriptomes of Rosaceae species have become available and will greatly facilitate Rosaceae research and breeding. This review summarizes major genomic resources and genome research progress in Rosaceae, highlights important databases, and suggests areas for further improvement. The availability of these big data resources will greatly accelerate research progress and enhance the agricultural productivity of Rosaceae. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four years after the death of Charles Darwin, his research associate, George Romanes, invoked a mysterious process—"physiological selection"—that could often have secured reproductive isolation independently of, and prior to, natural selection, so leading to an origin of species. This postulate of two sequential selection modes can now be regarded as leading to modern "chromosomal," as opposed to "genic," speciation theories. Romanes' abstractions—which confounded many, but not all, of his contemporaries—equate with divergences in parental DNA sequences that impede meiotic pairing in their hybrid offspring, so rendering that offspring sterile. Unlike Darwin, Romanes saw hybrid sterility as a parental, rather than offspring, phenotype that would, within a species, reproductively isolate certain parents from each other while not impeding their crossing with other parents. This group selection would have empowered natural selection to act more advantageously than in its absence. Given suitable conditions, there could then be divergence from one species into two. The present essay introduces Romanes' "Physiological Selection; an Additional Suggestion on the Origin of Species" (published in the Journal of the Linnean Society of London: Zoology (1886) 19:337–411; available as supplementary material in the online version of this essay) for the journal's "Classics in Biological Theory" collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship on The Time Machine has changed in emphasis, critics departing from the traditional perspective on the scientific romance as utopian satire or class parable, instead emphasizing the more self-conscious aspects of the text, whether this is its enacting of anxieties about the purpose and permanence of literature or presenting a skepticism of empiricism and science and embrace of a kind of idiosyncratic aestheticism. This article follows this tendency in interpretation of The Time Machine but rethinks its contours, focusing on the novel's narrative and aesthetic characteristics, particularly as these interact with Wells's scientific preoccupations by reading it in another way, in light of the practice of the scientific thought experiment. Reading Wells's novel in this light shows that the interactions between science, narrative and imagination in his work are deeper, more intricate, and perhaps even more disquieting, than has previously been appreciated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William Henry Hudson has been largely overlooked by the ecocritical paradigm of recent decades, yet he stands out as one of the most prominent voices of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century environmentalism. His fiction and nonfiction alike are characterized by Romanticism and nostalgia for what is perceived as a vanishing realm of pristine nature, as well as by a critique of anthropogenic exploitation of animals and their natural habitats. This fusion of Romanticism and environmentalism is interesting when considered in the light of current ecocritical scholarship. This article examines how it is possible to read the inherent environmentalism of Hudson's work as exhibiting a form of ecological in congruence with the thinking of current ecocritical scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first edition of the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin apologized for not correctly referencing all the works cited in his magnum opus. More than 150 years later we have catalogued these citations and analyzed the resultant data. Looking for a complete selection of collaborators, a flexible interpretation of the term citation was necessary; we define it as any reference made to a third party, independently of its form or function. Following the same idea, the sixth edition of the Origin, originally published in 1872 and reprinted with minor additions and corrections in 1876, was chosen for the research because it represents the end of a long debate between Darwin and his peers. It naturally is the edition with the greatest number of citations and collaborators. Through a diverse theoretical analysis, we aim to present a new perspective for the study of the Origin of Species: a bibliographic approach that provides the tools needed to understand the history of the book as a physical and cultural object. Bibliometrics provides a theory of citations as well as a quantitative analysis; science studies highlights the profound social aspects of science in the making. The analysis resulted in 639 citations to 298 collaborators and provided a new perspective of the rhetorical structure of the Origin, even though these results are only the tip of the iceberg of the potential of all the data gathered in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a contradiction between Darwin's methodology and how he described it for public consumption. Darwin claimed that he proceeded "on true Baconian [inductive] principles and without any theory collected facts on a wholesale scale." He also wrote, "How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!" The scientific method includes 2 episodes. The first consists of formulating hypotheses; the second consists of experimentally testing them. What differentiates science from other knowledge is the second episode: subjecting hypotheses to empirical testing by observing whether or not predictions derived from a hypothesis are the case in relevant observations and experiments. A hypothesis is scientific only if it is consistent with some but not other possible states of affairs not yet observed, so that it is subject to the possibility of falsification by reference to experience. Darwin occupies an exalted place in the history of Western thought, deservedly receiving credit for the theory of evolution. In The Origin of Species, he laid out the evidence demonstrating the evolution of organisms. More important yet is that he discovered natural selection, the process that accounts for the adaptations of organisms and their complexity and diversification. Natural selection and other causal processes of evolution are investigated by formulating and testing hypotheses. Darwin advanced hypotheses in multiple fields, including geology, plant morphology and physiology, psychology, and evolution, and subjected them to severe empirical tests.

No single author presented Darwin with a more difficult question about his priority in discovering natural selection than the British comparative anatomist and paleontologist Richard Owen. Owen was arguably the most influential biologist in Great Britain in Darwin's time. Darwin wanted his approbation for what he believed to be his own theory of natural selection. Unfortunately for Darwin, when Owen first commented in publication about Darwin's theory of descent he was openly hostile (Edinb. Rev. vol. 111, Article VIII, 1860, pp. 487–533, anonymous). Darwin was taken off-guard. In private meetings and correspondence prior to 1860 Owen had been nothing but polite and friendly, even helping Darwin in cataloguing and analyzing Darwin's zoological specimens from the Beagle voyage. Every early indication predicted a life-long friendship and collaboration. But that was not to be. Owen followed his slashing review with a mounting campaign in the 1860s to denounce and discredit both Darwin and his small but ascendant circle of friends and supporters. But that was not enough for Owen. Starting in 1866, perhaps by now realizing Darwin had landed the big fish, Owen launched a new campaign, to claim the discovery of "Darwin's theory" for himself. Darwin naturally fought back, mainly in the "Historical Sketch" that he prefaced to Origin starting in 1861. But when we peel back the layers of personal animus and escalating vituperation we discover in fact their quarrel was generated more by mutual misunderstanding than scientific disagreement. The battle ended only when Darwin finally penetrated to the crux of the matter and put an end to the rivalry in 1872, in the final version of the Sketch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speciation, an evolutionary process by which new species form, is ultimately responsible for the incredible biodiversity that we observe on Earth every day. Such biodiversity is one of the critical features which contributes to the survivability of biospheres and modern life. While speciation and biodiversity have been amply studied in organismic evolution and modern life, it has not yet been applied to a great extent to understanding the evolutionary dynamics of primitive life. In particular, one unanswered question is at what point in the history of life did speciation as a phenomenon emerge in the first place. Here, we discuss the mechanisms by which speciation could have occurred before the origins of life in the context of chemical evolution. Specifically, we discuss that primitive compartments formed before the emergence of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) could have provided a mechanism by which primitive chemical systems underwent speciation. In particular, we introduce a variety of primitive compartment structures, and associated functions, that may have plausibly been present on early Earth, followed by examples of both discriminate and indiscriminate speciation affected by primitive modes of compartmentalization. Finally, we discuss modern technologies, in particular, droplet microfluidics, that can be applied to studying speciation phenomena in the laboratory over short timescales. We hope that this discussion highlights the current areas of need in further studies on primitive speciation phenomena while simultaneously proposing directions as important areas of study to the origins of life.

That the publication of the Origin of Species marked an epoch in the development of the natural sciences is well known to the layman. That the combination of the very words origin and species embodied an intellectual revolt and introduced a new intellectual temper is easily overlooked by the expert. The conceptions that had reigned in the philosophy of nature and knowledge for two thousand years, the conceptions that had become the familiar furniture of the mind, rested on the assumption of the superiority of the fixed and final; they rested upon treating change and origin as signs of defect and unreality. In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the Origin of Species introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.

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One new species Mesoplophora (Mesoplophora) parainvisitata sp. nov. from the Palm house of Praha is described. In 30 of soil and litter from the Palm houses in Berlin, Praha, Brest and Minsk, 13 species of ptyctimous mites were found. Five of them are widely distributed, one is holarctic, four are semicosmopolitan and eight of them are exotic species. Among the exotic species one is newly described, one is oriental, one is Neotropical and five are pantropical species. Generally, it was established that more than half of the species come from the country of the plant origin, while the rest are probably native fauna to the soil added to the introduced plants. http://www.zoobank.org/urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:31638FCF-FE3E-4E17-8783-175491915860 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both Christians and Darwinians have discussed the topic of war very extensively. There is a paradox. One might think that Christians, as followers of Jesus' commands in the Sermon on the Mount, would be against war, and Darwinians, as followers of the claims of the Origin of Species about a struggle for existence leading to change, would be in favor of war. To the contrary, Christians have long argued that one can legitimately go to war and that war will be with us always, whereas Darwinians believe that we can and should transcend our past, and give up war. This article explores the roots of this difference and argues that there are some remarkable shared connections and that today we can and must recognize that both sides of the argument are wrong and that we can now hope for a better understanding of the nature and causes of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although a detailed analysis of Darwin’s lexicon in On the Origin of Species has not been undertaken, critical literature claims that there are lexical signs of a teleological nature in the language used in this work. I intend to refute, through an analysis of the lexicon in Darwin’s work, the criticisms that claim a teleological subtext in Darwin’s language and that conceive said language to be a reflection of a teleological conception of nature. I will place special emphasis on the lexical material that Darwin uses in those paragraphs dedicated to the description of the function of Natural Selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historical process underlying Darwin’sOrigin of Species(Origin) did not play a significant role in the early editions of the book, in spite of the particular inductivist scientific methodology it espoused. Darwin’s masterpiece did not adequately provide his sources or the historical perspective many contemporary critics expected. Later editions yielded the ‘Historical Sketch’ lacking in the earlier editions, but only under critical pressure. Notwithstanding the sources he provided, Darwin presented theOriginas an ‘abstract’ in order to avoid giving sources; a compromise he acknowledged and undertook to set right in later editions, yet failed to provide throughout the six editions under his supervision. Darwin’s reluctance to publish the historical context of his theory and his sources, particularly sources which were also ‘precursors’, may be attributed as much to the matter of intellectual ownership as science, or even good literary practice. Of special concern to Darwin were issues of priority or originality over ‘descent with modification’ and especially over Natural Selection. Many later historians have argued that Darwin was unaware of the work of his precursors on Natural Selection. Darwin’s theory was an example of independent discovery, albeit along with such obscure precursors as Matthew or Wells, who were unknown to Darwin until after the publication of theOrigin. Both Matthew and Wells had a medical education, like James Hutton or Erasmus Darwin earlier in the eighteenth century, or even (in part) Charles Darwin. Evolutionary theory, at least in Britain was a product largely of the medical evolutionists rather than the natural historians which ‘history’ has chosen to select for the focus of attention; and among the medical evolutionists the figure of John Hunter stands out as theorist, experimentalist and teacher: the medical evolutionists were predominantly the product of Hunter’s legacy or of the medical profession and particularly the Scottish Universities. Much recent Darwin scholarship has focused on the privateNotebooks, to establish Darwin’s discovery of Natural Selection around 1837–1838 and demonstrate Darwin’s ignorance of his precursors; requiring an explicit acknowledgement by Darwin as the legitimate substantiation of any claim to prior influence. The precursors have been categorized as uniformly obscure or irrelevant to the science of evolution which may be defined exclusively as ‘Darwinian’. The inclination to acknowledge influences, however was not something Darwin was gratuitously given to doing, especially on matters of priority. TheNotebooksare not Darwin’s private thoughts; from an early stage he considered them incipient public documents and later sought to protect them as proof of his originality. William C. Wells was not an obscure thinker, but a celebrated scientist whom Herschel, Darwin’s guide to scientific methodology, had recommended as providing a model of scientific method. Darwin discovered Wells through Herschel, and quickly acquired a copy of Wells’ recommended work, no later than 1831, and held it thereafter in his library at Down House. This book, the 1818 edition of Wells’Two Essayscontains a third essay, Wells’ account of Natural Selection. Later, in theDescent of Man(1871) Darwin acknowledged his separate discovery of the correlation of colour and disease immunity in man, also earlier recounted by Wells. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Historians tend to speak of the problem of the origin of species or the species question, as if it were a monolithic problem. In reality, the phrase (or similar variants) refers to a, historically, surprisingly fluid and pluriform scientific issue. It has, in the course of the past five centuries, been used in no less than ten different ways or contexts. A clear taxonomy of these separate problems is useful or relevant in two ways. It certainly helps to disentangle confusions that have inevitably emerged in the literature in its absence. It may, secondly, also help us to gain a more thorough understanding, or sharper view, of the (pre)history of evolutionary thought. A consequent problem-centric look at that (pre)history through the lens of various origin of species problems certainly yields intriguing results, including and particularly for our understanding of the genesis of the Wallace-Darwin theory of evolution through natural selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among philosophical analyses of Darwin's Origin, a standard view says the theory presented there had no concrete observational consequences against which it might be checked. I challenge this idea with a new analysis of Darwin's principal geographical distribution observations and how they connect to his common ancestry hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]