Charles Darwin

Context

• context from Charles Taylor, A Secular Age: everything is in place intellectually, not just from earlier evolutionary theories by Charles Lyell or Chambers et al., but from secularizing disenchantment, for Darwin to make the coup de grace:

"The earlier cosmos ideas saw the world as fixed, unvarying. But our consciousness of the universe is dominated by the sense that things evolve...this transformation in outlook from a limited, fixed cosmos to a vast, evolving universe starts in the early C17, and is essentially completed in the early C19, though the final terminus might be fixed with the publication of Origin in 1859." (325)

• the "modern cosmic imaginary" (350) creates the space to wander between secular, religious, material, metaphysical options

Origin

Charles Darwin. "The Origin of Species." Pub. 1859. Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Philip Appleman. New York: Norton, 2001. Print.

• If you really take Darwin seriously, he gets rid of teleological development
  • purpose is retroactively proscribed -- the thumb was not made for texting
    • (rel to Walter Benjamin retroactive causality?)
• Narrative is inherently teleological arguably (though not necessarily always) - somewhat at odds with an evolutionary worldview
• sexual selection potentially in tension with survival
• deeply cautious in the way it unfolds: let's start with the least amount of controversy and build toward grander questions
• 104 breeding vs. selection: intentional breeding not to create new breeds necessarily: more about taste than an evolutionary plan
• key intervention is natural selection as the method for evolution
  • contra Lamarck, the mechanism is solely based on inheritance of capability vs. acquired characteristics (which are now coming back in epigenetics)
  • tension around the individual (end result and dead end) - problems for individual agency - interesting for literature because of inheritance determinacy
• 107ff the struggle for existence
  • struggle for existence is in part symbiosis, dependence, rather than just fighting for resources vs against environment
    • it's not a game with rules and a winner, i.e., Social Darwinism, which reduces complexity of all the relationships that go into successful selection
  • the struggle to pass on genes isn't necessarily a fight over a bone: metaphorically they are fighting over who will have puppies
    • struggle is our metaphor: for other species it's just existence
• 113 ff. Natural Selection
  • change without design
  • natural selection vs. man's: it's hard for us to understand a non-willful selection process
  • "How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man!" - like Donne's sermons
  • Nature's disinterestedness is what's so disturbing for Alfred Tennyson for ex.
  • removing anthropomorphism from language: selection without agency or teleology (Beer)
    • it's a struggle: "workmanship" doesn't suffice and he knows it
    • before Gillian Beer lit scholars didn't much care for Darwin
  • it's hard to think past metaphysics, to provide a mechanism by itself that does it (which is what Darwin is trying to do)
• 134 The great tree
  • when he wants high notes he reaches for metaphor and rhetoric, to Genesis
  • imaginative in the way it creates a tree branch decaying and falling off, which doesn't really happen
  • sacrificing philosophical precision
• 136 crust of the earth as a "vast museum" (see Black 2000)
• Key ingredients/influences on Darwin's theory:
  • Charles Lyell -- deep time
  • Malthus -- population -- if all organisms have a lot of offspring the world would be overrun, so clearly many offspring have to die
    • Darwin takes Malthus and says there must be some mechanism for why some die and some don't: scarcity produces change
• 174: the entangled bank
  • the view this requires is not to look at one species at a time, which we in the humanities don't do
    • a proto-post-humanist move
  • history: understanding underlying mechanisms and energy regimes
  • attending to the non-human in created artifacts has the problem of them still being put there by the author
    • how do you pay attention to what the author didn't? Ex) things that don't do anything in Bleak House (1853)
  • what we think of as human history has been created by works because they help bury the artifacts
• Vic evolutionary theory picked up on the progressive vision of evolution, where later interpretations saw it as radically rejecting teleology
  • social Darwinism, naturalizing imperialism/conquest
• concepts circulating by metaphor