153

5

Darwin and the

Darwinians

One of the ironies of the history of biology is that Darwin did not really explain

the origin of new species in The Origin of Species, because he didn’t know how

to define a species.

Douglas Futuyma^1

... The Origin of Species, whose title and first paragraph imply that Darwin

will have much to say about speciation. Yet his magnum opus remains largely

silent on the “mystery of mysteries,” and the little it does say about this mys-

tery is seen by most modern evolutionists as muddled or wrong.

Jerry Coyne and H. Allan Orr^2

Darwin’s ideas have been widely misinterpreted almost from the date of the publica-

tion of the Origin in November 1859. In this chapter, we shall see that he has in fact

a fairly orthodox view of species as real things in nature (albeit temporary things),

that he did not think interfertility was a good test of a species, and that his dismissive

comments in the Origin have more to do with the professional nature of taxonomy

and the difficulties of diagnosis and nomenclature than a claim that species did not

exist at all.

Darwin’s Development on Species

It is occasionally stated that Darwin denied the reality of species, or held that “spe-
cies” was an arbitrary concept (see the epigrams above). Mayr notes “one might get
the impression [from the Origin of Species] that he considered species as something
purely arbitrary and invented merely for the convenience of taxonomists.”^3 Mayr
goes on to note that he nevertheless treated species in a perfectly orthodox taxonomic
manner and that he treated the concept purely typologically. Beatty and Ereshefsky
raise similar doubts on Darwin’s view of species.^4 On the contrary, it will be argued
in this chapter that Darwin was a species realist, and although he developed his
views over time he never ceased being a species realist, just as his mentor Lyell was.
Charles Darwin is important not so much for the novelties on the nature of the spe-
cies concept that he provided—there are only really two of these, failure to breed in
nature, and selection as the motive force of specific characters, as we shall see. Rather

(^1) Futuyma 1983, 152.
(^2) Coyne and Orr 2004, 9.
(^3) Mayr 1982, 268.
(^4) Beatty 1985, Ereshefsky 1999.