Species

The Species Problem Arises 197

Non-Darwinian Ideas after Darwin

The variable ensemble of Darwinian ideas was not universally adopted.^36 During the
so-called “eclipse of Darwinism” period, in which neo-Lamarckian ideas overtook
Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection, species were often thought to be types
again. Such American neo-Lamarckians as Cope and Hyatt adopted an “orthoge-
netic Lamarckism” in which species underwent a series of developmental changes
in a kind of embryological analogy between individuals and species.^37 In the period
from Edward Drinker Cope’s 1868 essay “On the origin of genera”^38 through to
the period immediately before World War I, species were thought by this school
to be the result of internal forces rather than selection or geographical isolation.
Cope called this growth force “bathmism,” while others, such as Alpheus Hyatt and
Alpheus Packard, and Henry Faireld Osborn, had additional mechanisms. Osborn,
in particular, adopted the Baldwin Effect as (he thought) a non-Darwinian mech-
anism which enabled organisms to direct their own evolution through individual
adaptation,^39 which marked the Baldwin Effect as anti-Darwinian, or Lamarckian,
for a long time to come.^40 Osborn, under attack from Baldwin for saying that varia-
tion is non-random, then made the claim that there were linear variational trends for
which Darwinism could not account.^41
William Bateson produced a lengthy book describing the sorts of variations that
occurred from the type, in which he treated species as morphological classes, with
no continuity of form between species, and hence no reason to think they varied suf-
ciently for Darwinian evolution to occur. Species are groups of organisms united
by a common form, but there is no denite difference that divides them. He writes of
what he calls “the Problem of Species”:

No denition of a Specic Difference has been found, perhaps because these

Differences are indenite and hence not capable of denition. But the forms of living

things, taken at a moment, do nevertheless most certainly form a discontinuous series

and not a continuous series. ...

The existence, then, of Specic Differences is one of the characteristics of the

forms of living things. This is no merely subjective conception, but an objective, tan-

gible fact. This is the rst part of the problem.

In the next place, not only do Specic forms exist in Nature, but they exist in such

a way as to t the place in Nature in which they are placed; that is to say, the Specic

form which an organism has, is adapted to the position which it lls. This again is a

relative truth, for the adaptation is not absolute.^42

For Bateson, though, form is more than a way of describing or diagnosing spe-

cies, it is what species are—they are classes of forms. Adaptation is not relevant to

(^36) Hull 1973.
(^37) Bowler 1983, 121ff.
(^38) Cope 1868.
(^39) Bowler 1983, 131.
(^40) Tu r n ey et al. 1996.
(^41) Bowler 1983, 132f.
(^42) Bateson 1894, 2.