10 Michael Ruse
putting in contraceptives as Malthusian drill, Malthus himself was horrified at such
practices.) Darwin saw that there can be no prudential restraint in the animal and
plant worlds, and hence there would be ongoing unrestricted struggles for survival.
This was the motive force that he needed behind a natural form of selection. More
organisms are born than can survive and reproduce, some win and some lose, and
on average the winners are different from the losers. Given time, this process leads
to ongoing change or evolution, and in the direction of adaptive advantage. The
winners have things that the losers do not have, and these are the things that
make for victory.
An idea is not a theory. Darwin mulled over his ideas, and in 1842 wrote up a
35 page sketch of his thinking followed by a longer, 230 page essay in 1844 [Darwin
and Wallace, 1958]. But he did not publish. Instead he then went off for almost
ten years on a massive taxonomic study of barnacles [Darwin, 1851a; b; 1854a; b].
Thomas Henry Huxley’s explanation for the delay was that Darwin recognized that
he was not a trained biologist and so set off to get that training and the authority
that came with it. The trouble with this explanation is that there really is not that
much difference between these early versions and the account that finally appeared
in 1859, theOrigin of Species. More plausible is the suggestion that in 1844, an
anonymous author (since revealed as the Scottish publisher Robert Chambers)
published an evolutionary work,The Natural History of the Vestiges of Creation.
All hell was let loose, with the senior members of Darwin’s circles — Sedgwick
and Whewell particularly — excoriating it in articles and books. Darwin — the
now really sick Darwin — had no taste for that kind of controversy. So he sat on
his work, year after year. Finally, in the mid 1850s, with supporters now around
him — with the old guard no longer in major authority, with the idea of evolution
(thanks in major part to Chambers) no longer so controversial — Darwin started
to put together his ideas for publication. A massive work that would convince by
argument and footnote.
But he had nearly left things too late. In the summer of 1858, Darwin of all
people — surely showing that the scientific world was becoming aware of Dar-
win’s evolutionism — received from a young, naturalist collector in the Malay
Archipelago, an essay based on the idea of natural selection. The mechanism was
not called that, but there was no ambiguity — even the Malthusian calculation
was included. Darwin’s friends, Lyell and Hooker, immediately arranged for publi-
cation in theTransactions of the Linnaean Society, of this essay, by Alfred Russel
Wallace, together with selected passages of Darwin’s writings. Then, claims to
originality and priority established, Darwin set about writing up his ideas.On the
Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured
Races in the Struggle for Lifeappeared at the end of November, 1859. 1250 copies
were published and booksellers snapped them up on the first day. Darwin started
right in on a second edition. (In all there were six editions, the last appearing in
1872.)