Species

156 Species

Kottler notes that Darwin is not here using Buffon’s 1749 definition of species, as

by the phrase “in the largest sense” Darwin is including both sterility and aversion,

which Buffon had not, merely requiring sterility when crossed. Immediately before

the last passage, says Kottler, Darwin had written

... one species may have passed through a thousand changes, keep distinct from other,

& if a first & last individual were put together, they would not according to all analogy

breed together.

Therefore, Darwin takes “being a species” as the outcome of changes that lead to

a failure of the organisms to interbreed, not as the outcome of failure to interbreed

first. He is not using a diagnostic notion of species. This is a generative notion, one

to be explained by transmutation. In fact, Darwin expects that diagnosis may be nigh

on impossible:

Hence species may be good ones and differ scarcely in any external character [B213]

... we do not know what amount of difference prevents breeding... [B241]

The Notebooks were completed eight years later, in 1845. In them Darwin devel-

oped a notion of speciation as due to adaptation to local conditions, mostly due to

geographical isolation, which prevented backcrossing.^12

D a r w i n’s P r e -Origin Correspondence

In his correspondence with his scientific friends, Darwin begins to ask questions
about species relatively late, around 1855,^13 although Padian notes that in 1843 he did
once ask the museum taxonomist G. R. Waterhouse what he meant by “relationship”^14 ;
Darwin’s query is instructive:

It has long appeared to me, that the root of the difficulty in settling such questions as

yours,—whether the number of species &c &c should enter as an element in settling the

value of existence of a group—lies in our ignorance of what we are searching after in

our natural classifications.—Linnaeus confesses profound ignorance.—Most authors

say it is an endeavour to discover the laws according to which the Creator has willed

to produce organized beings—But what empty high-sounding sentences these are—it

does not mean order in time of creation, nor propinquity to any one type, as man.—in

fact it means just nothing—According to my opinion, (which I give everyone leave to

hoot at, like I should have, six years since, hooted at them, for holding like views) clas-

sification consists in grouping beings according to their actual relationship, ie, their

consanguinuity, or descent from common stocks ...^15

(^12) Kottler 1978, 287f.
(^13) Barlow 1967.
(^14) Padian 1999, 353.
(^15) 26 July 1843 [Burkhardt 1996, 76].