‘Living Mingled’: Darwin’s Botany, Race, and Reproduction in Nineteenth-Century America”

Tina Gianquitto (Colorado School of Mines)

This paper examines both Darwin’s experiments involving cross- and self-fertilization and popular responses to those experiments in U.S. periodical literature. The paper places Darwin’s studies of dimorphism and his conclusions about intercrossing, fertility, and common ancestry into the context of discussions about race, miscegenation, and civil war in the United States. Darwin argued that dimorphism, or differentiation from a simpler to a more complex form, developed as an evolutionary adaptation to prevent weak self-fertilization and promote robust cross-fertilization. Sterility marks individuals who have so diverged over time as to be reproductively distinct from each other, while fertility serves to denote evolutionary kinship. Darwin’s argument powerfully undercut the rhetoric of anti-abolitionists, who argued that the races of man were distinct and separately created. It also shows how evolutionary support for monogenetic theory provided a platform for later reformers to argue for racial equality. Darwin’s studies into cross-fertilization re-emerged toward the end of the 19th century in the U.S., anchoring anti-nativist, anti-immigration arguments.

“Diagramming Evolution: The Case of Darwin’s Trees”

Greg Priest (Stanford University)

From his earliest student days through the writing of his last book, Charles Darwin drew diagrams. In developing his evolutionary ideas, his preferred form of diagram was the tree. An examination of several of Darwin’s trees—from sketches in a private notebook from the late 1830s through the diagram published in the Origin—opens a window onto the role of diagramming in Darwin’s scientific practice. By diagramming, Darwin could simultaneously represent both observable patterns in nature and conjectural narratives of evolutionary history. He could then bring these natural patterns and narratives into dialogue, allowing him to explore whether the narratives could explain the patterns. But Darwin’s diagrams, and the historical narratives they embodied, did not represent series of events that he claimed had actually occurred; instead, they were conjectural, schematic and probabilistic. Nevertheless, he believed that his diagrammatic narratives explained fundamental aspects of the evolutionary process. By examining Darwin’s diagrammatic practices, we can better understand how he conceived of evolutionary explanation, and how diagramming contributed to the emerging science of evolutionary biology.

“Group Selection and Individual Selection in Darwin's Explanation of Altruism”

Anne-Marie Gagné-Julien (Université du Québec à Montréal)

Did Darwin think of group selection as a possible mechanism that could explain the evolution of altruistic traits even if he sees organisms as the principal units of selection? It is possible to distinguish between three different answers to this question. (1) Some deny that Darwin ever invoke group selection and that he sticks to individual selection (i.e. Ghiselin 1969). (2) Most commentators argue that Darwin invokes group selection to account for mutual aid and altruism (i.e. Borello 2010). (3) Some go further and defend that by using group selection, Darwin has to contradict the principle of organismic selection to explain the emergence of altruistic traits, a contradiction that he would only accept in order to explain the evolution of human morality (Gayon 1992, Ruse 1980). In this paper, I will argue for an interpretation that fits between (2) and (3).

The two main theses of this paper are as follows: (1) there is no major discontinuity between The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) about how Darwin conceives organismic selection and the possibility of group selection; (2) even if Darwin conceives group selection as acting against individual interests, he sees this process as compatible with the primacy he gives to individual selection. The second thesis has generally been missed by commentators. For Darwin, group selection doesn’t contradict the principles of individual selection. In this paper, I want to put forward the compatibility that Darwin tries to articulate between individual and group selection.

“Translation and Transmutation: The Origin of Species in China”

Xiaoxing Jin (University of Notre Dame)

Darwinian principles do not develop in isolation from the people who use them. The earliest references to Darwin in China appeared in the 1870s through the writings of Western missionaries who provided the Chinese with the earliest information on evolutionary doctrines, with Christian beliefs encoded into their texts. Meanwhile, Chinese ambassadors, literati and overseas students contributed to the dissemination of evolutionary ideas with modest effect. The “evolutionary sensation” in China was, instead, generated by the Chinese Spencerian Yan Fu's (1854-1921) paraphrased translation and reformulation of Thomas Huxley’s Romanes lecture, Evolution and Ethics, in 1896. It was from this source that “Darwin” became well-known in China—although it was Darwin’s name, rather than his ideas, that entered the discussions of the Chinese intellectuals. The Origin of Species itself began to receive attention only at the turn of the 20th century. Nonetheless, the translation process was haphazard between 1902 and 1920, with the full text of the sixth edition of the Origin published only in September 1920. The translator, Ma Junwu (1881-1940), incorporated non-Darwinian doctrines, particularly Lamarckian, Spenserian and Huxleyian principles, into his edition of the Chinese Origin. This partly reflected the importance of the pre-existing Chinese intellectual background. In this paper, I will elucidate Ma Junwu's culturally-conditioned reinterpretation of the Origin, and situate his transformation of Darwin’s principal concepts—variation, adaptation, the struggle for existence, artificial selection and Natural Selection—in China's broad historical context of the first two decades of the 20th century.