Revisiting the Origin of Species
Résumé
Contemporary interest in Darwin raises from a general ideal of what Darwin’s books ought to contain: a theory of transformation of species by natural selection. However, a reader opening Darwin’s masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, today may be struck by the fact that this “selectionist” view does not deliver the key to many aspects of the book. Without contesting the importance of natural selection to Darwinism, much less supposing that a fully-formed ‘Darwinism’ stepped out of Darwin’s head in 1859, the aim of my book is to return to the text of the Origin itself, not so as to produce yet another orthodoxy, but in order to hold it up against the host of interpretations it has spawned.
The book develops in showing that, beyond the classical figure of Darwin-the-selectionist, a multiplicity of Darwins inhabits the original text of the Origin of species. The six editions of the Origin, the translations of the Origin into other languages, and the circumvolutions of Darwin in the Origin itself, show how the Origin is not only “one long argument” but also, “a difficult book to read,” as Huxley confessed. Hence the numerous debates on the ultimate nature of “Darwin’s argument.”
In contrast to mainstream “selectionist” readings, I show that Darwin was understood as theorizing on the origin of variations; that Darwin himself was never a pan-selectionist (in contrast to some of his followers) but was concerned with “other means of modification” (which makes him an evolutionary pluralist); that his Origin was read as a metaphysical project, dealing with origin of man and origin of life.