History of Evolutionary Thought before Darwin

The history of early theories of evolution has suffered from two opposite assumptions. The most popular one insists that Charles Darwin (b. 1809–d. 1882) was an isolated genius working against crowds of creationists. A minority tradition believes that Darwin simply added his voice to a disjointed chorus of precursors spread throughout time and space. The work of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (b. 1744–d. 1829) has been referred to, especially by French and anti-Darwinian commentators past and present, to show how far the British naturalist lacked originality. Some historians have pushed the search further back into the past and traced the beginning of the doctrine of evolution to Greek times, or to Latin authors such as Titus Lucretius Carus (b. c. 99 bce –d. c. 55 bce). Others have called attention to 18th-century France as the intellectual cradle of evolution. Still others have pointed out that the attribution of evolutionary intentions to naturalists of the past is often based on sentences or paragraphs extrapolated from their context; in other words, the sin of anachronism has produced many illegitimate precursors. One feature unites the opposite camps: the past is studied to determine its relevance to present-day concerns. Studied on its own terms, the past is much more interesting and fascinating than the obsessive autobiography of the present we are used to. Recent scholarship is exploring the many ways in which, from the mid-18th century to the first half of the 19th, a plurality of commentators—naturalists, anthropologists, travelers, philosophers, even theologians—asked questions concerning the history of life, its geographical distribution, and the extent to which change could and did occur. After the turmoil of the French Revolution, naturalists working within institutions and members of the social elite worried by atheism and subversion opposed all forms of speculation concerning life and its history. However, authors addressing the curiosity of the reading public engaged in speculations on the history of the universe, of life, and of mankind. Successful popular encyclopedias, dictionaries of natural history, and journals throughout Europe kept alive a debate that “official” science shunned. To reduce such an intense scientific and social debate to the sole figures of Lamarck and Darwin is to miss the greater part of the story. Reactions to Lamarck and Darwin prove that contemporaries had much to say on their work simply because many had their own views on organic change. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species did not convert contemporaries to evolution; it provided authoritative support for doctrines many had already embraced.