Abstract
Until 1859 theories of transmutation of species had been based on the assumption that there was an inherent capacity to develop, possibly stimulated by external circumstances; this has been called the developmental view of nature.1 As we have seen, Lamarck thought there was an innate tendency to greater complexity and improvement, whereas Buffon held that there was more likelihood of deterioration so that any changes would be for the worse (see p. 85). However, Buffon’s view was unusual and most philosophers were optimistic enough to assume that a change would be a change for the better. Thus Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) thought that ‘the faculty of continuing to improve’ was a fundamental property of life.2
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7 NATURAL SELECTION AND PROGRESS
Peter J. Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1988, p. 60.
Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1982, p. 528.
Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, II, 233–40, quoted in Desmond King-Hele, ed., The Essential Writings of Erasmus Darwin, MacGibbon and Kee, London, 1968, p. 87.
Eric Nordenskiöld, The History of Biology, Tudor Publishing, New York, 1928, p. 295.
Michael Bartholomew, ‘Lyell and Evolution: An Account of Lyell’s Response to the Prospect of an Evolutionary Ancestry for Man’, British Journal of the History of Science, 1973, p. 265.
Adam Sedgwick, review of Chambers’s Vestiges of Creation, quoted in Charles Gillispie, Genesis and Geology, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1951, p. 165.
Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘On the Reception of the “Origin of Species”’, from The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, including an Autobiographical Chapter, ed. Francis Darwin, Vol. 2, p. 188. Also in Science and Religious Belief 1600–1900, ed. D.C. Goodman, The Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1973, p. 466.
A.M., ‘A Letter to the Editor’, The Illustrated London News, 28 December 1850, ibid., p. 27.
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Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1967, p. 637.
Jennifer Trusted, Physics and Metaphysics, Routledge, London, 1991, p. 149.
Roger Smith, ‘Alfred Russel Wallace: Philosophy of Nature and Man’, British Journal of the History of Science, 1972, p. 180.
Charles Darwin, quoted in Colin A. Russell, ‘Unit 16 The End of an Era?’, in The New Outlook for Science, AMST 283, Units 15–16, The Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1974, p. 40.
Charles Darwin, from ‘Notebooks on Transmutation of Species: 1837–9’ (source De Beer, 1959), quoted in Michael Bartholomew in Mankind’s Place in Nature, A381, Block VI (12–14), The Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1981, p. 15
Herbert Spencer, First Principles, 6th edn, Williams & Norgate, London, 1900, p. 96.
See Michael L. McGlashan, ‘The Use and Misuse of the Laws of Thermodynamics’, Journal of Chemical Education, May 1966, Vol. 43, pp. 226–32.
Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, Sinclair-Stevenson, London, 1990, p. 971.
Charles Raven, Natural Religion and Christian Theology, Cambridge University Press, 1953.
G.B. Smith, Religious Thought in the Last Quarter Century, University of Chicago Free Press, 1927.
See Ninian Smart, The World’s Religions, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 364.
Stephen J. Gould, Wonderful Life, Hutchinson Radius, 1990.
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© 2003 Jennifer Trusted
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Trusted, J. (2003). Natural Selection and Progress. In: Beliefs and Biology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375246_7
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