How many Origins?

When I refer to a book with the phrase Origin of Species in the title, it is generally understood that I am talking about the volume by Charles Darwin, published in 1859, that was so important that we are still avidly discussing it almost 150 years after it was published. Like any popular hit, however, there were other tomes that tried to capitalize on the fame of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

Earlier this year I mentioned one such title; a print version of some of T.H. Huxley's popular lectures published (with his consent) under the title On the Origin of Species. Given that Huxley's role in producing this book was minimal, it cannot be said that he co-opted his friend's title (although I am curious what he thought about the final product).

Other authors appear to have wanted to attract attention to their works as critiques or expansions on Darwin's book. In 1860 Theophilus Parsons, professor of law at Harvard, published the paper (later reproduced as a pamphlet) On the Origin of Species in which he took issue with Darwin's gradualist mechanism. It was saltation that allowed evolution to produce so many different creatures;

My position therefore is precisely this. It is always possible that offspring may be born, differing as much from their parents and kindred in the way of gain, of advantage, and of improvement, as we know that offspring have differed in the way of loss, of hindrance and of degradation ; and therefore when I speak of extreme aberration I shall mean by it variation carried to this extent.

Another "Origin" book was published by the physician H. Freke in 1861. Called On the Origin of Species by Means of Organic Affinity, Freke states that he had independently put forward views similar to Darwin's a decade earlier. They went unnoticed and he did not have time to further develop his ideas;

In a somewhat extended series of papers on " the Pathology of Inflammation and Fever' published by me in The Dublin Medical Press, during the years 1851, 1852, and 1853, and diffused through several volumes of that Journal, I incidentally introduced my views "on the origin of species by means of organic affinity." I did so, however, in such manner as was least likely to obtain for them much notice. Views thus put forward, in connexion with a subject towards which they may appear to have had but little relation, and coming before readers who for the most part took extremely little interest in the question, I did not, or indeed could not, expect would attract much attention. Other pursuits have since prevented me from submitting those opinions to the public in a detached form.

The interest created by Mr. Darwin's recently published work on the same question, connected with the fact of that distinguished naturalist having reached a conclusion identical with one I had myself attempted to establish, has led me to believe that the present would be a favourable opportunity for me to reproduce my own views, and now for the first time to submit those views to the judgment of the public in a distinct and separate form.

The "view" in question was that all life from from a single "primordial germ." Freke was not making a claim to natural selection, only to one of the consequences of Darwin's evolutionary mechanism and derived by a different line of investigation, at that. Indeed, Freke's evolutionary ideas involved a kind of progression towards a particular point rather than Darwin's branching phylogenetic trees, and his ideas were closer to some of Lamarck's than Darwin's.

A later work was A New Theory of the Origin of Species published by Benjamin G. Ferris in 1883. In the book, Ferris attempted to find a sort of middle road between evolution and religion; evolution was merely the progressive creation of new types from pre-existing forms. If it really was unguided evolution, and evolution was re-played in the womb, then "why do not female dogs occasionally give birth to reptiles? Or a human mother to a gibbon?" Thus, in Ferris' view, evolution had to be progressive and better understood as a series of special creations.

Perhaps the most blatant attempt to co-opt Darwin's title, however, was under taken by John Crawfurd in his 1868 book On the Theory of the Origin of Species by Natural Selection in the Struggle for Life. It was a little more straightforward in its critique, and the author opens the book with his objection to Darwin's theory;

I propose in this Paper to state, in so far as concerns the natural history of Man, such objections to the Darwinian theory as have occurred to me, and which oblige me to refuse my belief in opinions which have received the assent of many eminent men of science.

One of the first criticisms was one that had been around since the time of Cuvier, and that Huxley was trying to resolved through his concept of persistent types (i.e. that most of evolution occurred during "non-geologic time" and the fossil recorded the little modified descendants of those older forms);

Authentic history certainly affords no evidence in favour of the theory of beneficial mutation by natural selection. The wild and even the domestic animals of Egypt have undergone no change in times of an antiquity which has been variously estimated at from 5,000 up to 10,000 years. In the Egyptian catacombs have been found mummies of the ibis and the kestrel hawk, not differing in a feather, or the spot of a feather, from these birds of Egypt of the present day. The ox, the ass, the dog, and the goose represented on the Egyptian monuments of equal antiquity, are the same varieties which exist now. If, then, thousands of years have produced no change at all, it is reasonable to believe that, except in dreams, millions would be equally inoperative.

Crawfurd's privately-printed critique only runs about 16 pages. The rest of the book consists of other papers on races of people.

I did stumble upon one book, however, that was not so much a critique of Darwin's ideas as a fanciful reinterpretation of "the origin of species." In Punch's 1882 Almanack, there was a now-famous illustration of evolution from worm to human, with Darwin seated in the middle of it all. The humor book Funny People, or the True Origin of Species carried on this theme, imagining the "evolution" of different people from different animals. Different personalities (or vices, as the case may be) are traced back to different animal ancestors, and the "animal within" seems to have been a major theme in the cartoons in the book.

I'm sure there were other articles, books, and cartoons that I have not yet seen that tried to gain attention through using the phrase "Origin of Species" somewhere in the title. What is curious, though, is that many of the titles were written to either add to or tear down Darwin's original work. These were not books in support of evolution by natural selection or non-technical summaries of the concept, but books that were probably (to varying degrees) meant to gain the authors more attention than their ideas alone merited. (Huxley's lectures being an exception due to the way it was produced.)

Even though I only had time to skim each title, they are worthy of more investigation. It is commonly assumed that the moment Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published, the entire world was in agreement and that the only criticisms were made by religious zealots. This, of course, if patently false, and even if the scientific content of these "other Origins" is wrong, they can still teach us quite a bit about the history of evolution as an idea.

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