Degeneration and the Victorian Sciences

Abstract

When Bénédict Augustin Morel advanced his formative definition of degeneration as ‘a pathological deviation from an original type’ in his Traité des dégénérescences in 1857, Charles Darwin was getting his own grand treatise into shape. On the Origin of Species (1859), however, seems to work in the very opposite direction of Morel’s thoughts. Instead of degeneration, it traced the vagaries involved in the generative process of evolution by means of natural selection. At the same time, Darwin’s theory can be read as accommodating the spectre of its own inversion. Not only could degeneration be pictured as a species’ evolutionary development reeled off in reverse — evolutionary theory in itself contains the very notion of biological regression.