Darwin and the Agronomists: An Influence of Political Economy on Scientific Thought

Abstract

The Origin of Species was the culmination of Darwin’s theorizing of the previous twenty years. Its unique role in delineating the subsequent debates over all aspects of evolution accounts for an enduring interest in the construction of the Origin and in the intellectual and social factors that helped shape its final form.1 Of especial theoretical importance are the dynamical explanations that Darwin advanced in the Origin. These can be traced back at least to January 1839, when, in his fourth notebook on the transmutation of species, the E notebook, Darwin expressed a view of dynamics based on his notion that nature’s dynamical equilibrium maximizes the amount of life per unit area and that diversity is a way of accomplishing such maximization. One of the sources of this approach was the literature on scientific agriculture, which for the social scientists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries formed an important part of or adjunct to the subject of political economy.