Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards? Philosophical Essays on Darwin's Theory

Abstract

In the preface to this engaging and elegant collection of essays, Elliott Sober tells us that the book is ‘a mixture of historical attention to Darwin’s texts and philosophical attention to questions that arise in Darwin’s theory and in the evolutionary theory that his biology initiated’ (p. 9). I find it remarkable that this should be a fairly unremarkable description of a subject matter. Darwin’s status is surely unique in this respect within indisputably scientific fields. It is easy to see substituting Darwin with Freud or Marx, say, in the above quote, but certainly not Newton or Lavoisier. Yet, whether Freud or Marx initiated a scientific theory are matters of serious debate that the same question about Darwin, creationism notwithstanding, is certainly not. I shall briefly return to this intriguing issue later, but first I will say a little about some of the essays that fall under this rubric. The first essay, from which this volume derives its title, perhaps best demonstrates the potential fruits of this particular blend of history and biology. The topic is a relatively familiar one, the relation between two concepts in Darwin’s view of evolution, common ancestry and natural selection. Clearly, these are independent: an account of evolution could emphasize either without the other. Sober’s question, then, is what are the relations between these two in Darwin’s work (and beyond), and why does Darwin begin the Origin with an extended defence of natural selection and leave common ancestry to much later. The puzzle arises because, as Darwin recognized, natural selection far from providing evidence for common ancestry tends to obscure it. Natural selection provides an alternative account to common ancestry for two species sharing traits (we do not take having wings as evidence that birds and butterflies are closely related). It is sharing traits that …