The Origin Then and Now: An Interpretive Guide to the Origin of Species, and: Darwin’s Pictures: Views of Evolutionary Theory, 1837–1874 (review)

These two recent books, perhaps themselves shards of the enormous celebration of Charles Darwin’s bicentenary in 2009, have little in common except deep admiration for Darwin’s originality and continuing importance. Their differences are marked by the distinct orientations of their writers: David Resnick is an evolutionary scientist, and Julia Voss is an historian of art and science.

For an audience oriented to cultural study, history, and literature, Resnick’s book, though consistently instructive, will feel a bit alien. Resnick is interested not in the relation of Darwin’s ideas to politics, ideology, class, literature, tragedy, or power, but in whether they were right or not. And he writes as though he knows. His book, like Steve Jones’s Darwin’s Ghost (2000), is almost literally a rewriting of On the Origin of Species (1859) in the light of modern science. Moving section by section through the original, it explicates and updates it for the lay reader. Cultural matters enter primarily to help us understand the state of science when Darwin wrote so that we can understand how he got to his theory, why he got some things wrong, and why modern science has had to make corrections and additions. What matters finally is that Darwin was basically right and helped get us to where we are now in evolutionary biology.

Resnick intersperses essays on evolution today, often invoking his own surprisingly interesting guppy studies to make his point. The book takes on positively Darwinian qualities, making guppy experiments breathtaking, as Darwin made his observations of ants and worms. But it is math, not induction and intuition, that confirms Darwin’s science. “We have,” says Resnick, “developed Darwin’s original concept of fitness into quantifiable features of organisms” (132). But this is no matter of sheer plod. Consider what might be involved in actually being able to measure precisely and meaningfully the comparative death rates of guppies, transferred to different contexts, in different populations!

Fulfilling the book’s aim entails detailed exposition and explanation of every one of Darwin’s arguments, and it would be pointless here to try to follow these explanations. But updated Darwin of this kind makes yet more clear the reasons that evolution is simply the foundational idea of modern biology, as Theodosius Dobzhansky observed seventy-five years ago.

One major point of Resnick’s argument, however, is particularly worth attention. Consider the theoretical and cultural implications of the fact that The Origin of Species strongly implies that there are no such things as species. Yes, “species” is a necessary word that makes scientific work possible, and yes, it has a common-sense significance that we can all use: horse, dog, cat, and so on. Although all scientists recognized that species might have many variations, there was something that limited their variations and constituted an essence. Darwin’s anti-essentialism has made his thought grist for the literary, cultural, and philosophical mill: in his world all boundaries are contingent.

Such considerations are not part of Resnick’s project. He believes that modern science restores the reality of species by shifting its definition from the biological (sexual reproduction). From that perspective Darwin was right: there is “no single definition that can accommodate all known variations in mode of reproduction.” Modern definitions, however, are “based upon physical or genetic similarity rather than the ability to interbreed” (144). Thus, species can be understood as “objective realities” and, thus, after all, “the Origin really is about the origin of species” (150).

How depressing for cultural critics. I would only suggest briefly and tentatively here that even modern science’s claim to have found a...