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1 “s p e c i f i c va l u e s ” a n d “s p e c i f i c c o n d i t i o n s ” On june 5, 1861, shortly after the start of the Civil War, Charles Darwin wrote a letter to his American friend the Harvard botanist Asa Gray. In its outline, the letter is in many ways typical of Darwin’s correspondence: it opens with some mention of work and overwork, continues to discuss reviews and responses to On the Origin of Species, moves on to a request for observations and information, and ends with a brief personal note. But this “typical” letter is remarkable in its details, which include Darwin’s response to Gray’s recent reviews of works critical of Origin , as well as Darwin’s reiteration, to his religiously minded friend, of his rejection of design in nature. The conversation easily flows on to other matters, and Darwin asks Gray questions about a new pet project on the sexual organs of Primula before concluding with his observations about the progress of the U.S. Civil War and the hoped-for abolition of “the greatest curse on earth.” Darwin and Gray began their correspondence in 1855, a few years before the publication of Origin. The English naturalist had gently cultivated a friendship with the American botanist, quickly seeing in his new friend a potential ally and able defender of evolutionary theory in the United States. Indeed, Darwin had shared the secret of his “doctrine” of natural selection with Gray as early as 1857, sending him an abstract of his “long argument” for Gray’s comment. Even though Darwin and Gray fundamentally disagreed on the role of design in evolutionary theory, they agreed on other fundamental aspects of evolution, such as the power of natural selection and the descent of all organic beings from a common ancestor . Both likewise rejected special creation and the racist polygenetic arguments of detractors of evolution, who argued against the very idea of common descent. Darwin ’s faith in Gray was not misplaced: he was the naturalist’s bulldog in America, t i n a g i a n q u i t t o a n d l y d i a f i s h e r Introduction Textual Responses to Darwinian Theory in the U.S. Scene 2 Tina Gianquitto and Lydia Fisher anonymously publishing the most influential early review of Origin in a three-part Atlantic Monthly series and fighting off challenges to Darwin’s theory by another great naturalist of the era, Gray’s Harvard colleague Louis Agassiz. It is hard to underestimate Gray’s role in paving the way for evolutionary theory in America; as historian Janet Browne observes, Gray functioned as “the main gateway by which Darwin’s ideas entered the United States.” But when Darwin wrote to Gray in June 1861, he was not really thinking about firing what he had come to call his “usual long-range shot” at Gray’s theistic evolution . Instead, he was wondering and worrying about two distinct yet suggestively related topics: dimorphism in the flower Primula and the “crusade” against American slavery. Darwin explains to Gray that he has “been idling & working at Primula,” expecting that his “experiments will explain their dimorphism”—or give meaning to, as he writes elsewhere—the existence of two distinct forms of the flower on plants of the same species. He was in the midst of a breakthrough, and his revolutionary work on these hermaphroditic flowers clarified a vexing taxonomic issue, conclusively proving that Primula had evolved to possess two different forms of flowers on the same plant, a long-styled form and a short-styled form. By analyzing the pollen grains produced by each, Darwin rightly concluded that pollen from a long-styled stamen could only be completely fertile when united with a long-styled stigma, and vice versa. Any other combination resulted in weak plants with lower fertility or even sterility. Thus, Darwin argued, dimorphism, understood as differentiation from a simpler to a more complex form, developed as an evolutionary adaptation to prevent weak self-fertilization and promote robust cross-fertilization. Among the conclusions that Darwin drew from this study was that differentiation of this sort marked evolutionary development away from a common ancestor. Darwin’s botanical work, which has yet to receive substantial critical attention, is an essential component of his grand argument for...

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