The Changing Face of Darwinism

The following books are under consideration in this review:

Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition, 3rd ed., edited by Philip Appleman; pp. 696. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001, $19.20 paper.

Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, by James Secord; pp. 624. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, $35.00.

Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Generation, by James E Strick; pp. xi + 283. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, $30.95.

Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender, edited by Ronald L. Numbers and John Stenhouse; pp. xi+300. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, £35.00, $54,95.

Many people have come to Charles Darwin through Philip Appleman. A founding editor of Victorian Studies, a novelist and a poet, Appleman is also the editor of the Norton Critical Editions of Darwin. The first edition appeared in 1970, the second edition in 1979, and now we have the third edition just out in 2001. The first edition went through twelve printings in nine years; the second edition went through twenty-three printings in twenty-two years. Thinking in Malthusian terms—Appleman is also the editor of Norton's Malthus—since we are working in an geometric progression, we should expect this edition to last until around 2040 and go through between forty and fifty printings. Charles Darwin is well served.

The Norton Critical Editions are aimed at the college market. What kind of picture of Darwin and Darwinism is Appleman giving to young students? Let us start back with the first edition of 1970. The Creationist movement was gathering strength again—the seminal work by George Whitcomb and Henry C. Morris, Genesis Flood, was published in 1961—although as yet the movement did not have the profile it gained later in the decade. Within the academy, evolutionary studies were starting to ferment and bubble. Most particularly, people were now becoming aware of the pathbreaking achievements of William Hamilton, who was the key thinker in the move to (what Richard Dawkins later labeled) the "selfish gene" perspective on natural selection, and which within a few years was to provide the theoretical backing for a whole new science of the evolution of social behavior (so- called "sociobiology"). In parallel with the exciting new work of scientists, historians likewise were moving forward quickly. In 1970, Darwin studies were just about to take off. The embryologist Gavin de Beer had been transcribing and publishing Darwin's private species notebooks, and others were following to the archives in Cambridge and digging into the world behind the veil of print. Relatedly, some were opening up the pamphlet and periodical literature of Darwin's day. Things were really moving.

Appleman's 1970 Darwin was an old man. The cover and the frontispiece were based on the well-known photograph of Darwin around seventy years old but looking more like ninety, bearded and with bushy eyebrows, carrying the world's cares as he stares into space and worries about major conceptual problems. Appleman's Darwin was first and foremost a heavyweight, serious scientist, who found one of the truly great scientific theories of all time and who pushed ahead to justify it to himself and then to prove it to the world in a skillfully presented series of works. This original Darwin started with a section containing primary and secondary extracts informing us about the pre-Darwinian scientific world, and then followed with massive (and usefully abstracted) passages from the major writings, notably The Origin of Species (1859) and TheDescent of Man (1871). Although in the original more than half of Descent was devoted to the secondary mechanism of sexual selection, for Appleman (rightly) it was the application of evolutionary ideas to our own species which really made Darwin important and interesting.

The first edition of the Norton Darwin then moved on to Darwin's influence on science, down to the present. This section was...