Darwin's Conceptual Dilemma

Here’s a question for you, did Darwin know what he was talking about? His most

famous book, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation

of the Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, published in 1859, underwent six

subsequent editions. With each edition Darwin worked to answer his critics. These

critics were not outraged clerics or angry folks in the pew, but his fellow naturalists. In

working to meet the many objections edition after edition, he had to make so many

retreats that his “baby” natural selection was much hollowed out by the end of this

process. But natural selection was Darwin’s gift to those looking for a scientific reason

to believe nature could make species with no need for the Divine. Natural selection is

the great term we associate with Charles Darwin.

In the mid nineteenth century, the zeitgeist was ready for, anxious to receive in fact, an

explanation of the origin of species that did not involve God. Darwin provides what so

many were so wanting with his “baby” natural selection. Ah, nature, all on her own,

works like animal breeders, those who select traits for sheep or for dogs. Working

gradually over millions of years natural selection creates new species. God is out of the

picture. Nature, without any goal, gets the job done. It was important for Darwin that

there be no teleology in the process. Nature has no goal. The process is blind. Nature

is not trying to build anything. Nature is not trying to create anything. This blind, hit-or-

miss, process just happens to produce lions, tigers and bears, you, your grandmother

and your Labrador Retriever. But right in the heart of Darwin’s “baby”, the word “select”.

Oh boy! Selecting means to be choosing; choosing among options, for a reason (a

goal?). Uh oh, selecting has smuggled in the teleology that his “baby” was intended to

eliminate.

Charles Lyell (1797-1875), who wrote a seminal work on geology, had a profound

influence on Charles Darwin. Darwin was reading Lyell’s book during his voyage on

HMS Beagle. Lyell posited that the features of our Earth were not the result of

catastrophic events in the past. Rather, the Earth looked as it did because of processes

in operation that we observe now, and these processes had very slowly, over vast

amounts of time, created mountains, lakes etc. Lyell offered uniformitarianism as the

key to understanding our Earth, not events like Noah’s flood. Uniformitarianism would

be a gift to Darwin. He would posit that if nature had millions of years to act, gradual

changes in biological forms could render new species by small incremental stages

much like Lyell’s view of changes on our Earth. But Lyell would disappoint Darwin.

Lyell did not believe that the process he described for things inanimate could be

transferred to living organisms. For Darwin, not receiving Lyell’s blessing, but instead

his objection, counted as a real blow.

In a letter to Lyell in September 1860, Darwin told him, “Talking of ‘Natural Selection’ if I

had to commence de novo, I would have used natural preservation.” This is striking.

His book was published in 1859 and a year later he is questioning his “baby” natural

selection. But ‘natural preservation’; preservation preserves, it doesn’t get you a new

species, it does not advance any biological feature. So here, at the very heart of the

revolution that Darwin started, is a problem with the very term that was Darwin’s great

gift to all in the nineteenth century wanting a scientific reason to believe in evolution.

The inventor of natural selection is regretting his “baby”, and so we know at the heart of

Darwin’s thinking was his own confusion, or his own inability, to understand what he was

trying to say. He thought he had eliminated teleology from the origin of species, but it

turned out when he closely examined his own term, he had not. It turned out that there

wasn’t a way to have nature achieve new species with a blind hit-or-miss process.

Teleology could not be even conceptually eliminated from the process. Darwin’s own

struggle with his own term, natural selection, showed this to be the case.

Today, well into the twenty-first century, science still cannot tell us what brings about

new species. In their book What Darwin Got Wrong authors Fodor and Piattelli-

Palmarini, ask this rhetorical question of scientists today: “So if Darwin got it wrong,

what do you guys think is the mechanism for evolution?” Their answer: “We don’t know

what the mechanism of evolution is”. It turns out, neither did Charles Darwin.

[I am in debt to Neil Thomas, from his book False Messiah (2025), for the insights that

went into this blog post. His early work, Taking Leave of Darwin, is not to be missed.

Neil Thomas is a longtime member of the British Rationalist Association]