快猫短视频

Darwin鈥檚 Ghosts by Rebecca Stott shows how Darwinian evolution was built on a grand ancestry of ideas

WHEN Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, he probably did not expect to be taken to task for plagiarising Aristotle. Yet the ancient philosopher was just one of several dozen men who Darwin was compelled to credit with anticipating evolution as his ideas spread and his originality was questioned.

As Rebecca Stott shows in Darwin鈥檚 Ghosts, he partly brought it on himself. Having outlined a 鈥渉istorical sketch鈥� of scientific forebears, Darwin put off publishing it with the first edition for fear it would be incomplete. Accused of intellectual plagiarism, he overcompensated, appending to later editions an ever-expanding foreword that included such unlikely authorities as , author of On Naval Timber and Arboriculture. If anything, Darwin鈥檚 thoroughness further obscured the lineage of his ideas. Stott provides the lucid intellectual genealogy of evolution that the great man could not.

She begins by rescuing Darwin from his own deference. Darwin added Aristotle to his preface after receiving an extract from Aristotle鈥檚 On the Parts of Animals translated by a clerk named . According to Grece, the excerpt proved that Aristotle foresaw the mutability of species back in the 4th century BC, a claim Darwin accepted since he didn鈥檛 read Greek. While written by Aristotle, the excerpt is in fact an exercise in ridicule: seeking to supplant poetic fancy with empirical observation, Aristotle paraphrases the poet Empedocles, who held the weird notion that species evolved by random redistribution of their organs.

But Stott also discusses proto-evolutionists unknown to Darwin and his detractors. The earliest was the 9th-century Muslim scholar Al-Jahiz, whose observations of insect communities led him to see life as a web in which only the fittest survived. Stott convincingly argues, though, that Al-Jahiz鈥檚 web of life was intended to show the perfection of God鈥檚 design. Like Aristotle, Al-Jahiz was an excellent naturalist, and noticed some of the phenomena that would lead Darwin to his grand conclusions, but he was not asking Darwinian questions.

As Stott puts it, 鈥渢he history of evolution ultimately testifies to the fertility of nature and its production not only of a variety of forms鈥� but also of a variety of ideas.鈥� Against this variegated backdrop, Darwin鈥檚 theory emerges in its full originality.