Darwin's argument by analogy : from artificial to natural selection

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Darwin's argument by analogy : from artificial to natural selection

Roger M. White, M.J.S. Hodge, Gregory Radick

Cambridge University Press, 2021

  • : hbk

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Includes bibliographical references (p. 237-246) and index

Summary: "What can the actions of stockbreeders, as they select the best individuals for breeding, teach us about how new species of wild animals and plants come into being? Charles Darwin raised this question in his famous, even notorious, Origin of Species (1859). Darwin's answer - his argument by analogy from artificial to natural selection - is the subject of our book. We aim to clarify what kind of argument it is, how it works, and why Darwin gave it such prominence. As we explain more fully in our Introduction, we believe that the argument becomes much more intelligible when set, contextually, in a story stretching from classical Greek mathematics to modern evolutionary genetics: a long story, and a broad one too, encompassing everything from Darwin's earliest notebook theorising on the births and deaths of species, to agrarian capitalism as a distinctive form of economic life, to shifting Western reflections on art-nature relations"-- Provided by publisher

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Description

In On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin put forward his theory of natural selection. Conventionally, Darwin's argument for this theory has been understood as based on an analogy with artificial selection. But there has been no consensus on how, exactly, this analogical argument is supposed to work - and some suspicion too that analogical arguments on the whole are embarrassingly weak. Drawing on new insights into the history of analogical argumentation from the ancient Greeks onward, as well as on in-depth studies of Darwin's public and private writings, this book offers an original perspective on Darwin's argument, restoring to view the intellectual traditions which Darwin took for granted in arguing as he did. From this perspective come new appreciations not only of Darwin's argument but of the metaphors based on it, the range of wider traditions the argument touched upon, and its legacies for science after the Origin.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • 1. Analogy in classical Greece
  • 2. Analogy in the background to the Origin
  • 3. Darwin's analogical theorising before the Origin
  • 4. The 'one long argument' of the Origin
  • 5. An analysis of Darwin's argument by analogy
  • 6. Darwin's use of metaphor in the Origin
  • 7. Rebuttals of the revisionists
  • 8. Wider issues concerning Darwinian science.

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