Was Darwin really a species nominalist?

Journal of the History of Biology

Volumn 29, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 127-144

  Stamos, David N ^a  

^a YORK UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; BIOLOGY; EVOLUTION; HISTORY; HUMAN; SPECIES DIFFERENCE; UNITED KINGDOM;

BIOLOGY; EVOLUTION; GREAT BRITAIN; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HUMANS; SPECIES SPECIFICITY;

EID: 0030093903     PISSN: 00225010     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. From Darwin's autobiography, in Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley: Autobiographies, ed. Gavin de Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 26.
2. Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley: Autobiographies, Ibid., p. 49.
3. See Frank J. Sulloway, "Darwin's Conversion: The Beagle Voyage and Its Aftermath," J. Hist. Biol., 15 (1982), 325-396.
4. Darwin, autobiography (above, n. 1), p. 48.
5. See Notebook D, in Charles Darwin's Notebooks, 1836-1844, eds. Paul H. Barrett et al., (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 134-135 (subsequent references to the notebooks will be to this edition) ; cf. Darwin, autobiography, p. 71.
6. Darwin, autobiography, p. 74.
7. See Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 266.
8. Cf. Darwin, Notebook C, p. 152.
9. Peter H. Nidditch, ed. John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 4th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), III.vi.36.
10. Darwin, Notebook M, p. 84.
11. Antony Flew, Darwinian Evolution (London: Paladin, 1984), pp. 46-47.
12. But see Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994): according to Desmond and Moore (pp. 87-88), among the works that Darwin was examined on in his final examination at Cambridge (January 1831) was Locke's Essay.
13. Sandra Herbert and Paul H. Barrett, "Introduction to Notebook M," in Barrett et al., Darwin's Notebooks (above, n. 5), p. 518.
14. Unlike Descartes and many others, Locke, in subscribing to the Great Chain of Being, did much the same as Darwin (see Essay [above, n. 9], IV.xvi.12). Nevertheless, he denied that animals below man have the power of abstract thought, and he affirmed that this "puts a perfect distinction betwixt Man and Brutes" (II.xi.10).
15. Cf. Darwin, Notebook C, p. 243, and Notebook M, p. 123.
16. Darwin, Notebook D, pp. 36-37.
17. Mayr, Growth of Biological Thought (above, n. 7), p. 266.
18. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 1st ed. p. 52. (Parenthetical page numbers in the text will refer to this edition.)
19. David B. Kitts and David J. Kitts, "Biological Species as Natural Kinds," Phil. Sci., 46 (1979), 618.
20. See Darwin, Origin, pp. 47, 59, 248, 276, 297, 469.
21. See, for example, David Hull, "The Effect of Essentialism on Taxonomy: Two Thousand Years of Stasis," Brit. J. Phil. Sci., 15 (1965), 320;
22. Ernst Mayr, Populations, Species, and Evolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 13;
23. Jonathan Howard, Darwin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 17, 37;
24. Niles Eldredge, Time Frames (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 109-110;
25. Paul Thompson, The Structure of Biological Theories (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), p. 8;
26. and Marc Ereshefsky, ed., The Units of Evolution (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), p. 190.
27. Quoted in John Beatty, "Speaking of Species: Darwin's Strategy," in The Darwinian Heritage, ed. David Kohn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 270.
28. Elliott Sober, Philosophy of Biology (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), p. 143.
29. Mayr, Growth of Biological Thought (above, n. 7), pp. 267-268.
30. Growth of Biological Thought Ibid., p. 269.
31. Beatty, "Speaking of Species" (above, n. 21), p. 266.
32. Speaking of Species Ibid., p. 270.
33. Speaking of Species Ibid., pp. 271-274.
34. See Darwin, Origin, pp. 49-50, 247, 268, 424, 485.
35. Beatty, "Speaking of Species" (above, n. 21), p. 278.
36. Speaking of Species Ibid., p. 280.
37. See, for example, Mayr, Growth of Biological Thought (above, n. 7), pp. 288-289, 640-641, 741.
38. See Aristotle, Topics 101b35.
39. See Darwin, Origin, p. 310;
40. , and autobiography (above, n. 1), pp. 73-74.
41. See Darwin, Origin, pp. 44, 47, 49, 51-52, 248, 268, 484-485.
42. See, for example, George Gaylord Simpson, Principles of Animal Taxonomy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 129
43. , and Ernst Mayr, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 187, 314.
44. Horizontal species, of course, are ontologically prior to vertical species. If vertical species are real, then so must horizontal species be real. But if vertical species are not real, that does not mean that horizontal species are not real (any more than in the case of evolving languages). Horizontal species may be real without being vertically real. But clearly if horizontal species are not real, then neither are vertical species. To affirm the unreality of biological species taxa, then, although one must affirm the unreality of both vertical and horizontal species taxa, the issue comes down to whether horizontal species taxa are real.
45. Mayr, Growth of Biological Thought (above, n. 7), p. 273. It should be noted that by "multidimensional" Mayr is referring to populations compared at different times and different places. Whether members from two different populations completely separated in either space or time, or in both, can furtively interbreed can never be determined by observation but can only be inferred. Such inferences result in a multidimensional species concept. Since horizontal species refer to conspecific populations that may be separated geographically but not temporally, Mayr's nondimensional/multidimensional distinction, contrary to what he thinks elsewhere
46. (cf. Mayr, Toward a New Philosophy [above, n. 35], p. 314), does not perfectly correspond to the horizontal/vertical distinction.
47. Mayr, Growth of Biological Thought, p. 286.
48. See Darwin, Notebook N, p. 65, and Origin, pp. 422-423.
49. Cf. Ernst Mayr and Lester L. Short, Species Taxa of North American Birds (Cambridge, Mass.: Nuttall Ornithological Club, 1970), p. 1.
50. I myself am skeptical, but am of course incompetent to pass judgment. I think of, for example, members of Pongo pygmaeus (orangutans), which in the wild live an almost exclusively solitary existence: it seems evident that their competition comes mainly from man and not from each other. But this may indeed be an exception. Darwin may be right as a rule - his "almost invariably." Against my view, it is almost a truism in ecology that species occupy niches, and that if two species occupy the same niche, one will eventually cause the extinction of the other, this is known as the competitive exclusion principle (or Gause's axiom). It would seem to follow that "niche differentiation should reduce competition between species relative to that within species" (R. Law and A. R. Watkinson, "Competition," in Ecological Concepts, ed. J. M. Cherrett [Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1989], p. 273). However, as Law and Watkinson point out (pp. 275-276), there are almost no data to support this or any conclusion on the relative strengths of the two types of competition.
51. Of course, one might naturally credit Lamarck instead. Not only did he stress gradualness, but on his view all extinction is pseudo-extinction. He believed that any given species does not cease to exist by evolving into another species but continues to exist in that new form (cf. Mayr, Growth of Biological Thought [above, n. 7], p. 349).
52. One consequence of this view is that it makes out of the tree of life one large phylogenetic continuum (Simpson, Principles of Animal Taxonomy [above, n. 35], p. 51) and consequently one big species.
53. And from this one big species it is easy to conclude that there are no species (plural) in any conventional sense, that any method of chopping up the continuum is entirely arbitrary. And that was precisely Lamarck's view: like numerous species nominalists before him, but now for entirely new reasons, he found himself forced to conclude that only individual organisms are real, although he was later to recant (Mayr, Growth of Biological Thought, p. 264).
54. However, unlike Darwin (cf. Origin, p. 484), Lamarck apparently did not hold a belief in common descent, the view that all life can be traced back to one or a few ancestors in the very remote past.
55. And yet he did, in a sense, inaugurate the historical version of the Great Chain of Being, modifying the Great Chain into branches, with all lineages beginning at the most rudimentary level and evolving upward through levels of ever-increasing complexity, upward all the way to humans, who are still evolving. Combined with what was then the widespread belief in constant and rudimentary spontaneous generation - a view not shared by Darwin, who, like biologists today, thought that the favorable conditions for the origin of life were long distant in the past (Mayr, Growth of Biological Thought, pp. 582-583) - Lamarck's tree of life is perhaps better thought of as a homogeneous forest.
56. See Darwin, Origin, pp. 88, 168, 208, 313, 345, 388, 406, 468.
57. See Origin, ibid., pp. 194, 206, 210, 454, 460, 471.
58. Douglas J. Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology (Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer, 1986), p. 228.
59. Mayr, Growth of Biological Thought (above, n. 7), pp. 410-417.
60. See Darwin, Origin, p. 124 for his discussion.