Thus at the end of the Origin he writes that when his and Wallace’s views “or analogous views on the origin of species are generally admitted, we can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history”!

He then proceeds to much firmer prophecies, all of which have come true. “A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation, on the effects of use and disuse.” “Our classifications will come to be, as far as they can be so made, genealogies ; and will then truly give what may be called the plan of creation.” “Psychology will be based on a new foundation,” and finally that immortal understatement “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”

Today we can go much further: owing to Darwin, our entire picture of man and of his place and role in nature has been transformed. At first, the emphasis was on origins. Darwin did not call his great book The Evolution of Life, but The Origin of Species; and when he later came to discuss human evolution his title was not The Ascent but The Descent of Man. This approach characterized most of the work done during the remainder of the nineteenth century in the vast field which Darwin had opened up. Biologists largely concerned themselves with establishing relationships and constructing forests of family trees. As regards man, it became ever clearer that he had originated from an ancestor sufficiently ape-like to be placed in the same group with the existing great apes. Man could no longer be regarded as the Lord of Creation, a being apart from the rest of nature. He was merely the representative of one among many Families of the order Primates in the class Mammalia.

However, as time went on the approach changed. The fact of evolution had been established and was no longer in need of further proof. Later, the underlying mechanisms of genetics and variation were discovered and the principle of natural selection was established as the method of evolution. It now remained to study the course of evolution as a process.

This approach yielded several important new points of view. In the first place, not only did discovery still further enlarge the time-scale of evolution, so that it now has to be measured not in millions but in thousands of millions of years, but emphasis began to be laid on its future as well as on its past. It became clear that man had as vast spans of time before him as those he had enjoyed for his entire evolution from his first submicroscopic ancestor. Secondly, evolution came to be increasingly looked at as a process of realization of new possibilities, and so involving an element of progress. And thirdly, evolutionary succession, in which an earlier successful or dominant type is wholly or largely replaced by a new and biologically improved type, began to be studied. Darwin had noted and correctly interpreted a few cases of succession. It now became clear that succession was a widespread and indeed general fact of evolution, and constituted the method by which major evolutionary advance was achieved. The reason that the reptiles were largely replaced by the mammals as dominant land vertebrates was because the mammals were in a perfectly legitimate sense of the world higher organisms than the reptiles. It further emerged that man constitutes the latest dominant group, and is today, thanks to his new method of evolving by the cumulative transmission of experience, the only type capable of realizing important new possibilities and of achieving further major advances in the future. Thus, in the light of the science of evolutionary biology which Darwin founded, man is seen not just as a part of nature, but as a very peculiar and indeed unique part. In his person the evolutionary process has become conscious of itself, and he alone is capable of leading it on to realizations of possibility. A century after Darwin’s modest statement that light will be thrown on the origin of man, we can truly say that, as a result of Darwin’s work in general and of The Origin of Species in particular, light has been thrown on his destiny.

AN HISTORICAL SKETCH

OF THE PROGRESS OF OPINION
ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES,
PREVIOUSLY TO THE PUBLICATION OF
THE FIRST EDITION OF THIS WORK

 

I WILL HERE give a brief sketch of the progress of opinion on the Origin of Species. Until recently the great majority of naturalists believed that species were immutable productions, and had been separately created. This view has been ably maintained by many authors. Some few naturalists, on the other hand, have believed that species undergo modification and that the existing forms of life are the descendants by true generation of pre-existing forms. Passing over allusions to the subject in the classical writers,2 the first author who in modern times has treated it in a scientific spirit was Buffon. But as his opinions fluctuated greatly at different periods, and as he does not enter on the causes or means of the transformation of species, I need not here enter on details.

Lamarck was the first man whose conclusions on the subject excited much attention. This justly celebrated naturalist first published his views in 1801; he much enlarged them in 1809 in his ‘Philosophie Zoologique,’ and subsequently, in 1815, in the Introduction to his ‘Hist. Nat. des Animaux sans Vertebres.’ In these works he upholds the doctrine that all species, including man, are descended from other species.