Abstract
“[The book] revolutionized the study of Natural History, and carried away captive the best men of the… age”1—such were the words that the co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, used to describe Charles Darwin's seminal work On the Origin of Species (“Origin”). Yet, Gregory Claeys, in his article The “Survival of the Fittest” and the Origins of Social Darwinism, contends that ‘Darwin's discoveries occasioned no revolution in social theory, but instead involved remapping, with the assistance of a theory of the biological inheritance of character traits, a preexisting structure of ideas based largely, though not exclusively, upon a Malthusian and economic metaphor of the “struggle for existence”.'
Thus, we have here two contrasting (but not necessarily conflicting) viewpoints on Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection: one that sees it as groundbreaking in the field of natural history; and another that considers it a kind of re-arrangement of concepts in the history of ideas that, though important, was hardly original. My opinion on this is two-fold: firstly, it must be kept in mind that Darwin's theory and concepts were not static, as they developed over a period of time—they were not, as “might be too easily perceived by modern readers[,] a monolithic idea grasped more or less at once by Darwin.”
