The Importance of Writing Strongly

“The elder De Chandolle, W. Herbert, and Lyell have written excellently on the struggle for life; but even they have not written strongly enough.”

(Darwin in a letter to Asa Gray, September 5^th, 1857)

Writing, for Darwin, was a tool. As we have discussed in class, Darwin, in his writing, tends to abandon strictly scientific prose in order to present his readers with a more approachable and descriptive text. He refuses to bog down his text with data and exempla in order to “write strongly” about his theory of natural selection. As Darwin states in his introduction to the Origin of Species, the idea of evolution, or the mutability of species, was easy enough to imagine, the data was all there, but that the next step of determining a mechanism was the difficult leap to be made from this data: “nevertheless, such a conclusion [of mutable species], even if well founded would be unsatisfactory, until it could be shown how the innumerable species inhabiting this world have been modified” (Norton, 96).

Most of this we have discussed in class, but as I was thinking about this after class, I remembered an interesting controversy that my evolution professor had mentioned that highlights perfectly the effectiveness of Darwin’s essentially literary approach to his scientific writing.

Shortly After Darwin published Origin of Species a fellow naturalist by the name of Patrick Matthew came forward and claimed that he had actually been the discoverer, and the first to write of, evolution by natural selection. Matthew published his treatise in 1830, 29 years before Darwin’s Origin of Species. The world, however, had not noticed. How then was Darwin able to capture the attention of the world and to shake the foundations of thousands of years of a natural theological approach to science and life? The answer, as it turns out, stems exactly from Darwin’s claim that naturalist had failed to write strongly or persuasively enough on the matter.

To begin with, Matthew published his essay describing a theory that closely resembled Darwin’s in a little know journal titled Naval Timber and Arboriculture. This journal, hardly a scientific or widely circulated one, could account for most of Matthew’s failure. Another contributing factor, however, as Matthew acknowledged in a letter to Gardener’s Chronicle in the spring of 1860, was his lack of description for the mechanism of natural selection as he claims to have thought of it as a rather intuitive idea:

To me the conception of this law of Nature came intuitively as a self-evident fact, almost without an effort of concentrated thought. Mr. Darwin here seems to have more merit in the discovery than I have had—to me it did not appear a discovery. He seems to have worked it out by inductive reason, slowly and with due caution to have made his way synthetically from fact to fact onwards; while with me it was by a general glance at the scheme of Nature that I estimated this select production of species as an a priori recognisable fact—an axiom, requiring only to be pointed out to be admitted by unprejudiced minds of sufficient grasp.

This example of failure perfectly highlights Darwin’s complaint of the ineffectiveness of his predecessors’ writings and lends more insight into why, perhaps, Darwin favored this literary and descriptive approach to his writing on the theory of natural selection.

For this post I referenced the online abstract of the article The historical context of natural selection: The case of Patrick Matthew by Kentwood D. Wells published in the Journal of the History of Biology (volume 6, number 2) at:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/rhk86067q63l4428/abstract/