ABSTRACT
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was published in 1859. Darwin’s problem was to convince the reader of events that happened in the past, as hidden from the waves that supposedly lie behind visible light, as it bends its way through prisms and splits into many colors when coxed in the right way. A pertinent analogy, because just when Darwin was becoming an evolutionist and seeking a cause, in the 1830s, the wave theory of light was just then conquering the particle theory, due to Newton and popular for over a hundred years. Darwin showed the causal power of natural selection by going in a Whewellian consilience right through the life sciences: social behavior, the fossil record, geographical distributions, anatomy and morphology, systematics, and embryology. Darwinians built in the thoroughly value-impregnated belief that evolution – evolution through natural selection – leads progressively up to humankind.
