ABSTRACT
Charles Darwin first began thinking about the nature of species in his Notebooks in 1837 and 1838. This chapter argues that Darwin was a species realist, and although he developed his views over time he never ceased being a species realist, just as his mentor Charles Lyell. But equally interesting is that, contrary to many twentieth-century Darwinians Darwin himself has no problem explaining asexual species, and even explains them, as Manfred Eigen does the result of natural selection entirely. It is occasionally stated that Darwin denied the reality of species, or held that species was an arbitrary concept. In correspondence with Huxley on September 26, 1853, and October 3, 1853, Darwin discussed the Natural System of classification: it was merely genealogical; we did not have access to a written record, and thus we had to work it out, but the cause of analogy and homology was genealogy.
