Atheism has achieved renewed vigor in the West in recent years with a spate of bestselling books and growing membership in secularist and rationalist organizations, but what exactly is the nature of this peculiar form of non-belief? This article sets the context for the emergence of the ‘New Atheism’ with a review of the dominant theory of atheism’s dialectical and theological origins, and an examination of major historical episodes in atheistic thought. The author argues that a significant development has received (...) insufficient attention: the 19th-century split in atheism that produced two distinct streams of criticism. The first is scientific atheism, closely associated with Darwinism and Enlightenment rationalism. The second is humanistic atheism, aligned with the rise of the social sciences and pioneered by Marx and Feuerbach. The contemporary atheist movement is primarily rooted in the scientific tradition, excluding the humanistic approach on epistemological and political grounds, though emerging tensions within the movement suggest that the humanistic tradition still plays a role. The relationship between these two approaches within the movement should be a focus of future research. (shrink)

In 1749, Linnaeus presided over the dissertation "Oeconomia Naturae," which argued that each creature plays an important and particular role in nature 's economy. This phrase should be familiar to readers of Darwin, for he claims in the Origin that "all organic beings are striving, it may be said, to seize on each place in the economy of nature." Many scholars have discussed the influence of political economy on Darwin's ideas. In this paper, I take a different tack, showing that (...) Darwin's idea of an economy of nature stemmed from the views of earlier naturalists like Linnaeus and Lyell. I argue, in the first section of the paper, that Linnaeus' idea of oeconomia naturae is derived from the idea of the animal economy, and that his idea of politia naturae is an extension of the idea of a politia civitatis. In the second part, I explore the use of the concept of stations in the work of De Candolle and Lyell – the precursor to Darwin's concept of places. I show in the third part of the paper that the idea of places in an economy of nature is employed by Darwin at many key points in his thinking: his discussion of the Galapagos birds, his reading of Malthus, etc. Finally, in the last section, I demonstrate that the idea of a place in nature 's economy is essential to Darwin's account of divergence. To tell his famous story of divergence and adaptation, Darwin needed the economy of nature. (shrink)

Joseph Hooker first learned that Charles Darwin believed in the transmutation of species in 1844. For the next 14 years, Hooker remained a "nonconsenter" to Darwin's views, resolving to keep the question of species origin "subservient to Botany instead of Botany to it, as must be the true relation." Hooker placed particular emphasis on the need for any theory of species origin to support the broad taxonomic delimitation of species, a highly contentious issue. His always provisional support for special creation (...) waned during the 1850s as he lost faith in its expediency for coordinating the study of plant geography, systematics and physiology. In 1858, Hooker embraced Darwin's "considerable revolution in natural history," but only after Darwin had carefully molded his transmutationism to meet Hooker's exacting specifications. (shrink)

In a series of articles and in a recent book, What Darwin Got Wrong, Jerry Fodor has objected to Darwin’s principle of natural selection on the grounds that it assumes nature has intentions.1 Despite the near universal rejection of Fodor’s argument by biologists and philosophers of biology (myself included),2 I now believe he was almost right. I will show this through a historical examination of a principle that Darwin thought as important as natural selection, his principle of divergence. The principle (...) was designed to explain a phenomenon obvious to any observer of nature, namely, that animals and plants form a hierarchy of clusters. Theodosius Dobzhansky made this the motivating observation of his great synthesizing work, Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937): “the living world is not a single array of individuals in which any two variants are connected by a series of intergrades, but an array of more or less distinctly separate arrays, intermediates between which are absent or at least rare. . . Small.. (shrink)

There is a pervasive contrast in the early natural history writings of the co-discoverers of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin. In his writings from South America and the Malay Archipelago (1848-1852, 1854-1862). Wallace consistently emphasized species and genera, and separated these descriptions from his rarer and briefer discussions of individual organisms. In contrast, Darwin's writings during the Beagle voyage (1831-1836) emphasized individual organisms, and mingled descriptions of individuals and groups. The contrast is explained by the different practices (...) of the two naturalists in the field. Wallace and Darwin went to the field with different educational experiences and social connections, constrained by different responsibilities and theoretical interests. These in turn resulted in different natural history practices; i.e., different habits and working routines in the field. Wallace's intense collecting activities aimed at a complete inventory of different species and their distributions at many localities. Darwin's less intense collecting practice focused on detailed observations of individual organisms. These different practices resulted in different material, textual and conceptual products. Placing natural history practices at the center of analysis reveals connections among these diverse products, and throws light on Wallace and Darwin's respective treatment of individuals and groups in natural history. In particular, this approach clarifies the relation between individuals and groups in Wallace's theory of natural selection, and provides an integrative starting point for further investigations of the broader social factors that shaped Victorian natural history practices and their scientific products. (shrink)

In the first edition of the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin apologized for not correctly referencing all the works cited in his magnum opus. More than 150 years later we have catalogued these citations and analyzed the resultant data. Looking for a complete selection of collaborators, a flexible interpretation of the term citation was necessary; we define it as any reference made to a third party, independently of its form or function. Following the same idea, the sixth edition of the (...) Origin, originally published in 1872 and reprinted with minor additions and corrections in 1876, was chosen for the research because it represents the end of a long debate between Darwin and his peers. It naturally is the edition with the greatest number of citations and collaborators. Through a diverse theoretical analysis, we aim to present a new perspective for the study of the Origin of Species: a bibliographic approach that provides the tools needed to understand the history of the book as a physical and cultural object. Bibliometrics provides a theory of citations as well as a quantitative analysis; science studies highlights the profound social aspects of science in the making. The analysis resulted in 639 citations to 298 collaborators and provided a new perspective of the rhetorical structure of the Origin, even though these results are only the tip of the iceberg of the potential of all the data gathered in this study. (shrink)

Historians and philosophers of science agree that Darwin had an understanding of species which led to a workable theory of their origins. To Darwin species did not differ essentially from ‘varieties’ within species, but were distinguishable in that they had developed gaps in formerly continuous morphological variation. Similar ideas can be defended today after updating them with modern population genetics. Why then, in the 1930s and 1940s, did Dobzhansky, Mayr and others argue that Darwin failed to understand species and speciation? (...) Mayr and Dobzhansky argued that reproductively isolated species were more distinct and ‘real’ than Darwin had proposed. Believing species to be inherently cohesive, Mayr inferred that speciation normally required geographic isolation, an argument that he believed, incorrectly, Darwin had failed to appreciate. Also, before the sociobiology revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, biologists often argued that traits beneficial to whole populations would spread. Reproductive isolation was thus seen as an adaptive trait to prevent disintegration of species. Finally, molecular genetic markers did not exist, and so a presumed biological function of species, reproductive isolation, seemed to delimit cryptic species better than character-based criteria like Darwin’s. Today, abundant genetic markers are available and widely used to delimit species, for example using assignment tests: genetics has replaced a Darwinian reliance on morphology for detecting gaps between species. In the 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species , we appear to be returning to more Darwinian views on species, and to a fuller appreciation of what Darwin meant. (shrink)

Alexander von Humboldt’s depictions of mountain vegetation are among the most iconic nineteenth century illustrations in the biological sciences. Here we analyse the contemporary context and empirical data for all these depictions, namely the _Tableau physique des Andes_ (1803, 1807), the _Geographiae plantarum lineamenta_ (1815), the _Tableau physique des Îles Canaries_ (1817), and the _Esquisse de la Géographie des plantes dans les Andes de Quito_ (1824/1825). We show that the Tableau physique des Andes does not reflect Humboldt and Bonpland’s field (...) data and presents a flawed depiction of plant occurrences and vertical succession of vegetation belts, arising from Humboldt’s misreading of La Condamine’s description (1751). Humboldt's 1815 depiction, by contrast, shows a distribution of high-vegetation belts that is consistent with La Condamine’s description, while the 1824 depiction drops innovations made in 1815 and returns to simply showing numerous species’ names, thus not applying Humboldt’s own earlier zonation framework. Our analysis of contemporary reactions to Humboldt’s TPA includes Francis Hall’s posthumously published 1834 illustration of Andean plant zonation near Quito and Humboldt’s reaction to Hall’s critique. Throughout his work on plant geography, Humboldt disregarded some of his own observations, or confused them. At stake was his reputation as an innovator in the field of plant geography and a discoverer of the sequence of high-elevation vegetation belts on the world’s mountains. (shrink)