SummaryIn this article I argue that Darwin was the author, quite contrary to his original intentions, of a fundamental revolution in the theory of scientific knowledge. In 1838, in order to meet the anti-evolutionist challenge of his professional colleague, William Whewell, he began to sketch a transmutationist theory of the origin of human ideas which would explain the success of inductive science: its discovery of what Whewell and his contemporaries thought were necessary and certain truths. But though it explained how (...) scientific ideas originated, Darwin's theory implied also that theoretical certainty in science was impossible. Thus Darwin's evolutionism when combined with Whewell's a priorism led to a thorough-going fallibilism. This was worked out in detail by W. K. Clifford, a Cambridge evolutionist, Kantian and fallibilist. (shrink)

The major tenets of the recent hypothesis of punctuated equilibrium are explicit in Darwin's writing. His notes from 1837–1838 contain references to stasis and rapid change. In the first edition of the Origin (1859), Darwin described the importance of isolation of local varieties in the process of speciation. His views on the tempo of speciation were influenced by Hugh Falconer and also, perhaps, by Edward Suess (1831–1914). It is paradoxical that, although both topics were recorded in his unpublished notes of (...) 1837–1838, the second was not explicitly and fully discussed until the fourth edition of the Origin (1866). While no wholly satisfactory explanation of this paradox suggests itself, it seems probable that Falconer's work on the persistence of fossil species of elephant helped Darwin to see the wider significance of the tempo of evolution for his general theory. (shrink)