Why Evolution Doesn't Appear in the First Edition of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species
You might be surprised to learn that the word evolution doesn't appear in any of the first five editions of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. We'll take a look at why, and how the publishing history of his books reflects his changing ideas.
Did you know that the term evolution doesn’t actually appear in the first edition of Charles Darwin’s most famous book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection? Neither does the idea that humans had evolved from ape-like ancestors? This is what makes Darwin’s books so intriguing for collectors, the way that their publishing history reflects his lifetime of grappling with these grand concepts.
On the Origin of Species is one of the most important books in the history of science. Prior to Darwin, many people had theorised that species change over time, but none had put forward a rigorous mechanism by which it could occur. Darwin’s breakthrough was the concept of natural selection: individuals with traits that made them successful in their environment would have better reproductive success, thereby increasing those traits in the population and gradually creating a new species.
The Origin was a remarkable work of popular science and an immediate best-seller, but it presented only a small part of Darwin’s thinking and research. He had long been interested in the application of his theory to humans, but hesitated to address this controversial subject publicly, so it was never mentioned in The Origin (though contemporaries on both sides of the issue immediately made the connection).
Instead it was his close friend and colleague Thomas Henry Huxley who published the first serious book on the subject, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, in 1863, four years after The Origin of Species. Huxley’s book is also notable for presenting, as its frontispiece, the precursor to modern left-to-right ‘evolutionary progressions’. Though Huxley himself had only intended it to compare human and primate skeletons (none of the species depicted are direct ancestors of humans), the format was later adapted to generate diagrams that inaccurately depicted evolution as a progression to more ‘advanced’ types of beings.
Darwin finally went public with his thoughts on human evolution in 1871, when he published the two-volume work The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (can you put copy 121326 online as a sold copy and link here?) This book was also the very first time that the word evolution appeared in any of his publications. In avoiding this term it’s likely that Darwin chose to distance himself from the ideas of his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), who used it in Zoonomia (1801) to describe a very different process that was more like the ‘the simple chronological unrolling of a predetermined creative plan’ (Marshall, The Evolution of the Word Evolution, Oxford University Press).
Instead, Darwin preferred the phrase ‘descent with modification’, which emphasised the random and undirected process by which speciation occurred, and in which no species was more ‘advanced’ along the path of evolution than others. However, for a variety of reasons the wider culture embraced the word, and Darwin finally used it in the concluding sentence of the sixth edition of The Origin, published in 1872 (which was also the first edition to drop ‘On’ from the title):
‘From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.’
My new catalogue Darwin & Friends celebrates the publishing history of Darwin’s own books as well as those of his influences and collaborators, as well as his intellectual legacy in modern evolutionary biology and genetics. The books are available to view in our shop at 94 New Bond Street. If you are interested in selling books like these please fill out our contact form and the correct specialist will be in touch.
