Notes on Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species²

1. Admitted the probability of a gradual ‘variation’ from parent to progeny, from ancestors to descendants, to an unlimited extent, if traced through a vast series of successions.³

2. Also, that among the countless numbers of organic beings produced, a process of ‘natural selection’ will in the long run determine which kinds shall die out, and which shall continue to produce descendants, themselves in turn more or less changing still.

3. Also, that a constant divergence from the lineal types is thus effected; because variation is necessarily divergence, and because no extremely antient type appears to have been exactly continued to the present epoch.

4. Such divergence nepotally onwards necessarily implies an equal convergence ancestrally backwards; which must therefore be admitted, although unproved except for slight variations and brief periods.

5. Constant convergence backwards must lead at length to one single prototype;—which itself must have been originated in some mode different from the mode in which all its successors have been produced; because that prototype could have had no organic parent.

6. Constant convergence onwards from that prototype must have led successively to types,—

diag here

We may assume the million to represent the number of specific or quasi-specific types now existing on the Earth.

7. Are we now at or near the end of the divergent variations? It would seem not. No grounds are shown for supposing that variation from parent to progeny has ceased, or that it is slower or less complete than heretofore. And the theory of the ‘Origin’ proceeds on an assumption that present facts evidence a continuance of variation now as in eras past.

8. Therefore this figure of 1,000,000 may and will, for aught we can see to the contrary, go on indefinitely increasing until the Earth has its present million increased to millions

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&c. &c. &c.

9. Eventually, in this course, there will be as many millions of species as of beings or pairs of beings; every one or pair still tending to vary. If it be argued that ‘natural selection’ will prevent this vast increase of specific types, at any one time in existence, the answer is, why did it not arrest them at 10,000 or 100,000?— Why now, rather than then?— Or, why at 2 millions rather than at 4 millions?—&c. &c.

10. Thus, whether we go ancestrally backwards, to arrive at one prototype, not produced like all the rest that have succeeded it;—or go nepotally diverging onwards to a termination in countless million of species,—in either course we arrive at something so totally different from what is now observed, so utterly incapable of proof, so inconceivable as a reality, that it must seem in itself an improbability amounting to an absurdity almost.

11. Ought we not to seek carefully among present facts or events for some counter-action in nature, adequate to save us from being forced upon this almost reductio ad absurdum in either direction, either backwards or forwards?— I think that the counter-action can be seen and specified.

12. Would it not be better to reason up to no beginning, and to no end, than thus to make out a seeming absurdity, by arriving at results totally different from, if not absolutely inconsistent with, the present course of natural events, as seen in our own small span of time?⁴

13. It would appear that the difficulty could be met and neutralized by the hypothesis or inference that individuals converge into orders, genera, species, as well as diverge into species, genera, orders, through nepotal descent.

14. No doubt that hypothesis (rejected in the ‘Origin’) is far more difficult to support by evidence. But various facts in nature seem explicable only on this assumption. And it tends to remove other difficulties which might be urged against the theory of the ‘Origin’, and which nepotal divergence by itself seems unequal to explain;—for example, the intricately complex manner in which characters are crossed and combined in species; the effect of which would likely be to throw the same species into different groups, not subordinate to each other, if classification were attempted on the hypothesis, that any character in common between two species must have been derived from some common ancestor.