To James Torbitt 26 January 1876
Down,
Jan. 26, 1876.
My dear Sir
I am much obliged for the Belfast Journal, which I will look to. It is, I believe, almost impossible to answer your question.— “what makes an Individual?”1 Naturalists are generally agreed to look at all the members produced by one act of sexual generation as belonging to the same individual, but this definition will not apply to some of the lowest organisms which multiply by self division, but not as far as known by sexual generation.2 How it is that a single cell, or a very few cells, suffice to give rise to a new organism will never be known until we can say what life is, and we are at present a long way off this goal. I wish I could have answered your question better.
Dear Sir | Yours faithfully | Chas. Darwin
J. Torbitt, Esq. | Belfast.
Footnotes
Bibliography
Correspondence: The correspondence of Charles Darwin. Edited by Frederick Burkhardt et al. 29 vols to date. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985–.
Elwick, James. 2007. Styles of reasoning in the British life sciences: shared assumptions, 1820–1858. London: Pickering & Chatto.
Torbitt, James. 1875. Potato cultivation. [Read 14 April 1875.] Proceedings of the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society (1874–5): 112–25.
Summary
Obliged for Belfast Journal.
Almost impossible to determine what constitutes an individual. Definition for sexually reproducing organisms does not apply to lower ones.
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-10368
- From
- Charles Robert Darwin
- To
- James Torbitt
- Sent from
- Down
- Source of text
- DAR 148: 91
- Physical description
- C 1p
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 10368,” accessed on 24 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-10368.xml
Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 24