Adaptive continuity

Perhaps there will not always be an England (particularly on time scales favoured by palaeontologists), but a few miles of Channel and nearly a thousand years of freedom from full-scale invasion (1066 and all that) have produced a plethora of British distinctions, both idiosyncratic and deeply philosophical, from continental preferences and modes of thought. (A common language across 3000 miles of ocean can inspire more closeness than twenty miles of La Manche accompanied by a divergence of tongues – hence the similarities between American and British histories of evolutionary thought, as discussed in this article.) In this work, I try to identify adaptation as the most distinctly anglophonic subject of natural history and subsequent evolutionary ideas. I set out to show that Charles Darwin's (Figure 1) decision to site his defence and mechanism of evolution in the explanation of adaptation has roots in a long tradition of English natural history and theology that never provoked much continental attention. Our current struggles over ‘ultra-Darwinian’ versus structuralist modes of thought continue the same debate and establish a particularly English continuity across several centuries.

In the operative paragraph of his Introduction to The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin stated (1859, p. 3) that the classical subjects of natural history could provide sufficient evidence for the factuality of evolution: