you might say, produced an innumerable multitude of individuals; a small number found themselves constructed in such a manner that the parts of the animal were able to satisfy its needs; in another infinitely greater number, there was neither fitness nor order: all of these latter have perished.4
There we see ‘survival of the fittest’ spelled out unambiguously a century before Charles Darwin was active. It is clear from the words of Maupertuis that the idea of natural selection was known far earlier than it is popular to imagine, yet his work too has been largely forgotten. Desmond King-Hele has suggested to me that the disappearance of his work could be due to suppression by Voltaire, to whose lover Maupertuis taught mathematics. She was Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, the Marquise du Châtelet, and a brilliant mathematician who translated Isaac Newton’s Principia into French. Little wonder Voltaire regarded Maupertuis with envy.
Four years later the notion of evolution was spelled out by Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who was the greatest naturalist in France of his generation. He understood what fossils were, and he also recognized that living organisms changed over time, and that they came from simpler, common ancestors. Buffon’s books extended to numerous volumes and were highly detailed, while his grounding in practical science was exemplified by the engraving that acted as the opening illustration to the History of Animals – it shows him peering intently at a specimen down a microscope.5
As we have discovered, James Hutton was a brilliant geologist, and in 1794 he also came up with the essential idea of evolution by natural selection. In a far-reaching book on knowledge and reason, he wrote:
If an organized body is not in the situation and circumstances best adapted to its sustenance and propagation, then, in conceiving an indefinite variety among the individuals of that species, we must be assured, that, on the one hand, those which depart most from the best adapted constitution, will be the most liable to perish, while, on the other hand, those organized bodies, which most approach to the best constitution for the present circumstances, will be best adapted to continue, in preserving themselves and multiplying the individuals of their race.6
In the words ‘best adapted’ we have ‘survival of the fittest’ spelled out once more, long before Charles Darwin. Hutton’s thoughts might have gained even greater currency, but he had appalling handwriting and many correspondents had difficulty making out what he meant, so his followers relied only on his published works. Here is yet another quotation – still dating from the eighteenth century:
At length, a discovery was supposed to be made of primitive animalcula, or organic molecula, from which every kind of animal was formed; a shapeless, clumsy, microscopical object. This, by the natural tendency of original propagation to vary to protect the species, produced other better organized. These again produced other more perfect than themselves, till at last appeared the most complete of species, mankind, beyond whose perfection it is impossible for the work of generation to proceed.7
These words reiterate the concept of ‘survival of the fittest’ and were published in a book by Richard Joseph Sullivan in 1794.
This was the same year in which the farmer-cum-physician James Hutton published the idea of natural selection and Erasmus Darwin published Zoonomia, embracing similar thoughts. If there was truly a year when ‘survival of the fittest’ emerged in the literature of science as the principle driving evolution, then in my view it was 1794 – 65 years before Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. His grandfather Erasmus revisited the topic of evolution in his poem entitled The Temple of Nature, published in 1802:
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.
Here are the notions that great eras had passed; ages of creatures living in water and aspiring to evolve on land had existed long before our present-day world emerged. By 1810 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was publishing his views on evolution in France, and came up with a theory that was quickly rejected. Lamarck claimed that organisms evolved because of adaptations made in response to the experiences of successive generations – the reason a giraffe has a long neck, his theory argued, is because successive generations had stretched to reach up for leaves. Survival of the fittest, by contrast, holds that natural selection of longer-necked animals takes place as those with shorter necks were eliminated by an inability to reach up for leaves, and so they would die of starvation. We all know the two versions, and we have been taught to dismiss Lamarck and his views as misguided. Yet Charles Darwin did not do so – for him, the inheritance of acquired characteristics was entirely possible. This surprising view was called Pangenesis by Darwin, and he included many examples of the phenomenon in the last chapter of a book published in 1875 entitled Variation in Plants and Animals under Domestication. The argument was that cells within an organism would produce ‘gemmules’, microscopic particles containing inheritable information that accumulated in the germinal cells, which runs contrary to what is conventionally called Darwinian evolution. This is a remarkable revelation: in some ways, Darwin supported Lamarckism. More recent findings by biologists including Denis Noble at Oxford University have revealed the extent to which genetic change can be passed on through epigenetics – the way gene expression is regulated – so we now know that the extent to which genes are expressed can impose profound controls on evolution. Lamarck was partly right.
Although the theories expounded by Wallace and Darwin were to propose natural selection as an evolutionary principle, that essential idea had recently been published by an experimenter whose name has largely been forgotten. He was an arboriculturist named Patrick Matthew. Like Darwin, he went to Edinburgh University, and like Darwin, he left without a degree. Matthew returned to his family home in Errol, a small Scottish town, where he showed proficiency as a grower of fruit trees. He experimented with cross-breeding, and, notably, with grafting. These activities gave him insights into heredity, and in 1831 he published an important book entitled On Naval Timber and Arboriculture. It is in the Appendix that he introduced the crucial concept of natural selection. Wrote Matthew: ‘There is a law universal in nature, tending to render every reproductive being the best possibly suited to its condition,’ and he continued:
Nature, in all her modifications of life, has a power of increase far beyond what is needed to supply the place of what falls. Those individuals who possess not the requisite strength, swiftness, hardihood, or cunning, fall prematurely without reproducing … their place being occupied by the more perfect of their own kind.8
This was in print, and widely available, 27 years before Charles Darwin’s ideas were first presented. When the matter was raised with Darwin, he wrote: ‘I freely acknowledge that Mr. Matthew has anticipated by many years the explanation which I have offered on the origin of species under the name of natural selection,’ and he promised: ‘If another edition of my book is called for, I will insert a notice to the foregoing effect.’ He did not keep his word but wrote instead: ‘An obscure writer on forest trees clearly anticipated my views … though not a single person ever noticed the scattered passages in his book.’ In the fourth edition of the Origin of Species, Darwin eventually admitted:
In 1831, Mr. Patrick Matthew, published his work on Naval Timber and Arboriculture, in which he gives PRECISELY the same view of the origin of species as that … propounded by Mr. Wallace and myself in the Linnean Journal, and as that enlarged in the present volume.
He then added:
Unfortunately, the view was given by Mr. Matthew very briefly in scattered passages in an Appendix to a work on a different subject, so that it remained unnoticed until Mr. Matthew himself drew attention to it in the Gardeners’ Chronicle, on April 7th, 1860.9
This claim was disingenuous. Matthew’s views were well known and widely discussed when first they appeared – indeed, many libraries banned his book because of its scandalous allegations that evolution had occurred.
Since