Abbreviations should be kept to a minimum. So a formulation such as the following is not to be recommended (quoted from Spiers 1984):

It requires some years in the profession to grasp immediately that this patient with atherosclerotic heart disease and a history of myocardial infarction, status post-coronary-artery-bypass graft, had an episode of bright red blood per rectum prior to admission for endoscopic retrograde choledochopancreatography!

The abbreviations used in this sentence are probably all accepted in the specialty. But just because an abbreviation is permitted does not mean that you are obliged to use it.

So when should you consider using an abbreviation? Let us take an example. The term nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (accepted abbreviation NSAID) may not warrant abbreviation unless it occurs, say, a dozen times in a paper of standard length.

Some abbreviations are more readily understood than the full forms: DNA, AIDS, laser. Often such abbreviations are accepted in the major bibliographic databases. If so, you are free to use them without definition – even in the title and the abstract section.

Refrain as far as possible from inventing your own abbreviations. Try instead to find substitute expressions. Assume that you have made a study of young mature Sprague Dawley rats. You are now writing the paper and need to refer frequently to this group. You therefore consider devising a more convenient construction, such as the YMSD rats.

As no two authors write in the same way, no one can say which way of writing will suit you best. You will have to find out for yourself. The writing procedure described here is the one I personally have found most useful – by trial and error. Hopefully you may find some portion of it to adopt.

A central part of this writing scheme is to collect ideas while the study is in progress.

Write down your thoughts as they arise

While the study is still in progress, jot down ideas as they occur to you. The notes can be assembled, for example, in a loose-leaf binder containing plastic sleeves, one for each section of the paper. (Woody Allen, the moviemaker, works in a similar way; in a drawer he gathers slips of paper with ideas for his forthcoming movie.)

Ideas can pop up anywhere – in bed, in the bath, in the street, on the bus. So, place your notebooks strategically so that you always have one at hand, wherever you are. Use one sheet of paper per idea, even if the idea is only a single line or phrase.

Eventually, the reservoir may contain all the components of the paper (or film script), waiting to be arranged.

Where and when to write?

As a beginner I made the cardinal error of taking two weeks off and sitting down on a Monday morning in an attempt to write the first draft continuously from beginning to end.

You will most probably find the right journal for your paper among those periodicals you most often read. That is where you have your readership.

If you think that more than one journal seems appropriate, you may wish to rank them by quality. One way to do so is to look at the “impact factor,” which tells how often the average article of a journal is cited. Such information is provided by the Institute for Scientific Information in its annual Journal Citation Reports.

The impact factor is especially useful for comparing journals within a particular field of research. Let us take, for example, Orthopedics. The 42 journals listed for 1998 had an impact factor in the range 0.2 to 2.1, with a median of 0.6. It is reasonable to assume that journals with an impact factor of 2.1 attract the best papers in the field, and that these journals have a greater impact on science in that field than a median (0.6) impact-factor journal.

However, if you select a high-impact journal, the publication of your paper may be delayed, as is hinted at in this question from a course participant:

Popeye, the beloved cartoon character, would probably never have been created had it not been for a misplaced decimal point. As you know, Popeye gets his strength by eating spinach, assumed to be rich in iron. This misconception derives from a report indicating, due to a misplaced decimal point, that spinach has an iron content tenfold higher than its true value. An overlooked error seldom has such amusing consequences, however.

How to read proof

When you receive your masterpiece, nicely typeset in the form of a proof, you may be tempted to read it straight through at that very moment. My advice is to follow your intuition. You will be on the alert and will easily notice if the reading makes sense, thus catching errors of omission, such as a dropped line or a lost paragraph. In order not to overlook printer's errors, however, you will have to reread the proof at least once more.

For the second reading, persuade someone to slowly read the manuscript aloud while you check the text in the proof. If you can't find a reader, place a finger under the first line of the manuscript and a finger under the first line of the proof, just under the first character. Look from manuscript to proof and back again, checking word by word, numeral by numeral, and punctuation mark by punctuation mark. Be especially careful in checking the tables and the reference list.

For every person who reads the whole of a scientific paper, about five hundred read only the title (Kerkut 1983). One way to improve this statistic could be to make the title declarative by including what the paper says, not just what it covers.

Whenever possible, use a declarative rather than a neutral title

This title is neutral:

John Vane, in his classic paper published in Nature in 1971, put it more expressively:

(In 1988, Vane was awarded a Nobel Prize in acknowledgment of his discovery. Vane told us how aspirin relieves pain.) A few journals, however, still ask for nondeclarative titles in their Instructions for Authors – JAMA and N. Engl. J. Med. are two. Yet declarative titles may be found in these journals. Here is one from JAMA (Wechsler et al. 1998):

And here is an example from N. Engl. J. Med. (Bolla et al. 1997):

The following declarative title is taken from the biological sciences (Marvin 1964):

Goodman et al. (2001) recommended that the study design also be included in the title, as follows (Heart Protection Study Collaborative Group 2002):

A TWO-PART THEORY

Like Darwin's own theory of evolution, the modern Darwinian theory of evolution has two main elements:

The first of these propositions says that any two contemporary organisms have a common ancestor. Human beings are genealogically related to each other, but each human being also has a common ancestor with chimps, dogs, clams, daffodils, bacteria and yeast. The second proposition, as I have formulated it, does not say that natural selection is the only cause of evolution. Indeed, it should be understood to leave open the possibility that there are traits for which natural selection is entirely irrelevant. This is the big picture, and evolutionary biology is devoted to filling in the details.

Although Darwinism is easy to describe, this simple theory gives rise to a rich range of metaphysical and epistemological questions. It is the purpose of this chapter to discuss some of them. In conformity with the structure of Darwinian theory, I have chosen one metaphysical and one epistemological problem from each of the two big ideas. I begin with a problem in the metaphysics of natural selection – the role of chance – followed by a problem in the metaphysics of the tree of life – the nature of a biological species. Turning from metaphysics to epistemology, the later sections of the chapter examine the testing of hypotheses about genealogical relatedness (the tree of life) and the testing of adaptive hypotheses (natural selection).

ORIGINS AND CHARACTER OF THE ORIGIN

Reading On the Origin of Species is a rite of passage for many biologists and its reasoning continues to play a pivotal role in biological thought. It is often said, following Darwin himself, that the Origin is 'one long argument' (459). There is something important in this remark. Readers expecting the Origin to be structured around a narrative account find the book perplexing. Unlike the paradigmatic early Victorian book on evolution, the Edinburgh journalist Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published anonymously in 1844, the Origin was not written as a history of life's evolution on earth. Rather, the Origin was structured as an argument. Hence, Darwin's insistence that his book was one long argument provides an indispensable clue for reading the text. But it is not clear that it should be read as one argument. Although Darwin may have designed his book to be read as one long argument for evolution by means of natural selection, many of his readers must have read it differently. We know this because the Origin persuaded many readers to accept the 'evolution' idea but not the 'by means of natural selection' part of Darwin's view. These readers were not swayed by one long argument for evolution by means of natural selection. So, to understand the reasoning that influenced Darwin's readers, it is better to think of the Origin as a body of argumentation flexible enough to allow readers' views of the reasoning to differ from what Darwin might have intended. The aim of this chapter is to provide a guide to the Origin's flexible and sometimes elusive body of reasoning.

THE PERSISTENCE OF DARWINISM

For nearly one-and-a-half centuries, biologists interested in evolution have been haunted by the question of whether their conceptions are or are not 'Darwinian'. While it may not be unique, this persistent positioning of new developments in relation to a single, pioneering figure is quite exceptional in the history of modern natural science. Physicists currently working in the domains of relativity or quantum theory may refer sometimes to Einstein or Bohr; but their debates are not massively structured by this reference as evolutionary theory has been and remains structured by reference to Darwin. A proximate cause of Darwin's enduring presence is that evolutionary biologists have never stopped reading him. The remarkably numerous editions and translations of Darwin's books have in themselves helped to make this possible. But the availability of key texts only takes us so far in understanding why evolutionary biologists go on reading Darwin, referring to him, feeling the necessity of labelling their theories as 'Darwinian' or 'non-Darwinian' or 'anti-Darwinian'.

Indeed, on the face of it, there are compelling reasons for modern biologists to avoid affiliating their work with Darwin’s. Darwinism does not belong only to the history of science; it also belongs to cultural and political history.1 Among other things, neo-liberal economics, social Darwinism, racial anthropology, Nazi ideology and the materialistic monism of Darwin’s German supporter Ernst Haeckel had strong interactions with Darwinism in the first century of its history. Likewise, in more recent times, sociobiology (in its more ideological forms), American liberalism and the European right-wing have been more thoroughly committed to Darwinism than their opponents.

DARWINISM, NATURALISM AND HUMAN AFFAIRS

Among philosophers, naturalism is the view that contemporary scientific theory is the source of solutions to philosophical problems. Naturalists look to the theory of natural selection as a primary resource in coming to solve philosophical problems raised by human affairs in particular. For the theory combines relevance to human affairs and scientific warrant more strongly than does any other theory. Theories in physics and chemistry may be more strongly confirmed, especially because their more precise predictions can be tested in real time. But these theories have little to tell us about human conduct and institutions. On the other hand, actual and possible theories in the social and behavioural sciences may in the future have more to tell us about humanity than Darwinian theory; but these theories do not as yet have anything like the degree of confirmation of Darwin's theory.

This chapter surveys contemporary strategies for providing a Darwinian understanding and vindication of morality, ethical norms, our conception of justice, and the cooperative human institutions which those norms and conceptions underlie. We will see that while the prospects for a Darwinian vindication of moral claims – as true or well founded – remain clouded, the prospects for explaining the normative dimension of human affairs by appeal to Darwinism appear to be improving. Indeed, the emerging evolutionary understanding of why human beings have been selected to be moral agents may come as close to a vindication of morality in human affairs as naturalism will allow.

DARWIN AND PHILOSOPHY

Some scientific thinkers, while not themselves philosophers, make philosophers necessary. Charles Darwin is an obvious case. His conclusions about the history and diversity of life - including the evolutionary origin of humans - have seemed to bear on fundamental questions about being, knowledge, virtue and justice. Are we different in kind from other animals? Do our apparently unique capacities for language, reason and morality point to a divine spark within us, or to ancestral animal legacies still in evidence in our simian relatives? What forms of social life are we naturally disposed towards - competitive and selfish forms, or cooperative and altruistic ones? Once we adopt a Darwinian perspective, moreover, how should we respond to such venerable doctrines of theWestern tradition as Aristotle's essentialism, Descartes' dualism of body and mind and Kant's rejection of the very possibility of a natural science of the mind?

The Cambridge Companion to Darwin aims to facilitate understanding of such issues. It provides an introduction to Darwin’s thinking and to the various and often contentious uses made of his legacies today. To serve these ends, the volume departs somewhat from the precedents of earlier volumes in this series. The chapters come in four clusters, two broadly historical and two broadly philosophical. The first cluster concerns Darwin’s theorising. The second looks at his setting, and the reception and influence Darwin had in his own time. The third examines Darwinian themes in such branches of current philosophy as ethics, social philosophy, philosophy of mind and philosophy of biology.

THE CULTURAL CONDITIONING OF DARWIN’S THEORY

Machines, competition, empire and progress fascinated the Victorians. One of the most famous scientific theories of the era, Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, tells of machine-like organisms that compete, colonise and improve. To notice resemblances such as these, between the context of Darwin's theory and its content, is nothing new. In 1862, Karl Marx, in a letter to his collaborator Friedrich Engels, wrote: 'It is remarkable how Darwin recognises among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, “inventions”, and the Malthusian “struggle for existence”. It is Hobbes' “bellum omnium contra omnes” [“the war of all against all”].' In our own day, debates over the cultural conditioning of scientific knowledge have made this old insight newly problematic. This chapter attempts to clarify these new problems. Drawing on recent thinking about culture and science, it looks at how Darwin's social, material and intellectual culture conditioned the form and content of his theory of natural selection.

One view may be dispensed with at the start: that Darwin developed the theory of natural selection because he was a genius, and, since geniuses do not belong to mundane history like most people, it is pointless to ask about the cultural conditioning of his theory. There is general consensus among historians of science that talk of ‘genius’ does not so much explain scientific innovation as redescribe it.

POLAR PERSPECTIVES

Twentieth-century attempts to evaluate the philosophical significance of Darwinism have been dominated by a pair of polar perspectives. At one extreme stand those who insist on the autonomy of philosophy and who conclude, with the early Wittgenstein, that 'Darwin's theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis in natural science.' At the other extreme are naturalists who maintain that 'now that we know' this or that other fact about the cosmos, the human brain, or (most pertinently for present purposes) the role of natural selection in hominid evolution, traditional philosophical problems are easily solved. Each opponent lives off the excesses of the other. Both also overlook the possibility that scientific ideas, including Darwin's, might play a useful, but partial, role in a variety of philosophical discussions. It has proved remarkably difficult to give Darwin his due.

Philosophers drawn to the Wittgensteinian pole typically assume that there are concepts and methods whose application to philosophical questions is unaffected by the deliverances of any science, even a science that might transform ideas about life and mind. Their discussions of questions in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics take over the idioms in which traditional philosophy has posed them, often without appreciating the fact that the language they employ was developed in response to a scientific picture that has long been superseded. Consider, for example, the group of philosophers most influenced by the younger Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle.

SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN THE DEBATES OVER THE ORIGIN

Soon after the publication of the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin sent out over a hundred complimentary copies to a variety of contemporaries, including his former geology teacher, Adam Sedgwick. Darwin was prepared for attacks on the content of his theory. What he had not expected were attacks on his methods. Sedgwick, for example, writing in the Spectator in March 1860, complained that 'Darwin's theory is not inductive, - not based on a series of acknowledged facts pointing to a general conclusion, - not a proposition evolved out of the facts, logically, and of course including them. To use an old figure, I look on the theory as a vast pyramid resting on its apex, and that apex a mathematical point.'

In other words, for Sedgwick, the problem with the theory of natural selection was that Darwin had not supported it in the right way. The right way was to show that the theory was a generalisation from a wide range of particular facts. That was induction. The wrong way was to invent the theory as a hypothesis and then deduce from it particular facts. That was the method of hypothesis. In Sedgwick’s estimation, the theory of natural selection was not an inductive generalisation, but an invented hypothesis, and as such could claim no support from the facts. His image of the pyramid is telling. As he saw it, in induction, a wide base of particular facts supported a single theory up top, just as the base of a pyramid supports the rest of the structure. Darwin had produced an upside-down pyramid of a theory, inverting the relations that ought to obtain between theory and facts. The resulting structure was accordingly doubtful.

DARWINISM AND THE MANIFEST IMAGE OF HUMANKIND

A major task for philosophy is to adjudicate conflicts between our ordinary way of understanding persons and the world - what Wilfrid Sellars called the 'manifest image' - and scientific accounts of persons and the world - the 'scientific image'. Sometimes, of course, it is possible to blend the two images so as to produce a genuinely stereoscopic or synthetic picture. But this is not always possible. In the case of Darwin's theory of natural selection, we seem to have a scientific theory that cannot be comfortably assimilated into the extant manifest image by adding, in Sellars' phrase, a 'needle point of detail' to that image.

As traditionally understood, we humans are made in God’s image and sit beneath God and the angels and above the animals on the ‘Great Chain of Being’. There is a tripartite ontology of Pure Spirit(s) (God and angels), pure matter (rocks, plants and animals), and dualistic beings who, while on earth, partake of both the immaterial realm and the material realm (us). We humans know the material realm through our senses and reason, and the immaterial realm – theological and moral truths in particular – through illumination, grace or other non-empirical and nonrational or arational means. God sets out the moral law, and if we obey it, thereby using our free will properly, we will gain eternal salvation.

Nothing in this metaphysics, epistemology and ethics seems to square with the theory of natural selection. On this theory, no divine, intelligent designer is needed to explain the existence of humans or any other type of organic life. Moreover, as animals, descended from other animals, we humans possess no mysterious epistemic powers to detect what is true or what is good. The idea that morality has a divine origin and justification loses its force. The prospects for personal immortality seem nil. The manifest image of humankind thus takes a major hit at the hands of Darwin2019s theory, and it is not clear how to maintain sensibly the central components of that image.

As such, he was engaged neither in natural history nor in natural philosophy. Natural history, in the tradition of the Swedish botanist Linné (Linnaeus), concerned the systematic ordering of animals and plants and the discovery of new species. Natural philosophy, in the tradition of Descartes and Newton, concerned the search for general physical laws. Darwin was aligning himself with investigators whose work fell outside these traditions. Some were interested in a comparative anatomy based on ideal forms - the so-called 'transcendental' anatomists, such as the French zoologist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and his Scottish disciple Robert Knox. Others, such as the geologist Charles Lyell, were interested in building comprehensive theories about the earth and its inhabitants.

Philosophical naturalists spoke of various ‘laws of life’. They debated the existence of laws, for example, said to relate taxonomic groupings in regular circular arrangements, as in the so-called quinarian system, or to govern organic functions such as the development of the embryo. Another law under discussion was the law of the succession of types. In different areas around the world, it seemed, living species had replaced extinct species of the same kind or type. Living armadillos in South America, for instance, had apparently replaced the armadillo-like creatures fossilised in the rocks of that continent.

THE DARWINIAN CHALLENGE

During his Cambridge years, Darwin was preparing to become a priest in the Anglican Church. Later in life he saw the irony: 'Considering how fiercely I have been attacked by the orthodox it seems ludicrous that I once intended to be a clergyman'. Why he was attacked by the orthodox has never been difficult to explain. Offering a naturalistic account of the emergence of human beings from ape-like ancestors, Darwin offended religious sensibilities as well as common sentiment. His theory of evolution by natural selection reinforced doubts about biblical authority at a particularly sensitive time. It could easily be interpreted as an affront to human dignity and it called for a serious re-thinking - not necessarily a rejection - of traditional Christian doctrines.

Despite friction between competing Christian traditions, and despite political tensions in England between the established Anglican Church and socially disadvantaged dissenters, there were features of a Christian creed that transcended party lines. These were belief in an all-powerful, merciful God on whom the world depended for its creation and continued existence. Humankind had been made in God’s image and had been granted the privilege of free will. The privilege extended to dominion over, and responsibility for, the rest of creation. The Christian God was an active, living God, to whom prayers were directed and whose providence was not confined to an original creative act. Central to most Christian belief was the doctrine that human nature had been tainted through Adam’s disobedience and that in the life of Jesus Christ was a special revelation of the nature of God.