Most modern biologists would find it difficult to separate the practice of classification from Darwinian evolutionary theory. In any case, Darwin was less inclined than many subsequent commentators to discuss his work exclusively in the language of 'revolutions' and 'turning points', terms that simultaneously assume and emphasise discontinuity. Thus, specifically, 'a breed, like a dialect of a language, can hardly be said to have had a definite origin' and, more generally, 'it may be worth while to illustrate this view of classification by taking the case of languages'. Thus, in response to the current biodiversity crisis, the distinguished biologist E.O. Wilson proposed 'the disiy and classification of all species', a formulation pragmatically untroubled either by Darwin's revision of the notion of species or by any subsequent complications of taxonomic theory.

The author addresses two kinds of perceived threat to the purity or integrity of Darwin's Origin. First, the author considers the way in which debates around 'Social Darwinism' highlight the methodological issues and anxieties surrounding the attribution of a political position to Darwin and/or the Origin. Then, the author wants to question the tendency to isolate the text as a single and radically discontinuous act, principally by surveying the history of its successive editions. Finally, in exploring particular aspects of the form and reception of the Origin, the author wants to indicate how difficulty and uncertainty - prerequisites of a defamiliarised perspective - are built into the fabric of its language and are thus integral to what David Amigoni calls its 'epistemology of representation'. Wordsworthian parallels are inevitably brought forth by an examination of the Origin's rhetoric.

Desmond and Moore are quite right to celebrate the new emphasis on the 'cultural conditioning' of knowledge. For writers in the English language, it was probably the work of Thomas Kuhn which did most to dismantle a prevailing orthodoxy about science. Marxism itself claimed scientific status - and, indeed, in some of its versions, did play the role of a ruling ideology in the 'formerly existing' bureaucratic regimes of eastern Europe. The relevance to the question of the origin of species of variation under domestication was well established in natural history circles well before Darwin's first formation of the idea of natural selection. The use Darwin makes of Malthus involves him in a reversal of the direction of Malthus's own argument.

Great Expectations is a text obsessed with the idea of origins: the origin of wealth, the identification of parenthood. In Great Expectations, Dickens takes up the idea of unbreakable patterns of cause and effect working to determine present existence. The tenuous nature of the division between animal and human - even vegetable - life in Great Expectations is notable on a broader scale than the half-comic, half-queasy gastronomic one. Wemmick's choice of language shows that he has no worries about speaking of a human being as though she is an animal to whom motiveless violence comes naturally. The relegation of the importance of biological origins is of crucial importance to Great Expectations. Extremely conservative in class terms, Great Expectations is a novel which refuses to admit the desirability of any kind of reorganisation of society.

The success of gendered science is assumed rather than explained: the suggestion that this success can be attributed simply to the contemporary prestige of science underestimates the degree to which scientific ideas were subjected to critical scrutiny from within and without the scientific community. More importantly, it diverts attention from the fundamental contradiction in the women's movement, that of demanding expanded opportunities for women, whilst denying any need for a reappraisal of the male role or of the patriarchal foundations of contemporary society. This chapter attempts to address some of these issues by looking first at Darwin's views on gender as elaborated in the Origin and in other private and public communications; second at the development of those ideas by Darwin's disciples and at the use made of them in the cause of anti-feminism and third at the response of some of the women involved in the 'woman question'.

This chapter traces an emergent perception amongst some nineteenth-century intellectuals that Darwin's Origin comprised not simply a methodology but a language which proliferated widely beyond the book i which contrived to contain it, varying as it moved. It examines the political anxieties provoked by the perception of proliferation, and looks at the ideological strategies devised for limiting proliferation, which involved making the figure of Darwin into an individual intellectual creator who named and had authority over his creations. The chapter focuses on these strategies as they emerged in and were exchanged between the theoretical and critical writings of two intellectuals working in different fields: Friedrich Max Muller in the field of comparative philology (the historical study of the origin and development of languages); and Leslie Stephen, working in the fields of philosophy and literary criticism.

This chapter looks at the impact of evolutionary theory in late nineteenth-century India. To put the matter in its Indian context will involve looking at the institutionalisation of British cultural and educational policy towards India. The chapter argues that as Western evolutionary thought was encountered by late-nineteenth-century Hindu thinkers, whose Hinduism was inflected by emergent Indian nationalistic aspirations, the result was far more complex. Nevertheless, in the last three decades of the nineteenth century the name of Darwin, together with the key word 'evolution', became a familiar part of Indian discourse in English. The chapter explores the speculative assimilation of evolutionary theory, both pre-Darwinian and post-Darwinian, in nineteenth-century Hindu culture. Vivekananda also exploited the difficulties which Christian thinkers had with Darwinism. If, however, as seems evident, the name of Darwin came to dominate Indian evolutionary discourse, the explanation may lie in the need for a source of revelation.