This work is a history of ideas, not a history of science. It uses the past to answer the questions of whether the Darwinian Revolution comes from ideas already prevalent in Victoria society – or is it a work of rebellion? – and whether the Darwinian Revolution was truly revolutionary – or is this a mistaken judgment made by historians and others?

Since the Greeks, our world has been understood in terms of one of two root metaphors – the world as an organism (“organicism”) and the world as a machine (“mechanism”). With the coming of evolutionary ideas in the eighteenth century, we see that there are interpretations in terms of both metaphors.

What are the implications of Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection for thinking, prejudicial or otherwise, about foreigners, race, Jews, sexual orientation, and women? Did Darwin himself, caught in Victorian prejudices, have any awareness of the full implications of his theorizing?

Darwin was no rebel. Every item in his theory of evolution was drawn from his culture or society. However, Darwin reordered the elements, like a kaleidoscope, to produce a truly revolutionary vision of the world – in science, in philosophy, in religion, and in literature, with major implications for our thinking about social issues.

Remarkably, literature was the field where Darwinian thinking was immediately and warmly received. Charles Dickens’s weekly magazine, All the Year Round, at once published articles that gave detailed, sympathetic accounts of the theory of the Origin, and these were followed by writers using Darwinian themes in their fiction and poetry, Dickens himself using sexual selection to structure a key relationship in Our Mutual Friend. This continues to the present, when leading novelists like Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson use very different reactions to Darwin to mold their narratives.

The organicism–mechanism divide continued. Darwin was a Newtonian and a mechanist. Herbert Spencer was a Romantic and an organicist. Thomas Henry Huxley denied full status to natural selection. Louis Agassiz continued to deny evolution. Henry Walter Bates used selection to explain mimicry. Amateurs explained industrial melanism. All accepted the fact of evolution. Darwin was honored by being buried in Westminster Abbey.

The standard trope is that evolution and religion are at war. Bishop Wilberforce against science professor Thomas Henry Huxley. John Thomas Scopes was prosecuted for teaching that humans evolved from apes. Many, however, welcomed evolution, bringing it into their religious world picture. This was particularly the case for those drawn to organicism, Henri Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin in France, and Alfred North Whitehead, founder of process theology/philosophy in America. Evolution, Darwinism in particular, was now seen as a stimulating challenge rather than as a dire threat.

The Origin has a three-part structure: analogy of artificial selection; struggle for existence leading to natural selection and hence explaining the tree of life; consilience of inductions confirming evolution. Relevance of “paradigms” from Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

The British tended to deny that Darwinism had anything to say to philosophy, epistemology, or ethics. The Americans were far more appreciative of Darwinism, which supported strongly their approach to epistemology – Pragmatism. Today, on both sides of the Atlantic, there are enthusiasts for a Darwin-influenced philosophy, for instance one promoting a naturalistic Kantianism in epistemology and ethical nonrealism in moral discourse.

The work of Gregor Mendel was rediscovered and fused with natural selection to make for adequate evolutionary understanding. The key figure in England, working as a mechanist, was R. A. Fisher. In America, the key figure was Sewall Wright, working as an organicist. In England, E. B. Ford provided empirical evidence. In America, the Russian-born Theodosius Dobzhansky did likewise.

The triumph of Darwinian evolutionary biology in the second half of the twentieth century brought social behavior into the picture, although – labeled “sociobiology” – not without controversy. The mechanism–organicism split continued to divide evolutionists, with “Standard Evolutionary Thinkers” firmly mechanist, and challengers “Extended Evolutionary Synthesists” – often appealing to evolutionary development (“evo-devo”) – firmly organicist.

A brief introduction to the life of Charles Darwin and his discovery of the causal role of natural selection in explaining evolutionary change. The effect of the publication of Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, the long delay and the publication in 1859 of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.