Deconstructing and Reconstructing the History of Evolutionary Thought: An Agenda for a “Post-Darwinian” Historiography

In this chapter, I argue in favor of a new historiography of evolutionary thought that reassesses the place of Darwin in it. I challenge two myths that have haunted many previous histories: the idea that, before Darwin, most scholars believed in a static world populated of “essential types” and the related idea that Darwin is the undiscussed protagonist of any general history of evolutionary thought. I also claim that, while many scholars have highlighted the antiquity of “evolu- tionism,” they did so under the problematic categories of “precursors” and “forerunners.” Those categories assume that history must be written in terms of “pre-Darwinian” anticipations of Darwin. Instead, I argue that a post-Darwinian, historiography should move away from those categories altogether and consider the following questions: how did the modern concept of “evolution” become possible? What kind of conceptual ingredients made such an idea compelling? I explore the possibility that the very idea of “evolution” emerged by the conflu- ence of ancient materialism and the burgeoning “diachronization” of nature as hinted by many different and influencial scholars such as Descartes, Leibniz, Burnet, Kant, Buffon, and Lamarck, among others. I suggest that modern materi- alism and the discovery of “deep time” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which prompted a progressive historcization of nature and naturaliza- tion of human and non-human history, constituited the two fundamental pillars sustaining and stimulating the development of an evolutionary worldview.