In his paper ‘Natural selection according to Darwin: Cause or effect?’ (History Philos Life Sci 44, 2022), Ben Bradley argues that Charles Darwin did not regard natural selection as a cause or ‘cause in itself’ of evolution, as modern proponents of the modern evolutionary synthesis (MS) do. Instead, like proponents of developmental or active Darwinism, he saw natural selection as a higher-order effect of other causal processes. Bradley’s central and more specific claim is that historians who believe that Darwin regarded natural selection as the vera causa (true cause) of evolution have been misled by the MS. In reality, Darwin believed that natural selection was at the heart of a so-called consilience of inductions, which was central to William Whewell’s methodology. In Bradley’s view, this implies that he did not regard it as a cause and vera causa of evolution. However, both the new distinction that Bradley makes between consilient hypotheses and causes, and the existing distinction that he tries to exploit between consilient hypotheses and verae causae, are incorrect. In reality, consilient hypotheses were causal and they were regarded as verae causae. In stark contrast to what Bradley claims, Darwin’s own statements on natural selection illustrate this: he defended natural selection as a vera causa of evolution, largely because it was a consilient cause. Bradley’s thesis is deeply flawed, but the great merit of his paper is that it has brought the consilience/vera causa dichotomy into the limelight, challenging us to investigate how it arose and what role it has played in the literature.
