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 “evolutionism,” 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 confluence 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 materialism and the discovery of “deep time” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which prompted a progressive historcization of nature and naturalization of human and non-human history, constituited the two fundamental pillars sustaining and stimulating the development of an evolutionary worldview.