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Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World without Darwin, by Peter J. Bowler; pp. 318. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013, $30.00.
Darwin Deleted is Peter J. Bowler's twelfth monograph on the history of evolutionary theory and its ramifications in intellectual and social history. For his latest look at the subject, he has chosen to approach it through a problem in counterfactual history. What would evolutionary theory have looked like, Bowler asks, and how would it have developed, if Charles Darwin had never discovered natural selection? In an uncharacteristic moment of narrative fancy, Bowler imagines Darwin washed overboard offthe H. M. S. Beagle, never to make land again. This premise gives him an opportunity to analyze what was distinctive about Darwin's contribution to science. More precisely, it enables him to show what was so distinctive about Darwin himself that enabled him to make his discovery, and that led other scientists and the reading public to take notice. By deleting Darwin's contribution from the record, Bowler can explore how the many other evolutionists writing in the late nineteenth century might have got along without him.
According to Bowler, Darwin was uniquely well placed to discover natural selection. Crucially, he was the only mid-Victorian biologist to combine a detailed knowledge of biogeography with the close study of animal breeding that underpinned his analogy between the differential survival of individuals in the wild and their deliberate selection under domestication. Alfred Russel Wallace's co-discovery of the principle Darwin called natural selection lacked this crucial focus on variations between individuals rather than groups. Besides, even if we were to take Wallace as having discovered the same process as Darwin, his lack of social and scientific status and connections...