Rereading Darwin’’s Origin of Species: The Hesitations of an Evolutionist

Widely seen as evolution’s founding figure, Charles Darwin is taken by many evolutionists to be the first to propose a truly modern theory of evolution. Darwin’s greatness, however, has obscured the man and his work, at times even to the point of distortion.

Accessibly written, this book presents a more nuanced picture and invites us to discover some neglected ambiguities and contradictions in Darwin’s masterwork. Delisle and Tierney show Darwin to be a man who struggled to reconcile the received wisdom of an unchanging natural world with his new ideas about evolution. Arguing that Darwin was unable to break free entirely from his contemporaries’ more traditional outlook, they show his theory to be a fascinating compromise between old and new.

Rediscovering this other Darwin - and this other side of Onthe Origin of Species - helps shed new light on the immensity of the task that lay before 19th century scholars, as well as their ultimate achievements.

Richard G. Delisle holds a PhD in paleoanthropology and a PhD in philosophy. He is associate professor at the University of Lethbridge, Canada where he teaches evolution and history/philosophy of science at the School of Liberal Education, being also affiliated with the Department of Philosophy. He is the founder and editor of the book series Evolutionary Biology: New Perspectives on its Development with the academic publisher. He is the author of Debating Humankind’s Place in Nature, 1860-2000: The Nature of Paleoanthropology (2007) and of Charles Darwin’s Incomplete Revolution: The Origin of Species and the Static Worldview (2019), among other publications.

James Tierney studied Philosophy and French at the University of Michigan and Philosophy at the University of Chicago, USA. He is currently Senior Lector and Director of Yale English Language Programs at Yale University, USA. As part of the founding board of the Consortium on Graduate Communications, he organized its first Summer Institute at Yale University (in 2017) and is active in research and advocacy in the field of advanced language learning at the graduate level. He has also worked as a freelance editor and translator since 2005.