The objective of this project is to perform archival research leading to online textual editions of two important segments of the manuscript material left by Charles Darwin. The first segment, the 'Origins of the Origin', forms a part of Darwin's Scientific Notes and comprises those notebooks, notes and drafts used by Darwin in developing and writing the Origin of Species. The second segment, Darwin's Abstracts, forms a part of Darwin's Marginalia and Reading Notes and comprises the complete collection of Darwin's reading notes abstracted from the literature of natural history. These materials each add a coherent and original piece to our understanding of Darwin's work as a scientist and to his integration with the scientific community. The manuscripts will form part of the Darwin Manuscript Project and will be published online at the Darwin Digital Library of Evolution, a website sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History.
Intellectual Merit The intellectual merit of the 'Origins of the Origin' manuscripts is that they constitute the full record of the growth of Darwin's theory of descent by natural selection up to its first publication in 1859. Voluminous and conceptually significant sections of that record have hitherto remained unpublished, while some published sections have been inadequately edited. The intellectual merit of 'Darwin's Abstracts' is that they constitute and reveal Darwin's most systematic mode of engagement as a reader of the scientific literature, an engagement that spanned his entire post-Beagle career and covered the full range of topics that he mined for their relevance to the theory of evolution.
Broader Impacts As a de novo online project, perhaps the broadest impact of publishing these materials is that a treasure trove of rich and generally unexplored Darwin materials will be made accessible to an enormously widened audience of potential interpreters, which includes scholars, teachers, and students. The general public has little appreciation of the diverse ways in which scientists work to develop original knowledge. These materials show Darwin hard at work extracting information, conducting experiments, refining and restructuring the expression of his ideas and always working as part of a community of knowledge. The impact of publishing these materials to high editorial standards and yet in this public, image-rich way is that they provide a means to deepen the public grasp of scientific practice.
PI: David Kohn The Darwin Manuscripts Project is dedicated to producing an online edition of Charles Darwin's scientific manuscripts. These include all his observational and theoretical notes and all the surviving drafts of his many publications. They also include all his numerous speculative and experimental notebooks as well as all the books and journals in his highly annotated library. In sum, the Darwin Manuscripts Project will publish the primary working papers of Charles Darwin, the practicing scientist. Without exaggeration, these working papers are a major cultural treasure and a significant part of the patrimony of science. For it will only be by studying these documents when they are fully edited that it will become possible to reconstruct the diverse, layered, and complex development of Charles Darwin’s thinking as a scientist. That goal is within the grasp of this generation and then Darwin will be one of the first scientists for whom a comparable developmental resource has been achieved. The scope of the NSF project allowed us to begin building the Darwin Manuscripts Project as a major online resource. Specifically the award supported the transcription and historical research for two out of six units. We set out to edit all manuscripts relevant to the decades long gestation of the Origin of Species and in parallel we were to publish a significant part of the documentary record of Darwin’s reading. With respect to the latter, we have completed transcription publication of Darwin’s abstracts of books and journal articles, which will soon appear online. The principal objective of the award: the DMP unit devoted to the Creation of the Origin. This aspect of the award had two goals. The first was to mount online, in a high quality edition, all relevant documents from the Beagle voyage through to the book’s publication in 1859. We began the project already convinced that there were important documents yet to be made part of the common stock of known Darwin materials. So a second important objective was to seek and edit such new material. Both of our goals has been largely attained, though adding and polishing footnotes, and adding introductions, and indeed some transcription, will continue to go on. We have raised this whole most critical vein of manuscripts to a new editorial level. And as the following table shows, in the course of the grant, we have brought many previously unknown manuscripts to light. The net effect is, we believe, to substantially change the landscape of those publicly known Darwin manuscripts that most directly bear on the formation of Darwin’s core theory. previously unknown to all or most Darwin scholars unpublished in print format previously unpublished online newly transcribed February 1835 Essay + + Notebooks on Geology, Species, Metaphysics 1837-1840 + 1842 Pencil Sketch + + General Aspect 1843 + + + 1844 Essay draft rejected draft of part I fair copy + + + + + + + Catalogue of Down Specimens 1855 + + + + Experiment Book 1855 + + + + Lawn Plot Experiment + + + + Natural Selection Portfolios I, II + + + + Natural Selectionabandoned 1st draft ofOrigin 1856-1858 Chap 8 rejected pages (DAR 205.7) + + + + Outline of Species Theory, sent to Asa Gray, 1857 draft fair copy + + Origin of Species, 1859: Surviving Manuscript Leaves (previously uncollected) + + + + We can briefly point to the materials that are new. The February 1835 Essay demonstrates that Darwin’s theoretical thinking about species began during the Beagle voyage. But the key locus of those speculations was the well known notebooks on the transmutation of species 1837-1839, which culminate with the discovery of natural selection. Our new edition of the 1842 Pencil Sketch reveals an incomparable complexity of revision as Darwin struggled to give his theory its first narrative expression. In 1843, Darwin wrote an overview of the countryside around his home that begins in grand style but soon devolves into notes on the first experiments conducted at Down. In 1844 he wrote a longer essay, transcribed here the draft and fair copy versions. Substantial rewriting of the section of the 1844 Essay on variation under domestication led to a rejected, yet never discarded first version. During 1854-1859, Darwin became engrossed in preparing his species book. We publish here the large trove of related theoretical and experimental notes produced in this period as Natural Selection Portfolios I & II, Catalogue of Down Specimens, and Experiment Book. It is in these materials that Darwin developed his ideas on speciation, the principle of divergence, and the evolution of instinct. The publication of these materials makes available for further examination the full—considerably richer than generally recognized—documentary basis for the intellectual development of evolution by natural selection.
