Darwin's Personification of Natural Selection

In his landmark work On the Origin of Species, Darwin introduces his concept of natural selection as the driving force behind evolution. Although it was published as a mere abstract for his much longer and more detailed manuscript, Origins does provide a vast array of evidence supporting natural selection. Professor Durant talked a lot about the reception of Origins by the public, and in particular, the wider impact it had on people’s understanding of theology. However, he also noted that Darwin took great pains to avoid controversy by never explicitly referring to “God” anywhere in the book, and by keeping quiet his thoughts on how natural selection and evolution apply to the human race. People read much more into Origins than Darwin had anticipated, and the larger implications for religion and the role of the human race were hotly debated, despite his avoidance of these issues.

In reading Chapter IV of Origins, however, I was struck by Darwin’s personification of the force of natural selection throughout. He constantly uses action verbs to describe the work of nature, and he even refers to a being “Nature,” with a capital “n.” Indeed, in comparing the act of natural selection to that of artificial selection performed by humans, Darwin is, whether consciously or not, giving this being “Nature” human-like qualities and agency. For example, Darwin states, “Man selects only for his own good; Nature only for that of the being which she tends. Every selected character is fully exercised by her…” Perhaps this was merely a device of Victorian writing, to refer to inanimate things as “she,” but to me, it seems as if Darwin is attempting, by giving natural selection animate qualities, to leave room for people to interpret this driving evolutionary force as God, if they so choose, as if he is apologizing for the inevitable religious implications of his theory.