It is widely believed that one of Charles Darwin’s most important accomplishments was to have banished teleology from biology. Darwin’s view of teleology was a much-debated question in the 19th century, when both advocates and opponents of teleology equated it with divine design (Asa Gray and Karl Ernst Von Baer, for example). Darwin himself, however, did not think he had done so, and didn’t think that teleology should be banished from biology. This chapter will challenge the myth of Darwin the anti-teleologist by looking at two distinct kinds of evidence. First, we will look at his correspondence with Harvard Botanist Asa Gray, who praised Darwin’s use of teleological explanation. While Gray and Darwin agree on the value of teleological thinking in biology, Darwin disagrees with Gray that this counts as evidence for divine design in nature. Then we will look at Darwin’s own biology, especially his botanical works written after the publication of On the Origin of Species, to better understand his use of teleological explanation in biology.

● Darwin believed that mutations have their causes, but they do not arise because they would be good for the organisms in which they occur; they are “random,” not “guided.” ● Darwin also held that adaptive evolution is a gradual process, meaning that it involves the accumulation of small phenotypic changes rather than large ones. ● An experiment by the Lederbergs is analyzed that is widely taken to refute the idea that mutations are guided. ● A thought experiment is provided to clarify what the theses of random and guided mutation mean. ● It is argued that the fact that microbial populations increase their mutation rates when they are starved does not show that mutations are guided. ● R.A. Fisher’s geometric argument for gradualism is analyzed. Motoo Kimura’s formula for the fixation probability of an allele shows why Fisher’s argument fails; Allen Orr’s follow-up does better. ● Fisher and Orr are talking about the likelihood of gradualism, not its probability.

This chapter takes Dickinson as its first case study to examine how figures such as a robin or a pine can map out partial ecological relations that allow for survival. As her poetic and scientific engagement shows, understanding species as figures reveals both their material and speculative potential—what is termed their disjunct specificity since a literary figure can be understood to have both a material or literal ground and a metaphorical meaning. As figures, species are partially empirical matter (as the successive biological reproduction of individuals) and partially subjective concepts (as idealized or defined “types”). The chapter first examines the scientific problem that disjunct species presented, where similar species appeared in widely disparate geographical regions, prompting investigations by scientists such as Asa Gray and Louis Agassiz about whether or how these species could be biologically and spatially related. Moving from their observations to Dickinson’s poetic-empirical observations, the partiality of her gaze reveals a sense of species engaged with current discussions of biological species, but also significantly more diminutive. This “species” reveals ecological relation to be figural and partial, based upon a certain slippage between some material that holds while the earth, sky, and even body shifts, departs, disperses.