Darwin and the Concept of a Struggle for Existence: A Study in the Extrascientific Origins of Scientific Ideas
T HIS ESSAY IS AN ATTEMPT to explore the role of external, extrascientific factors in the development of biological theory in the nineteenth century in England. More specifically, it is an attempt to trace the sources of one of the most important ideas in Charles Darwin's epoch-making biological synthesis of the midcentury-his idea of a struggle for existence. The choice of century, of science, and of concept is not gratuitous, for the biological sciences in mid-nineteenth-century England were in a pre-specialized, proto-professional state,1 a state peculiarly receptive to influences from without the more narrowly defined discipline of biology. The concept of a struggle for existence appears to have emerged from a complex matrix of economic, political, religious, and scientific traditions and thus affords an especially rich example for the study of extrascientific influences. Perhaps in another century, with a different science, and some other concept, external factors could be seen to play only a peripheral role, and a more or less strictly "internalist" approach would be considered a quite sufficient analytic methodology. Yet such an approach does not seem sufficient for the Darwin case study under question, as I hope to demonstrate in the course of this essay.