Non-fiction: Evolution, Old and New

Overview
Samuel Butler’s Evolution, Old and New (1879) revisits the history of evolutionary ideas to argue that the so-called “new” Darwinian theory is neither wholly original nor wholly adequate. Butler contends that earlier thinkers, especially Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, offered a richer, more purposive account of organic change than the modern emphasis on accidental variation filtered by natural selection. He proposes that habit, use and disuse, desire, and a kind of hereditary memory furnish the primary motors of evolution, with natural selection acting as a secondary, pruning force rather than the creative cause.

Context and Aim
Written two decades after On the Origin of Species, the book situates Darwin within a lineage of transformist thought. Butler seeks to correct what he sees as Darwin’s minimizing of predecessors and a general British neglect of French evolutionists. He is not an anti-evolutionist; rather, he resists what he regards as the mechanistic, chance-driven core of Darwinism. The work extends themes Butler explored in Life and Habit, framing organisms as living continuities of experience whose past acts and adjustments solidify into structure, instinct, and form.

The “Old” Evolution
Butler offers sympathetic readings of Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck. From Buffon he draws an emphasis on the malleability of species under environmental pressure. In Erasmus Darwin he finds a poetic yet systematic vision of life’s self-developing powers, organisms shaped by appetencies, needs, and efforts that leave lasting traces. Lamarck’s two laws, use and disuse shaping organs, and the inheritance of acquired characteristics, are treated as the practical engine of adaptation. Across these authors, Butler underscores the role of purpose-like striving and the gradual conversion of practice into structure.

The “New” Evolution
Turning to Darwin, Butler acknowledges the elegance and scope of natural selection but faults its presentation as a creative principle. He argues that selection only preserves; it cannot originate the adaptive novelties that arise from the organism’s own activities. He objects to the portrayal of variation as “fortuitous” and to the near-exclusion of use, habit, and will. He also charges Darwin with misreading or disparaging Lamarck, and with insufficiently recognizing his grandfather Erasmus Darwin’s anticipations. For Butler, Darwin’s system is a stripped-down inheritance that loses the purposive thread binding organism to environment.

Habit, Desire, and Hereditary Memory
Central to Butler’s positive account is the notion that organisms possess a form of unconscious memory across generations. Repeated acts, reaching, burrowing, flying, digesting, become easier within a lifetime and, through inheritance, more deeply ingrained in the lineage, hardening into instincts and anatomical features. Instinct, then, is remembered practice; structure is habit made flesh. Desire and effort guide the line of variation, while selection sifts outcomes after the fact. The embryo’s recapitulative development exemplifies for Butler a memory-work, replaying ancestral adjustments as ontogeny.

Style, Method, and Examples
The book combines historical critique with extensive quotation, comparative analysis, and a polemical, witty tone. Butler draws everyday analogies to show how practice shapes aptitude, then extends the logic to species across generations. He points to animal instincts, functional modifications, and the obvious effects of use and disuse as evidence that agency-like processes, not mere accident, steer adaptation’s course.

Reception and Legacy
Evolution, Old and New helped revive Lamarckian and teleological currents in late Victorian debates, challenging the dominance of selection-first explanations. Though later genetics would undermine the inheritance of acquired characteristics, Butler’s insistence that organisms actively participate in their own becoming influenced dissidents from strict Darwinism and contributed to ongoing discussions about development, instinct, and the sources of adaptive novelty.