1859

1859 is the pivotal date associated with Charles Darwin’s explanation of evolution by natural selection: in The Selfish Gene, it marks the point after which questions about why organisms exist could be addressed through a coherent scientific account rather than superstition. The year also serves as a boundary between pre-Darwinian speculation and an evolutionary framework whose implications, the book argues, were still not fully absorbed by science and the humanities.

A dividing line in explanation

The opening chapter presents Darwin’s achievement as more than a biological theory. Living organisms had existed on Earth for over three thousand million years without understanding why; Darwin made it possible to give a tenable answer to the child’s question about human purpose. Earlier answers, the book reports through zoologist G. G. Simpson, should be set aside: Simpson characterized attempts before 1859 to answer what humanity is for as worthless. The date thus divides not simply two scientific positions, but two ways of framing the question of existence.

The book treats evolution as about as open to doubt as the Earth’s orbit around the sun, yet insists that acceptance of the theory had not brought full recognition of its consequences. Zoology remained a minority subject in universities, and students could study it without grasping its philosophical significance. Philosophy and the humanities, meanwhile, were still often taught almost as if Darwin had never lived. In this account, 1859 begins a revolution whose central proposition became secure sooner than its wider intellectual effects.

From Darwinian theory to the gene’s-eye view

The later preface distinguishes the theory itself from a subsequent way of seeing it. The selfish-gene perspective, the author argues, is Darwin’s theory expressed through an image Darwin did not use: it shifts attention from the individual organism to the gene without proposing a different theory. Like the two equally compatible orientations of a Necker cube, the gene’s angle and the individual’s angle are alternative views of the same neo-Darwinian account.

The preface traces the explicit development of this perspective to W. D. Hamilton and G. C. Williams in the 1960s, while locating its earlier implication in the work of R. A. Fisher and other pioneers of neo-Darwinism in the early 1930s. The book’s own project followed: begun in 1972, interrupted when industrial-strife power cuts ended after two chapters, and resumed during a sabbatical in 1975, it sought to develop the gene’s-eye view through examples of social behaviour. This history makes 1859 a point of departure rather than the completed form of the argument: later writers made explicit a perspective the book presents as an outgrowth of Darwinian theory.

What the date does not settle

The book’s account of Darwin’s legacy is also a warning against confusing evolutionary explanation with moral instruction. It argues that natural selection cannot be assumed to serve the good of a species or group: competition among individuals can favour short-term selfish success even when a group’s longer-term prospects suffer. The book therefore rejects the inference that people ought to imitate the ruthless behaviour expected of successful genes. On the contrary, it says that a society governed simply by universal genetic selfishness would be a harsh place to live and urges people to teach generosity and altruism.

That distinction clarifies the date’s continuing significance. The theory associated with 1859 explains how traits and behaviours evolve; it does not prescribe how human beings should behave. The book’s argument is that understanding the evolutionary process may help people resist its tendencies, not mistake a description of natural selection for a moral code.