Darwin, philosophical and historical aspects, an animal breeder’s

The development of Darwin’s thought is traced from the uncritical acceptance of the theories of Independent Creation and Fixity of Species by his peers, through progressive dissatisfaction with the ability of these theories to account for the actual distribution of species in the natural world; and the formulation of his theory of Evolution through Natural Selection based on an analogy of the workings of nature, with the workings of the great English animal and plant breeders of the late 18th and early 19th centuries