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Article ID: CBB541044017

Darwin and the White Shipwrecked Sailor: Beyond Blending Inheritance and the Jenkin Myth (2024)

Hoquet, Thierry (Author)

Journal of the History of Biology
Volume: 57
Issue: 1
Pages: 17-49

DOI: 10.1007/s10739-024-09770-y

URI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-024-09770-y

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Variation (biology) Inheritance Science and race Heredity Modern Synthesis (biology) Natural selection 19th century Jenkin, Fleeming Darwin, Charles Robert University of Edinburgh

This paper revisits Fleeming Jenkin’s anonymous review of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, published in the North British Review in June 1867. This review is usually revered for its impact on Darwin’s theory of descent with modification. Its classical interpretation states that Jenkin, a Professor of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, made a compelling case against natural selection based on the fact of “blending inheritance” and the “swamping” of advantageous variations. Those themes, however, are strikingly absent from Jenkin’s text. They were later read into Jenkin’s text by scholars trying to explain how Darwinian selection was reconciled with Mendelian genes and the birth of the Modern Synthesis. While many scholars have tried to measure Jenkin’s effect on Darwin, the value of the 1867 review remains unclear. This paper re-examines its content and concludes that Jenkin’s “able review” was in fact written by an engineer whose competencies in biology were very low. Focusing on the figure of the shipwrecked white sailor isolated on an island inhabited by Black people, this paper also underlines the racial assumptions behind Jenkin’s review. “Blending inheritance” is thus a theme linked to theoretical reworkings on the question of race and skin colors, taking its root in Galton’s typology of heredity. Darwin was probably mostly unimpressed by Jenkin’s review. The problems raised by the review were not so much “blending inheritance” and “swamping” but a conundrum of problems related to the effects of intercrossing on variation and reversion.

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