6 - Calling Dr. Darwin

Summary

Toward the end of his Autobiography (1887), assessing the process of his intellectual development, Charles Darwin writes: “My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts … I think I am superior to the common run of men in noticing things which easily escape attention, and in observing them carefully.” In his articulation of the link between general laws and “large collections of facts,” Darwin draws attention to the relationship of evidence to conclusion, of part to whole, of individual to species. Making explicit the uniquely synecdochal logic of his scientific texts, Darwin casts himself as the Sherlock Holmes of Victorian natural philosophy, capable of understanding what others cannot even see, and of developing “general laws” for scientific and behavioral theories alike.

This logic prevails throughout his Autobiography, like The Origin of Species, Darwin's autobiographical text is a narrative of origins that recasts the larger questions of his intellectual life onto a smaller, personal framework. However, the translation of the phylogenetic, or group, narrative of origins, to the ontogenetic, or personal narrative, exposes a set of anxious displacements behind and within Darwin's self-construction. When he represents himself as the evolutionary subject, the generic and practical conventions of autobiography require the explication of a family structure, and specifically of a parent–child structure.