Some of the criticism that followed the publication of The Origin of Species was generated by theological prejudice. Few experts in the field would deny or doubt that. However, Darwin and his followers lumped these critics together with other detractors whose objections were first and foremost of a scientific kind, collectively painting them with the tar brush of creationism. A case in point is the enduring misrepresentation – from Darwin till Dawkins – of Owen and several of his allies. Yet Owen had been an adherent of evolution well before his critique of Darwin’s 1859 book. He himself was severely censured by creationists when he put forward his famous vertebrate archetype as palpable evidence for the evolutionary origins of backboned animals. His approach to origins was in fact more comprehensive than the Darwinian one. It had been developed previously, from the year 1755 on, when Kant published his Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels. Kant’s unified theory of evolution had many and eminent followers, not least Humboldt with his first two volumes of Kosmos. Denigrating Owen’s critique as theologically prejudiced and without a sound scientific basis is a Darwin myth.

This chapter discusses Darwin’s lifelong interest in unconscious agency and instinct. Darwin typically treats instinct as a rational action that has become habitual and thus heritable; instinct embodies a cognitive process that does not know itself as such. His discussion of instinct is thus connected to other moments in his work where he uses the term ‘unconscious’; his treatment of previous taxonomists of species as unconsciously providing evidence for species transmutation, and his discussion of unconscious selection as an analogy for the effect of aesthetic preference in sexual selection. Darwin’s unconscious anticipates Freud’s as the embodiment of human agency in biological history.

In this chapter I trace the origin of the idea of evolutionary ancestors back to pre-evolutionary archetype concepts in the thinking of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Richard Owen. Ancestors and archetypes were both used to explain unity of type, homology, and the origins of organismal form, but due to their metaphysical dissimilarity, they achieved this in fundamentally different ways. The archetypal thinking of these authors each illuminates a distinctive aspect of this explanatory strategy. I also diagnose and defuse a modern myth that has arisen about the views of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, which claims that he thought that the ventral surface of arthropods corresponds to the dorsal surface of vertebrates. When Darwin reinterpreted the archetype as an ancestor, evolutionary storytelling became possible, with hypothetical ancestors becoming the central subjects in phylogenetic narratives. But the emergence of ancestors as actors in evolutionary stories also required reconceptualizing the systematic relationships between taxa to provide pathways along which evolutionary stories could flow.