Darwin and Italy

The history of the interrelation between Charles Darwin and Italy begins long before Darwin's main works were published. In 1814, the Italian natural scientist Gianbattista Brocchi published his Concchiologia fossile subappenina con osservazioni geologiche sugli Appenini e sul suolo adiacente, in which he supported the theory that species can disappear and do actually become extinct, based on his detailed examination of the fossilized remains of crustaceans. With this theory, he contradicted Carl von Linné, J. E. Walch, Georges Cuvier, and Jean Baptiste Lamarck, who all, in their different ways, ruled out the possibility that a species could disappear entirely. Brocchi explained the disappearance of species by analogy with the life cycle of an individual. Just as an individual is born, grows old, becomes weaker, and finally dies, he believed that species became increasingly weaker down the generations. Brocchi believed he could prove that before they disappeared, extinct species had become smaller and smaller from one generation to the next and then finally died out. In this way, Brocchi saw the tiny spiral snail as the last stage of development of the originally much larger ammonites. Strangely, although Brocchi drew these parallels between the life of the species and the life of the individual, he did not use them as the basis to explore further what would seem the next obvious question about the origin of the species. He therefore accepted a gradual aging of species irrespective of exceptional external changes (catastrophe theory) but rejected Lamarck's theory that one species could develop into another.

Through Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830–1833), in which Brocchi's theories were examined at [Page 685]length, Charles Darwin came into contact in the 1830s with Brocchi's theory that species could change independently of external influences and gradually disappear. This caused him to doubt the claim made in Natural Theology (1802), by William Paley, that the species were contrived to be perfectly adapted, and eventually brought him to the theory of transformism.

In 1830, the famous dispute between Cuvier and Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire took place at the Académie des Sciences in Paris about whether there were several designs in nature (Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire) or just one basic design (Cuvier), a debate behind which was the fight between fixism (Cuvier) and Lamarckism (Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire). In 1859, Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published. In the period between these two important dates, the question of the origin of the species played only a minor role among natural scientists in Italy. This was because, with a few exceptions like Franco Andrea Bonelli and Carlo Porro, they were occupied mainly with questions of systematics and classification. Bonelli, Francesco Baldassini, F. C. Marmocchi, and some others responded positively to Lamarck's theories, while natural scientists like Camillo Ranzani and Filippo Parlatore rejected them with the arguments previously produced by Cuvier against Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire as “pantheistic” and therefore unchristian. As early as 1856, Carlo Luciano Bonaparte, on the other hand, claimed the variability of species within a geological period and classified human beings in the order of the apes. Faced with the choice between fixism and Lamarckism, many natural scientists in the Italian states chose to tread a third path: Returning to the model of a “Great Chain of Being,” which had already been discussed in the 18th century, they assumed a gradual difference and consequently a relation between the species, but without regarding this as chronological evolution. Among others, Filippo De Filippi Parlatore and Gabriele Costa also advocated a nonevolutionary, systematic connection of this kind between the species, although in a different form. It is important to remember that many extremely different evolutionary theories inspired by natural philosophy were circulating at that time within the scientific community in the Italian states. These theories bore reference to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Carl Gustav Carus, among others. This demonstrates that numerous attempts were made to reconcile creationism and evolution.

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