Naturalists

Naturalists are the 19th-century equivalent to biologists in modern-day. Their primary object of study, therefore, was plants and animals. As Darwin characterizes them, naturalists of his period were especially wedded to the notion that the species were created in an unchanging form by God. Since the origins of the species were already explained, then, the naturalist appears to have spent most of time his painstakingly classifying organisms into varieties, species, genera, and higher levels. There appears to have been a large amount of bickering about whether one animal belonged to the same genus as another and, according to their methodology, disputes of this nature could never really be solved, as classifications were based entirely on external similarity. If scientists disagreed about the similarity, or dissimilarity, of two organisms, very little fruitful debate could be had.

The Origin of Species is directed at changing the view of naturalists on...