Title: Monstrous Fate: The Problem of Authorship and Evolution by Natural Selection

Authors(s): Victoria N. Alexander and Stanley Salthe

Source: Annals of Scholarship, Volume 19, Issue 1 (Aug., 2010), 45-66.

Abstract: A widely remarked fact about On the Origin of Species is that it is not about "origins" per se—singular points at which something new begins—but about gradual changes in the

proportions of already existing forms. Artists and others have long resisted Darwin's revolution on the grounds that natural selection does not explain evolution, a theory of which must include a

theory of actual creativity. In early 20th-century biology, there were still many vocal and powerful dissenters: William Bateson and C. H. Waddington (also a painter and a poet), Richard

Goldschmidt, and D'Arcy Thompson, who were heir to 19th-century teleomechanists and morphologists such as von Baer, Mivart, Owen, Muller, and Geoffroy. Repressed in the 1950s

during the hardening of the Modern Synthesis, ideas about evolutionary creativity and progress have bubbled up again. Saltationists have increased in number, and Robert G. B. Reid, in his

recent Biological Emergences: Evolution by Natural Experiment (2007), describes a neoDarwinian house that is now deeply altered from within. Many of those calling themselves

selectionists have actually strayed far from the fold insofar as their research shows that saltatory changes occur and the resulting organisms are immediately viable, making natural selection as a force of change superfluous. Now is precisely not the time for students of literature to start looking to Darwinists for guidance. Rather the reverse is true: neoDarwinists could do well to

refocus attention on creativity and the processes whereby variations come to be. This paper examines non-Darwinian authorship in Vladmir Nabokov, (late) Henry James and various other 20th

century novelists.