The Distribution of Romantic Life in Erasmus Darwin’s Later Works

Nerve poetry and fiber art: Biosemiosis and plasticity in Erasmus Darwin

“…The retroactive tendency to synonymize “epigenesis” with Kant's notion of autotelic “self‐organization” has affected even the tiny (but zesty!) world of Erasmus Darwinian studies, in so far as Devin Griffiths's far‐reaching and perceptive work on the topic of biological life in Darwin has found it necessary to argue that in so far as Darwin reaches towards models of distributed agency, atomistic assemblage, and ecological causation in the constitution of living forms, he leaves the insularity, autopoetic closure, and Romantic heroics of epigenesis behind (Griffiths, , ). In fact, the “anti‐organic” alternatives Griffiths and I have both charted in Darwin were core affordances of the materialist and naturalist versions of epigenesis and equivocal generation overwritten by organicist theory…”

“…In each article, Griffiths draws a firm distinction between the androcentric commitment to “epigenesis” on evidence in The Botanic Garden (1789–1791) and Zoonomia (1794) and the more open, egalitarian, and ecological conceptions of the assembly and reproduction of living forms put forward in The Temple of Nature and Phytologia (1800). In each case, however, he also argues that the details of Zoonomia rather undermine than substantiate a firm distinction between active/formal/male and passive/material/female principles—a point with which I heartily agree, and would also affirm of The Botanic Garden (Griffiths, , p. 312, and 2016b, p. 8). Most basically, however, although the relative roles, principles, and powers of male and female seminal “substance” were certainly disputed by both epigenesists and preformists in the generation debates of the 18th‐century, and though Darwin's epigenesis theory is as androcentric as Griffiths suggests (at least on the face of it), what joined epigenesists together was a major, baseline bid for the power of “mere” matter and immanent, natural causes to produce form without the imposition of immaterial (aka Divine) intelligence.…”

The Fertile Darwins: Epigenesis, Organicism, and the Problem of Inheritance

“…As I explain elsewhere, his Phytologia (1800) and Temple of Nature (1803) would eventually cashier the Aristotelian theory of epigenesis completely in favor of a model of elective affinity that offered a more distributed understanding of material, organic, and erotic agency. 20 In the third, "corrected" edition of Zoonomia, Erasmus makes the reversal indicated in Phytologia explicit: "I am now induced to believe, that the embryons of complicate animal and vegetable bodies are not formed from a single filament as above delivered; but that their structure commences in many parts at the same time" (Darwin, Zoonomia, 1801, 2:277-78). But this shift was well under way by the early 1790s, as manifest in the confrontation Zoonomia's first edition stages within the ontology of nature.…”