"Darwin on Orchis Bank"--winning essay

As promised, here is Kathryn Tabb's winning essay sponsored by the Darwin Correspondence Project and the Templeton foundation.

A selection:

Several Darwin scholars have argued that Orchids contraverts Paley with a very different rhetoric from the Origin, one that at times seems sympathetic to him. Typifying such arguments John Agnus Campbell writes, "In the course of his infectious expressions of delight over the 'beautiful' and 'curious' structures he finds, Darwin both powerfully repeats yet subtly displaces the natural theology vocabulary he invokes: Darwin seems to 'out Paley Paley'" (Campbell 1994, 72). This paper will make the further point that Orchids subverts the rhetoric of natural theology by troubling the analogy with divine design that Darwin established in his previous work.

Download the full essay at...

Darwin Correspondence Project


And the winner is...Ms Kathryn Tabb