Darwin & evolution
de Candolle, geography, and domestication
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
De Candolle first refused to treat crop variation as a model of wild speciation, then in 1883 adopted Darwin and mapped domestication in space.
How this study connects
Role on claims
Each row is a claim on a concept or method page where this paper supports, challenges, or qualifies the statement. Roles are hand-checked — not a model guess.
De Candolle first refused to treat crop variation as a model of wild speciation, then in 1883 adopted Darwin and mapped domestication in space — a delayed conversion, not instant Darwinism.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Read in sequence alongside published work, correspondence tracks how one thinker's position moved over decades. De Candolle's letters with Darwin on cultivated plants, set beside his 1835, 1855 and 1883 books, show him first refusing to treat crop variation as a model of wild speciation and then, in 1883, adopting Darwin and mapping domestication in space.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Open questions
Tensions this paper is part of
From concept pages' “where studies disagree.” Disagreement means the same question; scope means different assays, populations, or outcomes.
De Candolle first refused to treat crop variation as a model of wild speciation, then in 1883 adopted Darwin and mapped domestication in space — a delayed conversion, not instant Darwinism.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Qualitative / archival — Comparison of de Candolle’s 1835/1855/1883 books and Darwin correspondence on cultivated plants
- N
- Intellectual history; later treated 157 cultivated species — not a sample N
- Population
- Alphonse de Candolle’s botanical writings on domestication and geographical distribution
- Outcome
- Shift from refusing cultivated variation as speciation model to Darwinian spatial mapping
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
Inspect source passages
de Candolle, geography, and domestication
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
He expanded the number of cultivated species treated to 157.
where he expanded the number of cultivated species to 157 (de Candolle , p. 984)
Before Darwin’s Variation?
domestication was interpreted more as a resource management issue than an evolutionary process. Precisely one of the most valuable contributions of the ana
Key findings
Before Variation, domestication looked like resource management, not evolution. De Candolle denied that cultivated variation explained new species, then integrated spatial distribution. He named three agricultural hearths: China, southwest Asia/Egypt, and intertropical America.
Methodology
The authors compare his 1835, 1855, and 1883 books and his Darwin correspondence on cultivated plants.
Limitations
This is an intellectual history of one botanist’s trajectory, not a modern archaeobotany of crop origins.
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