The Origin of Species

1. We've seen Carlyle adopt the persona of a preacher or prophet, Mill of the cool-headed, logical investigator. What persona does Darwin convey in the Origin? Does this persona also serve any rhetorical purposes?
2. How does natural selection operate? What role does variation play in it? The "struggle for life"?
3. What kind of picture does Darwin paint of the natural world? Is the passage on p. 43 about "the face of nature" typical or atypical of this? How does he depict Nature on pp. 48-49? Where does Darwin's gendering of Nature and locate him in relation to his culture's debates on "the Woman Question"?
4. Darwin frequently draws on the language and concepts of political economy (what we would call simply economics)--see, for example, pp. 43-44, 64. In what ways does Darwin see nature as operating like the English socioeconomic system?
5. The literary critic Gillian Beer has argued that Darwin is implicitly offering a narrative that both draws on and transforms those of the Bible and Milton's Paradise Lost, the two most powerful and widely-read English accounts of the creation, fall, punishment, and salvation of humans. How do you think Beer develops and supports this view?
6. The Origin has often been seen as an attack on religion, yet Darwin says (120-21) there's no necessary incompatibity between natural selection and religious views about the creation of life. Why would he say so? Do you believe him?