The question of "why there are so many Darwins" seems not to have been resolved, in spite of much new research. Historians continue to provide one set of interpretations, biologists another. My book The Triumph of the Darwinian Method attempted to present a case for one biologist's interpretation of how Darwin did his work. 1 The possibility that Darwin thought profoundly and on a vast scale seems to be becoming a virtual orthodoxy. Yet from discussions of my work, it would seem'that we need to communicate better. I am amazed, for example, to learn of my supposed claim that Darwin was the first to use the hypothetico-deductive method in biology; I only said that he was good at it and used it extensively. Perhaps our points of view differ so much that real understanding is not possible.
Historians often dismiss the commentary of scientists on the history of their own subject as not really history at all. Supposedly there is a right way and a wrong way to research such matters. History is supposedly done by searching through archives, ferreting out influences and seeing how science interacts with society as a whole. It may be claimed that a scientist will have to bring his biased outlook into the picture, something that is assumed to be deleterious. This may be true, but there is another possibility. Much that scientists write about the past is not history; rather it is intended to be criticism. My own work on Darwin is a case in point. My goal has been to reveal what Darwin accomplished, thereby allowing us better to appreciate his work. One can hardly break the rules when one is not playing the game. On the other hand, the critic has to incorporate a certain amount of history in his research, so the difference is not an absolute one. Indeed, I myself was originally trained in a branch of history called 'comparative anatomy.' Ever since it has been one of my goals to turn intellectual history into something more like evolutionary biology, or perhaps it would be better to call it subsuming two fields under a more general one.