Darwin, Margins, and the Future of Creatures
How a nineteenth-century book helps explain the mystery of the creature world
This week, I keep coming back to one question:
What can Darwin’s ideas tell us about the future of creatures?
Some books change the way people understand the world.
When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, it did exactly that. His theory of evolution by natural selection challenged long-held assumptions about how life develops and how species adapt across generations. The book sparked enormous debate. Religious leaders questioned it, scientists argued over it, and readers across Europe struggled to understand what Darwin’s ideas might mean for the future of life on earth.
Among those readers, in the world of The All Souls novels, was Matthew de Clermont.
And Matthew didn’t just read Darwin’s book, he wrote in the margins.
A Scientist Reading Darwin
Matthew Clairmont has lived through centuries of intellectual history. He has watched scientific theories rise and fall, seen the Enlightenment reshape European thought, and spent much of his long life studying the nature of life itself. Darwin’s work would have captured his attention immediately.
Darwin argued that species aren’t fixed. They evolve across generations, shaped by environmental pressures and the slow accumulation of genetic change. For Matthew, that idea raises a far more complicated question: if human species can evolve, what about creatures?
In A Discovery of Witches, Diana discovers Matthew’s annotated copy of On the Origin of Species. His notes reveal that he has been thinking about creatures in evolutionary terms long before the events of the trilogy begin. In the margins, he wonders whether vampires, witches, and daemons might once have been part of a single species that diverged over time.
He also notices something troubling. Across generations, creatures appear to be losing the abilities that once defined them. Vampires struggle to sire children, witches find their magic weakening, and instincts that once guided creatures seem to fade.
Darwin’s book doesn’t answer those questions.
But it gives Matthew a framework for asking them.
Darwin’s Impact in the Real World
Darwin’s book didn’t simply change biology. It changed how people thought about life itself.
Victorian readers were accustomed to thinking of the natural world as orderly and permanent, arranged in a hierarchy that had remained unchanged since creation. Darwin challenged that idea by proposing that species evolve slowly through natural processes.
The reaction was immediate and intense.
Some scientists embraced Darwin’s ideas, recognizing the explanatory power of natural selection. Others rejected them outright, arguing that evolution undermined traditional religious beliefs about creation. Public debates filled lecture halls and newspapers across Europe.
Darwin himself understood how radical his proposal was. In one of the most famous passages of On the Origin of Species, he writes:
“There is grandeur in this view of life… from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
For Darwin’s readers, this idea was both exhilarating and unsettling. If life could change and diversify across generations, then the boundaries people believed were permanent might not be permanent at all.
The debate Darwin began in the nineteenth century still continues today.
The Creature World’s Version of the Same Debate
In The All Souls novels, the creature world is struggling with a remarkably similar question.
For centuries, witches, vampires, and daemons have lived under the authority of the Congregation and its central law: the Covenant. Officially, the Covenant exists to prevent creatures from drawing attention to themselves. Relationships between species are forbidden so that witches, vampires, and daemons remain hidden within human society.
But the Covenant preserves something else as well.
Power.
By forbidding relationships between the species, the Congregation maintains the existing hierarchy. Vampires and witches hold the greatest influence, while daemons, often dismissed as unstable or unpredictable, remain at the margins of creature society.
The rule appears simple, yet its consequences are profound.
By keeping the species separate, the Covenant prevents the exchange of traits that might strengthen them all.
Over time, the creature world begins to weaken.
The Missing Piece
Matthew’s research eventually reveals something the Congregation failed to understand.
Daemons aren’t the weakest members of the creature world.
They are the missing piece.
Matthew’s genetic studies suggest that daemons carry an extra chromosome, something that contributes to their creativity, unpredictability, and bursts of brilliance. More importantly, those genes appear to stabilize the others. Without daemon genes entering the population, the remaining species begin to decline.
Vampires lose the ability to sire.
Witches lose the strength of their magic.
The Covenant, designed to preserve order, has slowly been weakening the entire creature world.
Weavers and the Bright-Born
This discovery also helps explain something that had puzzled creatures for generations: the appearance of weavers.
Weavers are rare witches capable of shaping magic in ways other witches cannot. Instead of simply casting spells, they create them, weaving strands of magic together in new patterns. Matthew’s research suggests that weavers often appear in families where daemon and witch bloodlines intersect.
In other words, the very relationships the Covenant forbids are the ones that produce the most powerful magic.
By the end of the series, the next generation of children begins to reflect that possibility. Diana and Matthew’s twins carry elements of both species. One inherits Matthew’s vampiric nature while the other shows Diana’s magical abilities, yet both retain something unexpected: mortality, though stretched across unusually long lifespans.
Another child appears as well.
Margaret Clairmont-Nilsen, the daughter of the daemon Sophie Norman and the witch Nathaniel Wilson, becomes one of the first examples of this new future. At first, children like Margaret were feared as dangerous crosses between species and were often sought by the Congregation.
But Matthew’s research suggests something very different.
They may represent the future of the creature world.
A Different Kind of Evolution
Darwin’s theory proposed that species evolve slowly through generations as the pressures of their environment shape survival and reproduction. In the world of The All Souls novels, something similar may be happening.
For centuries, the Covenant tried to freeze the creature world in place, enforcing divisions between species and protecting the existing hierarchy. Yet nature rarely remains fixed forever. Over time, the children appearing at the end of the series suggest that the creature world is adapting despite those rules.
The traits of witches, vampires, and daemons may once again begin to exist together.
A brighter, more complicated future than the one the Congregation tried to preserve.
Sometimes revolutions begin with wars or declarations.
And sometimes they begin quietly, in the margins of a book.
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