The Cumulative Action of Creation

Upon my first reading of Origin, I was struck by Darwin’s late-stage mention of the rate of change of variation. The more I looked, the more I found an implicit calculus within. Consider Nature’s insensible series, cumulative action, and continuous summation. Of course, Darwin does not give us numbers or equations. Still, his often mathematical language made me wonder whether we could calculate rates of adaptation; whether we could sum each successive change and plot an organism's transformation; whether we could compare these quantities across time, space, and creature; whether we could ultimately reconstruct Darwin’s tree on a coordinate plane.