Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists by Rebecca Stott
Soon after publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin received a letter that deeply unsettled him. He had expected outrage and accusations of heresy, but this letter was different: it accused him of taking credit for a theory that wasn't his. Yet when he tried to trace his intellectual forebears, he found that history had already forgotten them...
During the Christmas celebrations of 1860 Charles Darwin sat down to try to assemble a list of his predecessors, the men who had held evolutionary ideas before him. But as he was such a poor scholar of history, he told his friends, he failed to find more than ghostly presences and vestiges of their lives.
In this chronicle of scientific courage and insight, Rebecca Stott goes in search of those first evolutionists whose intellectual originality and daring have been lost to us and to Darwin. She rediscovers Aristotle walking the shores of Lesbos with his pupils and Leonardo da Vinci searching for fossils in the mine-shafts of the Tuscan hills; Diderot, in Paris, exploring the origins of species while under the surveillance of the secret police, and the brilliant naturalists of the Jardin des Plantes finding evidence for evolutionary change in the natural history collections stolen during the Napoleonic wars. Darwin’s Ghosts is a tale of mummified birds, inland lagoons, Bedouin nomads, secret police files, microscopes and curiosity cabinets, as well as the history of a profoundly dangerous idea.
This a masterful and thoroughly engaging retelling of the collective daring of a few like-minded men, whose early theories flew in the face of prevailing political and religious orthodoxies and laid the foundations for Darwin's revolutionary idea.
In this chronicle of scientific courage and insight, Rebecca Stott goes in search of those first evolutionists whose intellectual originality and daring have been lost to us and to Darwin. She rediscovers Aristotle walking the shores of Lesbos with his pupils and Leonardo da Vinci searching for fossils in the mine-shafts of the Tuscan hills; Diderot, in Paris, exploring the origins of species while under the surveillance of the secret police, and the brilliant naturalists of the Jardin des Plantes finding evidence for evolutionary change in the natural history collections stolen during the Napoleonic wars. Darwin’s Ghosts is a tale of mummified birds, inland lagoons, Bedouin nomads, secret police files, microscopes and curiosity cabinets, as well as the history of a profoundly dangerous idea.
This a masterful and thoroughly engaging retelling of the collective daring of a few like-minded men, whose early theories flew in the face of prevailing political and religious orthodoxies and laid the foundations for Darwin's revolutionary idea.
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