Darwin Publishes On the Origin of Species
Darwin published On the Origin of Species in November 1859 and the entire print run of 1,250 copies was taken by booksellers on the first day. He had worked out natural selection by 1838, two years after returning from five years on the Beagle, after reading Malthus on population and recognising that more offspring are produced than can survive. He then did nothing about it for twenty years, writing a sketch in 1842, an essay in 1844 with instructions to his wife to publish it if he died, and eight years on barnacles instead. The delay is usually explained by caution: he knew what the argument implied, his wife was devout, and the previous anonymous book on evolutionary themes had been savaged. What forced him was a letter. Alfred Russel Wallace, collecting specimens in the Malay Archipelago in 1858, sent Darwin an essay setting out the same mechanism and asked him to pass it on if he thought it worth anything. Their friends arranged a joint reading at the Linnean Society in July 1858, which nobody noticed — the society's president reported that the year had produced no striking discoveries — and Darwin wrote the Origin in thirteen months as an abstract of the longer book he had planned. The argument is one long argument, in his phrase: variation, inheritance, more offspring than can live, and therefore descent with modification. He avoided human beings almost entirely and returned to them in 1871. The mechanism of inheritance was supplied by Mendel, whose paper he never read.
- Year: 1859 CE
- Category: Scientific
