I'm not a Darwin scholar and looking at the materials that Allen has linked to, it seems to me that there will be no definitive answer to why Darwin waited so long to publish "On the Origin of the Species" unless some new material comes to light. I assume that there were multiple factors in causing the delay, some of which are publicly available and some that may have been known only to Darwin himself (I am reminded of the situation with Ph.D. candidates who take a LOOOONG time to write their dissertation; when asked, they'll say they're working on, they're overloaded with other work [i.e., their day job], they're thinking through what they want to say, etc., but in some cases there may be the fear that either they can't actually finish writing it or that what they write will not be satisfactory, mostly to themselves regardless of what members of the dissertation committee say [e.g., "We know what you did and how it turned out, just write the damned thing and get the degree already!"].
One question I didn't see addressed (perhaps I missed it) is what effect would having published the book 20 years earlier would have had? Would its reception had been different from when it actually came out? Worse, the same, better? Did the passage of 20 years make Darwin's theory more palatable because of other changes in culture, beliefs, and society? Or would evolutionary theory be more advanced than it is today if it had been presented 20 years earlier (it still would have to wait for Sir Ronald Fisher to make the connection between evolutionary theory and genetics in the early 20th century)? -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] On Tue, 06 Oct 2009 06:12:42 -0700, Christopher D. Green wrote: >Allen Esterson wrote: >> "Mind the gap: Did Darwin avoid publishing his theory for many years? >> http://tinyurl.com/cobvtn >> >> It is by John van Whye, historian of science at Cambridge University, >> and Director of The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online. >> http://darwin-online.org.uk/people/van_wyhe.html >> >> A brief (though inadequate) summary of Whye's views is given here: >> "Contrary to the beliefs of many Darwin scholars, the great >> evolutionist did not delay publishing his theory for fear of >> professional ridicule or social shame. According to a new analysis of >> Charles Darwin's correspondence, the real reason was much more prosaic >> - he was snowed under with work." >> http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/mar/28/uk.books > > Allen, I've read van Wyhe's article. Although it cleared out a lot of >underbrush (like the Bowlby stuff), I must say that I didn't find his >"too many other important things to do" account to Darwin's "delay" >wholly convincing. The urgency of the barnacle book can't really be made >to bear quite so much weight, IMHO. The issue, it seems to me, was not >so much whether he was "afraid" of religious authorities but, rather, >that he knew the theory would be extremely controversial, and he wanted >to collect in advance as many lines of evidence as possible in order to >be able to most effectively defend his position (having seen all too >well what happened in the /Vestiges/ controversy of the late 1840s). The >issue of his wife's conventional Christianity seems to have been played >up a lot recently in order to "personalize" the matter (making for >better drama, but perhaps not for better history). > >That said, I, too, was a little underwhelmed by the trailer for the PBS >show: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/darwin/program-q-300.html --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
