���Re the publishing of "Origin of Species*, Chris Green wrote: >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).
I couldn't agree more that (especially after the publication of the seriously flawed *Vestiges*) Darwin was deeply concerned to collect as many lines of 20evidence as possible for his highly controversial theory. With regard to the barnacle work, it is probably significant that Darwin took a remark from Hooker to heart in 1845, to which he replied, "How painfully (to me) true is your remark that no one has hardly a right to examine the question of species who has not minutely described many. I was, however, pleased to hear from Owen (who is vehemently opposed to any mutability in species) that he thought it was a very fair subject and that there was a mass of facts to be brought to bear on the question, not hitherto collected." The barnacle studies were to be an example of the "mass of facts" brought to bear on one small 20corner of animal life, and in 1846 Darwin wrote to Hooker that the work would take him "some months, perhaps a year, and then I shall begin looking over my ten-year-long accumulation of notes on species and varieties, which, with writing, I dare say will take me five years…" Once started, being Darwin he could not but make sure he had covered just about everything there was to say about the subject, and eventually produced in four large volumes the definitive work on barnacles, what Rebecca Stott describes as "the sum of all barnacle knowledge". The first volume alone, together with his work on coral reefs, led to his being awarded the Royal Medal of the Royal Society. =0 D And with all the specimens he was receiving from all over the world, the "possibly a year" ended up about six years (which included an estimated couple of years lost through lengthy periods of illness and attempts to alleviate the symptoms with time away from Down on "cures"). Mike Palij wrote: >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? Just to clarify one point for those not familiar with the details, there was of course no way that Darwin could have produced such a book 20 years earlier (ie, around 1839), within a couple of years of returning from the Beagle trip in late 1837. It was only in March 1838 that the identification of his Galapagos mocking birds as different species by Gould became the starting point for his conviction of the transmutation of species, and his reading of Malthus later that year inspired in him the notion that evolutionary changes occurred by what came to be called natural selection. But at that time he had a mass of work to undertake, writing books and articles on the Beagle voyage, on geological ideas arising from what he had seen on the voyage, and on the formation of coral reefs. Only as what he called his "prime hobby" cou ld he in those years make notes on his ideas on transmutation, including during times when his illness prevented the arduous work required for books and articles. References Stott, Rebecca (2003). *Darwin and the Barnacle*. Faber and Faber. Sulloway, Frank (1982). "Darwin's Conversion: The Beagle Voyage and Its Aftermath." Journal of the History of Biology, 15 (1982): 325-96. http://www.sulloway.org/Conversion.pdf Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London http://www.esterson.org --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
