Correction! I slipped up on dates in my last posting, where I wrote of
Darwin returning from the Beagle voyage in late 1837, and the
identification of the Galapagos mocking birds as different species by
Gould in March 1838. I should have written:
"...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 1836. It was only in March 1837
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 in the following
year inspired in him the notion that evolutionary changes occurred by
what came to be called natural selection...
Allen Esterson
Former lecturer, Science Department
Southwark College, London
http://www.esterson.org
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