Ebook: Darwin's ghosts : the secret history of evolution

Christmas, 1859. Just one month after the publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin received an unsettling letter. He had expected criticism; in fact, letters were arriving daily, most expressing outrage and accusations of heresy. But this letter was different. It accused him of failing to acknowledge his predecessors, of taking credit for a theory that had already been discovered by others. Darwin realized that he had made an error in omitting from Origin of Species any mention of his intellectual forebears. Yet when he tried to trace all of the natural philosophers who had laid the groundwork for his theory, he found that history had already forgotten many of them. Evolution was not discovered single-handedly, the author argues, contrary to what has become standard lore, but is an idea that emerged over many centuries, advanced by daring individuals across the globe who had the imagination to speculate on nature's extraordinary ways, and who had the courage to articulate such speculations at a time when to do so was often considered heresy. & nbsp;Read more... Darwin's list: Kent, 1859 -- Aristotle's eyes: Lesbos, 344 BC -- The worshipful curiosity of Jahiz: Basra and Baghdad, 850 -- Leonardo and the potter: Milan, 1493 ; Paris, 1570 -- Trembley's polyp: The Hague, 1740 -- The Consul of Cairo: Cairo, 1708 -- The Hotel of the Philosophers: Paris, 1749 -- Erasmus underground: Derbyshire, 1767 -- The Jardin des Plantes: Paris, 1800 -- The sponge philosopher: Edinburgh, 1826 -- The encyclopedist: Edinburgh, 1844 -- Alfred Wallace's fevered dreams: Malay Archipelago, 1858 -- 'An historical sketch of the recent progress of opinion on the Origin of species' / by Charles Darwin