QUOTES OF THE WEEK

“You only have power over people as long as you don’t take
everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man
of everything he’s no longer in your power—he’s free again.”
       —Alexander Solzhenitsyn, from The First Circle

“There is moderation even in excess.”
       —Benjamin Disraeli, from Vivian Gray


THIS WEEK IN HISTORY

NOVEMBER 24, 1859: Charles Darwin’s monumental The Origin of Species (full title: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life) is published in London. The essence of Darwin’s work was that organisms gradually evolve through a process he called “natural selection.” By natural selection, organisms more suited to an environment tend to propagate more than organisms less suited to an environment. Darwin acquired most of the evidence for his theory on a five year journey aboard the H.M.S. Beagle from 1831-36.
       Although most people today credit Darwin with creating the theory of evolution, it was in fact not a new concept at the time. It had been suggested earlier by French naturalist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck and even by Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus. Lamarck actually drew the first evolutionary diagram in the early 19th century, but it was Darwin who first presented a practical explanation for the theory.
       Although Darwin had formulated his theory by 1844, he was reluctant to reveal his findings to the general public, since they explicitly contradicted the biblical description of creation. In 1858, British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace independently published a paper that effectively summarized Darwin’s findings. With the cat out of the bag, so to speak, Darwin and Wallace agreed to give a joint lecture on evolution before the Linnean Society (the world’s foremost society on the study and discussion of biology and taxonomy) in July of the same year.
       When The Origin of Species was finally published in 1859, it sold out immediately and was widely embraced by scientists (however, Orthodox Christians condemned the work as heretical). When Darwin died in 1882, his theory was generally accepted. Despite subsequent developments in genetics and molecular biology, Darwin’s ideas continue to be central to the field.

Sources: This Day In History, Wikipedia, The Linnean Society.