• Complain

Stott - Darwins ghosts the secret history of evolution

Here you can read online Stott - Darwins ghosts the secret history of evolution full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: New York, year: 2014;2012, publisher: Spiegel & Grau Trade Paperbacks, genre: Detective and thriller. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

No cover
  • Book:
    Darwins ghosts the secret history of evolution
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Spiegel & Grau Trade Paperbacks
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2014;2012
  • City:
    New York
  • Rating:
    3 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 60
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Darwins ghosts the secret history of evolution: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Darwins ghosts the secret history of evolution" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

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.
Darwins Ghosts tells the story of the collective discovery of evolution, from Aristotle, walking the shores of Lesbos with his pupils, to Al-Jahiz, an Arab writer in the first century, from Leonardo da Vinci, searching for fossils in the mine shafts of the Tuscan hills, to Denis Diderot in Paris, exploring the origins of species while under the surveillance of the secret police, and the brilliant naturalists of the Jardin de Plantes, finding evidence for evolutionary change in the natural history collections stolen during the Napoleonic wars. Evolution was not discovered single-handedly, Rebecca Stott 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 natures extraordinary ways, and who had the courage to articulate such speculations at a time when to do so was often considered heresy.
With each chapter focusing on an early evolutionary thinker, Darwins Ghosts is a fascinating account of a diverse group of individuals who, despite the very real dangers of challenging a system in which everything was presumed to have been created perfectly by God, felt compelled to understand where we came from. Ultimately, Stott demonstrates, ideasincluding evolution itselfevolve just as animals and plants do, by intermingling, toppling weaker notions, and developing over stretches of time. Darwins Ghosts presents a groundbreaking new theory of an idea that has changed our very understanding of who we are.

Stott: author's other books


Who wrote Darwins ghosts the secret history of evolution? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Darwins ghosts the secret history of evolution — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Darwins ghosts the secret history of evolution" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
Darwins ghosts the secret history of evolution - image 1

Darwins ghosts the secret history of evolution - image 2

ALSO BY REBECCA STOTT

The Coral Thief
Ghostwalk

Darwins ghosts the secret history of evolution - image 3

Darwins ghosts the secret history of evolution - image 4

Copyright 2012 by Rebecca Stott

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

S PIEGEL & G RAU and Design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury Publishing Pic, London.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Stott, Rebecca.
Darwins ghosts: the secret history of evolution/Rebecca Stott.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60413-6
1. Evolution (Biology)History. 2. Darwin, Charles, 18091882. On the origin of species. 3. Darwin, Charles, 18091882Sources. 4. ScientistsBiography. 5. NaturalistsBiography. I. Title.
QH361.S76 2012
576.82dc23 2011041951

www.spiegelandgrau.com

Title-page images: iStockphoto (journal; shell)

Jacket design: Tal Goretsky
Jacket images: PoodlesRock/Corbis (snake),
Science and Society/SuperStock (green insect),
akg-images (fish, cuttlefish)

v3.1

For Kate and Anna,
and for Dorinda

Once grant that species [of] one genus may pass into each other & whole fabric totters & falls.

Charles Darwin,
NOTEBOOK C

Masterpieces are not single solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

Virginia Woolf,
A ROOM OF ONES OWN

Preface

I grew up in a Creationist household. As a child, I often thought about Charles Darwin; I wondered who he was and whether he knew, as my grandfather and the other preachers alleged, that he had been sent to earth to do Satans work. It seemed an odd reason to make a man, I thought, but then, in the scale of things, perhaps no more odd than the story of God and Satan tormenting Job or the angels who appeared in Sodom and Gomorrah, no more strange than the pillar of salt that Lots wife was turned into, or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I also wondered if, as Satans man, Darwin might have hooves and scales. But generally it wasnt a good idea to ask questions about such things.

One hot summers day, when I was around the age of nine or ten, knowing that I could not ask about Darwin or his ideas without being reprimanded, I went looking for him in the pages of the family Encyclopaedia Britannica. The house was emptymy preacher father was away from home and my mother was out gathering my younger brothers and sisters for the evening prayer meetingbut I still felt fear as I eased out the volume marked D from the shelves. I knew I could be getting myself into serious trouble.

But the page where Darwin should have been was missing. Along the gap there was a perfectly straight stub: the page, my father told me much later, had been razored out by my grandfather sometime in the 1950s. When the encyclopedia volumes had arrived in their wooden crate, my grandfather had summoned the family to the sitting room in their Brighton house to admire them; during this ceremony he had picked up the D volume and taken a razor to the page, while delivering a sermon about the wickedness of Mr. Charles Darwin.

The missing page only made me more determined to find out what Darwin had really said. Because we had only a small collection of carefully selected books on the shelves of the family homeincluding several morality tales such as The Story of Mary Jones and Her BibleI had already discovered the transgressive pleasures of the school library. There, a few days later, I found another encyclopedia set, and in a stolen moment between lessons, I read as quickly as I could the definitions of evolution, animal-human kinship, and natural selection, convinced that at any moment I might be discovered and denounced. I struggled to understand the complex ideas on the page. I dared not ask questions, however, even of my teachers, for fear that news of my scientific interests might be revealed at a parent-teacher evening. Questions multiplied in my head. I began to daydream about half-animal, half-human forms, molten landscapes and prehistoric worlds.

When my parents later joined a moderate Anglican church and developed more permissive views, later still when my father had lost his faith and my mother had allowed us to work out our own beliefs for ourselves, when, as a teenager, I had the freedom to pursue my own intellectual curiosities unchecked, I continued to feel the simultaneous magnetism and frisson of danger when I wandered, as I often did, back to library shelves containing books on Darwin or evolution or genetics. I still feel it.

Certain curiosities, perhaps especially those that arise out of childhood prohibition and transgression, are not sated by a lifetimes reading and thinking. Evolution opened up a new way of seeing the world for me that was quite different from the one I had grown up with, but not necessarily any easier to understand or any less odd or extraordinary.

Years later, I wrote a book about the young Darwin. I came to admire him for his doggedness, for his rebelliousness, and for the range and brilliance of his imagination, as well as for the way he had stuck to his guns and kept on pursuing answers to his questions about the origin of species even though he knew he would be denounced as a heretic.

At the same time, I became preoccupied with the shadowy figures behind Darwin, his predecessors, the less well-known rebels who, I realized, had asked similar questions about the origin of species before him, in some cases a long time before him, and reached similar conclusions. What kinds of risks had they taken? What price had they paid for their curiosity? Why had understanding natures laws and the origins of species been so important to them that they had been prepared to challenge intellectual or religious orthodoxies and thus risk their reputations and sometimes even their freedom? I knew they must have been audacious as well as clever.

Priests and bishops denounced Darwins predecessors; police agents spied on them. They locked their ideas away for fear of bringing disgrace on their families. They deferred publishing. They searched out like-minded men and women and safe places to ask the questions about the origins of time and of species that pressed upon them. They went underground. All of them went on gathering evidence just the same, convinced that species were not fixed and that they had not all been created in seven days.

Many of Darwins predecessors were called infidels. The word has its origins in the fifteenth century and means, in its broadest sense, those who do not believe. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when religious leaders and university professors called Darwins predecessors infidels, they believed them to be as dangerous as the infidel soldiers of the Crusades; anyone who promoted a theory about the mutability of species, they declared, was an enemy of Christianity because such an idea contravened the sacred truth set out in the Bible. By the early nineteenth century it seemed there were so many infidels aroundmostly radicals who were promoting atheism as part of a reformist agendathat evangelicals wrote books with titles like

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Darwins ghosts the secret history of evolution»

Look at similar books to Darwins ghosts the secret history of evolution. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Darwins ghosts the secret history of evolution»

Discussion, reviews of the book Darwins ghosts the secret history of evolution and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.