John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin - On the Origin of Evolution: Tracing ‘Darwin’s Dangerous Idea’ from Aristotle to DNA

CONTENTS

John Gribbin gained a PhD from the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge before working as a science journalist for Nature and later New Scientist. John has written many best-selling popular science books, including In Search of the Multiverse and The Universe: A Biography.

Mary Gribbin is a teacher with a special gift for communicating difficult concepts, and she is a previous winner of the TES Junior Information Book Award. John and Mary are both Visiting Fellows at the University of Sussex. They have co-written several titles, including Out of the Shadow of a Giant.

The theory of evolution by natural selection did not spring fully formed and unprecedented from the brain of Charles Darwin. Rather it has been examined and debated by philosophers the world over for thousands of years.

This history traces the evolution of the idea of evolution, showing how it has changed and been changed by different societies over time. It will put Darwins Dangerous Idea into its proper context, showing how it built on what went before and how it was developed in the twentieth century, through an understanding of genetics and the biochemical basis evolution. None of this diminishes the achievement of Darwin himself in perceiving the way evolution works at the level of individuals and species, but his contribution was one link in a chain that extends back into antiquity, and is still being forged today.

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This ebook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright John and Mary Gribbin 2020

Cover illustration by Jack Smyth

John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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Source ISBN: 9780008333409

eBook Edition April 2020 ISBN: 9780008333386

Version: 2021-08-26

Mary and John Gribbin write with great clarity Guardian

Immensely readable The Times

Precise yet mysterious as beautiful as a poem and as exciting as a novel Sunday Times

Elegant and meticulously researched The Observatory

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There are two essential online resources for anyone interested in the origins of evolution:

http://darwin-online.org.uk/

and

http://wallace-online.org/

Both include biographical information and a mass of publications, correspondence and notes by the subjects. Many of the quotes we have used, especially in Chapters 5 and 6, are taken from here.

Elizabeth Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1886 (in 2 volumes).

Claude Albritton, The Abyss of Time, Freeman, Cooper & Co., San Francisco, 1980.

Antoine-Joseph Dzallier dArgenville, LHistoire Naturelle, originally published 1757, available from Forgotten Books, 2018.

Svante Arrhenius, Worlds in the Making, Harper, New York, 1908.

John Baker, Abraham Trembley of Geneva, Edward Arnold, London, 1952.

Nora Barlow, editor, Charles Darwins Diary of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, Cambridge UP, 1933.

Nora Barlow, editor, Charles Darwin and the Voyage of the Beagle, Philosophical Library, New York, 1946.

Nora Barlow, editor, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, complete edition, Norton, New York, 1958.

Barrett, P. H., Gautrey, P. J., Herbert, S., Kohn D. & Smith, S. editors. Charles Darwins Notebooks, British Museum, London, 1987.

Henry Walter Bates, The Naturalist on the River Amazons, John Murray, London, 1892.

William Bateson, Mendels Principles of Heredity, Cambridge UP, 1909 (includes a reprint of Mendels classic paper).

David Beeson, Maupertuis, Oxford UP, 1992.

Jim Bennett, Michael Cooper, Michael Hunter and Lisa Jardine, Londons Leonardo, Oxford UP, 2003.

Wilfrid Blunt, Linnaeus, Frances Lincoln, London, 2004.

Russell Bonduriansky & Troy Day, Extended Heredity, Princeton UP, 2018.

John Bowlby, Charles Darwin, Hutchinson, London, 1990.

Peter Bowler, The Mendelian Revolution, Athlone, London, 1989.

John Langdon Brooks, Just Before the Origin, Columbia UP, New York, 1984.

Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging, Cape, London, 1995.

Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, Cape, London, 2002.

Georges Buffon, Natural History, Strahan and Cadell, London, 1785, translated by William Smellie, available online at https://archive.org/details/naturalhistoryge02buffuoft.

Georges Buffon, The Epochs of Nature, translated and edited by Jan Zalasiewicz, Anne-Sophie Milon and Mateusz Zalasiewicz, University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Frederick Burkhardt and colleagues, editors, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Cambridge UP, 1985 onwards.

Thomas Burnet, The Sacred History of the Earth, originally published in Latin in two volumes, 1681 and 1689; available from Forgotten Books, 2018, or as download from https://orange36.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/The-Sacred-Theory-of-the-Earth-Books-123-and-4-from-1691-347-pgs.pdf.