Volume 26, Number 13 · August 16, 1979
Darwin Vindicated!
By Stephen Jay Gould
Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X: New Light on the Evolutionists
by Loren Eiseley
Dutton, 264 pp., $12.95
Samuel Butler, a master of acrimonious polemic, confronted Charles Darwin with the sorest of all scientific subjects—a dispute about priority. In Evolution Old and New (1879), Butler accused Darwin of slighting the evolutionary speculations of Buffon, Lamarck, and his own grandfather Erasmus. To this book, and to later, more specific taunts,[1] Darwin reacted with the most effective ploy of all: silence. Darwin's son Francis later wrote of this incident: 'The affair gave my father much pain, but the warm sympathy of those whose opinions he respected soon helped him to let it pass into a wellmerited oblivion.'[2]
Review, 3082 words
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