Here’s another way to educate yourself that I ran into online today. The Guardian ran a piece on the opening of an online archive of the complete works of Charles Darwin.
Here’s a quote:
The collection brings Darwin’s breathtaking range of writing together for the first time, with 50,000 pages of searchable text, and tens of thousands of images, many from previously unpublished manuscripts, together with notebooks, diaries and original publications such as The Origin of Species, The Voyage of the Beagle (the Journal of Researches) and The Descent of Man. Audio versions of key works will be free to download at the project website.
That website is http://darwin-online.org.uk/
Of course there’s lots of interesting reading there in the form of Darwin’s published texts and notebooks, but there’s also the less primary sources, like his collected letters.
For example I recently was reading about Herbert Spencer, and found that he was actually the inventor of the phrase “survival of the fittest”, so I did a little searching on the Darwin site. I found that Darwin was made aware of this phrase after the publication of The Origin Of Species in a letter from “A. R. Wallace”. Here’s a quote from Darwin’s reply:
I have been much interested by your letter, which is as clear as daylight. I fully agree with all that you say on the advantages of H. Spencer’s excellent expression of “the survival of the fittest.” This, however, had not occurred to me till reading your letter. It is, however, a great objection to this term that it cannot be used as a substantive governing a verb; and that this is a real objection I infer from H. Spencer continually using the words Natural Selection. I formerly thought, probably in an exaggerated degree, that it was a great advantage to bring into connection natural and artificial selection; this indeed led me to use a term in common, and I still think it some advantage. I wish I had received your letter two months ago, for I would have worked in “the survival,” etc., often in the new edition of the Origin, which is now almost printed off, and of which I will of course send you a copy. I will use the term in my next book on domestic animals, etc., from which, by the way, I plainly see that you expect much too much. The term Natural Selection has now been so largely used abroad and at home that I doubt whether it could be given up, and with all its faults I should be sorry to see the attempt made. Whether it will be rejected must now depend “on the survival of the fittest.”
Well, it’s not like “natural selection” has disappeared from the discourse, but the first thing that comes to most people’s mind when Darwin is mentioned is pretty surely “survival of the fittest”, so I guess it is winning the evolutionary meme contest. Too bad everyone thinks Darwin invented it, and only a relatively few people know about Spencer.
I look forward to spending some more time digging around the site, and especially to the forthcoming audio stuff, and scans of the images from the Beagle notebooks.
