[QUOTE=bonzer]
On the wider history, this talk.origins article provides an intro to how pre-Darwinian thinking separately covered most of the individual components that went into the Origin’s “one long argument”. It is an extremely widespread myth that all pre-1859 thinking was dominated by the notion of divinely-created fixed species. That was already an old-fashioned way of thinking at the time, even at the level of popular culture.
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Not only was Darwin not by far the first to introduce the notion of evolution; the basic principles were laid out by James Burnett and Pierre Louis Maupertuis, along with some general schemes that resemble very skeletal arguments for natural selection. Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, presented theories of evolutionary mechanisms in his book on pathology, Zoönomia, although the more resembled those of the inheritance of acquired characteristics of Lamarck, who of course also preceded Darwin.
Even (Charles) Darwin’s true contributions–his theories of natural and sexual selection, and the decades of research supporting thereof–were not unparalleled among his contemporaries; his correspondence indicates that he was rushed to publish On The Origin of Species by the essay On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type by naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, which Wallace had sent to Darwin to review, and which Darwin was shocked to read as it was essentially an abstract of his own work. While Darwin and Wallace differed on minor details of the overall theory and examples confirming it, the thrust of both theories were virtually the same.
So none of what Darwin presented was a great surprise to the natural scientists of the day, or indeed, to the general public who had a demonstrated appetite for revolutionary advancements in science that challenged conventional views. Species was a very popular book (with five editions IIRC and multiple printings of each), and while his later books (The Descent of Man, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals) were more challenged and somewhat less well received, they were still quite popular, all the moreso for the controversies, interpretations, misconstruations, and attempts to define a specific mechanism by which inheritance could operate.
Of the latter, clues were put together by Gregor Mendel in his work with heredity and Swedish botonist Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli, but it wasn’t until August Weismann’s discovery of meiosis and his germ plasm theory that a method for transmitting inheretic characteristics was to be had. Walther Flemming should probably be mentioned somewhere in there as well, though he didn’t make the necessary connections and was apparently unaware of Mendel’s work. It was, of course, the famous discovery of DNA transcription and replication that gave a complete explanation, but despite the inference, Darwin’s theories were outstandingly apropos.
Natural scientists of the post-Enlightenment period were intent on finding the “meaning of God” through His creations, and were often dissecting and classifying in order to delve some deeper order or meaning. Linnaeus and his eponymous nomenclature were merely another effort in that vein, and he had no interest or belief in falsifying or debunking traditional fundamentalist religious belief; quite the opposite, actually. That’s okay, Max Planck never accepted that light was quantitized, either, and considered the physical law that bears his name to be “a purely formal assumption” with no physical reality; Einstein and Bose had to give his “formal assumption” a rigorous empirical model and formal derivation, respectively.
David Quammen’s The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution is a good, easy summary of Darwin’s life and development of evolutionary theories of natural and sexual selection.
Stranger