ABSTRACT
St. George Mivart (1827-1900) was an unlikely scholarly product, being an admirer of Richard Owen and a protégé of Thomas Huxley, archrivals in the paleontological field in nineteenth century England (Desmond, 1982). Most important, he appears to have been the most effective scientific critic of natural selection as the main mechanism of evolution, originating a line of argument that persists to the present day in the writings of Leo Berg, Richard Goldschmidt, Sewall Wright, Pere Alberch, Niles Eldridge, Stephen Gould, Soren Løvtrup, and others. As testimony to Mivart’s effectiveness, he is the only one of Darwin’s numerous critics to be singled out for mention in Darwin’s Autobiography (p. 126). Darwin hides behind a comment from an American admirer to label Mivart a “pettifogger,” so it is clear that he really did get under Charles’s skin.
