ABSTRACT
Charles Darwin first publicly aired his new theory of evolution by natural selection in a paper read to the Linnean Society in 1858 (Darwin and Wallace, 1858). Darwin himself was not there and neither was the author of the other paper on the same topic, Alfred Russel Wallace. The papers were read and ignored. The President of the Linnean Society delivered a report that characterized 1858 as a year in which little of significance had occurred in the realm of science. Whether he had misread the mood of the scientific community, or whether the wave of interest in Darwin’s ideas had not yet developed, what is clear is that fifteen months later, the scientific community was indeed ready for Darwin’s ideas. The Origin of Species, published on November 24, 1859, sold out on that very first day. However, even after he published it, he did not see The Origin as his definitive presentation of his theory. Throughout his life, he worked on what he called his “big book.” This was supposed to be the book of which The Origin was a mere abstract. He never published his big book. Over a century later, some parts of the manuscript intended to be that book did get published and what we see is that the abstract is a clearer presentation of the theory than his big book would have been. What was concise, sharp, and focused in The Origin was obscured in the big book, hidden as it was in the wealth of detailed evidence he had brought together over the decades. The Origin’s crucial fourth chapter, called “Natural Selection,” which is less than forty pages in most editions, has its correlate in the big book that, when published, turned out to be the same size as the whole of The Origin itself.
