by When Darwin came back from his voyage it was clear that the London he had left five years ago had changed drastically. There were now railways, towns and new churches everywhere. British society was unstable and had come close to a revolution, having conflicts between the haves and the have nots. There was fear that the status quo was going to be disrupted and part of that status quo was the church. To publically adopt transformative ideas was to mark oneself as a dangerous political radical.
Two men who took this mark proudly and who influenced Darwin were Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin, who happened to be his own grandfather. Both these men wrote between the years of 1798 and 1809 and presented the idea that plants and animals were not controlled by a divine creator. Darwin’s new world was full of change and ideas about change and Darwin himself felt changed. He worked hard to distribute his ideas and make himself known to the scientific community. He did however keep one theory a secret because he was afraid that it may be too unorthodox for British society in the nineteenth century. The theory would be published twenty years later in Origin of Species.
One event that had a large influence on Darwin and the way that he published the Origin of Species was the anonymous publication of the book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. This book changed the discussion and debate of evolution pushing the conversation to places it had never been before. It’s influence was not just in the elite scientific community but was reprinted into cheap editions and was even translated into different languages. This book tapped into the progressive aspirations of the age. The people had very extreme reactions but whichever way they felt the book was still widely discussed. The book lacked a clear scientific component and was inaccurate and had some unsupported facts, some even claimed that it was so uninformed it must have been written by a woman. This book suggested that people did not come from God but instead orangutans.
The author of this book was not a woman but Robert Chambers who was a successful Scottish journalist. Darwin was stunned when he read Chambers’ work, mostly because the ideas were so similar to his own, yet he did not rush to publication. There was so much backlash and abuse that was thrown on this anonymous author that Darwin was afraid he would receive the same treatment if he published his own work with similar ideas. Darwin realized that much of the critique from the scientific community came from the fact that there was not much evidence to support Chamber’s claim. Darwin was determined to have evidence to back his theory and worked over the next fifteen years to make sure when his work was published he had what he needed to support his claim. Darwin was influenced by Chambers, and Darwin’s work in barnacles show this influence. Darwin devoted many years of his life to studying barnacles and how they evolve. Darwin used his study of barnacles to help strengthen the theory of evolution.
