Darwin now had immense scientific and social authority, and his place in the parish was assured when he was sworn in as a justice of the peace in 1857. He was preparing his rhetorical strategy, ready to present his theory.Īfter speaking to Huxley and Hooker at Downe in April 1856, Darwin began writing a triple-volume book, tentatively called Natural Selection, which was designed to crush the opposition with a welter of facts. Darwin perfected his analogy of natural selection with the fancier’s “artificial selection,” as he called it. Then he kept fancy pigeons, to see if the chicks were more like the ancestral rock dove than their own bizarre parents. Through 1855 Darwin experimented with seeds in seawater, to prove that they could survive ocean crossings to start the process of speciation on islands. Species would diverge on the spot, like tradesmen in the same tenement. He used an industrial analogy familiar from the Wedgwood factories, the division of labour: competition in nature’s overcrowded marketplace would favour variants that could exploit different aspects of a niche. In 1854 he solved his last major problem, the forking of genera to produce new evolutionary branches. The world was becoming safer for Darwin and his theory: mid-Victorian England was stabler than the “hungry Thirties” or turbulent 1840s. Huxley, the philosopher Herbert Spencer, and other outsiders were opting for a secular nature in the rationalist Westminster Review and deriding the influence of “parsondom.” Darwin had himself lost the last shreds of his belief in Christianity with the tragic death of his oldest daughter, Annie, from typhoid in 1851. The changing social composition of science-typified by the rise of the freethinking biologist Thomas Henry Huxley-promised a better reception for Darwin. SpaceNext50 Britannica presents SpaceNext50, From the race to the Moon to space stewardship, we explore a wide range of subjects that feed our curiosity about space!Įngland became quieter and more prosperous in the 1850s, and by mid-decade the professionals were taking over, instituting exams and establishing a meritocracy.Learn about the major environmental problems facing our planet and what can be done about them! Saving Earth Britannica Presents Earth’s To-Do List for the 21st Century.Britannica Beyond We’ve created a new place where questions are at the center of learning.100 Women Britannica celebrates the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, highlighting suffragists and history-making politicians.
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