The Origin of Species (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Darwin [3]
1839 His first published work, Journal of Researches, an account of his voyage aboard the Beagle, is released. He marries his cousin Emma Wedgwood.
1842 Darwin leaves London to settle in the village of Down, in Kent, where he will reside for the rest of his life. He drafts a short essay that first expounds his theory.
1844 He drafts a short-book-length essay that lays out the argument to be made more fully in The Origin of Species.
1848 The pioneering North American botanist Asa Gray, later to become Darwin’s chief advocate in the United tates, publishes A Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States.
1851- 1854 Darwin publishes a series of monographs on cirri pedes (barnacles) that are based on his evolutionary thinking and that become the standard works on the subject.
1858 In a letter to Darwin, British naturalist Alfred R. Wallace proposes a theory of evolution through natural selec
tion based on his research in Brazil and the Malay Archipelago. Wallace’s theory is almost identical to the one Darwin had begun to outline. Without Darwin present, his and Wallace’s theories are presented to the Linnaean Society on July 1.
1859 Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life is published; the work establishes the concept of natural selection as the guiding factor in human evolution. Despite heavy attacks by religious conservatives for its implied quashing of the biblical notion of Creation, the book is widely read; six edi tions will be published during Darwin’s lifetime. (Starting with the second edition, Darwin will remove “On” from the title.)
1863 Darwin’s hypothesis becomes widely accepted, and the theory of an evolutionary link between humans and apes quickly gains hold. Over the following decade, several scientific works are published in support of this theory, including English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature ( 1863). Darwin devotes most of his efforts to botanical research.
1866 In Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, German biologist Ernst Haeckel promotes a materialist interpretation radically different from existing theories of progressive evolution. Austrian monk Gregor Mendel publishes the findings of his research with inherited “factors” in pea plants.
1868 Darwin’s The variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication is published.
1870 Wallace’s Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection is published.
1871 Darwin publishes The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, in which the assumptions laid out in Origin are extended directly to humans and in which the theory of sexual selection is fully laid out.
1872 He publishes The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
1876 Wallace publishes The Geographical Distribution of Animals, which focuses on the bio-geographical aspects of evolution.
1880 Darwin publishes The Power of Movement in Plants.
1881 He publishes The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits.
1882 Darwin dies on April 19; he is buried in Westminster Abbey next to Isaac Newton.
1889 Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection, Wallace’s tribute to his rival and colleague, is published.
1900 Scientists Carl Correns, Erich von Tschermak Seysenegg, and Hugo De Vries rediscover Mendel’s laws of heredity. De Vries goes on to become an advo cate of the theory of evolution by genetic mutation.
1902 American geneticist Walter Sutton closes the gap between cell morphology and heredity by discovering evidence that chromosomes carry units of inheritance, which forms the basis for a chromosomal theory of heredity, and establishing the interrelationships between cytology and Mendel’s principles.
1908 Geneticist Thomas H. Morgan discovers sex-linked inheritance through his research on Drosophila (fruit flies). Godfrey H. Hardy and Wilhelm Weinberg refute the notion of automatic evolutionary change,