Darwin Mythology: Debunking Myths, Correcting Falsehoods

Contents
List of Figures page
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Myths and Darwin
Myth 1 That Myths Are Simple Falsehoods
Myth 2 That Most European Naturalists Before Darwin Did Not Think That Species Change Was Possible
Myth 3 That Charles Darwin Was Not Directly Influenced by the Evolutionary Views of His Grandfather Erasmus
Myth 4 That Darwin Always Rejected the Argument from Design in Nature and Developed His Own Theory to Replace It
Myth 5 That Darwin Converted to Evolutionary Theory During His Historic Galápagos Islands Visit
Myth 6 That Darwin’s Galápagos Finches Inspired His Most Important Evolutionary Insights
Myth 7 That Darwin Was a Recluse, and a Theoretician Rather Than a Practical Scientist
Myth 8 That Darwin Rejected Lamarck’s Ideas of Use and Disuse and of the Inheritance of Acquired Traits
Myth 9 That Darwin’s Theory Was Essentially Complete Once He Came Up with the Idea of Natural Selection
Myth 10 That Darwin Delayed the Publication of His Theory for Twenty Years, Being Afraid of the Reactions It Would Cause
Myth 11 That Wallace’s and Darwin’s Theories Were the Same, and That Darwin Did Not Reveal Wallace’s 1858 Letter and Theory Until He Ensured His Own Priority
Myth 12 That Huxley Was Darwin’s Bulldog and Accepted All Aspects of His Theory
Myth 13 That Huxley Defeated Wilberforce, and Ridiculed His Obscurantism, in the 1860 Oxford Debate
Myth 14 That Darwin’s Critics Such as Owen Were Prejudiced and Had No Scientiûc Arguments
Myth 15 That Natural Selection Can Also Be Accurately Described As the Survival of the Fittest
Myth 16 That Darwin Banished Teleology from Biology
Myth 17 That Darwin’s Success Depended on Undermining “Aristotelian Essentialism”
Myth 18 That Darwin’s Theory Would Have Become More Widely Accepted Immediately Had He Read Mendel’s 1866 Paper
Myth 19 That Darwin Faced a Conspiracy of Silence in Lamarck’s Country
Myth 20 That Hitler Endorsed and Was Inûuenced by Darwin’s Theory
Myth 21 That Sexual Selection Was Darwin’s Afterthought to Natural Selection
Myth 22 That Darwin’s Hatred of Slavery Reflected His Beliefs in Racial Equality
Myth 23 That the Discovery of Australopithecus in 1925 Belatedly Confirmed Darwin’s 1871 Scientific Prediction of African Human Origins
Myth 24 That Darwin’s Theory Brought an Instant and Immediate Revolution in the Life Sciences
Conclusion: What Inferences About Science Can We Draw from Charles Darwin’s Life and Work?
Further Reading
Index