***Time has been updated to 12:00 Noon on Nov 26, and the format is hybrid (in person and online via Zoom)***

We will be discussing Darwin’s Ghosts by Rebecca Stott.

Christmas, 1859. Just one month after the publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin received an unsettling letter. He had expected criticism; in fact, letters were arriving daily, most expressing outrage and accusations of heresy. But this letter was different. It accused him of failing to acknowledge his predecessors, of taking credit for a theory that had already been discovered by others. Darwin realized that he had made an error in omitting from Origin of Species any mention of his intellectual forebears. Yet when he tried to trace all of the natural philosophers who had laid the groundwork for his theory, he found that history had already forgotten many of them.

Darwin’s Ghosts tells the story of the collective discovery of evolution, from Aristotle, walking the shores of Lesbos with his pupils, to Al-Jahiz, an Arab writer in the first century, from Leonardo da Vinci, searching for fossils in the mine shafts of the Tuscan hills, to Denis Diderot in Paris, exploring the origins of species while under the surveillance of the secret police, and the brilliant naturalists of the Jardin de Plantes, finding evidence for evolutionary change in the natural history collections stolen during the Napoleonic wars. Evolution was not discovered single-handedly, Rebecca Stott argues, contrary to what has become standard lore, but is an idea that emerged over many centuries, advanced by daring individuals across the globe who had the imagination to speculate on nature’s extraordinary ways, and who had the courage to articulate such speculations at a time when to do so was often considered heresy.

The book may be obtained from your local library, via interlibrary loan, possibly as an audio or e-book via ListenUp Vermont or in New Hampshire, New Hampshire Downloadable Books. Users need only get a barcode number from their local library to use the services. Or you can obtain the book from your favorite local bookseller, or via www.bookfinder.com, the aggregator site for booksellers both large and small from all over the world, and for books both new and secondhand.

All are welcome and we look forward to seeing you.