It takes a genius like Darwin to ignore the facts

Work of scientific genius has the singular feature of seeming ever more impressive as the years go by. This comes across especially clearly when one reads the original works of the genius in question. While authors of secondary sources like to talk of the "inevitability" of a breakthrough, the original publications often give a much better impression of the prescience of their authors. The works of Charles Darwin are a case in point. His development of the modern theory of evolution is well-known, but his extensions of this core idea are still at the centre of research almost 150 years later...