[tucker93]

Happy reading:

Charles’s humanist grandfather, Erasmus Darwin wrote on the subject of evolution by some 65 years with his book Zoonomia published in 1794. Interestingly, this is where Charlie got a majority of his "ideas".

Dr James Hutton (1726–1797), conceived a theory of selection as early as 1794. Paul Pearson, professor of paleoclimatology at Cardiff University, has recently found in the National Library of Scotland a formerly unpublished work of three volumes and 2,138 pages, written by Hutton in 1794. Entitled An Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge and of Progress of Reason, from Sense to Science and Philosophy, it contains a full chapter on Hutton’s theory of ‘seminal variation’. (Reviewed by Paul Pearson in Nature 425(6959):665, 16 October 2003)

[Ignatius J Reilly]

So when you assert the theory of evolution was around LONG before Darwin you mean a) his grandfather wrote Zoonomia (a naturalist study and catalog) which in large part is a work about the similarities of classes of animals. and b)Dr. Hutton had a similar ideas and wrote about it in a manuscript that was NEVER published. OK thanks, I didn't know there was such a huge groundswell of evoltionary thinking and that nasty Darwin came along and stole all the credit.