though he died in 1829, impoverished and shunned, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s views contributed greatly to the mainstream to the scientific evolution theory. After him, the French naturalist Geoffroy St. Hilaire headed another version of evolutionary change in the 1820s, followed by the British writer, Robert Chambers, who authored a best-selling argument for evolution in 1844, ‘Vestiges of a Natural Creation’. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859.
Lamarck, St. Hilaire, Chambers, and Darwin all had radically different ideas about how evolution operates, but only Darwin's still has scientific currency today.
Richard Broke Freeman, in his work, ‘Charles Darwin: A Companion, wrote:
“Darwin's name occurs in every relevant work of reference from about the time of his election to the Royal Society in 1839 until his death, and in superabundance from then onwards. In the British Museum's General catalogue of printed books, (1959-1966), the appendix of titles relative to Darwin contains more than 400 entries, whilst that for Galileo has about 150 and that for Newton less than 130. This excess is exacerbated because his name also occurs in every work on evolution and in every student textbook of biology as well as in many works about the religious and social implications of evolutionary theory.”
