> Presumably, Darwin would be pleasantly surprised to learn how his fame grew after his death, in 1882. From what he could see when he was old, however, the wor

> Presumably, Darwin would be pleasantly surprised to learn how his fame grew after his death, in 1882. From what he could see when he was old, however, the world had passed him by, and he had become irrelevant. Wow he really fucks it up too. Darwin didn’t die some obscure pauper. He was already pretty famous in scientific circles when the Origin of Species was published and by the time he died the theory of evolution was the prevailing theory by a longshot. He was as close to a house hold name as a living scientist could be in that age. He was only “irrelevant” in the sense that an entire generation had taken his ideas and developed it to such an extent that he couldn’t keep up as a single human. Centuries of study in naturalism was recontextualized in the span of decades.