Gmail - Fw: error in a NYTimes article on Darwin - the importance of being HONEST TO DARWIN - jacobthanni@gmail.com

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Gmail - Fw: error in a NYTimes article on Darwin - the importance of being HONEST TO DARWIN - jacobthanni@gmail.com
Fw: error in a NYTimes article on Darwin - the importance of being HONEST TO DARWIN

Willis Elliott
to confessing-Chr.



To the Editor (letters.nytimes.com):


Being honest to Darwin is serious intellectual and cultural business.

Your July 9, 2008 edition had an article - "An Original Confession," by Olivia Judson - with a serious error on Darwin. In quoting the end of "The Origin of Species," Dr. Judson omitted a crucial phrase that was in the first printing of the first edition.

In the library of his London home, Darwin expert Eric Evans, an atheist, put in my hands his copy of that first printing and asked me to read aloud the last sentence. I did so: "There is a grandeur in this view of life,...breathed by the Creator...." (His personal library included a copy of the first printing of everything in the Darwin oeuvre; and we spent some time together in Down House, where Darwin wrote it all.)

Dr. Judson's quotation lacked the phrase, "by the Creator," though she claimed to be quoting "from the first edition." She conveyed the false impression that her source was the original printing. Her Harvard University Press "facsimile" is not of the original printing, though it is of the first edition.

Here we have a dark puzzle in the politics of publication. Honorable wording demands that a first revision of a first edition be called the second edition. We know that the first printing was quickly sold out, and the second printing - a few months after the first - was called the first edition even though the first printing had been revised by eliding the specific reference to deity. (The first printing is No.811 in "Everyman's Library," London and New York, 1928-58.)

But elided also were three supportive quotations on the first printing's page facing the title-page. The third - chosen by Darwin to associate the Bible and nature - was from Francis Bacon's "Advancement of Learning": "[No one] can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God's word, or in the book of God's works...let men endeavor an endless progress or proficiency in both."

How much "evolution" battling between science and religion might have be avoided!

Willis E. Elliott
5410 17th Av., Apt.328
Kearney, NE 68845
308.698.7328