Robert M. Young and Darwin Studies

My thinking about Darwin and his importance was formed by and has persisted from a year (1972-1973) that I spent at Cambridge University attached to the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. I like to joke that I rarely agree with the opinions of the Marxist scholar Robert M. Young, and he never agrees with mine, but I still think that his was the most original mind that turned to the study of Darwin. (Acknowledgements to The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Darwin and Evolutionary Thought, )

Bob Young, as the historian of science, Robert Maxwell Young, was universally known, was born in Texas in 1935 and died July 5, 2019. He was a practicing historian of evolutionary biology for less than a quarter of his more than fifty-year career in the history of science. Yet, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that he was, and remains, one of the most innovative and influential people in the field. I can unambiguously say that Bob Young was by far the most important person in my own development as a historian of science, and his influence colors almost all work that I do to this day.

Young came to Darwinism at a good time and in a good place. For the first hundred or so years after the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, it seems not unfair to say that most that was written on Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution rarely reached the standards of professional historical writing. It was not until the 1950s that the history of science started to get professionalized. Those trained in the field realized that archives had to be opened up and consulted. Work done on the subject had to locate itself in the historical corpus generally, not looking upon Darwin rather like the Archangel Gabriel come to earth for a few decades in the nineteenth century. Professional historians turned their interests towards Darwin and his theory.

Young at Cambridge was perfectly placed to take advantage of the new winds, as one might call them. In major respects he did to the full, alth