Their declaration that miracles were irrational stirred up unprecedented anger, drawing much of the fire away from Darwin. His paper on Glen Roy had proved embarrassingly wrong, and he may have wanted to be sure he was correct.
While he was researching, he told many people about his interest in transmutation without causing outrage. Due to illness, Darwin began growing a beard inand when he reappeared in public in with a bushy beard, caricatures centred on Darwin and his new look contributed to a trend in which all forms of evolutionism were identified with Darwinism.
That designer must have been a person.
Essays sold 22, copies in two years, more than the Origin sold in twenty years, and sparked five years of increasingly polarised debate with books and pamphlets furiously contesting the issues. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species—that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers.
The Londoners says he is mad with envy because my book has been talked about: what a strange man to be envious of a naturalist like myself, immeasurably his inferior!
So we three enjoyed it together: not that I really enjoyed it, for it made me uncomfortable for one night; but I have got quite over it today. Thus, Darwin did not just supplant Paley's conception of Creator within Origin; he supplanted it on a worldwide scale, gaining global support for his work.
The spite lingered. Four days before publication, a review in the authoritative Athenaeum [5] [6] by John Leifchildpublished anonymously, as was the custom at that time was quick to pick out the unstated implications of "men from monkeys" already controversial from Vestigessaw snubs to theologians, summing up Darwin's "creed" as man "was born yesterday — he will perish tomorrow" and concluded that "The work deserves attention, and will, we have no doubt, meet with it.
It is important to clearly differentiate this concept of supplantation from other depictions that scholars have made of the relationship between Darwin's works and Paley's.