On the morning of November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species made its first appearance and the world changed forever. An age of faith was plunged into profound religious doubt, and believers of every kind rose to pronounce anathema on Darwin's godless tract, sparking a fresh battle in the long-running war between science and religion. But while the reactionaries raged, the scientific community soon came to accept natural selection, and the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's work in 1900 (which marked the founding of modern genetics) set the seal on Darwin’s triumph by providing the missing piece to his puzzle – a scientific understanding of just how inheritance works.

Unfortunately, everything in the previous paragraph is nonsense, apart from the Origin's publication date (and even that is wrong in Morse Peckham’s recently reissued variorum edition, which claims it was November 26). Nonetheless, statements like the ones I've just made summarize the popular view of Darwin and his great book; variations on them are made regularly throughout the media - even by those who really ought to know better. Take, for example, the mythical clash between science and religion. The Victorian "crisis of faith" predated the Origin by many years; Tennyson found himself stretching "lame hands of faith" when confronted by "nature red in tooth and claw" in 1850, almost a decade before Darwin went public. When Nature gave voice in Tennyson’s In Memoriam, instead of demonstrating the existence and beneficence of the creator, she expressed complete indifference for species, the "types" of living things: "'So careful of the type?' but no. / From scarped cliff and quarried stone / She cries, 'A thousand types are gone: / I care for nothing, all shall go'".