Not sure I disagree overall, but Darwin isn't a very good example. He produced quite a lot of writing throughout a long career, and his most famous book, On the Origin of Species, came somewhat late (he was 50, and it was something like his tenth or eleventh published book).
Natural selection is a great example for more than one reason: Darwin wasn't the very first to think it, but Origin of the Species is perhaps the most beautiful science ever written.
I think Darwin gets special note for the fact that while there are many incredible works of theory in math and physics, there's really only one in biology: On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.
Darwin is fantastic. Not only did he bootstrap the field of evolutionary biology despite his lack of access to modern genetics, but he also wrote about it beautifully. On the Origin of Species is still a great read and a lucid explanation of a difficult subject. He's a great person to strive to emulate.
On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin. It's pretty dense, dry, and can require a bit of a commitment, but there's some pretty interesting bits and pieces in there aside from just proposing evolution.
Darwin is far more readable than any of the others you mention.
Possibly Mein Kampf could compete in short passages by a "reading difficulty" score, but it's really tedious and much longer (by a factor of 5!). Darwin could actually write. Origin of Species was intended for the educated public as well as for scientists.
To add to your anecdote: Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species with a day that ran: Breakfast and a walk; 90 minutes of writing; spending time with his wife reading their letters and a novel; another 90 minutes of writing; and lunch.
After lunch was attending to his correspondence, reading with his wife, then dinner and games.
For all the talk of "crushing" and "changing the world" I doubt that anything almost anyone here works on or ever has worked on will have the same impact as Origin. The cult of productivity is unhinged, madness.
Great point and you said it well. Darwin was much the same, many of the ideas he discusses were already out there, but he brought them together in a novel, united, coherent, and compelling way that really made the idea of evolution stand on its own feet.
I wonder how many present-day luminaries will be ignominiously dumped in a future era.
As to the rapidly extending list today, I think we can expect London's Royal College of Art to rename the Darwin Building shortly. The full title of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin is "The Origin of Species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life"
If only he'd thought a bit before putting pen to paper.
"I have this vague notion in my head that you need to gather enough clues through the socialisation and then focus relentlessly to produce something of value"
One example, Darwin. The time delay publishing "On the Origin Of The Species", 20 years was broken by a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace who came to similar conclusions. This spurred Darwin to publish his findings. [0]
"A classic is something everybody wants to have read, but no one wants to read." --Mark Twain
It's amazing how much low-hanging fruit there is in classics. When I read Darwin's "Origin of Species", I found that a huge amount of it was devoted to this thing called the "Knight-Darwin Law" which was extremely important to Darwin but which seemingly vanished out of all knowledge around the turn of the 20th century, as if no-one was actually reading the book since then. Then I wrote a couple papers related to that Law, which ended up being my most successful work so far.
Most apparent with Darwin's theory of natural selection: He had to rush to publish because someone else had stumbled upon the same thing while he was still analyzing his data and compiling it together.
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