DENIS DIDEROT AS A PREDECESSOR OF CHARLES DARWIN
"...la régénération par la destruction même" — Raynal

AM | @HDI1780

In a new book on Charles Darwin's predecessors, Rebecca Stott devotes one chapter to Abraham Trembley and one to Denis Diderot (*). For readers of Histoire des deux Indes, this is important news indeed. It was largely from Trembley's work on polypes d'eau douce —and also from Ovid's Metamorphoses— that Diderot derived his views on régénération, which would play such an important role in the Era of Revolutions [see]. In his NYT review of Darwin's Ghosts, Hugh Raffles describes Rebecca Stott's Diderot as "kinetic, smart-alecky, irrepressibly rebellious".

(*) Rebecca Stott. Darwin's Ghosts. In Search for the First Evolutionists. London: Bloombsbury, 2012 [info].

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