The Origin of Species, Man's Place in Nature and the naming of the calcarine sulcus.
In The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection of 1859, Charles Darwin provided a detailed, coherent proposal: species changed into new ones by the action over time of natural forces in the environment acting continuously on the variations always present within species. Readers immediately extrapolated Darwin's argument concerning lower animals to the implications for humans, and its denial of a special creation of humans. In opposition to Darwin's theory, Britain's preeminent paleontologist and comparative anatomist, Richard Owen, argued that man was unique among all creation in the possession of a particular structure within the brain, the 'Hippocampus minor'. Darwin's great defender, Thomas Huxley, demonstrated that this structure also existed in monkeys and apes, and that it was simply a manifestation of a 'particular sulcus' in the posterior cerebral cortex, which he named as the 'calcarine' sulcus. The home of the visual striate cortex was thus named as part of the controversy surrounding the birth of evolutionary theory, soon to be accepted as the great unifying concept in all of biology.
Fishman
R S
RS
Washington Hospital Center, DC, USA.
D005075:Biological Evolution; D006624:Hippocampus / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D049672:History, 19th Century; D009885:Ophthalmology / Q000266:history*; D012641:Selection, Genetic; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D006113:United Kingdom; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000033:anatomy & histology*