THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, MANS PLACE IN NATURE AND THE NAMING OF THE CALCARINE SULCUS

In The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection of 1859, Charle s 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. R eaders immediately extrapolated Darwin's argument concerning lower ani mals to the implications for humans, and its denial of a special creat ion of humans. In opposition to Darwin's theory, Britain's preeminent paleontologist and comparative anatomist, Richard Owen, argued that ma n was unique among all creation in the possession of a particular stru cture within the brain, the 'Hippocampus minor'. Darwin's great defend er, Thomas Huxley, demonstrated that this structure also existed in mo nkeys and apes, and that it was simply a manifestation of a 'particula r sulcus' in the posterior cerebral cortex, which he named as the 'cal carine' sulcus. The home of the visual striate cortex was thus named a s part of the controversy surrounding the birth of evolutionary theory , soon to be accepted as the great unifying concept in all of biology.