Document signed by Darwin set to sell at auction for over a million pounds

A piece of paper signed by Charles Darwin with text, in which he defends his theory of evolution will be sold at auction with Sotheby’s in New York.

The object likely to sell for over a million pounds, record price for a Darwin manuscript. The document was created by the English naturalist and biologist to be copied in a celebrity magazine in 1865.

Darwin was not in the habit of archiving his writings and so very little original material survives. When he always did signed only with the abbreviation ‘C Darwin’ or ‘Ch Darwin’. Very rarely did he write his full name, “Charles Darwin».

Professor John van Wye, who curates the scientific collection known as Darwin Online, told the BBC that the document is particularly special.

“It includes a passage that appears in the third edition of On the Origin of Species,” explained the senior lecturer at the National University of Singapore.

“It’s a really favorite quote, because he tries to say that people may find his theory incredible and strange, but they argued the same for Newton and gravity and no one doubted the existence of gravity anymore. The same, he says, would ultimately be true of the principle of evolution based on natural selection,” the professor told BBC News.