Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution by Rebecca Stott

I like to think that Darwin might have recognized structural patterns in this long history of evolution and that it would have given him pleasure to see that the process of discovery did not travel in a straight line. a historical progression moving inexorably toward a final truth.  Instead, like the history of species as he understood it, the story of the discovery of natural selection is a story of meanderings and false starts, of outgrowths, adaptations, and atrophies, of movements backward as well as forward, of sudden jumps and accelerations and convergences.
--Rebecca Stott, The Secret History of Evolution (Spiegel and Grau, 2012)

We like to give credit to one person for inventions and discoveries:  Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, Edison invented electric light, Philo Farnsworth invented television, Darwin discovered natural selection.  In fact, all these guys had numerous predecessors and sometimes it depended on when one filed for a patent and when one published.  Darwin, for instance, rushed On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection to print in 1859 because Alfred Wallace was about to publish his book on the same subject, though Wallace's theories were developed after Darwin's

But even before Wallace and Darwin there were numerous scientists who came close to the same conclusions, often hampered and suppressed by the prejudices and power of the Catholic Church.  Rebecca Stott's book is both stylish and intelligent, as she lays out in fascinating detail all the amateurs and scientists who preceded Darwin -- to whom Darwin gave credit -- starting with Aristotle, who published The History of Animals in 344 BC, through Jahiz in 850, Leonardo in the 15th century, Plissy in the 16th century, Diderot in the 18th century and the increasing numbers in the 19th century: Lamarck, Coldstream, Grant, Chambers and Wallace.  Stott brings these seekers after knowledge vividly alive, not only for their discoveries but for their struggles against ignorance and prejudice and for their personal struggles with their health and finances.