A Darwinian Gentleman at Marx's Funeral

by Stephen Jay Gould
Natural History, September 1999
 

Let me now introduce another anomaly, not so easily resolved this time, about the death of Karl Marx in London. This item, in fact, ranks as my all-time favorite, niggling little incongruity from the history of my profession of evolutionary biology. I have been living with this bothersome fact for twenty-five years, and I pledged long ago to offer some resolution before ending this series of essays at the millennium. I think that I now have the basic answer, and not a moment too soon. Let us, then, return to Highgate Cemetery and to Karl Marx's burial on March 17, 1883.

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