Artificial intelligence reveals authors of anonymous 19th-century texts on evolution

Some anonymously published papers on evolution far predate the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). With the help of modern AI software, Koen Tanghe (UGent) and Mike Kestemont (UAntwerpen) have revealed the authors of two of these papers. This work may help to foster interest in those early, intriguing publications on evolution, their authors and their possible influence on Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin did not invent the idea of evolution. It already flourished in Edinburgh in the first decades of the 19th century. The city where, for two years (1825-1827), he studied medicine. Because of their speculative and controversial nature, several articles on evolution were published anonymously during this early but influential blossoming of evolutionary - thought.