Perfectionist Concerns: The #1 Trap Researchers Should Avoid 

Thank you for your comment. As you say, your first comment is not really related to what I was saying, though I agree it is a point worth making. The second point you raise is actually on the topic of the video, but is almost certainly not quite right. He did indeed have a long gestation period for his book, but he was attending to other work, particularly his obsession with barnacles, and was very productive in that time. I have no doubt that he was not at all worried about his scientific reputation - evolution was very well known to the scientific community at the time and had been for a long time. Do a google search for Erasmus Darwin - Charles Darwin's grandfather - whose poem "The Temple of Nature" clearly articulated the idea of evolutionary change in the early 1800s, though without any mechanism such as natural selection. So, no, there is no evidence that Darwin was worried about his scientific reputation (he had told his discovery to several scientists of the time, so it was well-known informally), though he naturally worried about whether Victorian Society was ready for the idea. There is no evidence that he was being a perfectionist about it, or that he had perfectionist concerns. Perhaps read about this myth here: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2006.0171 If you read the two papers that were read into the Linnean society (by the way, on Darwin's insistence, Wallace's article was read first and therefore has precedence), you can see that Wallace's paper is superior, while Darwin's has the look of a slightly rushed manuscript (again, no perfectionist concerns). To emphasise that science at that time was really quite OK with evolutionary thinking - and that Darwin wouldn't have been too worried about his reputation being damaged by his publication, in his Presidential address in May 1859, Thomas Bell, the president of the Linnean Society, said: “The year which has passed… has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionise, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear.” The scientists of the time didn't find Darwin's ideas to be in the least bit problematic or iconoclastic or reputation-breaking. Again, in my video, I was talking about the book, not the Linnean papers and Darwin's acknowledgement of the gaps in knowledge. I'm going to have to disagree with you - Darwin wrote perhaps the most important book derived from research that has ever been written and he did so knowing it was not perfect....and this is the point I was making. I still think it is an excellent example.