"IT IS NOT AN INSUPERABLE DIFFICULTY THAT FORAMINIFERA HAVE NOT PROGRESSED IN ORGANIZATION SINCE EVEN THE LAURENTIAL EPOCH; FOR SOME ORGANISMS WOULD HAVE TO REMAIN FITTED FOR SIMPLE CONDITIONS OF LIFE, AND WHAT COULD BE BETTER FITTED FOR THIS END THAN THESE LOWLY ORGANIZED PROTOZOA?“ CHARLES DARWIN, 1872

Charles R. Darwin wrote these titular words in The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 6th Edition, 1872. Foraminifera were absent from the 1^st, 2nd and 3rd editions of his book, but were included in the 4^th, 5th and 6th editions. Modern foraminiferal workers, like Martin A. Buzas whom we honor in this symposium, find this a remarkably mistaken view of the group. How did Darwin come to these conclusions? As Darwin boarded the HMS Beagle in 1831, foraminifera had for three centuries been considered to be tiny invertebrates, like "worms", gastropods, and especially cephalopods. D’Orbigny in 1826 placed them in his new Order “Foraminifères” of the Cephalopoda with a classification including 64 genera, 51 newly described. While Darwin was still at sea in 1835 and functioning chiefly as a geologist, Dujardin demonstrated the body parts that d’Orbigny used to justify them as Cephalopoda did not exist and that foraminifera were single-celled organisms. As far as known, Darwin did not encounter foraminifera during Beagle’s voyage although they occur in marine waters and deposits everywhere he went. He did, however, accidentally collect them in the matrix of fossil vertebrates at Bahia Blanca, Argentina. When Darwin returned to London, he asked W. H. Carpenter about the forams he accidentally collected. Carpenter had severely chastised d’Orbigny for describing so many species, genera, and other groups of foraminifera. He wrote that d’Orbigny made “species with reckless indifference to the innumerable inosculating forms”. Darwin reviewed Carpenter’s manuscript on “Introduction to the Study of Foraminifera” for the Royal Society and accepted his ideas that foraminifera were simple organisms that did not evolve over long periods of geologic time, hence added that conclusion to the Origin, 4th through 6^th editions. Darwin did not survive to see the works of his compatriot H. Brady on the foraminifera of the HMS Challenger expedition which asserted the numerous species that must have evolved from earlier forms. Darwin, of course, would have been pleased with Brady’s book and all the foraminiferal work that has progressed since his last edition of the Origin, just as all foraminiferal workers are pleased to be Darwinians themselves, Marty Buzas included.