Despite the similarities between how St. Andrews developed and the central British intellectual interest in theories of self-organization, I’ve never found any evidence that Smith played golf, nor his great successor Charles Darwin, who attended medical school in Edinburgh. (Charles’ grandson Bernard Darwin did become the leading golf architecture critic of his time, though.)
However, the chief polemic for evolutionary theory in the decade before Darwin’s Origin of Species, the anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation of 1844, a book that much influenced Darwin, turned out to have been penned by the keen golfer Robert Chambers while in St. Andrews.
Is Darwin’s grandson’s vocation — “leading golf architecture critic” — an example of evolution, or its opposite?
