Between 1831 and 1836, Charles Darwin circumnavigated the globe as the naturalist for the renowned HMS Beagle. Darwin's task, as far as Britain was concerned, was to discover and describe flora and fauna from across the globe. Along the way, Darwin famously discovered the principles of natural selection, which serve as the primary evolutionary force that came to shape the nature of life itself (see Eldredge, 2005).
A devout Christian, and relatively quiet man—not known as someone who was interested in making waves—Darwin sat on his ideas regarding evolution for more than two decades. After much time, and in light of various communications with other scholars at the time, Darwin (1859) finally got around to publishing On the Origins of the Species—one of the most important books in the history of science, and one that would radically and permanently change our understanding of life itself.
With regard to having discovered the process of natural selection, in 1844 Darwin wrote in a letter to a close confidante (botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker), "It is as if one were confessing to a murder."
Darwin reported vomiting regularly thinking about the implications that his ideas would have for our understanding of what it means to be human.
In a recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (Clark et al., 2023)—a paper that I feel fortunate to have co-authored—a case is made that perhaps the most prevalent form of censorship in science might be considered "self-censorship" (see my Psychology Today piece on this concept here). Self-censorship in science essentially exists when a scientist is hesitant to present some findings or ideas—for a number of potential reasons—and ends up refusing to disseminate said ideas or, in some cases, delaying dramatically the presentation of said ideas.
Not sure about you, but to my mind, the fact that Darwin discovered natural selection in the........