Reactions to On the Origin of Species Owen's pre-eminence. To him, new species appeared at birth, not through natural selection. As well as attacking Darwin's "disciples" Hooker and Huxley, he thought that the book symbolised the sort of "abuse of science to which a neighbouring nation, some seventy years since, owed its temporary degradation." Darwin had Huxley and Hooker staying with him when he read it, and he wrote telling Lyell that it was "extremely malignant, clever & I fear will be very damaging. He is atrociously severe on Huxley's lecture, & very bitter against Hooker. So we three enjoyed it together: not that I really enjoyed
Genetics and the Origin of Species whiz by." The book began as a series of lectures at Columbia University in October and November 1936. Dobzhansky decided to attend the summer 1936 meeting of the Genetics Society of America in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. When the geneticist Leslie Dunn learned of this, he invited Dobzhansky to give a series of lectures at Columbia. He sent the invitation in April, and within a month he had suggested that the lectures be a springboard for writing a general treatise on evolutionary genetics. Dobzhansky was enthusiastic, and in May he wrote back, proposing the title "Genetics and the Origin of Species".