PG seems to have revised a couple of his essays from 2006, labelling them "rev August 2009":
http://www.paulgraham.com/6631327.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/randomness.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/whyyc.html
"Few people can experience now what Darwin's contemporaries did when The Origin of Species was first published, because everyone now is raised either to take evolution for granted, or to regard it as a heresy. No one encounters the idea of natural selection for the first time as an adult."<p>It's interesting to read this in the context of _The Selfish Gene_. Mary Midgley (who wrote a scathing attack on the book[1]) once suggested that she probably found it hard to appreciate its virtues because she'd read the ideas in it so many times before -- by the time the book came out they hardly seemed novel to her.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/article.php?id=14" rel="nofollow">http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/article.php...</a><p>"So if you want to discover things that have been overlooked till now, one really good place to look is in our blind spot: in our natural, naive belief that it's all about us. And expect to encounter ferocious opposition if you do."<p>Peter Singer is a good case study in this.