Egregious

In the mid-1800s, thousands of treasured documents vanished from the Institut de France, stolen by Italian mathematician, Count Guglielmo Libri, who fled to London in 1848 with a collection of 30,000 books and manuscripts, including those by Descartes, Galileo, Fermat, Leibniz, Copernicus, Kepler, and other scientific and mathematical giants. Among the audacious thief's trove were seventy-two letters by René Descartes, the founding genius of modern philosophy and analytic geometry.
    Yesterday's article in The New York Times, "Descartes Letter Found, Therefore It Is," by Patricia Cohen, reports that

one of those purloined letters...dated May 27, 1641, [concerning] the publication of Meditations on First Philosophy, a celebrated work whose use of reason and scientific methods helped to ignite a revolution in thought...has turned up at Haverford College in Pennsylvania.
    ...The document, experts say, reveals just how much Descartes tailored his writings to answer his contemporary critics. Frequently suspected of heresy, Descartes sent copies of his arguments to well-known theologians to gauge their opinions and answer their objections within his text.

    It would be disingenuous of me to say that I thought of Descartes last night while watching a 2009 TV program about Charles Darwin, who, more than 200 years after Descartes, also had reason to fear being thought a heretic, for I read Ms. Cohen's article only this morning. But I might very well have thought of Descartes, or of countless others who tailored their statements or their dates of publication (to follow their death, for example), in order to avoid censure (or premature death at the hands of inquisitioners).

The current meaning of the word "egregious" may have come about under the same pressure. The theologians and other powers that were (and largely still are) thought Descartes and Darwin outrageously bad or reprehensible. They were egregious in the sense of being outside the flock; "egregious" derives from Latin egregius, separated or chosen from the herd, from e-, ex-, out of, from + grex, greg-, herd, flock.
    But dictionary.com the other day pointed out that

Egregious was formerly used importing a good quality (that which was distinguished "from the herd" because of excellence [emphasis mine]).

    One would hope that the original meaning will come back. But if herd members can compliment Descartes now (assuming that they've heard of him), it's largely because he has been dead for almost 400 years. Many people still have trouble with Darwin. And look how egregious in the bad sense Richard Dawkins is considered to be. He's just too alive in his distinction from the herd of people who still reject evolution.