The Origin Of Species By Means Of Natural Selection, Or The Preservation Of Favoured Races In The Struggle For Life

The Origin Of Species By Means Of Natural Selection, Or The Preservation Of Favoured Races In The Struggle For Life
by Charles Darwin

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About Book

Amazon.com
It's hard to talk about The Origin of Species without making statements that seem overwrought and fulsome. But it's true: this is indeed one of the most important and influential books ever written, and it is one of the very few groundbreaking works of science that is truly readable.

To a certain extent it suffers from the Hamlet problem--it's full of clichés! Or what are now clichés, but which Darwin was the first to pen. Natural selection, variation, the struggle for existence, survival of the fittest: it's all in here.

Darwin's friend and "bulldog" T.H. Huxley said upon reading the Origin, "How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that." Alfred Russel Wallace had thought of the same theory of evolution Darwin did, but it was Darwin who gathered the mass of supporting evidence--on domestic animals and plants, on variability, on sexual selection, on dispersal--that swept most scientists before it. It's hardly necessary to mention that the book is still controversial: Darwin's remark in his conclusion that "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history" is surely the pinnacle of British understatement. --Mary Ellen Curtin

From AudioFile
Very few people can confidently summarize Charles Darwin's contribution to the theory of evolution. Fewer still can claim an understanding of his methods. This two-cassette abridgment will put the average lay person well ahead of his peers on both counts. Ken Ruta has a very listenable voice and reads Darwin's lucid, dense prose with appropriate deliberatation and clarity. The sound is a bit telephone-like (lacking in lows) but is perfectly intelligible. J.N. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Victorian Studies
A masterful condensation.

Book Description
Perhaps the most readable and accessible of the great works of scientific imagination, The Origin of Species sold out on the day it was published in 1859. Theologians quickly labeled Charles Darwin the most dangerous man in England, and, as the Saturday Review noted, the uproar over the book quickly "passed beyond the bounds of the study and lecture-room into the drawing-room and the public street." Yet, after reading it, Darwin's friend and colleague T. H. Huxley had a different reaction: "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that."
Based largely on Darwin's experience as a naturalist while on a five-year voyage aboard H.M.S. Beagle, The Origin of Species set forth a theory of evolution and natural selection that challenged contemporary beliefs about divine providence and the immutability of species. A landmark contribution to philosophical and scientific thought, this edition also includes an introductory historical sketch and a glossary Darwin later added to the original text.

Charles Darwin grew up considered, by his own account, "a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard of intellect." A quirk of fate kept him from the career his father had deemed appropriate--that of a country parson--when a botanist recommended Darwin for an appointment as a naturalist aboard H.M.S. Beagle from 1831 to 1836. Darwin is also the author of the five-volume work Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle (1839) and The Descent of Man (1871).

From the Trade Paperback edition.

Download Description
In the Origin of Species (1859) Darwin challenged many of the most deeply held beliefs of the Western world. Arguing for a material, not divine, origin of species, he showed that new species are achieved by 'natural selection'. Development, diversification, decay, extinction and absence of plan are all inherent to his theories. Darwin read prodigiously across many fields; he reflected on his experiences as a traveller, he experimented. His profoundly influential concept of 'natural selection' condenses materials from past and present, from the Galapagos Islands to rural Staffordshire, from English back gardens to colonial encounters. The Origin communicates the enthusiasm of original thinking in an open, descriptive style, and Darwin's emphasis on the value of diversity speaks more strongly now than ever.

From the Publisher
This book is in Electronic Paperback Format. If you view this book on any of the computer systems below, it will look like a book. Simple to run, no program to install. Just put the CD in your CDROM drive and start reading. The simple easy to use interface is child tested at pre-school levels.

Windows 3.11, Windows/95, Windows/98, OS/2 and MacIntosh and Linux with Windows Emulation.

Includes Quiet Vision's Dynamic Index. the abilty to build a index for any set of characters or words.

Inside Flap Copy
Perhaps the most readable and accessible of the great works of scientific imagination, The Origin of Species sold out on the day it was published in 1859. Theologians quickly labeled Charles Darwin the most dangerous man in England, and, as the Saturday Review noted, the uproar over the book quickly "passed beyond the bounds of the study and lecture-room into the drawing-room and the public street." Yet, after reading it, Darwin's friend and colleague T. H. Huxley had a different reaction: "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that."
Based largely on Darwin's experience as a naturalist while on a five-year voyage aboard H.M.S. Beagle, The Origin of Species set forth a theory of evolution and natural selection that challenged contemporary beliefs about divine providence and the immutability of species. A landmark contribution to philosophical and scientific thought, this edition also includes an introductory historical sketch and a glossary Darwin later added to the original text.

Charles Darwin grew up considered, by his own account, "a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard of intellect." A quirk of fate kept him from the career his father had deemed appropriate--that of a country parson--when a botanist recommended Darwin for an appointment as a naturalist aboard H.M.S. Beagle from 1831 to 1836. Darwin is also the author of the five-volume work Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle (1839) and The Descent of Man (1871).

From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the Back Cover
"Darwin's humanity,
with all its foibles,
shines through in
his life and writing."
--stephen jay gould

About the Author

Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England, on February 12, 1809--the same day that witnessed the birth of Abraham Lincoln--into a prominent middle-class family. His mother, who died when Darwin was eight, was the daughter of the famous potter Josiah Wedgwood. His father was a wealthy doctor, and his grandfather Erasmus Darwin had been a celebrated physician and writer whose books about nature, written in heroic couplets, are often read as harbingers of his grandson's views. Yet for someone whose revolutionary writings would turn the scientific world upside down, Darwin's own youth was unmarked by the slightest trace of genius. 'I believe that I was considered by all my masters and by my Father as a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard of intellect,' he later said. Darwin was an indifferent student and abandoned his medical studies at Edinburgh University. For years his one all-consuming passion was collecting beetles. ('I am dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects,' he once wrote to a cousin who was likewise obsessed. In 1831 Darwin graduated with a B.A. from Christ's College, Cambridge, seemingly destined to pursue the one career his father had deemed appropriate--that of country parson.

But a quirk of fate soon intervened. John Henslow, a Cambridge botanist, recommended Darwin for an appointment (without pay) as naturalist aboard the H.M.S. Beagle, a scientific vessel commissioned by the Admiralty to survey the east and west coasts of South America. Among the few belongings Darwin carried with him were two books that had greatly influenced him at Cambridge: Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, which posited radical changes in the possible estimates of the earth's age, and an edition of the travel writings of the early nineteenth-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. The Beagle sailed from Plymouth on December 27, 1831, and returned to England on October 2, 1836; the around-the-world voyage was the formative experience of Darwin's life and consolidated the young man's 'burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science.'

Darwin devoted the next few years to preparing his 'Transmutation Notebooks' and writing Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by the H.M.S. Beagle, 1832-1836 (1839) in which his beliefs about evolution and natural selection first began to take shape. In 1839 he married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood. They lived in London until 1842, when Darwin's chronic ill health forced the couple to move to Down House in Sussex, where he would spend virtually the rest of his life working in seclusion. There he soon completed the five-volume work Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle (1840-1843) and outlined from his hoard of notes an early draft of what was eventually to become The Origin of Species. Over the next decade he also produced a monograph on coral reefs, as well as extensive studies of variations in living and fossil barnacles.

In 1856 Sir Charles Lyell persuaded Darwin to write out his theory of evolution by natural selection, which he had recently buttressed with ingenious experiments in breeding pigeons. Halfway through the project, Darwin received an essay from naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace that presented an identical theory, though one unsupported by anything comparable to Darwin's massive accumulation of data. Wracked by doubts and indecision, and fearful of the controversy his theories might unleash, Darwin nevertheless pushed forward to finish The Origin of Species. Published on November 24, 1859, the book forever demolished the premise that God had created the earth precisely at 9:00 A.M. on October 23, 4004 B.C.--and that all species of living creatures had been immutably produced during the following six days--as seventeenth-century churchmen had so carefully formulated.

Although he did write one sequel and amplification of his theory of evolution, The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin dedicated most of his remaining years to botanical studies. Charles Darwin died on April 19, 1882, following a series of heart attacks. He had wished to be interred in the quiet churchyard close to the house in which he had lived and worked for so long, but the sentiment of educated men demanded a place in Westminster Abbey, where Darwin lies buried a few feet away from the grave of Isaac Newton.

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